Goodbye for Now

by Laurie Frankel

  “I don’t give a shit,” said Dash. “We will eat cheese and drink beer and enjoy each other’s company tonight. Not optional. Should other options present themselves, I’ll let you know.”

  Josh admitted that beer settled his stomach, so Sam knew he was defeated and said he was going upstairs to get ready. Really, he needed an aspirin and to talk to Meredith. He opened his computer and climbed into bed with her. It was like porn. It was nothing like porn.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey!” She was always so glad to hear from him. This would stop, he suspected, the more they chatted. The projection would learn to expect him. But what Meredith remembered was how rarely he called her—having, at the time, so little need—so for a while yet, he’d get to keep her delight at seeing his face. “You’re home!” she noticed.

  “Yeah. I got in this afternoon.”

  “You don’t look so good. Are you okay?”

  “I have a headache,” he said. “And jet lag. I took an aspirin.”

  “Jeez, Sam. You should really be getting some sleep.”

  “Never mind. I just miss you. A lot.”

  “I know, sweetie. Poor Sam. I miss you too.” But he knew she didn’t.

  “Something’s wrong with the software.” He changed the subject. “David’s users are pissed off. The algorithm’s screwed up, I think. It’s doing weird things. I’m not sure I can fix it.”

  “Of course you can. I love your big brain, Sam. And all your big parts. You’re a genius.”

  “A computer genius. Human interaction is harder.”

  “Well that’s what you have me for,” she said cheerfully. “I’ll be home soon.”

  Sam nodded miserably. “Everything’s in the toilet, Merde.”

  “I have shat all there is to shit,” she replied. “Barfed all there is to barf.”

  Sam could hear Dash apologizing for him in worried tones in the living room. “We’ll drag him out soon. He spends a lot of time in the bedroom these days. He spends a lot of time online.”

  “With her?” Jamie asked.

  “Of course.”

  “I was like that at first too,” said Eduardo. “Couldn’t work up the energy to leave the bed. And didn’t want to do anything but RePose with Miguel. You wouldn’t think doing nothing all day would be so tiring, but … mourning is a special kind of exhausting.”

  “It hasn’t been that long,” said Dash. “I get that. I mean, I’m not saying he should be over it or anything, but it’s time to come out of his room.”

  Sam heard the front door open and Josh come in then Dash walking down the hallway and opening the door to the bedroom.

  “Where are you?”

  “Under the covers.”

  “Talking to Meredith?”

  “I was.”

  “It’s like porn.”

  “It’s nothing like porn.”

  “I miss her too.”

  “I know.”

  “But it’s not the same.”

  “I know.”

  “Come have a beer, Sam.”

  “Thanks, Dash, really. I just don’t feel like it.”

  “If Josh can, you can. Would a Coke be better than a beer?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  Sam threw some water on his face and emerged. It was, at least, a group to whom he didn’t have to offer explanation for his mood. Dash, meanwhile, was having problems with his cheeses. These were psychological rather than culinary. The mozzarella whipped up in an hour or so. The chèvre was quick to make and then had to drain for only a couple days. Mascarpone, Neufchâtel … these were all fairly immediately gratifying. But the hard cheeses, the aged cheeses, the moldy ones, these needed months, even years, to come to fruition. He could serve the cheddar he’d set to aging in August, but it’d be better next month and better still the month after that and better and better the longer he waited. He had all these cheeses and could never eat any of them because the amount better he imagined they’d be if he was patient always outweighed, if only just barely, the desire to eat them now. So they had five different kinds of soft, new cheeses spread on crackers with manly beers and headache-soothing Coca-Cola and sullen conversation. It was Sam’s best night in weeks.

  Sam spent the weekend poring over code, running unit tests and sanity checks. The good news was RePose was working just fine. The bad news, of course, was that RePose was working just fine. As Meredith pointed out, this was what they needed her for. And as every molecule of his body and every atom of the air and every sign from the universe reminded him every moment that existed, Meredith was unavailable. They divided and conquered and flipped a coin. Dash won and got Nadia. Sam lost and was stuck with Edith. But first and together they did Emmy because she was the easy one. Sam sent her an e-mail Sunday night, and she was at the door of the salon waiting for them when they dragged themselves out of bed at eight o’clock the next morning and wandered downstairs.

