He opted, inexplicably, for The Game Plan, a goofy-looking Disney comedy starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson as a football player and gadabout who learns important life lessons when the young daughter he didn’t know existed—a girl whose requisite good cheer and pluckiness made me want to strangle a bag full of kittens—comes into his life.
I mentioned, didn’t I, that toward the end tumors had begun to grow in my father’s brain?
I bought tickets and loitered at the snack counter in the hopes of missing the first ten minutes of the film. My father needed to sit, though, so into the theatre we went.
The inanity can be neither explained nor comprehended. The dialogue singed my synapses. The endless agonizing gags felt akin to sitting through the firebombing of Dresden. And the girl . . . good lord, the girl. She sassed her way through two hours—and since when are Disney comedies two hours long, by the way?—of pure pain, dropping one obvious wisdom-from-the-mouths-of-babes line after another, until I found myself wanting to shave her studiously cute head of hair.
I sat there, marking time. My father munched popcorn beside me, staring impassively at the screen, giving off that stink. It was impossible to know whether he was enjoying this, though I found it impossible to believe that he could be.
I actually began to feel sick to my stomach. My watch indicated that an hour and a half had crawled by, and still the film’s easily foreseeable denouement hadn’t begun to take shape. Happy as I’d been when my father had asked to go to the movies, I found myself fighting the urge to ask him if we could get out of there. But he was still my father, and one did not ask him to leave—if he wanted to he would decide all on his own, without input or suggestion from me.
A giddy tension mushroomed inside me until I felt on the verge of bursting into hysterical laughter, and not at the movie.
Finally, the credits rolled like a mercy killing. I walked at my father’s side, holding his elbow lightly on the slight upslope out of the theatre and preparing myself for the possibility that, half-witted by the cancer in his head, he had in fact enjoyed the movie—and that I was going to have to pretend to have enjoyed it, too.
We didn’t say a word to one another, all the way through the lobby and out to the car. I eased him into the passenger seat, my tension abating now, thinking that his ever-reliable silence would save me from having to discuss the movie at all.
Quiet in the car, still, until apropos of absolutely nothing, about ten miles down the road, my father, staring through the windshield at the cones of light from the headlamps, said: Well, that was a real piece of shit.
And all the laughter I’d bottled up in the theatre came out at once, until I was crying, until I had to slow down while I tried to gather myself and get my eyesight right again, and even my father, two weeks or so from being dead, cracked a rueful smile.
The ascendance of my book from an unfinished navel-gazer of a manuscript to the hottest literary commodity since Harry Potter, I would come to learn, began like this:
On the island, my landlord finally showed up with the keys. Chief Morales and his henchmen let themselves into the pink stucco casita and found, among my belongings, the suicide note. Case closed, as far as they were concerned.
The note was the thing that set it all in motion, you see.
Morales catalogued and packaged my things and put them in the mail to my mother—but not before giving the note to a woman who’d asked to read it.
This woman’s name was Cecily Calder. Turned out all she had to do was ask, and Morales handed it over without a second thought. Again, crack police work.
Calder did not just read the note and give it back. My disappearance was big enough news in the town where I lived that the local paper had sent Calder to the island to report on it firsthand, and as part of her work on the story she transcribed the note word-for-word into her iPad, though she had both the professional and moral good sense to harbor no intentions of using it for the story.
She was simply struck by the thing—in particular the passages addressed to Emma, which had broken Calder down—and she wanted to preserve it for herself verbatim. Her affinity for the sentiments expressed in the note were such that, while none of it appeared in her own writing, it did heavily influence both the tone and content of the stories she wrote about my death. In addition to three straight news pieces, Calder ended up banging out, on spec, a lengthy Sunday feature praising my book and implying that there are circumstances under which suicide is not to be condemned, but understood, even celebrated.
