The Emoticon Generation

by Guy Hasson

  It was almost impossible to believe that just yesterday, every number they’d tried had been dry and now, using only numbers that are inbetween the numbers they’d tried, there was nothing but movement and people and action. It was as if the air was teeming with ghosts.

  Oddly, not once had they seen someone ‘popping’ into reality. They were either there or they weren’t. If someone was there, then there was always a number that came before in which that someone was already there. Disappearance was the same. They never actually ‘caught’ anyone disappearing. There was always a miniscule number later in which that person was still there.

  The more Tony and Matt worked, the more Matt was forced to put some of his research aside and focus on this. Some he gave to others, some he just put aside, hoping this will blow over soon. But he also liked working on it. He’s been working on the human mind, and this was like the opposite of a Rorschach test to him. It was fascinating to watch.

  Tony focused on the places that included him. Aside from the Tony sitting there on the chair, seemingly frozen in time, there was another Tony walking around behind him.

  There was a reenactment of the first time he and Tony had met. The three of them – the two Tony’s and Tony’s friend – leaning on the wall of the hospital room (instead of on the hood of the car). The three were holding a conversation which Tony and Matt could not hear. Still, to Tony it seemed accurate.

  At another spot, he and Tony literally popped into the room, undressing each other while kissing. He recognized it. It was the first time she’d stayed over. If it wasn’t for the strange frozen surroundings of the hospital room, it would have been the perfect video reconstruction of what had actually happened.

  And here, floating around another Strange Attractor, the moment he’d proposed to her in that restaurant, being played over and over and over, in a sick playback loop.

  Tony stared at these moving images again and again, obsessed. And he took tapes of everything, to play at home, to keep forever.

  And then the dryness returned.

  As they broke the numbers down even further, looking to see what happened between the moments in which things popped in and out of reality, there were massive expanses of nothing.

  Another day passed. They broke it down further. And there was still nothing.

  Another. Nothing.

  Another. And now even the bits in which things had popped into reality had frozen in time. Nothing happened around them or between them. At the end of a day in which Tony and Matt had stared at nothing but still pictures of frozen people, Tony suddenly said: “Freeze it!”

  Matt tensed. “What?”

  “Something jumped. Another ‘scratch’ on the ‘film’. Roll it back a few seconds.”

  Matt did so, and replayed the same few seconds in slower motion.

  “There! Stop!” Tony said.

  “What?” Matt stopped the action a few frames late. “I didn’t see anything.”

  “Roll it back, frame by frame.” The two watched silently. “There!”

  “What?”

  “Go one frame forward.” Matt did, and Tony almost fell from his chair. “Oh my god.”

  “What?” Matt looked at the picture. It was the same basic frame they’d started out with. There was no one else in the room, no additional people, only Tony. Matt looked at him. “What?”

  “How can you not see it? Look, in that chair, where I always sit, looking at her –”

  “Oh, my god,” Matt whispered, finally seeing it. He’d gotten so used to it that he had never looked. But sitting in that chair in the same position ... “That’s not you!”

  Tony put his hand on his face.

  Matt looked at the picture and took his time. “Well,” he said as a smile slowly spread across his face. “At least things are interesting again. So,” he turned to Tony. “Who’s this one? That’s not someone we’ve seen before, right?”

  “No, this one’s new. But the thing is ... She didn’t know this guy.”

  “What? How can you know that?”

  “She’d never seen this man before in her life.”

  “Tony, come on. Look at the position he’s in, look at the way he’s replaced you. This is probably one of her past boyfriends.”

  “This is not one of her boyfriends.”

  “You’re being ridiculous. So there’s someone she didn’t tell you ab –”

  “Matt, there are things you know for certain! Tony and I had stayed up hundreds of hours in bed just talking about everything in her life, about everything in my life.

  “I’ve seen pictures of all her past boyfriends. I’ve seen pictures of all her teachers from all the yearbooks, all the annual class pictures. I know what all her ex-classmates look like today. I know everyone in her family and everyone in their families. I even know what her neighbors looked like in all the apartments she’d lived in. She’d described them to me and I described mine to her. I’d even recognize the people she went to kindergarten with. I know everything about her.”

  Matt looked at him, wondering how seriously should he take what he’d just heard. Tony did have an obsessive nature. If he said he knew everyone, he knew everyone. “So ... You’re saying you know for certain that the equation didn’t pull this guy out of her memories? Are you saying the equation invented a person? A person?!”

  “I obviously don’t know everyone she ran into on the street or the subway or the bus or whatever. But this couldn’t be someone of any importance in her life.”

  Matt stared at the picture. “I’ll take your word for it. For the time being.” He stared at it further. “Well, he reminds me of someone, that’s for sure.”

  “Who?”

  Matt scrunched up his mouth, and presently said, “Don’t know.” He looked at it a bit further, then sighed, and stood up. “Oh, well,” he took his jacket. “It will come to me.” He kept the door open for Tony. “Let’s go home.”

  They turned off the lights and left the lab.

