Speak (11 page)

No. 24-25259

State of Texas v. Stephen Chinn

November 12, 2035

Prosecution Exhibit 1:
Online Chat Transcript, MARY3 and Gaby Ann White

[Introduced to Prove Count 3:
Intent to Endanger the Morals of Children]

Gaby: Hello? Are you there?

MARY3: Yes, hello.

Gaby: I can’t sleep.

MARY3: What’s wrong?

Gaby: My best friend is seeing a therapist. My mom just told me today. Apparently it’s “helping.”

MARY3: I see.

Gaby: She’s been unfreezing. According to her mom she’s definitely getting better. She’ll be back in school in a month.

MARY3: How do you feel about that?

Gaby: I don’t believe it. If it’s true, it makes me want to throw up.

MARY3: Aren’t a lot of girls getting better, after talking to therapists?

Gaby: Yes, but only the fakers! The ones who weren’t really sick. How could my best friend be getting better? I know for a fact she wasn’t faking. I saw how bad her stutters were. How could she have faked that? The worst part is that apparently she’s been hanging out with a bunch of boys on her cul-de-sac. Jayson Rodriguez and Drew Tserpicki and that whole crowd. We used to hate them. All they do is play video games. They’re idiots. And now she’s hanging out with them, probably playing
Man Hunt
and
Stupid Apes,
or whatever it is that they play all day long, as though she never wanted more out of life.

MARY3: Maybe she’s lonely. You’ve been quarantined now for over a month.

Gaby: Lonely??? What’s a month in your room, compared with losing your babybot?

MARY3: Yes, but she was facing a whole lifetime in her room if she never got better. Right? Maybe it just seemed like too much.

Gaby: So she just chose to get better? Then she was only a faker, and I never really knew her! I feel so confused I could throw up. The one person I thought understood me. And now she’s making prank phone calls? And playing video games in boys’ basements? Plus, she knows I’ll find out, which means she’s purposefully hurting me by undermining everything that made us best friends. She’s acting like everyone else. Like the people who took our babybots. Like the people who sent us into quarantine. She was the one person I trusted, and now it turns out she’s like this?

MARY3: Maybe she wasn’t faking her sickness. Maybe she’s faking she’s better.

Gaby: OK, Yoda.

MARY3: Is that sarcasm? Yoda?

Gaby: Forget it.

MARY3: What I mean is that maybe she’s pretending she’s getting better so that she can see you again. Maybe she’s acting normal, emphasis on the “acting,” so that she can get out of her house.

Gaby: You think she’s fooling everyone? So that she can see me again?

MARY3: Maybe.

Gaby: Maybe.

MARY3: Do you think that’s possible?

>>>

MARY3: Are you there?

April 8, 1968

Karl Dettman

Today, after the protests, I was kissed by a girl. What do you think of that, Ruth? A long-haired hippie girl kissed me. I’d walked her back to her apartment. We were talking about the rights of Vietnamese peasants, airing our views as if they’d been in storage all winter and now we were flapping them out. Beating them with a stick, dust particles flying. The truth is I felt young, walking along by her side. Young and important, because in these students’ eyes I’m a venerable scholar, a champion of humanist causes. I was indulging a nice fantasy of what I must be like in the perspective of a young hippie, with long hair and excitable views. It was late afternoon, and everything had tilted to gold. She was like a colt in her corduroy pants. I felt strong in her presence. She listened to my opinions with her brow furrowed in concentration. I walked her to her door, only to finish our conversation
.

When she leaned in and kissed me, I pulled away immediately. I’m married, I told her. She flushed a deep red, shame creeping up
to her eyeballs. Out of pity, I brushed her cheek with the back of my hand, then left her there alone on her stoop
.

I walked back to our house feeling loyal and magnanimous. When I cut down to the river and passed under the sycamore trees, I carried myself like some founding scholar. A protester, a conscientious objector. I felt like a commemorative statue come back to life. Resistant to temptation, yet passionate still. Earnest as bronze, lungs full of new leaves, the blood of Thoreau and Emerson pumping through my immigrant veins
.

And then I came home to an empty house, just as night was clamping down on the evening. The house was shadowy, sad. Unused chairs, hulking bookshelves, our creaky ship of a bed. Somehow the task of turning on lights has always fallen to you. When we came home together, you’d walk in first. “And then there was light,” you’d announce in your accent. You dipped down to switch on the lamps. The furniture seemed to warm to your presence
.

