We can do this
Nancy Kress
Short story
W hat he needed was polygamy. South Sea Islanders, renegade Mormons, Old Testament patriarchs – anything that would legitimise having more than one wife. A behavioural system instantly and conveniently superimposed on late 21st-century New York, like those VR eye glasses that added another dimension to the ordinary.
Since he wasn’t going to get it, Ethan buttoned his shirt, braced his mind, and went from the bedroom to the kitchen, where Maureen sat eating breakfast. She looked up and smiled at him. He couldn’t read the smile. Not that he’d ever been good at that sort of thing anyway.
“Today’s the day, then,” Maureen said. He had always been irritated by her lawyerly need to state the obvious in unambiguous words, and he was irritated now. But Ethan said nothing. Today would be hard enough without starting it with friction.
“You know how much I appreciate your agreeing to this, Maureen.”
“I don’t see that I have much choice. You signed a legal contract. But she’s here for only three months, Ethan. After three months, other arrangements must be made.”
“Yes.” He turned away from her to open the refrigerator door, so that she would not see his face. Or maybe so that he would not see hers. At sixty, Maureen was pretty as an older woman, but she was litigating today and her court look – severe blue suit, mouth made prominent by tiny blue dots on both lips, hair gelled back in the current “serious” style – was not one that appealed to him. Or maybe he just didn’t want to see her racing through the eggs, rolls, and huge stack of pancakes that her body now required.
She didn’t say, “I’m sorry I can’t go with you,” because Maureen never lied. Instead she said, “We can do this, Ethan.”
“Of course we can,” he said, knowing he didn’t have Maureen’s truthfulness. Nor her generosity, her decisiveness, her greater salary. All of which he had once appreciated so much, and all of which now made him feel bad because he knew he was supposed to go on appreciating them. Maureen was an amazing woman. Everyone said so, including Ethan. How many women would accept this new situation so generously?
Of course, there was a contract.
“I love you,” Maureen said, gulping the last of her sugar-heavy coffee.
“Yes,” Ethan said.
It felt strange to key in at work, as if this were just an ordinary day. No one in the vast office complex knew it wasn’t, and until noon Ethan dealt with his usual office-manager routines for Afton Biotech Corporation. At noon he keyed out and took the corporate tram to the labs. Martin Carey from Legal met him there.
“Ready?” Carey said.
Ethan nodded, unable to speak. Carey led the way to the hospital wing. Outside the cubicle where Lissa lay, he went over the contract with Ethan one more time. Ethan barely listened. He was finding it hard to breathe. Finally Carey said, “The surveillance equipment is on in the cubicle. You won’t be aware of it, of course, but do remember that’s it there, creating a legal record. The nurse will leave as soon as she administers the wake-up drug, unless you want her to stay. Or a psychotherapist, or—”
“No, no, nobody,” Ethan said.
The lawyer threw him a sceptical look. Ethan turned his back to him and went into the cubicle. The nurse injected the slight figure on the bed, and then Ethan waved her away. She went, but not before she said, meaningfully, “The recording equipment is on. And the bed shield. You will not be able to touch her, Mr. Spencer, not until—”
“Yes, I know. Please go!”
She did. On the bed, the figure stirred.
He had forgotten so much. The curve of her small ears – how could he have forgotten that? He used to nibble on them, before love-making. The firm little chin. Her long lashes. Lissa had never been beautiful, not as Maureen had been beautiful once, but her eyes had been extraordinary: transparent green under long thick lashes. Ethan held his breath, waiting for those eyes to open.
They did. Bewilderment, then fear, then bewilderment again as she recognised Ethan. How did he look to her? Old – of course he looked old, she had been in suspension for thirty-five years. But he was one of those people whose wrinkles didn’t significantly change his long, pale face, and he’d made sure to not only keep all his hair but also to cut it in the same old-fashioned style, in case today ever happened.
“Ethan?” she whispered.
