The Answers Page 11

  So she did, crying but keeping quiet, not wanting him to worry.

  How was it that he seemed so calm? Hadn’t he been worried about her? Hadn’t he been afraid? Or perhaps, she thought, he was swallowing his fear to be steady for her, that his love had manifested not in mania but in solidity, that this was the way they balanced each other. This moment, this horrible moment, had made them see, she thought, how necessary they were for each other. She stood wrapped in a towel, feeling so changed and important.

  Kurt gave her a change of clothes, jean shorts and a T-shirt that she’d left at his place that Kurt had put by the door for the last couple weeks, hoping she would take them home. He handled her toxic, dusty clothes with dish gloves, sealing them in plastic bags and disinfecting everything they’d touched.

  This is all outside of our control, he said as Alexi clutched on to him, her hair wet, eyes red.

  Her outsize emotions bothered him. The few people she knew in the city—her roommate and her two other real friends—had been accounted for. She didn’t know anyone who worked in the Financial District. She hadn’t personally lost anything. This wasn’t her tragedy. She was reacting too much like a certain kind of actress would, taking any opportunity as a chance to perform.

  They didn’t speak much for the rest of the afternoon or night, just listened for a while to a radio that worked, turning it off to have athletic, wordless sex to which they each ascribed a different meaning.

  Weeks later, when she asked him what he had been thinking of that day, she was unnerved (then upset, then repulsed) by what he said. It wasn’t Alexi’s safety or his safety or even his friends’ safety (and did he even have any friends?) and wasn’t even the staggering heaps of human life wasted only blocks from his luxury west SoHo loft. No. He confessed to Alexi that he thought of how the funding for The Walk would probably fall through now—and, yes, Kurt said, he realized she might think this was shallow or detached, and he realized that he wasn’t experiencing the attack in the emotionally penetrable way that she was, not that there was anything wrong with that, per se, but there really sort of was, if you thought about it, but listen, he told her as she began to sob, will you just fucking listen to what I’m saying for once instead of obsessing over your own emotional reality? Huh? For once? Can you do that for me?

  The way his beautiful face went hard—eyes molted with his young-man beliefs—this would be the image Alexi kept with her long after she left him. Maybe his heart had atrophied after being so publicly beloved, and maybe that’s why he seemed unmoved by the shrines to the lost, the faded, photocopied portraits of the dead on every street corner—Have you seen this person?—a city of unashamed eye contact, millions of people now reverent with each other, seeing the holy in each other, and this man, this little monster, was worried about his fucking production schedule.

  Everyone out there right now, he said, all the volunteers and firefighters and everyone having their big come-to-Jesus, everyone crying over this admittedly truly horrible and terrifying thing—listen—no, listen!

  She tamped down her tears to hear the exact ways in which he was terrible.

  You may think you’re crying because all those people died and it’s tragic, but you’re still crying for yourself. You’re crying because you know it could have been you. You’re crying because life is not special and everyone dies and the complexity of your “self” is still going to vanish someday and there’s no such thing as justice.

  Her tears had stopped.

  No one can cry for someone else.

  She examined his face as if he were an object.

  I’m not prone to ecstatic displays of emotion to get attention, but I still feel things. I just organize that experience in a different way. I process it logically.

  It saddened her that this was the man she had chosen to sleep with for a whole summer into autumn, a man so stingy with himself that he refused to witness another’s pain.

  When I realized what had happened, I thought, one, human life is temporary; and two, the only way I can cope with this fact is making something that outlives me; and three, the film I have been developing for the last three years is probably going to get delayed yet again if there are problems with funding; and four, yes, I could be so much as a pile of dust tomorrow and that’s sad; and five, the only way that I can deal with that fact is by working, that I could make something bigger than me, something that has an effect on other people.

  She felt nauseous as she considered the many ounces of him that she had sucked into her body. What was he really made of?

  Do you understand what I’m saying? Or do you just want to think I’m a bad guy because I don’t cry the way you do?

  (She remembered him sipping a goblet of red wine in his living room the night of the attacks, after they’d had what she thought was emotionally potent sex. He was enjoying the most expensive bottle he had, alone, because Alexi was on a diet for a role, so he sat in the living room reading a novel—a fucking novel!—while she stayed in bed, the dust on the windows filtering the light all gauzy, her head swimming in the sincere enormity of the present, distantly wondering why he had gotten out of bed without explanation, why he didn’t answer when she asked where he was going, why he wasn’t in bed with her, warm at her side.)

  I’m a different fucking person from you. I see the world differently, I process emotion differently. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You just need to grow up and accept it.

  (He had returned to bed that night with lips edged and breath heavy with Cabernet, and though Alexi’s face was swollen red and salt-gritty from tears flowing, drying, and flowing again, he made no move to comfort her, just turned out the light and was snoring in minutes.)

  I don’t need to become more like you. Hell, you probably need to be less like the sort of person you are.

