Hugh Sheehy
Vor seinem Tode sammeln sich in seinem Kopfe alle Erfahrungen der ganzen Zeit zu einer Frage, die er bisher an den Türhüter noch nicht gestellt hat.
—Kafka, "Vor dem Gesetz"
Now that Dave has reached the end, he would like to access his memory once more. There's something unrealized there, he thinks, some insight floating out along the edges, unsayable yet possessing undeniable substance.
The Tomorrow interface prompts him: I can perform this function. Would you like me to proceed?
"I have instructions," Dave says, or feels like he does. He hears his voice, though he understands his ears are plugged, encased in the machine along with the rest of his head, and that he does not move his mouth to speak. It's easy to forget that he's imagining all this, or that only his eyes move, surrounded by the interface's dark screen. Of course, it's supposed to be easy. That's what he's paying for. "I want to put this into words, and then I'd like to send it, as a message. Just in case."
The interface replies in an electronic voice represented by a squiggly pink light flashing across the visual surround. I can perform this function. To whom would you like to send a message?
Dave hesitates. The unhappy truth is his ex knows him best, but Leslie is also wired into this life-extension network, and a message from him would get lost in the background of whatever virtual experience they're having. Besides, she was at pains to hear him out in even the best of times. Maurice is observant, he knows, and would listen closely, but his son, no longer young, would let the words sink to wherever he stores things he'll never repeat or revisit. There is Delia, the intuitive choice, though Dave worries she's light years beyond any insight he might muster. His daughter has always been far smarter, but he supposes there's a chance experience has taught him something she doesn't know.
"Beggars can't be choosers," he says. "Send it to Delia."
I can perform this function, the interface responds. Would you like me to proceed?
He kneels in the flowerbed in front of his house, the first he ever bought, pulling weeds impatiently. He's been alive thirty-four years and had many formative experiences. He's grown up, seen both parents die, married a woman and reproduced with her (Maurice is six at this point), and assumed ownership of an expensive and demanding suburban half-acre. Tall and quiet with floppy blonde hair he brushes back from a gentle-looking face, he has a good job in the local refinery and drives a powerful car. He's attractive to many women and men, and he's long used his appeal as a license to be casual and easygoing.
This is the moment the red fly bites him. He has committed himself to uprooting little knots of crab grass and is coated with sweat and dirt. His tolerance for the presence of an insect on his grimy arm—even one he's never seen, a bug that looks like a blue bottle fly, only with crimson iridescence along its brief abdomen—has expanded a few seconds. The instant before he moves to brush it off, the insect lowers its maxillae and tears loose a tiny piece of flesh, firing a lightning bolt of pain down through his fingertips and then back up his arm.
It hurts so much he hops up, swearing inarticulately. The fly is gone, having left a small pink wound just above his elbow. It generates an extraordinary agony, unbelievable, nearly funny. Dave becomes aware he is cursing loudly enough to disturb neighbors, and he bites his lip hard enough to leave teeth marks. In the ensuing peace, he hears the sprinkler three yards down spattering water across the pavement. He decides to take this melodrama inside, pinching the damaged skin until he can hold it under the running faucet. He waits and waits for the stabbing, shooting pain to subside. Instead, the bite and the area around it grow more and more inflamed, and finally he goes to the medicine cabinet and smears cream on the burning pink dot. He pops a couple of yellow tablets and stands in the bathroom, the only lighted room in the house, waiting for the drug to take effect. A headache is forming. Outside, he senses, it has clouded over. The day has shifted. He will not return to gardening.
The doctor prescribes an antibiotic he's never heard of. It takes him a few attempts to pronounce its name correctly. She gives him the pharmacy slip and takes another look, her eyebrows suggesting a mixture of wonder and concern. The skin surrounding the bite has risen to a purple lump. The whole thing looks like a ripe miniature plum with a piece missing. She frowns and exhales through her nose.
"No alcohol with this medicine," she says. "No prolonged direct sunlight. You might have insomnia and some diarrhea."
