Instead, he watches his VHS movies. Tapes worn so thin in certain parts that the screen just fills with fuzz.
Maybe he’d even ask the Institute to do it one day, before he retires. Wipe his mind clear. Why not? You have nothing to lose but your past. For example, he’d sat out one humid night in his backyard in Baltimore and destroyed all the photos of his ex-wife with a Zippo lighter in a small trashcan, after he’d quit the force and been put on disability but before he’d packed up his apartment and moved all the way out here. Burning those photos—wasn’t that just a low-tech, homemade version of doing what the Institute does? He remembers the acrid smell of them. The emulsion catching fire. Her smile bubbling, curling. Then gone.
She’d already left him, and took that smile with her, which, to be fair, had been underused of late. He burned her photos, and packed up his apartment, and answered an ad for a job, and here he is. He feels like most of his life is only half-remembered at this point anyway. He barely remembers her smile. He wishes he’d kept one of those photos. Saved it from the fire. All those years they’d spent together seemed like someone else’s years to him now, someone else’s life, someone else’s smile.
There’s nothing special about this place, he thinks. We all forget. Then we forget what we forgot. And that’s how we survive.
Rigo taps the tablet screen and finally looks up.
“Tell me about Calvin Cooper,” he says.
“What would you like to know?” Robinson says.
“For starters, would you say he is a violent person?”
“Define ‘violent,’” Robinson says.
Fran sits at the library table, hunched over the articles, making her way through them, one by one. Isaac’s curled up in a corner of the kids’ section, lost in a YA novel.
Fran reads the first article again.
The story of the tech tycoon in California who was shot in the head by his wife.
A domestic dispute, is how the article describes it. An argument that escalated. Crime of passion.
She knows that’s not what it was.
It’s very unusual to be shot point-blank in the head and survive.
Unusual. But not impossible.
A miracle, really. No other word for it. Nearly a year in a coma. He was written off, for sure. Then he came out of it. Then four years in rehabilitative therapy. Relearning to stand. Relearning to speak. Then three more years of—what? she thinks. Just waiting. Searching, maybe. Planning, perhaps.
Shot, he survives. In a coma, he awakens. Bedridden, he rises. In a wheelchair, he walks again.
Runs.
Runs for office.
Mark Vincent, tech titan, noted philanthropist, victim of a terrible tragedy and, armed with an inspiring backstory, soon to be the next senator from the great state of California.
An American miracle.
He was a well-known figure at the time of the incident, a billionaire in his early forties who’d made his fortune in predictive algorithms applied to political campaigns. Better than polling, was the promise, and better than polling was the result. His software could collect and collate consumer information, then tell you, with unnerving accuracy, how someone will vote.
“I thought, I’ve spent my life perfecting a way to predict how people will vote,” he says, quoted in one of the stories. “Maybe I’ll try to win some of those votes for myself.” He was well on his way to laying the track for a Senate run eight years ago, when he was derailed by a senseless attack. A gunshot wound to the head. It nearly killed him.
Nearly.
Fran’s been too long out of touch with the news, after eight years of tuning out the chatter of the TV in the Laundromat, of ignoring the yellowing newspapers on wooden spines in the library. But from what she can gather scanning these pages, things in the outside world aren’t going too good right now. Economy is down. Violence is up. People are scared.
Yet amid all that, there comes reason for hope.
The American Miracle.
That’s what they’re calling him now or, at least, that’s the slogan festooned across his podium when he speaks.
“I think America can rise again as well,” he says. The medical miracle is promising a national miracle. It’s a narrative that can only end in the White House. It should have no problem lifting him to the Senate. And after that, who knows?
He’s even forgiven his wife, he says. Wherever she might be.
He doesn’t like to talk about it, but he will if the press insists.
He has no memory of the event itself—the incident—and really that’s for the best. Memories can hinder you. He’s all about moving forward. He believes there’s a larger plan for his life, and when you believe there’s a plan for your life, then everything in that plan becomes an instrument of that plan. Even a disloyal wife.
Even a coma.
Even a bullet.
He wishes her only the best, he says. No, he hasn’t heard from her in years. Not since that night. When you spend nearly a year in a coma, he jokes, you tend to fall out of touch with people. [Laughter.] Imagine my email inbox, he jokes. [Laughter.]
The press nods and jots down his remarks.
His wife was a PhD student in English lit at UC Berkeley when they met, a good fifteen years younger than he was. Part of a group of top students he’d brought in to help make his algorithm more poetic. The kind of tech project you undertake when you have shareholders to dazzle and unlimited money to spend. Nothing came of the meetings, but the two of them fell in love. A real storybook romance, he says. [Laughter.] She was a bookworm, with a vast collection of volumes that arrived at his home in dozens of boxes after he finally convinced her to move in. He built her an incredible library. An entire room inlaid with built-in bookcases floor to ceiling, all her own, her vast collection of books shelved, ordered, tagged, archived, and neatly tucked away.
They’re not married anymore, not legally, of course. She’s in prison, somewhere in solitary, receiving appropriate treatment for her mental illness, so he understands. Probably for life. He wishes her the best. He’d rather not say anything more about these personal matters. Let’s move on. Next question.