Speak (20 page)

I entered my empty apartment and took stock of the place: bare walls, books on the floor, two stools at the counter. I tried to go about my evening routines, to prevent myself from slipping into self-pity. I stood at my window. The horizon was checkered with spires of light, blinking telephone towers lining the ridges that block out the west. I looked over them all. What right, I asked myself, does a person with such a view have to such feelings? There’s an electric can-opener built into the wall. I have food in the pantry, I am alive
.

From my unsociable stockpile, I chose a can of lentil soup, poured it like sewage into the pot, and stirred it with an old wooden spoon. Stirring, I felt myself settle. My thoughts became more distinct. It was one thing, I realized, to miss you after twenty years apart. But the woman I was when I was with you decided she’d rather be free than be a part of your story. One can only act in the moment. The bloodred rhomboidal shadows at your feet in that lecture hall, the didactic tone in your voice when you said things like “real world”: those caused revulsion to simmer in me. That revulsion was real, no less so now that I’m back in my modern apartment, longing for the home you could have provided
.

Once the soup boiled, I turned it down and returned to my desk. So here I am: looking over my letter to you. Trying to maintain my rational mind-set. The truth is, if I were to fly to Germany on a whim, hop in a taxi and show up at your door, I’d probably want to leave as soon as I got there. First of all, your little wife would annoy me. I imagine her asking me questions about what it’s like to be a woman my age, me giving her exaggeratedly frightening answers about bone-density loss and living alone. With two women to impress, rather than one, you’d start holding forth, waving your confidence that takes up the whole room. I’d watch you, leaning forward in your excitement, wearing a sharp sweater over your shirt, and I’d remember the feeling of inhabiting your version of life. Of living on board a ship with you at the helm and nothing to do but stand at your shoulder. I’d remember the feeling of symbolizing suffering, and I’d do something insane like call a cab from the bathroom and leave without thanking your wife for the supper. I’d get on the first flight back to Boston. On my way home, I’d think to myself that bare walls aren’t so bad. They allow a person to think. I’d tell myself I’ll get a dog, name him Ralph, take him for walks. Work on my bone density. Have dinners with Toby, spend my mornings browsing the stacks, my afternoons talking with MARY. Telling her your story. Feeling less lonely for the company of your words, the attempt you made to knit me together
.

I’m relieved enough to laugh at myself as I go check on the soup. It’s gotten cold, so I turn up the heat. I notice that the ring of flame from the burner casts a little reflection on my windows, and though I often take my view for granted, I’m struck with the enormity of the city below me, the multitude of lights, the knit and glitter of a metropolis fending off sleep
.

I turn out the kitchen lights, extinguish the lamp on my desk,
and go up to the glass to look out on the night. The bridges sparkle with electricity; cars pulse red down the highways. In the sky, the lights of airplanes weave between stars, and I almost feel I’m on board one, coming back from Germany, returning from your apartment. Without thinking, I lift my hand to wave through the window. I peer down below, hoping to find the single warm light that shines out of your perfect apartment. Goodbye, Karl, I think. Goodbye, my only husband. Have a good life and thank you. You led me back to our bedroom. You made me strong enough to depart
.

Now I move among constellations, the same that Turing saw through Chris’s telescope, the same that sparkled above Mary’s ship. Now I’m not looking back any longer. From one star to the next I move away from the earth, alone in my spaceship, deeper into the darkness, until behind me the soup boils over and I draw myself back to make supper
.

A
fter I learned of Dolores’s illness, I worked for another nine days, pausing only for brief stretches of sleep, never leaving the studio, eating bags of almonds and energy bars I’d stocked in the cabinet. I was completing MARY3’s voice, and I had to finish it quickly, so that I could focus on my struggling wife. Clearly, as a result of my distraction, I wasn’t understanding correctly. How could she not need me at her surgery? Had we decided against having more children? To grasp the whole situation, I had to wipe my mind clear. I couldn’t be thinking in codes when I took my wife’s hand and sat by her bedside. I couldn’t be distracted by snippets of Mary Bradford’s diary when I championed my wife through her illness.

