Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, Page 3

  Then still other days I prayed for the Singularity, after which no one will ever be sick again.

  All of this crazy thinking, of course, the despair and worry, having everything to do with Emma. The way she’d made me disappear into her, and then disappeared herself, rendering me ghostlike, invisible to my own eyes. The way she once again had taken over my brain, like those mind-control bugs in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan—you know, those creepy little earwig-looking things that Khan put into the heads of Chekov and the guy who played Blacula, to get them to kill Kirk?

  And now that I think about it, the guy from Blacula opted to commit suicide, rather than murder Kirk. He believed it was his only option. All seems to make sense, in retrospect.

  Do you realize that in a very real sense, no one really has cancer until the doctor tells him he has cancer? E.g. my father. He was fine. Working, golfing, tending his garden. It was summertime. And then he went to the doctor and the doctor said You have cancer, and only then did my father start dying. And he died quick, and at the last moments I sat on the edge of his bed and watched him vacate his own eyes, and I was not frightened then, but I am now.

  One night in February, on the island, three locals on horseback followed me out of Duffy’s bar and up the road toward the casita. I heard horseshoes on the pavement as they cantered behind at a distance. I knew they were after me, and I didn’t care much. I could have taken the Jeep to the bar, but I’d opted not to. Though I don’t remember, I’m sure the reason for this was that I knew I’d likely find trouble if I walked instead, and was hoping for it.

  What I didn’t know was word had gotten around that I wasn’t afraid to scrap, and had relieved a few caballeros of their teeth, and so the men on horseback had brought whips with them as insurance.

  Here’s something else I didn’t know, and maybe you don’t either: the cracking sound that a whip makes in a skilled hand is actually a small sonic boom. For a split second, the end of the whip exceeds the speed of sound.

  Even though we’re destined to be eclipsed by machines, we’ve come up with some fairly remarkable things in our time, haven’t we? A simple piece of braided leather, engineered so precisely that it can break the sound barrier with a vigorous flick of the wrist. Genius, really.

  And the night the caballeros followed me home, I felt and understood that genius.

  Another bit of engineering genius for which the machines should remember us fondly, perhaps even commemorate us: nicotine transdermal systems, known colloquially as nicotine patches, brand name NicoDerm CQ.

  I used these to quit smoking when Emma and I were together, when things between us were good and we talked often about having a kid. We wished for her eyes and teeth, my hair, her disposition, my constitution, her smarts, my heart. For a while I thought I might end up with obligations that reached beyond my own border, that previously impermeable frontier, and it seemed I may need to stick around longer than my life expectancy with two packs a day figured in.

  I wanted to rely on willpower. After three days of biblical furor, though, Emma brought me a box of the patches. I slapped one on, skeptical in my withdrawal rage, but half an hour later was transformed. I smiled, and meant it. I suddenly found space in my mind for thinking about something other than cigarettes. It was like mind control, like being Stepforded. Flimsy little plastic miracles, those things.

  Of course I didn’t stay quit. But that’s no indictment of nicotine patches. Honestly, in a world where most things don’t work, those really, really do.

  The day after the caballeros worked me over I limped down to the Jeep and drove across the island to the home of the man who’d clipped me on the bridge. For the same reason that everyone on the island knew who I was and what I’d done to him, it was easy enough for me to find out where he lived. I opened the gate on the chain-link fence and walked up the steps and left a small envelope on the concrete landing in front of the door. Inside the envelope were two of my teeth—a canine and a premolar, both lower right, knocked loose by the butt of a bullwhip. I’d come to with them tumbling around my mouth that morning, minced my way into the bathroom to spit them in the sink.

  Along with the teeth I’d included a note:

  Por favor, acéptelos como símbolo de mi arrepentimiento sincero.

  I didn’t know if the guy could even read—many of the locals could not—but I figured with the teeth he’d get the idea.

  The island was remote and undeveloped except for one posh resort going bankrupt only a year after opening its doors. The outlying areas teemed with low jungle scrub and unexploded munitions from half a century of naval test bombing. Unemployment sat firm at 70 percent. For two weeks, ski-masked locals wielding spearguns held up one bar after another, until the island’s drug kingpin, angered that the robberies kept people inside at night and hurt his business, found the bandits himself and had them shot. Once a week, the police flayed cheap bags of dog kibble and left them on the side of the road, to keep feral packs from attacking people.

  In other words, this wasn’t paradise. Tourists—the smart ones, anyway—skipped right over the island and kept heading east until they reached St. Thomas.

  There were, on the other hand, plenty of retired gringo couples drawn by cheap tropical real estate, couples who with little else to do started drinking mimosas at seven in the morning, and graduated to liquor by lunchtime.

  Despite the fact that they were drunks, most of these couples seemed quite happy and relaxed with each other. They sat side by side on barstools along the malecón, and almost never touched one another but were nonetheless unmistakably together in that way happy couples who have been married for ages seem to have. There’s an ease there, and a oneness, as though at some point in their union they ceased being individuals, and now were only ever two parts of a whole.

