They Know Not What They Do, page 46
‘I told you, Becky,’ says Miriam, who is still standing in the entryway with her shoes on, as if weighing whether or not to come in.
‘Yeah, I know, I know.’
‘You need to be more careful with your passwords. If I can guess two out of three of them, then—’
‘I know, I know.’
‘Remember that site I showed you? About passwords?’
‘I know, I KNOW!’
Now that the iAm and social media have been forbidden, Rebecca has, after a period of raging, gone back to her incessant texting with her friends. Joe is afraid she’ll end up running into a light post or getting scoliosis as she walks through life, shoulders hunched, face glued to her screen. And then there’s the constant monitoring: according to Miriam, Rebecca has been caught on social media again, broadcasting to the entire world whose party she’s going to on Saturday night, as if she hadn’t learned a thing from Hackett’s warnings.
Miriam takes off her shoes and walks into the living room. She surveys her surroundings as if she’s in a stranger’s home.
‘So what has been hacked?’ Joe asks his wife.
Miriam doesn’t have time to respond before Rebecca sighs and reluctantly tears her eyes from her phone.
‘My iAm account has been charged for dozens of hours of some news service, email connections, and God knows what else. And some fucking Formula One races. Almost a thousand dollars.’
Joe is stunned: ‘Huh?’
Miriam nods at him. ‘Last night. Becky just checked this morning.’
Tap tap. Once again Rebecca’s eyes are nailed to her tiny screen from the couch, where she has collapsed with her phone.
‘And fucking porn,’ she says.
‘Really?’ Miriam asks, and looks up from the orchids she’s inspecting on the windowsill: Joe has been given detailed instructions for their care, which he has consistently neglected. ‘I hadn’t heard that.’
‘Yeah. Some sex modules.’
Joe’s cheeks are burning. This can’t be happening. He specifically paid for the modules with his own credit card.
He suddenly remembers having heard that the device automatically sends its manufacturer and programmers information about the user’s location, somatic nervous system reactions, selected mimages, mass activations of neuron populations, even the nervous-system impulses of lone neurons. Apparently it’s partially unclear, even to experts in the field, who this data might be delivered to.
‘Don’t they…’ He gulps as he sets the kitchen table. ‘If someone buys them… then don’t they have to pay for them themselves, with a credit card or…? I mean… how did you get the information?’
‘There’s a per-minute fee.’
‘Oh, so…?’
‘Yeah. That comes on top of the credit-card bill.’
‘Is that so?’ He hopes he doesn’t sound as horrified as he feels.
Joe can feel Rebecca’s eyes studying the back of his neck. Based on the pause in her tapping, he deduces she has even lowered the phone to her lap. The thought flashes through his mind then: I should have taken my own iAm when it was offered.
‘They withdraw it from your account,’ Rebecca says. ‘The fee depends on how many minutes are included in your package.’
The silence that follows feels like it’s directed at him personally. He doesn’t know what to do with himself. No more iAm, Joe thinks: not even on campus. His use of the device ends here and now.
Then he remembers Miriam’s and the girls’ bags.
‘Should I got get your things from the car?’ Joe asks his wife, who is standing at the living-room window, arms folded across her chest.
‘We, um, well…’ Miriam says, and hesitates before she adds, ‘That’s everything.’
He stares at her. ‘What?’
‘Let’s talk about this later, shall we?’ Miriam says when she sees Daniella, who comes out of the bathroom and clearly also wants to hear what.
‘I can see everything on my account statements,’ Rebecca says in a voice that means everything is something disgusting.
‘Everything what?’ Daniella asks, copying Rebecca’s position on the sofa down to the millimeter.
‘All the stuff that guy’s been doing. What kinds of things and with what kind of woman,’ Rebecca says.
‘How can you see all that?’ Joe asks, before he has the sense to stop himself.
For a second, Rebecca looks perplexed by the horror in his voice.
‘There are different prices for different senses.’
‘Aha,’ Joe says, trying to keep the pounding of his heart from being audible in his voice.
