The Emoticon Generation (28 page)

“Good night.”

Tony stayed standing there for a minute, thinking, as Matt went to his car. Matt stood by his car, his hand on the handle. Then he turned around again.

“Tony. I don’t want to do that tomorrow.”

“What?” Tony snapped out of his thoughts.

“We have other things to do. Real research.”

“But ... You don’t think I’m just
playing
, just to get my–”

“No, please, please don’t get me wrong. I know how important this is to you. But if we keep on digging forever, we’ll just find more of the same things. Bits of her subconscious, bits of her memories, her dreams, her whatever. This is not helping you to let go. And two weeks is as much as I can afford to let other people do the research without me.”

“Matt ...”

“Please,” Matt needed to get it all out at once. “It was Tony, and it was you, and I understand that. And there was enough scientific interest in it for me. But we’ve discovered everything we’re going to discover. Everything else is repetition. We solved the last problem – we solved that image – it’s her dream. Fine. That’s it. Let’s move on. And besides,” he had to stop for breath, and with Tony looking at him and saying nothing, he looked down, and then up again to meet Tony’s eyes. “The people from
Tout le Monde Tout Jours
are coming here tomorrow.” Tony winced inside. The French production company! It was the last thing he’d spoken about with Tony. He’d convinced her to be interviewed by them. If he had argued with her for another minute, if he had phrased things differently, she’d be here today.

Matt went on, “You know how important that is to us. This is publicity we can only dream of.”

Tomorrow? Was it already a week before the wedding? He said, “I ... No ... I can’t deal with them right now.”

“That’s fine. I understand. You don’t need to.
I’ll
handle them.
I’ll
talk to them and explain what we do and show them around. At least for a few days. You just ... Take a couple of days. Work, don’t work, but get yourself back into ... you know.”

Tony deflated. “I guess,” he said.

“Working on the ... on those last ten seconds. It just makes it harder to say goodbye.”

“I don’t
want
to say goodbye!” Tony exploded.

Matt stared at him. Tony put his hand over his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.
You
handle them tomorrow.”

“Go home.”

“Okay.”

Matt stood by his side for what seemed like five silent minutes.

“You’ll be okay?” Matt finally said.

“Yeah.” Tony still hadn’t looked up.

“I’m going home.”

“Okay.”

Matt got into his car and drove away.

~

There were seven days to the wedding.

And the second Tony woke up, a clock began to tick inside his head. A clock that counted backwards to the wedding. It was there before, but it had counted silently and in the back of his mind. But now it was strong, and the feeling of absence, of loss, hit him, as if it was the first time he realized it.

The wedding would never happen.

The rest of his life would never happen.

He couldn’t bring himself to get up from the bed.

After an hour, he finally dragged himself up and went to drink coffee.

Two hours later, he was still sipping his first cup.

He couldn’t stand the house. He couldn’t stand the emptiness.

A week before the wedding. My god!

He should go to work. But he couldn’t. He should stay here. But he couldn’t. The entire house smelled like Tony. And ...

A week before the wedding. The clock was ticking. Three hours had passed since he’d first had that thought.

If she were alive, what would she be doing now? Her calendar! He went over to her laptop, the computer that had stayed untouched ever since that morning.

He pressed a key, and the screen lit up immediately, showing an animation of a snake climbing up naked Eve’s leg in the Garden of Eden. Her screensaver. With a hesitant finger, he touched a key, and the screensaver disappeared.

The screen was filled with Friendly Reminders that had jumped to the top of the screen over the last three weeks. One by one, he pressed ‘Dismiss’. Get a fitting; Talk to Saban about the vacation; Check with Binias’ people; Drag Tony to buy new shoes. Finally, with the screen clear, he pressed on the ‘Calendar’ and saw her schedule for the day. 8:00 a.m. pre-interview with Altman, 11:30, pre-production back at the station.

That means she’d have been up at six a.m., an hour before him. The alarm clock would have gone on on her side of the bed, and within ten seconds, just as he would have stirred, her long arm would have reached over, and shut it down permanently. Tony had never needed the ‘snooze’ function. She would have sat up, looked around her, yawned, and bent down and kissed him softly on the lips.

