The Answers

by Catherine Lacey

  Staring into the bedroom’s darkness, he tried to force himself to relax and stop indulging all this nostalgia, get another hour of sleep, but his mind wouldn’t stop spinning. A year before Camille had been Melanie, five months that now felt a lifetime away. She was a few years older than him, an actress often described as a formidable talent, known for taking few interviews, for being recalcitrant and indifferent in the ones she did do, known for her graceful and brief acceptance speeches. Surprising even himself, Kurt bought a ring, booked a suite at her favorite hotel in the middle of the desert, proposed to her their first morning, still in bed. She said nothing, got up, put pants on, went topless to the patio to smoke.

  You don’t love me, she said. You love the idea of me.

  He’d never seen her smoke before and noticed how she exhaled in a self-conscious, half-guilty way. She glanced down at the ring in his hand as if it were a plate she was waiting to be cleared from her table.

  You can put that away, really. It’s sweet of you to be so idealistic but this is just … this isn’t that.

  She was smarter than he was—he knew that, had always known that, had always loved that about her, but it meant she had more control of him, was able to leave him with such self-assured ease. He went over the girlfriends he’d had before Melanie—Sara, Martina, Jenny, Kate—each relationship marked by some kind of frenzied beginning and a long decline or a sudden souring. He thought all the way back to his first love or first maybe-love—Alyssa. He was sixteen, she was two years older, both of them fools. Spring of his sophomore year, her senior, they would make out endlessly, pressing against each other, faces mashed together for hours upon hours, but they never had sex, never even talked about it, and as he looked back as an adult, this baffled him—it wasn’t a religious or a moral issue; all their friends were fucking each other; they had condoms from sex ed; her parents were never around. Hadn’t they both been healthy teenagers? And didn’t Kurt feel as if his body were dissolving when he was around her? He remembered shivering on a warm April day and she said when she was with him she felt as if she were standing at the edge of something high, how a body feels when it fears a fall, and sometimes they’d just stare at each other in a trance of feeling and at night they’d tie up their parents’ phone lines by staying up for hours, listening to the other’s breathing finally soften toward sleep. But if they had been in love, completely in love, wouldn’t they have been unable to not have sex? Wouldn’t it have been inevitable? It wasn’t for lack of opportunity or attraction or hormones. They just hadn’t. When Kurt lost his virginity to a college girl at a party a few months later—pretty, distant, inconsequential—he was mainly just relieved to have done it at all. Alyssa had graduated and gone off to Vassar and had probably already met someone else, he thought, and he felt oddly fine about that, too. He sent her one letter and she called him once or twice, when she’d heard his mom was sick, but that was all. So perhaps, he thought now, that whatever he felt with Alyssa was not a complete love—unless the sexlessness of their desire indicated a purity, a vapor-distilled, uncontaminated joy in the other’s being, not some sort of procreative impulse or lust renamed devotion, but the real thing, a feeling that needed nothing.

  After Alyssa there were others, but no one he’d been so content to just stare at. In those months his mother was in chemo he did kiss one girl—Nicola someone—but he had felt so troublingly empty that when she moaned, pulled him closer, put her hand in his back pocket, all he could do was remove her hand, back away, shake his head, and say he had to go. He remembered a brief look of sadness in her face but it faded and she returned to the birthday party they had ducked away from, and later he’d even seen her roller-skating, arms linked with another girl, laughing. He sat on a bench intentionally far away from all the other kids and brooded over a fountain soda until someone’s mom came by and asked him if he wanted anything to eat and he could tell from the way she had looked at him that she knew about his mom. He said he was okay. She patted his shoulder and left. Why did he remember all this so clearly?

  In his dark bedroom now, sun still hidden in the east, he indulged himself in dwelling. He always thought of that day at the skating rink as an important part of his mythology, a narrative he’d projected over all his sceneless, arcless days. He felt he could remember the exact thoughts he’d had while watching Nicola skate in circles, smiling, fine to be around these other people, lacking nothing. He remembered thinking that no one needed anyone in particular—that people just generally needed other people, but probably no one ever irrevocably needed someone above all else, and in realizing this, that no pair carried a patent on a feeling, Kurt feared he may have broken himself, that if he believed this idea, then he might have just vaccinated himself against ever being in love. And even if he did let himself be in love, he would always know that beneath any theater of romance he might perform would be this thought: I could be anyone else. She could be anyone else.

  But he’d still managed to do it, hadn’t he? Managed to fall in love a few times? Maybe he had. And maybe it had been best that summer with Alexi. He remembered time with her as always feeling easy and calm and their sex had always followed some innate choreography, while still feeling improvised and urgent. When their eyes met for the first time after an absence, it seemed every color around them grew brighter and sounds sharpened and their attention poured into each other as easily as smoke blending into the air.

  That September it all vanished. Lots of people were breaking up then as everyone had been loudly reminded of their approaching death and reacted accordingly, quitting habits or starting habits, quitting jobs or people or versions of themselves, having realizations—anything to stop the suspicion that everything, everything, was completely outside one’s control. Perhaps it was a helpful delusion to do what one could when faced with the enormity of how little one can really do. It was necessary to find a way to push against the world, to forget what was helpful to forget.