"For a whole month? It's just a fly bite."
"If this doesn't go away, or if you develop splotches, we'll break out the big guns."
Dave doesn't want to think about what the big guns might entail. "This some new disease?" He tries to block out the horror stories he's read online. "Should I be worried?"
The doctor watches him with inscrutable blue eyes. She is small, unconventionally beautiful, and relentlessly solemn. "It's cause for vigilance. But it's not new. It should clear up in a month. The odds are in your favor."
The odds? he thinks, with a sense of disbelief. "What'd the deal with the fly? I've never seen a red one like that before."
She shrugs. "They've always been here."
Ah, he thinks, disappointment mingling with relief. That explains it. He's the outsider, the one who comes from another state.
It's the year an October hurricane rides unseasonably warm waters a hundred miles upriver, flooding towns, washing out railroad tracks and destroying crops. Several people drown, and a larger number die when the resulting power outages and traffic jams prevent them from receiving the medical attention they require. Dave and Leslie's house is significantly damaged, the windows blasted out, the flowerbed annihilated, the furniture waterlogged, though they are fortunate enough to get an insurance payout that lets them raze the wreckage and build another.
They are also fortunate enough to be relatively far away when the storm hits. Way out on Interstate 80 in western Pennsylvania, they inch forward, surrounded by miserable-looking families in cars and SUVs and trucks and minivans. They are bound for the Chicago suburbs, where they'll stay with Leslie's parents until the authorities deem it safe to return. The storm is bigger than any Dave has seen. It covers the sky even here, and they only emerged from the outermost belt of rain half an hour ago.
Leslie is driving. It makes sense that someone with both arms would do it, especially in an emergency. She insisted, just as she insisted Dave remove his robotic arm to keep it from being damaged in the torrential rains they faced at home. They have good insurance, but the device still incurred heavy out-of-pocket costs, and though its most sensitive electronics are protected by waterproof seals, it's best not to take chances. He's wearing his rubber prosthetic—an unwieldy but comforting extension of the nub medical professionals call his residual limb—for the appearance of normalcy, or least that's what he tells himself. Leslie isn't fooled for a second, and Maurice accepted the change in his father's body as if amputations were common. He looks at the man driving the minivan beside them, a little ashamed to be sitting shotgun. He knows this probably makes him a sexist, though that amuses him a little in light of everything else he's become. He is happy with his current medication. It leaves him drowsy, but he hasn't had an inflammation attack since the last adjustment, and he can't help but feel like he has his health back. Of course, it's all relative.
He's gotten good with his remaining hand. He uses his phone to tune in to news from New York City, which describes the destruction in their north Jersey suburb. The anchor interviews a scientist who studies hurricanes and other oceanic storms.
"This is new," the anchor says. "I've been living here my whole life, and, well, I don't want to age myself, but let's just say this hasn't happened in almost half a century."
"That's not accurate," the scientist replies in his needly voice. "Just seven years ago Hurricane Bernard struck the city as a tropical depression and flooded the valley to the north."
"Wait a second," the anchor cuts in peevishly. "That was a splash in the face next to this."
Is the anchor doing a bit or being candid? Dave looks over at his wife for her reaction, but her chin sags like she might vomit. She squeezes the steering wheel and inhales mightily.
"Perhaps that's true," the scientist says quickly, "but there was a far more damaging hurricane in the region in 1912. And there were other such storms throughout the nineteenth century. We like to think of this region as unlikely to be affected by hurricanes, but it's simply not the case."
"Well, I guess you learn something every day," the anchor says in a satisfied-sounding voice. "It's easy to get caught up in the present and lose sight of the big picture. We could all use a history lesson now and then."
The segment ends.
Leslie glares at the radio. "What the shit was that?"
He wants to do something, to say words that make all this better. Looking over his shoulder, he finds Maurice engrossed in his tablet's touchscreen game. Normally the sight of the addictive device makes Dave anxious, but now he's glad it's there. He guesses every generation of parents has a love-hate relationship with some new technology.
