Universal Love

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  For my parents, Eva and Stephen

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am deeply grateful for the love and support of so many people. Thank you to my agent extraordinaire, Leigh Feldman, and to Ilana Masad for futuristic guidance on these stories. Thank you to Caroline Zancan for making this collection sing and to the entire team at Henry Holt for ushering Universal Love into existence. Deep thanks to Phong Nguyen, Robert James Russell, and Stephen Weinstein for integral edits to early versions of these stories. To Howie Sanders, thank you for your intrepid championing. Deep thanks to Tony and Caroline Grant and the Sustainable Arts Foundation for everything you do to support parent-writers. Thank you to Siena Heights University for the gift of time which made this book possible. To Carol, Mark, Tina, and Laura for the LHSP/RC home. International love to Pablo Llambías, Rúnar Helgi Vignisson, Mads Bunch, and Lárus Jón Guðmundsson. Endless gratitude to the writers at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing for building a community with magic and love every summer. To my friends, who’ve surrounded me with the warmth of your hearts during the writing of this book—Nicholas, Brodie and Carter, Frank and Larissa, Hosef (edible insect love), Milagros and Curtis (proofing love), Craig Holt (coffee love), David and Priscilla, Jill, Jayne, Clay, the A2, Geneseo, and MV crew, and so many others. Wopila to Harold Thompson, Iam and Laura, Stef and Kathy, and the Ypsilanti lodge community. For Mason, Ashton, Blake, and the Higginses and Brotjes—your love means the world to me. Universal love across the sea to my Danish and English family. To my parents for a lifetime of love and guidance. To Rachel, love of my life, for this lifetime and infinite more. To my son, Peter, light of my life and first listener to these stories. And to all of you, thank you for making this world a better place with your love.

  THE YEAR OF NOSTALGIA

  I.

  Nin found Dad frozen in the backyard. He wasn’t trimming the hedges, just standing with his clippers in hand, staring at the bushes, she told me. Who knew how long he’d been like that, his body shivering. She’d put her hand on his back and guided him inside, where she made him a cup of tea.

  “You need to come home, Leah,” she said. So I asked for another week off, got a reluctant yes, and headed back to Ohio.

  Our parents had done everything together, from puttering around the house to working in the garden. Dad would rake leaves, Mom would prepare lunch, and they’d sit in the living room in the late afternoon, reading ebooks together. At night they’d stream a movie or go into town for dinner. They were that rare and beautiful couple, almost nonexistent nowadays, lifelong companions and best friends. Then, suddenly, there was only Dad: calling to tell us Mom was gone, making funeral arrangements without us, stern-faced through the service, telling everyone he was fine, just fine.

  I’d tried to help during the funeral—I cooked, cleaned the house, washed dishes, had planned to stay an extra week—but Dad pushed Nin and me away. Everything was fine, he told us, we girls should head home, no use staying at the house when we had our own lives to live. And after two days, he said we needed to go. What could we do? Nin left, driving the three hours back to her apartment in Toledo, and I flew back to Boulder, where Theo and the kids were waiting. Two weeks later, Nin called to tell me about finding Dad by the bushes.

  Nin picked me up from the airport. Besides the funeral, the last time we’d been home together was when I was finishing my grad degree and she was completing her freshman year as an undergrad. We’d argued about something dumb—an anthropology course she hated—I’d called her narrow-minded, and she’d called me a patronizing bitch. After that we hadn’t spoken for years. I was hoping grief might help us mend the distance, but when she picked me up she was being her annoying self, asking me about my flight while simultaneously flicking her eyes to send texts in her contacts as she drove.

  “Uh-huh,” she commented when I told her how the kids were doing, and laughed suddenly at a video in the corner of her eye. So, instead of continuing, I sat in the passenger seat hating how ADHD her generation was.

  “If Dad’s got dementia,” she said, “you’re going to have to move home. I can’t handle this alone.”