  And forgetting, too, was necessary to falling in love, a drink from the river Lethe, all past love was renounced for the present. Maybe this wasn’t completely a delusion, but a form of evolution, that the brain might somehow be chemically altered by the experience of falling in love, and that any love that came after that love would have to be more enormous than the last in order to register in that chemically altered brain.

  He resisted, again, getting out of bed to write this down or speak it into a recorder for Matheson, thinking if this thought was true, it would return.

  But how did a person, how did a brain or a body, measure the old love against the new? Was there some inner barometer, some switch that had to be flipped? And if there was—and Kurt felt blindly sure there was—he wanted this barometer to be located and set, like a thermostat, to keep someone in love, to transform an unconscious activity into a conscious one.

  Then, on that thought, as if on cue, the blinds and curtains of his bedroom began their automated opening with the sun’s rise, light seeping in on Kurt, giving him the sense, the euphoric but delusional sense, that this was some clear sign to him.

  Later that day, in the middle of his Relational Experiment with the Mundanity Girlfriend, Kurt stood at the large window and stared at the bridge, feeling the sensors on his body warming and cooling and warming again as he watched a single jogger making his way through the crowd of tourists. Shifting his focus, he caught Poppy’s reflection in the glass. She lounged on the sofa on her belly, wearing the loose, neutral clothes the Research Division had determined appropriate. She read a magazine, her hair tied up in a knot. He felt comforted in her ambivalence toward him, this absent presence. At the thought of this his eyes flooded, though his face hardly moved, just flushed red. It startled him—he rarely cried—but here was this woman, a stranger he had never once exchanged a word with and would never speak a word to, whose merely being here seemed to have given him such a deep solace. And, true, you could say Kurt’s actual connection to her was so shallow that it was nonexistent, but Kurt
rejoiced and was moved by its meaninglessness, its total lack of complication.

  Hours later, after the experiment was over and Poppy was gone, the researcher removing Kurt’s sensors told him the Research Division had a short presentation to make about an important feature of these sensors, something they hadn’t been able to tell him before and needed to explain to him immediately. A screen was pulled down, lights dimmed, a projector turned on, and another researcher appeared before it, cleared her throat, and began.

  As you know, the long-held goal of the Research Division has been to optimize human emotions, to discover ways that we can use technology to better understand our decisions, our mistakes, to make the human mind and body healthier, more logical.

  Kurt looked over his shoulder and realized the rest of the Research Division had gathered behind him, as if they were watching a movie together.

  Now, we want to explain to you an extremely sophisticated and unparalleled feature of our sensors called Internal Directives.

  A series of windows appeared on the screen: a small spreadsheet of digits changing and changing, the glowing green line of a cardiogram, a pie chart with slices that grew and shrank, what appeared to be an MRI of a brain, and a surveillance video of Kurt standing at the window just hours ago, staring at the bridge. His eyes went straight to the video, accustomed as he was to seeing himself on-screen, and he quickly concluded it was a good shot, well framed, his stance unaffected, natural—only then remembering this wasn’t a film set but was part of his home, his experiment, his Research Division.

  This, as it may be obvious, is the feed of information that you produced today, as measured by the sensors and cameras. As you already know, the data produced by each subject within a Relational Experiment is being collected and run through our analytic software, creating a nuanced portrait of yours and the girlfriends’ physiology and mental temperament over a period of time under a given set of circumstances.

  The researcher gestured to the screen.

  For example, today you entered the Relational Experiment feeling rather peaceful, contemplative, though mildly underslept, just a little dehydrated, and occasionally distracted by a stray sexual thought—but on the whole, rather content. Would you agree?

  I suppose so. He couldn’t be sure what he felt. Exposed? Impressed? Glad that the Research Division’s sensors could so easily capture him? He wondered what the sensors would have gathered now, had he been wearing them.

  Now, suppose I could tell you, for absolute certain, that having even a passing sexual thought, even an unconscious fantasy in the back of your mind, suppose I could tell you that this was having a catastrophic effect on your creative output—

  Is that what—

  Just suppose that were true. I’m not saying it is, but just suppose it was. I’m only giving this example to prove a point and it in no way reflects our actual research.

  One thing Kurt had asked the Research Division to focus on was whether there was some relationship between one’s romantic and sexual life and one’s creative output, as he’d long wondered if his inconsistent and unfulfilling relationships with women had been sapping his energy, stopping him from completing a full cut of The Walk.

  What if I told you—it’s very simple, Kurt, if you just stop thinking about sex unless you’re actually having it, then your creative energy will be completely unhindered and within your control. Do you think you could do that very easily? Do you think anyone could?

  Well— He noticed now that of all the women in the Research Division she was easily the most attractive, fortysomething and graceful, milky-brown hair to her shoulders glittered with whitish gray, but now that she was asking him to not think about sex, he was gripped with the image of kneeling at her feet, pushing up her lab coat, pulling her hips to his mouth … Well, no, in fact, no, I don’t think anyone would be able to do that.

