Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (22 page)

P
erhaps the concept of the Singularity becomes less difficult to accept when you consider the fact that we are all, and always have been, machines.

We are made up of components—in our case, biological components, but components nonetheless—that interact according to strict and immutable rules involving chemistry, physics, and, by extension, mechanics. That we do not yet understand some of these rules doesn't change the fact that our bodies, and more important, our brains, obey them.

Stands to reason, then, that achieving artificial intelligence will be a fairly simple matter of gaining understanding of the rules of chemistry and physics that our brains obey, and then—in principle, at least—there should be no reason why we can't transfer those rules onto nonorganic materials that are not subject to acne, or hypertension, or bedwetting, or muscle fatigue, or staph infection, or pinkeye, or gout, or influenza, or diaper rash, or erectile dysfunction, or joint deterioration, or AIDS, or radiation sickness, or anorexia, or canker sores, or epilepsy, or halitosis, or IBS, or lead poisoning, or multiple sclerosis, or altitude sickness, or tennis elbow, or smallpox, or kidney stones, or rot, or heartache, or cancer, or cancer, or cancer.

A
round the same time that Calder circulated my suicide note among her friends, two packages containing my belongings, along with the original note, arrived at my mother's apartment, the place she'd moved into after she was finally able to wrench herself away from the cherry trees and sell the house.

This is one aspect of my faux death that I feel nothing but bad about, and rightly so. My poor mother, still grieving hard for my father despite the passage of time, cutting open those boxes and believing, in a deep and concrete way reinforced by the sight, the feel, the scent of my things, that in that most agonizing reversal of the natural order she had outlived her son.

And then the manner in which I had ‘died,' and her pulling the note from wherever Morales had stowed it—I never asked her, but I always picture it folded neatly at the top of the first box she opens—and having to read a fairly eloquent account of my cratered, smoldering interior landscape, a state of mind that itself was very much real, even if the suicide it indicated was not.

Of course at the time the suicide
was
real to her, and surely one's mother does not need to read in brutal detail about the mental horrors that led to it.

Maybe this was why she ended up giving the note to Emma. Maybe she couldn't stand the thought of those pages being anywhere inside her home, lurking in a drawer or on a closet shelf, a permanent account of her son's deterioration and end.

Or maybe she, like Calder, found herself most affected by the section of the note addressed to Emma—who, by the way, my mother was not a fan of after she'd kicked my ass on our first go-round, but who it turned out she'd warmed to in their shared grief after my death—and felt that it rightly belonged to her.

Whatever the reason, shortly after receiving the packages my mother tracked Emma's number down and called her. They shared a cry on the telephone. They shared another over cups of coffee when my mother drove down to meet her several days later. Then my mother handed over the note, and that was that.

My other things—clothes, iPod, books, shoes and flip-flops, handful of DVDs, backpack, set of dominoes—my mother sorted through, making a point to touch each item and let that touch linger for a moment. Then she placed them carefully back in the boxes, and the boxes themselves went into her bedroom closet.

She did not put away my computer, though, or my notebooks.

No, because she had reluctantly opened the notebooks and found portions of what was recognizable as a work in progress, and then she turned on the computer and found more of the same. And these things, to her mind, should not be stored away. But she didn't know what to do with them herself, so she called my agent.

And he said, Please, absolutely, if you don't mind, send them along, we'd love to take a look. He promised to return them exactly as they were received.

T
o my recollection, the only time my father ever hit me occurred when I was about five years old, when I'd been flipping through a pictorial history of Vietnam that he owned, and I put together what I knew about him and what I saw in the book's photos and asked him if he'd ever killed anyone. He reached back and slapped me across the face hard enough to knock me flat, and then left the room and the house and didn't come back again until the next day, or maybe even the day after that, it's hard to remember exactly, you know, time and memory being what they are.

