The Absolved Page 3

  “It may well be impossible,” he’s saying, “for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing. So we cannot count on the charity of those who have everything to be the stewards of the people, to take care of their brothers and sisters, in their time of need. A system that does not work for the majority of the people it serves cannot sustain itself …”

  At the end of the bar sits a man who looks fifty years old—but a hard fifty—like he’s seen the worst life has to offer. A pit bull lays at his feet. The man is striking matches and putting them out between his fingers, against his neck, on his tongue. Halfway through the president’s speech, he yells at the screen.

  “You filthy bastard, you’ve done nothing for the people of this country!”

  Lydia pours him a drink and pats him on the arm. He kisses Lydia’s hand.

  “You’re the only good one left in the world,” he says.

  Lydia fills a bowl with water and hands it to the man for his dog, followed by a dish of pretzels. Then she mixes two whiskey drinks, one for each of us, and joins me. A pendant with the photo of a young boy dangles from her neck. The kid looks like a wilted flower. Lydia catches me staring and tucks the necklace into her shirt. There is the utter feeling of the past lingering in the present.

  Now the masochist is hurling pretzels at the TV.

  “Goddamn it, Karl,” Lydia snaps. “You know I have to clean that up!”

  The man lowers his head, like an acolyte before his saint. I offer to buy him a drink, and he moves down the bar to the stool beside me.

  “You know,” he says, still looking at the screen, “I could kill this man and feel no remorse at all.”

  “You and about three-hundred-million others.”

  “What’s a guy like you do for a living?” Karl inquires.

  I glance at Lydia for help.

  “He’s a doctor, Karl,” she answers, “and a damn good one too from what I hear, so be nice to him.”

  “Let me ask you a question.”

  “Shoot,” I say.

  “How do you get your fruit and vegetables?”

  “My wife only does farm to table.”

  “But how do you think normal folks do?”

  “In refrigerated trucks, of course.”

  “That’s right, Doc,” Karl says, pausing to take a long pull from his beer. “And until just ten months ago, I drove for Sunny Hill Foods, before they replaced all the humans with self-drivers.”

  “Could’ve seen that coming.”

  “I suppose you’re right about that,” he says. “Let me ask you one more question: what have you ever done to serve your country?”

  “I pay most of my taxes and voted in three of the last five elections.”

  Karl smashes his fist into the bar. “That just figures, don’t it? Someone like you does nothing and gets everything, while someone like me does everything and in return is made obsolete.”

  He struggles from his stool and limps toward the door, his dog at his side.

  “The people really have their pitchforks out this election season!” I say to Lydia.

  “A guy like you should be careful, Henri.”

  She pours two shots, and we down them. I pay my tab through my gram, and tip Lydia triple the bill. Then I signal for Chloe to pull the car around and pick me up out front.

  3

  In the morning, I’m different than at night—a family man with traditional values. Just the sight of my wife and son across the table nearly reduces me to tears. Last night seems indefensible. Who was that man carrying on in that hotel? I bear no resemblance to that adulterer, that scoundrel, that villain. Here with my gram loaded with The Times, my coffee, my wife and my son, I couldn’t feel more complete. There’s an old saying: “There’s life, and there is greater life!” Well, this is greater life. I want only to make my family feel safe and loved.

  It’s just 7:00 a.m., but Rachel’s already made up for the day, a process that takes nearly two hours from start to finish—at least, ever since she started to dress like a Disney princess about six months back. This transformation began when she came home from the salon one day with a wavy bob, crowned with a little red bow, a la Snow White.

  “Very Brothers Grimm of you!” I said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied. “This style is very chic. It’s currently all the rage in Calcutta and Nanjing.”

  At the time, I gave her the benefit of the doubt. Now I’m not so sure. She’s appropriated everything possible to complete the aesthetic, all the way down to the purple eyeshadow, the blue, red, and yellow ensemble, and the short red cape.

  “You’re looking gorgeous as always, darling,” I tell her this morning.

  “You don’t think the short, puffy sleeves are too much?”

  “I think they’re just right. They really complement …” I pause to consider my choice of words, “your clogs?”

  “And you like the standing white collar?”

  “Love it!”

  “Oh, who am I kidding?” she mutters. “You don’t care. I don’t even know why I bother.”

  “Don’t be like that, darling.”

  “Just eat your breakfast,” she says.

  Rachel has had our meal service deliver gluten-free pancakes and apple sauce. Not my favorite, but a healthy and at least edible alternative to the traditional fare. After Julian’s birth, Rachel really struggled to lose the baby-weight. She spent months working with a personal trainer. First, he put her on a regimen of high cardio. When that failed, he switched her to a four-day-a-week weight-lifting schedule. Her strength improved markedly, but the routine did nothing to help her lose the fat in her belly, butt, and thighs. Finally, desperate, she hired the most esteemed nutritionist in town (not to mention the most expensive). After a thorough investigation, the nutritionist attributed Rachel’s inability to lose the weight to postpartum depression. However, Rachel took great offence to this diagnosis and required the nutritionist to ascertain a different explanation. The answer: a gluten allergy. It’s now seven years later and Rachel is still battling the bulge. Regardless of its ineffectuality, the gluten-free diet remains the only acceptable lifestyle choice in our home.

