“I SAW A television show about a woman who loses her husband in an accident. He was on that damn phone of his, and at the moment he starts laughing at some video of a man pretending to be a cat, a real man, a really drunk one, smashes into his car. The husband dies instantly. But the woman lives in an age somewhat like our own, but more advanced. A technology exists, available only by invitation, where you can communicate with the dead if you’re lucky enough to have most of your life online. There are no guarantees. The woman’s lucky because the husband was attached to his phone, captured and shared every moment of his life with it, so when they finally speak, she hears his voice, which is generated from all the videos he shot of himself: husband in front of the Grand Canyon, racking up roaming fees, then threatening to jump (he was kidding); husband recording the woman while she slept, whispering, I love you, I love you . . .”
There are tears in Ellie’s eyes.
Outside, Kate yanks at things.
“What’s this all about, Ellie?” James says. “What are you getting at?”
“How about staying the course for a change. With you, with her, I’m never able to finish a story.”
“You’ve always been the story.”
Ignoring James, Ellie continues. “So the woman goes crazy with grief, orders a physical version of him. He arrives on her doorstep and she activates him, the love of her life, with chemicals and bath water. When he gets out of the tub, he’s naked, born again, and she looks at him and says, ‘You look like him on a good day,’ and he says . . .” Ellie can barely contain herself. She kneels down to the floor and sits there. “He says, ‘Why did we only keep our most physically flattering photos? Those were the times we were most unhappy?’ Over the course of the night they make love, he cracks jokes—all from the memory track in his phone, and at one point the woman says that he’s not enough. This version of her husband is good enough on a good day, but never enough. He doesn’t come close to the man she loved.”
“Let me take you to bed.” James kneels down gently, moves toward her, and she recedes. Inches back along the carpet to the wall.
“Don’t come any closer. Don’t you fucking come near me. I know you. I know what you’ve done. What you’re doing and how long you’ve been doing it. We had a fucking deal and you blew it because she wagged her pussy in your face. You couldn’t wait a few months, until they threw dirt on my face and talked about how beautiful I once was. She was taken too soon, oh the humanity, or some such shit—you know how everyone we know talks.” Ellie looks at him as if for the first time. “You couldn’t wait for my death and the money that comes with it. Tell me, James. Was I ever completely enough, or just enough on a good day?”
“Oh, I get it. Suddenly I’m the villain because I spent the better part of my life lying next to a woman who didn’t want me and I got sick of it? I’m the bad guy because I woke up one day and realized that I’m hired help and maybe the payday wasn’t worth it? That I’m no better than Tim and those other men you left behind. For over twenty-five years I brought your coffee, asked about your day, and fucked you when and how you wanted me to—I gave you the best parts of me while you gave me leftovers. What else do you want?”
“I want nothing,” Ellie says. She remembers a time when James was a paragraph in a personal ad, when he was four lines of hope and possibility. He could take her away from all her familial history, but when she’d pulled up to his home with her daughter, he’d lost his sheen. If the wings of the butterfly are to keep their sheen, you mustn’t touch them. James was a man like any other man, and the only difference was he won because of his geography. He would never move to Nevada; he would never live in the house in which Ellie grew up, the place she’d once called home. He was a trip to California she couldn’t complete on her own because all those years ago, she was the girl in Annie’s story. She was the girl who saw the speeding cars on the highway and turned back. Headed home. She was the girl who became a woman who went home to a man. The road home was long and dark and scattered with the breadcrumbs she left in her wake. Ellie kept a house, raised a daughter, and swallowed pills. How do you explain that you didn’t have leftovers to give because nothing existed to begin with? Ellie thinks about Tim. We don’t choose who we love; we only choose to live with the parts that come with that love, and only now does she realize that she has devoted the whole of her wasted, brief life to bearing the penuries of that devotion.
Ellie loved the fact that James was a fixed point on a map, immovable. Who would’ve known that after all these years she would be the one who wanted to move back to that dark country, to any country really, if only it would allow her to love, to feel all of it again and again? Now her heart is breaking more than she thought it could, and when she finally wants everyone to care, no one does.
“I tried, Ellie. God knows I tried. But you never let me in, all the way in.”
Ellie wonders if under his skin lies a beating heart. Or has it gone cold, like the rest of him? Ellie remembers how her heart was a door that opened once. Be careful, his bow tie is really a camera, Tim sang Simon and Garfunkel loud and off-key. They were children faking snow angels on spring grass. Their arms moved so fast it was as if they were preparing for flight. If we could stay here, just like this, Ellie said. What would happen? Tim asked. Ellie turned to him, smiled, her heart and eyes as wide as the ocean when she said, We’d be happy. But as swiftly as that door crept open it slammed shut when Tim’s mother died and Ellie was left to marry a man, Tim, with whom she’d pass her life but never live it. Tim and James tried, with their skeleton keys and crowbars, but they never managed to push their way in. Ellie’s deepest regret is the fact that she never thought she could go with Tim.
James and Ellie sit across from one another. He picks lint off his sleeve and she traces the edge of a mug filled with coffee that has gone cold. Ellie will die in five hours, but now, right now, all she feels is the enormity of everything she’s lost.
“How could you fuck her in my house? My house.” Ellie’s voice splinters.
Kate walks into the kitchen and takes a loaf out of the cupboard. Ellie reaches for two slices because the only thing she can bear right now is toast. Ellie looks at her daughter, regards her as paper—a body that could easily crumble, a heart that steadfastly cuts.
“I have to go,” James says. He takes one of the hairclips that Ellie left on the counter and puts it in his pocket.
“I wonder,” Ellie says. “Where does everyone go when they say they have to go?”
Kate grips the counter with her hands. James slams the door shut. The toaster oven breaks the silence. The kitchen smells of things burning.