Children of the New World: Stories (19 page)

Feeling the closeness that sharing our layers brought, Katie suggested we give total openness a shot. It meant offering our most painful wounds as a gift to one another, a testament that there was no corner of the soul so ugly as to remain unshared. It’d become increasingly common to see the couples in Brooklyn, a simple
O
tattooed around their fingers announcing the radical honesty of their relationship to the world. They went to Open House parties, held in abandoned meatpacking plants, where partiers let down all their layers and displayed the infinite gradations of pain and joy to strangers while DJs played breaknoise directly into their heads. I resented the couples, imagining them to be suburban hipsters who’d grown up with loving parents, regular allowances, and easy histories to share.

Total openness seemed premature, I told Katie, not just for us but for everyone. Our culture was still figuring out the technology. A decade after linking in, I’d find drinking episodes that had migrated to my work layer or, worse yet, porn clips that I had to flush back down into the darkness of my hidden layers.

“I’m not going to judge you,” she promised as we lay in bed. She put her leg over mine. “You do realize how hot it’ll be to know each other’s fantasies, right?” There were dozens of buzz-posts about it—the benefits of total intimacy, how there were no more fumbling mistakes, no guessing, just a personal database of kinks that could be accessed by your partner.

“What about the darker layers?”

“We need to uncover those, too,” Katie said. “That’s what love is: seeing all the horrible stuff and still loving each other.”

I thought I understood it then, and though my heart was in my throat, my terror so palpable that my body had gone cold, I was willing to believe that total openness wasn’t the opposite of safety but the only true guarantee of finding it. So late that summer evening, Katie and I sat on the bed, gazing into one another’s eyes, and we gave each other total access.

*   *   *

I’VE SPENT A
lot of time thinking about what went wrong, whether total openness was to blame or not. Some days I think it was, that there’s no way to share the totality of yourself and still be loved, that secrets are the glue that holds relationships together. Other times, I think Katie and I weren’t meant to be a couple for the long haul; total openness just helped us find the end more quickly. Maybe it was nothing more than the limits of the software. We were the first generation to grow up with layers, a group of kids who’d produced thousands of tutorials on blocking unwanted users but not a single one on empathy.

There were certainly good things that came from openness. Like how, after finding my paintings, Katie surprised me with a sketch pad and a set of drawing pencils. Or the nights when I’d come home from a frustrating day of substitute teaching and she’d have accessed my mood long before I saw her. She’d lay me down on the bed and give me a massage without us even winking one another. But all too often, it was the things we didn’t need to share that pierced our love: sexual histories that left Katie stewing for weeks; fleeting attractions to waiters and waitresses when we’d go out to dinner; momentary annoyances that would have been best left unshared. Letting someone into every secret gave access to our dark corners, and rather than feeling sympathy for each other’s failings, we blamed each other for nearsightedness, and soon layers of resentment were dredged up. There was a night at the bar when I watched Katie struggling to speak loudly enough for the bartender to hear, and I suddenly realized his face resembled the schoolyard bully of her childhood. “You have to get over that already,” I blinked angrily. Soon after, while watching a film I wasn’t enjoying, she tapped into layers I hadn’t yet registered. “He’s just a fictional character, not your father.”

And then there was the final New Year’s Eve party at her friend’s place out in Bay Ridge. The party was Y2K-themed, and guests were expected to actually speak to one another. A bunch of partygoers were sporting Bluetooth headsets into which they yelled loudly. We listened to Jamiroquai on a boom box and watched Teletubbies on a salvaged flat-screen. Katie was enjoying herself. She danced to the songs and barely winked anyone, happy to be talking again. I tried to be sociable, but I was shut down, giving access only to my most superficial layers as everyone got drunk and sloppy with theirs.

We stood talking to a guy wearing an ironic trucker’s cap as he pretended we were in 1999. “So, you think the computers are going to blow up at midnight?” he asked us.

Katie laughed.

“No,” I said.

“Come on,”
Katie blinked.
“Loosen up.”

“I’m not into the kitsch,”
I blinked back.

“Mostly I’m just excited about faxing things,” the guy in the trucker’s cap joked, and Katie laughed again.

“You know faxing was the early nineties, right?” I said, and then blinked to Katie,
“Are you flirting with this guy?”