  “He’s just grieving,” I said. I couldn’t imagine uprooting everything and moving back to the Midwest. We had our jobs, the kids’ school, never mind living in suburban Ohio, a place Nin might be able to survive but not a place I wanted to return to.

  The house was a mess. Dad had let dishes pile up over the past weeks on tables, countertops, and bookshelves. Piles of laundry lay wherever he’d decided to get undressed. I ran the washing machine, scrubbed dishes, and mopped the floors while Dad told us he didn’t need our help. Later that evening, we found him in the basement, standing by the water heater for some reason only he understood. I led him back upstairs and got him in bed while Nin mixed us drinks from a bottle of gin she’d found in the pantry. We sat at the kitchen table, exhausted. I scrolled through my eye-screens looking for advice about Dad while Nin played a dumb game on her retinas.

  “What about Nostalgia?” I asked.

  “That app came and went in the twenties,” Nin said.

  “Not according to this.”

  I blinked the article to her and she scanned it without stopping her game. “Whoa,” she mumbled. “I had no clue old people were using it.” She blinked me a hyperlink from the comment section, and soon my eyes were opening other related posts.

  Like most people, I’d briefly subscribed to Nostalgia to get over a breakup. I’d uploaded videos of Sam, and there was his hologram making goofy jokes that made my heart leap. When I doubted my decision to dump him, I accessed the app’s shadow side and suddenly his hologram was being his snarky old self, a dark cloud that confirmed how much better off I was without him. Nostalgia helped me get over Sam, but it also left me feeling clingy and pathetic, particularly on nights when I’d use a sex clip to get myself off to his ghost. Nin was more familiar with Nostalgia’s reboot. She’d uploaded holograms of old friends to her contacts as a way to remember her high school days, before she grew bored and deleted the app.

  But Nostalgia had changed since then, and we skimmed article after article, clicked on suggested posts, and finally went to bed long after midnight, appearing red-eyed the next morning at the breakfast table.

  “Dad,” we said, “we think we have a way to bring Mom back.”

  * * *

  We found Dad’s contacts in a dusty case at the bottom of his dresser drawer. There were no daily videos on his feeds, no photos blinked from vacations, no live-memories of him and Mom gardening together. He’d only accessed his contacts for video calls, and had never explored the apps or used them for anything more complicated than a remedial form of Skype.

  “Why would I want the world watching Mom gardening?” he asked.

  “Maybe so we could have the memories,” Nin said.

  “You never took any photos?” I asked.

  “Sure, plenty. On my phone.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  But it was true. Dad had used his old iPhone to snap pictures. We scrolled through the storehouse of megapixel selfies of him and Mom, the two of them posing like people did back at the start of the millennium. There were a few inexplicable portraits of them taken at such a far distance that there was no way it’d been a selfie stick.

  “How’d you even get a shot like this?” Nin asked.

  “We asked someone to take it.”

  I shrugged. “I guess people were more trusting back then.”

  Nostalgia was going to be a lot harder to use. There were drop-boxes to upload Dad’s old pics to, user agreements, and clickable acknowledgments of less-than-perfect verisimilitude. It’d take twenty-four hours, which seemed forever, but it would be possible to re-create Mom from the photos.

  To pass the time, Nin and I did the yard work that’d been neglected. We raked leaves in the autumn light, the trees an explosion of yellows and reds all around us. I tried to find a way to break the silence, but Nin was watching videos in her eyes and listening to music. She created small piles in the expanse of our backyard, then paused and stood there with her shoulders slumped. I went over and put my hand on her back.

  “You okay?”

  She closed her eyes. “Are you going to let her into your feed, too?”

  I hadn’t thought about it. “I guess I’ll have to, right? Just to make sure it looks like Mom?”

  “I think we both have to,” she said. “That’s going to be weird.”

  I pictured Mom again, her joy when we’d come home for the holidays. I didn’t know how I’d respond to seeing her. Nin looked like she was about to cry, and I wanted to give her a hug, but she took her rake and walked across the
yard to start on a corner we hadn’t done yet, leaving us both to cope with our grief alone.