A weather map shows the hurricane has moved north of their town, and on social media he sees pictures of the flooding. There are no streets; the yards are gone. In one image he can just make out a roof. He is able to stop himself from crying until he shows Leslie and she bursts into tears.
"It's the end of the world, isn't it?" she says.
"It only feels that way." He runs a finger down the prosthetic arm, thinking of flood stories in the Bible and mythology. "There are people in the world who face this on a regular basis. We're just like them."
Leslie looks at him fiercely. "Fuck that," she says. "You sound like the jackass on the radio."
Dave blushes, angry and hurt. He's said the wrong thing, and Leslie resents him for it. Worse, he resents her for resenting him. She is a shallow person, he thinks. These words have been floating into his head more and more often. He tries to recall when it started, but he can't be sure. Maybe it began with his medical issues. Then again, maybe it was always there. She has long regarded him as a little slow. The difference is she used to think it was cute.
But that's all beside the point. When the fighting started doesn't matter. What matters is that it's happening. It matters because they love each other and have responsibilities. It matters because of Maurice. It matters because Leslie is pregnant with their second child, a daughter whose name they disagree on.
Dave finds himself looking into the dark field of the Tomorrow interface. "What's going on?" he says. "Why are we stopping? We're not there yet."
Safety protocol, the interface says. Would you like me to proceed? I can perform this function.
After the delivery, the hospital sends Delia to the NICU. Something is wrong with her heart, and the doctors are doing everything they can to get the little organ to cooperate, but it will never function like a healthy one.
"It's congenital," the pediatric cardiologist says. She has the kindest face Dave thinks he's ever seen. An occupational necessity? he wonders. "Let me be clear. It's not something you could have prevented."
Dave nods at this news, but Leslie refuses to accept it. She stares at the doctor hollowly, groggy with postpartum exhaustion. The birth was difficult, and she's swollen and tender. Strands of her dark hair are pasted to her face.
"There is no history of heart defects in my family," she says with fury that scares Dave a little. He has never seen her like this. "Not in my husband's family, either. Someone must have made a mistake along the line. Someone or something. Maybe it was my husband's disease. They amputated too late. He almost died. I know it's in your charts. He still gets sick sometimes."
The doctor's smile is infinitely wise and sad. "There's no known linkage. I'm very sorry. Neither of you is to blame."
Leslie shakes her head slowly. "I know how to do research," she says. "I've read the studies. There's a lot that needs to be explored. There are vaccines, food additives, pesticides. There are contaminants in the water. We're walking through a literal maze of poisons. A fucking thicket."
"The world can be terrifying," the woman says softly. She is the first person Leslie has allowed to hold her hand since the revelations about Delia's heart. "You have my utmost sympathy. The unfairness is crushing."
It's a heavy day. For once, Dave is glad that Maurice has joined the Scouts. This new organization is a bit macho for his taste, a bit nationalistic, a bit promilitary. It's his imagination, most likely, but Dave gets the feeling that the Scout sergeant and the older boys look at him with contempt and might even joke privately about his prosthetic. He gets the feeling they think he's somehow inferior, and he worries the Scout sergeant imposes a frightening politics on his "troops." But what is he supposed to do? Bring Maurice into these impossible discussions about Delia's health? The boy loves camp, the archery and the outdoor challenges. It's good for him to be in the woods, learning to cooperate with others. Besides, wasn't Dave exposed to all kinds of toxic masculinity when he was growing up? His uncles and cousins are racist joke machines, yet he turned out fine.
They take the baby out of the hospital. The city rises around them, thunderous with street noise. Leslie holds the swaddled baby close, refusing to look him in the eye. Staring at the robotic arm, she tells him to bring around the van they left in the parking garage.
Dave knows she dislikes it here, on the crowded sidewalks, among sounds that go on forever, and he looks down the block. A homeless man stands on the corner, shouting aggressively at passing cars. "Are you going to be okay alone?" he says. "Are you sure?"