  That was the last thing he ever said to her. He had trouble getting to sleep after she left mid-argument, and not because his call had gone straight to voice mail and not because she had tried to make him feel coldhearted, and not because he missed her, because he didn’t, because he enjoyed being alone, really enjoyed it, and he didn’t lie awake that night for two hours because of the World Trade Center, and when he later woke up crying, he knew it wasn’t sadness for life lost or the victims’ families or the bravery of people who risked their own insignificant lives for the insignificant lives of others. No. He must have just been crying for himself. Simple anxiety. He crossed his arms, felt his biceps, his chest, his belly, moved his hands down to his thighs. He was here. He didn’t need to cry for himself. He didn’t need to cry at all, he thought, and he stopped, fell asleep, slept until noon.

  * * *

  The traffic had finally loosened but Kurt hadn’t noticed, had been completely folded into this memory. The car was crossing the bridge when he opened his eyes, night-black river below, people walking along the lamplit waterfront in pairs, staring at each other or at the skyline, all of it so much more fragile than it seemed, everyone on the edge of oblivion, as usual. He watched the bridge beams rush by outside the window and thought about something he read once about some tiny muscles in the human face that send signals to other brains while bypassing a person’s awareness, skipping the eyes, going straight to their core. An unknown sonar, some language none realized they were speaking, an honest whisper. He wondered what his face may have said to her.

  7

  The Mundanity Girlfriend’s handbook explained all the ways she should be silent, how crucial her silence was, how she shouldn’t mistake her work for nothing—Like sleep for life, mundane company is an essential part of any successful pair bond, even beneficial to one’s health. It encourages the body into metabolic efficiency, lowers the heart rate, strengthens the immune system, allows damaged cells to regenerate more quickly. Your work as the Mundanity Girlfriend is an essential first step to understanding why and how certain neural activities occur when people do nothing together.

  The handbook told the Mundanity Girlfriend wh
at parts of the loft were off-limits, the positions she should or should not hold on a chaise or sofa or armchair, how many times per hour she was allowed to move. She was allowed to read a magazine or book, but never a screen. She was allowed to stare absently out a window in a daze for up to three minutes at a time as long as she kept her expression neutral, placid—never disdainful or bored. She was not to nap or crack her knuckles or bite her nails. She was to do everything she could to conceal a yawn.

  If Kurt enters the room, you will look in his direction, but not at his eyes. You will smile, slightly, as if you are thinking about something else. You should remain occupied by your chosen activity. You should not think of Kurt or let any of your attention settle on where he is in the room.

  Lying there at her first session, Poppy daydreamed of those early months with Sam—how he’d gone to Ohio for two weeks of work and instead of talking or texting each other the trivialities of their days, they decided to communicate entirely in videos—two minutes, four minutes—of themselves doing almost nothing. In hers she was going about her life as usual—morning coffee, blow-drying her hair, practicing headstands in the living room—while in his he was usually reading in the beige nonspace of his room at the Days Inn—a book, a newspaper, a spiral-bound report on the efficiency of his company’s data management software. She watched each one over and over, then let them play in a loop as she did something else, the sound track of his sighs, turned pages, a cough, or a sneeze keeping her company. She was sure no one had ever been more in love than they were in those weeks, consumed by such longing, wanting to just be alive beside each other.

  The years that followed were often quiet, pleasantly at first, then less so—silent train rides to see his mother up in Boston, waiting in line for one thing or another, pitch-dark nights and dim mornings spent trying to fall asleep or wake up, overcast afternoons when it seemed possible the whole world had run out of things to say. Toward the end they had fewer slow dinners, fewer nights talking through the dark, more films and plays where they could quietly forget each other in a crowd. Still, when she overheard him taking a shower—the sound of water breaking against his body as he hummed or sang low—she felt the most pleasurable kind of loneliness, even toward the end. It was possible, Poppy realized, daydreaming during her first Relational Experiment, that she had loved Sam the best in his silence, as his life went and carried her with it, as her life took him, too. She did not miss his voice, which, in the end, carried so much abuse, and she did not miss his body, which had a few times been used against her, and she did not miss the history or rituals they had created, the mythology all lovers write, but she did miss the comfort of his life drifting beside hers. She missed his nothing. It had felt like something.

  Kurt had been in Poppy’s peripheral all morning, staring out one of the large windows at the bridges and seeing himself from the outside, seeing himself being so casually content while Poppy was over there, being so casually content. He wondered if his self-awareness would complicate the data from the sensors, though he didn’t completely understand what they were measuring. Little, it seemed, had really been explained during the presentations the Research Division had given Kurt and Matheson weeks ago about their plan for the GX, or perhaps he hadn’t been listening as closely as he could have.

  Two of the researchers had led the presentation on how the sensors worked. Kurt had been sure these two men were twins, though they denied it. Still—they were nearly identical, same height, same haircut, even had the same glasses. It’s just the glasses, one of them said, and the other removed his frames as if this would prove something, though it did not.

  During their demonstration about the sensors, one of the not-twins had worn a set of them, while the other explained the various charts and graphs the data had begun to produce: information about the not-twin’s mood, the concentration of various hormones and neurotransmitters in his blood, nervous system activity patterns, heart and respiratory rate, something called vagal tone, which is important to romantic love for some reason, skin conductivity (whatever that is), and other things, though Kurt stopped listening, just nodded and squinted at the numbers and charts on the screen, as if he might have been able to give them some great insight about what he saw.

