And so I resumed telling stories, and slowly, little by little, I felt a change occurring in her. Perhaps I wore her down. Perhaps she warmed to my boyish persistence. I must have seemed like someone incapable of getting sunk. Maybe she thought it wouldn’t hurt to hitch her basket to such a balloon. If I could persevere despite her ongoing rejections, surely I had a unique talent for hope. Maybe, mistakenly, she interpreted this talent as courage.
Regardless, she did change a little. She seemed to open herself to my presence, if not to embrace it. Day after day, I told her stories, and when for the first time I asked her to marry me, she didn’t reject me out of hand. She only laughed a little, kept cleaning, and allowed me to keep talking. Other changes began to occur: a shower of laughter at a lackluster joke, an accidental brush of the sleeve, a sudden burst of conversation. When she walked in the front door, it was different. She came in with a rush of cool air. When she said hello, removing her coat, her eyes were as bright as if she’d been crying.
I asked her to marry me again in July; again she laughed and kept cleaning. This repeated itself a few more times that summer, and again in the fall, and like Scheherazade, postponing the day of my beheading, I kept telling stories. I kept up until Christmas, when Dolores had planned a five-day trip to visit her family. The evening before she departed, I stopped her at the door.
“This is it,” I said, like a man who lives in real time. “It’s now or never. Let’s get married. Let’s have a family together.”
“Maybe,” she said, then shouldered her tote bag and walked out the door. Five days later, when she arrived in the morning with a bag of groceries, she found me haggard at the breakfast island. I’d been waiting five days, five months, forever. She put the groceries down.
“OK,” she said. “Let’s try. But remember one thing. You’re going to lose interest. At some point, it will happen. You don’t think so now, but you’ll get distracted. You have to stay with me. If we have a family together, you have to be here to help.”
And so Dolores and I moved past the noisier stage of our courtship and began to build something quiet together. Without any witnesses, we were married at the courthouse downtown, surrounded by murals of murdering conquistadors. Dolores moved her few things into my house; we hired a new cleaning woman. When Dolores began to wander the halls like a shade, touching the bookshelves, the fixtures, the mirrors, I suggested community college. She enrolled in biology classes. At the end of the day, she came home with her books. In halting English, she told me about chlorophyll and ribosomes. Inspired by her energy, I began to dream up new programs. We settled into a routine. We found our favorite take-out spots; we stocked the freezer with ice cream. She told me about her family; we went to the movies. We talked about children. In the spring, we learned she was pregnant, and I realized, without even knowing when it had happened, that I’d become a human and was starting a life.
It doesn’t elude me that my readers might feel impatient with such a vague explanation of the way Dolores and I fell in love. When was the precise moment? What caused her to change her mind on her return from Mexico? I could try to provide answers, but this is my memoir. I get to choose how to tell it, and on the topic of Dolores marrying me, I insist on avoiding neat explanations.
Since well before I set loose my robots, we’ve been a binary race. We mimic the patterns of our computers, training our brains toward yeses and nos, endless series of zeros and ones. We’ve lost confidence in our own minds. Threatened by what computers can do, we teach our children floating point math. They round the complexity of irrational numbers into simple integers so that light-years of information can be compressed into bits. We’ve completed the golden ratio, moving the decimal up. But at what cost! What a pity, if Dolores’s decision to come close to Stefan were rounded up to the most rational reason.
Dolores moved, over the course of those months, from despising my messy existence to permitting me into her life. I’m not sure she loved me at first, but slowly, signs of affection began to appear: some little smile from the other side of the room, a new way of walking in the front door, that softening of her shoulders. I suppose I could reduce those to the clarity of integers, but the truth of that movement, the single greatest miracle of my paltry existence, doesn’t lie in rational numbers. From our initial distance, we became closer. The decimal points should go on forever.
After that movement, the rest is our own. It’s what I treasure in the rectangle of my cell, when there’s no hope for escape. The happy years of our early marriage should be a secret that belongs solely to us. I have no interest in describing them for the sake of a memoir. In setting them outside myself, urging them off to make friends. All that needs to be known, for the purposes of this little venture, is that slowly, carefully, Dolores permitted Stefan into her life. They were married, and later they had a child. They named her Ramona. They loved one another. Every day our Stefan felt grateful to his Dolores for teaching him again how much more he was than a perfect equation, and every day he worried for his baby Ramona that she might one day be tempted by a man such as himself.
(5) The Diary of Mary Bradford
1663
ed. Ruth Dettman
14th. At dinner, spoke to father again. Asked for funeral for Ralph. Rejected, on theological grounds. Soulless animaclass="underline" no other world in which Ralph is still living. Much loved, good life, etc. But soulless animal, and body washed away by the sea.
Must remember his details. Feet, for instance: two white, one black, one brown. Too often forget, eating radishes or salt horse as if nothing real has been lost. God forgive me my forgetfulness. No detail, no matter how small, can be permitted to weaken. If there be no other world in which Ralph is alive, he must remain here. Daily, then, I must wait for his return, which will never occur.
My skin has turned brown from sitting on deck, as salty as if I am a pillar. Found this transformation repulsive at first, but have since found some satisfaction. Perhaps I will become a part of the ship, made of leather, canvas, and tar. Soulless, same as Ralph, and both of us for ever at sea.
15th. Surprising incident today. Difficult to write. Not sure I understand. Feel as if I have halfway climbed over a fence, and wait there, suspended. Had visit from Whittier, carrying books. Found me in seat amongst crates and said that if it would please me, he would say words for my lost companion. Opened his book, it being poems he reads on occasion. Cannot now remember exactly, but said (I think) that he be no gifted speaker. That he would borrow some words. Smoothed over his page, spoke with uncertain voice. Ralph dead ere his prime (he said), but must not go unwept.
Heart caught in writer’s chest, and awful confusion. Face stung by sharp gale. Ralph’s death my fault, but also Whittier’s. Desire to heap blame upon him, confused with gratitude for gentle ceremonial gesture. Felt tears hotly rising: nearly sent Whittier away, for did not want him to witness my sorrow. But he faced out to sea. Did not gape at my tears, but spoke only of Ralph’s love for green lawns and driving afield in the morning, battening flocks whilst the dew was still fresh. Found myself caught by remembrance, of Ralph going forth, guarding our meadow, standing on hilltops. His bark, and the weight of his lean. Whittier continued, and I awash in desire for the place that we lost. For flowers of our home: amaranthus, jessamine. For his body, under the sea. For Ralph, on deck, being seasick and vomiting, yet looking homewards with sorry expression. For his familiar body, swept by the waves. For Ralph, being still with us.