‘Like, sounds are probably always included in the entry-level packages. And some basic characters.’
‘What’s a basic character?’ Daniella asks.
‘Maybe you don’t need to know all the details, Dani,’ Joe says, opening a can of salsa and pulling the plastic wrap off the guacamole.
As he calls Miriam and the girls to the table, he feels like a throbbing ruin of a man. He’s hot and sweaty down to his internal organs; his perversity shines from his face, wheezes in his breathing.
Daniella sits at the dining table, but Rebecca remains standing behind the back of her chair as if she’s about to make a speech. To have something to do, Joe clicks on the radio. Every second without eye contact with one of his family members is an oasis of relief.
‘I can just picture him,’ Rebecca says, picking at her nails.
‘Becky, that’s enough,’ Miriam says.
‘What’s he like?’
‘Dani, you too. Both of you, sit down.’
‘Spends all day sleeping and stays up all night alone at his computer, too scared to talk to anyone,’ Rebecca says. ‘All the times in the usage log are from evening to early morning.’
‘It’s some poor guy stuck in a semi-developmentally disabled stage,’ Miriam says.
Everyone takes their usual seats, but the table seems to have bizarrely changed shape. Joe’s headache seems to be getting worse.
‘But they’ll catch him, won’t they?’ Daniella says.
‘Of course. We can get his EnEfPee,’ Rebecca says. ‘You have to request it in writing. It costs a little bit, but—’
‘EnEf…?’
‘NFP. Neural fingerprint. It’s kind of like a fingerprint of the central nervous system.’
‘How?’ Joe asks, even though he doesn’t mean to. ‘Isn’t it… the device is registered to you, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, but every nervous system has its own.’
‘Really?’
‘The ammer retrieves it the first time you use it and saves it in the settings. It can store like two hundred of them.’
‘Wow.’
Joe’s heart is racing. It’s wonderful being a neuroscientist at the top of his field, someone people can turn to with questions about brain function.
‘Dad, can I get an ammer, too?’ Daniella says in the nagging tone she uses when she knows she’s not going to win.
‘No.’
‘Waaahhh, why not?’
Joe waits for everyone to start eating, but someone always has something more pressing to swipe at on their phone screen.
‘I’m just going to send a quick note to work to say that I’m unavailable for the rest of the day,’ Miriam says, and taps out the message on her phone.
Even the most burning desire for a beer apparently can’t get a bottle of Sol to move from the fridge into Joe’s hand of its own volition; he has promised himself he won’t open it until everyone is ready to eat. Besides, he wants to save the moment, to savor it with Rebecca in honor of their new, adult father-daughter relationship. But now Daniella has pulled out her phone, too. Every time the rest of the family is finally ready, one of them has grabbed their phone again during the wait.
‘Could we eat soon, please?’ he says, his eyes on the bowl of iceberg lettuce he’s carrying to the table. ‘Excuse me, Miriam, could I ask you to get the sour cream?’
She frowns at her phone, swipes the screen and smiles attentively at someone else somewhere else. The phone rotates a little when she starts tapping out her response, and from the color of the screen Joe can tell she isn’t sending a message to work, but is chatting with someone on a private messaging service. A pattering sound comes from the living-room windows, as the magicicadas crash into the glass.
‘How do you have sex using an iAm?’
‘As if, Dani. There’s no way I’m telling you. You’re eleven, for God’s sakes.’
Joe is forced to repeat his question to his wife before Miriam starts and raises her eyes.
‘OK,’ she says, and puts her phone back in her purse with a snap. ‘Let’s eat. Dad has prepared a lovely meal for us.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Miriam says to Joe privately, while Daniella is loading up her plate with chicken. ‘I promised Jill I’d send her comments on our nature-nurture material for the colloquium next week.’
Joe nods and looks at her for so long that she grows uneasy and coughs.
Take some more! Eat up, guys. Have some more! I’m so happy to have you all here again – it’s been so long.
‘It’s some PEDOPHILE,’ Daniella says. ‘Let’s report him to the Neighborhood Sex Offender Watch.’