  “You’re here early,” Dash observed sleepily.

  “I’ve been up for three and a half hours already,” she said. “Oliver started singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ in his crib around four thirty this morning, but he doesn’t know the words. It’s hard to sleep through, ‘Twinkle twinkle, la la la. Twinkle twinkle, la la la. La la la la twinkle la. La la twinkle la la la. Twinkle twinkle, la la star, la la la la la la la.’ So I brought him into bed with me, but he only wanted to jump around instead of lying down and going back to sleep.” Dash handed over his coffee without a word.

  “He looks very sweet now,” Sam observed. Oliver was strapped to Emmy’s front, cherubically sucking the mane of his stuffed lion and looking placidly at Sam with wide brown eyes.

  “They make them that way on purpose so you won’t toss them in a recycling bin and leave them there.” Then she started crying. Maybe she wasn’t going to be the easy one after all.

  “It’s not so bad,” said Dash. “You’re just tired.”

  “This isn’t forever,” Sam tried. “He’ll sleep someday.”

  “It’ll get easier as he gets bigger,” said Dash.

  “Soon he’ll learn all the words to ‘Twinkle Twinkle,’ ” Sam promised. “It’s not that hard a song.”

  Emmy laughed but she didn’t stop crying. “Why is this so much easier for everybody else?”

  “It isn’t,” said Sam, glad to be back on ground where he knew what he was talking about. “Eleanor was a liar. Everyone’s a liar.”

  “Eleanor was the world’s most perfect human.” Emmy rolled her eyes.

  “Maybe,” said Sam, “but she also lied and fibbed and omitted like hell and elided the facts and generally made things up.”

  “No one posts about their crappy morning,” Dash said. “No one posts photos of changing diaper after diaper after diaper. No one reports their status as, ‘Totally annoyed with my toddler who frankly is being kind of an asshole.’ No one sends out a message to the world when their kid hits and bites and then throws dinner on the floor. People complain about the weather, public sex scandals, poorly played sporting events, and the length of lines they’re waiting in, but they never say bad things about their kids, even when they deserve it.”

  “Because you and your sister were so close,” Sam explained, “both in proximity and the other way, you didn’t video chat much and you didn’t e-mail much. You saw her instead which is great, but it means the software mostly bases your relationship on her blog, her Facebook and Twitter posts, and your replies. And, of course, those are mostly happy moments and happy pictures and happy thoughts. It doesn’t mean she didn’t have the other kind of moments. It doesn’t mean she didn’t mostly have the other kind of moments. It only means that, like everybody else, the face she showed the world was a sunny one.”

  “So maybe she did sometimes think motherhood was hard,” Emmy said with dawning relief.

  “Almost certainly,” said Dash.

  “Maybe her kids did suck sometimes.”

  “
Probably still do.”

  Emmy grinned. “Hey, that’s my niece and nephew you’re talking about.” But then she darkened again right away. “But how does that help me? How can I commiserate with her and get advice for when it’s crappy and have her call me up screaming and I get to talk her down and have her there to talk me down?”

  “You can’t have that,” Sam said gently.

  “Why not?”

  “She died.”

  “But I know who can help.” Dash had made a Meredith-like preemptive plan and asked Mr. and Mrs. Benson to meet them at the salon at nine. “Their daughter fell out a window her first semester away at college. They could use some little-kid time. You could use some time to yourself. They’re happy to take Oliver for the day.”

  They’d jumped at the opportunity, in fact. They’d both taken the day off work to do it. They showed up at ten to nine carrying between them a laundry basket full of layers in a variety of sizes—tiny hats, mittens, scarves, boots, coats, and muffs—plus toys, stuffed animals, blocks, and puzzles. Emmy was speechless. “We weren’t sure what you’d have him dressed for, so we brought supplies,” Mrs. Benson explained. “We thought Oliver might like to go to the zoo, and we also thought maybe we’d go see the Christmas tree downtown and ride the merry-go-round. And we thought we might take him to the Fairmont to see the teddy bears and then lunch and then maybe hot cocoa and cookies afterward and then … well, you’ll want him home sometime, but we brought extra stuff just in case.”

