My lawyer hadn’t known that Emma would testify for the plaintiffs, because she hadn’t been declared as a witness at the beginning of the trial. The plaintiff’s attorney brought her as a rebuttal witness. To rebut, specifically, my testimony.
So we were all the picture of surprise when she strode into the courtroom, dressed for work in dark wool slacks and a sleeveless white blouse open at the neck, the usual admixture of sensibleness and sensuality. Her vault of self welded shut under the prurient gaze of those assembled. She walked past the defense table without a glance in my direction, but when she took the stand she looked straight at me, shrugged her shoulders almost imperceptibly, offered a slight smile.
And then proceeded to tell the truth, the whole truth, etc.
Which was bad news for me, legally speaking, though I couldn’t have cared less. I watched her mouth, those eyes. I noticed a shift in the courtroom’s silence, as those assembled went from lewd rubbernecking to rapt, malleable engrossment. She made people forget to breathe. For twenty minutes, at least, they were all as deeply in love with her as I was. And like that, finally, they understood.
When the plaintiffs’ attorney had finished, my lawyer declined, with a weary wave of one hand, to cross-examine Emma. The judge was about to dismiss her, but Emma asked if she could say one more thing.
Not as a rebuttal witness, Ms. Zielinski, the judge told her. You’re limited to answering specific questions.
Is there any way around that? Emma asked.
The judge considered for a moment. You could make a victim impact statement, if you like, she said. It wouldn’t be sworn.
Your honor? the plaintiff’s attorney said from behind her table. The judge ignored her.
I would like that, Emma said.
The judge nodded. Go ahead, she said.
Emma gazed out at the courtroom. You should all be ashamed of yourselves, she said. She looked at the plaintiffs’ table. You there, she said, pointing at the attorney. And all of you, she said, indicating the gallery.
Those assembled were mute.
Is that it? the judge asked.
That’s it, Emma said. That’s what I really came here to say.
Which brings us, more or less, to the coffee shop where I sat and waited for Emma, where I watched her come up the sidewalk with the setting sun at her back, where I found myself transported to a cold rainy day twenty years previous, then hauled back to the present when she stepped inside and those eyes scanned the room, once again, for me.
Nothing had changed. Nothing ever would. Inside me cars were overturned and buildings set ablaze, after so long. Five years, give or take. A death, a stint in purgatory, and a forced rebirth. On her left ring finger a new band of white gold, nestled against an engagement ring of more than respectable carat and style. Nothing too flashy, but certainly not cheap. Perfect, in other words, for her.
She spotted me, walked over to the table where I sat stiff and straight and upright. Her expression did not at all resemble that which you would expect to see on the face of someone engaged in a happy reunion.
This impression was confirmed when, now within range, she hauled back and slapped me across the mouth, much as her mother had slapped her in front of me all those years previous—with great sincerity, swinging from the hips, no concern at all for the fact of an audience.
I turned my head from side to side, flexed my jaw. Silence and stillness from the coffee shop’s other patrons.
Welcome home, Emma said.
I thought that we would talk, first, about my disappearance, the how and why of it. I imagined that we would not be able to talk about anything else until that subject was punctured and exhausted. I was sure it would stand in the way of anything else we might try to communicate to each other.
But as was so often the case when it came to her, I was wrong. Because she wanted to talk about anything but that.
She told me she’d bought a sewing machine, an interest she’d expressed and not really understood when we’d been together, and she’d begun fashioning clothes, for herself and for Peter Cash, that sometimes fit and sometimes did not.
I told her that I’d recently gone to Mass for the first time since just before I was supposed to be confirmed but instead, willful boy, had renounced the hymnal, the rosary, the cheap Chianti passed off as lamb’s blood. She asked why I’d suddenly decided to attend Mass after so long, and I said I didn’t know. I wasn’t looking to get reacquainted with God, or to be convinced anew of His existence and benevolence. The only clue I had regarding my motivation, I told her, was in the way I clung to the rituals from my childhood. The dipping of fingers in holy water, and the crossing of oneself. The genuflection. The exchange of blessings with my neighbors in the pews. There was something in these acts as ceremony that I wanted, though I had no idea what that thing might be.
She favored me with a guarded smile and said, It’s nice to see that you’re still making as little sense as possible. That you’re sticking with that strategy, despite everything it’s cost you.
Emma glanced out the window at a couple passing arm in arm on the sidewalk, then tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked back at me. Her eyes were blazing suddenly in that way I’d come to know and fear. At first I had no idea why she was so angry. We’d spent the previous twenty seconds in silence, fiddling with napkins and teaspoons, and then, seemingly apropos of nothing, she was on fire.
You had it all right here, she said to me.
To demonstrate what she meant, she held one of her hands out over the table, palm up, fingers flexed slightly as if cupping something. Right here, she said, poking her palm with the index finger of her other hand.
I didn’t respond. I had no idea what to say.
Goddamn you, she said, but her eyes were cast down at the tabletop now, and her tone was not entirely unkind.
Are you happy? I asked her.
I am happy, she said.
Good, I said. You got what you were after. Your white whale.
I meant it. I wasn’t trying to be an asshole.
She nodded and smiled, looked in her coffee cup. It’s not perfect, she said.
It never is.
You were a better lover, she said.
Life is full of trade-offs, I guess.
It is, she said. It is.
Sitting there as the day ended outside and people abandoned the coffee shop for home, or the bars, or wherever, I found myself thinking about a conversation we’d had years before, after particularly violent coitus, when we lay contused and content with our arms and legs braided together, and Emma had said, still somewhat breathless, You do things to me that no one else has done.