This last earned her more than a handful of harsh rebukes, from psychiatrists and clergy and parents who’d lost their teenagers to suicide—but it also served as a harbinger of the phenomenon that would end with Leonardo DiCaprio doing a better than serviceable job of channeling my angst in theatres all over America.
Here was the first domino in the chain: after the minimal local dust had settled from Calder’s feature, she emailed copies of my suicide note to several close friends, along with the somewhat naïve admonition not to share it with anyone else, given the nature of its origin.
In the prologue to his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil uses an old episode of The Twilight Zone as an analogy for the Singularity.
A gambler has died and gone to heaven. Heaven, for a gambler, is a casino where no matter what game he plays, and no matter how long he plays it, he can never lose. For months he moves from poker to roulette to blackjack and back again; he hits his number every time, and he wins every single hand. At first, the gambler is pleased. He accrues great stacks of chips, and enjoys the attention of the many beautiful women in the casino. After a while, though, he starts to grow weary. He wouldn’t, in life, have believed it, but this is monotonous, just winning and winning and winning. In its uniformity, winning has been stripped of its fun, of its very meaning. Over time he becomes desperate. He is buried under chips, drowning in his good luck. He goes to the angel who runs the casino and pleads with him: don’t make me stay here, winning and winning and winning, any longer. I wasn’t supposed to be in heaven anyway. Not the way I lived my life. I was supposed to go to hell.
And the angel tells him that, indeed, he was supposed to go to hell. Which is why that’s precisely where he finds himself.
The point, as concerns the Singularity, is that it’s easy to imagine that when perfection is achieved, it will lose its meaning. Without the contrast of imperfection, of strife and suffering and petty daily problems, there will be no upside to the upside. Which is actually true, when you stop to think about it. As Kurzweil says, we are more attached to our problems than to their solutions.
But when the Singularity occurs, Kurzweil argues, our inability to appreciate all the good things in store for us will be transfigured along with everything else. One aspect of perfection, after all, it stands to reason, will be that our need for imperfection will cease. Or, perhaps more precisely: that imperfection itself will cease to have meaning.
Sometimes when I grew restless and Suleiman was off in the mountains with Welsh tourists, or spending time with his family, I would lie awake in my hut, feeling my insides stir, longing for cheap domestic draft beer and Red Sox broadcasts and low-dose aspirin, and eventually I would rise and push open the door and go down to the edge of the sea.
I wouldn’t bother putting on any clothes. If the sky was clear, in the moonlight I could make out the undulating backbone of Saudi Arabia across the black water.
I’d wade in slowly. The shallows stayed warm even in winter, because the reef offshore came up to just a foot or so beneath the surface and held the water in, and each day the sun created a sort of naturally occurring hot tub between the reef and the beach. When the water rose to chest level I’d turn and let my feet leave the sandy floor and float on my back, staring up at the moon, listening to the womb-sounds below.
And while the
current was weak, in the right spots it would pick me up and pull me out gradually. I’d let myself drift, lungs filled with air for buoyancy, my arms and legs as slack as if I were quadriplegic. I’d know when I passed over the reef into deeper water, because the temperature dropped precipitously, sending a chill through me and making my muscles want to tense, but I would fight this. The discipline was like a physical manifestation of some Buddhist koan: struggling to stay loose, resisting in order to relax. And if I could resist as the cold numbed my limbs and sent exploratory tendrils into my center, if I could stay slack while my biology screamed its need to shiver, then I would feel my insides grow still again, however temporarily, and then I could breaststroke back to shore and go to my hut and climb underneath the mosquito netting and, cocooned in the damp softness of a single fleece blanket, tremble myself to sleep.
Coping strategies notwithstanding, there was no way, after a while, to deny that the blankness enveloping me on my arrival in the Sinai had become—like my life—a thing of the past. I abandoned Asif more and more often to disappear into the desert with Suleiman, and stayed disappeared for longer periods of time; so long, in fact, that Suleiman had started to complain about the absence from his family, and to sing ever more plaintively, a fact that made it more difficult for me to not respond to his singing—which of course meant we needed to stay in the desert even longer. And still I found myself in the water at least two or three nights a week, or so I estimated, having long ago stopped keeping track of the passage of time, which was to my mind a construct of use only to the living.
