“I’m Sylvie Yarrow now.”
“You’re Sylvie Yarrow.”
“I’m Sylvie Yarrow?”
“You’re Sylvie Yarrow.”
They ordered the Australian pinot noir pimped by the sommelier. The candle guttered, sending up a foul feather of smoke.
“If I’m Sylvie Yarrow, who are you?”
“I’m Rocco. Your boyfriend, remember?”
“But—”
“What is it?”
“My boyfriend is Bertrand.”
“You were with Bertrand but you broke up. Now you’re with me.”
“I think there’s something wrong with me. I don’t feel like myself.”
“Who do you feel like?”
“I feel like I’m between two someones. And where are we?”
“At the wine bar—”
“I know that, but more generally. We’re in the city, right?”
“Have some wine,” Rocco said.
“Seriously. This is Manhattan?”
“That’s correct.”
“The air doesn’t smell right to me.”
“You had nightmares last night. You kept moaning in your sleep. What were they about?”
“Who are you supposed to be?”
“I’m your boyfriend. Rocco. The nightmares. Tell me.”
Sylvie quaffed red. “I was in a morgue. There was a coroner. He kept pulling out slabs. On every one of them was the same woman. Dozens of identical corpses.”
“Sylvie?”
“I feel weird about you calling me that.”
“All I’ve ever wanted for you is a happy life. Out of all the lives in New York City I reviewed, this one was the happiest. So I made arrangements to assign you this life.”
“What do you mean ‘assign’?”
“The world you’ve known isn’t the world you’re actually living in. Your name is Sylvie Yarrow and you’re an editor at a publishing house. You live in the twenty-first century. You have an extraordinarily rich and rewarding life. Go deeper into this self. Relax your ego. Drift into this welcoming new person.”
“I can’t remember my real name.” Sylvie squinted. “It’s like a painful tip-of-the-tongue feeling.”
“Can’t you see what kind of heaven this is? All of it re-created just for you. You’re free to live in this place as it was at the height of its glory.”
The salads came.
“That looks good,” Rocco said. “What kind did you order again?”
“Arugula Gorgonzola something something.”
Rocco, his voice low, said, “Take this life. It’s yours. All the memories, the belongings. How many people have this kind of opportunity? How many people would die to trade lives with someone happier?”
“I’m Sylvie Yarrow.”
“You’re Sylvie Yarrow.”
How arduous this process was, turning one person into another. Way way more complicated than manipulating some douchebag’s actions via the Bionet. DJing was all about making another person succumb to your will. This kind of work, on the other hand, was like translating a book from one language into another, except instead of languages one translated entire personalities, and instead of words one worked with white matter flickering in gray matter. Rocco didn’t entirely understand the personalities, so it was a little like coding in real time with no QA process to grab the bugs. He detected a little panicked fluttering at the edges of her mouth, a momentary wobble toward tears. He cupped his hand over her non-fork-wielding hand. Would Sylvie’s personality successfully map onto Abby’s, or would little Abby remnants crop up from time to time, like continuity errors in a movie? Watching her disappear into Sylvie was a bit like watching someone die, he was hesitant to admit, and for a moment a miniaturized sadness presented itself in his thoughts. Then he remembered that the whole point of this experiment was to turn his girlfriend into someone more interesting. He wondered if she’d take on Sylvie’s sexual proclivities, if it would feel like sleeping with a new woman.
Rocco summoned the waiter and ordered the olive and cheese plate out of sequence with the salads and entrées, then rubbed the veiny bulges on top of Sylvie’s hand. “So tell me more about this guy’s novel?”
Sylvie sighed. “It’s about the beginning of a new world. There’s a rampaging glacier in it. Clones. Giant heads that appear in the sky.”
“One of those.”
A significant aspect of replacing one personality with another involved what came to be called, in academic circles, third personing. Most of the time this involved the use of a prop, specifically a doll or figurine, life-size or not, into which the subject discarded his or her former personality. For Abby’s third personing, Rocco’d purchased a custom sex doll manufactured to his specifications—a precise, to-scale model of Abby, with the same color eyes, hair, measurements, etc., crafted of a rubberized polymer and dressed in one of Abby’s white-blouse-and-black-pants combos. She sat positioned on the couch of Sylvie’s apartment, a fashion magazine open in her lap. Returning that night from the wine bar, Rocco snapped on the lights and addressed the mannequin from across the room.
“Hello, Abby,” he said.
Sylvie stood in the doorway feeling like maybe she’d entered the wrong apartment.
“It’s okay,” Rocco said. “She’s just going to hang out here. Say hello.”
“Hi there,” Sylvie said.
“Now be polite, Sylvie, and address Abby by her name.”
“Hi, Abby.”
“Abby here is a graduate of the University of British Columbia in digital data archaeology. She says you have a nice apartment,” Rocco said.
“Thanks. Sorry for it being so small,” Sylvie said.
“Abby says, ‘Oh, no, don’t apologize. I’ve seen way smaller apartments in New York City. And what a neighborhood. Right in the middle of the hippest part of Manhattan.’”
Sylvie said, “Oh, stop. Can I get you a drink, Abby?”
Rocco said, “Abby says that would be nice. ‘Do you have tonic water?’”
“I think I have that. Rocco?”
“Sure, tonic water sounds good to me, too.”
Sylvie retrieved the drinks from the kitchen and returned to find Rocco chuckling at a witty comment Abby must have just made. “Say, Sylvie, Abby says she just finished one of the books you edited, The Subject’s Object.”
“That was a bitch to edit,” Sylvie said, coastering beverages. “All those passages in Russian and Icelandic.”
“Abby says she loved the ending.”
“I’m proud of that ending,” Sylvie said. “It took a while to get there. At one point I was reduced to tears. And not the good kind of tears.”
“I couldn’t get into The Subject’s Object,” Rocco said, “but I’m not all that literary.”
“Rocco’s the left-brainer of the relationship,” Sylvie said.
“Shit!” Rocco exclaimed, looking at his watch.
“What is it, honey?”
“There’s an email I forgot to send from work. And I left my laptop on my desk. Damn. I’m going to have to hop over there and hit SEND. I won’t be long, promise.” He gathered his jacket and kissed Sylvie on the forehead. “Sorry, Abby, I was just starting to enjoy our conversation. You two carry on without me.”
With Rocco gone, there came an awkward silence. Sylvie swirled the cubes in her glass. “So what line of work are you in, Abby?”
“Good question,” Abby said. “I just graduated, so I’m looking for jobs. Digital recovery stuff. I specialize in DVDs. What I’d love to do is work for a museum, restoring old movies. By old I mean 1900s or earlier.”