I said I was sorry. “I didn’t mean that. Let’s talk about this later, okay?”
Samara didn’t look up. Daniel said, “Sure.”
At work I was on my second test experiment for the genotypes of lentils I’d been working with for the past month, which basically amounted to torturing half my plants to measure their response to drought stress. When I stepped into the growth chamber, Dan greeted me with its customary: “Dr. Lyons, welcome back.”
“Hey Danny,” I said. “Recap the last twenty-four hours for me.” The chamber was hot and bright so I squinted until my eyes adjusted.
It said, “You know I hate that nickname,” and then with an exaggerated sigh began its recap. Genotypes 3, 6, and 7 had begun water conservation at 20 percent soil water loss. Its analysis showed that the same cluster of genomes were responsible in 3 and 6.
“What about Genotype 7?”
“Genotype 2 has a similar set, but it won’t activate until 40 percent water loss. Genotype 7 is just more aggressive.”
“Three more tests and we’ll be able to confirm that for certain.” I made my way down the line of plant pods, running my fingers along the clear polymer over each individual plant. Attached to every pod were tubes running carbon dioxide and water vapor into their miniature environments. A separate tube pumped water into the soil, activating slow-release osmocote, that gradually replenished the nutrients in the soil. Fifty-six plants in all, seven for each of the eight genotypes: three controls and four treatments each. I was at the end of the first row when I asked, “And the other genotypes?”
“High functioning as expected. No drought stress response.”
“Controls?”
“Healthy.”
“Have you flagged any other crops with the same genome clusters as 3 and 6?”
“Two varieties of cowpea. Three soybeans. Four varieties of maize and tomato.”
“Mark the maize for the next experiment.” The four walls of the chamber were covered with a metal sheet to reflect light, which gave all the objects in the chamber a hyperreal quality, overexposed. The metal sheet reflected my face in a somewhat distorted way, but with that same abundance of light revealed the bags under my eyes in harsh detail. I was tired and the chamber knew it. “Report?”
“Uploaded to your console now,” it said. “You know, everything seems to be running smoothly. I can notify you immediately if anything goes wrong.”
I looked away from my reflection. “What?”
“Well—”
“Never mind that. Let’s model the maize experiment since we have some time to kill.”
The afternoon brought a meeting with one of my students. Tessa came in a few minutes late, which was common for her. I pretended not to notice. We discussed her dissertation at length, her progress and pitfalls. Tessa was researching the wrong-way response in stomata for her dissertation. She was in her fourth year. Two more years and she’d lose funding. She was where I thought she would be at this point, behind schedule but not alarmingly so. I gently reminded her of the timeline. She would still be behind for a while, I guessed. That’s how these things went. But the deadline would quicken her eventually. I just needed to provide the consistent nudge. I asked her when she wanted to meet again. Tessa bit her 1ip nervously and then produced a date in late October.
I asked, “Would late afternoon be okay? 4:00 p.m.?”
She nodded and after a few more exchanges about project goals left. After she was gone, I asked Ally to pencil in the meeting.
“That will conflict with—”
“Cancel any conflicts.”
“I would highly recommend rescheduling this meeting for another day. This date is really important to Daniel and Samara.”
“Ally, turn off mediation program while at work.”
“The mediation program is integrated into my whole system. You’d have to delete the program or set up a separate AI to handle work affairs.”
This seemed incredibly stupid to me so of course I had difficulty processing it.
As it turned out, I had an appointment with the family therapist the following evening. I brought up the obvious, that it was time to delete the mediation program.
She asked, “Why?”
“Why can’t I? I want to.”
“Do your kids know? Did you ask them?”
“No, do I need to?”
She gave me this long look, sad with something else mixed in. “Well no, you don’t.”
“Okay, I’ll do it. Should I just say ‘Delete mediation program.’”
“That should do it,” she said, and then, “you know—”
I could just feel that this would be something I didn’t like, so I braced myself.
“—you could have just done it on your own. The law requires the easy removal of that program.” She paused and fixed me with a penetrating stare. “So why did you really come here?”
I must confess I don’t like therapists. But Isaac had recommended it when he got sick and I thought, well, he’s sick, I should give him what he thinks he needs. My therapist said Isaac wanted us to try it when he was gone. I could have said no, since he was dead at that point anyway, but I didn’t.
I answered, saying something about feeling bad, like I was betraying him for wanting to get the program removed. The therapist leaned in. God, she was eager. I had a bad thought then, that therapists were the worst kind of voyeurs, sticking their noses everywhere, profession as a shield. She asked me to talk a little about that. Why betrayal? I looked at the clock and had to hold in a swear word. I was trapped there for another twenty-five minutes. I said I was being silly. I said, “Never mind.”
She frowned. “You should talk about this. Do you talk to your kids about Isaac?”
“What’s the point?”
Something about this surprised her, though she covered it well. “Have you tried speaking to him?” she asked.
I asked who.
“Isaac, of course.”
“There is no him to speak to.”
She watched me with her penetrating eyes. “People find it helpful to speak to the dead.”
