Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

by Ron Currie Jr.

  You know what it was about that suicide note? The reason why millions were compelled to post it in chat rooms and on message boards, to put it up on Facebook and MySpace and Tumblr and reddit, to email it to their parents and brothers and sisters and girlfriends and aunts and coworkers and yes, more ominously, to old lovers who’d jilted them, to film themselves talking about it and post the videos on YouTube, to hyperlink, to blog, to hashtag, to tweet and tweet and retweet ad nauseam? The reason why my suicide note not only persisted but thrived in the face of competition from cute animal pictures, videos of skateboarders snapping their forearms and people being mauled by sharks, the Twitter feeds of basketball players and reality television bimbos, the minutiae of friends’ lives updated by the nanosecond, the massively multiplayer online games, the virtual tours of the Louvre?

  Simple, to my mind. Of course it seemed simple only in retrospect, after I spent a lot of time thinking about it, marveling in a sort of nauseated way, and then reaching this conclusion: what people found so compelling about the note was its naked, abject honesty.

  Because I’d jammed more earnestness into a single line of that note than existed in the whole of my first book. And in a world where people daily put on false indifference along with their deodorant and makeup, where they girded themselves in irony between sips of coffee, where the morning newscasters winked at them while relaying the latest news, where their politicians did the same while telling them what they wanted to hear, where they told friends their babies were beautiful when in fact they were sort of nauseating to look at, where they told spouses they loved them when they no longer did, where they pretended not to know that the sun would one day expand and consume the Earth, where they smiled brightly at people they loathed, where they took Dexedrine to begin the day and Xanax to end it, where they ate when they were tired and fucked when they were hungry and slept when they were horny, where they willfully believed in television characters as a panacea for their loneliness, where they preferred this loneliness to the vulnerability that could relieve it, where they felt with their brains and thought with their hearts, where they seethed and feigned calm, where they feared and feigned courage, where they hungered and feigned satiety, where they almost never said how they really felt for fear of being perceived as strange or weak or plain crazy, where they each and every one continued to perpetrate this massive, ravenous lie upon themselves, they each and every one felt themselves, moment to moment, trembling for something true.

  And I was no better. Like everybody else, I had trembled my whole life for something true. I had hidden, and called it living. In my suicide note, at last, I’d finally stopped hiding. And this, to my mind, is the reason why that archaic thing, words on paper, in the form of my suicide note, carved out a section of the Internet’s burgeoning consciousness all to itself.

  Ever more alarmingly reckless, Noora took to sneaking away from her father’s house after dark to visit my hut on the beach. She stole into Habiba Village silent and shoeless, her feet tough from years of passing unshod over dust and rock. The first time she came, I woke from a dead sleep to find her hovering over me like an assassin, her hand on my cheek, and for a moment, in my confusion, I thought she was Emma, waking me in the bed on the island, tracing the scars and bruises on my face, demanding to know what had happened to me.

  I told her, that first night, that I would not tolerate her touching me again.

  What will you do? she asked, grinning impishly. Tell my father?

  Just don’t do it, I said.

  You should shave your beard, she said. I want to see your face.

  Her head uncovered, immodest child. Her hair long and dark and slightly kinky, shining in the moonlight outside my hut.

  I folded my arms over my chest. Stared across the water at the Kingdom’s bumpy silhouette. Said nothing.

  Noora obeyed my wishes, did not venture to touch me again. But every time she came to my hut she wore a little less clothing. Never anything racy by Western standards, certainly, but nonetheless. She went from the traditional thobe—a garment that resembles nothing so much as a tent—to jeans and loose long-sleeved blouses, to T-shirts that clung to her new breasts, to chino shorts that revealed strong brown legs and dusty ankles.

  Couldn’t you be stoned to death, I asked, for dressing like that?

