“No, she was fine. But I think we’d all like to keep it that way.”
“She misses Albert,” said Meredith. “It breaks my heart. Maybe it won’t even work. She said he didn’t use the computer much. But I think we should run it and see.”
“I think it’s a mistake,” said Dash.
“Vote?” She’d taken to proposing this when she and Dash disagreed because Sam always sided with her.
They voted. Dash lost. So Sam ran it and saw. When it didn’t work, he investigated further. Ordinarily, of course, he didn’t read dead loved ones’ communications—his algorithm did. He respected everyone’s privacy. And, truthfully, he didn’t really care about people’s secrets and lies and hopes and dreams. Ordinarily, he never actually saw any of that stuff. But Albert needed troubleshooting. Not surprisingly, Albert didn’t have a Facebook page. He didn’t have a blog. He didn’t video chat or post YouTube videos. He didn’t have a photo account because he didn’t have a digital camera. He didn’t send text messages because he didn’t have a cell phone. He didn’t even have anything he read regularly online. What Albert did have was a torrid, consuming, enduring, and fairly well-documented affair.
Albert had a few start-up messages from when he opened his secret e-mail account. He got confirmation of a few things he bought online. He got his fair share of spam. But other than that, Albert e-mailed exclusively and obsessively and sometimes alarmingly graphically with one Agnes Grayson. Sam couldn’t believe it. He tried to tell himself that what was gross and wrong here was the betrayal of a woman he was gradually coming to think of as family. But really it was the horror that you could know someone that well and love someone that much and still be totally wrong. That and they were old people, and old people should not, so far as Sam was concerned, be doing the things Albert was describing, especially upside down.
Meredith and Dash came home from their hard day at the office.
“Three new sign-ups today,” she reported.
“David had a new song for his mom,” added Dash. “I’m thinking of introducing him to my friend Bradley who does music for a studio in L.A. He’s really good.”
“Oh, and Maggie told Mr. Benson he was a good dad today. She was still pissed off that he grounded her, but she said she knew why he did it. He was over the moon. So nice going.”
“Thanks.” Sam looked like he’d been grounded.
“What’s wrong?”
“I ran the algorithm on Albert.…”
“Not enough to go on?”
“Enough to e-mail but—”
“That’s probably enough, you know?” said Meredith. “Dash is right. Video might be weird for her. Video chat with her dead husband would probably give her a heart attack.”
“He’s not going to be able to e-mail her.”
“Why not?”
“His e-mails all center on one thing only.”
“Really? What?”
“Out-of-the-way restaurants no one knows about. A series of motels cheap enough to be regularly afforded but clean enough to truly use the bed. Occasionally a B-and-B on the peninsula. Once even a campsite.”
“Shut up,” Meredith and Dash said at the same time. He was incredulous but a little impressed. She paled like she was the one being cheated on.
“He was having an affair,” said Sam.
“With who?” Meredith demanded.
“Please let it be a guy, please let it be a guy.” Dash crossed his fingers.
“ ’Fraid not,” said Sam.
“Would that make it better?” said Meredith.
“Old high school flame, evidently. Female. First there’s reconnecting; then there’s flirting; then there are lunch dates just to catch up.”
“Oh God,” said Meredith.
“Then there’s a lot of the ‘which hotel and what time’ kind of e-mails.”
“Men are pigs,” Dash smiled. “I should know. I am one.”
“Then there’s a lot of the ‘I’m going to touch you here, bend you this way, whisper this, make you scream that, then try it upside down and backward twice’ kind of e-mails.”
“My God,” Dash whistled and Meredith whispered at the same time.
“It’s okay,” Sam said. “We haven’t told her anything about RePose. She probably wouldn’t understand even if we did. She’ll have to mourn the old-fashioned way.”
“It’s not okay,” said Meredith angrily.
“Why not?”
“Because her whole life was a lie. Because the man she loved didn’t love her. Because we found her living in squalor, mourning a man who never was worth it.”
