A germ of the apocalypse unfolding halfway across the world crashed and took root at the end of 1941 on America’s edge. So sealed were the fates of countless boys to be made men only in death. Premonitions of the reaper made it even to Southern California, paradise on Earth.
“Roll the dice, young man! No — we’ll roll them for you!” Uncle Sam’s wicked countenance bellowed. If you wanted to amount to anything more than a ghost, you had to get to work and that meant you had to find a girl and make her yours. “Make her yours so she can make yours,” some wiseguy quipped.
Millions of men departed after cold, paralyzed non-goodbyes, their fates and the fates of their bloodlines undetermined. So gestated a new generation beginning in 1942. For the price of millions of their fathers they went on to rule the world.
A girl in paradise carried one of the first boomers. Her belly manifested as a bulge of shame, enough to kick her out of paradise.
“I can’t. I can’t,” she sobbed.
A local woman, childless and rational, hushed to her, “listen to me. There’s a doctor in town who came here from Kansas years ago. He knows how to take care of this.”
“…” the girl’s face glistened with mucus and salty tears.
“Tell him I sent you. He will know what that means.”
• • •
The doctor sat in a hard chair frowning. He was at once a lump of pudding and a grisly oak, outside of time, larger than fate itself and ready to pull its levers.
“How far along are you, dear?”
She hesitated. “I’m not… I’m not sure.”
“Take a guess.”
“Six months.”
The doctor shifted. His chair creaked and so did he.
Without breaking his frown, he spoke straight into her.
“Listen to me. That’s a baby now. I–”
He froze for a moment, gears turning.
“–do you have somewhere you can stay?”
“My daddy kicked me out but he would take me back.”
“You sure?”
“No.” She began to weep.
The doctor had trained himself not to react to patients’ outbursts of emotions. He preoccupied himself with a calculation: his own age, his wife’s, his future as it would be seen by his past, and the problem sitting in front of him, the problem of life itself. The decision came to him as if from far away in the sky.
“Here’s what we can do: stay with my wife and me for a couple of months and I’ll deliver your baby when it’s time. We will raise it as ours and as soon as you are back to full health and ready, you can return to your life. You can tell your mommy and daddy if you want. That’s your decision.” He paused for a shallow breath. “It’s all going to be alright.”
As cold as the words came out, and they were delivered matter-of-factly, without self-conscious emotion, the girl realized in an instant the magnitude of the warmth and compassion she was being shown, and realized moreover that she would never be shown anything like this for the rest of her life. She nodded, unable to speak.
That girl became a ghost to her baby just as the baby’s father had. The doctor delivered what became his daughter, fulfilling, in a roundabout way, his promise to keep the will of his life pumping, his promise not to be forgotten as a ghost.
• • •
Three years later, the apocalypse brought about its own end. The devil shot himself in the head and the impossible force of man ripping God’s perfect creation in half vaporized two hundred thousand at the speed of light. Certainty returned to paradise; even the waves of the Pacific relaxed as they kissed the Californian shore. The saved baby grew. She would be too young to remember the war and so inherited a promise of a future that could only be better. Her survival and then birth had been a primordial display of her will; that will never slowed. She defeated the boys in school. She practiced the piano at six in the morning, unwilling to take anything less than gold at the talent show. She stacked three books on the seat of her father’s automobile so that she could see over the wheel and drove with adult competence as a disguise. Algebra and geometry yielded to her efforts, shaking the misogynistic worldview of her ancient teacher who had no choice but to award her an A, his first ever to a girl. She graduated as the class of 1960’s valedictorian, described in the yearbook as having “a tongue like a scalpel.” The University of California system, growing in prestige and power in parallel with all of society, gave her another chance to prove herself. She took it. Chemistry, botany, and zoology yielded. Differential calculus and spherical astronomy yielded. She absorbed a survey of Scandinavian languages and the principles of history and criticism of art. She stayed out of trouble and rose to the top, filtering out students who couldn’t keep up with her but attracting those who could. They came from all over the state: Rebecca, whose grandparents left the Pale of Settlement, descended from an endless line of Talmudic commentators; Floyd, the son of a housebuilder who could decompose any gadget into its elemental, even abstract pieces; Gloria, who picked up French, German, Italian, Latin, and even some Ancient Greek on top of her California English and at-home Spanish; and Harry, tall and wiry, shy but hilarious every time he spoke, a young man with a gift for simplification, his mind a pot that boiled ideas down to their essences, his voice a whisper that conveyed only the truth, even if the truth was cynical or ironic. Harry had moved to California from New Jersey as a teenager. His father, from Glasgow, covered up an ancient sadness, a black shard borne of the Highlands, a sense that time only meandered and did not progress, with humor. His mother, a bitter and skeptical Polish-Ukrainian, suspected no good; everyone was up to something all the time. They packed up for sunshine, intending to leave behind the dim drizzle of the East Coast. Deep darknesses do not fade away so easily, so it turned out. Harry, the oldest child, defeated school by melting and boiling it in his mind, never showing any particular standout talent but rather rising to each challenge as it came.
