The eighth man showed the phone to Annette, who nodded, and then handed the phone back to the second man, who pressed a button that sent the email to every contact in the phone.
Then the second man plugged a new program into the phone. It was an application called Closure, and according to the people on the since-deleted message board who had recommended this team, it was what meant the difference between being the best at this and being only one of the best.
The program, using data that Annette had provided to them in advance, was said to be able to infiltrate every record-keeping website and database that had ever recorded the existence of her ex-boyfriend and erase all written and photographic evidence of him that was labeled by any of the four most common spellings of his full name. The program was guaranteed to work in under ten minutes. It finished in six and a half, and when it was done, the second man threw the phone into the river, where it, too, died instantly and anonymously.
That was it.
Annette approached the eighth man, pulled fifty one-hundred-dollar bills from her purse; handed them to him in a roll; and then impulsively kissed him on the side of the mask, making him blush, or so she imagined.
“Congratulations,” said the eighth man. “The first person to truly achieve closure.”
“Am I really the first?”
“Well, if you weren’t, I guess I couldn’t tell you, could I?”
The eight men walked away and got back in their surprisingly domestic-looking minivan and drove off, leaving Annette, heart racing, all alone.
There was a beaded line of sweat across her forehead, which she wiped off, and her lipstick was smeared a bit, which she corrected; now she looked close to perfect, which, she had always suspected, was actually a little hotter than perfect.
She walked alone to her favorite bar, ordered her favorite drink, and stirred it as she waited for the rest of her life to approach.
Kindness Among Cakes
CHILD: “Why does carrot cake have the best icing?”
MOTHER: “Because it needs the best icing.”
Quantum Nonlocality and the Death of Elvis Presley
You may remember a time when the most common headline to see on a tabloid newspaper in the checkout aisle of the supermarket was that Elvis Presley had been seen alive. And you may remember that sometime around 1994, all these newspapers stopped saying that around the same time.
The papers had been making it all up. None of the pictures were real, and none of the details had anything to do with anything.
But they were right, too.
“People just can’t accept the fact that the King is dead,” one woman sighed to her son when he pointed to such a headline in a Kroger checkout aisle in 1986, back when children were confused by newspapers that contradicted other newspapers.
Behind them in line stood the dead king himself, holding Wonder Bread, peanut butter, Tylenol, and a magazine about something else entirely.
It had in fact been Elvis who couldn’t accept that he was alive, who at a certain specific point could no longer understand on any level how this fat and tired man in Memphis, this man who combed his thinning hair and slept in his freckled skin, could possibly share the same name and memories as the most mythical creature that the world in his day had known.
It wasn’t simply that he had gained weight, or gained years, or transformed in any natural human way that would have made sad but rational sense to anyone. It was something deeper inside, something that told him that, as strange as it sounded, there wasn’t any true, unbroken line anymore directly connecting the man in whom he stood and Elvis.
Elvis.
Elvis!
ELVIS!
Who, really, could be Elvis?
He could trace it only as far back as a particular Monday morning when he poured himself a bowl of cereal as he did every day, turned on the television, sat down on his sofa, and then found himself suddenly overcome by a loud, hollow echo of a feeling—starting, somehow, in his ears—that told him that the old feeling had been gone for some time.
He spent the next few days waiting for this new feeling to fade away, but as the hours and moods came and went, the feeling didn’t.
He wandered the hallways of his Elvis-themed home, squinting into the framed photographs on the walls. The black-and-white photographs looked like Elvis, but not like him. The color photographs looked like him, but not like Elvis.
He looked in the mirror, and the person he saw looked like him, and it looked like Elvis. But it didn’t look like he was Elvis.
He wrote down his name on a pad of paper and stared at it: ELVIS. It looked like the Roman numerals for a made-up number, a number of a jumbled, indecipherable value, which was at least closer to how he felt than anything else so far.
It was strange to think that he wasn’t Elvis anymore, but it was even stranger to think that he ever had been.