Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

by Ron Currie Jr.

  I drove us into town. Emma talked and laughed the whole way. We parked the Jeep in a small dirt lot on the malecón and worked our way, in the gathering dark, through a mixed crowd of locals and sunburned gringos. We sat down at a tapas place. Emma smiled at me, and nothing else in creation mattered a bit other than that little streetside table, a glass of whiskey for me and an Emma Original for her, distant steel drums, and her laughing at my jokes now, chin down, shoulders shaking, eyes shut tight against her mirth.

  The earliest known mention of a person enhanced with a prosthesis, believe it or not, comes from the Vedas. We’re talking 1500 B.C., or thereabouts. A female warrior loses her leg, and is given an iron replacement. We’ve had 3,500 years to get used to the idea, yet when I talk about the Singularity people still get an indulgent look on their faces, like they’re humoring me and my absurd notions of human beings with brain/computer interfaces and titanium exoskeletons. I mean, they’re polite about it, usually, which I appreciate. But, you know, 1500 B.C. The first time a person was joined with a machine, however primitive. Consider that, I tell them, and then ask yourself: who’s being naïve, do you think?

  On our return from Ireland, before the island, before she asked me to leave, Emma and I flew back to Maine and were set to go our separate ways, but shortly after hitting the tarmac we learned that a young man barely out of his teens had taken a Glock to a political meet-and-greet at an Arizona Safeway. It was a sunny day in the desert. People were supposed to be smiling and having their picture taken with a congresswoman, asking her questions about Medicare, but instead twenty people had been shot, including the congresswoman, who’d had a bullet go clean through her head. The FBI had descended and the parking lot was polka-dotted with blood and a girl who’d been born on 9/11 had died with a hole in her chest the diameter of a plum.

  At first Emma seemed okay. She handed me her phone as we emerged from the plane, and I read the bulletin. We carried our bags up to the gate in silence and strode through the waiting area and out into the cold. I stopped on the sidewalk to light a cigarette, and we stood there in silence, gazing at nothing of any particular interest: security guards, baggage handlers, a ticket agent sneaking a smoke, people who would always be inconsequential to us except insofar as they kept a tiny part of our world operating so that we could get to where we were going.

  After a while I looked at Emma. I wondered what was going on behind her eyes, and then she gave me a clue.

  Can you come to my place tonight?

  I said Yes, of course.

  We loaded our bags into the car, and Emma drove us to her home. Along the way she told me she’d met the congresswoman back in 2005, when she’d worked on a campaign in New Mexico, before the job she had now. She told me she and the congresswoman were neighbors in her apartment building in D.C., had parking spaces next to each other.

  We listened to radio reports: The congresswoman was in surgery. The congresswoman was dead. Earlier reports claiming the congresswoman had died were erroneous. Six others were dead for sure, though, including two members of the congresswoman’s staff.

  Later that night we stood on Emma’s porch smoking cigarettes and not talking, when I noticed her flinch visibly at some thought.

  I asked her what was the matter.

  After a pause she said, I was just thinking. About what it would be like to get shot in the head. About what it would look like.

  We didn’t talk much after that. We drank until four in the morning, poured bourbon into coffee cups and bundled ourselves in down and Thinsulate and walked to the promenade, the same place where six months before she’d set the whole thing spinning with the simple, lethal act of resting her head on my shoulder. This time, in the bracing cold, we shivered past the scorched foundation of her old home, and we sat on a different bench and she put her head on my shoulder again. Snow wafted down through the orange glow of streetlamps, and we might have been the only two people on Earth, maybe even the only two who had ever existed. Later, in bed, with our fingers and toes stinging as they thawed and a reluctant winter sun beginning to rise outside, Emma lay on top of me and kissed my neck, my chest, let her lips and teeth linger over my nipples, and she fell asleep this way, still lying on top of me with her knees pulled up along my sides, her face buried in my neck, like a child.

  On the beach, her feet resting in my lap, the tiny brown hairs on her toes: three on the big, two on the next, one on the next, and the two smallest toes bare and capped with tiny unpainted nails.

  On a rare rainy morning on the island, over coffee mixed with scotch, Emma contended that happiness was the ultimate aim of all human undertaking, ordained in us by nature, written into our very genes.

  I bristled at this notion. She smiled at my bristling, unmoved, calmly resolute.

  We’re happiness ciphers, she said, as if it should be obvious. All of us.

  But why? I asked. Why is that automatically our goal? Because it’s comfortable?

  It’s hard, she said, and then, after gauging my expression, more serious: Happiness is hard.

  You mean hard to achieve. Not hard to occupy.

  Right.

  No argument there. But it is also, by definition, comfortable.

  A palm frond scraped the window, and she looked over at the sound, thought a moment, shrugged almost imperceptibly, nodded. Sure, she said. This was not a concession of any kind regarding happiness and its merits.

  I mean, you’ve read my novel, I said. Do you think that book ever gets written if I’m happy?

  Emma made a show of considering this, moving her head in a manner that was neither yea nor nay.

  I tried another tack. Baudelaire said . . . I want to make sure I get this right . . . he said, ‘I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no melancholy.’

