by Marc Levy
“Shit!” she muttered, running to the window.
“Who is it?” her father asked.
“Adam!”
“Who?”
“The man I was supposed to marry Saturday.”
“‘Supposed to’?”
“Saturday? The day you were buried?”
“Ah, yes.”
“‘Ah, yes’ is all he has to say,” Julia said, rolling her eyes. “That can wait. In the meantime, back into your box!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“As soon as Adam manages to parallel park—which gives us, I’d say, another two minutes max—he’ll come straight up here. We had to cancel our wedding to attend your funeral. Maybe it’s best he doesn’t find you just hanging out in my apartment.”
“Oh, why keep pointless secrets? You were considering marrying the man. I have every reason to trust him. I’ll simply explain the situation to him, as I did to you.”
“I’m not just ‘considering’ marrying the man; I am going to marry him. The wedding is temporarily postponed, that’s all. And forget about explaining the situation to him. I can barely wrap my head around all this, so there’s no way Adam will be able to process it.”
“Perhaps he’s more open-minded than you think.”
“Adam can’t even take a picture with his smartphone; how could he handle an android? For God’s sake, get back in your box!” Julia pleaded in pure exasperation.
“No use making that sour face,” he replied. “Besides, whether I’m here or not, you don’t think he’s going to find the six-foot crate in the middle of your living room just a little bit bizarre?”
When Julia failed to respond, Anthony added with satisfaction, “I rest my case.”
“Please,” pleaded Julia, leaning over to get a look out of the window, “just hurry up and hide somewhere. He’s out of the car already!”
“I would hide. But there’s really not much extra space in here,” Anthony said, glancing around with thinly veiled disgust.
“It’s all I can afford, and it’s all I need.”
“I can’t imagine how. These apartments with just one bedroom . . . how can you find even the slightest degree of privacy? If there were . . . I don’t know, say, a billiard room, a laundry room, or a study, I could easily hide there, but in here it’s just too—”
“You know, most people do not have a library or billiards in their apartment.”
“Maybe not your friends, my dear.”
Julia shot him a withering look.
“How nice. You tore my whole life apart while you were alive; now you spend three billion dollars on this machine just so you can keep at it even after you’ve died.”
“Even though I’m merely a prototype, this machine, as you call it, is not nearly as expensive as all that. Who could afford it?”
“Maybe your friends?” quipped Julia.
“Temper, temper! Same old Julia. Now, let’s stop the bickering and focus on hiding away the father who just miraculously came back into your life. What’s above us, an attic?”
“Another apartment.”
“If you know your neighbor well enough, I could go ring the bell and ask for a cup of sugar, while you get rid of your fiancé.”
Julia began to rifle frantically through the kitchen drawers.
“What are you looking for?”
“The key,” she whispered, hearing Adam’s voice outside on the street as he called out her name.
“I hope it’s for upstairs. I’m sure it crossed your mind that if you send me to the basement I might very well run into your fiancé.”
“I own the apartment above us. I bought it with my bonus last year. But I haven’t had time to fix it up, so it’s kind of a mess up there.”
“As opposed to down here, which is just spick-and-span?”
“Keep it up and you’re going to make me kill you.”
“I hate to split hairs, but I am already dead. And if you kept your life a bit more organized, you’d have already realized the keys are hanging on that hook next to the stove.”
Julia grabbed the key chain and shoved it at her father.
“Go up there, and don’t make a peep! He knows the apartment’s empty.”
“I think you’d better go see what he wants, instead of standing here lecturing me. Bellowing your name like that out in the street, he’s going to wake the whole neighborhood.”
Julia ran to the window and leaned out over the railing of the small balcony.
“There you are! I rang like ten times!” shouted Adam, taking a step back on the sidewalk.
“Sorry! Buzzer’s sound is broken,” Julia yelled down.
“And you didn’t hear me yelling?”
“I did, just now. I had the TV on . . .”
“Can you let me up?”
“Sure,” she said, but stayed planted at the window, waiting for the sound of the closing door to confirm that her father was really gone.
“You don’t seem all that happy to see me.”
“Of course I am. Why would you say that?”
“Because you’re up there, and I’m still down here? You didn’t sound so great in that voicemail, so I decided to stop by on my way home from the country. But if you want me to go . . .”
“No, of course not. I’ll buzz you in.”
She went to the intercom and pressed the entry button. She could hear the latch opening and Adam’s footsteps climbing the stairs. She hurried to the kitchen and grabbed a remote control, then realized she had the wrong one and tossed it aside. Julia rifled through a drawer and found the TV remote, praying under her breath that the batteries were still working. The TV flickered to life just as the door opened.
“So you don’t even lock your front door anymore?” Adam asked as he came in.
“Of course I do. I unlocked it just now for you,” Julia improvised, silently cursing her father.
Adam took off his jacket and laid it on a chair. He noticed the blizzard of static raging across the TV screen.
“Whatever happened to ‘I hate TV’?”