“Girl, you don’t know that,” said Dash.
“Sam read the e-mails,” said Meredith.
“No, I mean okay, he was having an affair, but you don’t know what was really going on. Maybe he loved them both. Maybe he didn’t love this Agnes chick at all but needed something he wasn’t getting from Penny. Hell, maybe she knew and okayed it. Grandma would say, ‘You never know what goes on in other people’s houses.’ Don’t get all uppity about it.”
“You think Penny knew and was okay with it? Really? That sweet old lady? That’s the defense you can muster?”
“I don’t have to muster a defense at all. And neither did Albert.”
“He did a terrible, terrible thing to the woman he was supposed to love.”
“In fact, I think he did her a huge favor.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Seems like he made sure she never knew. Took this to his grave. Set up a secret e-mail account. Used it when Penny wasn’t around. Made sure to meet his girlfriend only where no one would recognize them.”
“Yeah, so he wouldn’t get busted. If it were okay with her, he wouldn’t have had to sneak around.”
“Look, I’m not saying this was admirable,” said Dash. “I’m saying we don’t know the story. She feels like she was loved, so she was.”
“That’s not true.”
“That is true,” said Sam, siding with Dash for the first time all month. “That’s the whole premise here. That’s what powers RePose. That’s what makes it work. Feeling loved equals being loved. That’s all.”
“True in real life too,” said Dash.
“We should tell her,” said Meredith. “Maybe it will help her get over him. She’ll realize he wasn’t the man she thought he was.”
“Oh, Merde, no. Don’t tell her. She doesn’t want to know. Dash is right—we don’t know what was really going on. We only have e-mails to go on.”
“Isn’t that the whole point? E-mails don’t lie. They may be lies, but they don’t lie. We can reconstruct an entire human with them. This whole thing is based on e-mails being plenty to go on,” said Meredith. And then, “He lied to her. And we know it.”
“Well then we’d better keep it to ourselves,” said Dash.
He left to go get more rennet for his goat cheese, and Sam made dinner, and Meredith started working on an Allied World War I Spad (it looked like a biplane to Sam). Mostly, she just slammed supplies around. Then she called her grandmother.
“Hey baby,” Livvie said when she answered, “I was just thinking about you.” The wonder of it, of his own dead loved one, never failed to take Sam’s breath away. Ditto a computer program with the impression that it had been thinking of you.
“Hi Grandma,” said Meredith miserably.
“You seem in such a funk all the time these days. What’s wrong, baby?”
“Nothing.”
“Something.”
“Just … crap at work.”
“You work too hard. You and Sam should take a vacation and come visit me.”
“If someone knew a terrible secret about you and at first it would make you more unhappy, but in the long run maybe it would make you less unhappy, would you want to know?”
Livvie wasn’t sure what to say to that. “I’m sorry, sweetie, I don’t understand.” And then, “It’s so sunny here. You would love it.”
“Is this w
rong? Is what we’re doing wrong?” Meredith asked her grandmother.
“My baby?” Livvie didn’t understand the question, but she knew the right answer anyway. “She never does anything wrong.”
NOT ANYMORE
And that was just the beginning. As the first handful of users turned into dozens then hundreds, and as Sam’s two hours of sleep each night turned into four then five then eight, and as the dogs started getting better walks, and as Meredith seemed to relax into things a bit more, and as Dash started to stay down in L.A. more often, and as bringing dinner or a new book or a pot of flowers down to Penny got folded into their schedule, they all found a little bit of a rhythm.
Sam was finding time to run most mornings. He ran through the Arboretum or in Seward Park or along the waterfront downtown. One chilly, rainy morning at the end of April, he went all the way out to Discovery Park and ran along the bluff, down to the lighthouse, and back up again. He drove home, drenched in rain and sweat, with the windows open.
There he found his apartment heated to approximately three hundred degrees and Meredith in the middle of the living room doing yoga in a soaked tank top and very short shorts. Opening the front door was like walking into a wall. The dogs raised pitiful heads from the couch and wagged tails once apiece but could muster the energy for nothing further.
