Eternal Love, Page 3

  When she returned home from work, he had a major surprise for her. He told her he wanted to read everything she read and most definitely everything she wrote. “You will be bored to tears, my dear”, she said, “I often read some rather specialized literature. Literary influences, linguistic analysis, life minutiae of somebody long gone who is of interest to maybe three people in the world, all English PhDs like myself…”. “No matter,” he replied, “I have plenty of free time, and if I have trouble understanding something, there is an expert in this house who can help me! Let me start with the books you read for your PhD, hopefully they will be more digestible. And please give me all the papers you wrote, starting from your Master’s thesis.” She was somewhat skeptical as to the usefulness of that effort or its longevity, but figured if he didn’t have anything better to do, let him read all of it. She went into her study and returned carrying several thick books and some slim stacks of paper held together by staples, obviously a portion of her oeuvre. “Ok honey, you can start with this; when you are done with it I will give you some more.”, said she.

  The books were hard, but perhaps not as hard as she thought. He didn’t have to produce any original research. In fact, he cared little about the chapters of these books unrelated to her work. He plowed through her material and then followed her references into the books and read around them, trying to understand the flow of her logic. Sometimes he realized that he didn’t know something that she and the books took for granted, and she explained it or gave him another more introductory book. They started having conversations at the dinner table about what she had worked on for all the years they were together. He then reviewed their recorded versions, to better memorize what she had said. He was glad he installed that camera on a ceiling so close to the place of conversation. Peter needed to catch up, to immerse himself into what was going on in her life while he renovated bathrooms and installed new windows.

  In another year, she turned 30...

  ~~~

  They lived now a very established and settled life. Most people would probably find it boring, but it suited them just fine. He focused on his trading when the market was open, made sure the house was in good order and read the books and articles she gave him. Her work was her life. If she wanted to entertain friends and colleagues, she told him in advance and he would stay out. The guests knew she had a significant other with whom she lived, but never saw him and preferred not to ask questions.

  A chat room guru recommended him to move his trading overseas, and connected him to people who could guide him through the process. Peter liked that idea, primarily because it would give him more privacy.

  Soon he became a sole beneficiary of a new offshore trust formed in the Bahamas. The trust’s only asset was an International Business Company registered in Belize. The IBC owned a bank account in Antigua and a brokerage account in Gibraltar. Peter thought it didn’t get more private than this but was concerned that such an arrangement may prove to be too “tax efficient”. He met with a local CPA who shared his concerns and helped him set up a Wyoming corporation to pass his trading income through. They called this cute stateside small business “Timeless Ventures Inc.”. The CPA gave him a list of annual forms to file, and Peter contemplated with some trepidation that by the time he would learn how to operate this Rube Goldberg contraption, he would miss something essential and wind up in a criminal court, or maybe some of the jurisdictions would change the rules and the entire scheme would fall apart. To make some lemonade out of that lemon, he transferred his bank account, car and share of the house to Timeless Ventures. The beautiful thing about business entities is they don’t have a natural age limit.

  ~~~

  Peter was now in his mid-sixties, and it dawned on him that it was no longer possible for him to drive. If he would get pulled over, the officer would ask for his driver’s license and see his true age. To stay mobile, he decided to buy a fancy self-driving car, with a large LCD screen and an always-on internet connection but without a steering wheel or pedals.

  The AI in such cars was still considered not mature and reliable enough to let it operate completely on its own. The self-drivers made their first baby steps in the messy world of humans, and like a baby needed to be constantly monitored and controlled. The car manufacturers were required to implement a so called “connected driving mode”. The buyer would have to subscribe to a special cellular internet access plan. They also would need to sign a waiver that they understood that the car would not be operational in remote areas not covered by a cellular service. With the internet connection available, the road maps in the car’s memory were always up-to-date. The car interacted with other cars nearby and with the internet service that was aware about the local exceptions such as road construction or closures, detours or accidents. The service passed all that information to the car. If the car ran into something ambiguous, it could always ask the service for help. In case the car and the service could not resolve the ambiguity on their own, they would pass the controls to a human operator. The operator would then drive the car remotely until the situation became clear. This could happen if for example the car ran into a malfunctioning street light or needed to follow instructions given by a construction worker or a policeman.

  Peter was aware of all these and could easily live with it. He paid for the car and for the cellular service, and in a few hours got a phone call that the car was in their driveway. Peter went out to see it, wondered “Where is the driver?” for a moment and immediately realized he was being silly. Aside of giving a destination, a human inside that vehicle would not have any means to guide the driving process. Peter sold his old “manually driven” car and returned his driver’s license to the DMV.

