“She’s just being thorough,” I said. “Perfectionist.”
“Yes, perfectionistly insane.” Sonja laughed at herself. “Come see me in Portland before you drive cross-country, Matt? Yes? Make her do it.”
I promised I would.
By the time I got back to our rental house on the outskirts of Bend, dusk had settled in. The house was surrounded by pines, some fallen and skewed across the forest floor, taken over by rot and fungi. For over a year, while Kate schemed, we’d lived this quiet, out-of-the-way life, on the edge of a happy broke, getting by on her speaking fees and my photography work. We hiked the Pacific Crest Trail all the way into California, spent weeks at a time rafting and living out of a tent in the Deschutes, Willamette, Ochoco, and Mt. Hood National Forests. We had a living room with a fireplace, two bedrooms, a spacious kitchen, and rows of bookshelves. I must have read two hundred novels in those years, typically curled into a corner of our sectional while Kate buried her nose in her laptop and worked with only slightly less fever than the years in D.C.
Dizzy padded over, panting and ecstatic. It was hard to believe she was eleven years old. It felt like we’d found her as an underfed puppy in a dog pound cage only the day before. Now, I took my friend by the head and spent a good long while scratching her behind her gross brown ears.
I found Kate in her office. She wore her new ARs and spoke to an empty room.
“… Then tell her to fucking bring her own omnidirectional treadmill bullshit. What the fuck is this?” She paused, waiting for the answer, while glancing up at me. “Hold on, Matt’s home.” She hopped up, pecked me on the cheek, and then began pacing. I grabbed our VR set and joined. The boyish blond of Seth Young’s head digitized into my vision first, followed by his perpetually smiling eyes and slightly off-kilter nose. He was midsentence with Kate, his digital blond flattened like a Legoman’s head. I still hadn’t gotten used to talking to people like this, seeing them plasticky and colored all wrong. It was all uncanny valley.
“It’s for her social VR. She has to fly around in her worlde for the teenyboppers,” said Seth.
“Teenyboppers? All her fans have fucking mortgages now!” said Kate.
“Get her the pad. We’ve already got a VR tab in the bajillions, what’s one more—”
“Sure, what’s one more ego-freaked pop star’s demand for a white piano with a bowl of strawberries?”
“And the last thing I wanted to ask you about— Oh hey, Matt,” he said, as my avatar finally appeared for him. “Good, glad you’re here for this. The FBI interview? How’d it go?”
It was so ridiculous: having these conversations when we well knew the FBI was likely watching, and the FBI likely knew we knew they were watching. A playacted charade within a playacted charade.
“Just fine,” Kate said. “At least they didn’t haul me off to a black site. Someone somewhere made a decision that harassing me with law enforcement wasn’t effective or that it might rally folks to me.” A serenity passed over her face, which seemed to indicate that she was detached, yet this was the failure of AR to pick up and display these basic human cues. It was why hurt feelings and bad blood permeated the virtual realms: miss one tic on a face and the attitude being conveyed is the opposite of the person’s intention. “They’ve been trying to take me out at the knees in the public square instead. Go after my reputation, humiliate me, degrade me. Turn me into a slut and a sexual abuser and a coked-out whore.”
She winked at me.
“Yeah, no one gave them any ammunition.” I slipped an arm around her waist.
Kate shoved her curls over one side of her head, streaked with more and more errant grays these days, and asked Seth, “How’s the baby?”
“He’s amazing. I know all parents think their kids are geniuses, but Forrest really might be one.”
“Well, it was your sperm, not Ash’s, so I kinda doubt that,” said Kate.
I took the opportunity to beg out of the conversation, let them talk in their code, and collapse into bed. I loved the bedroom of this house. It was secluded, and with the door shut, held the silence of a cool and deep forest. Engulfed in solemnity. I undressed and laid down, but not before taking my phone out one last time, to mull the email I’d gotten.
The next morning when I woke, I realized Kate had not come to bed. I found her still in her office, comparing a detailed paper map to another projected on the wall from her laptop. She had the Apple ARs propped on her head, cramming back unwashed hair.
“Will you rub my feet?” she asked, wide awake.
“If you cook me breakfast like a good woman.” It was a joke because I always cooked. Otherwise, we’d live off raw vegetables and energy bars. That morning I made an egg substitute, lab-grown bacon, and chopped fruit. The clouds hung low and green in a nauseous yellow sky. During the Great Eastern Flood, there had been a tornado outbreak near Corvallis, an unusual phenomenon for Oregonians, but it had gone uncommented on in the larger country because most of the East Coast and Midwest was underwater.
“Smells good, kid.” Kate came up behind me and put her arms around my shoulders.
I served the plates in the living room. I ate mine quickly, scraping up the last of the fake eggs with a piece of toast. At first, I thought I only wanted to tell her so I could think things through out loud.
“I saw Coral in New York. And Rekia and Tom.”
Kate stopped chewing. Stared at me. Then slowly began chewing again. She finally swallowed. “Why?”
“And Holly Pietrus.”
“Yeah, why?”
“They wanted to talk. About the arrests, the harassment, the FBI, Love, Tony Pietrus vanishing down a hole—all of it. And they wanted to know what you’re up to.”
“And did you tell them?” She’d speared a piece of fake egg that was on its way to her mouth. Instead, she set the fork down.
“I told them you were busy planning the concert on the Mall. And that musicians are a pain in the ass.”
She nodded. “That’s good.”
“Those guys are doing good work still.”
“For the nonprofit-industrial complex, sure,” she said as if readily agreeing. “The moneyed crowd needs some way to salve their consciences, I get it.”
“There’s still time to call this whole thing off. Chalk it up to the bad idea that it is.”
Kate was not unused to my skepticism; I’d made it quite vocal for the past year, so this comment dissipated into uncaring pupils. “No, there’s really not. It’s happening.”
Sometimes, when you’re in love with a person, you don’t know what you’re about to say to them until it’s already leaving your lips. It’s like you walk around with this splinter buried deep in the skin, and you think, No way will that ever come out. Then suddenly it does. As soon as it left my mouth I knew there would be a moment before I said this to her and a moment after. That these words would be irrevocable.
“I’m not going to be a part of this, Kate.”
She’d been balancing her plate on her knees. Now she set it on the coffee table and drew the word out very slowly: “Okaaay…”
“I already know everything you’ll say, so maybe we can skip that part.”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“I guess what I’ve been trying to get across to you for a while now is, I don’t want to do this.” A lump formed in my throat, and I waited for it to abate. “And I don’t want you to go through with this either.”
She studied me like I was brand new to her. “What would you have me do, Matt?”
“It’s over.” I tried not to let the pleading creep into my voice but failed. “You’ve done what you can, Kate. You did something brave and incredible when you had the chance, and now it’s time to let other people take the reins. We can go wherever we want. We have our entire lives left.”
She laughed and her bright eyes churned around the morning-bright room in astonishment.