The Absolved Page 14

  It wasn’t until Rachel served her coconut-cashew rice pudding that things fell out. The sound of shattering dishes came into the kitchen. I tried to ignore it, but the smashing of two more plates followed, and then shouting. Astrid was on her chair, arms raised, howling. Rachel, to her credit, remained the model of composure.

  Astrid had gotten herself mixed up in a “pyramid scheme.” In the few minutes it took to make my espresso, she described to Rachel a doomsday scenario in which the Earth of the near future has been rendered uninhabitable. The sea boils into massive tidal waves that lay waste to everything within two thousand miles of the coast, and any land not under water would be toxic.

  No doubt Astrid and the company she works for, The Lunar Colonizers, have a plan to deliver to safety those lucky enough to have got in early. They have arranged “settler rights” to the most desirable plots of land on the moon. Astrid demanded that Rachel and I buy, at the very least, ten of these permits—an “investment opportunity that is out of this world,” Astrid insisted—which Rachel immediately rejected. Now, Astrid gone, Rachel is haranguing me for encouraging Astrid to complete her pitch.

  “After all of the atrocities my mother has committed against me over the years, how could you possibly take her side?”

  “You’re the one who invited her here.”

  “I’d a thousand times over rather be marooned on a deserted island than share another meal with that woman.”

  And now here I am at 3:00 a.m., on the couch. Unable to sleep, I read the book Taylor lent me, The Last Samurai. It’s marvelous! The writer, Helen Dewitt, is a genius. Like nothing I’ve ever read, it tells the story of a woman who flees her life in America and enrolls at Oxford. It’s her great desire to avoid the family tradition of “dreams deferred.” Later, she leaves the academy and gets pregnant by a hack travel writer. She detests this man, though, and refuses to tell her son who his father is. I like the book so much I’ve scribbled out eleven pages’ worth of impressive analysis on its character development and the thematic significance of its different symbols. I have a real knack for literary criticism, if I do say so myself. I might even write an essay and submit it to a prestigious journal. But mostly I just want to discuss the book with Taylor. Would it be crazy to call her in the middle of the night for a chat?

  Typically I’m as sound a sleeper as a bear in winter, but tonight has been truly haunted. In my dream, I enter a theater sharp as can be with Rachel, a vision in her red dress. Not since Isabella Emine in last year’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s reboot has someone looked so elegant. We take our seats near the front and are chatting as we await the show. When I kiss Rachel’s hand, she smiles and says, “Thank you, darling.”

  Then Taylor walks in, escorted by a young man, both of whom take their seat two rows in front of us. The man is tall and handsome, of sturdy build, square-jawed, and has a good coif of dark hair. Taylor, of course, is exceedingly beautiful—fresh-faced and lithe. Perhaps the man is just a friend, I think, a classmate or maybe a cousin. They’re conversing quietly. I can’t hear them, but from their body language and smiles, I can tell they’re very much enjoying each other’s company. Whenever he speaks, she laughs and touches his arm. At first it doesn’t bother me in the slightest, but the friendlier they get, the more perturbed I grow.

  At the intermission, I follow him to the bathroom and pee in the urinal beside him. I glance over to have a peek at his cock. It looks just like any other. I’m disappointed. I’d hoped it would be mangled, diseased, and puny. Afterwards, he washes his hands for the longest time. I think to myself, My God, what can my Taylor possibly see in so obsessive a man? He’ll make her life miserable with his mania and peculiar habits! Back in our seats, before the next act begins, Taylor rests her head on his shoulder.

  “Filthy bastard!” I say.

  “Excuse me?” Rachel says.

  “What’s that?”

  “Did you just say ‘filthy bastard’?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’m certain you did.”

  “You’re hearing things.”

  A long silence passes, and again I’ve forgotten about Rachel. “Keep your dirty paws off of her!” I mumble.

  “Who are you talking to?” Rachel asks.

  “I’m sorry, darling. I must’ve been thinking about work.”