Now she meets his gaze as she might the eyes of a stranger in a supermarket. "I was okay all those years before I met you, wasn't I?"
He finds himself in the dark. "Why are we stopping?"
Your pain index exceeds the default threshold, the interface tells him. This is an automatic message.
"There's more," he says. "Keep going."
I can perform this function.
It is not easy dating again. He's no longer young, and he struggles to parse the current trends. The women he meets are eager and happy to spend time with him, at least at first, but they are plainly racked with guilt and hang-ups of their own. He sees how they look at the robotic arm, hears the anxiety behind their questions about his medication. It's not the prosthesis or the pills that rattles them, he thinks, but the specter of old age and infirmity, the reminder of mortality just as they are trying to start over. Naturally, there remains the question of romantic chemistry.
One woman he falls in love with right away. It's torture, gazing across the table as she smiles sadly and plots her escape. She is sorry, her wonderful face tells him, but she is not ready for this. She waves over a waiter and orders a second margarita.
"Might as well make a night of it," she says, her hair falling over her eyes. "Tell me about your ex and your kids. Give me the whole fucking rundown."
He laughs. This is freedom, he supposes, with a horrible sense of having wasted decades. He takes a huge drink of his own margarita—he uses the robotic arm, winking as he does, which makes her laugh—and tells her Leslie left him years ago, after becoming convinced government scientists were to blame for Delia's heart condition. How she met Lou, a chiropractor with similar beliefs, and how they now live in rural Florida, in a concrete house with its own electrical grid and water supply. They regard themselves as having left society, though they still go out for groceries, gas, and, of course, ammunition. Maurice lives with them most of the year. It's the boy's choice. He owns an assortment of guns and altered American flags, and he participates in maneuvers with a militia group in the surrounding swamplands.
"Wow," the woman tells him, resting her chin on her hand. "I don't get a right wing vibe off of you at all."
Dave grins. "I hope not. That's my son and his mother. I'm not sure what happened there. I guess you can live with people and not really know who they are. That's an old story, right?"
"What about your daughter?"
He hesitates. He rarely gets personal right away and never talks about the person he loves most, but he can sense he's going to tell this woman about Delia, even though they'll only spend this one night together. He knows he'll boast about his brilliant eleven-year-old, the science whiz who lives with him and likes to look at the night sky through her high-powered telescope with her adorable nerdy friends. He'll tell her about his child's heart condition and her internal pacemaker, how he and Delia joke that they are two cyborgs living together in the twenty-first century, a pair of regular Jetsons, and that these jokes are a secret source of reassurance and happiness. He takes a drink and holds the liquor on his tongue until the tastebuds cloud over, aware that after he confides these things, this woman will never call him again, leaving him feeling he's betrayed the most important person in the world.
When he finds himself in the darkness again, he's ready. "Keep going, yes. Yes, I would like you to perform this function."
All this time the weather has been getting hotter. Maurice knows it as well as anyone. The man works along the border, armed with a high-powered rifle and driving a government vehicle. His job is to round up undocumented border-crossers and take them to a holding facility. Now and then he sends a photograph from his phone to prove to Dave and Leslie just what dangerous people these are. It's his way of pushing back against what he calls the liberal agenda, the globalist narrative, and the great hoax, by which he means the countless news reports and footage of the concentration camps along the border where families are being held in squalid and sometimes deadly conditions.
He sends an image of three filthy young men in t-shirts and jeans. They sit on a dusty roadside in the desert, handcuffed and looking unhappily away from the photographer, whom Dave supposes is his son. Out in the road, beyond their reach, a uniformed officer stands guard over the small heap of firearms, ammunition, and pouches of drugs these youths were transporting. The officer's face is red and slick with sweat.
Leslie's text response is almost immediate. THUGS! THANK YOU FOR PROTECTING OUR BORDERS SON! BLESSINGS!