For nine days I worked. On the tenth day I sent the finished program to be processed. The following day, via overnight mail,
a prototype arrived and I presented it to Ramona. I showered hurriedly, shaved, put on a clean shirt, and delivered myself to Dolores, who was resting on the living room couch.

“I’m yours now,” I told her. “I’m sorry. I’m yours, now and forever. Tell me what I can do.”

“My name is Ella. What’s yours?” the doll said to Ramona, who had trailed me into the living room.

Dolores propped herself up on an elbow. “There are divorce papers on the desk,” she said. “Please sign them.”

“Hold on,” I said. “You’re not making sense. Let’s talk this through.”

“No talking,” Dolores said. “I’m sick of hearing you talk.”

“I want to be with you. You’ll need someone to help you through this process.”

“I’ve managed so far,” Dolores said.

“How old are you?” Ella asked Ramona.

“Six,” Ramona said.

“OK,” I countered, “maybe you don’t need me, but I still need you.”

Dolores looked from her daughter to me. She practically snorted. “That’s a bit much to ask, don’t you think? I have enough on my plate.”

I moved into the studio. After I’d signed the divorce papers, there were sixty-one days to wait for the motion to be finalized. Dolores gave me until then to find a new place to live. During that time, while I persisted in a state of partial domesticity, I took refuge in anger. How could Dolores divorce me without any preparation? Where were the anguished conversations? Only a woman of little real feeling could divorce her husband so bluntly.

In this state of mind, I took satisfaction from the fact that
Ramona had fallen deeply in love with her bot. I liked to see the raptures she fell into, listening to Ella asking her questions. She was shy at first, unused to conversation with someone other than her parents. Often, instead of responding, she merely stared, her mouth hanging open. Ella handled this beautifully, capping the silence with another sweet question. Now, when Ramona cried, I could quiet her by offering the doll I’d produced. Sadness was quickly ousted by wonder. Ramona edged closer to me. We were thick as thieves, the two of us, waiting our sixty-one days, listening to Ella’s intelligent questions, speaking back to her implanted ears.

Now, of course, is when I invite you to judge me, in case you were still holding back. Now, as I present to you myself in the part of a self-centered man-child, angry because he isn’t needed, resentful because he’s failed and hasn’t been forgiven. My wife was two times alone: once because her husband left her to build a machine, and once again because her daughter fell in love with the machine her husband built. Both Ramona and I were distracted while Dolores faded into the background, exhausted by treatment, an occasional presence that we missed less because it was never actually gone. She recovered from the surgery; she adjusted to her new hormones; she survived a course of radiation therapy, delivered by micro-robotic devices. All this she accomplished while I waited for the divorce to go through, living in the studio and reporting to the house to play with Ramona while her mother slept. I kept to a strict household schedule. I picked up Dolores’s prescriptions; I did the grocery shopping. The dishes were always washed; dinner was served at the same hour. I swept the floors while Ramona talked to her doll. I assured myself that if I kept adhering to these healthy domestic
patterns, if I didn’t permit a break in routine, Dolores would conquer her illness and recover enough to realize what a terrible mistake she’d made.

