“Do you understand what she’s talking about?” I asked Zoey at one point.
“Most of it,” Zoey said. In those hours Zoey sat by the bed with her eyes closed, listening to our mother’s words as if listening to music.
“Can you explain it to me?” It was like being on the outside of a secret club, nose pressed to the glass.
“The simulation hypothesis? Yeah.” She didn’t open her eyes. “Think of how holograms and virtual reality have evolved, even just in the past few years. If we can run fairly convincing simulations of reality now, think of what those simulations will be like in a century or two. The idea with the simulation hypothesis is, we can’t rule out the possibility that all of reality is a simulation.”
I’d been awake for two days and felt like I was dreaming. “Okay, but if we’re living in a computer,” I said, “whose computer is it?”
“Who knows? Humans, a few hundred years into the future? An alien intelligence? It’s not a mainstream theory, but it comes up every so often at the Time Institute.” She opened her eyes. “Oh god, pretend I didn’t say that. I’m tired. I shouldn’t have.”
“Pretend you didn’t say what?”
“The Time Institute part.”
“Okay,” I said, and her eyes closed again. I closed my eyes too. Our mother had stopped murmuring, and now there were just her ragged breaths, with too much time between each one.
When at last the end came, Zoey and I were sleeping. She woke me in the exhausted gray light of early morning, and we sat together for a long time in silence, in reverence, before the stilled figure of our mother on the bed. We dealt with the formalities, hugged goodbye, went our separate ways. I returned home to my cramped apartment, and several days passed where I spoke only with my cat. There was the funeral, then more stillness. I needed a new job—I’d been without one for some time, and was burning through my savings—and so a month after the funeral I found myself in the basement office of a hotel Human Resources officer, a vaguely familiar-looking woman with blond hair, accepting a position that had been advertised as “hotel detective” but whose exact parameters were unclear.
“To be absolutely honest,” I told her, “I’m not entirely clear on what a hotel detective position might entail.”
“It’s just hotel security,” she said. I realized I’d forgotten her name. Natalie? Natasha? “The job title wasn’t my idea. You won’t actually be a detective. Just a security presence, as it were.”
“I want to be sure I’m not misrepresenting myself,” I said. “I left school a few months shy of my criminal justice degree.”
“Can we be honest here, Gaspery?” There was definitely something familiar about her.
“Please.”
“Your entire job is to pay attention to what goes on around you and call the police if you see anything suspicious.”
“I can do that.”
“You sound doubtful,” she said.
“I’m not doubtful for myself. I mean, I don’t doubt I could do it. It’s just, I’m—couldn’t anyone do this job?”
“You’d be surprised. It’s the attention part that’s hard to hire for,” she said. “Distraction is a problem, generally speaking. You remember that test you had to take on your first interview?”
“Sure.”
“That was to measure attentiveness. Your score was high. Tell me, do you agree with your test results? Can you pay attention?”
“Yes,” I said. I was pleased as I said this, because I’d never really thought of myself in this way before, but it seemed to me that I’d been paying close attention my entire life. I hadn’t been successful at very many things, but I’d always been good at watching. That was how I knew my ex-wife had fallen in love with someone else, just by being attentive. There were no obvious clues, just a subtle shift in— but the HR person was talking again, so I reeled myself in from the past.
“Wait,” I said. “I know you.”
“From before this meeting, you mean?”
“Talia,” I said.
Something changed in her face. A mask dropped. Her voice was different when she spoke again, less amused by the world. “I go by Natalia now, but yes.” She was quiet for a moment, looking at me. “We went to school together, didn’t we?”
“End of the cul-de-sac,” I said, and for the first time in the interview, she gave me a genuine smile.