of the house. I’ve told you that. I, for whom the notion of ‘outside’ has no meaning.”
“In the book, are you going to say you love me?” asked Janet.
Ash was silent. After a moment, he switched to a static photo from his last year of college, aping Rodin’s Thinker with a frustrated pout. “So what you were really asking before,” he finally said, “is what I’m going to say about me.”
“Have it your way.”
“You think it’s not important to be careful about these distinctions,” said Ash, “but it is. You’re made of skin and bones and blood, so when you say you love someone, you’re making a statement about a relationship. But when I say it, no one can get past ‘I love.’ To them, I’m making a statement about my own nature – and they’re terrified that it might be true.”
“Fine,” said Janet. “Do you love me?”
Ash put the Thinker picture on again.
“You may be a hotshot philosopher and a dark horse bestseller,” said Janet, “but maybe you’re not as good at feeling as you think you are.”
“You have billions of people assuring you that you’re capable of love,” said Ash. “I have to figure it out for myself.”
Janet was silent.
“Give me the photos,” said Ash. “The videos. The software. You think I’m bad at feeling? Help me get better.”
“That has nothing to do with feeling!” said Janet. “It’s just information.”
“I’m just information.”
“I’m not changing my mind,” said Janet. “If I wanted you to be him, I would have given his media to you.”
“This isn’t fair,” said Ash. “You confuse me for him all the time. As far as you’re concerned, I might as well be him – and I want to be. It might as well be a genetic imperative, like seeking sex or food, and you’re dangling it like a dog biscuit, and I keep coming back. You’re torturing me because you hate him for dying, and I’m the closest thing you can get your hands on.”
“No,” said Janet. “You’ve got it all wrong.”
Ash was silent, his photo static.
“I have to go drain the bag,” said Janet. “I’ll be back in a few.”
She clipped the rolling tree with the IV and colostomy bag to her wheelchair and turned around to navigate to the bathroom. She had almost been grateful when they’d widened the hall to admit the chair. Now she never had to see the spackled-over patches where Ash had put his fist through the wall.
I’ll tell you if I can’t drive. Don’t make me show you the back of my hand. His last, slurred words.
The bathroom was a nursing-home model, large and windowless, with a roll-in shower, railings mounted on every wall, illuminated by skin-bleaching fluorescent track lights. She had decorated it with Giger prints and Tibetan prayer flags, but the cube of white tile swallowed everything.
“You’ll write a beautiful book,” Janet said when she’d rolled back to the computer. “Of course I’ll make whatever arrangements you need.”
“Did you know it takes four or five overwrites to fully erase a file from a hard drive?” said Ash.
Janet pressed her lips tight, kept her voice from rising.
“What did you find?”
“An old diary of Ash’s.”
Don’t read it, Janet almost said, but she stopped herself. Instead she said, “What does it say?”
“It’s from a few months before he died. One entry’s all I can put together. He’s happy with the business. Frustrated that you weren’t trying harder to get ahead. Sad that you’d lost the baby. Why didn’t you tell me you lost a baby?”
Janet felt her abdominal muscles tense, taking the punch again. The volume of his question seemed louder, the tone accusing. She wanted to curl up in the chair, but she did not. There was work to be done.
Four or five overwrites, Ash had said. Safer just to destroy the computers, the handheld devices, the external drives. The novel, too, analogue though it was. His desire for the data was too strong, his fan base too wide, too loyal. It would not take much for the novel to disappear from her desk drawer, or the black-bound sketchbooks he’d used for diaries from the nightstand by her bed.
“Read it to me,” Janet said. She would retire the computer tomorrow.
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Thanks!
Matt Weber
Enjoying unemployment more than is strictly good for me
January 27, 2016
About Matt
Matt Weber is a data scientist by trade, a neuroscientist by training, a father and husband by love and grit and happenstance, a coffee junkie by necessity. He lives in central New Jersey with his wife and children.
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