Things I'm Seeing Without You Page 13

  “This is what you’ve been doing since you dropped out?” Daniel asked.

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  Mamie’s friends wobbled and kicked, arms around one another like a last-ditch chorus line. And as the song picked up steam, moving into that revved up orchestra part, Candy led them in Mamie Lee’s trademark shimmy. One at a time, they lay down on the floor and raised their legs straight up in a full-body quake until it was all wiggly thighs and Bobby Darin singing:

  Happy we’ll be beyond the sea. Never again I’ll go sailing.

  “Is this actually happening?” asked Daniel.

  I could feel him watching me out of the corner of his eye, shyly taking in a face he’d only seen in pictures. His proximity was unnerving, but my heartbeat would not slow down. I had no idea where things were supposed to go from here, so I just kept staring at the stage.

  “I think so,” I said.

  It was the best I could do.

  26

  Then Daniel Torres was living in my house.

  One day, he was a line of text, a disembodied voice, and the next day, he was sleeping on a couch in my living room.

  Well, my dad’s living room technically.

  When I approached Dad after the funeral, to ask if Daniel could crash for a few days, he chose that very instant to pretend he was a real parent. Probably because Grace was standing there, he asked what he thought were real parent questions.

  Did Daniel’s guardians know he was here? (Yes.) Was he on drugs and planning to steal things from the house? (Probably not.) How did I know him? (Friend of a friend?) I could see him trying to think of additional, better questions, but in the moment, he seemed to draw a blank.

  “Fine,” he said. “But he sleeps on the sofa.”

  Daniel was fine with this, but he seemed to take it to mean that he was confined to the couch exclusively for the duration of his stay. So for the first few days, he sprawled out there with a laptop balancing on his small belly. Meanwhile, I flitted in and out of the room and made sorry attempts at conversation.

  “How did you get here, anyway? You never said.”

  “The bus.”

  “Huh. The bus. Interesting.”

  “Yeah. There was a guy in the back guarding the toilet.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Totally. He wouldn’t let anyone use it. He said it was an infringement on his rights.”

  “Hmm. Weird.”

  “Yeah.”

  And that was the best we could do.

  We couldn’t seem to get anything going. And I thought, on numerous occasions, that I’d made a terrible mistake by implying he should come here. I couldn’t understand why things were so strained. After a couple days of relative silence, there were still no signs of improvement.

  Then he showed up at my room.

  At night.

  Just a half hour before he appeared, I had gone down to the kitchen to get a snack. I’d heard him shuffling and twisting around on top of the cushions, taking small, frustrated breaths like a baby. I couldn’t sleep either.

  So I was awake when I heard the knock. I got up slowly. I assumed it was my father at first, come to ask me what the hell was going on with the odd teenage boy on our couch. Instead I found Daniel standing in the dark hallway, blinking at me.

  I hadn’t closed the shades, so there was enough moonlight in the room that we could see each other. He was wearing a baggy T-shirt, and his hair was matted against his forehead. He looked my way, and a sudden wave of self-consciousness broke over me. I was wearing ripped boxers and a tank top. Not exactly ready for prime time.

  “Can I come in?” he asked in a whisper.

  I considered this a minute. What were a gentleman caller’s intentions when he showed up at your bedroom in the middle of the night? When I looked at his face, though, it didn’t seem especially pervy. It seemed pensive and vulnerable. Also, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t try anything sketchy with my father snoring down the hall. It probably wasn’t the world’s most cautious decision, but I let him in anyway.

  He walked over to my bed and lay down with his eyes open. I waited about half a minute before I sat down on the other side, with a gulf of bed between us.

  “I didn’t think it would be this weird,” he said finally.

  I sighed. On the one hand it was a relief to hear him say it. On the other, it confirmed that things were weird for both of us.

  “Maybe you don’t want reality,” I said. “Have you ever thought of that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How could the real me actually be as good as the hypothetical one? Maybe real me kind of sucks. I mean comparatively, of course. In most ways, I’m fucking awesome.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But real you doesn’t suck.”

  I felt myself blushing in the dark.

  “Should I go home?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer him because I honestly didn’t know. And for the next minute, we just lay there on opposite sides of the bed like siblings in a hotel room.

  “What do you do all day?” I asked eventually.

  I wasn’t looking at him, but I heard his head shift toward me.

  “What?”

  “On the couch?” I said. “When you’re just sitting there with your computer. What do you do?”

  He took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes.

  “I can show you if you want,” he said.

  I nodded, and he immediately crawled out of bed and disappeared back down the stairs. When he returned a couple of minutes later, he was carrying his laptop. He unfolded it, and the glowing screen lit up the room.

  He opened his browser, and the homepage for Twitter appeared on the screen. I saw a familiar face in the little white Twitter frame. I sucked in a quick breath. It was Jonah. The same photo that he had used on Facebook for as long as I’d known (and not known) him.