Maurice does not reply to his mother's texts. He almost never sends anything in writing, only photos of what's going on around him. If pressed to write something, he produces a one-word reply, an internet acronym, or an emoji.
Dave refrains from texting back. He knows this message's recipients were chosen to leave him outnumbered, just as he knows Maurice would deny this and say he's simply letting his "people" know what he is doing, that Delia wouldn't want to hear from him anyway. That he only wants to make Dave and Leslie proud. That he, Maurice—though he wouldn't come out and say it—is the real victim here.
Dave has fallen for this setup in the past, with the predictable outcome that Leslie sends cruel and paranoid messages for the next hour, calling him a Nazi and saying he brainwashed their daughter. It is too painful and stupid to go through again, though he's tempted to point out that the three handcuffed men in the picture are clearly very poor, little more than teenagers, and that they would not stand out on any US street. In comparison to the heavily armed man looming over their seized contraband, they appear frail.
He calls Delia instead. Talking to his daughter always cheers him up. She works in the same state as Maurice, as it happens, though she has nothing to do with her older brother or mother and is reluctant to even discuss them. She is a government scientist who analyzes particles from cosmic rays that reach Earth from distant galaxies. This work is difficult for Dave to comprehend, but Delia does her best to simplify it for him, and he appreciates this. She is single and, he suspects, lonely, but she seems committed to living alone until she finds the perfect mate.
"Your brother sent me another photo."
"Gross," she says. "I'm sorry he tortures you. Mom, too. You could cut them off, you know. Then you wouldn't have to bother me at work. Though I'm starting to think that's why you keep in touch with them. To have excuses to bother me. Which I guess is acceptable. But you don't really need an excuse, Dad."
He sighs, thinking of the young men in the road and the countless others in fenced camps. "Those poor kids in the photo," he says. "I guess they have no choice."
"It's genocide," she says. "It's just beginning. It's going to get much worse."
Dave doubts this. "Things always seem to be getting worse," he says. "The end always seems just around the corner. But it never is."
"The world is disappearing," she says. "It's accelerating. We have the evidence."
He tries to change direction, to keep things lighthearted. "Anything out in the skies? Any new planets for us to move to?"
She groans, hates being patronized. "The problem is that the world we live in, the human world, is largely imaginary," she says. "It's an extremely bad copy of the underlying concreteness, but we don't appreciate that. We treat the bad copy like the thing itself. And almost everything we imagine is based on that bad copy, so what we call our ideas or dreams are even worse copies of the extremely bad copy we're all working from. It's a built-in flaw, and it's fine for living in the woods or what have you. But it lets people believe in fantasies, like the one where we could just pack up Earth and move to some other planet."
Dave is quiet for a moment. He doesn't understand what she's told him, not exactly. Finally he decides to say something he thinks sounds smart. He tells her that every generation believes it is facing the apocalypse.
"Those stories are about the survivors," she says. "I'm talking about something else."
One day the news is full of reports about extraterrestrials. They've always been here, the news people say. Dave thinks this is a big deal, but his coworkers shrug it off, saying they knew as much, deep down. Dave is confused. The evidence remains spotty, a few fuzzy films and photographs, recordings so choked with feedback he can't make sense of them and must rely on transcripts compiled by strangers. He still has no idea what these creatures from outer space are supposed to look or sound like. He has no idea how big they are, or what kinds of technology they possess. Are they, like him, enhanced by machines? Or are the visitors all robot—machine emissaries? He wants to be skeptical but feels he is flirting with paranoia. When he calls Leslie against his better judgment, she laughs.
"Of course there are aliens," she says. "Of course you believe now that it's in the mainstream media. You lemming."
There is no point in talking to Maurice about this, and he fears asking Delia, who's surely thought more about the matter than most people. The fact that she's never mentioned space aliens should tell him all he needs to know. Still, he calls.