  She laughed, and I shushed her, terrified someone would hear and come to investigate. Her eyes: shining, obsidian, mischievous. The plain facts of her body revealed in nightly increments, the Bedouin equivalent of a striptease. It moved me, and she knew it. I bobbed in the Red Sea while she sat on the beach, waiting, my one blanket folded in her lap.

  Through manipulation of our cognitive structures we will be able, post-Singularity, to make sex more unpleasant than a drug-free root canal. To transform it into literally the last thing we would want to do. To make naïvely manipulative and physically precocious young women less appealing than an IRS audit.

  And then of course there were the dinners at Suleiman’s, nerve-rattling affairs now. I sat guilty and trepidacious, ate little. Suleiman smoked and laughed, unsuspecting to the very end. Noora’s eyes twinkled. She was not evil, though, or even conniving. Just young, spirited, at odds with the constraints imposed by the accident of her birthplace, and by her limited knowledge of who I was.

  Thus prepped for the expansive earnestness of Emma’s book by the abbreviated earnestness of my suicide note, people bought hundreds of thousands of copies.

  I think if not for the phenomenon of the suicide note going viral the novel would have been a commercial flop, dead on arrival, as most books tend to be. It would have been too sad, too serious, too self-involved, despite the happyish ending tacked onto the manuscript by the ghostwriter hired to finish it. It would have been, above all, too damn earnest.

  But the suicide note had hit some great neglected nerve, and people came to bookstores as if on a pilgrimage, forking over thirty dollars apiece to bear witness to a devotion undiminished by death.

  Everyone still believed I was dead, remember. That was the thing. That was the fulcrum around which their reverence turned, gained momentum, grew to a fervor.

  The critics, though, were largely unmoved. One particularly snarky fellow said the book put him in the mind of nothing so much as ‘Nicholas Sparks with a thesaurus.’ To which I say, now: fair enough, sir. Fair enough.

  Noora asked many, many questions. At first I refused to answer, but she wore me down and I started to talk. Sometimes I lied, and sometimes I told the truth. It became a game for her, accruing answers and trying to figure out where they didn’t jibe with one another.

  When were you born?

  You already asked me that.

  Yes. I’m asking again.

  Nineteen seventy-seven.

  She stared. Last time you said nineteen seventy-five.

  For whatever reason, I’d decided to tell the truth that time.

  Either way, you are very old, she said. It was clear she found this appealing. And you were born in St. Paul?

  I’ve never been to St. Paul, I told her.

  Why did you say you lived there? Why did you lie to my family?

  Because I don’t want you to know who I am.

  Why?

  Noora, I said. You have to stop coming here.

  Just a few days before he died, my father called two of his sisters, my aunts, to his bedside. Theirs was to be a private talk, but I hovered in the room because he needed constant tending. In my role as caregiver I was less like a person and more like a fixture, as insensate, to outward appearances, as the bedside lamp, so their conversation went as though I weren’t even there. It wasn’t a long conversation. My aunts, grown women, knelt beside his bed. My older aunt held my father’s desiccated hand. He told them he was sorry, neglected to specify for what, exactly. Apparently t
hey all knew what he meant. Then he cried, and they cried. I blinked tears away myself, fiddling with my father’s morphine vaporizer. He was breathless to begin with, and the crying left him gulping for air. I turned the vaporizer on and pressed it to his lips, grateful for the mild hissing sound it made, grateful for the task itself, more grateful than I have ever been before or since for the simple blessing of having something to do.

  And that was it, really. My aunts stood, wiped their eyes, took turns leaning over to press themselves against his prone form in an approximation of a hug. One of them used the word ‘forgive,’ though I don’t remember exactly how. Then they left, and he went to sleep again. I never asked what he’d apologized for. I don’t have any idea, to this day.

  I had a dream about Noora. In the dream she did amazing, improbable things, and her body turned out to be exactly the marvel of youth and sound breeding that the T-shirts and chino shorts implied. The next morning I woke up to the rare tap of rain on the thatch roof, found my belly coated with flaky, dried sperm.