‘Hey, yeah,’ Rebecca says, and looks at her sister, inspired by this sudden insight. ‘He is so busted.’
‘Could we drop this already!’
Everyone appears startled by Joe’s outburst. It’s undeniably at odds with the homecoming vibe.
The conversation moves on to other topics for a moment: to Daniella’s swimming, the clothes Rebecca wants to buy. Joe notices that she hasn’t eaten anything yet.
‘The only good thing about him is that he’s an animal activist,’ she says to her phone.
‘Huh?’ slips from Joe’s mouth.
‘He reads all the animal activist sites,’ Rebecca says. ‘Every night. He’d have to be an animal activist to be that into it.’
‘Do you think it’s…’
Daniella’s thought remains unfinished, because she only realizes mid-sentence what she’s saying.
Suddenly the room is deadly still. The others have realized, too.
Joe sees the fear on Rebecca’s face.
‘I am so calling the cops,’ she says.
‘Are you sure that’s necessary?’ he says.
They all gape at him.
‘How can you say that?’ Miriam asks.
The gradually intensifying headache is hammering Joe’s skull to tiny shards of bone. Hopefully it isn’t a migraine. Worst-case scenario, he’ll have to lie in the dark for the rest of the evening. Which doesn’t sound like such a bad alternative, actually.
Rebecca frowns.
‘What do you mean, is it necessary?’
‘Well… maybe we can sort this out… some other way,’ he says, not understanding himself what he’s talking about.
Rebecca stares at him.
‘Some other way? My account has been hacked.’
‘Yeah, I got that, but… what I’m trying to say is – let’s just think about it for a minute.’
Rebecca gapes at him, slack-jawed.
‘Why?’
‘I’m getting seriously worried about you,’ Miriam says to Joe.
He prays, Dear God, let this headache be a migraine; pleads for a heart attack, preferably fatal, a stroke, anything, so he can slip from the world smoothly and as soon as possible.
Miriam has pulled out her phone in response to a beep. Whomever she was smiling at has replied.
But now, Joe realizes, and a wave of relief washes over him, it’s a ridiculously small thing but even so a life saver: beer. He retrieves the bottles from the fridge. The condensation that has beaded up on the glass makes his fingers wet.
Yet Rebecca responds to his carefully planned offer of beer casually, without looking up: ‘No, thanks.’
Joe is so surprised by the response that he just stands there at the table, brow furrowed. She didn’t even glance at the bottle.
‘Beer?’ he says. ‘It’s Mexican.’
Miriam lowers her phone to her lap – mid-message! – and her tortilla to her plate and turns to look at him. Joe suddenly realizes what it must feel like for the younger members of the psycholinguistics faculty when they end up in Miriam’s crosshairs. At the same time, he realizes that during their entire sixteen yeas of marriage, up until this spring, he has never been in this position with his wife.
‘Excuse me?’ she says.
Rebecca is also staring at Joe, eyes cartoonishly round, mouth halfway open in disbelief.
‘It’s good with lime,’ Joe says. ‘I cut some slices.’
The only thing he can do is continue down his chosen path. A parent must be, above all, consistent in his decisions.
‘I don’t want it! Are you deaf?’
Joe turns away from the others. He downs half of the bottle of Sol he has been saving for Rebecca in one swig and feels anger threading through his throbbing migraine. When he closes his eyes, poison-green patterns dance in that upper fourth of his field of vision, in the place where the search commands for the iAm’s non-screen write themselves.
‘Excuse me,’ Miriam repeats. ‘Did you just offer our fifteen-year-old daughter beer?’
‘Rebecca, could you please put your phone away while we eat?’ Joe says. ‘That’s always been kind of the rule in this household.’
‘You used yours last time,’ she mutters, unaware of what’s going on.
‘Yes, I did,’ Joe says to Miriam, who is staring at him. ‘Sue me.’