Perhaps the concept of the Singularity becomes less difficult to accept when you consider the fact that we are all, and always have been, machines.
We are made up of components—in our case, biological components, but components nonetheless—that interact according to strict and immutable rules involving chemistry, physics, and, by extension, mechanics. That we do not yet understand some of these rules doesn’t change the fact that our bodies, and more important, our brains, obey them.
Stands to reason, then, that achieving artificial intelligence will be a fairly simple matter of gaining understanding of the rules of chemistry and physics that our brains obey, and then—in principle, at least—there should be no reason why we can’t transfer those rules onto nonorganic materials that are not subject to acne, or hypertension, or bedwetting, or muscle fatigue, or staph infection, or pinkeye, or gout, or influenza, or diaper rash, or erectile dysfunction, or joint deterioration, or AIDS, or radiation sickness, or anorexia, or canker sores, or epilepsy, or halitosis, or IBS, or lead poisoning, or multiple sclerosis, or altitude sickness, or tennis elbow, or smallpox, or kidney stones, or rot, or heartache, or cancer, or cancer, or cancer.
Around the same time that Calder circulated my suicide note among her friends, two packages containing my belongings, along with the original note, arrived at my mother’s apartment, the place she’d moved into after she was finally able to wrench herself away from the cherry trees and sell the house.
This is one aspect of my faux death that I feel nothing but bad about, and rightly so. My poor mother, still grieving hard for my father despite the passage of time, cutting open those boxes and believing, in a deep and concrete way reinforced by the sight, the feel, the scent of my things, that in that most agonizing reversal of the natural order she had outlived her son.
And then the manner in which I had ‘died,’ and her pulling the note from wherever Morales had stowed it—I never asked her, but I always picture it folded neatly at the top of the first box she opens—and having to read a fairly eloquent account of my cratered, smoldering interior landscape, a state of mind that itself was very much real, even if the suicide it indicated was not.
Of course at the time the suicide was real to her, and surely one’s mother does not need to read in brutal detail about the mental horrors that led to it.
Maybe this was why she ended up giving the note to Emma. Maybe she couldn’t stand the thought of those pages being anywhere inside her home, lurking in a drawer or on a closet shelf, a permanent account of her son’s deterioration and end.
Or maybe she, like Calder, found herself most affected by the section of the note addressed to Emma—who, by the way, my mother was not a fan of after she’d kicked my ass on our first go-round, but who it turned out she’d warmed to in their shared grief after my death—and felt that it rightly belonged to her.
Whatever the reason, shortly after receiving the packages my mother tracked Emma’s number down and called her. They shared a cry on the telephone. They shared another over cups of coffee when my mother drove down to meet her several days later. Then my mother handed over the note, and that was that.
My other things—clothes, iPod, books, shoes and flip-flops, handful of DVDs, backpack, set of dominoes—my mother sorted through, making a point to touch each item and let that touch linger for a moment. Then she placed them carefully back in the boxes, and the boxes themselves went into her bedroom closet.
She did not put away my computer, though, or my notebooks.
No, because she had reluctantly opened the notebooks and found portions of what was recognizable as a work in progress, and then she turned on the computer and found more of the same. And these things, to her mind, should not be stored away. But she didn’t know what to do with them herself, so she called my agent.
And he said, Please, absolutely, if you don’t mind, send them along, we’d love to take a look. He promised to return them exactly as they were received.
To my recollection, the only time my father ever hit me occurred when I was about five years old, when I’d been flipping through a pictorial history of Vietnam that he owned, and I put together what I knew about him and what I saw in the book’s photos and asked him if he’d ever killed anyone. He reached back and slapped me across the face hard enough to knock me flat, and then left the room and the house and didn’t come back again until the next day, or maybe even the day after that, it’s hard to remember exactly, you know, time and memory being what they are.