  * * *

  Mom returned to us on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Dad, Nin, and I sat on the couch together, put in our contacts and logged on, and suddenly there she was, standing before us on the wooden floor.

  “Leah,” she said. “How are you, honey? Come give me a hug.”

  I looked to Nin. “I guess do it?” she said.

  So I crossed the room and Mom leaned toward me, putting her holographic arms around me as though she were real. Then she called Nin up for a hug, and finally she sat down on the couch next to Dad. “Isn’t it good to have the girls home, Lou!”

  Our father didn’t say anything, just looked at her, but his eyes were smiling.

  “You know what we ought to do,” she said, pulling a detail from some old photograph we’d uploaded. “We should carve a pumpkin tonight. What do you girls say?” She was up before we could answer, heading into the kitchen to do god knows what. We followed, and found her standing by the kitchen window, looking out at the yard. “Oh yes, we’re definitely doing that tonight.”

  On her insistence we got the pumpkin, and all of us sat carving a jack-o’-lantern that evening. Mom knew a lot about Nin and me from the feeds we’d uploaded from our own contacts. She asked me about Theo and the kids, suggested we video-call them, but I lied and said they were watching a movie. I’d only started to explain Mom’s death to them; this wasn’t the time to let the boys speak with her hologram. If Mom worked, we’d prep the kids for a Christmas visit. But for now, with Mom suggesting we salt and roast pumpkin seeds, I wasn’t sure what we were going to do. The hollowed gourd grinned at us from the table and we put a candle inside its bucktoothed mouth.

  “Looks pretty spooky,” Mom said.

  Nin looked at me. “Sure does.”

  We stayed with Mom for another hour, but though she was clearly all intact, her hologram made me feel as though something was missing, an arm or a leg. Nin looked like she was going to be sick. So we said we were tired, and I gave Mom an air hug good night before putting my arms around Dad. “You sure you’re okay with this?” I asked as we hugged.

  “Thank you,” he said into my ear. Then he thanked Nin, his contacts looking damp in the kitchen light, and we left him and Mom sitting at the kitchen table chatting. Later, we heard them turn on the TV to stream a movie together, and Nin and I went to bed, wondering if we’d made the right decision.

  * * *

  At four in the morning, we heard the garbage cans being dragged down the driveway. I opened my curtains to see Dad outside in the frosted night, wrestling with the leaves we’d bagged by the curb. He lifted one of the large paper bags, spilling leaves everywhere as he tried to stuff it into the yard waste container. A couple doors down the neighbor’s dog began barking.

  By the time we got outside Dad was in the garage, yanking a rake off the wall. Nin and I stood in the bleak garage light. “Dad, what are you doing?” I asked.

  His hand gripped the rake as if he might take a swing at us. “You can’t just leave the bags like that.”

  “Dad,” Nin said. “You’re freezing. Come inside—”

  “It’ll rain, they’ll rip.”

  “Dad,” Nin tried again.

  “You girls don’t know how to take care of anything.” He tried to circle around us, but Nin put her hand on his arm to keep him from leaving.

  “Dad,” she said. “Where’s Mom?”

  I blinked on my contacts and logged into Nostalgia. As far as I could see, Mom was still upstairs in their bed. Dad let out a white breath in the winter darkness, his knuckles blue around the rake.

  “You girls made a mess,” he huffed.

  “We’re sorry,” I said, and Nin took his arm softly.

  “Come on, Dad. We’ll make you some coffee, okay? You can tell us how to take care of the leaves.”

  Dad didn’t move, but his grip on the rake loosened. Then he looked past us toward the curb and all the leaves scattered there. “You made a goddamned mess.”

  Inside, Nin and I sat bleary-eyed as Dad held his mug between his hands and told us that the woman upstairs wasn’t his wife.

  “We know,” Nin said. “That’s what we were trying to tell you. It’s just a hologra—”

  “She’s a damned kindergarten teacher.”