She answers, but she's preoccupied with a current project. It's hard to get an answer out of her that isn't tinged with irony. Finally, she says, "Dad, there are so many things you'll never be sure of. Like the existence of God. You've never lost sleep over that, have you?"
"No," he admits. She's right. He has long since made peace with the unknowable. Yet this is different, he thinks. There are news articles. Shouldn't the evidence be clearer?
Delia sighs as if they have been arguing about this for years, a signal she's reached the end of her rope with the topic. "Aren't you the person who told me I shouldn't believe everything I read?"
In the end, he hangs up disappointed. He has gained nothing from his search for the truth, not even a connection with is daughter, and while this isn't the first time she's dismissed him, something about this conversation feels especially defeating.
His sickness comes and goes. Some days he can't get out of bed. More and more, he's unable to do what's required at work. He asks for a transfer to a less demanding, lower paying, largely ignored office. The request is granted at once, and at the end of the week he boxes up his supplies and personal effects and carts them to a subterranean cubicle in a room occupied by other aging men and women who sit bent at their machines, typing away. In the flickering fluorescent light, their faces look slightly monstrous, which unnerves him. He wishes he'd known about the fluorescent lighting, which he's always detested. He thinks it the one kind of light that is in fact a disguised type of darkness. But now it is too late to go back. He glimpsed his young replacement moving in when he retrieved his last box. A charismatic woman fresh from one of the good universities, she moved with an excitement he has not felt in years. He knows he could not compete with her. He sits at his desk and recalls how, when he made small talk with her, she blushed and stammered and avoided looking at his robotic arm, eager for him to leave. He vaguely remembers being on the other side of such an encounter long ago, when he was just out of school, remembers the pain he felt on behalf of the old-timer he'd dislodged, and also his resistance to feeling it, which is why the memory is so fragile and murky now. He gets caught on this thought about memory, and he sits at his new desk, face frozen in a grimace, sensing a resonating significance he cannot articulate.
Sometimes he thinks he slipped from one dimension into another. He wonders if other worlds exist, parallel to this one, and whether he's gotten lost among them. He suspects this is possible, even commonplace, and the more he considers it, the more persuasive the explanation becomes, and the less certain he feels of anything else. But no, his arm is proof that he is anchored in this world. Then again, maybe there exists an infinite number of worlds in which a man named Dave who is basically him has a robotic arm. He can only think about this so long before his thoughts turn to mush. The problem is he's been alive too long. He's had too many thoughts.
"Maybe that's it," he says to himself, watching news coverage of a fire that has engulfed the remaining habitable land in eastern Australia. Here is a woman saying that the people have escaped their homes, but nothing else will survive this unprecedented inferno. "It's not the world that changes. It's just you."
"No," he tells the interface, finding himself back in the darkness. "That's not it. There's more. Go on."
His stint in the subterranean office is short-lived. There comes a morning he cannot walk. His feet and joints are too swollen to rotate or bend, and everything under the skin sears constantly, as if it's burning away. The ambulance comes and carts him to a hospital, where he's moved from floor to floor before being put into a room where the doctors and nurses say they expect him to mount a partial recovery. Delia is there throughout, exhausted but tough, giving directions to apathetic nurses, arguing with specialists, shouting at the people in billing, whom she calls motherfucking criminals. She no longer works for the government. She has joined an activist group Dave has always associated with environmental terrorism, though she tells him those characterizations are overblown and he shouldn't believe what people say about things they don't understand.
Maurice arrives with his family. He comes in uniform, wearing his gun. He has grown quite thick, and he treats his body like a force of nature, knocking people out of the way when they don't move for him. He is absolutely unapologetic. His hair cut into a flat top, he stands over Dave without expression. His two sons stand at his sides. They, too, have flat tops, and they wear shirts that declare their support for the Second Amendment.
"They let you in with a gun?" Delia says.
Maurice stares at the younger sister he knows is far smarter. No dummy himself, he has learned to never engage on her terms. "Some people feel safer with a sworn officer around."
She closes her eyes in exhaustion. "You disgust me."