A
nd so it came to be that around the time I first went to work for Asif, my agent was busy poring over the two hundred thousand words I'd written since the last time I turned in a manuscript. The box arrived from my mother on a snowy Tuesday, winter's last stand that year in New York City. At my agent's request my mother had printed out the manuscript she'd found on my computer, put it together with the handwritten pages, and shipped the whole thing. The top of the box was dark with melted snowflakes. My agent is not a sentimental man, but he sat there for a few minutes just looking at the box, leaning back in his chair and considering it, thinking, allowing himself to hope a little. Then he slid a letter opener through the bands of tape my mother had used to secure the box top. He lifted the lid, peered inside. Read the title, sat back again, thought a bit more. Snow continued to fall lazily outside his office windows. His assistant came in with the
macchiato
he'd asked for. His assistant eyed the open box, thought to ask a question, then put the coffee down and left without a word. Finally, my agent reached in and removed the manuscript, set it on his desk, placed the box carefully on the floor. He really did mean to send it back to my mother exactly as he'd received it, including the box. He considered the title once again, decided it was okay but not great, flipped a page. Then another. At first he read with guarded optimism. The snow began to fall with purpose now, accumulating in wet piles on cars and awnings up and down 26th Street. My agent's optimism blossomed into satisfaction, then excitement. He read the manuscript in one sitting, eating lunch at his desk and staying there well after the rest of the office building was dark and empty. When he'd turned the last page he called my editor at home and told him they needed to meet for a drink, right away if possible, and then, glancing out his windows, my agent added that he should probably take the train, because the roads were a mess out there.

K
eep in mind that my agent's excitement, and by extension my editor's, had nothing to do with the massive publicity that the book would eventually be published to. None of that had yet come to pass. Calder's friends were only now beginning to violate her admonition and distribute my suicide note among their own social circles. This electronic dissemination had not yet taken on its own momentum, and remained, for the time being, private, email to email.

So although there had been a good deal of short-lived publicity surrounding my disappearance and death, my agent and editor were not twisting their figurative mustaches over the prospect of exploiting it. They were, in fact, not twisting their figurative mustaches at all. Theirs was the pure and guileless excitement of book people who believed they found themselves with the opportunity to publish a great book. My botched ode to Emma, my incomplete hymn to obsessive love, my literary flipper baby, was quite simply, as far as they were concerned, a hugely compelling piece of art—well nigh a masterpiece.

A
fter my mother gave her the suicide note, Emma took two weeks off from work and flew down to the island alone. Rented the pink stucco casita for twice what I'd paid for it, the extra tariff necessary to wrest the place away from another prospective short-term tenant. Discovered strands of her own long auburn hair in the sheets, and stuck to the shower wall, on the day she arrived. Slept alone for twelve nights in the bed we'd shared. Held the pillows to her nose, searching for a trace of me. Found my prized vintage Montblanc—apparently Morales and company thought it just another pen—and slid it into her messenger bag next to her journal. Ate at the same table at the resort where we'd had dinner several times, accepting a glass of Chianti from a man who said he couldn't stand to see a beautiful woman eating alone. Drove to all the beaches, sat in the sand with sunglasses on, sipping warm beers and staring at the water. Foiled men's gambits with smiles as frigid as they were polite, smiles that sent them scurrying in their minds and left them wondering, after, why they'd been so spooked. Went to Mosquito Pier, leaned against the makeshift repairs to the guardrail, watched old fishermen set their lines and grumble over tangled reels. Marveled at enormous, distant plumes of water as the Navy detonated stray ordnance they'd dropped into the bays thirty years previous. Wrestled guilt like a vengeful angel. Let it all go, in the end. Got on a plane and went home and added me to the list of heartaches she'd left behind. And good for her.

A
couple of months before my father died, after it became clear that the surgery hadn't worked and the doctors gave up on chemotherapy and radiation and his body sagged and protruded with unchecked tumors, he went to Boston for what at that stage could have fairly been considered a pointless examination. I imagine machines spinning and analyzing my father's blood and urine samples, CT and MRI and ultrasound units bouncing X-rays and magnetic fields through his body and compiling, byte by byte, visual proof of what everyone already knew, what one could literally smell on him at this point, and I imagine heart and blood pressure monitors beeping and whirring as they transmitted, moment to moment, evidence of his continued existence—all these machines working tirelessly, with absolute dedication, despite the futility of their task.

Then I imagine my father's doctors and nurses, the actual human beings involved in his care, spending less and less time on him, knowing that he was the very definition of hopelessness, and that all this testing was little more than the formal constraints of care continuity. Maybe even, at their team meeting, giving his charts a perfunctory riffle, saying, This one's a goner, what's next, and casting his paperwork aside.

In other words, the doctors were unwilling to waste their own time on the myriad tests they'd wasted my father's dwindling time with. The machines, though, remained uniform and unflinching in their dedication.

So anyway he'd gone to Boston for these pointless tests, and started to have trouble breathing in one of the exam rooms at the cancer institute, so they called an ambulance to take him around the block, to the ER of the hospital next door. Where they discovered, after yet another series of tests, that his one remaining lung had become choked with blood clots.

They administered Alteplase, without much hope given how weak he was already, and told my mother to call whoever should be around in the event that he died.