  “Huh?” I asked.

  “You’re all up early,” Mom said, walking into the kitchen. “What’s the celebration, sleepyheads?”

  “She’s not my wife,” Dad repeated, oblivious to Mom without his contacts.

  Mom began humming a song from our childhood. “What would you girls like for breakfast? Some chocolate-chip pancakes?”

  “I think we better log her out,” Nin whispered. So we did and Mom was gone, her humming cut mid-note. Dad’s hands were shaking. I reached out and put my palms on his fists. “Explain it to us again,” I said.

  It took a while, Dad mostly repeating that Mom wasn’t his wife—which didn’t make sense to either of us—but finally it began to grow clear: the nursery rhymes, the chocolate-chip pancakes, the singsong voice she’d slip into. The only recorded video feeds we’d uploaded had been Nin’s and my own, most of them from when we were kids. Mom’s hologram was closer to our childhood mother than the wife Dad knew, and though she’d entertained him last night with her novelty, after we went to bed she’d only wanted to talk about building a snowman together this winter.

  We logged on to Nostalgia for an emergency hotline or email help center but found nothing. There was no contact form or FAQ page—just a stupid little cartoon fox that kept popping up in the corner of my vision and asking, What can I fox out for you?

  “How do you get rid of that fucking fox?”

  “I think the fox is our only hope,” Nin said. So I right-blinked on him and thought-typed a short question. The reply came seconds later.

  I’m sorry you’re having trouble with your mother. Can you describe the problem? —Devi

  We told Devi our mom was stuck in a childhood loop.

  Can your dad please upload his feeds? This should fix the problem.

  Our father has no feeds, we thought-typed.

  OK! Do you have access to other social media? Blog posts your mother has written, personal websites, maybe an old Instagram account?

  No, we told him, our mom didn’t even have a smartphone. Wasn’t there anything else we could use?

  Archive Services is a good match! Our compassion-based AIs will reconstruct your mother from textual materials. Click here for a link on how to scan and upload diaries and journals.

  Diaries? Journals? Those were things people wrote in ancient times. But when we asked Dad, he said there might be something in a trunk in the basement. Sure enough, below the stairs, inside a musty wooden chest, was an archive of our mother’s life. There were finger paintings we’d made when we were five, first-grade report cards, and the yellowed edges of printed-out emails our parents had sent each other. The lion’s share, however, were forty-odd bound journals.

  “What are these?” I asked, picking one from the top.

  “Your mom wrote in those before bed.”

  “Can we have them?” Nin asked.

  “Sure,” Dad said before turning to go back upstairs, leaving us with our mother’s secret life. Nin opened one of the journals. Nin called from college asking for money. Always the same: more money, more plane tickets, more donations for some stupid sorority thing.

  “Jeez,” Nin said. “Nice, Mom.”

  “Yeah, well, read this.” I showed her lines from the journal I’d opened. He wanted me to touch him, but I wasn’t in the mood. Still, decided to do something. Told him to lie perfectly still and …

  “Ugh,” Nin said. She handed me back the journal. “Wait, that’s Dad she’s writing about, right?”

  I scanned the pages and grimaced. “Yeah,” I said, and shut the book.

  “Well, there’s plenty here,” Nin said, “but you’ve got to be kidding me. We need to scan all these? It’ll take forever.”

  Which was what Devi told us when we clicked back on the fox. Yes, we could do it, blinking photos of every page and uploading the files one by one, but that would be a complete nightmare. For an additional fee, Nostalgia’s scanner-bots would do everything for us. If we blinked the Order Now button, an overnight mailer would arrive within the hour. Simply put the materials in the box, return it to the driver, and they’d take it from there. It only required a one-year commitment plus a per-page scanning fee. Everything, he assured us, was insured against loss. It was expensive, but Dad needed help, and I needed to get home. So we blinked the ArchivePlus Membership, and sure enough the FedEx boxes arrived within the hour.