He almost couldn’t force words past his lips. He would have given everything he owned – if most of it hadn’t belonged to Maureen – to be able to hold her hand. His own rose, then fell in an ineffective gesture. Finally he made himself speak.
“Hello, Lissa. Welcome back.”
Sometimes the Revived wept. Sometimes they screamed. Sometimes they asked to “die again”, even though none of them had actually ever been dead in the first place. Modern biotech could cure so many illnesses, could ramp up dramatically the rate with which Maureen’s cells consumed energy, could let sixty-two-year-old Ethan hang on to a full head of hair. But it could not bring back the dead. Lissa, like all the Revived, had been put into suspension weeks (probably) before her incurable brain disease would have killed her. In thirty-five years, the incurable had become curable. Lissa, while still unconscious, had been operated on three days ago. The top of her skull wore living bio-bandages, like a small white medieval toque.
Lissa didn’t weep, or scream, or plead to die. She lay quietly as Ethan explained what she may or may not have been able to remember. From her face, Ethan could not tell which. He had often not known what Lissa was thinking, and he’d loved that about her. It was restful. Intelligent, she was also self-contained, like a perfect Ming vase that was always and only itself, polished and graceful.
Finally she said, “Thirty-five years?”
“Yes, darling.” The word just slipped out.
“My mother?”
“Gone, I’m afraid. I’m sorry. But Amanda’s fine, she lives in California. She’s married, with three kids.” And two grandchildren , he didn’t add. Not yet. She looked so young, lying there. Amanda, her younger sister, was fifty-eight. Lissa was twenty-six.
“And you… have you…” She had never liked to question him, had always waited gracefully for whatever information he chose to volunteer.
“I’ve… I am… Lissa, I didn’t know you would ever be cured. They told me the odds were against it. So fifteen years after you went in here, I… I married again. Her name is Maureen. I’m going to take you home in a few days, to where Maureen and I live. We’ll take care of you. I’ll take care of you.”
Lissa said nothing. She must be thinking over the situation – his remarriage, Amanda’s life three thousand miles away, Lissa’s own need to be near Afton Biotech for the necessary follow-up procedures – but she said nothing. Ethan was profoundly grateful. Maureen would have discussed problems, weighed options, anticipated outcomes, considered costs and benefits, talked and talked. Lissa looked at him from her clear green eyes and stayed silent except for three perfect words that replaced his anxieties with a rush of euphoric well-being.
“Thank you, Ethan.”
The day that Ethan brought Lissa home, Maureen had scheduled a cellular treatment at Afton. She timed it to be away from the apartment when they arrived there. Ethan didn’t know why Maureen wanted this, and he didn’t ask. Her treatments still embarrassed him.
When he’d married Maureen, she’d been beautiful in a buxom, tavern-wench sort of way. During the next ten years she’d gained two hundred pounds. He had no longer been sexually attracted to her, which he’d never said aloud because such a statement would have marked him as unloving, superficial, sexist. But Maureen had known – difficult to hide actions in the bedroom, or lack of actions – and of course she had insisted on thoroughly discussing it. Over and over and over. Then, without consulting Ethan, she’d gone into Afton for an elective metabolism ramp-up, increasing her cellular metabolism. She now had to eat large amounts to fuel her body. The treatments had to be repeated every six months. Her skin hung in folds because, she said with her big laugh, people would not stop suing each other long enough for her to go under the knife. But in clothes, she was as slim as Lissa.
“Here we are,” Ethan said, helping Lissa from the elevator to a chair in the living room. She was still weak.
“Wow,” she said.
Maureen’s money , he wanted to say, but of course he didn’t. Glass walls looked down thirty-seven floors to New York harbour, dotted with ships. The floor was covered with antique Aubusson, the walls programmed with softly sliding neutral colours. Maureen liked glass furniture, and its swooping curves balanced the square, bright cushions that adjusted themselves to the sitter’s body. When Ethan and Lissa had married, he’d been finishing his BA and they’d lived in a bare, one-bedroom apartment near the college. They’d lain in bed guessing at the wallpaper pattern under the layers of grime: “Butterflies!” “Filoviruses!” “Dog turds, done tastefully in paisley!”