  “One thing’s for sure,” Matt said as they walked the dark corridors – it was the middle of the night “Tomorrow we’ll be concentrating on that.”

  “Yeah.”

  The two exited the building, Tony stayed behind to lock the doors. “Go,” he told Matt. “Go.”

  Matt left him there, took a few steps, when suddenly he stopped and turned around.

  “I know who this guy reminds me of.”

  Tony turned around. “Who?”

  “Larry Steele.”

  “The actor?”

  “Yeah. He was a huge movie star when I was in grade school. Around the time Tony was in –”

  “High school!”

  “Yeah. All the girls were crazy about him. He was a megastar, not a superstar. He was compared to James Dean all the time. Until, just like James Dean –”

  “He died,” Tony whispered.

  “Don’t start thinking ghosts on me, again, Tony. That wasn’t Larry Steele. It just looked like him, but it also clearly wasn’t him.”

  “No, Matt, you don’t understand. It’s not that he’s dead. It’s that Tony ... when she was a young ... a teenager ... she always thought that the man she’d fall in love with would be someone like him. Not him exactly, but someone like him. He was her dream. The ultimate –”

  “The ultimate man?”

  “Yes.”

  Matt laughed. “Well. At least we know where the image was pulled from. Not from her memories, but from her desires. Or her dreams, maybe.”

  “But you didn’t pull this image from her teenage brain. You pulled it from her brain today. I mean ...” he put his hand on his forehead. “I mean, from a few weeks ago.”

  “So what? We never find our ultimate dream mate. We find someone close, a variation of the archetype. I mean, you must have had a dream woman in your head when you were that age.”

  “I did. She looked exactly like Tony.”

  Matt frowned. “Well,” he said. “Look. I’ll work around that number, see if he�
�s moving, too.” He looked at Tony for a second, and seemed to want to say something more. Then he turned around, and said, “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  Tony stayed standing there for a minute, thinking, as Matt went to his car. Matt stood by his car, his hand on the handle. Then he turned around again.

  “Tony. I don’t want to do that tomorrow.”

  “What?” Tony snapped out of his thoughts.

  “We have other things to do. Real research.”

  “But ... You don’t think I’m just playing, just to get my–”

  “No, please, please don’t get me wrong. I know how important this is to you. But if we keep on digging forever, we’ll just find more of the same things. Bits of her subconscious, bits of her memories, her dreams, her whatever. This is not helping you to let go. And two weeks is as much as I can afford to let other people do the research without me.”

  “Matt ...”

  “Please,” Matt needed to get it all out at once. “It was Tony, and it was you, and I understand that. And there was enough scientific interest in it for me. But we’ve discovered everything we’re going to discover. Everything else is repetition. We solved the last problem – we solved that image – it’s her dream. Fine. That’s it. Let’s move on. And besides,” he had to stop for breath, and with Tony looking at him and saying nothing, he looked down, and then up again to meet Tony’s eyes. “The people from Tout le Monde Tout Jours are coming here tomorrow.” Tony winced inside. The French production company! It was the last thing he’d spoken about with Tony. He’d convinced her to be interviewed by them. If he had argued with her for another minute, if he had phrased things differently, she’d be here today.

  Matt went on, “You know how important that is to us. This is publicity we can only dream of.”

  Tomorrow? Was it already a week before the wedding? He said, “I ... No ... I can’t deal with them right now.”

  “That’s fine. I understand. You don’t need to. I’ll handle them. I’ll talk to them and explain what we do and show them around. At least for a few days. You just ... Take a couple of days. Work, don’t work, but get yourself back into ... you know.”

  Tony deflated. “I guess,” he said.

  “Working on the ... on those last ten seconds. It just makes it harder to say goodbye.”

  “I don’t want to say goodbye!” Tony exploded.

  Matt stared at him. Tony put his hand over his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. You handle them tomorrow.”

  “Go home.”

  “Okay.”

  Matt stood by his side for what seemed like five silent minutes.

  “You’ll be okay?” Matt finally said.

  “Yeah.” Tony still hadn’t looked up.

  “I’m going home.”

  “Okay.”

  Matt got into his car and drove away.

  ~

  There were seven days to the wedding.

  And the second Tony woke up, a clock began to tick inside his head. A clock that counted backwards to the wedding. It was there before, but it had counted silently and in the back of his mind. But now it was strong, and the feeling of absence, of loss, hit him, as if it was the first time he realized it.

  The wedding would never happen.

  The rest of his life would never happen.

  He couldn’t bring himself to get up from the bed.

  After an hour, he finally dragged himself up and went to drink coffee.

  Two hours later, he was still sipping his first cup.

  He couldn’t stand the house. He couldn’t stand the emptiness.

  A week before the wedding. My god!

  He should go to work. But he couldn’t. He should stay here. But he couldn’t. The entire house smelled like Tony. And ...

  A week before the wedding. The clock was ticking. Three hours had passed since he’d first had that thought.

  If she were alive, what would she be doing now? Her calendar! He went over to her laptop, the computer that had stayed untouched ever since that morning.

