Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories (14 page)

Exhausted from the hours of effort, he brought the system back on line, only to find that something terrible had happened: the e-mail that had been stored in subscribers’ accounts over the past twenty hours had somehow been erased. Retracing his steps, our friend found that the mistake this time had been his own; he had inadvertently cleared all stored mail when he reset the network.

Since he knew that customers depended heavily on their e-mail, he decided to send a message to all subscribers, alerting them that twenty hours of mail had been lost, and apologizing for the inconvenience. But when his employer caught wind of this plan, she stopped him. Mistakes like this happen, she reasoned; nobody would even notice, and those who did would resolve the problem on their own. Sending a message admitting the error would cause more harm than good.

Our friend was tired and upset, and wearily came around to his boss’s way of thinking. But that night, unable to sleep, he put together a search program that would, over the next week, examine—for certain key words and phrases indicating jealousy, anger, remorse, or accusation resulting from the loss of important messages—every e-mail that passed through the network. This was strictly illegal, but a negative result would put our friend’s mind at ease, and he figured nobody would ever know.

About that, he was correct. But the results of the search were far from negative. Dozens of e-correspondents, he discovered, had suffered catastrophic fallout from the lost messages, including the break-up of romances and friendships, the termination of jobs and, in one case, ill health resulting from missing medical advice. Mortified, our friend began an intensive campaign of reconciliation, sending anonymous flowers and gifts and apologizing profusely under assumed names. But it was all to no avail. The damage had been done and could not be reversed.

After dinner, our friend burst into tears. He told us that he had some money saved up, but jobs were at a premium in our area and he had little hope of holding out long enough to find one he was qualified for. We suggested that he apply for system operator jobs in other towns, but our friend ruefully refused. There should be no system operators, he said. What single mailman served so many thousands, or delivered in such volume? Such responsibility, he believed, should be shared by many, for any compassionate person would crack under its strain. He begged us to cancel our own Internet subscription and return to written correspondence and actual, as opposed to virtual, commerce. Our need would drive our system operator mad.

I am embarrassed to admit that our Internet and e-mail usage has not changed. We still see our friend, but he remains unemployed.

Money Isn’t Everything

Thanks to an investment that he described as purely unpremeditated, the result of an overheard conversation in a fast food restaurant, a man we knew struck it rich on the stock market, and then, years later, on the very eve of the market’s collapse, sold everything, an act he insisted was impulsive, and due to no particular knowledge on his part. Soon after making these fortuitous decisions, the now-rich man got married and moved into a beautiful new house. His life, by all accounts, was one of ease and satisfaction.

Rumors spread, however, that this happiness was short-lived. When we saw the man on the street, he explained. His wife had found another man, he told us. In addition, his dog had died, his favorite sports team had fallen upon hard times, and the political situation filled him with despair.

Wasn’t it true, we asked him, that the real cause of his unhappiness was that he felt trapped by his affluence, which he knew, deep down, that he didn’t really deserve?

Oh, no, he explained—if it weren’t for his wealth, he would probably be even more unhappy.

But didn’t he have to admit that, ultimately, his money had done nothing to enhance his life, and had created unrealistic expectations for his future happiness?

Not at all, he said—his money had greatly improved his lot, and he went to sleep every night thanking his lucky stars it had come his way.

Though we parted that day on excellent terms, we have not attempted to contact the man since. It would be difficult to socialize with someone too stubborn to admit that money isn’t everything.

Lost

When I was two, I wandered away. My mother was washing dishes in the kitchen and watching me through the window, and in the glare of the setting sun mistook a bucket upturned on a mound in the sandbox for my body, hunched over in concentration. When the telephone rang and the police said they had me, my mother laughed and told them I was home, playing in the sandbox. She had to go out into the yard herself before she would believe them.

No harm had come to me, and apparently I didn’t cry. But the pedestrian mall where the police found me was a dozen blocks from our house, and by my mother’s reckoning I could not have been gone more than ten minutes. I was able to walk, of course, but not so quickly nor with such purpose and determination. So how did I get there?

In the car on the way home, my mother asked me that very question, and I am said to have answered,
Somebody.
I would not elaborate and giggled when pressed. This does not sound like me, of course, but what do I know? My imagination, my sense of humor, my willingness to reveal myself: these things could not have been then exactly as they are today, and I have no reason to doubt my mother’s memory.

The point of this story used to be the mystery of my kidnapper. Now, however, I see it another way. Until I disappeared, my mother had either accompanied me at all times, or left me with my father, or a neighbor or babysitter, someone who could account for the time with me she’d missed; she could know what I’d done and seen and said, and where I’d been. But she could not know the make of the car I was conveyed in that day, nor the shape of the person who’d taken me, nor the names of the people who passed me and wondered whose child I was and what I was doing alone. My life had diverged completely from hers for the first time.

As for me, I don’t remember the incident at all. Those days have always been lost to me.

Wake

The old man died, and our friend, his daughter, invited us to the wake. On the phone, she told us the circumstances of his death: he’d had a heart condition, and had been prescribed pills in a large green bottle which he was to take three times daily. The prescription could be refilled at any time, indefinitely, and the old man had plenty of money, but a habit of tight-fistedness drove him to short his dosage, presumably to conserve the precious pills. Consequently, he suffered a stroke and died on the way to the hospital.

It so happened that the old man was a connoisseur, and had, over the years, amassed a large collection of fine and extravagant goods: wines and liqueurs and rare single-malt Scotches, obscure and expensive pipe tobacco, black-market cigars. Many of his acquaintances, however, never knew he possessed these things, because the old man would always smoke cheap cigarettes and drink the most pedestrian of drinks out of colorful metal cans.

Not surprisingly, his many children loathed their father’s miserly ways and spent their adulthoods compensating with unbridled hedonism, which aged them prematurely and generated crushing debt. Though our friend did not mention it, the old man’s will was said to have erased their debts instantly, with enough left over to keep them in cars, hotels, sumptuous meals and new clothes for more than a year. The will had also provided for a huge wake, at which the children and their guests were supposed to consume every last precious item in the cellar. It was to this wake that our friend invited us.

It was a memorable party, to say the least. The hundreds of guests drank themselves into a stupor, and a thick, aromatic smoke filled the air until dawn. Everyone had a wonderful time. Our friend, however, could be seen dashing from room to room in a kind of fury, her face red and her hair streaming out behind her as if in a strong wind. At one point we stopped her and asked why she seemed so angry.

She replied that the old man had ruined her enjoyment by martyring himself: all she could think of was his privation, and how he had sacrificed his own pleasure to augment his friends’. At this point we suggested that perhaps her father had in fact taken great pleasure in the anticipation of satisfaction, more than he might have taken in the satisfaction itself, and we noted that he probably imagined this party with great joy, as much joy as the guests were feeling at that moment, if not more.

This gave our hostess pause, but it was only a few seconds before she shook her head and told us that she didn’t know what we were talking about. She stalked off, angrier than ever.

We fell asleep during the cab ride home, and nothing has tasted as good to us since.