Things I'm Seeing Without You Read online

  We all just stood there and watched them run as fast as they could over the pasture, disappearing until they were specks against the horizon. By the end of it all, Leroy had tears in his eyes. I saw him wipe them away on the sleeve of his butterscotch-coloured jacket before plucking a nearby carnation for his lapel.

  On the flight back, Dad seemed pleased.

  I watched him as he stared out the window at the wispy clouds just beyond the wing, a calm smile on his face. No animals had blown up this time, and he had a big cheque in his pocket. How big, I couldn’t tell you, but he kept touching it every once in a while to make sure it was still there.

  ‘I probably didn’t take the time to tell you, Tess,’ he said, ‘but thanks for your hard work the last couple days. That was, hands down, the best funeral I’ve done. And you’re a big part of it.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I said softly.

  And, for the moment, I couldn’t think of anything terrible to add. It’s not like I felt like dancing or anything, but I was feeling slightly less awful. The funeral planning had been a helpful distraction. Also: Skip had given me his number before I left.

  We weren’t likely to see each other again, but it felt good to know I wasn’t too far gone to attract a goofy-but-still-kind-of-hot cowboy. I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty, though, for not turning him down flat. If things had happened differently, I would be with Jonah right now in a tiny cabin somewhere, making sustainable yurts with gifted children in the mountains.

  ‘Leroy was impressed I let you have a say in my business.’

  My dad was talking again.

  ‘He said his father never trusted him with the horses. Not until he was almost thirty. Can you believe that?’

  ‘M-hmm,’ I said.

  I opened my Facebook account and started to scroll through Jonah’s pictures. The one, for instance, where he’s on a camping trip, standing in a stream, his hair mussed from waking, an unlit cigarette hanging from his bottom lip. And the one where his arms are covered in Scrabble tiles and he’s caught mid-laugh on a dorm floor.

  ‘Leroy doesn’t have any kids. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do when he has to pass on his legacy.’

  I looked at the pictures people started posting after his death. A high school photo where he has long hair and he’s crammed in a Portaloo with four of his friends (complete with the caption ‘I’ll always remember you like this, J. Much Love’). The first-communion photo his aunt posted where he’s wearing a white suit and looks a little like an R & B singer from the nineties. Her comment below said: ‘God got another angel today,’ as if he had actually died at the age of seven and not eighteen.

  At first, it didn’t register when I saw the message.

  ‘He’s worried when he dies, the horses will all go downhill. But that’s what he liked about your idea. Maybe they’ll be so strong they keep running. Even when he’s gone, they’ll keep running.’

  Not too many people contacted me on Facebook any more. A couple of high school friends from New York, but mostly they texted if I heard from them at all. So it wasn’t until I clicked on the icon and saw where the message was coming from, that my breath slowly left me.

  There was Jonah’s little face at the top right of the new message, which said:

  I have to talk to you, Tess.

  It’s important.

  ‘Tess,’ said my dad. ‘Did you hear me?’

  The sky outside the plane was cloudless now. A blue so bright it hurt my eyes. My dad was touching my shoulder, but I could barely feel it.

  ‘Tess,’ he said.

  I looked at him and saw the concern on his face.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘where did you go?’

  My thoughts went first to the article. The one Jonah had sent me about the Russian billionaire who wanted to upload his brain to keep from dying. At the time it hadn’t seemed that important. Jonah sent me lots of articles. And videos. And GIFs. And songs. And photos. And every other piece of media you can think of.

  Early on, we broke away from text alone, and for some weeks we communicated entirely in links and images. Not because we had nothing to say to each other, but because it was fun. Multimedia flirting: it kept things interesting.

  But sometimes he sent articles that weren’t meant to be a link in the flirt-chain. These pieces often had short accompanying messages like ‘Cool, right?’ or ‘READ NOW’ or just ‘This!’ The article about the Russian had no message at all.

  It just showed up in my inbox one day. I never mentioned it to him while he was alive. I think I repressed it. But after I got the new message from his account, I went back and read it over again. And it was just as creepy as I remembered. It said that someday, there would be no difference at all between man and machine. Scientists called this concept the singularity.

  For a moment, I surrendered to complete illogic and let my mind go down that road. Maybe the singularity had actually arrived and Jonah was still alive somewhere on the internet. Maybe he had melded with the machine I’d used to love him. It wasn’t that hard to picture.

  My computer, after all, was where I’d always found him. His face, when I saw it in the rare video chat, was pixellated, sometimes freezing in a smile when my internet connection was slow. And his Gchat messages popped up on my screen like the machine itself had generated them.

  I was all set to embrace this new reality and make contact with cyber-Jonah until I took a moment to take a few deep breaths.

  I was sitting at my dad’s computer where I had been since we got home from the airport. I closed my eyes and listened to some birdsong coming through the window. And when I saw the new message again, I couldn’t help but think of human fingers typing it.