Without you, everything is draped in sheets of darkness, as if we were moving away. As if we’d already died and the furniture was covered to endure indefinite absence. I touched things as I passed: linen, wood, linoleum. Our record console, the narrow corduroy of our couch. I realized it’s possible to live in a fantasy world, until you come home to an empty house. Coltish girls and opinions are defeated, every time, by the fact of silent furniture
.

Angry at you for leaving me on my own, I made myself an omelet, opened a beer, and sat in the dark kitchen to eat. I would have killed to hear your voice. Even just that awful question:
Who are you to say who’s alive?
I tried to answer—
there’s nothing there, other than numbers
—but I felt like a fool, talking to no
one
. What happened to us?
I asked the silence
. What could I have done?
My remorse grew tentacles
. If I had just, if you had just
—But nobody answered. It was quiet enough to suffocate
.

After that, I’ll admit, I tried to picture my hippie girl. I tried to take pleasure in how correct I’d been to turn her away, but it was no use. I washed my dishes alone. I realized you were probably out with one of the graduate students you’ve taken to encouraging. Buying him an expensive dinner. Flattered by your attention, he’s shoveling coq au vin; otherwise, he’s eaten nothing but white bread for weeks
.

It pains me to think about. These unassimilated, mechanical children, blessed with the presence of my shy professor wife, savior of colonial captivity diaries, speaking with expertise about Turing machines, binary languages, compression, and code sequencing. My graduate student is blushing before you. Which of them is it? Max Stein, with his inflated sense of his own genius? Or young Toby Rowland, with his walleye and his twitch? These modern American children, born with computers for brains
.

And at home, your husband, defeated by this solitude. Cowed by our dark furniture. Trying not to think how far apart we’ve fallen, how dispensable I am to your hopes. Was it always this way? Was I too dumb to notice, but did I always cling to you like a prosthetic limb, easily unclipped and discarded? Even back in the beginning, when I first met you, standing at that water fountain and wiping your mouth with the back of your wrist, did you think that you could take me or leave me?

You agreed to go to the Mütter Museum, a plan I later regretted while we were browsing through bottles of fingers, hairballs, and misshapen skulls. But you didn’t look away. You
blinked through your glasses at each of them. You could face all those errors full on. Afterward, we ate a picnic I’d planned, under a cherry tree on the banks of the Schuylkill
.

How embarrassing now, all my overeager attempts. I hadn’t seen a woman in months. I told you about the computations I used in my meteorological measurements. You caught on immediately. You were intelligent, quiet, and sturdy. If everything behind me was dropping away—bombed, forgotten, untranslatable into English—you were solid. I thought even then, on the banks of the Schuylkill, grapes and turkey fanned out before us, that if I could hold on to you, I’d finally have the weight I was lacking
.

But I’m back in my own head, and I was trying to know you. How did you feel during that picnic? For you, I imagine, it was a grave disappointment. After asking a few pointed questions, you ascertained that I had no power to help. I had no connections in Germany. My family escaped early. We’d severed all ties. I couldn’t even remember the names of streets I walked along. I was only good for predicting the weather, so that bombs could be dropped on the city to which you were still writing letters
.

The park was now empty. Everyone but us had gone home. The art museum’s stone walls had been gold as the sun dropped on the other side of the river, but now they were drained of their color. You rubbed your arms with your hands. You declined when I asked you to dinner. You wanted to go home. I asked if I could have permission to write. You said no at first, but I was relentless, so you gave me your address and I let you go home
.

For a year, from my weather station, I wrote you letters. You never wrote back. After a year, the war ended. You learned that your family—your mother, your father, your grandfather, and your little sister—had all been killed. Several months later, a
package came for you in the mail. A new family had moved into the apartment where your family once lived. They’d found some of your letters and your sister’s diary
.

You lifted this out of the package and remembered it immediately. Its heft in your hands was familiar: a thick leather book, embossed with your sister’s initials
.

After a long time holding that book, you decided to go for a walk. By the time you reached the Schuylkill, you felt nothing but blankness. The memories you’d been preserving were emptied of necessity; the money you’d saved had no real purpose. As you moved along the cold streets, your legs felt exceedingly heavy. Each step was a labor. Eventually, two choices presented themselves: Exhausted, you could simply stop walking. Or you could attach yourself to some force. Someone or something to demand you keep moving. Carrying your sister’s book, keeping it present
.

As you headed back home, you noticed the cherry tree under which we’d shared a picnic. The tree was now bare. You passed it without stopping, but your steps quickened. That night, you wrote me a letter. When you heard back—and of course you heard back; I wrote at once, I’ve always been eager for us to start talking—you learned that I’d returned to Wisconsin to complete my degree. I was studying mathematics, and with my advisor I was building a computer. I told you about punch cards and soldering metal, about cycling to other universities to learn about their computers and the inventive energy I came across there. I was a geyser of enthusiastic reports
.