It’s so great seeing you guys again! I’m so glad you’re here! The chicken breasts Joe has grilled outside, shirt plastered to his back – the temperature has passed the hundred-degree mark today, with a relative humidity of one hundred percent – are still lying almost untouched on the serving dish. They’re too charred for Daniella after all; they’ve just been learning about carcinogens at school.
Even though they used to avoid red meat and were eating vegetables more and more often, ever since the package arrived in the mailbox, it goes without saying that meat is served at every meal. Veal, which Joe never used to touch for ethical reasons, is now a staple.
Rebecca moves a small piece of chicken around on her plate and occasionally cuts it into even smaller pieces. It’s a familiar routine: the chicken will end up in the trash. Rebecca isn’t fooling anyone with her dismemberment routine, but on the other hand, they won’t let her not take any. Maybe this is the outcome all child-rearing principles naturally strive towards and, in spite of the arguments, end at: an arbitrary, logically indefensible ritual no one would consciously pick but that allows them to avoid the most violent clashes.
‘This is really good.’ Miriam smiles bravely, and Joe’s heart breaks.
His wife is leaving him; he has known it since the moment he saw her in the entryway without her bags.
He manages to scrape and cut pieces of chicken until they’re white enough for Daniella.
But the chicken isn’t the only tortilla filling Rebecca has a problem with. The sour cream isn’t fat-free, the avocados are basically pure fat, the beans are hard on the digestive system, same goes for the onion, and because Joe has grilled the peppers and zucchini in oil, Rebecca’s going to pass this time, thanks, next time try to keep an eye on how many gallons of oil you drown them in.
In the end, she sits silently at the table and stuffs her tortilla with nothing but lettuce. Joe watches this operation, struggles not to say anything and most of all to stop himself from imagining neural fingerprints in public pedophile registers. Miriam has excused herself to go to the bathroom but has remained standing in the hall between the bathroom and the kitchen to tap at her screen, where the arriving messages clearly contain something irresistible and amusing.
And then it happens: Joe’s eyes light on the jar of salsa, and he unwittingly asks Becca if she won’t try some of that at least. And because even the salsa isn’t acceptable, Joe, in a burst of exhausted, migraine-induced irritation – alleviated by the beer to the point that he immediately followed it with another, which he has already finished, and is now battling a burning desire to crack a third – asks why.
‘What the hell is wrong with that?’
And this, along with a few more well-chosen lines, develops into a ferocious fight revolving solely around tomato salsa, which Miriam, after a slight delay, also returns to participate in and that for all four of them will, perhaps, remain a more profound and permanent memory than any other family-defining experience. Daniella, who usually chatters on obliviously even if full-blown nuclear war is raging around her, stares silently at her plate, eyes wide, and then slips off to her room.
At first Joe refuses to go back to the store simply because the salsa he grabbed at random and in a hurry from the shelf at Whole Foods contains sugar.
‘How much sugar is actually in there?’ Joe asks.
‘Read the fucking label!’ Rebecca shouts.
‘That’s nothing but tomato and vinegar!’
‘Joe, I’m not sure that’s the most constructive approach,’ Miriam says, going so far as to lower her phone for a moment.
‘There is a TON OF SUGAR in it!’
It rapidly becomes plain how impossible it is to force a nearly full-grown woman to eat if she has decided otherwise. Rebecca raises a scene that beats any reality TV show for decibel levels and includes, in addition to melodramatic expressions and a tearful tantrum, the throwing of objects, the slamming of doors, and in the end the refusal of all contact.
Now they can’t even beat a whole-wheat tortilla into her body.
‘Nice work, Joe,’ Miriam says.
The cicadas cover the trees, lawns, and rooftops in an unbroken, red-eyed carpet that has become a natural part of the landscape. As he walks, they’re crushed under the soles of his shoes, but it no longer feels like anything; they’ve turned into a kind of gravel. He nods at the parked vehicle occupied by one of the two men who take turns looking out for his daughters’ safety, but because of the tinted windows, he cannot tell which.
Every time he sees the SUV, he remembers to check that his red safety button is still in his pocket. On a few occasions, he’s left it in his other trousers.
