“And if everything is possible,” he said, “then you have to help him. You have to act. It doesn’t mean your product is a failure.”
“My product is a failure and a half.”
“You fix him and it’s not.”
“It’ll look like a public apology.”
“Imagine what that would mean, someone from your industry telling the world, ‘We made a mistake. We hoped for the best, but it came out as usual.’？”
Karen smiled, both dimples activated. “Listen to you talk,” she said. “I’ve never heard you be so forceful.” She kissed him, felt the furriness above his upper lip, stale moisture on his chin, an unbearable childhood cuddliness. He was thinking of it, too, the way they used to fall asleep on each other’s shoulders in their childhood beds （fully clothed, of course）， the TV still on. Their parents would see them and be shocked, Karen yelled at for the better part of a year. But eventually they made their peace. They had seen it on television, too. In this country, a boy and a girl well past puberty, just friends.
* * *
—
The quarantined Actor had been left huddled and yearning in the Petersburg Bungalow, Masha depositing meals in front of his door, her much-admired blueberry pancakes for breakfast, the leftovers of Ed’s previous feast for lunch. He opened the window once and peeked out. “Mash,” he said, “come in and talk to me. Just talk, nothing else.”
She saw the pallor of his face through the stubble and the dregs of entitlement, and recoiled. A human being had been drained like some Mesopotamian marsh—and for what? “You’re going to get better,” she said. “Karen’s going to sit down with you. Be strong, okay?”
“Won’t you be my friend?” he said. “Won’t you help me talk to her?” By which, she supposed, he meant Dee. She turned around and walked away briskly, her eyes on the second floor of her house, where her husband and daughter were playing a Russian card game called the Fool.
She felt it in her bones, the way the autumn would turn suddenly irrevocably cold, the way summer could be so quickly replaced by the unknowable. An American expression: “borrowed time.” Followed by an image from her birthland: tanks in the streets moving in single file. She knew Senderovsky always topped off his gas tank for a run across the border, but the border was closed. Hunting season or no, the shots would continue to ring out over the distant hills, growing ever less distant. Back in her armoire-mirrored Rego Park apartment, Lara was laughing at her.
* * *
—
“What do I do?” the Actor asked, the words coming out mealy and indistinct. “How should I be?”
They were sitting on the living room couch in her bungalow. All the windows were open as a precaution against the virus. She showed him photographs, actual glossy printed photographs, of himself from various parts of his life, though quite a few were taken from his days in New Haven, those crisp, cosseted, promising but anxious “pre-” days, right before his big bang set in motion a whole other universe for him and his fans. “I don’t understand,” he said to Karen. “Shouldn’t you be showing me pictures of Dee? Or maybe comparative shots with Elspeth? Other people I’ve fallen in love with?”
“No,” she said. “Just you.”
The photographs kept coming. He had no idea there were so many in the public domain. As he flipped through them, he thought of his mother. His beautiful mother, who either wouldn’t let him out of her sight or couldn’t stand the sight of him. They had identified the illness later on. He knew what it was, so it wasn’t a big deal anymore, and he would not be defined by that. A Kodachrome of him in a bunny hat with a T-shirt bearing the name of a ski resort. A child with peanut butter on his nose （that couldn’t be him, he was never so silly）。 Leaning out of the back seat of a car, head on his arms, moody. There was always a presence nearby, the whiff of her sickness, but so what? He willed himself to love the boy in the photos, but an ingredient was missing. Then again, if the ingredient had been there all along, would there have been the Actor?
“You’re overthinking it,” Karen said, although he hadn’t said a word.
“I know,” he said. “Overthinking is anathema to my work.”
“The algorithm searches for a vulnerability in your eyes. In the creases of your cheek. In your gaze. In the tremble of your chin. The person you’re looking at when the app is engaged is merely a substitution. We actually researched Method acting when we were putting the whole thing together. You’re always substituting on the stage from your own experience. Finding the emotional trigger. Dee is a substitution. You’re in love with an absence. When you look at the photo the absence is encoded in your own eyes. You’re mistaking it for your love of her.”