Ethan brought her a cup of tea; she’d never been a coffee drinker. “Shouldn’t you eat something?”
“Yes. The hospital sent those packets, some super-nutritious glop.”
“I’ll fix one for you!”
He did, and she nibbled at it in companionable silence. Just as she finished, Maureen came in. Ethan stood, the absurdity of the tableau washing over him like a rip tide. My wife, meet my wife… But the law was very clear on this point. Maureen was his wife, Lissa only his former wife.
“Hello,” Maureen said, holding out her hand. “I’m Maureen.”
Lissa looked up at her from the depths of the wing chair and blushed.
Ethan felt his heart split along its seam. She was so young to face such complexity, such uncertainty and loss! Her face mottled an ugly maroon and she bit her lip.
Maureen, who was not young, took over. “Lissa, I know this is an odd situation. But we can all get through it, and Ethan and I are so glad for your returned health and life. It’s such a miracle.”
Kindness, generosity, and a speech obviously rehearsed, although Maureen, with a litigator’s skill, had managed to make it sound spontaneous. So why did Lissa blush even more, and why did Ethan suddenly resent his wife?
Maureen said, “Let’s all talk about it.”
Lissa said, “I think I’d like to rest now.”
Ethan said, “She’s still weak from the operation, Maureen!”
Maureen apologised. She helped Lissa to the guest room, made sure she had everything she needed. After the door closed, she turned to Ethan. “Well, that went well, don’t you think?”
And Ethan said what he was supposed to say, what Maureen had legitimately earned: “Thank you.”
“Technology erases consequences,” Maureen had said after she got her first metabolic ramp-up and the weight began to fall off her. “I’ve been a pig, and my body shows that, and now this medical tech is just undoing my mistakes. In a way, it contravenes justice.”
“You’ve told me that the law often contravenes justice,” Ethan said, and Maureen gave her big, hearty laugh and agreed.
New York, he thought as he walked the streets every day, was one big mass of consequence-erasing technology. Island too small for the population who moved here? Build up, and up farther, and up yet more. Harbour and rivers a polluted cesspool? Make it sparkling and clean with debris-eating nanos. Biofuels used up in a centuries-long orgy of energy consumption? Invent cold fusion. Look at that homeless man there – the city provided him with a portable lightweight tent that would, when its nightly nanos went to work to stiffen it, protect him from practically anything, including other homeless.
Ethan had time to observe skyscrapers, clean water, computer-controlled cars, and homeless people because he now walked to work every day. He told himself that he needed to give Lissa more time alone in the apartment. But each night he almost ran home, puffing, to arrive sooner, and each night his legs seemed stronger, more youthful.
“What did you do all day?” he asked Lissa.
“I talked to Amanda on the Link.” Her sister was due to visit soon.
“Good, good. What else?” He wanted to know everything.
Lissa gave him her quiet smile and gestured at the stew cooking on the stove, the salad with ingredients bought fresh that morning, the table set prettily for three. They never ate until Maureen came home, which she did far earlier than previously. Was Ethan rushing to get home before Maureen?
No , he told himself angrily. He just needed the exercise.
Usually he helped Lissa finish the cooking, working in companionable silence shattered by Maureen’s arrival.
“Oh, stew! It smells so good! Spicy – is it Moroccan? Wait until I wash up, court was so down-and-dirty today that I swear my client left grime all over the judge’s chambers! Still, it looks like we’ll settle out of court after all, opposing counsel is more reasonable than I thought at first, and…” Her voice dimmed as she ran water in the sink, returned as she came to the table. She was jocular, appreciative, even motherly.
Maureen had never wanted children.