  Fingertips on keys. The same fingertips that had once – just once – rested above my hip bone. Jonah was not typing things on a keyboard any more. He was not doing this because he had no living fingers. He had dead fingers. He was not living in a computer or in a stream of code. He was gone.

  I took another long, slow breath. Then I typed my response, one letter at a time. I pressed Reply and looked at the three words I had typed.

  Who are you?

  It was the only logical question to ask. I had probably known that from the beginning. I watched the screen and waited out the two minutes it took for a response.

  Not sure where to start.

  I got up from my chair and walked around the room, letting my bare feet dig into the old wool rug in my father’s office. Then I sat back down.

  Start by telling me who you are . . . maybe?

  It was still Jonah’s face that popped up alongside each reply, his eyes looking right at the camera, and by extension, at me.

  I’m the person you’ve been talking to for the last five months.

  A real urge to shut everything down came over me. To cancel my account. Shut off my dad’s computer. Go to sleep. Wake up in a few days. But if I did that, I might never know anything.

  And just so I can keep from fully going insane, that person is not Jonah?

  This time, the response came quickly.

  No.

  There are TV shows about people like me. That was the thought that bubbled up. I had watched these shows, the ones where people think they’re in love with a gorgeous woman and it turns out to be an obese insurance manager in the suburbs of Cleveland. But I had actually met Jonah! I had gotten contact information directly from him.

  Was I ever talking to Jonah?

  A question I wasn’t sure I wanted answered.

  Yes.

  When?

  In the beginning. The first couple months.

  Then I was always talking to you?

  Yes.

  The first stirrings of anger arrived then.

  Has it occurred to you that this is unspeakably fucked up?

  No response.

  And that you’ve been reading messages I wrote for someone else? And some I never intended anyone to read? Private accounts of my own grief.


  I couldn’t stop typing.

  And that you have been involved in the cruellest kind of trick imaginable for months of your life? Has it occurred to you that you have done a deeply, deeply fucked-up thing, and that you are likely a deeply, deeply fucked-up person?

  A brief pause. Then:

  Yes.

  The urge to keep going was a hard one to ignore, but the one thing I knew was that I couldn’t give this person anything else. So, I tried not to remember all of the things I’d said in the last month, the intimate things that I never would have spoken aloud to anyone. Things that felt safe only because I knew, deep down, they would never be read. A new message came from him:

  I thought about never telling you.

  Then:

  But then I actually thought that might be worse.

  And finally:

  I never meant to keep doing it. And I didn’t know that Jonah was going to kill himself. I’m not sure I can really explain it all right now. Like this.

  I stared at the screen. I was able to quell the growing rage and confusion enough to type one last line. There was only one more thing I wanted to know before I extricated myself from all of this and curled up in the foetal position on the floor. And it was something simple.

  You never answered my first question.

  A short pause.

  My name is Daniel Torres.

  I was Jonah’s room-mate at MIT.

  A name. Of course, that was all it was. Someone else’s name. I moved my cursor up to the X that would close out the page. But before I could click it, another message came through.

  I’m sorry, Tess.

  I pressed down on the mouse. And in an instant, all of it was gone.

  The next week disappeared out from under me like one of those tablecloths a magician yanks clean. It was there one moment. Then it wasn’t. I can only remember a few things to prove the days went by at all. First, there was the fallout from Forever Friends. Apparently, Elaine had feared the worst when I didn’t turn up for evening fellowship, and within minutes, she sent people out to comb the fields to make sure I wasn’t lying dead in the organic kale. This was according to my father who received an earful via voicemail.

  The next day, he got a second dose once Elaine reached my mother in India. I heard him arguing with Mom for an hour, adopting the same exasperated and defeated tone I remembered from their fights in the run-up to the divorce, when suddenly he seemed never to know anything.

  ‘How should I know?’ was his catchphrase back then, and it made its glorious return that morning. ‘How should I know why she came here? Why don’t you ask her?’ Then: ‘How should I know why she’s dropping out of school? Do you think she tells me anything?’

  Eventually he called me down to talk to her. I hadn’t spoken to my mom in weeks. In the time since the divorce, she had become almost as odd and walled-off as my father, but in more socially acceptable ways.

  Instead of obsessing over death, she chose life! Well, life-affirming exercise anyway. She’d always been a jogger, but once she was husband-free, she started running six miles every morning with her aggressively positive boyfriend, Lars.

  Yoga came next. Everyone in her Park Slope neighbourhood wore yoga pants at all times anyway (just in case the need for downward dog should arise?) so it was only a matter of time before Mom caught on. Then it was love at first cobra pose. And these days she always seemed to be off somewhere without an internet connection, seeking enlightenment while getting a herbal tea colonic. Or something.

  I still remembered a version of her that was twenty pounds heavier and loved eating popcorn with me on Sunday nights, laughing at bad romcoms. Where had that woman gone?

  ‘I’m in the Panchagiri Hills outside Bangalore!’ she yelled now. ‘Why are you choosing this moment to ruin your life?’

