“Is that what you did?” I ask. “Reached for more?”
I will never forget the way she glares at me across the table.
Later, she sits at the baby grand and plays my favorite piece—“Tr?umerei,” from Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood. She’s drunk by this point, the piano barely out of tune, and some of her notes slur together.
I think of other, better times, when she played flawlessly for our whole family—Christmases or New Year’s or just random nights when we were all together and happy and blissfully unaware that it wouldn’t always be that way.
Mom offers to make up my old bed, but I make an excuse about needing to get back to my dorm room and study for an upcoming final.
So she walks me to the door and, on the threshold, embraces me.
There’s a ferocity in how she holds on to me, as if she’s clinging to something that is slipping inexorably away.
“It’s going to be okay,” she says. I don’t think much about it in the moment. I think she’s had too much to drink and been caught in a rare vortex of sentimentality.
As I walk to my car, I hear the front door slam shut behind me.
The air is perfumed with the minty, piney, honeyed scent of the big eucalyptus that overhangs the front yard, a smell inextricably linked to my childhood and the deepest sense of my identity.
I don’t know this at the time, because in life, you’re almost never aware when you’re living a last chapter—but I won’t see my mother ever again.
Three days later, she’ll drive her car off Highway 1 and plunge a thousand feet into the Pacific.
* * *
—
Dawn broke on the north Texas grasslands.
It was Christmas morning.
I was still driving, and because of the mutations to my BHLHE41=DEC2, NPSR1, and ADRB1 genes, not remotely tired.
I pictured my family, and there was no mind’s-eye imperfection in the conjuring of their faces. I saw them as clearly as if they were with me in the flesh.
I wondered what they were doing without me, and as my eyes filled with tears that splintered the morning light, I took the raw emotion that was unraveling me and shoved it into the mental cage whose walls were growing more impregnable every day.
I hated doing it.
Each time, it was getting easier, and while at this stage turning my heart to stone was still a conscious, painstaking operation, I could imagine a time in the not-too-distant future when the control and suppression of sentiment would become second nature.
* * *
—
We stopped in Amarillo to charge the car batteries, grabbed breakfast at a roadside diner, and pushed on across the sunlit prairie.
In New Mexico, the landscape turned arid.
In the course of an hour, I saw four rockets launching to the southwest out of the spaceport near Truth or Consequences—billionaires spending their Christmas morning in low-Earth orbit.
By lunchtime, we were climbing into the high desert near Santa Fe. The City Different, as they call it, was the second oldest city in America. On approach, Santa Fe hid in plain sight, the low-slung, earth-colored buildings blending quietly into the brown hills.
We drove into the plaza and got a suite at an enormous adobe hotel called La Fonda. In the lobby, there were lights strung from the exposed wood beams, a twenty-foot tree, and families everywhere in terrible sweaters.
I slept through the afternoon and woke with a fierce appetite.
As evening fell, we went out in search of a meal.
It felt good to walk the meandering streets that seemed frozen in time. This tourist town seemed to be offering an experience of America before the great decline—a chance to be in a place where the future still felt like the future.
Christmas trees glowed through the windows of adobe houses, and the scent of wood smoke trickling from fireplaces perfumed the clean, cold air. The mountains east of town were just beginning to glow in the light of a desert moon. I ached with homesickness, and for a moment, I let the ache have its freedom.
We had dinner at a tapas place adjacent to the plaza, which was outrageously expensive since it boasted a nonsynthetic protein menu.
“Not exactly how you imagined Christmas this year, I’m guessing?” Kara asked.
I shook my head and took a sip of the excellent Ribera del Duero. It was almost impossible to find Spanish wines anymore, since the prime growing regions had shifted north. So many iconic wineries no longer produced.
The experience of tasting a world-class wine post-upgrade was mind-blowing. I’d always thought I had a decent palate, but now I was registering an explosion of flavors and smells and finding that I could savor them individually and collectively, simultaneously—dirt and sunlight and dusty black fruits and rose petals and the stellar permeation of oak and time.
“What would you be doing tonight?” I asked.
Kara took one of the tomato bread slices topped with jamón serrano.
“Depends on the weather,” she said. “If it was snowing, I’d stay home. Make my famous mulled wine. Watch Bad Santa. If the roads were good, I’d drive into town. Knock back a few with the nowhere-else-to-go Christmas crowd at El Moro. No.” She corrected herself. “That’s what I’d do pre-upgrade. Now? I’d stay home and read and think.”
“Has your memory improved toward perfection?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Same.”
“It’s rough,” she said. “My life in Montana was built on the concept of forgetting who I was. Where I came from.” Kara looked at me across the table, her scarred face almost grotesque in the candlelight. “There are memories I would love to lose forever. You’re having a hard time, aren’t you?”
I knew what she meant.
“Emotion?” I said.
She nodded.
“Yes.”
“There are things you can do,” she said.
“I know. I’ve been doing them.”
“It gets easier.”
“That’s what scares me.”
“Why?”
I glanced over at the table beside ours. A couple was eavesdropping on our conversation. I suspected it wasn’t the words we were saying that had drawn their attention, but the speed of our exchanges.
I cut my eyes at the table and said quietly to Kara, “We should have our conversation at normal speed.”
“Right.”
I answered her question, forcing myself to speak more slowly and deliberately. “It scares me because I’m afraid of losing the ability to feel things deeply.”
“Tell me the advantage of feeling things deeply,” she said. “Doesn’t feeling cloud logic and reason?”
“To a point. Feelings are also the core of compassion and empathy. We’re becoming capable of rationalizing anything. Maybe sentiment helps with the checks and balances.”
“True. Or maybe you’re just afraid of growing beyond the people you love.”
More food came.
It was taking all of my willpower to filter out the seven rambling conversations within my range of hearing and the innumerable smells wafting from other people, out of the kitchen, off the tables.
“Do you wish you hadn’t gotten this upgrade?” Kara asked.
“That’s a hard one. I finally have the mind I always wanted.”
She sipped her wine. “Must’ve been hard.”