  “You were out late last night,” Rachel says.

  “Did you get the flowers?”

  “What time did you finally make it home?”

  “Rough day at the office. I stopped at Anodyne to cool off.”

  Rachel seems to accept this answer, and turns her attention to Julian, who has syrup on his face and T-shirt. The boy has the table manners of a savage. The child psychologist assured us he’d grow out of it, but that was two years ago. He’s no better now than he was at four or five. I wonder if he has a rare condition that affects his spatial awareness. I’ve consulted all of the texts, but I’ve yet to find any data to confirm my hypothesis.

  Rachel tells the boy to take off his clothes and eat in his underwear. She’s tired of buying him new shirts and pants. Even worse than that expense is the effect Julian has on our water bill. Over the past twenty years, California has experienced the worst drought in human history. In 2032, we had one good rain year, and the experts predicted we’d seen the worst of it, that things would return to normal. However, things have only gotten worse. In 2035, we received less than two inches of rain. This year we’re on pace for even less. Thankfully, California has made great strides in desalination technology, due to techniques we’ve imported from Israel. However, the cost of water is still crippling. We spent more on Julian’s post-meal baths last month than we did on his private school, which is the second most prestigious in the city.

  Seeing Rachel at her most maternal always puts me in the mood. My years of studying the human condition informs me it’s the pheromones she emits while under the stress of child rearing. As she finishes cleaning up a mess of apple sauce that Julian has splattered on the floor, I make a proposition.

&nb
sp; “What would you say if I insisted we reinstitute our Thursday night dates?”

  She breaks out into a fit of laughter, practically shrieking. I haven’t witnessed such a display of merriment since our honeymoon.

  “Are you kidding? What with Julian, your schedule, and my commitments to charity work, who has the time?”

  “It would be really good for us.”

  “Emma is acting up. If you can fix her, I’ll give you a date next Thursday.”

  Emma is the OS who runs our home. She controls the temperature, the dishwasher, the washer and dryer, the water, oven, stove, doorbell, clocks, locks, WiFi, TVs—everything.

  Rachel doesn’t know this, but last week I tampered with Emma, attempting to mask my little foray into VR sex—a luxury I’ve previously never permitted myself. In today’s society where many people feel more intimately connected to their VR-life than to their real life, VR sex is a far more flagrant offense than common adultery with an actual person, and therefore unbecoming of a married man. Nevertheless, in a moment of weakness, I succumbed.

  I blame it on Serena. She had spent weeks teasing me with stories about what a spectacular time she’d been having participating in group VR sex with Chinese college students.

  “A temptation resisted,” she always says, “is a good time wasted!”

  Fortunately, I botched my attempts to log into the Chinese sex site, failing to override Emma’s hardwired programing to block engagement with Chinese businesses, due to long-term economic sanctions.

  It’s a good thing, too, because Rachel has a real aversion to smut or, for that matter, anything else she views as deviant. This wasn’t always the case. During our first few years together, she was something of a pervert and freak. Rachel used to get off on having sex in public spaces, and for a few years she was an active dominatrix, a fetish I reluctantly participated in until one evening when she left me bound and gagged in the basement for nearly two hours. Alas, those days are gone. Now she’s certain VR is responsible for the decline in our country’s family values. She cites a statistic that only nine percent of men and women between the ages of twenty-five and forty are married with at least one child, while, coincidentally, ninety-one percent of people in this age demographic report a propensity for VR. In my humble opinion, on the other hand, the reason young people aren’t marrying and having children is due almost entirely to rotten economics. Only six percent of Americans, I tell Rachel, citing a recent statistic, feel they are in good enough socioeconomic standing to care for an additional person.

  “What’s wrong with Emma?” I question.

  “You don’t think it’s strange she’s only speaking Mandarin?”

  “I hadn’t notice.”

  “What about her insistence that we dine on Boy Eggs?”

  “What are those anyways?”

  “They’re eggs soaked and boiled in the urine of young boys. Street vendors sell them on the streets of Beijing.”

  “Why don’t you fix her?” I ask. “It would take you less than thirty seconds to have her running tiptop.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, Henri, I’m extremely busy. Yesterday alone I brunched with the women from the Wildlife Foundation, took a Pilates class, met with the interior decorator, took Julian to baseball practice, and picked up dinner.”

  Rachel knows all about my poor aptitude with technology. It’s been a great source of shame for me ever since I was a kid. Most men of my generation grew up on video games. My friends would spend hours every day tethered to their consoles. “Warriors of the controller” is what I called them. But I simply had no interest. I wanted to be outside.

  My neighbor, Travis, was my best friend between the ages of six and ten. The kid loved video games. He would have played them endlessly had he been allowed. He’d have foregone food, sleep, and even sunlight.

  Before I used to go to his house to play, I’d have my mother ask his to hide his console. He’d be in hysterics by the time I got there—tears rolling down his face, eyes red and swollen, screams of anguish pouring from his mouth. After his initial fit, however, he’d calm down, and we’d catch spiders or play basketball, or do any of the hundreds of other things kids once did in the great outdoors.

