At around five o’clock Donny called Amy into his office, standing in his doorway, cream cheese crumbs still lodged in both corners of his mouth.
“Hey, Aim,” he said.
She handed him a Kleenex as she walked in, and sat down in the chair across from his desk.
He tapped on his keyboard with one hand while swiping his lips with the back of the other, the one that held the tissue. The screen was tilted toward her.
Furrier.com.
“Whenever my grandma was pissed at my grandpa,” Donny said, “she always used to say, ‘I should have married the furrier.’”
Grandma. Twice in one day. Was he feeling homesick? She’d been sort of a recluse, Lauren’s mother; a loner who’d loved to cook. There were two fully stocked freezers in her kitchen. One for dinners, one for desserts, although she hardly ever entertained guests—and her husband was diabetic. When Amy visited Lauren back east on school breaks, they’d get high in the backyard, come inside, and eat their way through the freezer burn.
“What would have happened if she had married him?” asked Donny.
“She’d have had at least one fur coat,” said Amy.
“I mean what would have happened in the parallel universe?” said Donny. “The sliding doors. The alternative reality.”
“You and I would not be sitting here,” said Amy. “Your mother would never have been born.” She sighed. She’d been up since 4:45 a.m. “You’re not a sophomore anymore, Donny. You’re a junior. You know that nobody knows the answers to that question.”
Donny clicked on his Facebook page.
“Not true,” said Donny. “There’s an algorithm for anything. From now on in, it’s all aggregation of information, plus math.”
“Math can tell you what would happen if you altered history?” said Amy.
“Math plus info, sure. At least a fairly good approximation,” said Donny slowly, as if she were intellectually challenged or deaf. “The universe is math, Amy.” This was the way he talked to his own mother; she often heard them go at it on speakerphone.
“I’m good at math,” added Donny.
Big effing deal, thought Amy. You and your perfect SATs. They’re a dime a dozen around here. Plus, Lauren spilled: you had $350-an-hour test prep.
“Look,” said Donny. “This part is easy. The odds that any of us are born are infinitesimal, right? And if we beat the odds once, then there are infinitesimal odds that yet again we could beat those odds twice and so on for infinity. You know, like snowflakes, none are the same except in a world of infinity where there are infinite chances for one to be exactly the same infinite times. You’ve got that much, right?”
Right, Amy nodded. She got that much.
“And at this point in time, we’re all willing to accept that space is infinite because of, you know, physics, but in my gut I know it’s infinite because it’s essentially round. Even back in the day, Einstein thought you just have to go fast and far enough to come back to where you started.”
“A circle,” said Amy.
“Without edge,” said Donny. “So if gazing into the distance is the same as looking at the past, I can also see alternate pasts, streaming alongside them, because there are infinite chances for these alternate pasts to have formed.”
“Interesting,” said Amy, biting at a cuticle. “You mean like a scallop shell? Like the past is fluted?”
“Remember the summer I went to MIT math camp?” Donny said.
Well, no, thought Amy, but she nodded in the affirmative. An affirmative nod often shortened a Donny story.
“My counselor there, he was way into parallel universes. Old news, but when I was eleven it made an impression. Multiverses. Where all that can be, is.” He paused. “I want to monetize that.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” said Amy. Nothing wrong with making money.
“There is no reason to think that the Big Bang was unique, right? That would be arrogant. And you and Mom are always telling me not to be so arrogant. Plus, I never drank the Kool-Aid that wave functions collapse when measured. And if they don’t collapse, all their values coexist but on different planes. The cosmos just keeps dividing into additional actualities, in each of which an atom or unit or a number is always in one of its multitudinous possible locations. Right?”
“Right,” said Amy. Wrong? she thought, with a silent tee-hee. She had no idea what he was talking about.
He gave her a look, like, what’s so funny?
“I thought you said it was a circle,” said Amy, lamely.
“Without edge,” said Donny, annoyed. “That’s what makes it infinite. If there is infinite space, there are infinite Grandmas making infinitely different decisions, and therefore all these Grandmas lived infinitely different lives. In one she shacked up with the furrier.”
“Sounds very Twilight Zone to me. Infinite Grandmas? A nightmare,” said Amy. “No offense,” she added. She loved that phrase. It was offensive in its essence. Use it and you could get away with saying anything and still leave a scorpion’s sting. “Grandma was a very sweet woman,” she murmured. Amy was enjoying herself.
“With math and info I can approximate what happened to all of them,” said Donny. “We already do some of this 2.0. For example, if you’d taken that gig at MGM? When Dan was offered the job at the San Jose Mercury and you moved up here?”
One of those marriage crucibles. They had one child. Dan was at the Hollywood Reporter, but he’d been stuck. He wasn’t into covering the movie industry. He’d been so full of fire back then; “Democracy is built on good reporting”—he said that all the time. “Local journalism is what keeps government in check.” It was one of the reasons Amy had fallen in love with him; Dan was so intent on doing something meaningful and important with his life. She’d been so dazzled by him, and even after marriage she’d stayed dazzled. Permanently dazzled or so she’d thought. He was always the smartest person in the room. He wanted to change the world, and he wasn’t afraid of taking action, again and again, picking hard, honest work over money. Sexy, tall, warm and caring, funny, kind, easy to talk to—he was her guy. His love had healed her. She wanted him happy.
