Goodbye for Now (8 page)

“It’s a nightmare,” said Jamie.

“It’s fantastic,” said Sam.

“How do you figure?”

“I am vindicated. Nothing like being fired and still managing to wreck things for BB remotely.”

“It’s very frustrating,” said Jamie. “That algorithm was the best piece of software ever developed on my watch, and no one even gets to use it.”

“Well, not no one,” said Sam.

“Explain.”

“Meredith’s grandmother died.”

“And you’re fixing her up with Abe Lincoln.”

“Abe Lincoln?”

“Just trying to name a dead American.”

“And Lincoln was who came to mind?”

“I’m not from around here. Quick, name a dead Brit.”

“Shakespeare,” said Sam.

“Shakespeare’s not British. He’s universal. But never mind. What are you doing with the algorithm really?”

“Not using it. Just using the idea of it. Looking through someone’s e-mails to learn more about them.”

“You’re stalking Meredith’s dead grandmother?”

“Meredith wanted to write her grandmother a letter. Say goodbye and she loved her and missed her and whatever. Not that unusual an impulse, right? But we’re living in her apartment, so she couldn’t send it there, and they e-mailed each other quite a bit, so that’s what we settled on. She e-mailed her grandmother.”

“And? I’m waiting for the punch line.”

“Her grandmother replied.”

Jamie grinned. “Zombie-mail. No wonder BB fired you.”

“I wrote a script that looked at her back e-mails and compiled a reply to Meredith that’s pretty much indistinguishable from what she’d have actually written if she were still alive.”

“Pattern matching? Fill in the blanks?”

“Basically. How varied are your e-mails with your grandmother?”

“My gran wouldn’t know what e-mail was if she woke up in bed with the ‘You’ve got mail’ guy, but I take your meaning. That’s pretty clever.”

“Thanks.”

“So what’s the question?”

“Do I show it to Meredith?”

“No way.”

“Really? Why?”

“Too unsettling. What was useful in this exercise for Meredith was her writing to her grandmother. She’s obviously not expecting a reply.”

“But she said she wanted one. She said all she wanted was e-mail from her grandmother.”

“Correspondence from one’s dead relations can never be anything but disturbing, Sam.”

“I don’t know,” said Sam. “Maybe it would be cathartic.”

IT WAS NOT CATHARTIC

H
e decided to sleep on it. He routed the e-mail to Meredith’s inbox but then stashed her laptop under his pillow in case he changed his mind. In the morning when they woke up, he began with, “This is weird. It is. And I’m not sure about it, but I want to show you and let you decide. I have a surprise.”

“Oh goody.” She reached over for him.

“Not that,” said Sam and then thought better of it. “Well, sure, that first if you want.”

“First? What else is on offer?”

Sam produced her laptop from under his pillow.

“You got me … my laptop?”

“I sent you an e-mail.”

“I think I pick sex,” she said, reaching for him again.

“It’s not really from me though,” Sam hedged.

“You
forwarded
me an e-mail? This surprise gets less and less exciting.”

“Check and see.” Sam held the laptop out to her nervously. Meredith opened it and scanned her inbox.

“No e-mail from you. What are you …? Wait … oh my God. Oh my God, Sam.” She looked at him, and he held his breath while for a moment, then two, she didn’t do anything. Then she clicked on the e-mail. Read it. Paled to whitewash. Looked confused. Then angry. “My grandmother replied to my e-mail.”

“Yes.” Sam waited. And then added, “Well, I helped.”

“To trick me?”

“No!”

“To fuck with me?”

“Merde, of course not.”

“Do you think this is funny?”

“No, I—”

“Why would you—How could you?”

“I didn’t actually.”

Puzzled silence. Quiet anger. “You just said you did.”

“I did. I mean I did say that. I didn’t e-mail you. Your grandmother e-mailed you. I just helped.”

“You helped?”

“Not even me, actually. I just pushed start. Well, jiggered the program and then pushed start.”

“You logged into my grandmother’s e-mail account and e-mailed me as a joke.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. Does that e-mail sound like me?”

“You do a good impersonation.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. It was computer science.”

Meredith had nothing to say to that. Just looked at Sam and waited, annoyed, for an explanation.

“I wrote a little program that studies the sorts of things Livvie wrote in e-mails to you and then models them, re-creates them. I invited it to respond. It did. Well, she did. She was eager to. I didn’t make it. Her.”

“It wasn’t her.”

“It sort of was, actually.”

She got out of bed. Pulled on clothes from the pile on the floor. Said nothing. Wouldn’t even look at him. Grabbed keys and just left. Sam sank back under the covers and didn’t move for three hours. Then he called Jamie.

“I showed her the e-mail.”

“Of course you did.”

“She did not take it well.”

“If only you could have seen that coming.”

“Now what do I do?”

“How should I know, Sam? I’m not a woman—I’m a computer programmer. Worse, I’m a manager of computer programmers.”

“Not a very good one. Why do you let me go rogue, Jamie? Your job is to stop me from doing things like this.”

“Would that I could, Sam. I’d still have you working for me.”

“I was asked to develop that algorithm,” said Sam.

“But not to bring down the company,” said Jamie. “Point is, it was a good algorithm. It wasn’t wrong about you and Meredith which means it’s mathematically impossible for you to destroy this relationship which means there’s a way to fix this.”

“What?”

“I have no idea.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“Tell her the truth. The truth is always the answer, Sam.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Oprah. But it sounds like good advice.”

“The truth is I’m so in love with her, I’d try anything to make her love me half that much back. The truth is I’m such an arrogant prick that my response to, ‘I’m sad my grandma died,’ is, ‘Let me invent a computer program so she can write you letters.’ The truth is I’m so awkward and clueless that I think giving someone an e-mail from her dead grandmother in bed is romantic.”