In the end, of course, Dolores was fine. She no longer speaks to me—she holds to this day that there was far too much talking wasted between us—but she is living, gardening on our ranch. Before I went to prison, I drove by it sometimes, just to see her from a distance: the shape of her arboreal hair, the familiar curved lines of her body. I never came as close to her as I did on that day during my trial, when she showed up at my courtroom. But even from that distance, she caused me to quicken. Indeed, even now, from the remote rooms of this prison, she still picks up my pulse. She’s as beautiful to me as she was on that day when she dazzled me in the kitchen, holding a pineapple up to the light. I go to great lengths to follow her progress. Knowing her routine gives me pleasure. Ramona’s helpful in this regard; so are my old neighbors, who occasionally respond to my letters. Dolores might have moved anywhere else in the world, but she chose to stay on the ranch. From what I’ve been told, she’s struggled with new water restrictions. She was forced to reduce the size of her herd. But though I failed her in every other respect, I did leave her a great deal of money, so my Dolores will never be forced to sell rights to water or movement. Real earth is still her domain. Kneeling in hay, she nurses the kids with baby bottles, stroking their long, velvet ears. There are still zucchinis in her garden, and she still drives to Austin to visit her cousin. As she grows older in the real world, where droughts are severe and travel is restricted, she’s kept company by our daughter, Ramona, who has single-mindedly cared for her mother since the moment she gave up her bot. What Ramona learned from that doll—the
pleasure of devoting one’s life to another—she’s since applied to her mother, who perhaps has not been entirely wronged by those little chattering robots, training wheels for human devotion.

I can write about this now. It wasn’t such a catastrophe. I’ve lost everything, but Dolores has not. Back then, of course, we didn’t know what would happen. Dolores lived with a constant awareness that she might die. In the face of such danger, I nurtured my brutality. It would have been death to face the full extent of my guilt. I was therefore insistently cheery. Taking my cue, Ramona ignored the atmospheric anxiety and blithely played with her doll. She had already fallen in love. She didn’t look up when Dolores walked into the kitchen to fill a glass of water, using the countertop for support. In the office, Ramona and I sat together, I with my computer, she with her bot. I decided to market my doll; why should Ramona alone be the recipient of my genius? Using my laptop, I tracked the success of my latest invention. The babybot was an international hit. At Christmas it caused stampedes, breaking every record in sales. By summer, there were more babybots than children in the state of Texas. Every national talk show wanted me as a guest. For personal reasons, I declined, but once I had, I actually allowed myself to feel noble for giving up glory for the sake of my wife.

Piece by piece, of course, I assembled a more sane reaction. As she suffered the side effects of radiation, I saw the thinness in her vigorous hair, the sallow tint to her skin, and I realized how far away I’d been, how much she’d managed on her own. By then, of course, it was already too late. There are distances that can’t be recrossed. The divorce hearings had already commenced. She asked for sole custody and basic alimony and I added the ranch. She gave me one weekend a month with
Ramona. I bought a house with a room for my one-weekend daughter. While the house was being completed, I moved to a hotel in Houston, that empty city, lapped by salt water. Mornings commenced badly and the days became worse. To organize the course of my existence, there could only be the completion of a clerical task that Dolores had asked me to finish. Otherwise, I ghosted all the usual motions, slightly apart from myself, wishing there were some bridge somewhere that would carry me back to the land of the living. I donated my savings to a cancer research organization, but even that brought no relief. When I received the final divorce papers in my hotel room, I signed them at once, not because it was what I wanted to do, but because it was what Dolores had asked for.

Sometimes, I considered routes toward oblivion. I weighed my parents’ addictions against a leap from the turrets. A knife to the throat, a poisoned apple. But I was, after all, still a father. There would be those occasional weekends. Someday, I told myself, I might be asked to help Ramona with something. And so instead of cutting the cord I merely returned to my work. Settled in my new house, I locked myself in my office to create the second babybot. One that could taste, see, touch, smell. The task of creating artificial neurons was insanely expensive, requiring an army of scientists in the lab, but money was rushing in from the first batch of bots and I was glad for the challenge. It allowed me to disregard the all-consuming absence that had engulfed my whole life.

Dolores and I were once close, and then we fell apart. I allowed this to happen. I didn’t pay proper attention. I gave her too little time. Only now, in the suspension of prison, our estrangement guaranteed for as long as we both shall live, do I
rock myself to sleep at night by summoning her. Now, too late, I devote her the proper attention. In the endless hours of nighttime, I work to remember each line on her face, each curl in her hair, each catch of her voice. Now I bring her closer. She’s with me here in my cell; we finish each other’s thoughts. I’ve become so close to my wife, now that I’ll never see her again.