“All I’m saying is check out this Bluetooth. Can you believe folks wore these?”

“I know, that’s crazy,” Katie said.
“No, I’m not flirting. I’m talking. How about you try it for a change?”

“I told you, I don’t like talking.”

“Great, so you’re never going to want to talk, then?”

“Did you guys make any New Year’s resolutions?” the guy asked us.

“Yeah,” Katie said, looking at me, “to talk more.” In her annoyance an image from a deeper layer flashed into clear resolution. It was a glimpse of a future she’d imagined for herself, and I saw us canoeing in Maine, singing songs with our kids. Even though we’d discussed how I never wanted children, there they were, and while I hadn’t sung aloud since grade school, there was a projection of me singing. Only then did I see the other incongruities. My eyes were blue not brown, my voice buoyant, my physique way more buff than I ever planned to become. And though I shared similarities with the man in the canoe, as if Katie had tried to fit me into his mold, the differences were clear. There in the canoe, was the family Katie wanted, and the man with her wasn’t me.

“What the fuck?” I said aloud.

“It’s just a question,” the guy said. “If it’s personal, you don’t have to share. I’m giving up gluten.”

“Excuse us for a minute,” I said, and I blinked for Katie to follow me. We found a quiet spot by the side of the flat-screen TV.

“Who the hell is that in your future?” I whispered.

“I’m really sorry,” she said, looking at me. “I do love you.”

“But I’m not the guy you want to spend your life with?”

“Ten … nine … eight,” the partiers around us counted as they streamed the feed from Times Square.

“That’s not true,” Katie said. “You’re almost everything I want.”

There was no conscious choice about what happened next, just an instinctive recoiling of our bodies, the goose bumps rising against my skin as our layers closed to each other. I couldn’t access the lake house anymore or the photos of her father; her childhood dog was gone, followed by the first boyfriend and her college years, until all that was left were my own private memories, trapped deep within my layers, and the pale tint of her skin in the television’s light. We were strangers again, and we stood there, looking at each other, while all around us the party counted down the last seconds of the old year.

*   *   *

I LOGGED OFF
for long periods after we broke up. I gave up on trying to convince my students to have real-life experiences. When they complained that reading the “I Have a Dream” speech was too boring, I let them stream a thrash-hop version instead, and I sat looking out the window, thinking about Katie. I walked to my station alone every day and sat on the train with my sketch pad, drawing the details I remembered from our trip to Maine: the shoreline with its broken shells and sunlight, the heron before it took flight, Katie’s face in the summer darkness. It’s the intangible details that I remember the clearest, the ones that there’s no way to draw. The taste of the perch as we sat around the table; how a cricket had slipped through the screened windows and jumped around our bed that night; how, after we’d gotten it out, the coolness of the lake made us draw the blankets around us; and how Katie, her father, and I had sat together in the warm light of the living room and played a game, the lettered dice clattering as her father shook the plastic container.

“All right, Andy, you ready?” he’d asked me, holding his hand over the lid.

And I’d thought I was.

ICE AGE

THE IGLOO IS
cold this morning. It’s been getting chillier ever since we had to cut back on wood rations. But this morning, with the winter winds whistling past our entrance from the north, even the furs don’t keep us warm. The kids are already up, playing with snowballs and the Playmobil firefighter I found out on the tundra. I was hunting elk with Tom when I spotted the little red figure. One of the Paulson kids must have dropped it. I bent down, covered it with my glove, and pocketed it. Tom didn’t say anything, just kept his eye on the horizon for elk. The way I figure it: the Paulson kids have plenty. My kids, what have they got? Snowballs and a little fox I whittled out of an oak stub.

“Morning,” Lisa says. She’s cutting up the chinook we’ve had brining for the past month.

“Morning,” I say.

“Hi, Daddy!” the kids say.

And for a moment it all feels good, the four of us in our igloo with our moose fat candles burning, the morning sun catching the thinner parts of the walls and making a pattern of translucent gray patches in the ice. Lisa brings me a stone bowl of fish and puts another one on the floor for the kids. We sit down on our stones and eat.

“Cold night,” she says.

“Yeah. Pray I bag something today.”

“Yup,” she says, and puts a piece of salmon into her mouth.