  Emma smirked at me, lifted her mug, and said, Too bad there aren’t any dead French poets here to help me through my day, huh?

  And then she took a long, pointed drink of adulterated coffee, her eyes on mine, daring me to offer a response.

  That night, after watching movies on the sofa all afternoon while rain pelted the metal roof, we sat at the same table in the kitchen. Over my rum and her bourbon, I put my chin in my hands and said, Don’t get me wrong. On my worst days, happiness? Contentment? Hell yes. Give me some of that. Forget the books. I’ll go sell fucking insurance. But then those worst days pass. And I want my sadness back.

  True to form, she gave no indication of being moved by this in any way. She offered a bare nod. She might have been deeply touched. She might have thought I was silly. There was no way to know.

  That night I woke terrified from some nightmare, the details of which were lost the moment it ended. Upright in bed, stiff as raw ore, I felt not merely that I didn’t know where I was, but that I was actually nowhere. Like I’d come to in a vacuum, and neither I nor anything else existed any longer. For a while I thought maybe I was dead. As I stared around the void, warm hands reached out. One rested on my waist, the other on my ribs on my left side, pulling me back down, and Emma’s voice, drowsy and kind, asked what was the matter, but I couldn’t tell her because I didn’t know. I followed the hands and found her body, and I lay down again, and her warm sleep smells brought everything back into existence—the mattress underneath us and the covers above, the rain ticking against the windows, the points of light on the main island across the bay, grappling tirelessly with the dark.

  Would my preoccupation with Emma seem more sensible to you, less melodramatic, if the way in which she became absent from me was something more than my inconstancy and her decision not to abide it? Would my grief carry more weight, and would you share in it, if rather than being separated merely by our mistakes, Emma and I were instead separated by the Styx? If she had, for example, died in a plane crash on her way to the island? And
if it would carry more weight—if you would share in it—then why? Why is grief, when inspired by certain types of loss, considered something to surmount, to get over, while when inspired by other types of loss it’s given a pass, allowed and even encouraged to go on forever?

  My mother’s grief, incidentally, seems like it will be forever acute. She sleeps three hours a night, and still wears my father’s wedding band on a necklace. She cries while waiting at railroad crossings, or in line at the pharmacy. It’s been four years.

  It was a night like any other. Emma had been on the island nearly a month. I took her to dinner at the resort. We sat on the deck in a warm northern breeze and traded bites of our dinners and made fun of tourists and went back to the casita and fell into bed. When she climbed on top of me she moved slowly and moaned and whispered that it was better than it ever had been with anyone else, and she punched my chest while I grabbed her by the throat and squeezed, pinched and twisted the flesh on her hips, and all was perfect, there in that moment.

  To this day I have no idea why I decided, on that early morning, to tell her about Charlotte.

  Emma stood nude at the side of the bed, cutting the air with her hands as she unloaded her grief. Her eyes burned with a wrath I knew and recognized and, yes, I will admit, feared. No doubt she had learned this wrath from her mother—it shimmered too violently in the pools of her irises, was too impervious to reason, to have come from anywhere else—but whether it was transmitted to her by the womb or by the fist is a mystery that, like Emma herself, will never be solved.

  Everything is wrong, she said. In the semi-dark the skin of her bare breasts shone pale against the tan on her shoulders, her upper arms, her belly. Nothing ever lasts, she said. Nothing works. I try to believe it will but look at the fucking evidence. Matty and I were in love once. I know we were. Look at us now. Look at my life! I lost everything, Ron. Everything. How can I trust this, now? You and me? How can I trust my own judgment? I trusted my judgment before, and here is my reward. Choices, Ron. These things did not just happen to me. I made choices that created these circumstances. How do I account for that, and still trust myself? I can’t. My instincts—everyone’s instincts, Matty’s, yours, my mother’s—our instincts, the basis for all our choices, are fucked. Therefore, our choices will be fucked.

  I wanted to reassure her, tell her she was mistaken. I knew it was my responsibility, knew that everything between us going forward depended on my ability to convince her that she was mistaken. But then I thought of my own choices—thought of Charlotte—and remained silent.

  And now Emma, who stalked happiness so keenly, said: I want to be away from everyone. From you. I want to crawl away and be alone. Like a fucking dying animal. She brushed tears from her cheek with a violent swipe of one hand. I hate it. But that’s what I want.

  Here’s the thing: she was constant, and I was not. She was absent, yes, and she asked me to go away for a while, but only so she could construct a better version of herself to present to me. But I saw what I needed to see to make my victim narrative real: a selfish, insensate woman who cared only for her own feelings, insofar as she had any. I realize now, of course, how wrong I was. Because while she tried to prepare herself, I pulled away by increments. She was constant, and I was not. And that, ultimately, was all that mattered.

  I am so reasonable now, so understanding. I see so very, very clearly. All of this is true.

  The next morning I pulled on a decent pair of jeans and the one button-down shirt I had, and stayed sober all day, filled with a creeping dread of the empty space Emma would leave in her wake, and in the afternoon I brought her to the airstrip and sat beside her as we watched Cessnas and de Havillands alight on the ground like giant aluminum dragonflies.