  When the next time they wanted to go on vacation, Peter realized that he would have difficulty getting on a plane without a government ID. He found a very clever solution. They would get to the airport, and then when it would be the time to show his ID, he would “discover” that he probably forgot his driver’s license at home. They would panic and try to find it in his bag, and all they would find would be some utility bills with his name and their address. The security officer would see that the bills were on the same name as his boarding pass and on the same address as on her driver’s license. This would prove that he was indeed the Peter who was supposed to travel that day. Such a trick worked, and they were allowed to board.

  ~~~

  One day next year, she returned home from work all cheerful and happy and told him: “Guess what? I got a tenure! Now finally, after all these years, I am an associate professor of English. It looks like we are really going to stick around here for a while”. Peter was glad for her but got a little concerned. He wondered: “Her job is now quite stable and probably decently paid. On the videos, her office looks increasingly crowded and messy. She gets a lot of books and articles to review, and she is running out of space to keep them. What if she starts a conversation about a new and bigger house, with an office suitable for a tenured professor? I would have to reinstall the “Precious Moments” at a new place, and she may not like it there. It’s been a few years since I set it up, and we never really used it for its primary purpose, to record family occasions. Maybe she will want the new house to be “nice and cozy”, a dwelling of successful professionals and not something purchased by a PhD student and an unemployed lab technician. These cameras, they would probably not go very well with a new décor, plus there would have to be more of them…”

  He shouldn’t have worried. She had always been non-materialistic and had no sense of new entitlement what-so-ever. The school gave her her own office, and the problem of overcrowding was resolved, at least for a time being. As to everything else, she was perfectly fine with their house. It was a place for her to spend nights and weekends, and it continued to serve that purpose well.

  He had read through all her papers and related books. She was impressed and grateful to him for this effort. She often discussed with him wha
tever she worked on, and they both truly enjoyed these discussions. Now that he better knew her field of study, she could share with him more details. Sometimes she even bounced off him some ideas and found this very stimulating for her thought process. Maybe if she had had a cat and bounced those ideas off it, the result would have been the same, but she would have felt weird conversing about English literature with a cat.

  Peter’s calendar age was now advanced enough for him to apply for Social Security. He did this with great hesitancy, and only because he could do it online. He felt more amused than happy when monthly deposits started showing up on his bank account statements. After his college graduation, he had never received a single dollar that he didn’t earn as an employee, business owner or investor, so each of those deposits felt like a Christmas gift. He was worried however that Social Security would send somebody to check if he was still alive, and they would not be amused if a man in his thirties would answer the door and say “I am Peter”. He rarely discussed with her his financial matters, but he felt compelled to share with her his concerns and ask to tell whoever would be looking for him in person that he wasn’t home.

  ~~~

 

  The seasons continued to change. Now she travelled much more than she used to. She became fairly well known in her field and was often invited to attend a conference or to give a guest lecture. Peter hated it. He felt that he was losing a little bit of her every day they weren’t together. Some of her presentations were posted as videos on the internet. He figured out how to save those videos and convert them into the file format used by the “Precious Moments” system. She got an offer to spend a sabbatical as a visiting professor somewhere, but he begged her to decline it: “What am I going to do here alone? My parents have passed away, I have no friends, all I have is you”. She agreed, quite reluctantly. She thought that being a couple required some compromises, and there was very little she had to compromise on in her life with him.

  She also got some graduate students to advise. This was new to her, and she took it very seriously. Now in addition to her work, they discussed at dinner time the fumbling efforts of her students. Peter asked her to explain him everything she wanted to instill into them. “If I can understand you, they most likely will as well. After all, they just got their degrees in English, and I have never gotten one.” On her recorded videos, he would often see her reading a draft of somebody’s paper and making numerous notes on it.

  In a few years, they noticed that slowly but surely, she approached his visible age. “You know what?”, she once told him, “It may sound funny, but I do not notice me becoming older. It is you who keep getting younger and younger! I guess I am the only person with such experience, and I must tell you, it feels really weird.” When they had gone out or travelled together, people used to think of them as of a successful businessman, plain and boring, and his really hot girlfriend. Now they looked more like two friends, possibly divorcees, who were trying to figure out if they could become more than just friends. He was obviously head-over-heels with her, because he followed her everywhere with his camcorder making videos of her walking, talking and drinking coffee…

  And then that year arrived, the year when she indeed turned the same age as he was when he made that fateful injection of the mousy cocktail. She didn’t notice it. Peter told her how old he was at that time when they were in the bank’s private room, but she was never good with numbers and probably forgot. For him, it was a watershed year. He knew that once again, his life was divided on “before that” and “after that”. He was often depressed. He would give anything to start aging again, to live out his life while always being the same age as she. He wouldn’t feel then that the time was taking her away from him and had already taken the years of her youth…