  It had been a while since I’d encountered the picture, and seeing it again was both gratifying and unnerving. It was an image that I used to love, one I kept myself away from these days for a reason. I looked at the most recent post on the feed and immediately felt a familiar sense of uneasiness. I turned to Daniel.

  “This post is dated yesterday,” I said.

  He nodded.

  The message said simply, “So so many new planets!” and then it linked to a recent article about new planets discovered by NASA’s Keppler telescope. It looked like any other post from a Twitter user.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Are you still pretending you’re him?”

  Daniel shook his head.

  “I’m writing an app,” he said. “It was our first assignment in Computer Science. I started out making a game. But then I switched to this.”

  I tried not to meet Jonah’s eyes in the photo.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s called Post-Life. It allows you to stay active on social media after you’re gone.”

  “Gone? As in . . .”

  “As in dead,” he said.

  I looked at another of the Post-Life tweets.

  “When I eat two chili dogs in a row, I usually hear the Braveheart sound track in my head.”

  “Who’s writing these?” I asked.

  “He is,” he said. “I mean, kind of. The program surveys his entire online persona, filing away all his likes and dislikes, interests, and the speech patterns of his previous posts. Then it uses that information to generate new ones, which it sends to his friends.”

  I stared at the screen.

  “How can he eat chili dogs if he’s dead?”

  Daniel pushed the hair back from his forehead.

  “That’s a bug I haven’t quite worked out yet. It doesn’t seem capable of distinguishing what a dead person can and can’t do. An ideal version would just keep up his int
erests, you know, as if he were still alive.”

  “But he’s not still alive.”

  “I know.”

  “And he didn’t ask for this.”

  “I get that,” he said.

  There was a current of irritation in his voice for the first time.

  “It’s not done yet. And the service would be for people who actively subscribe. People who want to keep posting after life. Jonah’s profile is just a test. For me.”

  He snapped his laptop shut, and the room went dark again.

  “You think it’s creepy, don’t you?” he said.

  “A little,” I said.

  He wiped his hand over his eyes.

  “That seems to be the consensus,” he said. “My teacher suggested I switch projects.”

  It was starting to rain lightly outside. More like a heavy mist than a storm.

  “It’s not the same,” I said. “You can’t keep him alive that way.”

  I watched as a small puddle slowly pooled against the windowsill.

  “I have a problem,” he said, “don’t I?”

  “No,” I said.

  He looked at me.

  “You have a lot of problems.”

  He smiled, but only for an instant.

  “I knew it was wrong to write to you as him,” he said. “But I did it anyway. I wanted to keep him here.”

  He rolled over in bed so he was facing me. But we were still miles of bed apart.

  “The starlings,” I said.

  “What about them?”

  “Did you write that?”

  He nodded.

  “You wrote most of it, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Jonah was always better in person. At least when he was feeling good. I’m better online, I guess.”

  “Why did you stop?” I asked. “I didn’t get any messages for a week or so before he actually died.”

  “After that day in the Public Gardens, I couldn’t do it anymore. I think the truth of everything finally became clear to me. It wasn’t a game. Jonah was a real person, and something was seriously wrong with him.”

  “Wait a minute,” I interrupted.

  “What?”

  “You didn’t write as him after the Public Gardens?”

  “No,” said Daniel.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Positive. Why?”

  I sat up and opened Daniel’s laptop. I signed into my e-mail. I should have known from the beginning, I thought. The problem was that Jonah didn’t send too many e-mails by the end. It was rare. But, still, I should have known that this one wasn’t Daniel’s. I searched my messages and finally came upon it, alone in a sea of advertisements and Quaker school newsletters. I opened it and handed the computer to Daniel.

  “Did you write this?” I asked him. “You have to be honest.”

  It read:

  Hello, Tess Fowler,

  The Internet tells me that the swans in the Public Gardens are named Romeo and Juliet, but that they’re actually both female. People like a good love story on their terms, I guess. The swans there are mute swans, but that just means that they’re “less vocal” than other kinds. Part of the way they communicate is through the fluttering of their wings in flight. I wish I could do that, don’t you? I think I might like it better than talking. There are so many things I like better than talking.

  It’s odd that we never saw each other after that night in Iowa. I make so many plans, Tess Fowler. I see them so clearly in my head. The way they’re supposed to go. You and me are in there, in one of the plans. We’re walking along somewhere and it’s really nice and casual and everything is so easy like it was when we were talking that night. It takes so much energy to make things easy for me. I have to go a thousand miles an hour to make it seem like I’m going ten.

  The new plan, the one I’m making right now, is a retroactive plan. When we meet at the farmhouse, this time I wake up the next morning and I miss my ride to the airport in Des Moines. I miss my flight back to Boston. And instead I stay with you a couple days. I live in your dorm like a stowaway and you smuggle me food from the cafeteria. I only come out at night, and no one else knows but you. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. But it seems like enough. Doesn’t it, Tess?