  And in their ease, their oneness, these people made for good drinking companions. One couple in particular, David and Penny, spent even more time than the average out at the bars. They were in their sixties, from western Massachusetts, still had a house there. They told me about raising their kids and growing David’s IRA through forty New England winters with an eye toward buying a home on the island, which they’d done fifteen years before. At lunch they often shared one meal, bumping shoulders pleasantly as they ate. David drank vodka rocks; Penny favored white wine. When her glass neared empty David made a point of getting the bartender’s attention for her, but always let her do the actual ordering.

  And I would sit there, smiling stupidly and realizing they had no idea how rare and lucky they were, and realizing further that this ignorance of their great good fortune could well be the whole trick of achieving it in the first place.

  It occurs to me now that the first time I thought about machines and the Singularity (well before I knew what to call it) was actually way back in 1996, when world chess champion Garry Kasparov took on Deep Blue, another IBM invention and, one would imagine, a direct ancestor in one way or another of Watson.

  Even though Deep Blue lost the match, it did manage to beat Kasparov handily in one game, marking the first time that a computer had bested a world chess champion. Momentous, to say the least, even if at the time I viewed it in much the same way that people would view Watson’s victory on Jeopardy fourteen years later: interesting, and maybe a bit creepy, but more like a sideshow than the first hint of an impending, comprehensive shift in reality.

  If I’d paid any attention to Kasparov’s words after the match, I probably would have thought differently. He wrote: ‘I could feel—I could smell—a new kind of intelligence across the table.’

  The next year an improved Deep Blue took not just a game, but the match. And Kasparov, normally so cool and inanimate that one wanted to put a mirror under his nose to make sure he was breathing, spent most of the time clutching his head over the board, sweating and muttering to himsel
f and ruing, no doubt, that he’d had the misfortune of being the best human chess player around the same time that humans were so eagerly rendering themselves obsolete.

  It turned out that the man I’d beaten up could read after all, and spoke conversant English to boot.

  His name was Roberto. He installed DISH TV service for a living, and played bass in his church band, and hadn’t touched alcohol for nineteen years on an island where all people did, the locals and the gringos alike, was drink. I learned these things when Roberto came to the pink stucco casita to return my teeth.

  I don’t want, señor, he said when I answered the door. He held the envelope out to me. You are sorry for what you did, I can see. That is enough.

  I am sorry, I told him. Can I buy you a drink?

  And this was how I discovered that Roberto had given up alcohol: when I took him to Duffy’s on the malecón he ordered a club soda. He winced, shifting his bulk on the barstool in a vain effort to get comfortable. The ribs still bothering him, as broken ribs will.

  How angry you were, he said. That day on the bridge. Where is the woman who made you this angry?

  I looked at him, and he smiled knowingly. After a moment, I just shrugged.

  You were drunk, too, and that makes the anger grow, of course. Pero the drink does not create the anger. He hoisted his club soda, a silent toast to whatever sort of man he’d been before his last glass of rum. This is the truth, he said.

  We were quiet for a minute. On the other side of the bar, a glass hit the floor and exploded, to the delight of half a dozen locals.

  You love her? Roberto asked.

  I do.

  And she? You?

  I shrugged again.

  Ahh! Roberto clapped me on the back, his laughter cut short by the pain in his ribs. It would not be fun if they just gave in, though, would it?

  She’ll never give in, I said.

  The locals across the bar, inspired by the accident, were now breaking things on purpose. They hurled shot glasses against the back wall, laughed and slapped five. A few gringos got up from their stools, eying the group warily, and sidled out into the street.

  How long have you loved her? Roberto asked.

  Since we were children.

  And you are how old now?

  I’ll be thirty-six this year.

  And she has been dancing away from you all this time.

  I extended my arm and flexed my fingers as if grabbing at something. Always just beyond my reach, I said.

  Roberto nodded sagely. She maybe never love you. It does not matter. You love her. She can dance all she wants.

  We watched in silence as the bartender hustled the vandals out. Roberto finished his club soda and slapped the glass down on the bar and told me to drive him home. He had something he wanted me to see. With his bulk listing the Jeep to the passenger side we crossed the island, past wild horses munching straw grass on the roadside, past the beaches and the island’s one school, past roving dogs pocked with mange, to Roberto’s modest house in barrio Monte Santo.

  He did not invite me in. We sat in the Jeep on the shoulder opposite the house and watched a young man pace the short, yellowed lawn inside the chain-link fence. The young man held what looked like a curved cylinder of Styrofoam in one hand, waving it back and forth in front of his face. His lips glistened wetly. His eyes were empty and far away, and he took shaky, stuttering little steps around the yard.

  Mi hijo, Roberto said, pointing. Autista.

  I thought I knew what Roberto was driving at, here: get some perspective. It could always be worse. Note your blessings. Contemplate the misfortunes of others and recognize your relative good luck. Your heart is broken; so what? Be glad you aren’t a sad crippled drooling boy, trapped forever inside the prison of your own mind.

