Fortune Smiles: Stories

by Adam Johnson

  I don’t say anything.

  “You’d take me with you, right? I could be your assistant. I’d hold your palette in my teeth. If you need a model, I specialize in reclining nudes.”

  “If you must know,” I tell her, “the president told me to locate my inner resolve.”

  “Inner resolve,” she says. “I could use some help tracking down mine.”

  “You have more resolve than anyone I know.”

  “Jesus, you’re sunny. Don’t you know what’s going on? Don’t you see that I’m about to spend the rest of my life like this?”

  “Pace yourself, darling. The day’s only a couple minutes old.”

  “I know,” she says. “I’m supposed to have reached a stage of enlightened acceptance or something. You think I like it that the only person I have to get mad at is you? I know it’s not right—you’re the one thing I love in this world.”

  “You love Kurt Cobain.”

  “He’s dead.”

  We hear Hector, the morning nurse, pull up outside—he drives an old car with a combustion engine.

  “I have to grab something from work,” I tell her. “But I’ll be back.”

  “Promise me something,” she says.

  “No.”

  “Come on. If you do, I’ll release you from the other promise.”

  I shake my head. She doesn’t mean it—she’ll never release me.

  She says, “Just agree to talk straight with me. You don’t have to be fake and optimistic. It doesn’t help.”

  “I am optimistic.”

  “You shouldn’t be,” she says. “Pretending, that’s what killed Kurt Cobain.”

  I think it was the shotgun he pointed at his head, but I don’t say that.

  I know only one line from Nirvana. I karaoke it to Charlotte:

  “With the lights on,” I sing, “she’s less dangerous.”

  She rolls her eyes. “You got it wrong,” she says. But she smiles.

  I try to encourage this. “What, I don’t get points for trying?”

  “You don’t hear that?” Charlotte asks.

  “Hear what?”

  “That’s the sound of me clapping.”

  “I give up,” I say, and make for the door.

  “Bed, incline,” Charlotte tells her remote. Her torso slowly rises. It’s time to start her day.

  —

  I take the 101 Freeway south toward Mountain View, where I write code at a company called Reputation Curator. Basically, the company threatens Yelpers and Facebookers to retract negative comments about dodgy lawyers and incompetent dentists. The work is labor-intensive, so I was hired to write a program that would sweep the Web to construct client profiles. Creating the president was only a step away.

  In the vehicle next to me is a woman with her iProjector on the passenger seat; she’s having an animated discussion with the president as she drives. At the next overpass, I see an older man in a tan jacket, looking down at the traffic. Standing next to him is the president. They’re not speaking, just standing together, silently watching the cars go by.

  A black car, driverless, begins pacing me in the next lane. When I speed up, it speeds up. Through its smoked windows, I can see it has no cargo—there’s nothing inside but a battery array big enough to ensure no car could outrun it. Even though I like driving, even though it relaxes me, I shift to automatic and dart into the Google lane, where I let go of the wheel and sign on to the Web for the first time since I released the president a week ago. I log in and discover that fourteen million people have downloaded the president. I also have seven hundred new messages. The first is from the dude who started Facebook, and it is not spam—he wants to buy me a burrito and talk about the future. I skip to the latest message, which is from Charlotte: “I don’t mean to be mean. I lost my feeling, remember? I’ll get it back. I’m trying, really, I am.”

  I see the president again, on the lawn of a Korean church. The minister has placed an iProjector on a chair, and the president appears to be engaging a Bible that’s been propped before him on a stand. I understand that he is a ghost who will haunt us until our nation comes to grips with what has happened: that he is gone, that he has been stolen from us, that it is irreversible. And I’m not an idiot. I know what’s really being stolen from me, slowly and irrevocably, before my eyes. I know that late at night I should be going to Charlotte instead of the president.