My phone rang around nine that night. I'd been drinking, but I took a cold shower and threw a few things in a backpack and drove to my uncle's house. He looked at me and suggested he drive, and we got in his car and headed south on the mostly empty highway.

We talked about my father, but we talked about other things, too, and not without good humor. One of the peculiar aspects of ushering someone you love through a long illness is that everyday life, dull and unimportant though most of it is, inevitably intrudes upon and somehow obscures the high drama of looming death—so that you find yourself, at a bedside in a sick room, talking about last night's
American Idol
, for example.

And as we drove through the night toward what we believed and acknowledged out loud could be my father's corpse, my uncle and I discussed high gas prices, and the oddly warm October we'd had, and the Red Sox, who were blazing through the postseason on what would turn out to be their second world championship in just three years.

And I said, in reference to my father, You know, he could have waited to die until the playoffs were over.

These things come out of your mouth, sometimes. You get tired, or dumb, or just plain angry at someone for dying on you, though they obviously have no choice in the matter.

When we got to Boston just after one in the morning my father was still alive but sleeping, and we joined my mother and my aunt in the waiting room. None of my sisters, scattered about the continent, could get there in time. We sat for hours, talking in fits and starts but mostly quiet, listless. We flipped through old magazines, watched the sky brighten from black to a stolid autumnal gray outside the windows. Paced the ghastly fluorescent-lit halls. Received periodic non-updates from the nurses: Still sleeping. Doing okay. Seems to have stabilized.

Finally, after nine, we were allowed in to see him. He sat up in bed in a private room, some network morning show on the television, and I was struck by a plain and unmistakable fact: for the first time since he'd been diagnosed, my father looked
happy.
His eyes shone soft and peaceful, and while he wasn't smiling, exactly, relaxation had settled around his mouth in a way I'd never witnessed in thirty years of knowing the man, giving him a contented, sage look.

I sat there all day. My father talked in a gentle, friendly voice I did not recognize while doctors and nurses and family wandered in and out. I only rose from the chair at his bedside twice before sundown, both times to use the private bath attached to his room.

Who was this gregarious dying man, I wondered, and what had happened, while we sped down the highway and sat up in the waiting room all night, to create him from the raw material of the man I'd known before?

And then, during the Red Sox pregame show, it struck me: acceptance, was what had happened. His was the relaxed, friendly manner of one who has come to truly accept his own doom. The sort of enlightenment that dedicated Buddhists strive after their whole lives and often never achieve, right there in front of me, clad in a hospital johnny with graying mustache askew and eyes warm and calm.

Before the first pitch his dinner showed up, a dry greenish slab of something the attendant claimed was meatloaf, and my father was about to dig in happily (this was another sudden change, as weeks beforehand his appetite had abandoned him and more than once I found my mother in tears after trying and failing to get him to eat) when I stopped him.

There's a food court downstairs across the street, I said. Let me get you something edible.

He asked for a steak and cheese sandwich from Subway, and I left and went down in the elevator, feeling strangely light and happy as I jaywalked over to the Longwood food court. The place was filled with people in scrubs and white lab coats, sitting at plastic tables in groups of three and four, scarfing the same McDonald's burgers and Chinese takeout that had delivered many of their patients to them across the street.

I ordered a footlong from a plump, surly Puerto Rican girl in a mustard-stained Subway polo. My father had asked for nothing but the meat and cheese, no vegetables, and I watched as the girl plopped two tiny microwaved dollops of stringy beef into the hollow she'd cut from the bread. It didn't look any better than the meatloaf, and I thought to ask her to work on the presentation a bit, maybe add more meat, or at least spread it out in a way that didn't make so obvious it had been dropped out of a plastic cup—in short, to try a little harder—but then I didn't. Though I'd given myself the assignment of finding something good for my father to eat, at that moment I kept my mouth shut.

And then carried that limp, lukewarm bag back across the street and up in the elevator and into my father's room. He sat upright still, his eyes trained on the television. In the fourth the Sox were up 1–0.

I handed him the sandwich, feeling as though I'd failed in some small but vastly important way, and he smiled and said thank you—understand, again, that the warmth, the smile, were just this side of a shock coming from him—and unwrapped the sandwich, dug in with delight.

Later, after he'd fallen asleep during the seventh inning and I'd switched off the television and the light over the bed and gone out, I sat at a nearby bar thinking about how I'd never expected to learn something about joy, how to create and sustain it, from my father of all people.

And then smiled into my beer as one of my mother's favorite chestnuts came to mind: miracles, she liked to say, never cease.