  But that wasn’t what he meant, at all. We watched the boy pace small circles for several minutes, and then Roberto said, You see my son there, yes? You see how happy he is? With his little piece of plastic, and a warm day to walk around? He is happy. He teaches me to be happy. He shows me every day, for nineteen year. He will keep showing me forever, porque he will never leave me, never go out on his own.

  I looked more closely at the boy. He seemed vacant, like a golem, bound to perpetual pointless motion by impulses he could neither understand nor resist. I was reluctant to say it, but I told Roberto that his son looked anything but happy. Shuffling around, waving that quarter-moon of Styrofoam in his own face.

  Pero that is how you know he is happy, Roberto told me. He walks on the grass. He rocks back and forth. He plays with his plastic. He is not like you and me. He does no need to talk and have all kinds of things and never be alone. This is all he need.

  Roberto nodded toward his son again, who had turned around at the border of the chain-link fence and now shuffled toward the house, his back to us. It’s when he sit still, Roberto said, that you know something is wrong. But this is not often.

  So, Roberto said, looking back at me. Now you see, yes?

  I didn’t. Not really. The things he said made a distant kind of sense, but whatever revelation he hoped they would inspire wasn’t happening. Which, looking back, had a lot more to do with me than with Roberto’s son and his circumstances.

  Later, when my self-involvement grew somewhat less acute, I realized that not only did what Roberto said make sense, but I actually recognized his son’s brand of happiness from my own experience.

  Because after the first time Emma dismantled me, I’d become something of an autistic myself. The words I wrote were my fenced-in yard, and the company of mostly anonymous women my Styrofoam crescent. I passed season upon season caring for nothing else. I was empty but content. I took pride and pleasure in good work: the finely hewn sentence, the sleepy smile of a well-fucked woman. I loved these things but I did not need them. I drank when I was thirsty and wrote when I was moved to and slept with whomever I wanted. I spent no time at all thinking about these things when I was not actually engaged in them, and thought of nothing else when I was engaged. When I wrote it was with a fever, and when I fucked my sole hope and aim was to make whomever I found myself with happy, if only for a few hours. And when we were done and I invited these women to leave me be, I slept the placid dreamless sleep of the long-dead, every night for almost two decades.

  The only ripples in this calm came on the rare occasion when I saw Emma. Those early years she still lived in town, with the boyfriend who’d displaced me, and I would run into her at bars, or else see her at the restaurant where she waited on tables through college, and each time I would smile and introduce a new woman to her and talk literally about the weather and keep my hands wrapped tight around my drink glass so Emma could never see how they trembled.

  Later, after she moved away, it became easier. She only appeared during the holidays, and if I wanted to pretend for long stretches that she didn’t exist, all I needed to do was stay away from the bars at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

  High school sweethearts, Emma and I. My senior year, her junior. I loved her so much, I even loved her cat. Alarming physical chemistry. The sort of ravenous coupling that only teenagers are capable of. It didn’t matter what positions our bodies contorted themselves into; we found a way to execute. And also of course the consumptive non-sexual preoccupation with one another that, again, only teenagers. So imagine my surprise and dismay when, nearly twenty years later, after she and her husband split up and before she sent me away to the island, as I rested my chin on her bare sternum between her small breasts, she smiled at me and asked in an uncharacteristic moment of open wonder, How long has it been? and I realized suddenly that at thirty-six my body couldn’t hope to keep up with either my heart or my brain when it came to this woman, always this woman, only this woman, because with this woman I was forever going to need the ravenous coupling that only t
eenagers are capable of, and I had not been a teenager for a very long time.

  When Emma dismantled me the first time, she did it on her bed, in the house she shared with her mother.

  We both still had baby skin, back then. We knew less than nothing, and certainly had no idea how to wield sway over another person without breaking them. Still, we stayed together, though I went away to college in South Carolina and she had another year of high school.

  Three weeks after I left she called me and said, Come home. I didn’t.

  Autumn takes its time in South Carolina, and winter never shows up at all, at least not from the perspective of a kid from New England. And maybe that was the problem. Maybe that was why it didn’t seem urgent when she asked me to come home. Because the trees stayed green, and the snow never fell, and so it didn’t seem like time was passing. But once I finally went back, when the calendar indicated Christmas had arrived, time was all over Emma’s face. It was in her posture, in the way she kept her mouth closed, mostly, when we kissed.

  Still, I didn’t get it.

  Early that second semester, already hot in South Carolina, and she called and told me she’d been with someone else. No, not just been with, she corrected herself. Was with. Present tense. Ongoing.

  Over the next week everything fell from me. I could actually feel the physical descent away of most of what I had, until that moment, considered meaningful. Classes, the very notion of school. Friends, garden-variety college fun, the Solo cups and cheap beer, the earnest drunken talks. I stopped brushing my teeth, to give you an idea.

  And then I dropped out. I didn’t bother with the formalities and paperwork; I just left. And went north, and presented myself to Emma.