  So, this is how you’ll be able to tell, Kurt said, you know, what’s … happening … internally … during the Relational Experiments?

  The not-twins said Yes in unison. A machine clicked and another beeped, then a woman’s voice rose from the back of the room.

  Feelings and emotions are not mysterious. They are merely attempts to respond rationally to an uncertain world, a series of neurochemical reactions that can be analyzed and traced back to their origins.

  The not-twin who wasn’t wearing the sensors spoke up, too—Though we do acknowledge that this is an inexact science, measuring people’s feelings and moods.

  Yes. We do acknowledge that, the woman in the back said.

  But our methods are becoming more exact all the time, the sensored not-twin said.

  Yes, all the time, the other not-twin said.

  A human system merely responds to the data it is given and creates a set of data as an answer to that data, the woman said. And the more deeply we can understand these matrices of information, the better we will be able to diagnose and treat medical, psychological, and even interpersonal problems.

  More was said but Kurt wasn’t quite listening anymore, just looking at the Research Division in their starched white lab coats, pleased with himself for assembling these people to make the world nicer. The other members of the Research Division said nothing for the hour-long presentation; they did not even seem to move in their chairs scattered around the edge of the office. Some, it seemed, could have been sleeping with their eyes open. They were a strange lot, the Research Division—but he’d been assured they were the best.

  Kurt wasn’t a scientist and would be the first to admit that, but wasn’t it sometimes the case in history that those who were not technically scientists—those who were, instead, visionaries, let’s say—wasn’t it sometimes the case that these visionaries predicted a scientific fact centuries before these facts could be scientifically proven? He couldn’t remember exactly who, but there had been someone, not da Vinci but someone like da Vinci, someone of that era, some self-taught philosopher who had made an accurate prediction of something like DNA or the Internet. Some guy who was, like, Hey, you know what? Someone with a hunch. Anyway, Kurt wasn’t saying—to himself or to anyone else—that he was da Vinci or anything, but he did have this hunch that people had been missing some key element of romantic love. He felt sure there was a way to decode our disorganized reactions to partnership, the way two people can make each other so tremendously happy at one point only to reach new depths of misery or boredom only years, weeks, or months later. And, yes, he had his personal reasons for wanting to put himself at the center of the study, but Yuri had suggested he do so, said this whole thing would be particularly healing to Kurt, but what he was really trying to do was help make a discovery that would help others, deeply alter the world.

  And after years of thinking and theorizing and after months of planning and hiring and preparation—it was finally here, the first Relational Experiment held within his home. (For a while he had considered setting up a second apartment in which to run the GX, but Yuri had convinced him that having the GX in his home would be important to his healing.) He felt he was standing on a precipice, that he was witnessing himself begin what would become his legacy.

  But it was a burden, as well, to make something this large. He’d woken at four that morning, wide-awake in the blacked-out bedroom wondering if what he wanted might be impossible. He knew, in some ways, that solving love was impossible, but the wanting of impossible things, the faith that the impossible could become possible, this was where change came from—he was sure. This was the whole point.

  He shut his eyes, tried and failed to go back to sleep, his heart beating strangely in his che
st. Somehow he felt that so much depended on this day, on making sure these first in-house Relational Experiments for the GX went well, and though he had the impulse to get up and make a note, he forced himself to remain in bed, to rest up for his work.

  In a liminal state between sleeping and waking, memories of past love cued up in him, paraded by as if he were counting sheep. He’d fallen in love a few times, to various intensities, and he had seen the awful, horrible ways it could unravel—slow ends and sudden ones, that aching tapering off or a disastrous blaze. But how did he know, for sure, that any of these supposed loves had been actual love? How could a person measure this? Old love went blurry in memory, and looking back, trying to get a real count on how intensely he may have loved or whom or how many—he wasn’t sure he could put anyone on that list.

  He and Christy, his last real relationship, they’d had a nice few months together—steady and pleasant—but something had been missing the whole time and eventually he stopped calling her, and though he felt a little guilt over disappearing, it wasn’t even guilt, just sadness over his not even wanting to call her. On paper she’d been perfect. How was it that off paper she was something else? But Camille—the first Camille, not the second one—well, that had to have been love, at least initially. In those first weeks they believed they had cracked some unseen code, found something that had long seemed to be a myth. But after some perceived slight, she lashed out at him, ranted about how she didn’t have time for inconsistent men anymore—she really didn’t—but she wasn’t angry, she said (though she sounded furious), she was just sad, sad that she had mistaken Kurt for someone who understood himself enough to be kind.

  Something about the way she spoke was a little too rehearsed, though, as if she reached this scene with any lover, and it made him wonder if she’d been enacting a script for their entire affair. Camille had always seemed more like a character than a real person—a little too perfect, a little too precisely the sort of woman he’d imagined himself with. Maybe it had never been what it had appeared to be. Anyway that was years ago now—four, five—he wasn’t sure.