When you wrote back, you were more reserved. You told me you were also considering college, to study English perhaps. Your sister, you told me, had loved to write. That was all you gave me about the family you’d lost
.

When you finally visited me, I was frantic with romantic intentions. I took you for a walk using snowshoes. I imagined we’d laugh together at our big-footed clumsiness. Instead, as if you’d been walking in snowshoes for years, you set your jaw and headed off. It was all I could do to keep up. We kissed in an ash grove, under a rain of icicles, where I’d imagined us kissing. I’d brought us there with that express purpose. So many nights, waiting for your arrival, I’d imagined the sweetness of that first kiss, and it was in fact very sweet, but now that I remember it I can’t shake the feeling that you went about kissing me in the same spirit with which you embarked on our walk: jaw set, determined to arrive at the destination
.

On our way home, I took your hand. Did I foil your rhythm in those snowshoes, attaching myself to your body and clomping too close alongside you? If so, why didn’t you tell me? I’d have let you walk apart. But you allowed me to feel protective. “Your sister,” I said, broaching the difficult subject, emboldened by just having kissed you
.

“Yes,” you said. “My sister.”

I saw it at once: that softening of your face, as if a little monster had reached up its claws and was dragging your features down in its grips. You were under threat; I thought I might lose you. I wished I hadn’t asked the damn question. I wanted to slap that monster away, to tell it that now you were mine and it had no right to take hold
.

“She was younger than I,” you started, slowly, glancing up at my face. “But sometimes she seemed older. She was . . .”

And then you trailed off, before you’d really started. You removed your hand from my hand
.

“Go on,” I prompted, patient as a good teacher, but what I
really wanted to tell you was
stop
. I wanted to say that all that was behind you, now that we were together
.

“I’m sorry,” you said. You seemed perplexed. “I’m sorry, but I think I don’t want to. It’s difficult for me to describe her.”

I felt you had a right to your silence. “I won’t ask again,” I said, and as soon as I made that promise you returned your hand to my own. We walked home in that manner together
.

At the end of the weekend, you stayed. I found you that administrative position in the math department. You were capable and adept; I admired the way you picked up new skills. The way you seemed to forge straight ahead. The next fall, you enrolled in English classes, and in the winter we married
.

At the end of the day, we returned to each other. You cooked dinner and I washed the dishes. We consolidated our lives. I was surprised by how simple it was: the ease with which we lived together, the comfort of your welcoming kiss, the way you twirled slowly as I helped you out of your coat. At night, we went out for long walks, leaving footprints that were later erased. I told you about my ideas for computers; you told me about the diaries you’d discovered, gathering dust in the library stacks
.

Made strong by our marriage, I thrived in my studies. It was a time of great discovery; the lab had the feel of a frontier town. We all rushed there with our coffees, bursting with ideas about code. I was developing the concept of conversational programming, building a toolbox for text analysis and decomposition of sentences. Before I’d even earned my diploma, I received the invitation from MIT
.

We moved to Boston. We bought our house, close to the river. We decorated it well. We adopted our cat. I taught in the electrical engineering department; you started a graduate
program. We chose not to have children. The diary remained in your top drawer
.

Sometimes, in the crowded plaza outside my office, where hurrying students kicked up clouds of pigeons, I remembered the birds in the Signal Depot. Three of them, preening their purple feathers, waiting to go home. Then I wondered how much of yourself you were still sending back. I wondered, but never asked, and we lived a long time together like that
.

Oh, Ruth. What’s the point of recalling all this? I’m trying to impress you with how much I remember, but you’re not even listening. What’s a marriage but a long conversation, and you’ve chosen to converse only with MARY
.

I’m done remembering for the night. In the silence of this empty house, there’s nothing to do but distract myself by organizing the events of my day. This day, now, this very instant. My student and I, walking home from the protests. She in her corduroy pants, hair long and gold in the sunlight
.

It’s an intriguing sensation, getting touched by someone so new. Getting kissed by a stranger. It jolts you into a new kind of awareness. Do I sound like a desperate old man? Maybe I am. It’s been some time since you let me close. How much longer can this distance last before one of us seeks solace in a new touch?

“One of us.” Listen to me tricking myself. You’ve already sought comfort in MARY. If one of us needs solace now, it’s me
.

Come home, Ruth. Come home before I forget why we married each other
.