And so it came to be that around the time I first went to work for Asif, my agent was busy poring over the two hundred thousand words I’d written since the last time I turned in a manuscript. The box arrived from my mother on a snowy Tuesday, winter’s last stand that year in New York City. At my agent’s request my mother had printed out the manuscript she’d found on my computer, put it together with the handwritten pages, and shipped the whole thing. The top of the box was dark with melted snowflakes. My agent is not a sentimental man, but he sat there for a few minutes just looking at the box, leaning back in his chair and considering it, thinking, allowing himself to hope a little. Then he slid a letter opener through the bands of tape my mother had used to secure the box top. He lifted the lid, peered inside. Read the title, sat back again, thought a bit more. Snow continued to fall lazily outside his office windows. His assistant came in with the macchiato he’d asked for. His assistant eyed the open box, thought to ask a question, then put the coffee down and left without a word. Finally, my agent reached in and removed the manuscript, set it on his desk, placed the box carefully on the floor. He really did mean to send it back to my mother exactly as he’d received it, including the box. He considered the title once again, decided it was okay but not great, flipped a page. Then another. At first he read with guarded optimism. The snow began to fall with purpose now, accumulating in wet piles on cars and awnings up and down 26th Street. My agent’s optimism blossomed into satisfaction, then excitement. He read the manuscript in one sitting, eating lunch at his desk and staying there well after the rest of the office building was dark and empty. When he’d turned the last page he called my editor at home and told him they needed to meet for a drink, right away if possible, and then, glancing out his windows, my agent added that he should probably take the train, because the roads were a mess out there.
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Keep in mind that my agent’s excitement, and by extension my editor’s, had nothing to do with the massive publicity that the book would eventually be published to. None of that had yet come to pass. Calder’s friends were only now beginning to violate her admonition and distribute my suicide note among their own social circles. This electronic dissemination had not yet taken on its own momentum, and remained, for the time being, private, email to email.
So although there had been a good deal of short-lived publicity surrounding my disappearance and death, my agent and editor were not twisting their figurative mustaches over the prospect of exploiting it. They were, in fact, not twisting their figurative mustaches at all. Theirs was the pure and guileless excitement of book people who believed they found themselves with the opportunity to publish a great book. My botched ode to Emma, my incomplete hymn to obsessive love, my literary flipper baby, was quite simply, as far as they were concerned, a hugely compelling piece of art—well nigh a masterpiece.
After my mother gave her the suicide note, Emma took two weeks off from work and flew down to the island alone. Rented the pink stucco casita for twice what I’d paid for it, the extra tariff necessary to wrest the place away from another prospective short-term tenant. Discovered strands of her own long auburn hair in the sheets, and stuck to the shower wall, on the day she arrived. Slept alone for twelve nights in the bed we’d shared. Held the pillows to her nose, searching for a trace of me. Found my prized vintage Montblanc—apparently Morales and company thought it just another pen—and slid it into her messenger bag next to her journal. Ate at the same table at the resort where we’d had dinner several times, accepting a glass of Chianti from a man who said he couldn’t stand to see a beautiful woman eating alone. Drove to all the beaches, sat in the sand with sunglasses on, sipping warm beers and staring at the water. Foiled men’s gambits with smiles as frigid as they were polite, smiles that sent them scurrying in their minds and left them wondering, after, why they’d been so spooked. Went to Mosquito Pier, leaned against the makeshift repairs to the guardrail, watched old fishermen set their lines and grumble over tangled reels. Marveled at enormous, distant plumes of water as the Navy detonated stray ordnance they’d dropped into the bays thirty years previous. Wrestled guilt like a vengeful angel. Let it all go, in the end. Got on a plane and went home and added me to the list of heartaches she’d left behind. And good for her.
Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles Page 18