He blinks and replies immediately. "You disgust me. You and all the people like you. It's you extremists who are ruining this country."
Delia opens her eyes and looks down at Dave. "Sorry, Daddy. I can't be around him. It's just as well. Mom and her crazies are coming tonight, so you can have these freaks all in one dose. The nurses have my number."
Dave is too tired to speak. He smiles a little for her. He wants her to know he still believes in her. That there is nobody else.
Leslie and her second husband arrive with their oldest daughter, a seventeen-year-old girl in camo shorts and a tummy shirt. The first thing she does is locate the remote and to turn on the television high up on the wall. She finds a reality program in which married women wearing lots of makeup drink cocktails and complain about how the world has slighted them. She then looks at Maurice's boys and sighs with boredom, and the boys, who are thirteen and fourteen, look back in a worshipful silence. The three of them leave, the girl first, the two boys a moment later, when they have secured Maurice's stern permission to go.
Dave endures the blaring television while his ex-wife and his son converse with one another's spouses and avoid speaking to each other. Leslie talks exuberantly about how living off the grid, as she puts it, has contributed to her health and good figure.
"Look at us," she says to Maurice's meekly nodding wife. Her face and arms are dark and leathery. "Strong as bulls! We don't need any of the poison they have in here. They're making him sicker with drugs when they ought to wheel him out into the daylight and treat him with herbs. You can't trust these people."
Over by the wall, Maurice eavesdrops, smirking faintly. He has always taken a pleasure in observing his mother make a fool of herself, though he stopped commenting on it in high school. He is an emotional black box, laughing only occasionally, and unexpectedly, when nothing seems funny. He leans on the wall, big arms crossed, nodding as his stepfather, Lou, brags about hunting invasive Nile monitor lizards with a modified semiautomatic and barbecuing the animals with their survivalist friends. Maurice clearly doesn't care what the gray ponytailed man has to say. He understands Leslie is the one in charge here and that she simply expects him, the oldest child, to be present. Of everyone in this room, he is the person Dave understands least.
Leslie eventually tires of talking at Maurice's mute wife. She turns on her heel and addresses Dave, raising her voice unnecessarily.
"I can't tell you how much it kills us all to see you like this. But you brought it on yourself. You should have cashed out years ago. You should have stopped taking all that junk medicine while you had a chance. You should have thrown that arm in the ocean. Now the pharmaceutical companies and quacks have your money, and there's nothing Maurice or I can do about it."
At the sound of his name, Maurice turns to the window overlooking the parking lot, as if to distance himself from his mother's valediction.
"We talked about it, and we all agree. Delia's in the best position to nurse you. She doesn't even have a real job anymore. She doesn't have husband or boyfriend or, who knows, girlfriend. . . ."
Lou bends over and laughs into his fist.
Leslie grins, pleased with his reaction. "I wouldn't be surprised," she says. "But she's made her bed and she can sleep in it. I just want you to know we all love you, Dave. Always have and always will."
Dave is having difficulty following this speech, and now he sees, with a sense approaching shock, that his ex-wife, whom he hasn't seen in years and wishes would go away now, is sniffing forcefully, as if to draw up tears from some deep reservoir of feeling for him.
"We came up here to say goodbye," she tells him. "I really wish it could have been different. But this was God's plan."
Contrary to what the doctors predict, he does not recover. When his health deteriorates to the point where he must choose, he has his consciousness moved into a computer network. It's what everyone seems to be doing, including people he knows. The program is called Tomorrow, and the technology requires keeping his body on life support while the mind engages in what's billed as a practically unlimited number of virtual contexts. It's a big deal, a modern wonder, and even Delia, who tends to roll her eyes at these things, says he might as well try it.
"You could always opt out," she says, using the company's euphemistic language, though Dave doesn't blame her. How else is his little girl supposed to talk to her dad about this stuff? She frowns at the slick brochure's page of dense fine print. She's doing her best to be strong, trying to convince herself this isn't the end. "Everybody says it's basically the new retirement, only better. Because you can imagine whatever you, you know"—here she wrinkles her nose in discomfort—"you want."
