“I thought Abboo loved the pharmacy.”
She puts her knife down. “Every day he didn’t want to go, and every night when he came home, it was my fault. He wanted to be a writer, but he could never finish his novel. So he blamed me for killing his dreams.”
“I had no idea.”
“That was between me and him. And see, now that he’s retired, things are much better.” She puts the slices of chili into a bowl and squeezes some honey over them. I thought of my father as unchanging, exactly in childhood as he is today, all of his words going into his little notebook instead of coming out of his mouth. I can’t imagine anger or resentment, and I guess it must have been my mother absorbing all of that, acting like a membrane between him and the rest of us, allowing only the soft, kind version of his dreaminess to permeate.
As for Cyrus and me, I’m sure my mother is about to tell me to suck it up.
“These are the things I had to do, and I don’t regret them. Marriage is an epic poem.”
I’m almost done with the pineapple. It’s eyeless now and waiting to be sliced.
“But you are young, and smart, and God gave you some very unique gifts. So I don’t think that kind of compromise should be assumed.”
I was sure, about three minutes ago, that Cyrus had achieved a permanent place in Ammoo’s pantheon, but maybe not. Maybe she actually loves me more than she loves him, even though, unlike Cyrus, I’ve never sat at her table and asked her, at length, why she prefers Twelfth Night over all the other comedies. Maybe she was playing the role of his mother for my sake. My head spun with the thought.
“You think I should leave him?” I ask, finally down to my pineapple triangles.
“No, I’m not saying that.” She examines the platter. “I’m just saying: ‘To thine own self be true.’?”
Later, on the cab ride home, Cyrus says, “I wish you wouldn’t call me white people either,” so I gather he’s still angry about the other thing, and just as I was too tired to argue with him before, I’m too tired to say sorry again, so we go for another round or two until we get across the bridge, and by the time we pull up to the loft, I feel like I’ve aged at least a dozen years.
* * *
A month later, WAI purchases Obit.ly, and Cyrus, Jules, and I all become part owners of Marco’s company. I’ve scoured his tech and haven’t been able to find anything that would convince the others to back out, yet I continue to feel suspicious of Marco. I can’t figure out what his motivations are. I find it scary that he’s not turned on by money—in the end, he sold his company to us for less than we were willing to pay for it, and that’s because he hardly negotiated. He seems genuinely, passionately committed to making sure that when people die, all their friends will come to hear about it immediately. He speaks in terms not of the market or the opportunity but of people’s right to know. Why are we still depending on obituaries and word of mouth? When someone dies, everyone they ever knew should be notified straight away.
He also talks a lot about AI. How we should use AI to allow people to continue to live indefinitely. He is obsessed with films in which people’s brains live on in robots or in the bodies of other people. Cyrus is no longer listening to me on this subject, and I do not have the guts to bring it up again. Fuck it. This is not on me. Then at other times I want to shake Cyrus and tell him again and again that Marco will ruin us. I know it in my bones—but because at this point, not only am I afraid of Cyrus, I believe in him more than I believe in myself—I don’t say anything.
Fourteen
NOBODY WANTS TO BE MARRIED TO THE MESSIAH
Sometimes being right is actually worse than being wrong. Six months after we merge with Obit.ly, Marco ruins everything and we are done.
He and Cyrus have been working on a secret project. They hold meetings to which the rest of us are not invited. Cyrus puts black paper up on his walls and a sign on his door that says, DO NOT DISTURB—NO EXCEPTIONS, which I take to mean NO EXCEPTIONS, NOT EVEN MY WIFE. Jules and Gaby invite me over for dinner on a regular basis, and in their super-clean apartment, we speculate endlessly about what Cyrus and Marco are up to. When we ask Cyrus and Marco, they giggle like a pair of kindergarteners who have just discovered poop, and finally, when they break the news, it is too late for us to do anything: they’ve already convinced themselves it’s a brilliant idea.
Crazy Craig is jubilant. “THIS IS GOING TO KILL EVERYONE,” he says when he shows up at Utopia. “I knew it, I knew you two were a force, a super-fucking-natural force.” He waltzes around the office hugging people and passing out cannabis-laced lollipops. All this because, to everyone’s horror and Craig’s utter delight, for the first time in history (drumroll, please)…
A dead person has sent a text message.
Yes, it’s true. Marco has used the WAI code—my Empathy Module—and combined it with Obit.ly’s database to get people to communicate with their loved ones from beyond the grave. Cyrus has named it AfterLight. It mimics the tone, the written diction, the vocabulary, of a person based on an entire history of texts, emails, Instagram comments, likes, memes, and retweets. It takes all of that and creates new texts and sends them as if the person were still alive.
Now, if you want your family to hear from you after you’re dead, and if they want to hear from you, you can all go on as if nothing has happened. “Most people only call their parents once or twice a year anyway,” Marco argues. “They’ve got a family WhatsApp group, they exchange all their news there. So the AI just keeps going as if the person hasn’t died, the family chat stays the same. And you can postpone your grief for as long as you want. Maybe forever.”
There must be some kind of law against this, I figure. At the very least, it’s an idea ripped off from a TV show. I consult our lawyer, and she does a little digging, and two hours later, she calls to tell me that although it’s a gray area, the thing itself is so new that the law hasn’t really caught up. The people who invented messaging didn’t imagine they’d have to be solving for this particular situation, so we have no legal way of handling it.
* * *
I try to get Cyrus to change his mind. “Is it possible that I’m the only one here who thinks this is a ticking time bomb?”
Cyrus looks at me and I know he’s secretly calling me the girl who cried Marco is insane.
Jules has doubts too, I know he does—he and Gaby and I have gone over it all again and again—but it’s like he is programmed never to disagree with Cyrus out loud.
“I agree, there are risks,” Cyrus says. “I’ve thought about them, and I have to tell you, I believe this is the culmination of everything we dreamed of when we started this company.”
“What, that dead people will speak? What does that make you, the Night King?”
Cyrus lowers his voice to a near whisper. We are in his office, and there is a song playing in the background that I can’t place. “When I think of the number of times I’ve wished I could talk to my mom just one more time, and what that would’ve meant to me, I feel it’s my responsibility to offer this to the WAIs.”
So this is what it’s been about all along. How could I have been so stupid? This whole romance with Marco is about Cyrus and his dead mother and the fact that he still has things he wants to ask her. Questions that had been left unanswered by her death, and goddammit if he isn’t going to raise her from the grave and have her answer them. “This is about your mom.”
“It’s too late for me,” Cyrus says. “But for a lot of people, it could be a lifeline.”
I recognize the song. It’s Mama Cass singing “Dream a Little Dream.”