“Oh, it’s just every once in a while,” she responded, trying to gather her wits.
“I can’t say this show looks all that interesting.”
“Give me a break. I was trying to turn it off, but I hit the wrong button.”
She saw Adam’s eyes drift over to the imposing crate in the middle of the living room.
“What?” asked Julia, doing a poor job of feigning innocence.
“Well, Julia. It’s just . . . there’s an enormous box in the middle of your living room.”
Julia took a gamble, offering a hastily conceived explanation. The box was special packaging to return a broken computer. But the deliverymen had mixed things up and sent it to her house instead of her office.
“It must be incredibly fragile to need such a tall box.”
“Yes, it’s a very complex machine,” Julia explained. “And very bulky. But delicate.”
“And they delivered it to the wrong address?” continued Adam, clearly intrigued.
“Yeah. Well, I may have been the one who filled out the form with the wrong info. I’ve been so worn out these past few weeks . . .”
“You should be careful. They could accuse you of trying to steal company property.”
“Nobody’s going to accuse me of anything,” snapped Julia, betraying her growing impatience.
“Is there something we need to talk about?”
“Like what?”
“Like why I had to ring your buzzer ten times and wake up the entire neighborhood, shouting in the street just to get you to come to your window? Or,” he added gently, “why you look like such a wreck, and why the TV is on when the cable isn’t even plugged in . . . You’re not acting like yourself, Julia.”
“Come on, spit it out. What are you implying? Are you trying to say I’m hiding something?” Julia snapped again.
“I don’t know,” Adam replied. “You said it, not me.”
&n
bsp; Julia turned and flung the bedroom door open, then did the same with the closet door behind her. Next, she went to the kitchen and began throwing open all of the cupboards, beginning above the sink and not stopping until every last one was hanging ajar.
“Can I ask just what the hell you’re doing?” Adam said.
“Looking for my secret lover! He’s gotta be around here somewhere!”
“Julia!”
“What?”
Just as their uncharacteristic squabble was about to escalate, Julia’s phone rang. They both stared at it, stunned, until Julia finally picked it up. She listened for a long time, feeling her shoulders relax, then offered the caller some warm words of praise and gratitude before hanging up.
“Who was that?”
“The office. They finally fixed the problem that had been holding up the project. Production is back on schedule, full steam ahead.”
“See?” Adam said, his tone softening. “Just in time. In an alternate universe, if we were starting our honeymoon right now, you would’ve left with a clear conscience.”
“I know, honey, I really am sorry. More than you could know. Which reminds me, I have to give you back those tickets—they’re at my office.”
“Don’t worry about that—you can throw them right in the trash. Or keep them as a souvenir. No refunds, no exchanges.”
Julia looked at him with eyebrows raised, biting her tongue to hold back her reaction.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Adam said. “Most people don’t cancel their honeymoon three days before they leave. And we could still go, if we wanted.”
“We’d go . . . because the tickets are nonrefundable?”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Adam, taking her in his arms. “Your voicemail didn’t do your mood justice. I shouldn’t even have come. You were right: you need to be alone. Let’s just drop the whole thing for now. I’ll head home. Tomorrow’s another day.” He kissed her softly before letting her go.
As he was heading toward the door, a faint creak came from the apartment above. Adam threw Julia an inquisitive glance.
“Adam. That was a rat.”
“Sometimes I wonder how you manage to live in this pigsty.”
“I like this pigsty. And someday when I’m running my own animation studio, I’ll have enough money for a big apartment of my very own, you’ll see.”
“Don’t you mean ‘our very own’? I mean, you do remember what was supposed to happen yesterday, right?”
“I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant.”
“How much longer do you count on shuttling back and forth between your place and mine?”
“Now is not the time to rehash that old argument. I promise, as soon as we can afford renovating, we can connect the two floors and there’ll be plenty of space for the two of us here.”
“You’re lucky I love you the way I do. Otherwise, I’d insist you leave this place. Sometimes you seem more attached to this apartment than you are to me! But if you really want to stay here, what’s holding us back from renovating now?”
“There you go again with the insinuations,” Julia scoffed, changing her tone yet again. “If you’re talking about my father’s money, I wanted nothing to do with it when he was alive, and even less now that he’s dead. I have to go to bed. I’m not going on vacation, and I have a busy day tomorrow.”
“You’re right. Go to bed. I’ll write off that last remark, and that tone, to fatigue.”
Adam shrugged and left. He didn’t even turn back to see Julia wave a feeble goodbye from the top of the stairs. The building door slammed shut behind him.
“Thank you for that comment about the rat,” Anthony grumbled as he came back into the apartment.
“Right. I probably should have said, ‘Oh, that? That’s just a state-of-the-art robotic version of my father pacing around above our heads.’ You want him to have me hauled away in a straitjacket?”
“Not necessarily. Though it would have been exciting to see the look on his face,” Anthony retorted, not bothering to mask his amusement.