  While all this made me stronger, I attribute my poor aptitude for technology to my lack of time playing video games. This slow start has always haunted me. In eighth grade, I failed my beginner’s programming class. In high school, I got last place in the technology fair’s software writing competition. In college, I nearly got a herniated disc from lugging hardcopy textbooks, because I refused to adopt a tablet, like everyone else. In my job, today, I have to pay two scribes to follow me around to do all my data input, because I can’t manage the medical records program without wreaking major havoc on the system.

  Through my gram, I invade Emma’s controls. This wouldn’t make less sense to me if the whole thing actually were in Chinese. All at once, the curtains cover the windows, and every light turns on at its brightest. I continue to fumble about, and the windows and lights return to normal, but every door in the house locks down, trapping us inside.

  “What if there’s a fire?” Julian screams.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Rachel reassures him, glaring at me, “Daddy will get this under control.”

  I close my eyes and return to my mantra, “There is the nothing that is there, and the nothing that is not there.” I say this to myself at least a dozen times as I fuss with the controller. The electric fireplace turns on, and the house warms up to a balmy eighty degrees. Another stab at a manual override has Chinese Orchestral music playing at full blast.

  “Listen to the clear, bright tone of that Sheng!” Julian says.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “It’s a bamboo mouth organ, Dad!” he replies.

  Finally, Rachel shoves me out of the way and goes to work, swiping at the gram and making commands until the house returns to normal.

  “Date night?” I say.

  “Not even close.”

  It’s my firm belief that nine out of ten women take great pleasure in debasing the men they supposedly love. I see it all of the time, a woman contriving to put a man into a situation where he’s forced to dishonor himself, humiliate himself, or betray what is pure and strong in him.

  “I’m going to work,” I say.

  “Don’t forget, you promised to join me at the food drive tonight.”

  “Didn’t we just do one last week?”

  “And yet those same people are hungry again. It’s the craziest thing, isn’t it?”

  “The poor get all of my money in the form of taxes, and now they get my time, too?”

  “You’re such an altruist, Henri. Just one of the many things about you I love so much.”

  4

  It’s 7:30 in the evening and I’ve been at the office since 8:00 this morning. I’ve seen twenty-three patients thus far—a respectable number, though nowhere near my record of thirty-seven. The average life expectancy is eighty-eight, and the cancer business is booming. People are growing old, yet their golden years are fraught with disability and misery. The American Way, however, is never to give up. We stave off death for as long as we can, come what may.

  I’m late to Rachel’s charity event, but I still have one patient left to see, Mr. Toczauer, whom I’ve been treating for three years. Yesterday was his eighty-sixth birthday. He spent it in the hospital, just like he did his eightieth-fifth and eighty-third birthdays. He got a reprieve on his eighty-forth, managing a short bout of good health, which—like all good things—ended quickly, landing him back in our care a few days later.

  Before Mr. Toczauer became a near-permanent ward of the National Healthcare System, he had worked for forty years in middle management for a plant that manufacturers breakfast cereal—a terrific vocation for a man of Mr. Toczauer’s abilities. His job was to work with a team of analysts to crunch the numbers and then make strategic decisions accordingly. I’d never thought about it before Mr. T
oczauer had explained it to me, but there are trends in breakfast cereal consumption. For example, in 2022, an “anti-GMO” lifestyle craze swept through the entire West Coast. Virtually overnight all cereals made from Monsanto’s GMO corn stopped selling from Seattle to San Diego. The grocery stores couldn’t give Frosted Flakes or Cocoa Puffs away. Realizing this, Mr. Toczauer ordered all corn-based cereal production to be relocated from their plant in Riverside, California, to their plant in Martel, Ohio. In its place, he shifted all production of granola. This spell of genius saved the company millions in shipping costs. Mr. Toczauer was deemed a hero, and for his efforts his photograph was hung in the lobby of the corporate office in Topeka, Kansas.

  But those gallant days are long behind him. The man lying in hospital room #122 would be virtually unrecognizable to anyone who knew him in his prime. In fact, he’s been in this state of indefinite twilight for so long that I’m not sure even his own family can remember what a strong and adept man he once was. Unfortunately, it’s this condition—as a dependent, as a burden, as a man who can’t feed or bathe himself—that will forever be his legacy.

  Mr. Toczauer’s condition is called Agnogenic Myeloid Metaplasia. It’s a real mouthful to say, and I always stumble over the words as I give the diagnosis to a patient and their family. Every time, I have to repeat myself because my audience gets hung up on the words themselves, rather than what they represent. Mr. Toczauer’s state is so bad that for the past year he’s been completely dependent on blood transfusions just to stay alive. But now even this has ceased to work.

  When I enter his room, Mr. Toczauer is surrounded by his wife and grown children, a son and daughter. The man’s cheeks are so hollow and gaunt that the yellow skin on his face hangs off them like dead weight. When he gasps for breath, I notice that there are more teeth missing than not. His head, which I was told had once been thick with blond, curly hair, is now bald and flecked with liver spots.