Gloria had swooned to her friend, “you’re going to love him. He’s tall and handsome and he’s funny just like you are. Just come. Come on.”
“I don’t know.”
“Just come!” She grabbed her arm and they walked over to the soda shop where little kids bounced around in front and college students mingled deeper inside, along the walls.
Harry sat in a corner, leaned over a cup of coffee, blowing it cooler, looking like a wire hanger missing its coat. As the two girls approached he tilted his head up but did not fix his posture.
Gloria pulled out a chair and thrust her partner into it.
“I’ll be right back,” she giggled as she spun around.
“Hi,” Harry offered.
“Hi.”
“Harry.”
“Sandra.”
Harry, quickly, asked, “does anyone ever call you Sandy?”
Sandy laughed. Everyone called her Sandy. She introduced herself as “Sandra” only to people she had never met in an attempt to seem slightly more sophisticated.
“Yeah. Does anyone ever call you Sandy?” she fired back, with an impish smile.
The corners of Harry’s eyes crinkled as he laughed. “Not yet.”
Once or twice in your life, the realization strikes you that you are, right now, meeting a person that you were always supposed to meet. In the fleetingly rare instances where such a realization happens in both directions at once, time, in rare mercy, shows some patience and does not turn up the silent heat of awkwardness at least until both predestined friends-or-maybe-lovers have had a chance to soak in the moment.
Sandy twisted in her chair. “Where did Gloria go?”
Harry smirked. “I’m starting to suspect this was a–”
Sandy blushed. She cursed Gloria, nowhere to be found, in her head.
“You want a coke? This coffee is terrible.”
“Alright.”
• • •
They graduated in '64. Harry decided to pursue medicine: it matched his general, across-the-board competence and he knew he could keep a steady hand and push away the passions that would ruin a surgery. Sandy had earned pocket money as a nanny and learned that she was great with kids, so she figured she could be a teacher, which would make use of her talent, keep her sharp mind sharpened, and get some revenge on the grouchy bygone fools who domineered her own schooling, whom she had to defeat. It was a plan in a world where all you needed was a plan. They married at a hotel by the beach. Her father, the old doctor, by then almost petrified, breathed an ultimate sigh of relief at passing the girl he saved into the arms of a worthy man, a soon-to-be doctor, no less. He readied himself to die.
Harry’s residency began up the coast in San Francisco. He let her drive; she was better. Sandy spent half-days in experimental classrooms that flirted with revolutionary yet unsticky ideas in education. Harry, risk-averse, wanted to insure his future which was now their future. He enlisted in the Air Force, thinking that it was the best branch in which to be a medic: in the Army you’d see blood and guts, blown-off limbs, gangreen, and crushed bones; the maritime branches’d make him seasick; but pilots stayed basically healthy and if they crashed there was nothing he could do for them as a doctor. A couple years of service and he’d earn the prestige and security of a veteran. But that meant they’d have to move around. A long, pregnant drive took them to New Orleans, Louisiana. Their newborn daughter drank in music carried on steamy air. Cheyenne, Wyoming, a place devoid, with nothing to slow the cold, saw another daughter born. Baltimore, Maryland became a black city while they lived there, but black patients bleed red too and black kids read the same letters and count the same numbers as any other. Sandy and Harry neither undertook nor underwent the sixties. They observed and they served: she, those early in life, accumulating more of it; he, those drained of it, clawing it back as best they could.