  “It’s so rare we get to go out on the town. Try to enjoy yourself, won’t you?”

  This goes on until Taylor and I make eye contact as we leave the show. She smiles cruelly then pulls the man close and kisses him on the mouth. The kiss seems eternal. The universe has been entirely rearranged. The moon is something else, and the stars have vanished. I’m so weakened that I can’t even make a scene. Death would be preferable to this emptiness.

  I wake up in a panic and down glass after glass of water. It was just a dream, it means nothing. Once I dreamt that I won Wimbledon. Another time I wrestled an alligator. Another time yet I sold encyclopedias door to door. None meant a thing. I’m going to be okay!

  Upstairs, I find our bedroom a vivid recreation of Snow White’s climax, when the doomed girl eats the apple, poisoned by the queen. The walls are painted with a grand mural depicting the snowcapped peak of the hilltops surrounding the dwarves’ cabin in the woods. Our bed has been replaced by a crystal casket—transparent all over—in which Rachel is asleep. On the casket’s lid, written in golden letters, are the words, “Princess Rachel.” Somehow I’m compelled to climb inside and cuddle up to my wife. Her body is soft and warm, and, feeling me against her, she sighs, “Is that you, my prince?”

  30

  Last night Julian woke me complaining of a nightmare. The poor boy dreamt he was standing in a narrow hallway, at the end of which there were three doors labelled “Great Door #1,” “Great Door #2,” and “Great Door #3.” As he walked down the hall, a glimmer of light peeked through a crack, though not enough to reveal anything definitively. He opened each door and then stepped through Door #2, which led to a room with a roller coaster. Yet all he could think about while on the ride was what lay on the other side of the wall with the crack.

  “Dad,” he said, covered in sweat, “I’m afraid the world presents us with only an illusion of free choice while in reality we don’t even know what else is out there!”

  Helping him recover from this terror kept me up for hours.

  Now I’m lying in the backseat of my car, exhausted, reading the news on my gram, as Chloe drives me to work. It’s more of the same: Bradford has made an outlandish remark calling for a complete ban on all robots imported from Asia, while Martinez’s approval ratings are hovering around twenty percent, an all-time low for a sitting president.

  “Did you see the video of your bartender friend?” Chloe asks.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s trending number sixteen in today’s Virals.”

  I open the Virals section to find Chloe is right: a video titled “Bartender Goes Berserk Over Unpaid Fine” is number sixteen, just behind a clip called “Woman marries her OS in Las Vegas ceremony,” and just ahead of “Man Falls Off Chair and Breaks Neck while Virtually Climbing Mt. Everest.”

  The video comes from surveillance footage at the local courthouse. Lydia had gone to appeal the doubling of her fine for failing to pay her illegal public performance ticket on time. The city has recently passed an ordinance that has done away with human judges after a study proved that on average judges deliver sentences twice as harsh in the hour before lunch and the hour before the end of the day. Despite the change in procedure, the courtroom infrastructure has yet to be updated. Lydia approaches the bench, where a mannequin dressed in a judge’s robe, wig, and outfitted with a mechanical arm to swing a gavel, is presiding.

  “Your honor,” Lydia says to the mannequin, “I’ve been unable to pay the fine because my gram broke three weeks ago, and I can’t get an appointment for another two months to get it replaced. It’s unfair to punish me because the city won’t accept any form of
payment other than Hologram Transfer.”

  The mannequin’s eyes appear especially cold and black in the face of such harrowing testimony. A speaker implanted in its mouth, behind unmoving lips, responds in a flat and ominous tone.

  “There is a distinct divide between the National Healthcare System and the Department of Justice. While your circumstances are unfortunate, it is beyond the pale of the powers vested in my authority to account for the shortcomings of other governmental departments. While my intelligence recognizes the injustice of your predicament, my programming lacks the functionality to remedy it. The law states that failure to pay a fine by the scheduled due date results in the doubling of said fine. Now, would you like to pay your fine?”

  “By gram?”