  But when I’m with Charlotte, there’s a membrane my mind places between us to protect me from the tremor in her voice, from the pulse in her desiccated wrists. It’s when I’m away that it comes crashing in—how scared she is, how cruel life must seem to her. Driving now, I think about how she has started turning toward the wall even before the last song on the Nirvana album is over, that soon even headphones and marijuana will cease to work. My off-ramp up ahead is blurry, and I realize there are tears in my eyes. I drive right past my exit. I just let the Google lane carry me away.

  —

  When I arrive home, my boss, Sanjay, is waiting for me. I’d messaged him to have an intern deliver the hash reader, but here is the man himself, item in hand. Theoretically, hash readers are impossible. Theoretically, you shouldn’t be able to crack full-field, hundred-key encryption. But some guy in India did it, some guy Sanjay knows. Sanjay is sensitive about being from India, and he thinks it’s a cliché that a guy with his name runs a start-up in Palo Alto. So he goes by SJ and dresses all D-School. He’s got a Stanford MBA, but he basically just stole the business model of a company called Reputation Defender. You can’t blame the guy—he’s one of those types with the hopes and dreams of an entire village riding on him.

  SJ follows me into the garage, where I dock the drone and use some slave code to parse its drive. He hands me the hash reader, hand-soldered in Bangalore from an old motherboard. We marvel at it, the most sophisticated piece of cryptography on earth, here in our unworthy hands. But if you want to “curate” the reputations of Silicon Valley, you better be ready to crack some passwords.

  He’s quiet while I initialize the drone and run a diagnostic.

  “Long time no see,” he finally says.

  “I needed some time,” I tell him.

  “Understood,” SJ says. “We’ve missed you, is all I’m saying. You bring the president back to life, send fifteen million people to our website and then we don’t see you for a week.”

  The drone knows something is suspicious—it powers off. I force a reboot.

  “Got yourself a drone there?” SJ asks.

  “It’s a rescue,” I say. “I’m adopting it.”

  SJ nods. “Thought you should know the Secret Service came by.”

  “Looking for me?” I ask. “Doesn’t sound so secret.”

  “They must have been impressed with your president. I know I was.”

  SJ has long lashes and big, manga brown eyes. He hits me with them now.

  “I’ve gotta tell you,” he says, “the president is a work of art, a seamlessly integrated data interface. I’m in real admiration. This is a game changer. You know what I envision?”

  I notice his flashy glasses. “Are those Android?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I have them?”

  He hands them over, and I search the frames for their IP address.

  SJ gestures large. “I envision your algorithm running on Reputation Curator. Average people could bring their personalities to life, to speak for themselves, to customize and personalize how they’re seen by the world. Your program is like Google, Wikipedia and Facebook all in one. Everyone on the planet with a reputation would pay to have you animate them, to make them articulate, vigilant…eternal.”

  “You can have it,” I tell SJ. “The algorithm’s core is open-source—I used a freeware protocol.”

  SJ flashes a brittle smile. “We’ve actually looked into that,” he says, “and, well, it seems like you coded it with seven-layer encryption.”

  “Yeah, I guess I did, didn’t I? You’re the
one with the hash reader. Just crack it.”

  “I don’t want it to be like that,” SJ says. “Let’s be partners. Your concept is brilliant—an algorithm that scrubs the Web and compiles the results into a personal animation. The president is the proof, but it’s also given away the idea. If we move now, we can protect it, it will be ours. In a few weeks, though, everyone will have their own.”

  I don’t point out the irony of SJ wanting to protect a business model.

  “Is the president just an animation to you?” I ask. “Have you spoken with him? Have you listened to what he has to say?”

  “I’m offering stock,” SJ says. “Wheelbarrows of it.”

  The drone offers up its firewall like a seductress her throat. I deploy the hash reader, whose processor hums and flashes red. We sit on folding chairs while it works.

  “I need your opinion,” I tell him.

  “Right on,” he says, and removes a bag of weed. He starts rolling a joint, then passes me the rest. He’s been hooking me up the last couple months, no questions.