The last kid, a son, was born at the dawn of a new decade in an old place. Los Angeles in the 1970s, plagued by a blanket of smog, ushered an aging cohort of stars and geniuses into comfortable, poolside final chapters. The city worked, but not too hard. Neighborhoods came into their own, kids on bikes and in trees and swimming in pools, parents tired after a decade of inflamed unrest, the television the altar of every home now, World War II a memory just beginning to fade, the new war pushed to the fringes of thought no matter how bloody and how meaningless it got.
Four-hundred miles up the coast, undying embers of big, revolutionary ideas found their kindling in another world, a world yawning awake beyond soil and trees and ocean waves. The world of bits, silicon gates through which electrons passed, found its gods: cold men who could whisper down to the metal. The C programming language, then Unix, then miracle-machines like the Apple II let there be a new kind of light, no longer a basement-sized abstraction but now a full-powered beam, right in your house, right on your desk. Sandy had been watching her own kids’ eyes fill with light. She recalled mastering Euclid’s realm of geometry and Bach’s realm of counterpoint. Deep down, subconsciously, she remembered willing herself into existence, aborting her own abortion. The computer was going to be important — she just knew — and she would master it too.
A summer workshop on programming in COBOL gave her the basic vocabulary and thought patterns to mount her case. “What could elementary schoolers possibly do with a computer?” — she could hear the objections already. But she had built a reputation as the most competent and most progressive teacher at Franklin Ave. Elementary, thirty-five years old, ready to teach for thirty-five more.
“The budget people will never go for this—”
“Can I talk to them?” Sandy fired back immediately. She always called bluffs.
“I don’t—”
“You don’t what?”
“…”
After a month of pressing, she persuaded L.A. Unified to buy a personal computer for her classroom. The kids huddled, drawn into the green, otherwordly glow. You could type and remove characters without an eraser or gooey whiteout! 4,761 × 9,997 in a heartbeat! A speck, envisioned as a turtle, could trace its path on the screen, following instructions in the language of elementary-school-friendly geometry. A whole universe of universes materialized solely by the will of the intellect.
Sandy kept up with the times. She bought a digital camera and learned to see in pixels. She installed a CD player in her classroom. Hers was the only class that produced a movie, cut to VHS, at the end of every school year. She was the first person she knew to behold the bewildering, occult sound of a dial-up modem connecting to the Internet. No setup difficulty was too great; Sandy felt a moral imperative to follow the edge of the frontier. Her father was a farmer from nineteenth-century Kansas, a distant universe, and she was born into a world killing itself. She knew as deep as anyone could know anything that her brain was her ticket into the future. The future came; it was now, and with it came a license to shed the dessiccated exoskeleton of a failed past. The stupid prescriptions of old-world femininity, dresses and gloves to the elbows, could die. Authority based on no more than age could itself age away into irrelevance. She recalled the yellowed letters she had found tucked away in a box way back in a closet, letters she couldn’t understand, from her father to a woman not her mother but to whom he wrote “your daughter,” seeds of evidence dug up of her own adoption, to be detangled and reckoned with years and years later; the totalizing force of new, laser-cut technology and in particular the miracle of computation promised to illuminate every world hidden from her, to shrink the globe to a point you could hold in your hand, that you could shape yourself with metaphor and control with the strength of your mind, every picture ever taken fossilized in silicon amber inside a sleek little prism, every piece of music rendered as numbers rendered as infinitesimal cuts on a round sheet of glass, every ghost brought back to life.
At fifty-four years old, she saw time fold into a loop rather than progress as a line: her first child gave birth to her first child. Sandy was around the age her father was when he rescued her. This suspended her at a point halfway between past and future, the high noon of her whole life. When she had been born, the Allies, which is to say, millions of young men equivalent to her ghost of a biological father, raged in two theaters while the world’s brightest minds dedicated themselves to decoding and then unleashing the power of the Sun as a bomb so that the God of America could slay all others. Her grandson took his first breath in a world atop a substrate of computation, where America’s last rival had fallen and war was, if you were protected by the American empire, nothing more than a matter of numbers in financial databases. The moral imperitave to transcend and replace the fleshy real world of real violence and real disease and real hunger had seen its greatest realization yet: a little squad of math geniuses programmed first-person three-dimensional computer gameworlds that executed geometry and linear algebra so fast that you could run and jump and, more importantly, exist in them, these worlds, some horrific and alien, others bright and cartoonish, all so important, the obvious future of the species, needing only time to gestate. She’d make sure he, her grandson, her representative, so she felt, wasn’t left behind.