Lissa said little, although she listened to Maureen and sometimes laughed. It seemed to Ethan, not that the women liked each other – they were too different for liking – but that they respected each other. Or at least, each respected how difficult this was for the other. And yet Maureen’s wariness was there, under the wearing heartiness, and Lissa’s fear, under the deference. It was the fear that tore at his heart. She must feel so displaced, so unable to make her own way in a world that had moved on for thirty-five years without her…
Maureen said, “Lissa, have you thought what you’ll do when you leave here?”
“Maureen!” Ethan said. Why bring that up, why embarrass Lissa by reminding her of her dependency, why insist on talking about it—
“Yes,” Lissa said, surprising him. “I have thought. I want to learn how computers work now. I was a secretary, you know. I see that yours uses voice and that the programming has changed so much – is it AI?”
“No, no,” Maureen said. “We’re nowhere near that! But computer study is a good idea.”
Ethan said, “There’s no need to consider all that now. Lissa is still too weak from the operation!”
Both women stared at him, and for once both were silent.
When he rushed home from work the next day, a new office-model computer sat on a new desk in the living room, and the tutor Maureen had hired was just leaving.
He had never liked New York. They were here, of course, for Maureen’s job, but Ethan had grown up in the Pacific Northwest, surrounded by pine forests and still, cool summers. After he graduated from college, he and Lissa had spent a few weeks back home, hiking and camping in the Cascades. She leaned over campfires, frying bacon and humming, and when he made love to her at night in their cheap tent, she smelled of pine needles.
For the four years of their marriage, they’d lived in small towns. Only when Lissa became ill had he taken a job in New Jersey, to be near the best doctors, and then the cryo-crypt. After that, emotional paralysis had seized him and he’d stayed in New Jersey, until he met Maureen and his whole life changed.
As Lissa’s had not. She was still twenty-six. Her youth hit him anew every night when he came home to find her practising on the computer. Sometimes the tutor was still there. When he was – a young man, David Somebody, with lean hips and a smooth, unspotted face – Ethan went into his bedroom and closed the door to stare at his face in the mirror.
He desired her. No, more than that – he loved her. Still. Always. Forever. Maureen had been second choice, did Maureen know that? Maureen didn’t deserve to be anyone’s second choice, but she was. Ethan couldn’t help it. Lissa was the love of his life, and he was going to… what? There was nothing he could do.
He looked at his sagging, liver-spotted face in the mirror, and understood that there was nothing he could do.
“Ethan, we need to talk.”
Maureen stood in the middle of their bedroom, dominating the room, as she could do so effortlessly. She had taken off her suit and stood in her underwear. Ethan, hating himself, looked away. “I’m tired. I don’t want to talk.”
“Of course you’re tired. Stress creates exhaustion,” Maureen said, and he saw that unwillingly he had given her an opening. “Added to which, we are neither of us young anymore. I’ve been thinking of cutting back on my work schedule. But what I wanted to say is, the three months are nearly up.”
“So?”
“So it’s time for Lissa to leave.”
Now he had the opening he wanted. “You’d really make a young girl who’s been thirty-five years out of the world go out into a city she doesn’t understand to try and support herself?”
“She understands the city better than you think. Her tutor has been taking on – oh, I guess you’d call them ‘school trips’.” Maureen smiled and raised one eyebrow.
“Don’t mock her!”
“I’m not mocking her,” Maureen said in surprise. “I wouldn’t do that. You should know that.”
He did. He didn’t. He didn’t know anything. Lissa musn’t leave.
“Ethan?”
“I don’t want to talk about this now, Maureen. I’m tired and I did something to my shoulder at work and I don’t want to talk.”
“You never do,” Maureen said, and they undressed in silence and lay in bed with their backs to each other in the darkness.
Ethan’s last job before he and Lissa had moved to New Jersey had been in Oregon, along the Willamette River. He had taught Lissa to fish. She hadn’t been very good at it but had gamely accompanied him into the mountains most weekends. They discussed getting a dog but had decided against it. In November she planted bulbs, and in March their tiny yard had been a riot of tulips and daffodils and hyacinths.