I was pleased to hear this, of course, and I guess it was one of those times when it’s easy to believe that you will stay that safe and happy forever. And I did believe. Despite what I knew about the width and depth of the world, and how people get lost in all that empty space, I sank down under the weight of her body, wiped a crust of blood from the corner of my mouth, breathed the tang of our spent sex wafting up from under the covers, and I believed.
We didn’t touch at all, there in the coffee shop, except once when she shifted in her seat and her booted foot made brief accidental contact with my shin under the table, then immediately retreated.
There came a moment, unbidden, when suddenly I knew everything there was to know about the woman. Currently it takes Google about .25 seconds to produce between 70 and 80 million results, and it took me about the same amount of time to suddenly, if temporarily, become aware of the millions of bits of minutiae that constituted Emma’s life and times. On my father’s grave, this actually happened. I thought that perhaps the Singularity had occurred, but it only lasted a moment. I knew, though I could not see, that Emma had a bruise on her right
thigh, in the soft flesh just below her hip, and that she’d incurred this bruise the previous morning, when she’d risen to go to the bathroom before sunrise and whacked her leg on the armoire. I knew her blood type was O-negative. I knew that her hair had inexplicably turned clown-wig red and stayed that way for two years, between the ages of three and five, and I knew that after this period it had returned just as mysteriously to the subdued auburn shade I associated with her. I knew, also, that as she sat across the table she was filled with the urge to go somewhere private and have sex with me, and I knew that this urge had begun and blossomed independent of any thoughts about Peter Cash, and that, far from being uncomfortable or otherwise a burden, she found the urge warm and comfortable—because she had every certainty that she would not act on it.
I’d like to be able to say that we left the coffee shop and went to my place and made love one last time, a physical testament to the permanence of our feelings for one another despite the impossibility of being together, but that isn’t how it went down at all. There were a couple of moments during our conversation when I half-listened while I tried to drum up the impetus to take her hand and say simply Let’s go and walk her outside and get into a cab and take her home under cover of darkness and give her a look that broadcast unmistakably Damn the consequences and have her return that look and lead her up the stairs by the wrist and unlock the door and leave it open behind us and fall onto the bed and take her clothes off and have slow passionate cinematically lit sex and let our love lie in repose for a bit afterward and then put our clothes back on and agree to never speak of it to anybody and say good-bye and maybe never see one another again.
But it just wasn’t there. I wanted to be impulsive and passionate in a wildly inappropriate way, but nothing happened inside me, and to commit such an act without a genuine mandate in my gut would have been beyond horrible. Because look, it was just really nice, being there with her. We floated in the peculiar calm and sexless affection that blossoms when there’s nothing left to prove or salvage. Neither of us looking for an apology, or to be proven right at the other’s expense. No anxiety to make it better than it was, no yearning toward something more. No dramatic conclusion at all. Just an array of loose ends, wrapped in a bundle of memories, all tied together by the sinew of regret—regret that we could both ultimately live with.
I paid the bill. We paused at the table for a moment, looking at each other in silence, and then both stood at the same time and went out onto the sidewalk, where we paused again. She said, Alright, well I guess I’ll see you, and I said, Okay then. There was another moment of quiet during which neither of us moved, and then I said: Good-bye, Emma. And these were the words that dislodged us from one another, finally, when no other words would. She turned and went back in the direction I’d seen her coming from earlier. I did not watch her go, but turned away myself with my hands jammed in the pockets of my jeans, and I walked and walked.
I understand how unsatisfying an ending that is. Believe me, I understand better than you do. But that’s life, right? I mean real life, the kind of messy conclusionless non-narrative we all write a page of every day. I could tell you a story in which things wrapped up very neatly between me and Emma, if I wanted. But that’s just not how it happened. And besides, the story isn’t really over yet. I haven’t seen her since that day, but who knows? We’re both still drawing breath. Peter Cash could step in front of a bus. I could show up under her window with a boom box. We could both live to see the Singularity. For a while I despaired of making it all the way there myself, but recently I quit smoking again, so I’m feeling optimistic. The nicotine patches, once more. They tether me to life, keep me from my father’s fate, grant me time and, by extension, opportunity. As I wrote in the final line of my first novel, the one nobody read: ‘. . . anything, anything, anything is possible.’
Speaking of messy and conclusionless: I did eventually speak to the detective with the curly hair and the predatory manner, and he of course found no reason to hold or even suspect me in the fire that destroyed Emma’s house way back then. No reason at all, my alcoholic paranoia notwithstanding. They never made an arrest, and the detective very quietly deactivated the case, and that’s how the whole thing ended—with a shrug, basically.
Or, if you insist on a natty conclusion, how about this one: my father got sick and died and that was it. Nothing followed but silence. No insight or revelation, no evidence of anything beyond that last breath. We paid someone we did not know to transform him from a man full of love and hate and fear into three pounds of ash, which is just about as neat and tidy as it gets, if you like neat and tidy so much.
It has seemed, since then, as though he never existed.
Nothing left to say about all of that, except: The End.
Now that we’ve spent all this time together, now that you know everything there is to know, now that you know the capital-T Truth, when the moment comes I hope I’m here in this place with you. I hope you’re the one sitting there next to me and I can say: Did you feel that, just now? Like the smallest, briefest earthquake? Just a slight shifting of the ground, underneath the floor, underneath the chairs that we sit on at this moment? Raise your glass with me. That was the Singularity. Please, raise your glass. Here’s to perfection. Here’s to the end of all suffering. Here’s to being mastered with infinite benevolence. Here’s to being exterminated by our own creations. Here’s to never needing to solve another of our own problems ever again. Here’s to living for as long as the machines can keep our universe from decaying into a featureless void. Here’s to loving for that long, too, and loving perfectly, without error or sorrow, held forever on the edge of madness by our desire, but never tumbling over. Salud.
Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles Page 24