CHAPTER 35

TOGETHER

THOUGH THE WORK WAS far from complete, repairmen had made progress fixing the broken windows. A persistent cold breeze still permeated the apartment. Just Maggie and I alone, near sundown, I sitting behind my desk wrapped in a blanket.

There was an old sham Jewish haiku about a bar mitzvah boy that went something like, “Today I am a man. On Monday I return to the seventh grade.” Today I’m Nick Bones, I thought. Tomorrow it’s back to the real world. That world was now very different. Yet what to do but return to it?

“Nick,” said Maggie.

“Yes,” I said.

“Much remains unresolved,” she said.

“True. Let it lie. There’s no one out there paying me to worry about circles not yet closed.”

“As you wish.”

“As I wish.”

“Still . . .” she said.

“What,” I said.

“Well—”

“Coyness, Maggie. Never becoming.”

“Well—”

“Out with it.”

“There’s the matter of us.”

“Us?”

“Us.”

Us. Me and my computer, my closest relationship on the planet. With infinite combinations of two digits and sophisticated code, this machine had come to life and then into my life, as a female.

The computer world had changed radically since the Apple 2e, a large box and enormous monitor that knew nothing of the Internet or artificial intelligence and had graced my desk as a kid, a machine become prehistoric more rapidly than the Pony Express. From 128k of random access memory to Maggie.

Maggie, who saved my life, who centered me, who decentered me, who made me think about hard questions, who forced me to think of her as a who, as a she, lay as far away from one of Apple’s first designs as the Earth from Alpha Centauri. What I purchased not terribly long ago had forced me anew to ponder, What does it mean to be a human? And if Maggie, as she insisted, was a woman, as I at certain moments had conceded, then what might it mean for her and me?

“Nick,” she said.

“Yes, Mags.”

As usual, Maggie appeared on the screen in the image of Marlene Dietrich, the three Hebrew letters on her forehead spelling truth having made their reappearance. She was, moreover, wrapped in a large multi-colored tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl.

“I’ve joined the tribe, Nick, with the help of your friend Rabbi Hank.”

“I’m not going to ask,” I said.

“It’s a story,” she said.

“No doubt.”

“A story, but by the standards of certain authorities I have become a Jewess. Is it okay these days to say Jewess?”

No doubt I would hear the tale in all its particulars soon enough. At the moment, it was sufficient to bask in the sight of Marlene the Jewess.

“Feel free to call yourself whatever you choose,” I said. “I’ll need to expend some effort to believe it anyway.”

“Can I light candles Friday night?”

***

A week later I received the bill for my evening on the Psycho Path, a nasty number and an equally nasty reminder of my near-death experience after that triple dose of Little Rat Babies. The price for that rescue was extraordinarily higher than I’d imagined, but I had no means to judge these things.

I had no clue how I was going to pay. I could opt to pay in time, but the amount of time would carry me well into my next lifetime. Momentarily, I considered conversion to Hinduism so as to depend on my reincarnated selves to pay the thing off, several lifetimes down the highway. Or I could sell overpriced cookies to my students. That would take several years, too, well past my retirement, I realized. Though considerably smaller, I also received the bill for Abe’s funeral. It seemed I’d purchased the deluxe package without my knowing it. More time on the reincarnation clock.

“Quite a hefty sum, indeed,” said Maggie, Marlene with a yarmulke, tallit, phylacteries, and side locks, a convert experimenting with her new spiritual identity. A map of Israel formed the background, sometimes with the Territories, sometimes without. Maggie had lately been talking about immigrating, sometimes to Tel Aviv, sometimes to Ariel, that small city over the Green Line in what some believed was Palestinian territory. “It’s complicated,” she’d say.

“Maybe I’ll see if Mortar needs a partner,” I said. “You and I could maximize our presence on social media, drum up some business for the Outtaluck, and make our fortune selling instant coffee and old cookies to refugees and tourists.”

“Um, Nick,” she said, in an unmistakable tone of someone holding back a secret.

“Um, yes, Maggie.”

“Have you checked your bank balance lately?”

I engaged in this frightening activity as infrequently as possible, and told her so.

“But you know exactly when I check my balance, don’t you?” I said to her who knew my every digital footprint.

“Well, of course, and I see you’ve checked your balance three times in the last seven months.” She giggled. “Let me suggest you have a look.”

“I’d really rather not.”

Maggie disappeared from the screen, and in large numerals my bank balance popped up before my eyes.

My word!

According to what was written on that page, my current balance exceeded by thirty million the piddling amount that should have been there. It took several long seconds for my stomach to return to its usual resting place.

“Shmulie’s money, right?”

“Some of his money. Most of it, and believe me when I tell you the most part, went to worthy charities, some supporting life in the VU. Universities and other research institutes engaged in finding the cure received large anonymous gifts. Since you seemed fond of Mortar, he received a gift on the proviso that he improve the menu. Shelley and I agreed to an amount that would keep him in Broadway regalia for a long time, though probably not enough to engineer a revival. I even gave a few dollars to Mingus. I imagine he’ll let it sit.” Mingus as Mingus had returned to the foyer. “And then there was you, dear.”

“Don’t want it,” I said—impetuously, I confess.

“Why?”

“Not ethical taking a dead man’s money I didn’t inherit.”

My bank balance disappeared from the screen, and Maggie the Jewess reappeared.

“You leave a gun loaded and cocked in a room for a man to off himself, then you don’t go back and check on him, and you’re lecturing me about ethics?”

The point had enough merit to slow me down.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Then my bank account reappeared without Shmulie’s postmortem gift. I swallowed hard at the sight of my impending penury.

“At least pay off your debt. It came your way, after all, on the job. The search for Shmulie Shimmer brought you to that predicament. Let his money at least cover your debt.”

I agreed and pointed Maggie to my other bills that had been lingering a little too long. “We’ll decide what to do with the rest of it down the road,” I said. “Maybe I’ll keep some. Maybe I find a three-card monte game in the VU and takes me chances.”

“That’s a lot of money to give up. It doesn’t really belong to anyone anymore,” Maggie said, but my resistance had already wilted.

Thirty million would surely cover a wealth of sins. It made me feel sinless. “Let’s see where things go,” I said.

“We never know where things are going,” she said. “But they’re almost certainly going somewhere.”