  Then her plane arrived. We stood, both of us stiff and eager in the way I imagine a man about to be hanged would be stiff and eager. She had a messenger bag slung across her chest, which made it difficult to hug her properly. We shared a brief, awkward embrace, and kissed each other once, lightly, and she told me that she was sorry, and I told her the same thing though I wasn’t sure about the particulars of what we were apologizing for; all that seemed certain was there was definitely something to be sorry about. Then she walked out to the tarmac and climbed aboard, ducking her head on the way in so that her hair fell forward and obscured what I believed then would be the last glimpse I’d have of her face, because already I was thinking, see, plotting, and the engines coughed to life and the plane made a short taxi past the little terminal, then turned and whisked by again in the opposite direction, and the pilot banked left the moment the wheels left the ground, drawing a sharp parabola back toward the mainland, taking Emma away to a place where she could be alone, like a dying animal, as she wished.

  I’d like to pretend it was a selfless act, but I can’t, because I don’t believe there’s any such thing. And understand I say that not out of some easy, obvious cynicism, but simply because it seems to me that all motivation is internal, no matter how philanthropic or otherwise outwardly directed the act it inspires. The impetus never comes from outside of us. Therefore, by definition, every act is selfish.

  All the same, my reasoning when I drove the Jeep off Mosquito Pier was to ease Emma’s burden the only way I knew how. I couldn’t do anything about her mother, or the cold, sooty remains of her marriage, or the fact that she was in her midthirties and childless and worried to the point of panic, sometimes, that she would share her mother’s fate and go insane and grow old alone. I had tried to help with all of those things, and failed. I could, however, do something about the supplement of pressure and sadness I’d brought to her in the guise of love, like a cake laced with arsenic.

  But if I’m being honest, that wasn’t all of it, and even if I tried to pretend it was, you surely and rightly would not believe me. There is no such thing as a selfless act.

  Because I wanted out. For my own sake, my own reasons. One can only have so many fantasies about crashing airplanes into the jungle or leaping in front of trains before one finally takes that tiny step across the threshold between fantasy and reality. And listen, I grappled with these urges when all was well. They came unbidden, even while I had a smile on my face. So imagine their insistence when I was contractually obligated to write a novel, but couldn’t find either the motivation or the acumen to finish a grocery list. When I had a detective waiting to ask me questions at home, and my state of mind and relative drunkenness were such that I’d begun to suspect he might actually have reason to be interested in me. When I had become, in Emma’s estimation, just another poor choice among thirty-five years’ worth of poor choices.

  I’m not expecting empathy. Wouldn’t want it, in fact, if someone were to offer. Just trying to give you an idea of why I committed an honest and sincere act meant to draw the curtain down, an act that instead set in motion a helix of increasingly bizarre circumstances that bring us right to this very moment, with me trying, and probably failing by increments, to explain everything to you.

  As Emma had said, so sage, so beautiful in her sadness and fury: when our instincts are fucked, our choices can’t be anything but.

  The plan, if it can be called that, was neither very detailed nor complex for all the time I spent thinking about it. The idea itself seems, in retrospect, to have stemmed from the day I parked the Jeep at the beach and sat there for hours thinking about driving into the ocean.

  Mosquito Pier, on the island’s north side, was straight and true and over a mile long, provided a veritable runway for launching myself at high speed into the water where the Atlantic met the Caribbean. Built by the Navy during WWII, these days it was abandoned except for the occasional tarpon fisherman or dog-walking gringo, but all the same, not wanting to be dragged sputtering out of the surf by a strong-swimming Samaritan, I drove there early in the morning, when even wayward local teens would have finished their six
packs of Medalla and slunk home to bed.

  When I arrived the pier was dark as crude oil and, as I’d hoped, deserted.

  I sat with the engine idling at the spot where the pier met the island. The decision to actually hit the gas, when the time came, was surprisingly easy, almost matter-of-fact. I depressed the pedal steadily, gaining speed until the moist night air roared through the windows and around the cabin. The headlights illuminated cracked pavement, then gobbled it up in an instant. Dark shapes flashed by on either side of me. Overhead the galaxy shimmered with great good cheer: stars winked, a flip sliver of moon shone happily.

  There was a lot of noise, I remember that. The wind. The throaty whir of the Jeep’s old engine, stupid, reliable machine. The tires snapping over chunks of broken asphalt. The Dopplered chirrup of a thousand coqui frogs. The ocean, inhaling and exhaling at steady intervals. The splintering crack as the Jeep burst through the wooden guardrail at the pier’s terminus.

  And then: silence, airborne.

  This silence persisted, even after the Jeep’s grill hit the waves and my face bounced off the steering wheel. Viewed through the suddenly bloody lens of my sight, the last moments of my life were like a television set to mute. Black water flooded the cabin silently, soaking my pants, then the bottom of my T-shirt. As the water rose I felt my breath coming quicker, but could not hear it. I’m sure I moaned once or twice, but that sound failed to register, too.