“The dead don’t speak.”
“Not exactly.”
“Not at all.”
“Are you angry at your husband?”
“What kind of question is that?” I got up.
“Now, wait a minute.”
I said, “I’m not going to sit here and be insulted by you.” And then I walked out. In the car I laughed at my cleverness, and then that laughter turned to crying and I cried for a very long time.
Isaac and I had met at a party. A common friend introduced us. You’re both from the same place, she’d said, which was true; we’d both grown up in the Virgin Islands, though Isaac had left home for college and I’d left at the beginning of high school. At the time I had dated only a few guys, nothing serious. I was too busy with school. But in comes Isaac: tall, deep-voiced, shy with a self-deprecating sense of humor, a smile that poured into me until I was full. It was fast. A plane roaring off a runway. We did nerd stuff together: watched a ton of anime, listened to audiobooks, went to local museums and walked around until our feet were sore. Hosted board game parties.
Time passed in that sweet syrup of first love. We were comfortable, a steady center as school and life changed around us. We both got graduate degrees and then I went on to get my doctorate in plant physiology and crop science. Isaac got a master’s in English literature. In the last year of my doctorate, I got pregnant and had our son. Even that wasn’t such an upheaval. We were happy. Money was tight, but we were building a life.
Isaac’s circle of friends slowly shrank during all this time. The reduction was too slow to notice. He didn’t like going out, and with Daniel he had an even better excuse to blow off an ever-increasing number of social engagements. Trips to museums stopped, but that was no big thing—we had seen all the exhibits at the local museum dozens of times. New installations didn’t draw his attention. That was fine, too. Boar
d game nights stopped. No big deal either as they were hard to manage and we were busy. All of this could be explained as growing older. I’d never truly felt like an adult, so what did I know? Perhaps this was the normal occurrences of time and age.
Isaac stopped wanting to take trips. Weddings made him anxious. Visiting family made him anxious. He liked our neighborhood, but driving too far outside of it gave him anxiety. This was fine, too. He worked at a small college as an assistant professor and spent a lot of time with Daniel and then Samara once she was born. I could do my research and teach my classes. I was too busy to make a fuss. At home we spent a lot of time together. It didn’t feel so strange. I knew he had anxiety; I could feel it was in the air, electric and heavy. I didn’t push him. As long as he kept to his routines, he was fine. The same smile and self-deprecating humor. Did I mind our constantly shrinking circle of common friends, the way my life at work felt divorced from the rest of my life, all the little ways our life together got smaller and smaller? I don’t know. I didn’t think much about it to be honest. It was just the natural order of things.
It could have gone on that way with no intervention on my part if it weren’t for the cancer, and even then it was him, not me, who decided to get therapy, and to go on drives to other neighborhoods, and to do board game nights again. He decided to start expanding our lives once more just as he was dying. He decided to go on short trips with the kids, and of course I couldn’t go on every one because I was doing research and teaching a full course load. He recommended family therapy, saying we’d been enabling him for too long and he wanted to make sure we’d be okay in case the worst happened. The worst. On game nights I had to watch people watch him die. I watched him at the parties he now insisted on attending. Smiling that big dopey smile as his hair was falling out. Walking through exhibit after exhibit at the museums he’d long abandoned, now resurrected in his mind as his body failed. And of course I smiled through it and tried not to cry when I felt his bones when he held me.
He’d ask me to tell him what I was thinking.
“I was happy with our quiet life,” I finally told him, when I couldn’t hold it in anymore.
“Were you, really?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I wasn’t. I was resigned. I think you were, too.”
I hated when he did that, told me what I was feeling. And of course he kept insisting we see a therapist, deal with the inevitable, once we knew that’s what it was: inevitable. No use pretending. Better to talk it out while I’m still here. I love you so much. I love all of you. I want to do this right.
Like anyone could make a bad thing right with talking. Like it could be moved even one inch or lightened with words. Dying is dying. It isn’t pretty and no one can make it right.
And then he recommended we use the mediation program when he was gone. God, that man.
Close to the bitter ugly end he said, “I wasted so much time. I should have worked my shit out sooner. But we had a good life despite all that.” As if we were both dying. As if he weren’t leaving me behind.
God, that man.
I got an email from my student. She had to reschedule.
Ally chimed in immediately. “Now that you have an opening in your—”
I ordered Ally to turn off.
I’d been staring at the global crop index most of the morning and afternoon, looking for gaps in the data. This was why I was researching drought stress in crops in the first place, to pinpoint the best places to grow crops, especially along the growing areas of drought vulnerability, and even more so for places that lacked the economics or water reserves for irrigation systems. Truthfully, unequal water distribution would make the problem worse in the long run. Better to design a global crop index consistent with natural weather patterns, matching plant physiological traits to climate and region. We needed data from the genome level, to the ecosystem level, all the way up to the biosphere. The goal was to create a full map before 2050, which was now only five years away. We’d been hitting our global greenhouse emission targets, but the climate was still changing. A global food system was important for preventing food insecurity over the next fifty years. We were very close, and already parts of the map had been implemented to positive effects.
