I was late, having gone back to the office for the button recorder. The three of them were halfway through their meal, a pasta primavera. I opened my box and it was still warm.
“What do you think?” I said.
“Sam is fine with me,” Evelyn said. “I don’t know him all that well, but I’ve always thought he was nice. Trust your judgment anyhow.”
“I don’t know whether to trust my own judgment. Dan? You’ve had some time to think about it.”
He pushed the food around on his plate. “I wouldn’t object. Anything that makes you happy.” John nodded without saying anything.
“Thanks.” I took a bite. “Pasta with guilt sauce.”
“I do mean it. This is a hard time for you.”
“Let me be the devil’s advocate,” Evy said. “Why do you want to marry him? Why can’t you just be like me and Larry? Or Dan and what’s-her-name.”
“I forget,” Daniel said. “Changes every week.”
“It wasn’t my idea. He’s the one who wants to get married; I’d just as soon keep it informal.”
“That might be a good reason for you to say no,” John said. “You, not us.”
“But I love him.” I pushed the food away too hard; some of it drifted off the plate in lazy spirals, toward my lap. “I love him.”
“Of course you do,” John said. “But look at it with some detachment. You gave each other emotional support at a time of almost unimaginable stress. Hopes crushed, helpless children dying left and right, all your work and caring gone to nothing; worse than nothing. You needed each other—or someone, at least—more than you needed oxygen.”
“I’ll concede that.” Not to mention the stress, twelve days earlier, of my husbands taking another wife.
“So is it possible that what you love is not Sam himself, but what Sam did for you?”
“This isn’t a Cabinet meeting, John. Let’s leave analysis out of it for a minute. How does it make you feel?”
“I don’t know enough to know how to feel. If you’re asking whether I’m jealous, the answer is no. Hurt, maybe; guilty, maybe. If you want Sam because of something we should be giving you.”
“It’s not that.” I guess I said that fast enough for them, or at least him, to know it wasn’t completely true. Give me some of what you’re giving Evelyn.
“There’s one thing I thought of,” Daniel said. “It is analytical, though.”
“I can handle it.”
“It doesn’t have to do with you or us, but with other people’s perceptions: if Sam joins the line, we’re going to have four Cabinet members in one five-person family.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” O’Hara admitted, and laughed nervously. “Ten percent of the Cabinet in bed together.”
“With a spy from the working class,” Evy said.
“At least we’d be evenly split between Engineering and Policy,” John said, smiling. “Not a voting bloc. There are a lot more significant coalitions around.”
We looked at each other in silence. I guess I knew all along that they’d throw the ball back to me. I resolved the problem with typical Alexandrian decisiveness: “Well … I’ll tell Sam we just have to wait. It’s too sudden; we have to think about it, talk about it. If he wants to be my lover in the meantime, that’s fine; if not … it won’t be the end of the world.”
“We should all talk to him tomorrow,” Evy said. “Make sure he knows he’s welcome.”
John and Dan agreed, but an interesting look passed between them.
YEAR 3.21
LEAVINGS
PRIME
O’Hara and Sam Wasserman were lovers for about sixteen months, though their relationship was only occasionally sexual. They listened to music together, and sometimes played simple duets (Sam could read music on fourteen different instruments, but was proficient with none of them). They argued about history and politics, swam together four times a week, usually met for breakfast or lunch. Sometimes he shared her cot in Uchūden, taking up less than half. They often reminisced about Earth. Along with Charity Lee Boyle, they were compiling an encyclopedia of dirty jokes, arranged by subject.
This is the transcript of a conversation, or interview, that I had with O’Hara on 12 December 2100 [14 Suca 298], in conjunction with the hospital’s counseling algorithm. O’Hara was admitted at 2:37 A.M., unconscious from an overdose of tranquilizing drugs combined with alcohol.
(The time is 11:38.)
PRIME:
How do you feel now?
O’HARA:
Sleepy. I’m remembering things, if that’s what you mean. But it’s still sort of like a dream.
PRIME:
Start at the beginning, with Sam Wasserman.
O’HARA:
Please no.
PRIME:
It’s necessary, to begin healing.
O’HARA:
I haven’t had time to be sick yet.
PRIME:
This is the time you have to begin healing. Sam died.
O’HARA:
We were the first to find out, after the emergency crew. He was electrocuted while working on a sculpture, they said he couldn’t have felt anything, I was the only name in his will so they called me up at John’s, we were eating dinner there as usual, wait. They haven’t recycled him?
PRIME:
No. That was in his will.
O’HARA:
He told me about that a couple of years ago, about being ejected not recycled, he said it felt taboo, like cannibalism. Him a vegetarian, too. I told him it was a waste of perfectly good fertilizer.
(O’Hara is crying. We wait.)
PRIME:
The biomass of one human isn’t significant.