  “What do you think of Kurt Cobain?” I ask.

  “Kurt Cobain,” he repeats as he works the paper between his fingers. “The man was pure,” he says, and licks the edge. “Too pure for this world. Have you heard Patti Smith’s cover of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’? Unassailable, man.”

  He lights the joint and passes it my way, but I wave it off. He sits there, staring out the open mouth of my garage into the Kirkland plumage of Palo Alto. Apple, Oracle, PayPal and Hewlett-Packard were all started in garages within a mile of here. About once a month, SJ gets homesick and cooks litti chokha for everyone at work. He plays Sharda Sinha songs and gets this look in his eyes like he’s back in Bihar, land of peepal trees and roller birds. He has the look now. He says, “You know, my family downloaded the president. They have no idea what I do out here, as if I could make them understand that I help bad sushi chefs ward off Twitter trolls. But the American president, that they understand.”

  The mayor, barefoot, jogs past us. Moments later, a billboard drives by.

  “Hey, can you make the president speak Hindi?” SJ asks. “If you could get the American president to say ‘I could go for a Pepsi’ in Hindi, I’d make you the richest man on earth.”

  The hash reader’s light turns green. Just like that, the drone is mine. I disconnect the leads and begin to sync the Android glasses. The drone uses its moment of freedom to rise and study SJ.

  SJ returns the drone’s intense scrutiny.

  “Who do you think sent it after you?” he asks. “Mozilla? Craigslist?”

  “We’ll know in a moment.”

  “Silent. Black. Radar deflecting,” SJ says. “I bet this is Microsoft’s dark magic.”

  The new OS suddenly initiates, the drone responds, and using retinal commands, I send it on a lap around the garage. “Lo and behold,” I say. “Turns out our little friend speaks Google.”

  “Wow,” SJ says. “Don’t be evil, huh?”

  When the drone returns, it targets SJ in the temple with a green laser.

  “What the fuck,” SJ says.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell him. “It’s just taking your pulse and temperature.”

  “What for?”

  “Probably trying to read your emotions,” I say. “I bet it’s a leftover subroutine.”

  “You sure you’re in charge of that thing?”

  I roll my eyes and the drone does a backflip.

  “My emotion is simple,” SJ tells me. “It’s time to come back to work.”

  “I will,” I tell him. “I’ve just got some things to deal with.”

  SJ looks at me. “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about your wife. But you don’t have to be so alone about things. Everyone at work, we’re all worried about you.”

  —

  Inside, Charlotte is suspended in a sling from the Hoyer Lift, which has been rolled to the window so she can see outside. She’s wearing old yoga tights, which are slack on her, and she smells of the cedar oil her massage therapist rubs her with. I go to her and open the window.

  “You read my mind,” she says, and breathes the fresh air.

  I put the glasses on her, and it takes her eyes a minute of flashing around before the drone lifts from my hands. A grand smile crosses her face as she puts it through its paces—hovering, rotating, swiveling the camera’s servos. And then the drone is off. I watch it cross the lawn, veer around the compost piles, and head for the community garden. It floats down the rows, and though I don’t have the view Charlotte does in her glasses, I can see the drone inspecting the blossoms of summer squash, the fat bottoms of Roma tomatoes. It rises along the bean trellises and tracks watermelons by their umbilical stems. When she makes it to her plot, she gasps.

  “My roses,” she says. “They’re still there. Someone’s been taking care of them.”

  “I wouldn’t let your roses die,” I tell her.

  She has the drone inspect every bloom. Carefully, she maneuvers it through the bright petals, brushing against the blossoms, then shuttles it home again. When it’s hovering before us, Charlotte leans slightly forward and sniffs the drone. “I never thought I’d smell my roses again,” she says, her face flushed with hope and amazement. The tears begin streaming.

  I remove her glasses, and we leave the drone hovering there.

  She regards me. “I want to have a baby,” she says.