“Go to sleep,” she would have said, as she always had. “That was for me.”

He probably would have been sleeping too deeply. He’d have touched her face, then turned around and fallen completely back into his stupor. And when he’d have woken up an hour later, from the same alarm clock (which she would have reset and put on his side of the bed), Tony would have been gone and he’d have forgotten all about her kiss.

He stopped himself.

This was not good. Matt was right. He should stop surrounding himself with her scent.

Work would heal. Time would heal. Denial would heal.

Fuck being healed! He didn’t want to be healed of her. It showed disrespect. To the greatest ... the greatest ... of all ... in all ...

He kept reading the calendar, as it detailed hour after hour what Tony would have done each day until the wedding.

~

Three hours later, Tony got into his car and drove aimlessly in the streets. Half an hour after that, he found himself in front of Eternity Plus.

He parked his car. In his office, he found Charles Caudwell sitting at his desk.

“Charley,” he shook the man’s hand. Caudwell worked for one of the eight venture capital funds whose money financed the project. “How are you doing?”

“Fine, thank you.” He walked around the desk and sat at another chair. “How are you?”

“I didn’t know we had an appointment,” Tony sat down behind his desk.

“We don’t. But you don’t return phone calls.”

“I’m sorry. These last few weeks have been – I’ve had this personal –”

“I know. I heard, and I’m sorry. But in the last few weeks since your tragedy, Eternity Plus has used six million dollars of the shareholders’ money.”

“That’s normal.”

“But no longer acceptable. We’ve seen the research, you’ve shown us your computer program. You can put people in computers
now
. We want a finished product. We want you to start an ad campaign. We want to start getting this ready for the stores.”

“Charley, it’s not ready yet. We have a whole floor devoted to debugging this thing, to comparing the human original to the digitized copy, to check ... To check a thousand different things. All these things take time.”

“You’re telling me this because you
know
all the theory, you know all the research and everything that’s wrong with it.”

“No, of course not.”

“You rely on your scientists.”

“Yes.”

“Well, the consensus is, that you rely too much on your scientists. If scientists had their way, they’d never get anything out of the lab, they’ll just examine it to death. Tell them you need it now, they’ll give it to you now.”

“Charley, that’s reckless. If we send to the stores something that turns out to be –”

“That’s just talk. If you can’t control your scientists, maybe we’ll put in your position someone who
can
.”

Tony smiled at him, and Charley froze. “You have no sense of timing, do you? You’re whipping a man-eating lion when he’s aggravated. I’m going to do you a big favor and do your wife a big favor and do your
kids
a big favor because one of these days you’ll probably need money to send them to college – and I’ll forget this happened. You’ll have your product, but you’ll have a good one and a safe one and a trustworthy one. This is going to take a few more months, but
only
a few months, because we’re almost done. And ten yards before the finishing line is no time to lose your head.”

“I –”

“Now get out of my office before you see how crappy my mood really is. I lost a –” He took a deep breath. “Get out.”

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” Tony said.

Matt opened it hesitantly. “I hate to interrupt.”

“It’s fine. Charley was just leaving.”

Charley stood up. “There’s going to be a general meeting in a few days.”

“There really isn’t,” Tony said. “Nice seeing you.”

With a face that seemed to have been steamrolled, Charles Caudwell turned his back to Tony and left the office.

Tony looked at Matt. “Yeah?”

“Sylvia said she saw you come in a while ago. I hoped I might catch you.”

“Sure. What is it?”

“The guy from ARTE is here. I wanted you to meet him.”

“Matt, I thought we agreed I wasn’t –”

“Just say ‘hello’.”

Tony put a finger on his right temple and rubbed it. “Sure.”

Matt opened the door wide, and stepped inside. “Tony Moore,” he said. “Meet Steve Adams from
Tout le Monde Tout Jours
, from ARTE, France.”