“Holy hell, Merde, what is going on? It’s like a rain forest in here.”
She was breathing hard in downward dog and gazed up at him from between her legs. “My hot yoga studio’s closed,” she said. “It’s Take Your Daughter to Work Day.”
“Shouldn’t your hot yoga studio be open for Take Your Daughter to Work Day? So your yoga teacher could take her daughter to work?”
“She took her to her day job,” Meredith upside-down shrugged. “Her daughter doesn’t like the heat. It makes her queasy.”
“I know how she feels,” said Sam. “And you can’t do room-temperature yoga for one day only?”
“Nope. Once you go hot, you can’t go back. I’m so much more flexible this way.” She was drenched—wetter than he was, and he’d been running in the rain for an hour—and flexible indeed. She’d somehow flipped into a backbend with feet and hands planted firmly on the floor and the entire front of her straining in a perfect arc toward the ceiling. The bottom half of her tank stuck to her stomach and rose and fell as she panted through the pose. The top part, he noticed, just fluttered with her heartbeat underneath. She was breathing hard.
“You’re messing up my breath,” she accused him as sweat trickled down from her forehead, through messed hair, onto the mat beneath her in steady drops.
“I can’t tell you how bad I feel about that,” said Sam. He removed his muddy shoes and socks on the way over and spread his feet just outside of hers, shoulder-width apart (Sam had occasionally tried yoga as a way to meet women). He pressed himself against the current apex of her, and she took a deep breath in and curved herself deeper, pushing her bottom half more firmly against him but her top half further away. Sam couldn’t have that and reached forward to trace fingers through the pool of water at the hollow of her throat, down over her chest and between her breasts, and over her stretched-taut stomach, and she breathed into him for another moment, two, before somehow flipping back into downward dog. Sam had barely moved but now found himself pressed luxuriously into the only part of her that was pointing up. He found he also had more leverage now and draped himself over her, dog over dog, the outsides of her hands and feet pressed to the insides of his, his entire body laid out over the entire length of hers. He felt her draw a deep breath in. He balanced against her, against the mat, and managed to free his right hand from the floor. He reached between his own thighs to run his fingers up the inside of hers, then under her top, over her sweat-drenched stomach, underneath her bra. There, he cupped her breast, ran his thumb underneath and then over her nipple, and felt her heart beating beneath his palm as she struggled to hold the position, his weight and hers, against slippery hands and a tongue licking wet salt from the back of her neck. She balanced again, somehow freed her left hand, and twisted it behind her and into Sam’s shorts. He was quite impressed—hot yoga was doing wonders for her balance and her strength. Deep breath in, out. Then his left hand slipped and he tumbled on top of her, knocking them both into a heap on the mat.
He lay there for a moment, just feeling her underneath him, making them both wait, until she pressed him gently off her from behind and cleared enough space to flip over so they were front to front, all the whole length of them. When he lowered himself back on top of her, he found her all his again—nothing bent away, no balance to be maintained to keep her there, and slippery had ceased to be an impediment of any kind. He stopped licking her neck and kissed her instead with a deep, begging slowness belied by his racing pulse and breath he could not slow and hers. In revelation of having two hands free, he slid both under her shirt and bra and peeled them off her skin and over her shoulders in one long movement. He slid her out of her shorts the same way, thrilled to be so slippery, overjoyed to have both hands available for the job, one for the removal of clothing, the other to explore what it found beneath. Meredith did the same. Then he lay naked on top of her, slick and hard everywhere, both of them, and they drew impossibly hot air into lungs already on fire and moved entirely together, inside each other like puzzle pieces, soaked and soaking until they were done and lay panting and dripping and buzzing lightly on the mat with puddles forming all around them. Sam raised himself slightly, shifted his weight so as not to hurt her, but couldn’t quite tear himself away from the breath and heartbeat and body beneath him. She was the most living thing he had ever felt in his life.
