“Twin,” said Byron quickly. “If you wouldn’t mind.”
“You two related?”
“Hope here is such a dear,” replied Byron, putting one arm across my shoulders. “I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
In the face of the old woman’s smiling ambiguity, what was a man to do except smile back, and hand her the keys?
Byron said, “If I take a shower—”
“You’ll forget me, but I’ll still be here.”
“I’m beginning to find that quite an exciting prospect. I could learn to enjoy being perpetually surprised to discover your presence.”
I smiled and said nothing, and she left the door to the bathroom slightly ajar as she went to wash, as if that might make a difference.
A few minutes of local news was all I could stomach.
“I don’t need Washington to tell me what my children should learn, I don’t need the fat-cats in DC to spend my money, to tell me what’s right and wrong for my family, what I carry in my back pocket, like a knife or a gun, how to look after my health! It’s my life, what the hell are they doing interfering in it?”
“Ma’am, can I ask, do you believe in abortion?”
“I believe that every life is sacred.”
“Do you believe that the government has the right to legislate on what a woman can do with her body?”
“Now hold on there because you’re doing a thing here, you’re doing a thing…”
“Ma’am, I’m just trying—”
“… and I’m talking to you honestly, I’m having an honest debate about things that matter and you’re trying to make it something it’s not…”
“… should women choose—”
“This government has spent my money on teaching children I’ve never even met about stuff I don’t even know about…”
I changed channels, flicking through an array of cop dramas and soaps, until stumbling on a current-affairs/gadget programme in which two men and a cosmetically gleaming woman went through the technological toys of the day and of course, but of course, there was,
“… Perfection — now, Clarice, you’ve been trying this, haven’t you?”
“Well, Jerry, yes, yes I have, and it’s been absolutely sensational! Not only do I feel positive about leading a more goal-orientated existence, really trying to achieve who I want to be, but the rewards it gives for consistent effort are just fantastic. It’s not just a reinvention of a lifestyle app, it’s a reinvention of me…”
I turned the TV off and lay, face-down, on the single bed. The duvet cover was thin, layers above, layers below, ready for a hot, sunny California day, a cold California night when the breeze from the sea and the chill from the mountains combined. An embroidered sampler above the bed read “There’s No Place Like Home”. A copy of the Bible lay beneath the green-glass lamp on the bedside table. Someone had left a receipt for barbecued ribs and a bottle of Coca-Cola in it. Hear diligently my speech, and my declaration with your ears. Behold now, I have ordered my cause; I know I shall be justified.
I stood in front of the bedroom mirror, studied my face, my eyes, ran my fingers over my skin, stared at my reflection, and wondered why I could remember it.
Why was I here?
The sound of water stopped in the bathroom.
I counted packets of sugar standing up in the jar by the kettle.
Buttons on the TV remote.
Lights appearing in the city as the sun went down.
Byron gasped as she saw me, drew her towels tight, shook her head, said, “Wait,” went into the bathroom, came back out in a dressing gown, added, “Maybe we should have got singles.”
“Nervous of being caught walking around naked?” I suggested.
“Dignity and old age are difficult to reconcile, especially when you forget the company you’re keeping.”
“You wanted a twin so you could watch me,” I sighed. “You’re afraid that when you can’t see me, I’m not real.”
She didn’t answer, and I turned away from the mirror, and lay down to sleep.
Chapter 62
I woke, to find Byron sitting on the end of my bed. Her notebook was open, new writings, new questions and recollections, filling the pages. The napkin on which I’d scrawled my terms was in her hand. The reflected light of sunrise came in off the bay below, California dreaming, perfect climate, orange trees and vineyards, wealth and water — but perhaps that was the past. Before the drought and historical modality and the world gone mad.
Again, briefly, that look in her eyes, almost sensual, her fingers flicking out, brushing my face, fascinated. “When I woke this morning I thought I came here alone, because I wanted to visit Berkeley.”
“What’s in Berkeley?”
“The beginnings of my team. My objective is still to dismantle Perfection, to re-write treatments, but to do that… there are some promising candidates on campus.”
“You were just going to recruit them? Walk up and say ‘Hi, I want to destroy Perfection from the inside out — you game?’”
“Of course not — charitable fronts, corporate appointments, layers within layers, I’m not new to this.” She dismissed the question with a flick of one hand, butterfly-light flapping through the air. “When I turned on the bedside light, I saw you, and remembered writing about you, but even that’s barely enough. It is extraordinary, how the mind creates a story to fill in the place where you should be; simply extraordinary.”
Suddenly uncomfortable; I pulled the sheets higher around my chin, and she said, “I’ll… find breakfast. Give you a little privacy.”
She wrote in her notebook: The woman who joins you for breakfast is called Hope. She is the one you cannot remember.
This done, she let herself go, finger lodged in the page of the book, eyes fixed on it, in case the ink dissolved.
For a week, nothing happened. Byron went about her business. She visited Berkeley. She talked with people in quiet corners of cafés. She spent a lot of time on her laptop. She read the newspapers. She waited for phone calls, which she always took outside.
“I am thinking about you,” she mused, “but plans were in motion before I knew of your condition.”
“How will you destroy Perfection?” I asked, when she came home one night from a meeting with a person she would not name. “What will you do to it?”
In answer, she opened a file on her laptop. A document from my USB stick, stolen from Perfection. Names running down the screen, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands — men and women from every corner of the world. Next to them, date of birth, home address, net worth, annual income, annual expenditure, credit score, current score on Perfection, and drop-down menus to bring up more data. Last two months of movement, according to the GPS logs from their mobile phones. Next of kin, friends, family, with links to Facebook pages and little yellow flags for any of those who were also on Perfection. Calories consumed, purchases made on the credit card, restaurants visited, illicit lovers contacted in the dead of night, last three films purchased through the internet on-demand service, most visited websites, last fifty text messages sent, last one hundred emails, shoe size, trouser size…
“Enough,” I said, as she picked through the lives on the laptop. “Enough. What does Prometheus do with all this information?”
“Sell it, of course. What do you think?”
“And what will you do with it?” I asked.
Her lips thinned. “This list contains the names of everyone who’s currently using Perfection. I do not have time to go to each one individually and show them the truth, so I shall create a spectacle.”
“What kind of spectacle?”
“That depends,” she mused, “on how the next few months go.”