Tony rose automatically, his hand extended. And then he froze. He was staring at the man whose image he had seen only yesterday. The man they’d decided had been created from Tony’s subconscious desire.

“Steve Adams,” the man shook his hand.

Tony recovered quickly, reverting into his business self. “A pleasure.”

“I was just commenting,” Matt said. “On how much Steve looks like Larry Steele.”

“I get that a lot.”

“Yes, I can see the resemblance,” Tony said. “Um ... Have you had lunch yet?”

“Actually, no.”

“How about it, then, Steve? My treat.”

“Happy to.”

“Thanks, Matt,” he looked into the man’s eyes. “I’ll take care of our guest from here on.” Matt nodded. “And remember that avenue of research we were talking about yesterday? Maybe it deserves another looking into.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

“Good.”

~

“So, Steve,” Tony said, as the waiter put down in front of them Steve’s manicotti and his own linguine. “I can’t help but notice that you have an
American
accent.”

“Yes. I was born here and spent all my childhood here.”

“‘Here?’”

He smiled. “Not in New York, no. I’m from Lansing, Michigan.”

“Really? Why’d you move?”

“Well, my mother’s French. We moved there when I was eleven.”

“Eleven? Wow. How – if you’ll excuse the question – how long ago was that?”

“My god ... It was practically thirty-three years ago.”

Which meant he’d left before Tony had been born.

“Still,” Tony said. “There’s not a tinge of a foreign accent when you speak. You must have been here quite often.”

“Actually, no. I hadn’t set foot in the States since we’d left. My father insisted on talking only in English, though. He gave me homework, increased my vocabulary, forced me to keep on reading in English. It’s all thanks to him.”

“What? And you didn’t come back even once? Didn’t you come to see relatives, friends? Family?”

“Well, okay, once. It was actually during the Paris riots.” During the Paris riots Tony was in San Diego. “They broke out just as I landed in New York. From the way it looked on TV, I had to make sure that my family was all right. You couldn’t reach anyone on the phones, if you remember, so I just turned around and took a flight right back to France.”

“So when you said, ‘not once’, you meant ...”

“Not once. Yes. That one doesn’t really count.”

“Any others that don’t count?”

“No.”

“It’s just that you seem so familiar to me.”

“Well, maybe you’ve been to Europe.”

“No, never.” And neither has Tony.

“Then it must be the resemblance to Larry Steele.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it’s not. It’s just ... you
do
look familiar. You work on TV. Maybe I saw you there.”

Steve shook his head again. “No. This is my first actual job in front of a camera, and I had to work hard to get it.”

Another dead avenue. But they had to have met. She had to have at least seen him somewhere.

“So you’ve been in France all this time?”

“Hardly. Ever since I finished high school I’ve been roaming around here and there. Didn’t know what to do with myself. I spent a couple of years in Cambridge till I dropped out, then a couple of years at the Collège de France, then a couple of years in a university in Belgium you’ve never heard of. I had amazing grades, which is why they kept accepting me. But I was a bit on the wild side, which is why I couldn’t stay put. Then I just decided this wasn’t for me, and I started working at odd jobs in television, mostly in France.

“A couple of years ago, though, I finally settled down a bit, and decided television was definitely the thing for me. I got accepted to the BBC School of Communications. I was old, but I had a lot of experience, so they took me.”

Tony froze in mid-chew. Steve couldn’t possibly have said ... “The BBC School of Communications?”

“Yeah.”

“In London?”

“Yeah.”

But it couldn’t possibly be that ...

“When, when, when,” he stammered, then forced himself to stop. “When did you say you studied there?”

“Started almost exactly two years ago. Halfway through my second year, ARTE offered me a job, so I left the school and took it.”

“You started two years ago?”

“Two years ago minus four months, just about.”

“And what did you study?”

“Production.”

The same as Tony. Had she gone to London, she would have studied the same thing, at exactly the same time.

But ... But that explained nothing.

They had never
met
. She had never
seen
him. That’s not where the computer got his image from. But ...

But
would
they have met?

Tony put down his fork. “I heard good things about the program.”