I hesitated. “Living somewhere else. Maybe an apartment, in town. Or, and this is something I’ve only just started looking into, some sort of housing where you’d live with other people with similar issues, where there are staff who look after things you can’t look after yourself.”
“Why do you keep saying ‘issues’? I don’t have issues, Ray. I’ve had mental problems, which are very much under control. If you had arthritis, would you want me to say you had an issue with your bones?”
“I’m sorry. I was just . . .” I didn’t know what to say.
“Is this place where I would live a hospital? For crazy people?”
“I never said you were crazy, Thomas.”
“I don’t want to live in a hospital. The food’s terrible.” He looked at my unfinished meatloaf. “Even worse than that. And I don’t think a hospital room would have an Internet connection.”
“Nobody’s talking about a hospital. But maybe some kind of, I don’t know, a kind of supervised house. You could probably do your own cooking. I could teach you how to do that.”
“I can’t leave,” Thomas said matter-of-factly. “All my stuff is here. My work is here.”
“Thomas, you spend all but an hour of your waking day on the computer, wandering all over the world. Day after day, month after month. It’s not healthy.”
“It’s only a more recent development,” he said. “A few years ago, all I had was my maps and my atlases and my globe. There was no Whirl360. It’s so much better now. I’ve been waiting my whole life for something like this.”
“You’ve always been obsessed with maps, but—”
“Interested. I’ve always been interested in maps. I don’t say you’re obsessed with drawing silly pictures of people. I saw that one you did, of Obama, in the white coat with the stethoscope like he was a doctor, that ran in that magazine. I thought it made him look silly.”
“That was the point,” I said. “That was what the magazine wanted.”
“Well, would you call that an obsession? I think it’s just your job.”
This wasn’t supposed to be about me. “This new technology,” I continued, “this Whirl360, has not been healthy for your interest in maps. You’re wandering down the streets of cities all over the world, which I grant you can be an interesting thing to do, but Thomas, you’re not doing anything else.”
He looked down at the floor again.
“Are you hearing me? You don’t go out. You don’t see people. You don’t read books or magazines. You don’t even watch television. You never come down and watch a movie.”
“There’s nothing good on,” he said. “The movies are very poor. And they have so many mistakes in them. They’ll say they’re in New York, but you can tell from the background that it’s Toronto or Vancouver or some other place.”
“All you do is sit at the computer and click your way down street after street after street. Listen, you want to see the world? Pick a city. I’ll take you to Tokyo. I’ll take you to Mumbai. You want to see Rome? We’ll go. We’ll sit in some restaurant by the Trevi Fountain and you can order some pizza or pasta and finish it off with some gelato and it’ll be the most fun you’ve ever had. You’ll be able to see the actual city instead of some static image of it on a computer screen. You’ll be able to touch these places, feel the bricks of Notre Dame under your fingertips, smell the Temple Street Night Market in Hong Kong, listen to karaoke in Tokyo. Pick a place and I’ll take you.”
Thomas looked blankly at me. “No, I wouldn’t want to do that. I like it here just fine. I won’t catch any diseases, or lose my luggage, or end up in a hotel with bedbugs, or get mugged or get sick in a place where I can’t speak the language. And there’s not time.”
“What do you mean, not time?”
“There’s not time to get every place i
n person. I can get it done here faster, get the work done.”
“Thomas, what work?”
“I can’t tell you,” he said. “I’ll have to check and see if it’s okay to tell you.”
I let out a long sigh, ran my hand over the top of my head. I was exhausted. I decided to change the subject.
“You remember Julie McGill? From school?”
“Yes,” Thomas said. “What about her?”
“She came to the funeral. She asked about you. Asked me to say hi.”
Thomas looked at me, expectantly. “Are you going to say it?”
“What?” Then I got it. “Hi. If you’d come to the service, she could have said it to you herself.” He didn’t react to that. His refusal to attend was still a sore point with me. “Was she in your class?”
“No,” he said. “She was a year ahead of me, and a year behind you.” Thomas paused. “She lived at 34 Arbor Street, which is a two-story house with the door in the middle and windows on each side and three windows on the second floor and the house is painted green and there’s a chimney on the right side and the mailbox has flowers stenciled on it. She was always nice to me. Is she still pretty?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Her hair’s still black but it’s short now.”