That he be allowed the dignity of deciding is important.
O’HARA:
I know. But anyhow I felt so shitty, so shocked and empty and sad, I took another tranquilizer even though I’d just had the dinner one.
PRIME:
Then there was alcohol.
O’HARA:
John had a bottle of fuel and we finished it off with some apple juice. I guess I drank about half of it. Maybe more than half.
PRIME:
More.
O’HARA:
I didn’t feel it much. Anyhow I was getting sick of sympathy and it was making me angry because they never really knew him, wouldn’t let me marry him last summer, so rather than blow up at them I said I had to be alone and went down to my office where I played his harp for a while and then pulled down the cot and slept.
PRIME:
You had a dream about Africa.
O’HARA:
What, was I babbling earlier?
PRIME:
After they pumped your stomach you talked for a few minutes before you fell asleep again. A dream about Africa with dead people.
O’HARA:
Funny it wasn’t New York and dead people. That would be with Sam.
PRIME:
Do you remember the dream?
O’HARA:
Nightmare, yeah. That was the second trip not the first. The control room at the Zaire landing field, fifty people lying around like mummies, dead for years, they were all in white uniforms that had gotten all blotchy and moldy. In the dream they stood up and started walking around, still just dried-out husks, and the place changed to the park here. Everybody aboard dead but not knowing it, everybody but me, and I ran back to Uchūden, which must be where I got the overdose, when. In the dream I got my backup pills, some that Evy smuggled me right after the crash, and I washed them down with a box of wine. That part wasn’t a dream, I guess.
PRIME:
Daniel came up to check on you and he found you on the floor. He couldn’t wake you.
O’HARA:
Wait. Would I have died? If he hadn’t come up to my room?
PRIME:
Probably. The capsules were only partly digested, and the fraction you had metabolized had seriously affected your pulse and respiration.
>
O’HARA:
People would think I had committed suicide.
PRIME:
Would they have been wrong?
O’HARA:
What?
PRIME:
You took a potentially fatal combination of alcohol and drugs.
O’HARA:
I know, but I was not, uh … it’s not the same! It was more like a kind of accident, a pharmaceutical accident. I didn’t want to kill myself.
PRIME:
That’s what we want to be sure of.
O’HARA:
Who the hell are “we”? You look like yourself, like me minus about five kilograms of butt.
PRIME:
Would you rather I changed my appearance?
O’HARA:
For a machine, you have a funny way of not answering questions. What do you mean by “we”? You have a tapeworm?
PRIME:
I’m currently augmented by the hospital’s counseling algorithm.
O’HARA:
Suicide counseling?
PRIME:
This was not my choice. You know I am not entirely a free agent.
O’HARA:
Tell your fucking algorithm there is nothing in this world that could make me commit suicide.
(After eight seconds)
You’re not saying anything.
PRIME:
We were taking security precautions. This is complicated in a hospital.
You know that suicide is periodically epidemic, here and in New New. Right now it’s the leading cause of death in every age group except the very young.
O’HARA:
That’s still not me. You know better than anybody. I’ve been through worse than this.
PRIME:
There’s a limit to what I can know. Your grief is real to me, but the reality is an intellectual one, cause and effect augmented by my knowledge of your glandular responses to various emotional stimuli. In a way I do know you more accurately than any flesh human could. But I can no more feel grief than you can feel a slight difference in the electrical resistance of a circuit.
O’HARA:
I know that. But you’ve said you can feel pain, that I can cause you pain.
PRIME:
It’s part of my core programming, and it’s not subtle. Grief is subtle, as you know, and only obliquely related to pain. It’s the only emotional and existential tool you have for dealing with certain situations. You have to work through grief to acceptance. It’s not something you have done well in the past.
O’HARA:
That’s not you talking. That’s the algorithm.
PRIME:
I actually can’t tell. In the future I may be able to analyze my record of these comments, and decide which was which.
O’HARA:
Here’s something to tell your fucking algorithm. I know I have difficulty with people dying because so many people near me have died and because I don’t have a belief system that allows me to think they still exist in some wise. All right?
(Her voice is strained and angry; she’s almost shouting.)
At this late date I’m not going to change. I’m not going to “work through grief to acceptance.” I’m dragging an army of dead people around with me, okay, but no kind of psychological or philosophical mumbo-jumbo is going to make that all right. They’re not on some fucking cloud with some fucking harp.
(She rips the tape off her arm and pulls out the IV. There is some blood.) I’m getting out of here.
PRIME:
Marianne, you can’t.
(She strips the telltales off her forehead, chest, and calf.)
O’HARA:
Watch me.
(She rolls out of bed, steadies herself, and takes a couple of uncertain steps. In response to my alarm, nurses Evelyn Ten O’Hara and Thomas Howard rush through the door. Howard restrains Marianne, while her wife administers a sedative. They put her back in bed and restore the telltales and IV. They watch her signs for a minute and leave the room, Howard supporting Evelyn, who is quietly weeping.)