He learned to read on a GameBoy. She listened to him explain the numerical ins-and-outs of Pokémon. She bought a Zelda game that transported him to yet another world, an opera of mystery, shifting topology, and the dance between action and puzzle. She taught him to multiply. She impressed upon him a sense of respect by forcing him to wash his hands every time before he sat at her own mother’s piano, his great-grandmother’s, built a century before, a contraption somehow both parallel and dual to the desktop computer she taught him to use. The landscape of computer metaphors came so naturally to him as compared to her — that was the whole point! Window, menu, file; click, drag, drop; the mouse; keyboard shortcuts. So too the structure of music: octaves, fifths, counting off-by-one; two types of thirds and their inversions, sixths; scales as rulers; intervals as compasses. The geometry of harmony and rhythm blossomed subvisually meanwhile pixelsung melodies leapt across glowing screens; Super Mario a ballet; Gruntilda’s Lair in Banjo-Kazooie itself an instrument, played in computed space, rendered by cathode-ray tube onto a bulging screen; he told her everything every time, spitting with excitement.
He got serious about music so she called on her student from twenty years past to teach him clarinet and how to improvise. When your favorite teacher calls on you to become her grandson’s favorite teacher, you rush over. She talked shop with his middle school math teacher. His first iPod was a birthday gift from her and she let him use her iMac to import CD after CD, stars in a constellation by which to navigate. She taught him to teach too, putting her word on the line with neighborhood kids who needed math tutoring — “He can do it. I know they’re the same age but he can do it.” They sat at her desk practicing how to write upside-down like any good tutor should be able to.
What she gave him became his whole life. His inner monologue turned into music, his free time was computer games, and his pocket money was all from math tutoring. She held back tears when he left for college, to New Jersey of all places, where his grandpa’d been born. Did she do her job too well? Would he have stayed local if his applications were a little weaker? Her knees gave out. It would be hard to visit. A lifetime of believing in the food of the future, engineered rather than cooked — McDonald’s, Diet Coke, Skittles — had taken its toll on her heart and lungs. He didn’t forget to call but she wanted to go see him. She wanted to loop back on her own time matriculating into the class of 1964 with revolutionary fervor vibrating in the air. The class of 2016 would inherit cyberspace. “Giga” was the new prefix. Everyone was a little cartoon now, a face in Facebook’s book. She quieted her mind when fear of the new grabbed her or when she yearned for the new-plastic utopia of the fifties. This is the world now. Keep up. This is where it had to go. And in fact, the instantaneousness of online communication proved especially beneficial to old farts with mobility challenges. Plusses like this staved off looming dread pre-lamenting an atomized society. This can’t be right. Everyone’s necks just tilted into the phones now. I used to know my neighbors. Sandy had always been all-in on the future, all-in on the tech, as open-minded as anyone could be, but she couldn’t lie to herself about what she saw: fire extinguished from young eyes, politics nothing more than absurd screaming, Byzantine computer systems worse than any COBOL flowchart just to get a damn cheeseburger! Her younger grandkids mumbled into big glowing rectangles. To pay a bill was to juggle a bunch of secret codes until you got on the phone with a person who hates you. How could it end up like this? Californian elegance and optimism had delivered that first Apple computer but now Sandy found herself imprisoned rather than liberated, longing for her early life when California was still a secret and not yet the bulging eye at the center of an empire. The digital labyrinth became colder and crueler every year, always further betraying its original promise.
• • •
Sandy’s numb, bloodless finger jammed at an unresponsive touchscreen. Her “God dammit!” aroused Harry, asleep, leaned over in his heavy chair. It took eight shallow breaths to calm down and try again.
“There we go!” she relaxed as the call went through. Her grandson picked up within the second ring.
“Good morning!” He sounded energized.
“Well, I wish,” she grumbled, calling on her sarcastic 1940’s-movie schtick.