  He pressed a key, and the screen lit up immediately, showing an animation of a snake climbing up naked Eve’s leg in the Garden of Eden. Her screensaver. With a hesitant finger, he touched a key, and the screensaver disappeared.

  The screen was filled with Friendly Reminders that had jumped to the top of the screen over the last three weeks. One by one, he pressed ‘Dismiss’. Get a fitting; Talk to Saban about the vacation; Check with Binias’ people; Drag Tony to buy new shoes. Finally, with the screen clear, he pressed on the ‘Calendar’ and saw her schedule for the day. 8:00 a.m. pre-interview with Altman, 11:30, pre-production back at the station.

  That means she’d have been up at six a.m., an hour before him. The alarm clock would have gone on on her side of the bed, and within ten seconds, just as he would have stirred, her long arm would have reached over, and shut it down permanently. Tony had never needed the ‘snooze’ function. She would have sat up, looked around her, yawned, and bent down and kissed him softly on the lips.

  “Go to sleep,” she would have said, as she always had. “That was for me.”

  He probably would have been sleeping too deeply. He’d have touched her face, then turned around and fallen completely back into his stupor. And when he’d have woken up an hour later, from the same alarm clock (which she would have reset and put on his side of the bed), Tony would have been gone and he’d have forgotten all about her kiss.

  He stopped himself.

  This was not good. Matt was right. He should stop surrounding himself with her scent.

  Work would heal. Time would heal. Denial would heal.

  Fuck being healed! He didn’t want to be healed of her. It showed disrespect. To the greatest ... the greatest ... of all ... in all ...

  He kept reading the calendar, as it detailed hour after hour what Tony would have done each day until the wedding.

  ~

  Three hours later, Tony got into his car and drove aimlessly in the streets. Half an hour after that, he found himself in front of Eternity Plus.

  He parked his car. In his office, he found Charles Caudwell sitting at his desk.

  “Charley,” he shook the man’s hand. Caudwell worked for one of the eight venture capital funds whose money financed the project. “How are you doing?”

  “Fine, thank you.” He walked around the desk and sat at another chair. “How are you?”

  “I didn’t know we had an appointment,” Tony sat down behind his desk.

  “We don’t. But you don’t return phone calls.”

  “I’m sorry. These last few weeks have been – I’ve had this personal –”

  “I know. I heard, and I’m sorry. But in the last few weeks since your tragedy, Eternity Plus has used six million dollars of the shareholders’ money.”

  “That’s normal.”

  “But no longer acceptable. We’ve seen the research, you’ve shown us your computer program. You can put people in computers now. We want a finished product. We want you to start an ad campaign. We want to start getting this ready for the stores.”

  “Charley, it’s not ready yet. We have a whole floor devoted to debugging this thing, to comparing the human original to the digitized copy, to check ... To check a thousand different things. All these things take time.”

  “You’re telling me this because you know all the theory, you know all the research and everything that’s wrong with it.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You rely on your scientists.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the consensus is, that you rely too much on your scientists. If scientists had their way, they’d never get anything out of the lab, they’ll just examine it to death. Tell them you need it now, they’ll give it to you now.”

  “Charley, that’s reckless. If we send to the stores something that turns out to be –”

  “That’s just talk. If you can’t control your scientists, maybe we’ll put in your positio
n someone who can.”

  Tony smiled at him, and Charley froze. “You have no sense of timing, do you? You’re whipping a man-eating lion when he’s aggravated. I’m going to do you a big favor and do your wife a big favor and do your kids a big favor because one of these days you’ll probably need money to send them to college – and I’ll forget this happened. You’ll have your product, but you’ll have a good one and a safe one and a trustworthy one. This is going to take a few more months, but only a few months, because we’re almost done. And ten yards before the finishing line is no time to lose your head.”

  “I –”

  “Now get out of my office before you see how crappy my mood really is. I lost a –” He took a deep breath. “Get out.”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” Tony said.

  Matt opened it hesitantly. “I hate to interrupt.”

  “It’s fine. Charley was just leaving.”

  Charley stood up. “There’s going to be a general meeting in a few days.”

  “There really isn’t,” Tony said. “Nice seeing you.”

  With a face that seemed to have been steamrolled, Charles Caudwell turned his back to Tony and left the office.

  Tony looked at Matt. “Yeah?”

  “Sylvia said she saw you come in a while ago. I hoped I might catch you.”

  “Sure. What is it?”

  “The guy from ARTE is here. I wanted you to meet him.”

  “Matt, I thought we agreed I wasn’t –”

  “Just say ‘hello’.”

  Tony put a finger on his right temple and rubbed it. “Sure.”

  Matt opened the door wide, and stepped inside. “Tony Moore,” he said. “Meet Steve Adams from Tout le Monde Tout Jours, from ARTE, France.”

  Tony rose automatically, his hand extended. And then he froze. He was staring at the man whose image he had seen only yesterday. The man they’d decided had been created from Tony’s subconscious desire.