“We’re breaking it?”
And pretending we aren’t, like you just did. The shame in her face shows up only in freeze-frame. Everybody knows what’s happening. But we all look away.
She waits for him to elaborate. To say what’s wrong with people and what might cure them.
He says, I wish I had my sunglasses.
She laughs. “Why?”
He points toward the lake. There’s fish in there! We could see them, with sunglasses. Have you ever seen a northern pike?
“I don’t know.”
His face clouds over with incomprehension. You would know. You’d know, if you saw a pike.
A couple with two small kids walk the beach near them. Jay greets them with enthusiasm. He’s forgotten the camera crew. His arms spin around the compass points in pleasure. The parents smile as he points out three kinds of ducks and imitates their calls. He tells them about daphnia and other water crustaceans. He shows them how to find sand fleas. The little boy and girl hang on his words.
Dusk falls in time-lapse. The show’s theme music starts up, far away. Jay and his new best friend sit on their upturned boat. The lights of the city blink on in a ring around them. He says, My dad’s an astrobiologist. He’s looking for life up there. It’s either nowhere, or it’s all over the place. Which do you want it to be?
She looks up, where he’s pointing, into the dark sky. Her expression wobbles, as if she’s training to match the pattern of a feeling her mouth and eyes refuse to recognize. Maybe she’s thinking about how she’s going to violate her promise to me by keeping those last few words of his in the finished video. They’re just too good to be lost to something so small as ethics.
Dee Ramey speaks over the shot of her upward stare. “Most of us think we’re the only ones out here. But not Jay.”
The shot reverses, and it’s Robbie again, gazing at her with the same indiscriminate love he felt for everyone, in that narrow run of days. His face seems lit from the inside. She looks back down at him, a crumpled smile at dusk. Her later self goes on talking while the one on the screen stays mute.
“To spend time with Jay is to see kin everywhere, to take part in a giant experiment that doesn’t end with you, and to feel loved from beyond the grave. I, for one, would love to hear that feedback.”
But Robin has the last word. Serious, he says, smiling up at her in pure encouragement. Which do you think would be cooler?
CURRIER CALLED a week after Ova Nova posted the video. His voice skidded around the emotional color wheel. “Your boy’s viral.”
“What are you talking about? What happened?” I thought some brain infection had shown up on one of Robbie’s scans.
“We’ve gotten inquiries from half a dozen companies on three different continents. That’s not counting all the individuals who want to sign up for the training.”
I considered and rejected all kinds of replies. At last I landed on, “I truly hate you.”
There was a silence, more thoughtful than awkward. Then Currier must have decided I was just being rhetorical. He set to work as if I’d said nothing, filling me in on all that had happened in the last few days.
Ova Nova had dropped the video as part of a bundle called “The World Is Ending Again. What Now?” They launched the suite with a sweeping social media campaign. Other outfits picked up the news, if only to meet their own daily quota of announcements. Robbie’s video caught the rapidly strobing attention of an influencer. This woman had her own lucrative video channel where she went around the world helping people get rid of things they never really wanted. Countless people around the globe were addicted to her tough love, and two and a half million of those people counted themselves as her friends. The influencer posted a link with an image of Robbie holding his hands together around a jewelweed pod. Her caption read:
IF YOU HAVEN’T PUT YOUR HEART THROUGH A GOOD MANGLE YET THIS MORNING, TRY THIS.
The influencer followed up the invitation with several enigmatic emojis. All kinds of other influencers and non-influencers started to repost her post, and the resulting streaming jam caused the Ova Nova servers to choke for an hour. Nothing built more interest in free content than the supply briefly running out.
According to Currier, the hip flooded in on Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday and Friday, the mainstream arrived, and the late-to-the-party showed up over the weekend. Apparently, someone ripped the video and uploaded it to a pair of archive sites. Somebody else trimmed out a clip of Robin and ran it through a filter, making his eerie words sound even eerier. People were using it on message boards, in chats and text, at the bottom of their mail signatures . . .