  Exactly—controlling one’s own mind is nearly impossible for most people. Yet even more basic, conscious tasks—exercising, eating well, remembering to drink water—people have such a problem doing even these things that are within their control, even when the benefits are obvious and often immediate. People, in fact, are the main thing that stop themselves from their own well-being, and circumventing this self-sabotage, we’ve decided, is the only way we can effect actual change in making the human experience more streamlined and harmonious.

  All the data and images on the screen vanished and a different set of graphs and images took their place.

  To this end we have developed a feature of the sensors called Internal Directives. Instead of merely recording the bio-information of a body wearing the sensors, Internal Directives allow us to transfer information into the body, telling it how to behave, which hormones or neurotransmitters to increase or decrease, shifting the body’s vagal tone, raising or lowering the heart rate, and so forth.

  It would take too long and frankly be too boring to explain precisely how Internal Directives work, but essentially it uses a series of something like electromagnetic pulses to send data into the body. Now, what we have here on the screen are the graphs measuring your Emotional Vulnerability Quotient, EVQ, during today’s Relational Experiment with the Mundanity Girlfriend. Again, I can’t completely explain the exact mathematical formula we use to calculate one’s EVQ, but essentially we take all these different data points that your sensors are generating and run them through a complex algorithm that then gives us a measure of how willing or able a person is, in any given moment, to experience their surroundings and their internal state in a meaning ful way. Essentially it’s a measure of how closely you’re paying attention to the outside world, your emotions, and the emotions of others.

  The researcher turned on a laser pointer and aimed it at the graphs on the screen.

  So, about midway through today’s Relational Experiment we administered an Internal Directive to you intending to raise your EVQ. And you took to it quite well. You even teared up a bit, which you can see here—

  She used a red laser pointer to circle a spike in one of the graphs.

  She paused, looked at him in wait of some kind of reaction, but all he could do was squint at the screen. He tried to think of something to say, but just stammered, So you …

  Right, we caused that to happen.

  He could have felt angry, he knew, to have been marionetted like that, but he felt strangely fine about it. The researcher giving the presentation was still looking at him, waiting for something, but he couldn’t think of anything to say, just shook his head and smiled, confused.

  She continued, Often the way a person treats someone they love is contaminated by past relationships or grudges or things they may have had little to no control in creating—the way they were raised, unconscious biases and behaviors, even the epigenetic effect of the quality of a person’s grandparents’ marriages as their parents were conceived. For most people, it’s impossible to dismantle these unconscious behaviors and deeply embedded systems of logic, yet our intention with Internal Directives is to train a mind out of these unhelpful habits. Hence the example I gave you earlier about sexual thoughts—everyone has them of course, to a greater or lesser degree—but trying to not think of something as entrenched as sexual desire won’t get you very far. By using Internal Directives, however, one would be able to decide how to spend their mental energy, to choose how to be.

  Kurt looked over his shoulder again. Every member of the Research Division was looking at him, all with that same expression.

  I realize you may have concerns, the researcher standing at the head of the room said as he turned back to face her, about safety perhaps? Or the ethics of using such a technology on those who are not aware?

  And, yes, theoretically, Kurt understood there would have been ethical and safety concerns about such a thing—yet he felt no concern or worry. Even though he knew he had in some way been violated, he didn’t feel violated. His unbothered state might have been a result of this thing that had already been used on him, but
Kurt’s calmness belonged to him completely and he couldn’t manage to question it.

  One of the not-twins rolled his office chair up to Kurt’s left side and said, We’ve been testing Internal Directives on ourselves for almost two years now.

  Kurt smiled at the not-twin, almost wanted to hug him. It was marvelous—wasn’t it?—marvelous what they had discovered, what this could mean for the world.

  Our intent, in its simplest terms—the not-twin lowered his voice to a firm whisper—is to create a treatment that can allow people to feel what they want to feel and to not feel those feelings that are unhelpful to them. And though we hope that Internal Directives could be used as an alternative to psychotropic drugs or electroconvulsive therapy, this psychotechnology could also be useful to anyone who might like their life to be somehow improved, not just those with major mood disorders.

  The not-twin smiled at Kurt.

  Feelings are a kind of energy, a kind of matter, the other not-twin said as he rolled his chair to Kurt’s right. They cannot be created or destroyed.

  True, the first not-twin said, there’s really no arguing with feeling, now is there? There’s just repression or self-deception.

  Weren’t Internal Directives then a kind of repression or deception? Kurt wondered distantly, but didn’t ask. The researcher who had been leading the presentation was speaking again, telling him something about how they wouldn’t use Internal Directives on Kurt as much as they’d use them on the girlfriends, but that it was important to the study for Kurt not to know when they were being used and when they were not being used. There were more graphs, more lasers pointed at different points of these graphs. Kurt kept listening to her for a while but everything had gone hazy in him. He excused himself for a nap, and this day blended into his dreams like years blended into a life, unseen but still felt, the line between memory and present always bleeding.