He dredged up such memories as he walked to work, under the ubiquitous, unobtrusive cameras of the Municipal Automatic Surveillance System. What he needed was a camera to watch Lissa in the apartment, to record her every movement so that he could look at the recordings when she had gone… For an insane moment, he actually considered getting one.
No! Lissa wasn’t leaving. She wasn’t ready, wasn’t strong enough, only a jealous witch like Maureen could even think of such a thing!
Except that Maureen was not a jealous witch, not the ageing queenly stepmother to Lissa’s princess. Maureen was kind and generous and reasonable – oh, how reasonable, burying Ethan with her rational arguments, suffocating him with her generosity, she earned so much more than he ever dreamed of…
He stopped walking and put his hands over his face. His mind was out of control. Almost he could picture his mind as one of those skittery, glow-in-the-dark rabbits that kids bought as pets, frantically fluorescing and hopping and all the while craving quiet and the dark solitude of piney forests. He—
“Hey, old man, you all right?”
A teenager on a motorbroom, the machine vibrating softly in the street beside Ethan’s patch of sidewalk. The boy wore one of those new jackets that projected a holo of broad shoulders and chest that the wearer did not actually possess. Or maybe he did, maybe science had found a safe way to bulk him up without effort on his part, to compensate for riding everywhere instead of walking. Technology erases consequences… Ethan’s shoulder hurt.
“I’m fine!” he snapped at the boy.
“Well, jeez, eat your own dick,” the kid snarled and rode off.
He had to go home. Now, instead of reporting in to work. For once, Maureen had been right – this had to be talked about. But not with her.
“Lissa! Where are you?”
She came out of her room, wearing a dress he hadn’t seen before: yellow, with the same mirrors as Broom Boy’s set onto the shoulders, the short skirt displaying her firm, pretty legs. She carried an old briefcase of Maureen’s.
“Why, Ethan, what are you doing home?”
“Where are you going?”
She gazed at him steadily from her green eyes; how could such a transparent colour seem so opaque? She said, “I have a job interview.”
“A what?”
“A job interview.”
“But… how… why…”
“Maureen and David helped me set it up. The auto-cab is coming in ten minutes.”
“But, Lissa – you can’t! You’re not ready! You don’t know anything about this city, about this decade , and—”
“I’m going, Ethan. To the interview and, eventually, to my new life. I can’t impose on you and Maureen much longer.”
“Impose! Lissa, you’re my wife!”
It had just slipped out. And yet, he saw, it didn’t shock her. Lissa, no less than Maureen, was aware of Ethan’s feelings. She glanced at the wall clock, set down her briefcase, and walked over to take his cold hands. At the touch of her fingers, an electric thrill ran along his spine, straight to his groin.
“No, Ethan, I’m not your wife. Even if you hadn’t married Maureen, I would not be your wife. The Ethan I was married to existed thirty-five years ago, not now. And I’m changed, too. You can’t go through cancer and resurrection without changing.”
“I never thought—” He stopped. Maureen would have said No, you didn’t , but Lissa only dropped his hands, picked up the briefcase, and started for the door.
He seized her. As soon as his hands closed on her shoulders, the touch of her flesh under the thin yellow cloth drove him into a frenzy. He pulled her too him, feeling strong – a strength he never felt with Maureen! – and kissed her.
She didn’t struggle, but neither did she respond. Passive in his arms, her lips closed, she simply waited. Belated memory stirred. He let her go.
“You used to do that.” Lissa said. “Whether I liked it or not.”
“Lissa… I’m sorry… I didn’t mean…”
“No, I know you didn’t,” she said quietly. “You didn’t mean it even back then, all that riding rough-shod over me. All those fishing trips I hated. The dog I so desperately wanted and you vetoed. The things I wanted to tell you that you would never listen to. I blame myself as much as you, Ethan. You’re basically a good man. But I never stood up to you, and that’s what you needed. If I had, we might have had a chance to be happy. But I didn’t, and we weren’t. I—”
“I was happy!”
She just looked at him. He heard it, then, his singular pronoun. Vertigo almost took him. Could you lose a marriage over a pronoun?