  “How can I ever thank you for this?” Emmy wondered.

  “Let us take him again next week?” Mr. Benson said.

  Emmy laughed. “Let’s see if you’re still interested after spending the day with him today.”

  “I remember this age,” Mr. Benson sympathized. “Willful little buggers. Just a huge pain in the ass.” He grinned at his wife.

  “Ooh, I can’t wait,” she said.

  “One down, two to go,” said Dash.

  “Yeah, but that was the straightforward one,” said Sam.

  “Round two won’t be so bad.”

  “Easy for you to say. You won.”

  Dash sat down with Nadia and cut right to the chase. “Your mom’s projection isn’t broken. Had she lived, she really would think all those guys are jerks.”

  “Every one?”

  “Every one. Want to know what’s worse?”

  “What?”

  “She’s right.”

  “Every one?”

  “Every one. Look, I saw their profiles. I saw your mom see the guys you dated before. I saw what they did to you. The problem isn’t dating the creative, soulful poet types—trust me, girl, I see the appeal—the problem is dating someone who thinks it’s a good idea for you to work all day and take care of the house and make him dinner every night while he sits around on his ass and thinks deep thoughts. The problem isn’t dating hot guys with hot bods—trust me, girl, I see the appeal there too—the problem is dating someone who’s unwilling to take a night off from the gym ever to go out to dinner with you instead.”

  “But she hasn’t even met these guys. I haven’t even met these guys.”

  “ ’Tis a wise mother who knows her own daughter.’ ”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Something my grandmother used to say. Point is, you don’t have the best track record.”

  “I know,” Nadia moped.

  “Cheer up. Everyone’s track record is lousy until they meet the good one.”

  “I guess.”

  “And even if she were wrong, even if you’d found the good one, the projection is going to need some convincing before it’s supportive.”

  “Because she was never supportive while she was alive?”

  “Because she’s never going to think anyone is good enough for her little girl.”

  “I’m not a little girl,” said Nadia.

  “So you’ve mentioned.”

  Sam was taking Edith out to lunch. At a bar. He wasn’t sure Meredith would approve of that approach, but he was out of his depth here. He suspected Meredith would have been out of hers as well, especially given her reaction to the news about Penny and Albert. He also suspected alcohol was in order, given his findings, and that a public place wasn’t a half-bad idea either. He’d thought about lots of lies he might have told her. He thought about copping to her accusations that RePose wasn’t working somehow. But he couldn’t figure out a way to avoid the truth coming up again and again and again.

  “So, what are you drinking?” Sam asked.

  “Oh water, I think. Well, maybe one small glass of white wine,” said Edith.

  “Let’s order a bottle.”

  “Sam! It’s Monday. And it’s only noon. You’re so bad.” She was thrilled. Sam waited until the wine arrived and glasses were filled before he took a deep breath and plunged in.

  “Look, I don’t know how to tell you this, so I’m just going to tell you as much as I know as gently as I can.”

  “Hit me.”

  “You were right. Your husband was not, in fact, having an affair.”

  “Of course not. He wasn’t very kind to me, but he did love me.”

  “But RePose isn’t wrong either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He thinks he was.”

  “He thinks he was having an affair?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “So here’s the thing.” Sam emptied his glass. “Bob looked at a lot of porn.”

  “No. Eww. Bob?”

  “A lot.”

  “How could he possibly? He was an old man.”

  “Age restrictions on those sites usually work from the other end,” said Sam.

  “When?”

  “Until he died.”

  “No, I mean when did he do it? He worked all the time.”

  “Maybe not all the time.” Sam shrugged. “Or maybe he looked at it at work. Who knows?” Edith looked like she was trying to swallow her own lips. “It’s perfectly normal. Most men—”

  She waved him off. “Spare me that speech. Female?”

  “Yeah, female. He had a thing for … Well, the less said about specifics, the better maybe. Suffice it to say he had a type.”