  “Yes.”

  “But my gram is broken.”

  “Failure to pay your fine in the next two weeks will result in another doubling of the fine.”

  “If you won’t accept any other form of payment, can you at least help me get a quicker appointment to get my gram replaced?”

  “As I have said, there is a strict divide between the National Healthcare System and the Department of Justice.”

  “So there’s nothing that can be done?”

  “It appears not.”

  At this, Lydia dives across the bench, and with the judge’s gavel whacks its head until she is restrained by the bailiff and two other security people. Fortunately for Lydia, since AI judges are still so new to the judicial system, no legislation has yet been passed to criminalize attacks against them.

  At Anodyne that evening the line for drinks is unusually long. I take a seat at the end of the bar and wait. Lydia is moving slower than ever. She’s dropping glasses and can’t operate the beer tap or manage her bottles. It takes so long that nearly half of the customers leave. When at last she reaches me, I see the cause of her drink-slinging impediment. Her gram-finger is heavily bandaged in a crude wrapping of gauze and tape.

  “I suppose you saw the video,” she says.

  “Quite a spectacle!” I say. “I can’t say I blame you.”

  “I can’t tell you how good that felt.”

  “Let me see your hand.”

  I unwrap the dressing, wading through a quagmire of blood and puss, the symptoms, no doubt, of infection. The wound, it turns out, is the result of Lydia having removed her gram.

  “What the hell, Lydia?”

  “It’s something I should’ve done a long time ago!”

  “But how do you plan to navigate the intricacies of the modern world?”

  “Maybe I’m no longer interested.”

  I stare at her, dumbfounded. A person can’t simply openly defy society. Regardless of its folly, we must acquiesce to its zeitgeist.

  I’m broken from this stupor by Olivia waddling up. She’s as wide as a barn door, on the verge of popping at any moment.

  “Lydia,” she says, “you’re absolutely incredible!”

  “What are you doing here?” I inquire.

  “Serena says I’m ruining my life and insisted I join a mentorship program. I was so impressed with how Lydia handled the situation with the judge that I asked her to be my mentor.”

  “What about the robotic pet dogs?” I ask.

  Lydia struggles to pour Olivia a glass of seltzer water, spilling half of it on the floor. “It’s an unofficial mentorship,” she says.

  I go to the bathroom, and when I return am startled to see Lydia giving an instructional clinic on how to remove one’s gram with a kitchen knife and tweezers. A small crowd including Olivia and Karl are listening, transfixed.

  31

  I’ve sweated through my shirt this morning, walking from my parking space to the entrance of the hospital. A moment later, en route to my first patient, I slip and fall, tweaking my knee. The low-level tech who helps me up says he feels “terrible” about my accident. He spilled his drink, he says, and failed to report it. He then proceeds to direct a violence at himself that I can’t imagine he’d ever aim toward others, prattling on and on about human incompetence. A robot appears to clean the mess as I scurry away.

  I see fifteen patients before noon, none with a chance for recovery. One woman’s husband has died of a brain aneurism since the last time I saw her, a week before, yet she doesn’t seem distraught. When I offer her my condolences, her face lights up and she thanks me. I tell her she has remarkable character.

  “Old age,” she says, “gives one license to be sad, which makes it easier to be happy.”

  “The sentiment has a certain poetry to it,” I reply.

  “Doc, you always look a bit melancholy, and that’s too bad, because in youth, happiness is expected, and sadness is unforgiveable.”

  Serena has summoned me to meet in her office at lunch.

  She wants to discuss a new sexual conquest or some wild trip she has planned, I figure, perhaps a solo transatlantic sailing voyage. The year before she kayaked two hundred miles down the Amazon on a boat she made herself of kapok wood.