So, she’d agreed to move, even though she’d wanted that job at MGM. She’d done what was best for him. It was a “girl” decision, one of the many she’d lived to regret. They bought the house in College Terrace; they kept waiting for the right time to have another baby. With the tech boom, everything kept getting more and more expensive. Finally, Dan got an editorial job at the Chronicle. It was a green light in the kid department, but then Amy couldn’t get pregnant. That part had really sucked. She couldn’t find a job at Lucas or Zoetrope or Pixar. She started working in PR. When she finally did get pregnant, after pretty much giving up, God laughed: twins. Dan was downsized; he wrote a column; he tried and failed to write a book; he freelance-edited for magazines; adjuncted, took a stab at custom publishing; blah blah blah and blah. And then nothing. And then now.
“I already know,” Amy said. She googled sometimes, late at night, when she was miserable and couldn’t sleep; she also gorged on real estate porn and knew what that MGM salary might have brought her. They could have bought a place in Venice and lived by the beach. The Chronicle was a shit paper anyway.
“They laid off the three women they hired for similar positions in 2009 and in 2010 and 2012.”
“Hmmm, sexism. So, it was a wise choice,” said Amy, “choosing love.”
“See, you’re already buying happiness,” said Donny. “I’m making you happy. You’ve seen the road not taken, and you can congratulate yourself.”
Amy broadcast a smile.
“I’m simplifying all this into terms you can understand. You understand that, right, Amy?”
“Yes, I do, Donny.”
“Okay, so we establish that you made the right choice between MGM and Dan and that makes you happy and that happiness makes your eyeballs sticky. You’ll keep coming back for more. You love the reinforcement. So will the advertisers dy
ing to sell you face cream.”
“I don’t use face cream,” said Amy.
“You should,” said Donny. “Mom does.”
Instinctively, Amy’s hand reached up to the softening skin around her throat.
“Now we can know a lot of things—what Grandma and the furrier’s children might have looked like. I have an algorithm for that. Easy peasy. We can estimate their offspring’s interests and intelligence. What might have happened had she lived where he lived, which was, get this, Omaha, Nebraska. Her own career opportunities. Grandpa would never let her work. With the furrier, she could have modeled his fur coats. She could have been the queen of Omaha. We could even make a fair approximation of their sexual compatibility over time. Grandpa was a skunk and a hound dog. Anyone could have charted that disaster, even before they took their vows. But with what I’m working on now, the math of it, I can go even further into one of those alternate realities. I can create a virtual reality, so that you could be there then and be here now. What I’m proposing is Furrier.com. Our clients can ask: What would have happened if I’d taken that job? Who would I have met? What projects might I have worked on? How much money would I have now? All of life’s regrets and little mysteries answered with more than some bullshit poetry and endless waxing about the road not taken. A scientific approximation. Using AI.
“If we want, we could go simple, attach visuals—a lady and her original nose now that she has her final chin, she’d know what her old age might have looked like without the face-lift. The stuff that wakes people up at night. Grandma’s furrier. All in a boutique online website, maybe with fees, or a pay wall. Although it’s a natural for luxury advertising—spas, makeovers, fitness getaways. And then for the masses another app, for those niggling second-guessing everyday questions. We could call it Furrierlight, or Summer Fur.”
“Summer fur?” said Amy.
“Grandma had one,” said Donny. “A silver sheared mink. We could use that app for stuff like: What if I’d turned down Middlefield instead of Alvarado? Would I have found a parking spot? Been hit by a drunk driver? Met a cute girl from French class when she was carrying groceries and offered her a ride? Or what if I’d gone to the seven-thirty showing of The Avengers? Who might I have run into buying popcorn? Sergey Brin?”
“Isn’t that just Google married to Facebook plus Foursquare?” said Amy. “This is the kind of cocktail my best friend Lauren, your mother, drinks online all the time.”
“It’s a personalized crystal ball. And it’s boomer focused, which means people who are used to spending money, unlike my friends who expect to amass stuff for free. Plus, it plays from Scarsdale to Peoria. It we’re smart, if we’re really daring, we could use AI to go VR and produce the whole nine yards in a three-hundred-sixty-degree Sensurround. We might have ourselves a unicorn.”
“Talk about arrogant,” said Amy. “A billion-dollar company? Right now, we’re having trouble paying for all those free Cup-a-Soups. And what do you mean, Sensurround?”
“Like in surrounding someone with satisfying sensorial input,” said Donny.
“Can you say that three times fast?”
She was purposely testing his patience, but Donny could perseverate endlessly, patient or not. “Remember those old-fashioned hair dryers? They looked like cones?”
“Yep,” said Amy. “Your grandma had one. She bought it at a bankruptcy sale at a local salon.”
“Exactly,” said Donny. “I could blow your fucking mind sitting under one of those things. You’ll grow eyes in the back of your head. Feel the wind blow. Smell the saltwater spray. I don’t know, Amy, maybe we’re a potential decacorn.”