  I had been numbly sitting in front of the TV for the last ten hours or so, and I wasn’t really ready for human contact.

  ‘Do you know Dad is burying animals now?’ I asked.

  I heard her sigh.

  ‘Tessie,’ she said. ‘Please, will you tell me what you are doing?’

  I imagined her in a sari, bare at the midriff, trying to pretend she wasn’t from Minnesota. Did she have a bindi on her forehead? She had always been pretty. Probably the whole ashram was in love with her.

  ‘Taking a personal health break,’ I told her. ‘I’m practising self-care by not moving or speaking all day.’

  ‘What I should have done is bring you to India,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with your health?’

  ‘Mostly it’s my pesky brain,’ I said.

  ‘Your brain?’

  ‘It is filled with darkness.’

  More than anything, she hated when I was glib, but I refused to speak her language of enlightenment.

  ‘You have to go back,’ she said. ‘Go back to school and see that counsellor. I’ve been talking to her. You can still salvage the term.’

  ‘Not happening.’

  ‘Go back!’ she said, as if repetition might be the key. ‘Go back! Go back! Go back! It’s a mistake to stay with your father right now. He’s not going to help you move forward. You couldn’t set the bar any lower if you tried.’

  I didn’t speak.

  ‘I’m worried,’ she said in a near-whisper.

  ‘But not worried enough to come home,’ I said.

  ‘Tess,’ she said.

  ‘I have to go,’ I said.

  I handed the phone to my father. He stared at me with his hurt child look again. But I walked away and returned to my place on the couch where I proceeded to kill as many hours as I could watching the videotaped lives of B-grade celebrities. This whole situation had left me with two options as far as I could see it: 1) I could think of all the reasons why I had allowed this to happen to me, or 2) I could pretend it wasn’t happening and that I wasn’t actually a person. With most votes tallied, option number two was winning in a landslide.

  For the next three days I nearly absented myself from time. My father was in and out during this time, saying things to me that I barely registered, expressing concern in his detached, awkward way, sighing out of his nose, and delivering food. I went hours without remembering that he was in the house.

  Until the morning of the fourth day.

  I was on my fifteenth consecutive hour of reality television, and my fourth day in the same sweatpants when he walked into the living room, wearing a pressed black suit. I almost didn’t recognize him at first. His midlife-crisis hair was slicked back, and he looked more polished than I’d seen him in years.

  ‘Are you going to an old-person prom?’ I asked, staring at the screen.

  He walked right up to me and straightened his tie.

  ‘Tessie,’ he said, ‘I’m going to need you to go upstairs and put on some real pants.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘ Real pants?’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ he said. ‘ Pants pants.’

  ‘Pants pants,’ I mouthed to myself.

  He grabbed the remote and turned off the television.

  ‘And a nice shirt. Black if you have it.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said.

  But he was already walking out of the room. I had the shades pulled, and without the light from the television, the room was completely dark.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll wait for you in the car,’ he said. ‘We’re going to a funeral.’

  An hour later, I was wearing the realest pants I had, standing in the parking lot of Honey Creek Nature Preserve. I didn’t see a creek. Or any honey. But all around us were beautiful trees. Towering jack pines with grey-green needles and a few pale-blue spruces – the names came back to me from Girl Scout Camp. I saw no sign of a funeral, though.

  ‘Now what?’ I asked.

  ‘Now,’ said my father, ‘we hike.’

  He set off walking ahead of me, and I followed a few steps behind.

  In the car on the way over, he had prete
nded like nothing had happened in the last few days. He didn’t mention my brooding, or ask me what was going on, and for once, I was thankful for his self-absorption. Instead of prying, he briefed me on his situation. Essentially, he had been double-crossed. He was hired to do a funeral for someone named Maxine Harp, and now the client’s family had pulled out without ever telling him.

  ‘Do you know what a pre-need deal is?’ he asked me.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Basically, you meet with someone before they die and lock in costs for their funeral. The price of funeral real estate is always rising, so if you want to be buried, buying a plot early is a good idea. You can prepay for embalming liquid, mortician’s services, and even your burial gown. It’s a good way to get business ahead of time.’

  ‘So, you had a pre-need deal with Maxine?’ I asked.

  He nodded.

  ‘But you don’t have the money?’

  He avoided my stare.

  ‘They used an insurance company as a buffer. They have the money. We had an unspoken agreement.’

  His voice was soft when he said this. It was clear he felt now like an unspoken ass.

  ‘So, what kind of animal is Maxine? A lemur?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’ said my dad. ‘She’s a human!’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Huh.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m just surprised that an actual person wanted you to do a funeral. Did you get her wasted or something?’

  My father tightened his grip on the wheel. His face was starting to redden. I tried to backtrack.

  ‘I mean, I’m sure it’s similar to doing animals, right. Just like … less hairy.’

  ‘Please stop talking,’ said Dad.

  I was surprised by the fragile tone of his voice.

  ‘Dad,’ I said.

  ‘Enough,’ he said.