  I’d never had a wet dream in my life, up to then. Which was part of the reason why I didn’t entirely trust that it had been a dream in the first place.

  I never asked Noora. If it had been just a dream, I didn’t want her to know about it, and if it’d been more than a dream, then I didn’t want to know about it.

  Remember at the beginning of all this, when I vowed that I would not lie, either by substance or omission? Here, for the first time, I have violated that promise. Now I have to come clean.

  Because when I said I had no idea what my father apologized for, that was not the truth. I have an idea. In fact, I know exactly what he apologized for. But I won’t say it. I was named for him. I am his first and only son. Even today, people comment all the time about how much we look alike. His shame is my birthright, and my secret to keep. So please, don’t ask me to say it. I can’t. Let my admitting to the lie be enough.

  It took two years, but Noora finally figured out who I really was.

  The irony being that after she’d stalked my true identity so fervently and for so long, it came to her completely by accident.

  Irony: God pinching our backsides, waiting until we turn to see who just goosed us, then tweaking our noses for good measure.

  The accident: Noora bought the Arabic translation of Emma’s novel during a trip to Cairo with her mother. She had no idea, at first, that I’d written the book. She bought it simply because it was the hottest read going at the time, especially among teenage girls. On the long bus ride back to the Sinai she got about halfway through the book before flipping to the back and taking a good, long look at the picture of the guy who’d written the thing.

  At this point I was older, obviously, than my author photo, and wildly bearded, and much thinner, having not set foot in a gym since before leaving for the island. Nonetheless, Noora realized without a doubt who had been breaking bread with her family for the last four years.

  By then, Emma and Peter Cash were engaged. My mother, still fleeing my father’s ghost, had moved apartments three more times. Suleiman’s wife was pregnant again, with what would turn out to be their first surviving son.

  Oddly, for whatever reason Noora did not approach me with her revelation. It was Suleiman who came one morning as I stood in the kitchen at Habiba Village before breakfast, drinking coffee and trying to shake the fatigue from a long night spent drifting back and forth over the reef.

  He placed a hardcover book I did not recognize on the prep counter. He flipped the book over and put the tip of his index finger on a black-and-white photo of me smiling more widely than I could conceive of.

  My daughter tells me, he said, that you are dead. This is news to you, I’m sure.

  I started slightly at the mention of Noora, made a show of sipping my coffee. So the jig was up.

  Not exactly, I said.

  At this point, not having learned to read Arabic, I assumed that the book was a copy of my first novel—an edition had been published in Egypt.

  And also that you are quite famous, Suleiman continued.

  Though I didn’t laugh much those days, I couldn’t help but chuckle. That, I said, would be news indeed.

  You must be fairly well-known, Suleiman said, having written two books.

  One, I corrected him.

  Two, he said. He opened the book on the counter, flipped a few pages until he found what he wanted, then translated: Also by Ron Currie, he read, and then spoke the title of my first and, to my knowledge, only book.

  This, of course, was the moment when I began to wonder pretty vigorously just what the hell was going on.

  Though I can’t imagine a scenario in which the Singularity is a bad outcome for us, there are those who can. Ray Kurzweil and others worry, in particular, about self-replicating nanobots—machines the size of molecules, intended for use primarily in medicine, bucking their programs and making copies of themselves endlessly.

  It sounds silly, I know. The very word: nanobots.

  Then again, there was a time, not too long ago, when words like ‘cyberspace’ and ‘spyware’ seemed pretty goofy, too.

  Perhaps it would be easier to take seriously if I approached the idea obliquely. So think, if you will, of malignant cells. Of cancer. Because that, in essence, is the threat that self-replicating nanobots would pose.

  Imagine that the whole world has cancer. The Earth itself. Incurable, late-stage, almost instantaneously terminal cancer. This is what we’re talking about. Tiny self-replicating machines, convinced that their only purpose is to create more copies of themselves. In this singular ambition they consume everything, spreading across plains and through forests, devouring cities, plunging into the oceans’ deepest trenches, in the same way that cancer invades adjacent organs and bodywide systems, seizes an ever-larger portion of the blood supply, co-opts oxygen and calories for itself.