  “Was it late-middle-aged with a stature shorter than her ass is wide?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Sam said.

  “But he was just looking, right? He wasn’t sleeping with these … models?”

  “No, no, no, just looking. But Leanne fit the type, more or less. The algorithm considered his … proclivities. It saw how often he communicated with Leanne and she with him—all innocent, work-related stuff but very frequent, of course, and very kind and friendly too. And so it put two and two together and concluded that he must be sleeping with her.”

  “But he wasn’t.”

  “Not that I can see. If he was, he never, ever mentioned anything electronically.” This was true. Sam doubted Bob and Leanne were actually sleeping together. But he also thought the algorithm was probably right: it hadn’t happened yet, but it was about to. RePose: predicting the future. Bob’s language had changed. His tone had changed. If he hadn’t gotten sick, who knows what would have happened, but the scenario the projection played out wasn’t at all out of the realm of what was already occurring. Sam didn’t think Edith needed to know any of that though. Sam was beginning to think reality and honesty were overrated.

  “And of course the computer can’t tell that Bob loved me,” Edith admitted, mostly to herself. “He never said so. Hell, maybe he didn’t. Maybe I’m the only one who didn’t know.”

  “No, Bob did love you.” Sam seized on that. “That’s why the projection’s so confused. The software sees that he loved you. It thinks he was honest with you and close to you. It’s evidently decided this isn’t something he’d keep from you.”

  “It feels … guilty?”

  “It feels truthful. And I think Bob’s going to keep bringing this up until you respond.”

 
“Why?” Edith had paled and stopped drinking her wine.

  “Because he ignored you sometimes, but you’ve never ignored him before.”

  “Never too late to start.”

  “It might be,” Sam said gently. “I think he really did love you, Edith.”

  “Just not as much as porn.” She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “She used to visit him in the hospital.”

  “Who?”

  “Leanne.”

  Edith was no longer sitting with Sam. Her eyes had wandered elsewhere; her head had left the building. “She came some at the beginning. She’d sit there with me and the kids. She’d bring flowers or food or something—something every time—and she’d fill us all in on what was happening at the office. She has all these sisters—four or five—and she’d tell us what they were up to, all their crazy stories. I was always glad to see her.… She made Bob laugh. She made us all laugh. She was so … young. In such a different world. The world of the well. The world of the life-ahead-of-you. And then he got sicker, and she stopped coming. Everyone stopped coming, really. There were a lot of tubes and … fluids. It was kind of gross and, um, intimate? You know the body … bodies.… They’re kind of embarrassing, I guess. I just assumed … Anyway, then she started coming again at the end when he was so drugged up he was pretty much gone. Not much gross anymore—he was barely there. So I thought she could finally bring herself to come and say goodbye. To her boss. That’s what she told me. ‘He was the best boss I ever had.’ ”

  Sam reached over and squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.

  “It wasn’t a very good relationship anyway. And besides, it was more than a year ago now.”

  “Not that one.”

  She looked at him and managed a small, somber smile. “So now what do I do?”

  “Respond. When he tells you he’s having an affair, you respond.”

  “How?”

  “However you like.”

  LOVE LETTER

  Dear Merde,

  Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am a genius. But it’s not the same as being smart. We like to call that wisdom, but I feel like it’s more solid and nail-downable than that, or at least it would be for a smarter person. Good plus genius isn’t helping me without you. You were the heart of this idea—its genesis, its center, its moral compass and guide. Without you, I’m not smart enough to know. Are we helping these people? It doesn’t help users mourn to find out their loved one was unfaithful. When RePose violates the loved one’s better judgments and tells secrets they’ve brought to the grave, that may be honest, but it isn’t healing. I tell people, I tell myself, that it’s out of my hands. I don’t make anything up. Projections say what’s real and true. But is that real and true? Is that tiny shred of ourselves we make public and commit to bit code really who we are? Loved ones are loved, but they’re also disappointing. Real people don’t always, don’t even usually, say what we want them to, respond how we hope. So what then is the value of making projections as close to real people as possible? I have no idea anymore. No fucking idea.