“What’s up?”
“The damn computer isn’t working.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are you trying to do?”
“I’m trying—” she overenuciated, “—to look at Facebook.”
“Not loading?”
“No.”
“What do you see on the screen?”
“It’s blank.”
“OK. Uhh—” her grandson thought for a second, calculating. He knew this was going to be something stupid. Since he moved back he was the first line of offense against the technology. His grandma was eighty-one now; a stupid reason to see her was nonetheless a reason.
“—can I come over in like an hour?” he asked.
“That’d be great.” A stupid reason to summon him was a reason nonetheless.
Sandy sat, inert, receding from herself. She was once so active, such a force of will. Now time passed around her like a river around a stone. There was nothing to do — nothing to grab, nothing to cut, nothing to examine. Her body had deteriorated: a betrayal. Her beloved technology collapsed in on itself so that it was now just another obstacle: a betrayal. Only her tongue and her mind remained, but even then, with so little energy day-to-day, her sharpness, indeed her identity, had become blunt. Early memories of the beach and of those little books evaporated, leaving behind as residue second- or third-order memories of memories. Books of photos looked conceringly fresh — when was that? — and worst of all, memories of feeling any different, any better, dropped like overripened fruits from a sagging tree. It used to be different, but she could not say how.
A minute or an hour passed. A knock at the door then her grandson’s figure, towering and unwilted, appeared.
“Hey!”
“Oh!” Her mild look of shock concerned her grandson but he hid it away.
“I’m here!”
“Yes you are,” she said, long, as if to invite a “because.”
“The computer.”
“Oh yes! That’s right.” She remembered now.
He was already leaned over in front of the screen, mouse in hand, squinting.
“WiFi’s been OK?”
“I guess so.” She didn’t know how she would know if it hadn’t been.
He grumbled something under his breath.
“So, how are you today?” She wanted to talk about anything but the computer.
“Pretty good.” He was distracted trying to help her.
CNN blared across from her husband, who was folded in half.
“Turn that off!” she protested. He reacted in slow motion, reaching for the remote like a sloth.
“Is it hot out there today?” Sandy continued.
“It’s not too bad.” He was still clicking through window after window, earnestly trying to diagnose her Facebook problem.
A heavy and unwieldy sadness leaked onto Sandy from above. Years of slow withering lay beneath the bitter irony of what was happening: the computer, the technological promise of a strong, open, extended life, now the opposite, sludge and malaise, was taking the attention of her grandson away from her as the clock spun on and on, taunting all who dare look at it. She felt a deep confusion, as if the ground ceased to be but she did not fall.
“Forget it!” she yelped.
He turned to look at her, feeling that he had failed. He had, doubly: gone were the days where just by being a young person he could surmount any computer challenge; and worse, he was missing the whole point of the whole thing — human connection. Software had once again bared its jailcell-bar teeth, quietly imprisoning people just trying to get something done. Never before had he detected the terror of confusion in his grandmother’s eyes; never had she seemed so small. A breath stabbed him and he froze for a moment, then sat down.
“I’ll, uh, try again before I go.”
She just looked at him.
He changed the subject, “can I get you something to drink?”
“Diet Coke, lots of ice.”
The answer, same as it ever was, comforted them both.
• • •
Sandy had to time her words against the outflows of oxygen tubes, each shallow inhale affording three or four syllables to ride a labored exhale. Her tongue lived this dark rhythm.
“Can you call—”
“…”
“—the nurse?”
Her daughter and her daughter’s son both reached for the button at the same time.
“What do you need?” asked her grandson.
“Bring her some water,” his mother suggested.
He hovered a plastic cup by his grandmother’s face. She did not react.
“I’m putting it right here,” he enunciated.
“Ice—” she breathed.
“Here, Mom.” Her daughter cupped her hand and jangled a few chips of ice into her her hung-open mouth, ready to pounce in case she choked.
A nurse walked in, expressionless.
“Yes, Mrs. Campbell?” she chimed.
“We tried to give her some water but she only took a little ice.”
The nurse took an automatic glance at the tower of medical machines and registered nothing worth reporting. She took a step closer and tried again.
“What do you need, Mrs. Campbell?”
