“You assume it would have been better,” Sasha said once. “But Rob’s dad was really homophobic.”
“Having someone alive is always better,” I said.
Bix Bouton was the last person to see Rob and me before our East River swim. He got in touch with me out of the blue in 2016, when Own Your Unconscious was blowing up. Bix wrote that it was his memory of Rob, and that morning, and those years—his difficulty remembering them—that first spurred him to try to mass-produce a memory externalization device. It filled me with relief to know that Bix, whom I hadn’t seen since NYU and who’d become, in the interim, a tech demigod on a first-name basis with the world, was still moved by Rob’s death.
Not long after Bix got back in touch, Sasha and I went to New York to visit him and Lizzie. The four of us watched Bix’s memory of April 6, 1993, on separate headsets. Bix started rolling as we arrived at the East River, at sunrise. “Gentlemen, good morning,” came Bix’s voice, and there were Rob and me through Bix’s eyes: two shaggy-haired nineteen-year-olds. Kids, was my first thought. As a parent, I saw Rob with aching clarity through the screen of his reddish stubble: his exhaustion and worry, an edgy eagerness to please that his irony couldn’t conceal. At one point he lifted up his arms in a stretch and I caught the old football bulk, the ridges of pink scar tissue inside his wrists. And then there was the part I’d failed—or maybe refused—to see at the time: a tenderness when Rob looked at me, a trusting admiration that was obviously love. I wished, fleetingly, that Bix hadn’t silenced the thought-and-feeling portion of his consciousness; I wanted to know if he’d seen it. Would Bix have recognized the fumbling proposition Rob made to me, some twenty minutes later, as inevitable?
But the real torture was watching my nineteen-year-old self: cocky and full of hope, unaware that within the hour, I would begin the “after” portion of my life, in which I would try, endlessly and futilely, to atone. Gentlemen, good morning. We watched the memory again and again. I was clutching Sasha’s hand, and I felt her weeping. But repetition dulled her response, and at some point she and Lizzie removed their headsets and took a bottle of wine up to the roof deck. I had to keep watching. There was something I needed to pinpoint in the lull, that last pause before Rob and I waved goodbye and began walking south along the river in the blinding metallic early-morning sunlight. And then we were out of sight; Bix had turned and was walking toward the Sixth Street overpass, heading to his apartment on East Seventh Street.
“Wait. Stop,” I couldn’t keep myself from exhorting him. “Turn around! Call us back—stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”
I realized I was shouting only when Bix switched off my headset and lifted it gently away.
* * *
We wait outside a chain-link fence for Miles to come off the plane. He was bound to look different after fifteen-plus years, but the sight of him stooped under a faded Cubs cap is a shock. As he makes his way toward us, smiling nervously, I notice a slight thoracic scoliosis, a hint of jaundice in his eyes. I’m trying to break the diagnostic habit now that Sasha and I are in our mid-fifties. Friends and acquaintances have begun to be unlucky, and I’ve learned the hard way that detecting illness early puts me in a bind. “You saying I look like shit, Doc?” I’ve been asked, only half in jest. And there was my close friend and tennis partner, Chester, who was treated successfully for a lymphoma I suspected before anyone else. But for reasons I can’t comprehend, our friendship suffered. Chester avoids me now and plays tennis with other people.
Conversation is easy in the car, with Miles catching up on the extended family. I’m surprised at how out of touch he is with most of them. As he stares through the backseat window, I wonder if he’s ever seen an American desert. I never had.
Back at the house, we chat about improvements we’ve made to the place in the twenty years we’ve lived here. Miles points his questions at me, and when I defer to Sasha—he’s her cousin, after all—she replies to me rather than Miles. I feel like a diplomatic translator. This watchful, tentative version of Miles is so unlike the wincing jerk I recall, it’s like a stranger has come to stay with us. Leading to the question: What is he doing here?