“That’s unicorn shit,” said Amy.
“It’s business,” said Donny, simply, as if that one little noun solved everything. “Do you want to know what happened to the guy who interviewed you at MGM? The one who was so hot?”
Fucking Lauren. Lauren and her big mouth. This is what happened when women didn’t work. She had no life, Lauren.
“I’m bored, Donny,” said Amy. “I’ve got a job to do.”
To prove her point, she texted Dan in front of him: did the dog ever come back? pizza or Mexican for dinner?
To Donny she said, “I thought we had to imagine something new.”
“Multiple universes?”
“You said they were old hat.”
“Finding out what happened to you in another space and time, that isn’t new? I didn’t expect you to be so prosaic.”
Donny stared through the glass. She followed his gaze. Naresh was digging something out of his ear. Slightly nauseated, she turned back around again. She looked at her phone.
Dan texted: Thing Two got sent home from school today. It’s okay. I took care of it.
Amy texted back: WHAAAAAT? Is he okay?
Dan texted: I just said it’s okay.
“What if?” said Donny.
Amy looked up at him.
“‘What if I’d married the furrier?’ Finding the answer to that question with accuracy, that’s new. And if ‘what-if’ looks better than what-is, well, why not?”
“What are you proposing?”
“Well, Grandma’s gone, but if she wasn’t, maybe she’d still have a chance at love. Or at least the possibility would keep her coming back to us for more.”
“Now who’s prosaic?” said Amy, in the middle of texting I’m allowed to be worried about my son. “Sounds like a romance novel.”
She put her phone down.
“You’d really use this thing to find out about a furrier? What about wars or global warming, cures for cancer, California’s turning into a desert—we’re drinking processed pee water!”
“Or,” he said, spitballing, off in his own Donny orbit, “we can turn personalized alternative reality into a game, into a cyber-story with chapters, chapters you could augment, you could choose or mix and match. You can act on the information you receive in meat space or just mess around with it online.”
What now, Theo? Amy worried about her son. Donny wasn’t the only one who could choose to not listen.
“Music, visuals, avatars,” said Donny. “You could even hook up with a partner. The furrier, for instance.”
“Think that’s called flirting. Can’t picture Grandma doing that,” said Amy.
“Grandma’s dead,” said Donny. “But you, if we’re acquired by Google? We’ve spent the last few decades getting to know everything about you by what you do online, far more than your husband or your shrink or your BFF, my mother, ever did. Your shopping habits, your reading habits, your medical records, when you Dumpster dive for frenemies and old crushes, your political views, what you paid for your house—everything money. Of course, the porn . . .
“From that data alone we can predict your behavior. We know when you’re stressed and when you’re vulnerable. When the biopsy comes back. When you wonder what’s a better way to go, fighting with chemo, or downing Xanax in a bathtub. C’mon, Amy, what messages in a bottle do you send out into cyberspace? We can factor in your secret secrets. All via algorithm, so you don’t feel busted. The shrinks will go out of business, but who cares, really? That’s the beauty of math. We could even do it behind your back. Like targeted advertising, although that seems so 2001.” He paused.
“I don’t think I’d want that,” said Amy, slowly catching on.
“Well, your boss might. Your hubby. You know finding ways to lead you toward maximizing your potential.”
“Donny, that sounds illegal and immoral and like outing and indoctrination.”
He scratched his nose, stared into space.
“Well, what would you want to know?” said Donny.
He glazed. Or perhaps he was ruminating deeply. Profundities. Wise-man pretentious bullcrap.
“We have to think a bit outside the box here,” said Donny. “Go rogue. Cater to the middle. Cleveland, Sacramento, Kansas fucking City.”
As if he’d read her subconscious: “Do you want to see what your daughte
r would look like now? I could probably do that for you with a high degree of accuracy. I don’t even think I need the DNA samples. Image-wise. You know, your hair, his aunt Elisabeth’s tits.”
A block of ice shattered somewhere in her cranium, sending cold spiky shards down her spine and through her shoulders, piercing the veins in her arms with its frigid needles.
A girl.
“Mom told me,” said Donny. “About the miscarriage.”
It was an abortion. Not even Lauren knew that much.
“No one knows,” said Amy. “Dan doesn’t. He doesn’t.”
“The Cloud knows,” said Donny. “But I won’t tell. You can trust me.”
Trust Donny?
“They had fertility issues. His sperm’s been tested. Unless he lied to her, Amy, they don’t know.”
Wow. What? What!
“He searches for you sometimes. He Google-images you.”
She’d hoped, but she hadn’t known. It was all so long ago. She could barely remember him. It was hard to picture his chin. When she tried to focus on it, it weakened, and began to slope down toward his throat. But was it true? Did he sometimes comb through cyberspace for her, at his desk at work, while eating his turkey sandwich and his take-out soup? Or was Donny just holding out a carrot?
“His wife is younger than you are. Want to see her? She’s got a little chub. I think you could take her, maybe if you cared more. Face cream and all that.”
She wouldn’t fall down that rabbit hole.
“I don’t want to take her. I love Dan. I haven’t seen him in a million years. I actively don’t think about him.”
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