Back in the early years we used to talk more. There were emotions to process, loved ones to commiserate over, but eventually, it gets old. You go through all your memories, you tell the same stories, you laugh halfheartedly at stale jokes, and then it’s back to silence. The snow has a way of absorbing voices.

When we’re done, Lisa gathers the bowls and sits down to sew on the slab of granite we call our couch. She’s latching badger fur with fishing twine onto my Carhartts. The kids’ playtime is over. They stop their game of covering the Playmobil guy with snow, and Lisa sets them to fixing fishing nets. I get on my hat and gloves and collect my bow and arrows.

“Good luck,” Lisa says.

“Good luck, Daddy,” the kids say. Then I scoot out of our home.

It’s another gray day in our community. The sun’s just a dull thump behind the clouds, our scattered igloos like braille against the tundra. The sky spits down flakes, and the wind whirls the frozen drifts into cyclones. The Sanders kids are out in the snow, dragging wood and scraping ice from the branches. We’ve scavanged most of the usable wood already. The only stuff left is the remaining tops of tall trees that puncture the ice from below, white and frozen. You can chop away at the ice, get a couple more feet of the tree, but it’s exhausting work.

Tom’s waiting for me by the side of his igloo, his dogs in a huddle, muzzles to tails. “Morning,” he says. “Damn cold last night.”

“Yeah.”

“Fucking Paulsons,” Tom grumbles and rouses the dogs.

I don’t say anything to that. Enough people already hate the Paulsons that chiming in feels petty. When we first settled the area, the Paulsons kept their distance. They had two Mexicans build their igloo for them: a huge two-story affair, large enough for three families. We built our own shelters, struggling and freezing, as Phil Paulson stacked snowmen with his kids on the horizon. Then the fires started up. Phil Paulson has kept a fire burning
outside
day and night for the past year. You can see the smoke on the horizon, a thin trickle rising into the gray sky behind the high rise of their double-decker igloo.

Tom and some other guys, myself included, went over there early on to talk some sense into Phil about his bonfire. He was out front with his kids, where the workers had built them a snow hill. “Hey there!” he shouted, and let out a whoop as he and his daughters slid down the mound. Round the back of his house you could see the smoke rising from a hole. We went over and looked. The hole was a good twelve feet deep, deep enough to see the splintered wood of a telephone pole, exposed and scorched black by the flames.

Phil came over to our side. “Some weather we’re having!”

It was an old joke; none of us laughed.

“Phil,” I said, “we have to talk to you about this fire.”

“Isn’t it amazing?” Phil put his hands in his trouser pockets. “I’m figuring in a couple months we’ll make it down to the houses. Lots of buried treasure down there.”

“You’re burning up all the fucking wood is what you’re doing,” Tom said.

“Please”—Phil looked over his shoulder—“my daughters.”

“To hell with your daughters,” Tom said. “You’re putting out this fire today, got it?”

“Be reasonable,” I said, trying a more compromising tone, “you’re wasting fuel.”

“Guys,” Phil said, “I appreciate you coming to talk. Have a safe walk back.”

Then Tom tried to take a swing at Phil, and we had to subdue him and lead him back to the dogs.

That night the fire was still burning, so Tom and some other guys went up there, peed on the side of Phil’s igloo, and dumped a whole lot of snow down the hole. You could hear the hiss of the coals clear to our igloo. After that incident, Phil’s workers installed an insurmountable wall of ice, and from behind the wall the fires started up again. Smelling that smoke, sometimes it’s enough to drive anyone crazy.

Tom and I load up the dogs with bear traps, game bait, and our weapons, and let the alpha catch the scent. Today’s our day to track. Louis, Doug, and Seth are on wood duty, and Jerry and Sam are on fish. I scan the ice for game. We used to have herds of moose pass by our camp, even the occasional black bear, but animals grow smart when you kill enough of them. In the distance, out by the boulders, I can see a couple black dots, but they could easily be my imagination. The dogs trudge through the snow. It’s slow going. The dogs are hungry and tired; most of them aren’t even sled dogs, just survivors we trained. Tom and I end up having to get off the sled to walk beside them across the ice, and we make our way toward the boulders, where the rocks rise in sharp cliffs. We set a couple traps, then get downwind and hunch with the dogs behind the rocks.