  But I was mistaken. I’ve never seen her so anxious. Before I can take a seat, she’s telling me that the National Healthcare Service has been studying the algorithm for her Human Life Valuation Tool, in which they see tremendous potential to revolutionize how medical care is delivered. The tool will allow them to quantify what before they could only speculate. Namely, they are pouring trillions of dollars into needless healthcare expenses for the geriatric and terminally ill. A piece of legislation has been fast-tracked through Congress and the Senate, and will be signed by Martinez today. The bill is over three-hundred pages long and full of confounding legalese, but it boils down to the National Healthcare Service’s refusal to pay further medical expenses for patients who score lower than seventy-five percent on Serena’s Human Life Valuation Tool. Serena goes on to explain that this is the right course of action for the country’s financial well-being. She makes an earnest effort to emphasize that patients aren’t simply going to be refused treatment. They can always sign up for private insurance, or if they choose, pay out-of-pocket. In her defense of the bill, she utters the phrase “skin in the game” at least eleven times, by my count. She then runs through a number of facts and figures that prove her point.

  I ask what this means for Martinez’s prospects in the election. She says she doesn’t want to talk politics with me, that we have more pressing issues. But, quickly, before moving on, she does mention something about a second piece of legislation up for consideration: a bill that will disenfranchise the elderly voters affected by the healthcare bill.

  “They have no stake in the future,” she says, “so what do they care if the country goes down the toilet paying to prolong their misery?”

  Midway through our conversation, Serena buzzes her secretary. She’s had an epiphany that requires immediate attention. Her aquascaper, she says, must visit this afternoon to change her aquarium’s theme to “City of Atlantis.”

  I knew this wasn’t the end of our talk. What Serena really wants is to say how this legislation will affect me. Seventy-six percent of the hospital system’s cancer patients are losing their coverage. We have two senior-level oncologists on staff, myself and Dr. Hines, she tells me, only one of whom can stay. The hospital’s Board of Directors wants Dr. Hines. His metrics are better, and he’s more amenable to the organization’s philosophy. This rivalry between us, in which he has almost always gotten the better of me, has been a point of contention for many years. Two Christmases ago, when the annual bonuses were awarded, I learned that I was only being paid two-thirds of what Dr. Hines made. When I appealed to the Board, I was delivered a strong rebuke. In his admonishment of me, the Board’s chair said, “You and Dr. Hines being of the same value? That’s laughable. He’s a team player, and he never gives us any trouble. The same could never be said of you.”

  I’ve seen Serena fire many people. She recites a speech she’s committed to memory—something that sounds like it came from a corporate handbook:

  “Our busi
ness,” she always says, “has developed such that your services are no longer needed. At one time they were most important, but now they’re redundant. It’s nobody’s fault, of course. And it’s most regrettable for me to have to deliver you this news, but my hands are tied.”

  “So you’re firing me?” I say, prepared for this talk.

  “No. Not yet at any rate. But I can only keep one of you. I’m meeting with the Board this afternoon.”

  “Have you spoken with Dr. Hines yet?”

  “I wanted to see you first.”

  “I’d like to talk to him myself, if you don’t mind.”

  “You know you’ve never been your own best advocate.”

  Dr. Hines has redecorated his office. Hanging behind his desk is a collection of black and white photographs of Chinese street life from the early 2000s. One features a man smoking a cigarette while standing on the hood of his car, parked in an empty field of weeds, looking at a bustling shopping center on the other side of a fence. Dr. Hines steps right up, close enough to smell his sickly-sweet cologne.

  “Shanghai is now the financial and cultural center of the universe. It’s hard to imagine it once looked so underdeveloped. This photo in particular speaks to the pace of urban life and the temporary status of the present in a rapidly changing city. Fortunately, the photographer committed suicide two weeks after I bought these pictures—their value has doubled!”

  “We need to talk, Dr. Hines.”

  There is no clutter on his desk. Everything has its place. His mouth is moving now as if speaking, but no words come out. His habits exhibit all the symptoms of neurosis.

  “What do you want?” he says at last.

  “It looks as though Serena’s HLV tool has brought about the policy changes you advocated for.”

  “It’s brilliant, isn’t it!”

  “Indeed. Enough to put you out of work.”