  “A baby?”

  “It’s been nine months. I could have had one already. I could’ve been doing something useful this whole time.”

  “But your illness,” I say. “We don’t know what’s ahead.”

  She closes her eyes like she’s hugging something, like she’s holding some dear truth.

  “With a baby, I’d have something to show for all this. I’d have a reason. At the least, I’d have something to leave behind.”

  “You can’t talk like that,” I tell her. “We’ve talked about you not talking like this.”

  But she won’t listen to me, she won’t open her eyes.

  All she says is “And I want to start tonight.”

  —

  Later, I carry the iProjector out back to the gardening shed. Here, in the gold of afternoon light, the president rises and comes to life. He adjusts his collar and cuffs, runs his thumb down a black lapel as if he exists only in the moment before a camera will broadcast him live to the world.

  “Mr. President,” I say. “I’m sorry to bother you again.”

  “Nonsense,” he tells me. “I serve at the pleasure of the people.”

  “Do you remember me?” I ask. “Do you remember the problems I’ve been talking to you about?”

  “Perennial is the nature of the problems that plague man. Particular is the voice with which they call to each of us.”

  “My problem today is of a personal nature.”

  “Then I place this conversation under the seal.”

  “I haven’t made love to my wife in a long time.”

  He holds up a hand to halt me. He smiles in a knowing, fatherly way.

  “Times of doubt,” he tells me, “are inherent in the compact of civil union.”

  “My question is about children. Would you have still brought yours into the world, knowing that only one of you might be around to raise them?”

  “Single parenting places too much of a strain on today’s families,” he says. “That’s why I’m introducing legislation that will reduce the burden on our hardworking parents.”

  “What about your children? Do you miss them?”

  “My mind goes to them constantly. Being away is the great sacrifice of the office.”

  In the shed, suspended dust makes his specter glitter and swirl. It makes him look like he is cutting out, like he will leave at any moment. I feel some urgency.

  “When it’s all finally over,” I ask, “where is it that we go?”

  “I’m no preacher,” the president says, “but I believe we go where we are called.”<
br />
  “Where were you called to? Where is it that you are?”

  “Don’t we all try to locate ourselves among the pillars of uncommon knowledge?”

  “You don’t know where you are, do you?” I ask the president.

  “I’m sure my opponent would like you to believe that.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, more to myself. “I didn’t expect you to know.”

  “I know exactly where I am,” the president says. Then, in a voice that sounds pieced from many scraps, he adds, “I’m currently positioned at three seven point four four north by one two two point one four west.”

  I think he’s done. I wait for him to say “Good night and God bless America.” Instead, he reaches out to touch my chest. “I have heard that you have made much personal sacrifice,” he says. “And I’m told that your sense of duty is strong.”

  I don’t think I agree, but I say, “Yes, sir.”

  His glowing hand clasps my shoulder, and it doesn’t matter that I can’t feel it.

  “Then this medal that I affix to your uniform is much more than a piece of silver. It is a symbol of how much you have given, not just in armed struggle and not just in service to your nation. It marks you forever as one who can be counted upon, as one who in times of need will lift up and carry those who have fallen.” Proudly, he stares into the empty space above my shoulder. He says, “Now return home to your wife, soldier, and start a new chapter of life.”

  —

  When darkness falls, I go to Charlotte. The night nurse has placed her in a negligee. Charlotte lowers the bed as I approach. The electric motor is the only sound in the room.

  “I’m ovulating,” she announces. “I can feel it.”

  “You can feel it?”

  “I don’t need to feel it,” she says. “I just know.”

  She’s strangely calm.

  “Are you ready?” she asks.

  “Sure.”

  I steady myself on the safety rail that separates us.

  She asks, “Do you want some oral sex first?”

  I shake my head.

  “Come join me, then,” she says.

  I start to climb on the bed—she stops me.

  “Hey, sunshine,” she says. “Take off your clothes.”