“Yes,” Lissa said, smoothed her hair, and went down to the taxi.
Lissa got the job. Ethan got the surveillance system.
He knew he was out of control. But he had only two weeks before Lissa would start her new job, would move into the furnished apartment David had found for her. Was she dating David, the tutor so near her own age? Ethan didn’t ask. He didn’t touch Lissa again. He was scrupulous, respectful, careful. The apartment cameras, undetectable even to Ethan when he looked for them, silently stored up images to be preserved, hoarded, counted over in sweet privacy when Lissa was gone. If Ethan could not keep her, he would at least have images of her. He would use a machine to cheat her absence of its finality.
The night before Lissa left, Maureen helped her pack both her few clothes and the household things Maureen was giving her: dishes, pots, towels, bedding. In the morning David would help her move. Ethan stayed in his bedroom, unable to watch. He held his tablet, unable to read, staring at the same paragraph for an hour. When Lissa’s door finally closed, he turned out the light and pretended to sleep, unwilling to face Maureen.
But Maureen didn’t come in. She must be working late at her computer. When Ethan did sleep, it was to dreams of something formless chasing him, breathing hot on his neck, taunting him… Somehow, without even turning around, he knew the thing was the dog he’d denied Lissa, welling up from the past. “But I want the past!” he said, and tried desperately to turn around and face the dog, just as Maureen’s hand shook him awake.
Still dressed, she stood over him with a flimsy, printed out from the computer. The light behind her silhouetted her figure with its artificially maintained slimness, but kept her face in shadow. He didn’t need to see her face; the tone of her voice was enough.
“Ethan, what is this expense that wiped out two months’ salary?”
He lay rigid. She had their bank program, of course she did, but she wasn’t due to review that for another month and by that time he would have shifted money around to hide the loss…
Not from Maureen. He couldn’t ever hide anything from Maureen’s keen sight, and he should have known that. He did know that. He’d wanted Maureen to know what he’d done, and perhaps take action, so that he would not have to. Coward, coward .
“I asked you a question, Ethan. What is this debit to Private Leanings?”
Still he said nothing.
“It’s a surveillance company, isn’t it? You installed cameras in our apartment.” And then, in a tone he’d never heard from her before, “And not to record me.”
He’d expected cold anger, Maureen’s courtroom voice, relentlessly driving the defendant into one corner after another, hunting him as surely as a mastiff hunted prey. But Maureen’s voice was broken, almost childish. Amazed at this sudden, strange vulnerability, he sat up to reach for her. She retreated, and from the doorway said in that same gasp of a hurt child, “Don’t touch me. Not now, not ever. I tried, Ethan, to be generous about this… I tried…”
She had tried. She’d been perfect. Ethan had been terrible. But he’d known that all along. Why the fuck didn’t knowing something was wrong stop him from doing it?
“Maureen—”
“Don’t follow me,” she said, her voice enough like the usual commanding Maureen that he stayed where he was. The ultimate cowardice, or the ultimate gift, and he didn’t know which.
In the morning, Maureen was gone. Lissa was gone. Ethan, falling into sleep like a deep pit at 4:30 am, hadn’t heard either of them go. Both, not just Lissa, had taken clothes and toiletries.
In a frenzy Ethan combed the apartment, and still he could not find the cameras. Not in the ceiling panels, the light fixtures, the art work. He called the surveillance company to have the equipment professionally removed, paying extra for immediate service. “Are you dissatisfied with the results, sir?” said the impersonal voice on the other end of the link.
He couldn’t say, Yes, I am. Your technology didn’t undo consequences – it only made them worse . The man would think he was insane.
More insane.
While he waited for the surveillance tech, he sat at the dining room table, Maureen’s lovely rosewood table, with a cup of coffee he did not drink. His next step was clear. He had to go after one of them, bend all his resources to getting her to change her mind…
But which one?
He put his head in his hands and waited, helpless, for the doorbell to ring.