Robert Wilson: The Chronoliths

I had bought the local paper for a more practical purpose. I searched its classified pages for rental properties close to the ring of suburban digital design consortia. The search coughed up a list of possibilities, and by Wednesday I had bribed my way into a one-bedroom walkup just west of the Twin Cities Agricultural Enclave. The room was unfurnished. I bought a chair, a table, and a bed. Anything more would have been a confession of permanency. I decided I was “in transition.” Then I looked for a job. I didn’t call Janice, at least not right away, because I wanted something to show her, first, some token of my credibility: an income, for example. If there had been a merit badge for Good Citizenship I would have applied for that, too.

Of course, none of this helped. There is no retrieving the past, a fact the reader almost surely understands. The younger generation knows these things better than my peers ever did. The knowledge has been forced on them.

By February of 2022 Janice and Kaitlin had moved into a pleasant suburban co-op, far from Janice’s work but close to good schools. The divorce contract we had finalized in December included a custody agreement that gave me Kaitlin for an average of one week per month.

Janice had been reasonable about sharing Kait, and I had seen a fair amount of my daughter since the fall. I was scheduled to have Kait this Saturday. But a day together mandated by a divorce court isn’t just a day together. It’s something else. Strange, awkward, and uncomfortable.

I showed up at Janice’s at 8:45, a sunny but viciously cold Saturday morning. Janice invited me into her home and told me Kait was at a friend’s house, watching morning cartoons until the appointed hour.

The co-op apartment had a pleasant odor of fresh broadloom and recent breakfast. Janice, in her weekend-morning blouse and denims, poured me a cup of coffee. It seemed to me that we had reached a sort of rapprochement… that we might even have enjoyed seeing each other, if not for the baggage of pain and recrimination each of us carried into the other’s presence. Not to mention bruised affection, forlorn hope, and muted grief.

Janice sat down with the coffee table between us. She had left a couple of her antiques on the table in a faux-casual display. She collected printed-paper magazines from the last century, Life and Time and so on. They lay in their stiff plastic wrappers like advertisements for a lost age, ticket stubs from the Titanic . “You’re still at Campion-Miller?” she asked.

“Another six-month contract.” And a 3k re-up bonus. At this rate my net income might someday advance all the way from Entry Level to Junior Employee. I had spent most of that bonus on a widescreen entertainment panel so Kait and I could watch movies together. Before Christmas I’d been relying on my portable station for both work and entertainment.

“So it’s looking long-term.”

“As such things go.” I sipped from the cup she had given me. “The coffee’s lousy, by the way.”

“Oh?”

“You always made very bad coffee.”

Janice smiled. “And now you can bring yourself to tell me about it?”

“Mm-hm.”

“All those years, you hated my coffee?”

“I didn’t say I hated it. I said it was bad.”

“You never turned down a cup.”

“No. I never did.”

Kaitlin came in from the neighbors’ — crashed through the front door in dripping plastic boots and a pleated winter jacket. Her glasses immediately frosted over with condensation. The glasses were a new addition. Kaitlin was only modestly nearsighted, but they don’t do corrective surgery on children as young as Kait. She swiped her lenses with her fingers and gazed at me owlishly.

Kait used to give me a big smile whenever she saw me coming. She still smiled at me. But not automatically.

Janice said, “Did you see your cartoons, love?”

“No.” Kait’s eyes remained fixed on me. “Mr. Levy wanted to see the news.”

It didn’t occur to me to ask why Janice’s neighbor had insisted on seeing the news.

But then, if I had asked, I might have missed an afternoon with Kait.

“Have fun with Daddy today,” Janice said. “Do you need to go to the bathroom before you leave?”

Kaitlin was scandalized by this indelicacy. “ No! ”

“All right, then.” Janice straightened and looked at me. “Eight o’clock, Scott?”

“Eight,” I promised.

We hummed along in my secondhand car, neatly laced into heavy Saturday traffic by proximity protocols. I had promised Kaitlin a trip to an amusement mall, and she was already cycling through waves of elation and exhaustion, jabbering for long stretches of the ride, then lapsing against the upholstery with a forlorn are-we-there-yet? expression on her face.

During her silences I examined my conscience… cautiously, the way you might handle a sedated but venomous snake. I peeked at myself through Janice’s eyes and saw (yet again) the man who had taken her and her daughter to a third-world country; who had nearly stranded them there; who had exposed them to an expatriate beach culture which, though no doubt colorful and interesting, was also drug-raddled, dangerous, and hopelessly unproductive.

The kind word for that sort of behavior is “thoughtless.” Synonyms include “selfish” and “reckless.”

Had I changed? Well, maybe. But I still owed Hitch Paley several thousand dollars (though I hadn’t heard from him in half a year and had begun to harbor hopes that I wouldn’t, ever) — and a life that includes such accessories as Hitch Paley is not, by definition, stable.

Still, here was Kaitlin, unharmed, periodically bouncing against the upholstery like a harnessed capuchin monkey. I had taught her to tie her shoes. I had shown her the Southern Cross, one cloudless night in Chumphon. I was her father, and she suffered my presence gladly.

We spent three hours at the mall, enough to tire her out. Kait was fascinated, if a little intimidated, by the clowns in their morphologically adaptive character suits and makeup. She packed away an astonishing amount of mall food, sat through two half-hour Surround Adventures, and slept sitting up on the way back to my apartment.

Home, I turned up the lights and shut out the prairie-winter dusk. For dinner I heated frozen chicken and string beans, prole food but good-smelling in the narrow kitchen; we watched downloads while we ate. Kaitlin didn’t say much, but the atmosphere was cozy.

And when she looked to the right, I was able to see her deaf ear cosseted in a nest of golden hair. The ear was not grossly deformed, merely puckered where the bacteria had chewed away notches of flesh, pinkly scarred.

In her other ear she wore a hearing aid like a tiny polished seashell.

After dinner I washed the dishes, then coaxed Kaitlin away from cartoons and switched to a news broadcast.

The news was from Bangkok.

“ That ,” Kaitlin said sourly as she emerged from the bathroom, “is what Mr. Levy wanted to see.”

This was, as you will have guessed, the first of the city-busting Chronoliths — in effect, first notice that something more significant than a Stranger Than Science anecdote was taking place in Southeast Asia.

I sat down next to Kaitlin and let her curl up against my ribs while I watched.

Kait was immediately bored. Children Kaitlin’s age possess no context; one video event is much like another. And they’re ruthless with their attention. She was impressed, if confused, by the helicopter shots of the riverfront neighborhoods destroyed and ice-coated, steaming in the sunlight. But there were only a few of these segments available, and the news networks ran them repeatedly over an aural haze of casualty estimates and meaningless “interpretation.” The palpable atmosphere of confusion, fear, and denial evinced by the commentators kept her frowning a few minutes more, but before long she closed her eyes and her breathing steadied into petite, phlegmatic snores.