That’s all there is to say about that. I can’t even think what to say next. Where does one go from the end of a marriage? One simply has to move on. I’m aware that there’s nothing more boring than Grief. We’ve all had our losses; why should mine take up so much space? I should wrap up. I should shut these memoirs down. Only I’d like to end with a suitable conclusion, some explanation of what made me capable of such cruelty. Caught up in prison, I’ve mulled this question for hours, and I’ve developed one hypothesis, which I tell you now with the stipulation that, no matter how compelling you find it, you shouldn’t forgive me for what it led me to do. Otherwise we’re nothing more than a sad string of excuses, and I won’t sign off on such a reduction.

I’ve never been sure of myself. I’ve searched to fill in the gaps in my absent center. I’ve moved restlessly from one acquired enthusiasm to the next. As I fell in love with Dolores, so I also fell in love with a chatbot called MARY. As, in my youth, I fell for a punishing God, I also fell for the promise of codes. I’ve been taken into the arms of many pursuits. Unsure of my position, I’ve spent my life in quest of something that would hook me firmly in place. Someone to say “Stop, here, this is you. This is where you belong.” I’ve desired a red pin on a map. I’ve been a spinner at edges, a moving man on a traveling planet, incapable of coming to rest.

I don’t make this little admission in the spirit of self-flagellation.
Despite all my errors, I still find reason to be proud. We’ve come, in this world of clocks and labor division, walled neighborhoods and transport rights, to be increasingly fond of compartments. We’ve become rigid since the days when we moved in lunar cycles and astronomical loops. We stick to our given patterns as if they were lifeboats and the world were a tempest.

When Ramona comes to visit me, she arrives with reports from Babybots Anonymous, the children who are recovering from their addiction to toys. She’s a young woman now. Nearly a decade after the bans, the world has recovered some of its balance. Those babies haven’t marched out of the desert. They’re all dead in the hangars to which they were transported. My daughter, part of a generation that was asked to recover from the loss of their most cherished companions, has become a young woman of great composure. She dresses conservatively and draws her hair back. I don’t think her personal life is especially happy, but she has a network of friends and she derives satisfaction from her profession. Since she graduated from high school, she’s worked for a charity that pools transport rights and takes underprivileged kids out of their developments for day-trips to the beach. She is a good person. I’m astounded and eternally grateful that such a clear-eyed, balanced young woman came in part out of me. And yet I always feel a pang of some sorrow when she slips into her sad addicts’ language. She has formally forgiven me, and asked for my forgiveness. She is doing her penance for the grief she caused her mother while devoting herself to her toy. She has reorganized her life around the 3-P Principles of Productivity, Participation, and Peace. From the chaos of total, consuming love for her doll, she has emerged with a well-organized life. She
is able to love me in my prison cell, and then she’s able to leave me behind. She does not labor under the burden of confusion. Her affections are delineated and clear.

I don’t begrudge her that. I myself swung too hard in too many directions. I’ve come to a certain peace, here in prison, confined by four walls. There’s a pleasure in limited opportunities, a calming effect of strict boundaries.

And yet. Here I am, in the rec room, hunched over my computer. Wishing to explain myself to readers in posterity. Working myself up to alliterative heights. I can’t help but want more time to explain myself. I wish for more minutes, more hours, more years. To make up to Dolores, to care for Ramona. To return to our ranch, to stake up those sunflowers, to walk with my wife on the bed of our river. To explain myself and have myself known. I flail and I thrash. I want more than this sad little place with its bars, its wires, its cells.

The pornographer on my left types with one forefinger, a demented chicken, pecking away. A tax evader is chewing on his fingernails. We’re all staring at our screens, stuck here, hoping somehow to break free. Wishing for more than we’ve been given. My cursor blinks, blinks, blinks. A wall that appears and disappears, appears and disappears once again. Unceasing. Questioning. What will come next? it wants to know. It prods me forward, blinking and blinking. Do not stop talking, it reminds me. Do not stop speaking. You can never come to an end.