Adam Johnson - Fortune Smiles - Stories

After the doctor left, I went into the garage and started making the president. A psychologist would probably say the reason I created him had to do with the promise I made Charlotte and the fact that the president also had a relationship with the person who took his life. But it’s simpler than that: I just needed to save somebody, and with the president, it didn’t matter that it was too late.

I tap Charlotte’s patella, but there’s no response. “Any pain?”

“So what did the president say?”

“Which president?”

“The dead one,” she says.

I articulate the plantar fascia. “How about this?”

“Feels like a spray of cool diamonds,” she says. “Come on, I know you talked to him.”

It’s going to be one of her bad days, I can tell.

“Let me guess,” Charlotte says. “The president told you to move to the South Pacific to take up painting. That’s uplifting, isn’t it?”

I don’t say anything.

“You’d take me with you, right? I could be your assistant. I’d hold your palette in my teeth. If you need a model, I specialize in reclining nudes.”

“If you must know,” I tell her, “the president told me to locate my inner resolve.”

“ Inner resolve, ” she says. “I could use some help tracking down mine.”

“You have more resolve than anyone I know.”

“Jesus, you’re sunny. Don’t you know what’s going on? Don’t you see that I’m about to spend the rest of my life like this?”

“Pace yourself, darling. The day’s only a couple minutes old.”

“I know,” she says. “I’m supposed to have reached a stage of enlightened acceptance or something. You think I like it that the only person I have to get mad at is you? I know it’s not right — you’re the one thing I love in this world.”

“You love Kurt Cobain.”

“He’s dead.”

We hear Hector, the morning nurse, pull up outside — he drives an old car with a combustion engine.

“I have to grab something from work,” I tell her. “But I’ll be back.”

“Promise me something,” she says.

“No.”

“Come on. If you do, I’ll release you from the other promise.”

I shake my head. She doesn’t mean it — she’ll never release me.

She says, “Just agree to talk straight with me. You don’t have to be fake and optimistic. It doesn’t help.”

“I am optimistic.”

“You shouldn’t be,” she says. “Pretending, that’s what killed Kurt Cobain.”

I think it was the shotgun he pointed at his head, but I don’t say that.

I know only one line from Nirvana. I karaoke it to Charlotte:

“With the lights on,” I sing, “she’s less dangerous.”

She rolls her eyes. “You got it wrong,” she says. But she smiles.

I try to encourage this. “What, I don’t get points for trying?”

“You don’t hear that?” Charlotte asks.

“Hear what?”

“That’s the sound of me clapping.”

“I give up,” I say, and make for the door.

“Bed, incline,” Charlotte tells her remote. Her torso slowly rises. It’s time to start her day.

—

I take the 101 Freeway south toward Mountain View, where I write code at a company called Reputation Curator. Basically, the company threatens Yelpers and Facebookers to retract negative comments about dodgy lawyers and incompetent dentists. The work is labor-intensive, so I was hired to write a program that would sweep the Web to construct client profiles. Creating the president was only a step away.

In the vehicle next to me is a woman with her iProjector on the passenger seat; she’s having an animated discussion with the president as she drives. At the next overpass, I see an older man in a tan jacket, looking down at the traffic. Standing next to him is the president. They’re not speaking, just standing together, silently watching the cars go by.

A black car, driverless, begins pacing me in the next lane. When I speed up, it speeds up. Through its smoked windows, I can see it has no cargo — there’s nothing inside but a battery array big enough to ensure no car could outrun it. Even though I like driving, even though it relaxes me, I shift to automatic and dart into the Google lane, where I let go of the wheel and sign on to the Web for the first time since I released the president a week ago. I log in and discover that fourteen million people have downloaded the president. I also have seven hundred new messages. The first is from the dude who started Facebook, and it is not spam — he wants to buy me a burrito and talk about the future. I skip to the latest message, which is from Charlotte: “I don’t mean to be mean. I lost my feeling, remember? I’ll get it back. I’m trying, really, I am.”

I see the president again, on the lawn of a Korean church. The minister has placed an iProjector on a chair, and the president appears to be engaging a Bible that’s been propped before him on a stand. I understand that he is a ghost who will haunt us until our nation comes to grips with what has happened: that he is gone, that he has been stolen from us, that it is irreversible. And I’m not an idiot. I know what’s really being stolen from me, slowly and irrevocably, before my eyes. I know that late at night I should be going to Charlotte instead of the president.

But when I’m with Charlotte, there’s a membrane my mind places between us to protect me from the tremor in her voice, from the pulse in her desiccated wrists. It’s when I’m away that it comes crashing in — how scared she is, how cruel life must seem to her. Driving now, I think about how she has started turning toward the wall even before the last song on the Nirvana album is over, that soon even headphones and marijuana will cease to work. My off-ramp up ahead is blurry, and I realize there are tears in my eyes. I drive right past my exit. I just let the Google lane carry me away.

—

When I arrive home, my boss, Sanjay, is waiting for me. I’d messaged him to have an intern deliver the hash reader, but here is the man himself, item in hand. Theoretically, hash readers are impossible. Theoretically, you shouldn’t be able to crack full-field, hundred-key encryption. But some guy in India did it, some guy Sanjay knows. Sanjay is sensitive about being from India, and he thinks it’s a cliché that a guy with his name runs a start-up in Palo Alto. So he goes by SJ and dresses all D-School. He’s got a Stanford MBA, but he basically just stole the business model of a company called Reputation Defender. You can’t blame the guy — he’s one of those types with the hopes and dreams of an entire village riding on him.

SJ follows me into the garage, where I dock the drone and use some slave code to parse its drive. He hands me the hash reader, hand-soldered in Bangalore from an old motherboard. We marvel at it, the most sophisticated piece of cryptography on earth, here in our unworthy hands. But if you want to “curate” the reputations of Silicon Valley, you better be ready to crack some passwords.

He’s quiet while I initialize the drone and run a diagnostic.

“Long time no see,” he finally says.

“I needed some time,” I tell him.

“Understood,” SJ says. “We’ve missed you, is all I’m saying. You bring the president back to life, send fifteen million people to our website and then we don’t see you for a week.”

The drone knows something is suspicious — it powers off. I force a reboot.

“Got yourself a drone there?” SJ asks.

“It’s a rescue,” I say. “I’m adopting it.”

SJ nods. “Thought you should know the Secret Service came by.”

“Looking for me?” I ask. “Doesn’t sound so secret.”

“They must have been impressed with your president. I know I was.”