Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

Mary had snatched the cube back and stuck it in the deepest crevice of her purse, with two zippers protecting it. Barn door, horse. “I thought that after Roger, the breakup, that nobody could ever hurt me that much again,” she mumbled. “I guess I was pretty dumb. Right? This is way worse. I’m going to have your knife in my back forever.” They were standing in this hotel lobby, surrounded by travelers and people having bar meetings, at noon, having what ought to be a nighttime bar conversation.

“Don’t be like that, babe,” Stacia said. Roger used to call Mary “babe” when they were first dating. He’d stopped a few years in, and that hadn’t seemed significant at the time. “It’s just that memory is one of the main building blocks of identity. And you know, right around the time that you started seeing Roger was when I started to become the person I am now. I wasn’t seeing as much of you at the time, and I felt totally alone. And maybe I don’t like the person I turned into. I just want to remember that time in my life a different way.”

“Now you’re blaming me for your choices?” Mary said. “Like it’s my fault that you started having intimacy issues, because I was in a long-term relationship and you weren’t? Are you even listening to yourself?”

“It’s not about blame, babe,” Stacia said. “I’m just trying to get a different perspective on that time in our lives.”

“Stop calling me babe!” Mary didn’t even care anymore that she was yelling in a public place. A group of people with lanyards and fancy shirts glanced in their direction. “Just, please, stop.”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry.” Stacia didn’t know how to hold herself, what sort of body language to adopt with Mary. “I keep thinking about that nightmare you had two months after you starting dating Roger, the one about an ocean of pure acid washing over everything and melting all the people and buildings. Once you would have told me about that dream, but you told Roger, and he held you so tight he thought he could almost smush you. It was right after his father had just died. He felt so full of grief and protectiveness, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He thought his heart would just give out, pop or something.” Stacia leaned on the back of an armchair. “Then I called, wanting to see if you were up for brunch, and he suddenly just felt annoyed and jealous.”

Then Stacia walked away, doing some weird mixture of her sashay and Roger’s stride.

So now Mary had to avoid all the places she’d ever gone with Roger, plus every place she used to hang out with Stacia. All her other friends kept asking her if she was okay, because they heard there was weirdness with Stacia, but Mary did not feel like explaining. And Stacia kept sending message after message, until Mary blocked her. She started going to the motherboard garden after work, because she’d never gone there before, and watching the tiny motherboards making abstract shapes in the carbon nanofiber beds calmed her.

One day, Mary was sitting in the motherboard garden, trying to stop replaying in her head the story of Roger, Stacia, and their patsy. And she noticed a man over at the other end of the square—at first, he just seemed overcome with emotion at the zen-like simplicity of the place. But then she’d noticed a tremor on one corner of his mouth and some vessels bursting in the opposite eye, and Mary recognized the signs of someone who’d done the wrong combination of neurotransmitters, from when she used to experiment at school. She rushed to his side just as he started to keel over, and kina-ed an ambulance. She rode to the hospital with him, telling the paramedics what counter-toxins he probably needed.

Mary figured she would never hear from that guy, whose name was Dave, again. Most guys would rather forget that they showed weakness in front of a total stranger, right? But Dave got in touch a few days later and asked her out for jerk chicken and plantains.

Dave wasn’t the opposite of Roger or anything—Mary had to resign herself to accepting that she had a Type—but he was shorter and burlier than Roger, with darker skin and a thicker mustache. He worked as an estate planner, in a fancy office in the donut hole downtown, and he was maybe a touch more reserved than Roger. He never made her laugh the way Roger had, but he made her smile.

Mary waited until their fourth date, when she and Dave were already spending a whole weekend together, before telling him about Roger’s memory wisp. “It’s kind of dumb,” she said. “But I figured I ought to mention it, in case you wanted to. I mean, it would be one way to streamline things. You know. You could figure out sooner if you actually want to be in a relationship with me.”

“I’m already in a relationship with you,” Dave said, and she shivered all over, even though they were in a hot tub (naked) together. His ample chest hair glimmered.

“In that case, I’m in a relationship with you as well,” Mary said, leaning upwards and kissing him, while their feet nuzzled.

“You know, I think getting to know each other is the fun part,” Dave said, stretching out in the tub. “The newness, the thrill of discovery. Peeling back the layers. Getting to know someone can be delightful. If it’s the right person.”

Mary nodded. She hadn’t even thought of any of this as something that could be fun. She had been thinking of starting a relationship as like defusing a bomb, or cooking a complicated recipe. “Yeah. Let’s hear it for the slow way.” She raised an invisible glass out of the water, and chinked it with an imaginary glass in Dave’s hand.

“The slow way.” Dave toasted back.

Around the time Mary shoved the memory cube into the trash compactor of the “kitchen” rectangle of her studio apartment, listening to the satisfying crunch of data being fatally compromised, she realized it had been almost two months since she’d spoken to Stacia. Time was, they used to talk almost every day. She had a moment of slow bereavement, like the soil erosion after an old-growth tree is uprooted. She had to bite back the urge to kina Stacia and try to salvage something.

Of course, as soon as Mary destroyed the memory wisp, she regretted it, because the day might come, years from now, when she would desperately need concrete evidence that she had once been loved. That someone could fall in love with her. She had Dave now, and she was currently experiencing the sensation of falling in requited love—but she’d already seen how that turned out. Right?

Mary went dancing with Dave at that new club that was five dayglo rooms with imperfect soundproofing, so the beats bled from dance floor to dance floor, and she was whooping at the unpredictability of the rhythms and the proximity of Dave’s wide torso, when she looked over Dave’s shoulder and saw Stacia swaying towards them with a desperate grin on her face.

“Let’s get out of here,” she breathed in Dave’s ear. She hadn’t told Dave about what Stacia had done, because Mary felt like it was her fault in some way.

A couple days later, Mary and Dave were on the beach, half-dozing in the sun in new swimsuits, and Dave had his hand on her thigh without any fixed intent. Mary saw a shadow only a second before she heard a voice say, “Have you tried two fingertips right behind her kneecap? Just kind of describing a slow, slow circle? It drives her crazy, man.”

Mary stiffened, squinting up at Stacia’s face. She knew at once that the “two fingers behind the kneecap” thing would never turn her on ever again. “Wow,” she said. “You’re really creeping me out.”

“Who is this?” Dave was sitting up and squinting.

“Uh, never mind.” Mary gathered up all their stuff into a bundle, as though fleeing a tidal wave. She seized Dave’s shoulder with both hands and steered him out of there, while Stacia tried to explain that she was just trying to help, and Mary would thank her later, and why was everybody being so judgey? Mary could still hear Stacia behind them all the way back to the transit station, until they finally got lost in the crowd.