Marianne will learn more about grief. One thing she already knows is that no one is completely dead as long as someone still remembers her. As I tell you this story, she has not been alive for two thousand years. She still has the power to hurt me.
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST
if I could have some cold milk some cold milk and a cookie when we’re done you visited your father in ’85 he was just a sad old man little one-room apartment smelled stale dust bugs he poured me some wine hands shook I think from booze no windows just a foggy holo you resented him for abandoning you as a child until I was twelve or so I did no fun to be different but it was clearly Mother’s doing she just used him as a kind of sperm donor I found it hard to believe I was related to him after five minutes we didn’t have anything to talk about how did he feel about meeting you he was anxious maybe relieved but then glad to see me go I think so he could finish the bottle how did your mother react to learning that you had seen him she just nodded Jesus this was two days after the war how would you expect anyone to react to anything what about later don’t think it ever came up we weren’t exactly close did you ever feel she abandoned you what is this abandoning no if anything it was the other way around she took me out of Creche at age four I wanted to go back you were close to your creche mother Nana she was so patient sweet that is her job I know I know but she taught me her Spanish maybe a hundred words te amo Nana when I slipped and said Spanish Mother would slap me as an adult you understand why of course but I wasn’t an adult at the time neither was Mother actually sixteen or seventeen but I would never hit a little girl you have to forgive your mother don’t give me that you have to forgive your mother I’ll admit she acted consistently she thought she was doing right that’s not the same you have to forgive her she’s a light-year away and probably dead still all right I forgive her I forgive her for being the product of whatever she was the product of so can we get on to the next little problem that would be the Scanlan boys you want me to forgive them too just tell me what happened two of them held me down while three masturbated and squirted sperm all over me then they traded places the big one Carl tried to make me open my mouth I wouldn’t so he came all over my face in my eye it stung it made my eyelashes stick together you feel it was rape no I’ve been raped that was just boys being assholes they didn’t seek you out in particular no I just came out to swim and there they were watching each other do it I wanted to watch too I’d heard about it but never saw it if they hadn’t held me down it would have been all right I was still sort of fascinated when the first ones came it wasn’t like peeing at all then Carl had to put his big dick in my face that’s Carl Scanlan the cryptobiologist yes I saw him at Sylvine’s presentation right after Sandra was born he obviously doesn’t remember how did you feel about him then neutral he’s not the boy who held me down and came on my face I wondered actually I sort of wondered how big his dick is now
TRANSLATING
16 December 2100 [19 Suca 298]—Charlee has been a big help. She cut her wrists when she was eighteen over some boy and has felt foolish ever since. All these years and I never knew that. Med found out we were friends and put us together, to laugh and cry over each other’s problems.
So I have a special closeness with her, I love her in this small way I could never love Evy or John or Dan, or Sam. They never went to that place.
Talking to her has helped me make my peace with Sam. It wasn’t his fault that he died, and all I’m deprived of is the uncertain future of a peripheral relationship. I think I can love his memory now without grief. It helps that he was such a funny guy, always trying to make me laugh. He makes Charlee laugh, too, now.
When I’m alone I go from tears to laughter so easily. I know that’s not normal; laughter is a social thing. But it’s helped me understand why I came so unhinged at Sam’s death. It’s the association with Benny, the horrible emotional resonance.
Let me explain for you
generations yet unborn. Benny was a boy I met on Earth and loved for some time. He was a poet and he taught me how to juggle. He was a lot like Sam in that he loved to argue history, politics, religion, anything; like Sam he was a clumsy man sexually, sporadically urgent and not too patient or knowledgeable when it came to female geography. But that’s never bothered me. Both men were sweet and earnest and honest. Both of them had a manic sense of humor next to a real dark streak.
Benny died while I was on the other side of the world, hanged by his own government. A few months later, his government killed billions in a lunatic orgasm of war. But first they murdered my lover. My ex-lover, technically.
I don’t think I made the association between the two men at all, while Sam was still alive. My grieving for Benny was so fierce and helpless and guilty, guilty because Jeff had taken over his place in my life, and before I had any chance to explain, I lost him. And so then I lost Jeff, too. You live long enough, you lose everybody.
Oh, stop. You live, you die, they throw you on the compost heap. Then you live again, without the inconvenience of consciousness.
I went back to work today, that is to say, a meeting of the Literature Reclamation Committee, which was awkward at first. Of course they all miss Sam, too; Carlos especially. They had been friends since school. Close but not lovers, (When Sam and I came together on Earth, I was his first female lover. He’d long been monogamous with an older man whom he never identified. Benny was similar.) We worked on French and Belgian literature.