Most of what I did was fine-tuning on the micro side of the data pool, hence the slow torture of individual plants to see which genome clusters lit up. I was now on the third test of my lentil experiment. Bored and looking for something to do, I went down to the growth chamber. Dan immediately gave me its report. “All current results consistent with last two tests. Same genomal patterning. Controls healthy.”
“Full report.”
“Already on your console.”
“No fires to put out.”
“No fires.”
I walked down the rows of plants listening to the quiet hum of the tubes doing their work, sending water into the soil and moisture and carbon dioxide into the air. The plants looked healthy. Everything looked fine.
Dan asked if I had any appointments today.
“I was supposed to be meeting with one of my students. She canceled.”
“Oh,” it said. “Classes?”
“Not today.”
“You should go do something fun. I got this.”
I almost requested that we model the cowpea experiment, but it was terribly obvious that I was avoiding home and my children. “Okay,” I said, and went home.
I smelled Samara’s seven-cheese casserole from the driveway. When I opened the door and made my way to the kitchen, I saw them both, Samara sitting on the kitchen counter with a finished casserole on an oven mitt next to her, and Daniel, his head in the fridge. He looked over the open door, closed it like he’d just been caught shoplifting, and then stood looking at me. Samara kept looking ahead, not sparing me a single glance.
“Ally, what the hell? Why didn’t you send a reschedule notification for this event?”
“Listen to yourself,” Samara said. Then in response to my glare, “Ally did notify us. And we planned it anyway. With or without you, we’re doing this.”
Every once in a while, a child will say or do something both rude and righteous. I felt the rage bubbling up inside me, ready to rush out. I opened my mouth to rebuke them both, but what could I say, they’d outmanuvered me in every possible way. Cheeks hot, I stomped to my room, slamming the door behind me. There I was, alone and feeling like a child in my own home, my actual children eating a dinner they had prepared for themselves in honor of their dead father.
In my room another vessel for Ally lay dormant on the nightstand, a black cube emitting a soft blue light, listening for its name, so it could chirp to life and continue to bulldoze my life.
I said its name and it woke immediately.
“Yes?”
“Delete mediation software.”
It asked, “Are you sure?” and I might have imagined a slight bit of apprehension in its voice.
I paused then because the thought occurred to me that doing this might further damage my relationship with Samara and Daniel. But something else stopped me too, an impulse I had staved off for so long now, coming at me full force, a hurricane making landfall.
“No,” I finally answered. “Let me speak to Isaac.”
This time it didn’t ask me if I was sure, and it felt both reasonable and like an act of preservation for it not to. Instead the change was violent, brutal in its lack of preamble. “Hey, love,” it said, in Isaac’s voice.
The similarity was so uncanny my head emptied for a moment. “Hey, babe,” I said after a beat and immediately felt silly.
“What’s up?” it said again, casual in its brutality.
“The kids hate me.”
“They don’t hate you. This has been hard for them. Hard for you, too. They’ll understand.”
I asked, “You’ve been talking to Samara a lot?”
“Daniel, too.”
“What have they been saying?” I was trying to trip it up.
This was something Isaac would have no trouble answering, but an AI with a privacy protocol might be restricted from responding.
“They’re worried about you,” it said, not missing a beat. “You’ve been at work too much.”
“I’m always at work. Even before—”
“This is different and you know it.” The interruption, the soft-spoken Isaac-like certainty of the statement, sent me stuttering. He was like this, gentle in his bullying, trying to push me to admit things I didn’t want to.
“Yes, you have to keep busy, but the kids—”
“Shut up.”
He stopped then and it was impossible to tell if it was an AI command response or a compassionate yielding to my request.
After a while I said, “I’m so angry.”
“At me,” it said. A statement of fact. I didn’t bother to disagree. “Why?” it asked.
“I don’t know.” I suddenly remembered where I was. I’d lost sight of my surroundings for some time. The room was dark and I had somehow slid down to the floor, my arms folded over my knees. The light switch was above me, where I couldn’t reach it, not without stretching or getting up. I could ask Ally to do it but found myself unwilling to break the spell, to end whatever this was. Tears were warm on my face and I felt terrible, but I was transfixed, my eyes focused on the green light of that black cube, that miniature speaker for the dead.
“In plants there are two main options when a drought hits. Conserve water. Or use it up. Conserve and the plant may survive the drought or it may die anyway. Eventually water loss does its work. Use it up and the plant might grow to where it can release seeds. But the plant may die and the seeds may never find water. Either is a gamble, a race against the clock.
“In the end it often doesn’t matter which option is chosen. Most droughts are short enough that plant life will bounce back through either response. And a long enough drought renders both actions futile. But if it was me, I’d conserve, not waste my energy; not spend my valuable time doing things that might not matter. Save what I got for what’s in front of me.
“I think that’s why I’m mad at you. I wanted more and you gave me less. I was right in front of you and you wasted your time.”
Entanglements Page 16