“The contrast between you and work is breathtaking,” said Sam who had never imagined he’d be working so closely with death in his day job.
“I don’t think that’s what’s breathtaking,” said Meredith.
He traced a slow trickle of sweat with his finger down her cheek. “I love you, you know.”
“I know,” said Meredith. “I could tell.”
Then her phone started ringing. And Sam’s phone started ringing. They ignored them, but neither of them stopped. Finally, Meredith got up, got a towel, and answered. On the other end was the Seattle Times—local, friendly, fine. On the other end of Sam’s, after a shower he insisted on before dealing with whatever was going on, was CNN—less local, less friendly, and much less fine. The Times had just gotten wind of RePose and was interested in a local piece—what it was, how it worked, the genius behind it, the technology that made it go. CNN had just gotten wind of RePose too, but it was an ill wind.
“We’ve been looking into the service that’s been called ‘Dead Mail,’ ” investigative reporter Courtney Harman-Handler told Sam abruptly. “We’ve had undercover reporters in there. We’ve investigated the technology. We believe you’re defrauding your users. We’ll be running an exposé, and we’d like to invite you to comment on the record. The public has a right to know. It’s not real.”
“It’s totally real,” said Sam.
“We’ve uncovered evidence that reveals you’re faking these ‘projections,’ as you call them.”
“Nothing’s faked,” said Sam.
“Our evidence reveals the opposite—everything’s being faked. People’s ‘dead loved ones,’ as you call them, are not being reanimated or brought back to consciousness or sentience. They cannot communicate with anyone.”
“By ‘real’ you mean ‘alive’?” Sam was stunned.
“Of course, Mr. Elling,” said Courtney Harman-Handler. “That’s what everyone means by ‘real.’ ”
“Well then of course it’s not real,” said Sam.
“Let me remind you that you’re on the record, sir.”
“We aren’t claiming to raise these people from the dead. That would be something to get upset about.”
“You’re defrauding your users out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. You claim that they’ll be able to communicate wi
th their dead loved ones, but it’s all smoke and mirrors.”
“Well duh.” Sam thought Courtney Harman-Handler might benefit from having it dumbed down a bit.
“So you admit this is fraud?”
“No. Not fraud. You were right the first time. Smoke and mirrors.”
“Sir?”
“Really, really impressive-as-hell smoke and mirrors. Smoke and mirrors is what people are paying for.”
“A fake?”
“It’s not fake. It’s real. The computer is really studying then really compiling then really projecting users’ loved ones. It’s not me back there in a box with gears and levers furiously composing e-mails and hoping they sound right. It genuinely is what these people would really say if they were alive to say it.”
“How do we know that’s true?”
“You come in and use it and find out.”
“We believe it’s a hoax.”
“A hoax is deceptive,” said Sam. “There’s no deception here. The only one who’s suggested real equals alive is you.”
In seeming contrast, Meredith’s reporter, Jason Peterman, asked her out to lunch. She met him at a café in Belltown. They chatted for a couple hours. Meredith elevator-pitched how it worked and why. She effused about how glad they were for the opportunity to help people through the hardest parts of their lives. She described the salon and the lengths they went to to make sure no one had to be alone while they were RePosing or while they were mourning. She handed over the names and contact info of a couple of their users who were willing to talk. And then Jason Peterman asked her the biggest question of all: “Tell me about Sam Elling. What’s he like? How did he come up with such a unique idea?” There was no one more qualified to answer this question than Meredith and nothing she’d rather discuss. The interview went on for another hour from there.
“He’s brilliant, for starters. He doesn’t think things can’t be done; he just thinks they haven’t been done yet. He’s a problem solver. You know? My grandmother died, and he was so … sad for me? Everyone else said, ‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ or, ‘That sucks so much,’ or, ‘I remember when my grandmother died,’ or something like that. Sam said all those things. But he also said the thing no one else in the world would which was, ‘Well, maybe there’s a way to make her less dead, less gone.’ ”
Goodbye for Now: A Novel Page 16