  Among people who think about and discuss such things, this theoretical phenomenon is known alternately as ecophagy—Greek oikos (‘house’) and phagein (‘to eat’)—and the Gray Goo Problem.

  Either of which, depending on one’s perspective and mood, might be an apt way to describe cancer as well.

  Back in 2003, Prince Charles made the mistake of publicly asking the Royal Society to examine the potential threats posed by nanotechnology.

  Headline: CHARLES IS BLASTED OVER GREY GOO FEARS. Also: PRINCE CHARLES AND THE ATTACK OF THE GREY GOO.

  Et cetera.

  So then I made a trip to Cairo myself, spent eight hours on the bus, staring out at all that sand with my forehead pressed to the window and an unwelcome curiosity welling in me again. Beyond curiosity—I’d started to piece together in my mind what had happened, though I couldn’t begin to imagine the scope of it, and as I thought of Emma’s book having been published, God help me I wanted things again. I wanted the book to be loved. I wanted to be famous. I wanted my words to redeem and validate me in the view of strangers and friends alike. I wanted, most of all, for Emma to have read the book and understood how I felt about her, in a way I couldn’t have explained in ten lifetimes merely by talking.

  All these wriggling desires, again, after so long.

  I didn’t realize how accustomed I’d become to Sinai’s enveloping quiet until I deboarded the bus into the crush and stink of Turgoman station. I fought through a riptide of locals clamoring toward the loading bays and found one of Cairo’s ubiquitous black-and-white taxis, asked the driver for the nearest Internet café. He negotiated a series of filthy backstreets at alarming speeds, dropping me finally at a place called Sector 7, where I went inside and bought an hour’s worth of Internet access on a computer that looked like it had been obsolete when I’d first come to Egypt.

  I would end up needing four more hours to take in all the ways in which my life had changed
since I’d died.

  I’ve given you the broad strokes, of course. But imagine me becoming aware of all this for the first time, after four years in the sensory deprivation of purgatory. The fact of the book being published in the first place. The phenomenon of the suicide note, and what it spawned.

  There were uglier aspects, of course.

  When I searched my name on Google, the third hit was a website that kept a running count of how many spurned lovers, inspired by the note or the novel or both, had taken their lives. This was not merely a neat, sanitary list of names and dates, lifeless data. No. Each suicide had its own page, with a photograph of the deceased and a detailed narrative of how they’d loved and died. Casey, a woman of twenty-eight, pretty brunette, with the sad but hopeful eyes of a dog that’s been beaten with a broom its whole life: asphyxiation. Rhea, an RN from Quebec with dubious self-esteem who’d nonetheless found the will to demonstrate her chagrin to the dozen or so playboy doctors who’d used her throughout her career: pills, predictably. Paul, a middle-aged loan officer whose estranged wife would, according to his own suicide note, ‘withhold (her) love for weeks, on a whim’: leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge. Elliott, a bartender and singer/songwriter in Memphis: drove into a concrete overpass support. Yvette, UNC undergrad: pills again. Rob, merchant marine based in Maryland: jumped at sea. Carrie: slashed her wrists. Sunny: gunshot. Dustin: hanging. Liz. Jesse. Molly. Self-immolation. Suicide by cop. Starved self.

  A sufficient horror, to be sure. But there was more.

  Page after page of Google results revealed how the American celebrity machine had reached for Emma time and again, and how Emma had tried, with varying success, to avoid its grasp. She’d refused myriad interview requests, from Vanity Fair all the way to Penthouse, not to mention every cut-rate online venue. She’d shunned offers of television appearances, as well as one bit movie role. She’d changed her phone number at least twice, and during the height of her notoriety, around the time the book was published, took to wearing large-brimmed hats and sunglasses to thwart photographers, both professional and casual.