It's true. It is all of that—a second, virtual life. Through Tomorrow's programming, Dave is finally healed. He has both his arms; he is no longer sick; he is young and stronger than he ever was. He's reunited with people he hasn't thought about in years, and he meets new people in various virtual worlds. On beaches and mountaintops and sumptuous yachts, in castles and night clubs and concert halls and countless bedrooms. He has a wide range of virtual experiences, many of them sexual, especially at first. Through these experiences he learns things about others, and he learns things about his own desires, though none of these discoveries is terribly surprising. After all, he's been alive more than seventy years. He's had many thoughts, and he has rarely been afraid of them. When he hears that Leslie and Lou have joined Tomorrow, too, he's amused. It was only a matter of time, he thinks, but he has nobody to enjoy the moment with. In this world, there's nothing lamer than sharing one's petty resentments. Anyway, it's beside the point. By now, he and other First Generation Tomorrow Users have moved on from rampant virtual sex in all its possible configurations, and he has no contact with his ex-wife or her husband. He supposes they're probably still conspiracy theorists. The Tomorrow technology has a tendency to bolster, rather than correct, such fantastical frames of mind.
He's well aware of that same community in here. It has captured many he knows, inspiring even strongminded people with a hopeful spirituality. There is talk of going full Tomorrow, freeing consciousness to exist in the machine with no monitoring, no guidance, though some worry about the finitude of the resources that keep the machines going. Someone proposes the idea of further detachment, the concept that the spirit might be freed from hardware altogether. It's at this point that Dave loses interest. These hopes are no different from those of his devoutly religious grandparents.
By and by, he comes to see Tomorrow in a new light. It's a scam, he thinks, a new ploy for bleeding old people of their money. He supposes this should have been obvious to him a while ago. Maybe it would have been, had he not still hungered for experience.
Others he knows are figuring it out more and more. They just disappear. Some say goodbye before dropping out, but many don't bother. He understands. What exactly are you supposed to say? There's always an awkward moment, just before you disconnect.
What Dave does know is he's ready. And he'd like to be out of here before Maurice shows up.
He finds himself back in the interface. There is nothing more to remember, nothing he hasn't revisited so many times it would be boring to see it again now. His blissful yet vague childhood. His aimless adolescence. All the time he wasted, the years of existence he frittered away unthinkingly. Of course, he had no compelling alternative.
He does not weep. He's too bored to be sad. All the same, he is afraid, unsure about what will happen when he dies. That never goes away, though he knows it could be no worse than the oblivion beyond the deepest sleep he can imagine.
"Send a message to Delia," he says. "Let her know I've decided to opt out. I would like you to proceed."
The interface confirms the message has been sent with a whooshing sound.
He waits then, confident she'll respond quickly and come to his bedside. Still, he feels anxious, flustered. He wants to have something to tell her, something wise for her to take away. You were right, he could say. The apocalypse is always personal. The end of the world is something else. I missed you.
A soft bell notifies him a message has arrived. I'm here, Daddy.
He hesitates, wondering what emergence will be like. Will he be coherent? Probably, but maybe not. He is aware of the risks. They are always there. Nor can he imagine how things will appear out there, how much Delia will have aged, or what qualities of the current year will prove taken for granted by those who still keep track of time and events. But what is the alternative? To wait longer, knowing nothing will happen, for some eventual then that will feel the same as this now?
"I would like to log out," he says. "I would like to terminate my account."
Maybe, he thinks, it will be like being born. Like surfacing for air after too long underwater. It's a nice idea. But what comforts him is the presence of this person without whom he cannot rightly imagine his own life. Knowing she feels the same way. The knowledge that they existed, against all odds, and that they do. That's it, the thing he's been trying to think to say.
I can perform this function, the interface tells him. Would you like me to proceed?