Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

When they were alone on the tube, with a safe cushion of strangers all around them, Dave leaned in, one eyebrow raised with gentle humor but a concerned look in his eyes. “You want to tell me what that was about?” he said.

Mary could hardly bring herself to say out loud what Stacia had done, because it made her skin crawl. Dave just shrugged, though, and said that all of the estate planning conferences were having seminars about the emerging problem of parceling out the newly deceased person’s neural map. And the security sector was just starting to freak out about the problem of memory embezzlement. This was the crime of the future. When you put it like that, Mary almost felt trendy.

The next day, Dave and Mary met for sushi and Stacia was there, leaning across the bar so her face was uncomfortably close to theirs and saying things to Dave like, “Promise me you’ll take good care of this one, she’s like a tiger raised in captivity. Fierce, but trusting. Roger used to watch her in the bath. He used to keep waving goodbye long after she couldn’t see him anymore, whenever they parted ways. Roger had a crazy tidal wave of love for her, you have no idea.”

A few days later, Stacia was outside Mary’s apartment building when Dave and Mary came outside, tears scattering across her face. “I just want to know where we went wrong,” Stacia said, and Mary wasn’t sure which “we” Stacia meant. “What happened to us? I thought nobody could ever come between us. What happened? What happened to us? What happened to us? What happened to us?” Mary and Dave had to get in a random taxi just to get away from her.

Mary could see what was going to happen next. Stacia was going to stalk them one too many times, she was going to act just a little too creepy around Dave, and she was going to know too many embarrassing things about Mary. And then Dave would bail, and Mary would topple back into the dating pool. Wings on fire.

Maybe a week passed, and Mary started to relax. And then, when she was walking along the waterfront with Dave, Stacia came running up behind them, arms waving and eyes streaming with tears, wearing a torn skirt and mismatched high-heel shoes.

“I’ve never felt anything like what he felt, when he got together with you,” Stacia said, panting. “I’ll never feel anything like that for myself, firsthand. It was so intense. I can’t even imagine feeling that much love for anyone.” To Dave, she said: “You can’t compete. You might as well go home. She’s already had the great love of her life! Every time I close my eyes, I keep replaying it in my mind. It’s so intense. I wasn’t prepared. He loved her so much, he went half-crazy with love. You’ll never measure up. You’ll always be her second love. A consolation prize. Sorry to be the one to tell you!”

Then she ran away, stumbling over her own shoes.

That night, Mary spent hours staring into the depths of her kitchen trash compactor, where the last shreds of the memory wisp still clung. After a while, the crushing mechanism started to look like faces, or little blades of black grass, because your mind has a nearly limitless ability to see familiar outlines in anything. Mary didn’t cry, but she did heave, more and more violently, halfway between crying and empty-vomiting, until she had to send her kitchen away and summon her bed into the same spot on the wall.

Mary hugged herself in bed all night, staring at the peeling wall opposite. In the morning, she had a nine-tequila hangover, but she also had a moment of clarity: It wasn’t enough to avoid the places she and Roger had gone together. She had to grow up and move on with her life.

She took an extra smart cookie and spent an hour at dawn, sending out résumés for jobs that would actually use her bio-artist skills. And she started surfing apartment listings on her kina, because maybe she could actually live someplace where a sink and bed could coexist. She read up on extreme sports, which had gotten a lot more extreme since smart-cookies gave people superhuman reflexes and concentration. She kept looking for jobs and apartments for hours, until she was almost late for work.

By the time Mary met Dave for dinner (a different hand-pulled noodle place than the one where she got dumped), she was full of news. “I already have a job interview in ten days,” she said, sploshing dumplings. “And I’m thinking of trying BASE jumping. I know, this isn’t really like me, but change is healthy. Right?”

“I haven’t known you for long enough to know what’s like you,” Dave said. “I keep being surprised.” He looked around, as if afraid that Stacia would turn up at the next table, with more advice about Mary’s erogenous zones or more declarations that Dave couldn’t compete with Mary’s great lost love. “I’ve never met anyone like you before.”

“Um, yeah,” Mary said. “This has been a weird time in my life. I mean… ”

“You know,” Dave said in his matter-of-fact drawl, “I hate drama. I had a lot of drama when I was in my early twenties, and I just can’t stand it.”

Okay. So this was it. She was giving off too much crazy. She looked like a weirdness magnet, or at least someone with horrible judgment in choosing her friends. So, she was about to be dumped. She deserved to be dumped, truth be told. She had mismanaged her shit.

“This is really hard for me to say,” Dave said.

“I’m listening.” Mary braced herself, hands on elbows. Tried to keep a game face on. She was never going to eat hand-pulled noodles again.

“I know this is really out of line,” Dave said.

Mary felt her insides lose all stability, like she was falling off a skyscraper. But then she also felt a cushion of okayness, deep inside. Like she’d already been through the worst that could possibly happen, and she was still here. Even if Dave broke her heart again, he wouldn’t break her.

“Whatever you have to say,” she told Dave, amazed at her own calm, “just say it.”

“I think your friend is in trouble,” Dave said. “I know it’s none of my business, and you can tell me to butt out. But I think she’s having a psychotic break or something. Yesterday, at the waterfront, she seemed like someone who was coming apart. All that crazy stuff she said about the memories being so intense.”

Mary almost fell out of her chair at the realization that she wasn’t being dumped. Then she took on board what Dave was saying.

“God, you’re right,” she said. “She’s suffering from a neural overload. She can’t integrate those memories, because they’re so different and conflicting. You know, Roger kind of hated Stacia, especially early on. Plus she remembers the intensity of Roger falling for me, but not everything that came after, when we settled into just a normal relationship. Wow. I should have seen this sooner, but I was too busy thinking about how she hurt me.”

“Again, this is none of my business.” Dave raised his hands. “And I know this is her own fault. But… ”

“We ought to help her.” Mary grabbed her purse. “You’re right.”

“Thanks for not being mad at me for speaking out of school.” Dave seemed relieved. She had to pause to kiss him on the lips and embrace him with all her strength, right next to the man pulling noodles with his bare hands.

One time, when Mary and Stacia were still in college, Mary had cooked up a bad batch of prions. They were supposed to induce an hour of amyloid brain-melt, then dissolve harmlessly. But instead, they’d turned Mary and Stacia into basket cases, and when Mary found herself losing the use of language and forgetting how to walk, she’d lunged for the antidote she’d prepared just in case. Mary was fine an hour later, but Stacia had kept shaking and making preverbal chatter, like a giant baby. Mary had stayed with Stacia all night, holding onto her and saying, “It’s okay, I’m here,” until the prions had finally flushed out and Stacia had regained her mind.