  Her knees started bothering her, and she had to give up on her daily morning runs. She was very upset and frustrated. “I am getting old, my dear”, she told him, “and you are the same young man I met at a bus stop “. She decided to take up lap swimming. She would still get up at 6, have a quick breakfast and head to the university pool. In the warm time of year, she swam in the outdoor pool. She enjoyed it so much that she occasionally lost the sense of time and then had to rush her class preparation routine. Peter thought he could also get up early, ask his self-driving wonder to deliver them to the pool, record her swimming, return home and program the wonder to drive itself back to the university campus at the end of the day to pick her up. He was afraid however that the pool regulars would notice the same man coming to the pool every morning for years and years to shoot some videos. “I wish the car could also self-operate a camcorder, but this would probably be asking for too much”, he said to himself.

  ~~~

  They continued their evening conversations about her days. The department once asked their tenured faculty to propose new courses to be offered in the future. She got excited about that idea and spent a good deal of time thinking about it and researching possible alternatives. The result of this mental effort was a new graduate course on Indian authors writing in English. Unlike most countries in the world, India didn’t have a single language that every its citizen was expected to be fluent in. Hindi/Urdu would be a natural candidate for it, but it was very different from Dravidian languages spoken in the south of the country, and southerners ardently opposed its acceptance as a country-unifying language. They were afraid this would lead to an effective first and second class citizenship based upon linguistic proficiency. English didn’t have such a problem. It was very commonly spoken but had very few native speakers. Everyone was in the same boat when it came to learning it. Unfortunately, the government would never agree to declare it as “the” Indian language. On a grass root level however, its usage continued to widen, and many writers chose it as a primary language of expression, hoping to reach out to the countrywide readership. “It is a truly fascinating subject, the emerging Indian literature in English.”, she said, “In this country, nobody knows these writers aside of a small group of immigrants. That’s a shame, and hopefully this new course will help to remedy it to some extent. They write about things that are close to their reader’s hearts but seem foreign to us. Their vocabulary is often limited and language cadences somewhat simplistic. But this is just a beginning. The Indian middle class is growing by leaps and bounds, and it has become fashionable recently for them to hire American or British au pairs for their children. The au pair agencies have no shortage of candidates. A young woman from a small Midwestern town with no college degree can try to make ends meet by doing odd jobs, or she can get free room and board in a wealthy Indian household, plus some not inconsiderable pay, just because her parents taught her to speak English as her first language. Most of the young children that these au pairs take care of will grow up bilingual. Eventually they will have children of their own. And then they won’t need to invite au pairs from abroad to pass the language along to their progeny. They will do it themselves, thank you very much. A whole new social layer will appear whose English isn’t worse than yours or mine. They will use it as a primary language among themselves; a Tamil and a Punjabi who are its native speakers will feel more kinship toward each other than to their respective ethnic groups. They for sure will be avid and discriminating readers. And you can bet some of them will write and publish books to be read by people like themselves. These books will be as well written as those we have here in the States. And who knows, maybe centuries from now, the capital of English literature will not be London or New York but Bombay.”

  The course proved to be surprisingly popular. Many undergrads wanted to take it as well. “Any English instructor can teach us Jane Austin or John Steinbeck”, they would say, “But India, that’s quite uncommon”.

  She turned 40, and in a few years was promoted to a full professor and was given a bigger office. It immediately became cluttered, because she decided to move there everything from her home office as well. Peter was relieved; it now seemed unlikely t
hat she would want to buy a new house because her study was too small.

  Her girlfriends were now all married with children; some of them had to move out of town to follow their husbands. Only she and Peter followed their own individual paths in life they had chosen many years prior. They went out one day to the same restaurant at the mall, and she asked him, in her usual slightly detached way: “Honey, you must feel lonely sitting all day at home on your own. What if we volunteer to babysit, on a very occasional basis? My friends also want to have a night out every once in a while, or maybe to travel for a few days, and you can imagine how much fun it would be with young children. You don’t have to worry about them being surprised by your apparent agelessness. By the time they could notice it, they will grow up and won’t need babysitting anymore!“ He wasn’t exactly prepared for this turn of a conversation but thought that maybe having some children around the house every so often could indeed be rather entertaining, assuming that they would behave themselves. He answered: “Well, why don’t we give it a try? Only please, bring somebody quiet and manageable. As you know I have no experience quelling unruly children” She laughed: “Wow, maybe we will be more demanding in who we admit for babysitting than my school in who they admit for teaching!”. He really wished they were at home at their dinner table; her laughter would then have been recorded. Every time she smiled not on camera, he felt that something precious and irreplaceable had just disappeared …

  ~~~

  The finiteness of human life endows it with meaning. We may not think about it, but the limited number of days we are alive makes us value each of them. In childhood, we don’t think about death. But we understand that our childhood isn’t forever, and the time will come when we will outgrow it, like we outgrow our small yesteryear shoes. We know that our parents were children themselves many years ago, and now they no longer are. We go to school and enter a long and very important stage of our lives, but it has a known predetermined time limit, 12 years. Perhaps the most important thing we learn at school is to value our time. We work on our first projects and dedicate several days to each of them, and we ask ourselves whether we have succeeded and whether we were focused and productive. When we are young adults, it dawns on us that at the core of human experience is a never-ending time crunch. We have to make choices that will affect our entire lives. Should I go to college, or I should work full time instead, or maybe I am ready to have children of my own? We often wish we could choose “all of the above”, but it is simply not possible, at least not simultaneously. And after we’ve made our choice, we realize that the more time we devote to it, the less time we will have to catch up on the alternatives. It doesn’t take us long to learn that some of the opportunities we have chosen to pass on are lost forever. If I start a family, it may no longer be feasible for me to go to college, because I will not have the time for it. If I get accepted to a top university a thousand miles away, my high school sweetheart may decide that a long distance relationship isn’t for her and find somebody else. So not only we are in a time crunch, we are in a time crunch where we are bound to be late for something.