“While we’re bickering,” continued Julia, “let me take this opportunity to officially thank you for ruining my wedding.”
“In that case, am I expected to officially apologize . . . for dying?”
“And thanks for getting me in trouble with the owner of the shoe store downstairs. In addition to everything else, I’ll get the stink eye from him every day for the next two months.”
“The shoe salesman? Who cares?”
“I wasn’t done. Thank you also for ruining the only time off I’ve had all week.”
“Please. By the time I was your age, my only night off all year was Thanksgiving.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. And finally, and here I really have to hand it to you, thank you for turning me into a total monster with Adam.”
“Don’t thank me for that, thank yourself. I had nothing to do with it.”
“How can you honestly claim you had nothing to do with it?” shouted Julia.
“Fine. Maybe I did play a small part. Truce?”
“Truce? For what happened tonight? Or yesterday? Or for all our fights over the years?”
“I’ve never wanted to fight with you, Julia. I may not have been around much, but I tried my best to be kind.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. You did your damnedest to retain total control over my life, no matter the distance. You had no right. What the hell am I even doing? I’m talking to a dead man!”
“You can turn me off whenever you like.”
“It’s what I probably should do. Put you back in that stupid box of yours and ship you back to whatever high-tech laboratory you came from.”
“Jot this down: 1-800-300-0001, confirmation PIN 654.”
Julia looked at him inquisitively.
“It’s how you get ahold of the company that made me. You just dial that number and give them the code. They can even turn me off remotely, if you can’t bring yourself to do it on your own. One call, and I’m gone in twenty-four hours. But think long and hard before you do so. Think about all the people who can only dream of spending a few more days in the company of a mother or father they have lost. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. You pass it up, it’s gone. We have one week together, and not a second longer. Just seven days—well, six, now that Sunday’s almost gone.”
“Why one week?”
“It was the duration agreed upon by the ethics committee.”
“Meaning?”
“Well, as you can imagine, this kind of technology veers into some very slippery moral territory. We thought it was important to keep our clients from getting too attached to these machines, despite their near perfection. There are already many ways of communicating after death: wills, books, audio and video recordings. Our technology represents the next step—harnessing innovation for an interactive experience,” her father explained, with all the enthusiasm of a well-polished sales pitch. “In contrast to an arcane sheet of paper or a two-dimensional video, we offer the dying party a more complete medium to express their final wishes, while also giving the mourning family the opportunity to take advantage of a few last days in the company of the dearly departed. But we couldn’t risk an emotional transfer of affection for their loved one onto the machine. We learned many valuable lessons from previous attempts. I don’t know if you recall, but there was one toy manufacturer whose baby dolls were so convincingly lifelike that their owners ended up treating them like real infants. We don’t want to reproduce these sorts of twisted reactions. We are not interested in producing a clone—however tempting that might be.”
Julia rolled her eyes.
“You, however, don’t seem especially taken with the concept. At the end of the week, my batteries will run out permanently, my memory drives will be deleted, and the last signs of life will flicker out and disappear.”
“There’s no way of stopping it?”
“No, they covered all the bases. It’s irrev
ersible. If some smart aleck tries to tamper with the battery, the memory drives are automatically wiped clean. A bit of a dismal thought, especially for me, but I’m like a disposable flashlight. All I have is six more days of light, and then . . . poof! Darkness. Six days, Julia. Six short days to make up for lost time—it’s up to you.”
“Only you could come up with something this twisted. Ordinary shareholder? I bet you’re a lot more than that. Or were.”
“Present tense, please. Assuming you do decide to go along with this, and seeing as you haven’t yet pressed that button that will put me in the past, I’d prefer you speak to me in the present tense.”
“Six full days? I haven’t taken six days off since . . . I don’t know when.”
“You’re a chip off the old block.”
Julia shot her father a furious look.
“All in jest, dear. You don’t have to take everything so seriously,” he said.
“What am I supposed to tell Adam?”
“You seemed to have no trouble lying to him just now.”
“I didn’t lie to him. I hid certain things. Major things. There’s a difference.”
“The nuance escapes me. In that case, you can just keep on hiding certain things.”
“And what about Stanley?”
“Your gay friend?”
“My best friend.”
“Right . . . him,” responded Anthony. “If he’s really your best friend, you’ll just have to tread lightly.”
“And what? You’ll just hang out here all day while I’m at work? Plug yourself in and recharge?”
“Weren’t you supposed to take a few days off for that honeymoon of yours? Perhaps you don’t need to go in at all.”
“How do you know about all that?”
“The floor of your apartment, or the ceiling, if you prefer, is not soundproof. Typical for an old, run-down building.”
“Anthony!” Julia wailed.
“Now, dear, I may not be flesh and blood, but please. Call me Daddy. I can’t stand it when you call me by my first name.”
“For Christ’s sake, I haven’t called you Daddy for twenty years.”
“All the more reason for us to make up for it over the next six days,” her father replied with a broad smile.