She timed the oxygen-rhythm, “call—”
“…”
“—my father.”
Her daughter and her grandson shot each other equivalent glances, wincing. Then the nurse looked at all three of them in sequence, half-calculating ages. The daughter shook her head at the nurse.
“Mom, we can’t call him right now.”
She swallowed then continued, “but I am here and so is Jacob.”
A “hi” barely escaped Jacob’s lumped throat.
“Oh—”
“…”
“—Jacob?”
“I’m right here.”
Sandy didn’t seem to hear him.
“…”
“Call Jacob.”
She reached out for a phone that wasn’t there.
Jacob stood up right beside his grandmother and met her hand with his.
“I’m right here.”
“…”
“—OK.”
Sandy drifted back into a drugged sleep. Her grandson grimaced at the nurse to signal that she could go. She understood and left the room, looking down at the floor, building up momentum as she left.
Sandy’s daugther and her grandson resumed a hushed conversation that had been unfolding at varying levels of seriousness and intensity for months now.
“What about bank stuff?” he asked, not coming up with a better description.
“I think I can handle it all because I’m the executor.”
“But like, passwords and that kind of thing?”
“There’s a paper in the blue folder that has a lot of them written down.”
“From when?”
“No idea. We just have to try them.”
“Here — let me keep working on the emails.”
She handed him his grandmother’s phone. He scrolled through emails, flagging anything that could be construed as important or worth keeping, setting them up for a grand export. He kept talking as he worked.
“What about, like, subscriptions?”
“You’ll have to handle that. I don’t know anything about that.”
“OK.”
So they went back and forth, trying as a pair to thread their way to the exit of a labyrinth deep within which their beloved matriach had been locked. Layers of software security measures stood as cold obstacles to their dreaded project. Why couldn’t it just be done? No one was there to say what was legal or not, what was gray, what was necessary, or what could be let go with some grace and dignity. When you stop watering a plant it dies in its own beautiful way. Software, by contrast, thrashes around in rigor mortis, yelling warnings and shutting doors, unaware of its purpose in the world of flesh and spirit. How can money, nothing more than numbers, be so inert and fearful? Why can it not simply flow to where it is supposed to end up?
• • •
“We’re going to need to see the death certificate,” mumbled an underpaid teenager in a corporate office half a world away.
“She’s not dead yet.”
“Oh — can you have her call? Then we can begin the transfer process. Please have your account number ready.”
“She’s about to die.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, ma’am. If you can put her on the—”
• • •
“Is there someone we have to call first?” Jacob asked his mother.
“Just—”
She stammered for a second.
“—just— We’ll figure it out.”
He understood and quieted.
A minute elapsed. Sandy, her daughter, and her grandson all breathed in interlocking polyrhythms, creating warm, silent waves. Her husband back home broadcasted on another faint psychic oscillator the hope that she’d come back from the hopsital. Her great-grandaughter, just months old, had always smiled when she saw her great-grandmother but would never get a chance to form a conscious memory of her, just a bone-memory. Her heart beat faster and brighter than anyone else’s, adding a sparkle to the spectrum of the waves.
Sandy dreamed through the morphinated fog. The Californian Pacific Ocean heaved in and out, salting the air and shaping the sand. There she stood, an embryo, water pulling the backs of her heels, the ocean a huge lung, rhythm and geometry made real in liquid matter, the source of all life, the arena of ancient chemistry, the clock beneath all music. She looked out to the horizon and saw its nothing, a line at infinity curving if you looked real close; closeness, the opposite of the horizon; see nothing but sea…; sí; Control–C; C–D–E–F–G–A–B–C; CA, 90278. Electrons swirl in California’s silicon ocean; Apples fall, drag and drop; windows open with a click. Her ocean could never freeze but this false one did, a prison of ice; digital — of the fingers, but unresponsive now to their tips, cold blood useless against ice; flowcharts clogged. I will miss you. Wavelengths and amplitudes summed across every moment of every day, every student, every teacher, every file, every folder, every child, grandchild, and great grandchild, into one chord, crossing the circle, less than π-r-squared due to the curvature of the Replogle Globe, the chord the tongue’s scalpel, cutting the loop, rending it, ending it, forward now, no more endlessness. The End.