“It’s a start,” said Jamie, “but I’d work on the delivery.”

Sam hung up and went back to bed. Finally, toward dinnertime, the covers pulled back, and she was standing over him bearing Indian carryout and a very nice bottle of Scotch she held out to him like apology, forgiveness, light.

“Figured we needed the good stuff,” she said.

“I’m so sorry—” Sam began.

“Do it again,” said Meredith.

OKAY, IT WAS A LITTLE CATHARTIC

S
am wanted to talk about it. Meredith did not. Sam wanted to consider some ramifications here. In light of her reaction, Sam thought a discussion was in order before proceeding.

“Don’t ruin the magic,” said Meredith.

After dinner, after not a little bit of Scotch, after much typing and deleting and debating over what to say, she wrote back to her grandmother:

Cold, yes, but at least it’s stopped raining for the moment. Glad it’s nicer there and that you’re getting in bridge with the girls. Tell them hi for me. The beach does sound better than work, but we can’t all be retired.

Sam and I made a soup last week you would love. Lentil kale stew. I’m going to tweak it some and send you the recipe. Sam’s a good sous chef, and also, yes, a computer geek, and an Orioles fan (though of course he’s adopted the M’s now that he’s here).

Love you,
M.

Then nine hours passed during which Meredith did nothing but sit with her laptop and hit refresh. Sam begged her to come to bed, so she brought the computer with her, sitting up against the headboard all night.

“It’ll pop up when it comes in. It’ll make a little noise to wake you up if you set it to,” he groaned.

“Can’t you make it come faster?”

“Did your grandmother stay up e-mailing in the middle of the night?” It was four o’clock in the morning in Florida.

“No.”

“Then I can’t.”

She sat up all night anyway. At seven thirty-five in the morning, finally, it was there:

You should take some time off work and come visit me—get some sun for a few weeks. You work too hard!! They’ll get by without you. Send me the soup recipe. You still haven’t told me what Sam looks like!

Hugs and kisses, sweetie,
Grandma

Meredith shook Sam awake.

“She wants our soup recipe!”

“We made it up as we went along,” Sam mumbled from under a pillow.

“That took long enough,” Meredith griped. “And it’s so short. I want more.”

“It e-mails when and how she did. It’s her. She e-mailed midmorning, so it e-mails midmorning. Her e-mails were pretty brief and to the point, so it e-mails briefly and to the point.”

“I waited for hours. I want more than a paragraph! Doesn’t she miss me?”

“Only like she’s in Florida.”

“Can you speed it up? Can you make it write more?”

“It’s being your grandmother, Merde. It’s scientifically, logically, brilliantly, analytically modeling your grandmother. I’m not doing anything anymore. You have to take it up with her.”

Meredith’s next e-mail went through several drafts and ended up being a six-page missive on the nature of love and family, childhood and grandparents, memory, life, and the passage of time. It ended with the plea, “I miss you so much! Write more and longer, please. Tell me everything!”

To which Livvie chirpily replied:

Wow. Someone had a lot of time on her hands this week. Must be crummy weather there—here it’s gorgeous so I’ll have to write more later! Off to the beach!! Love you!!

P.S. Come visit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

P.P.S. Is he hideous, or why won’t you tell me what this boy looks like???

Sam was impressed with himself—especially that it was still curious, not having yet been told, about what he looked like—but Meredith was in a bit of a state. She didn’t care that her grandmother would never have sent her long, mushy e-mails in life. She didn’t care that if she received long, mushy e-mails, they wouldn’t seem like they were from her grandmother. And, of course, she couldn’t go visit her in Florida. Sam thought maybe they’d come to the end. The past had run up against the present. They had reached the limits of what they could overcome with memory, habit, and the way things had always been. Livvie couldn’t keep up. Her relationship with her granddaughter had changed since she’d died, but she didn’t know it, and there were things she could not thus account for.

“I need a believable reason I can’t visit. What do I tell her?” said Meredith.

“Nothing. Let’s call it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Be done with this now. Let’s call this an interesting experiment and stop here.”

“You mean not answer the e-mail?”

“Sure. Just leave it.”

“I can’t ignore her. She’ll wonder what’s up. She’ll be totally pissed.”

“No she won’t,” Sam said as gently as he could. “She’s dead.”

“No, she’s been e-mailing me.”

“Not her. The software.”

“Are you sure?”

“Totally.”

“I’m not.”

“Merde …”

“Someone’s e-mailing me. And it’s worried that I’m working too hard. It wonders what my boyfriend looks like. It wishes I’d come visit. I don’t want to disappoint it. Her. I don’t want to leave it hanging.”

When Sam was a kid, his dad whipped up a program so he could practice math on the computer. When he got a question right, it said, “Way to go, Sam,” or, “What a smartie,” or something like that. When he got one wrong, it said, “Sorry, not quite,” or, “Oops, try another.” It was incredibly simple programming, but it still didn’t work because after an hour’s worth of mistakes, Sam refused to use it again. He was sure the computer thought he was stupid. No amount of explanation on the part of his father could convince him that it didn’t. He knew it was inanimate, had no feelings, no opinions, no real knowledge at all, but knowing that didn’t help him know it, didn’t change his mind. So his dad rewrote the program with super easy problems—all wrong.

“What’s 2 +3?” the computer would ask.

“5,” Sam would type.

“Nope, it’s 4,” the computer would say. “How about 8 – 2?”

“6,” Sam would type.

“Nope,” said the computer. “It’s 7.”

So Sam got to feel superior to the computer. And thus gained the confidence—clout really—to do more practice math. On the other hand, that was his first computer. And he was seven. Meredith knew better. But even Sam wasn’t sure. It wasn’t her grandmother, but maybe something—someone?—was awaiting her reply.