  Yours,

  J.

  I read the e-mail along with Daniel, and we stopped around the same time. Daniel looked at the desktop of his computer, a swirling galaxy of tiny white stars.

  “I didn’t write it,” he said.

  “Don’t bullshit me,” I said.

  Instead of defending himself again, he just got quiet.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You got a good-bye.”

  At some point, we had moved closer together, maybe a foot apart. The drop in temperature had made the room chilly, but I didn’t want to get up to shut the window.

  “Is that what that is?”

  Daniel frowned.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know I shouldn’t be jealous. It’s petty. And I’m not proud.”

  “I get it,” I said.

  Then I sat up.

  “Why don’t you write yourself one,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “What’s the point of your stupid app otherwise?”

  With my free hand, I clicked on the Twitter tab and Post-Life flashed back on the screen. Daniel looked at the screen in front of him. He slowly brought his hands to the keyboard. But he didn’t type anything.

  Looking at Jonah’s picture, it was possible, for a moment, to pretend that he was really still out there somewhere, sending back updates from the unknown. But it didn’t last long, that feeling of contact. It was just another trick, some digital sleight of hand. Daniel closed the laptop.

  I expected him to get up and wander back downstairs. But he stayed where he was. And instead of moving farther away, he reached out his hand across the bed. I watched it there in the dark.

  “I liked them,” I said. “The things you wrote to me.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “It kind of complicates things, though.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “I thought they were coming from him.”

  “I know.”

  The rain outside was picking up, pinging against the screen. I moved my hand across the bed and set it on top of his.

  27

  The next morning I woke up in an empty bed.

  The sun was up and Daniel was gone. And when I got up to pee, the whole house was quiet. I’ll admit I panicked a little. Maybe, I thought, as I sat on the coldest toilet seat in human history, Daniel had gotten what he came for. We talked through a few things and that was all he needed. When I finished in the bathroom, I pulled on some pajama pants and went downstairs.

  The couch was empty.

  His computer was gone too.

  I stepped through the quiet hallway of the house until I reached the kitchen and let out a deep breath.

  There was Daniel at the kitchen table. A neglected bowl of cereal sat in front of him, along with a cup of my dad’s burnt coffee. He was fully dressed, for once, in a pair of well-fitting jeans and a light blue button-down. His hair was combed in a loose part.

  I hardly recognized him. He looked older and younger at the same time. He was looking over a bunch of documents and brochures. When I stepped closer, I saw they were materials from my dad’s business.

  “Your dad is a seriously weird guy,” he said. “A science fiction dog funeral? Holy shit.”

  I wanted to tell him I was glad he was still here. What I said instead was: “Why are you dressed like a host at the Olive Garden?”

  Daniel glanced down at his shirt. He smoothed it over his chest.

  “I
thought maybe we could go for a walk,” he said. “I haven’t seen anything but a strip club since I’ve been here.”

  I looked down at the pajama pants I’d been rocking for the last few days. They hung on me more than usual. I was getting skinny.

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I said.

  I lingered by the table. Daniel watched me.

  “Fine,” I said. “Give me a minute.”

  ■ ■ ■

  Outside, the sun was high and the blue sky glowed like it was backlit. We squinted against the brightness after days inside. I had yet to retrace my steps to the lake since the day I followed my computer into the water, and I wasn’t quite sure why I felt compelled to go there now. But, since my father was gone again, and my car was on E, there were few other attractions of note.

  Daniel didn’t seem to care. He shuffled along, a step behind me, pleased to be out of his self-imposed captivity. He rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt and held his face up to the light, like he hadn’t been in the sun in years.

  “So why are you doing this?” he asked with his eyes closed.

  I watched his face.

  “Walking outside for no reason?” I said. “Because you asked me to.”

  He smiled.

  “Helping your dad with his business.”

  “I’m his partner,” I said.

  I could hear the flatness in my own voice.

  “I didn’t ask what your role was. I asked why you’re doing it?”

  For a guy who didn’t love talking, Daniel had a way of asking pointed questions.

  “It helps just to do something,” Daniel said, after a moment. “Is that it?”

  He put his hands in his pockets.

  “When I first came home from school after Jonah died, I helped my dad repaint the garage. Then I did the whole house by myself, even though it looked fine. Every day, I climbed up the ladder and slapped on another coat. Dad was happy to provide the paint. The only thing he believes in is hard work, even if it’s meaningless. It worked for a little while, though. I felt better. Maybe it was the endorphins. Or just having a sense of purpose. But I think mostly it was the distraction. . . .”

  “—And that’s what you think my life is right now,” I interrupted. “The symbolic painting of a garage?”