“I love her,” he said. “I love her like my own life, I don’t want to be rid of her. But the kids are always sick, or something’s broken that needs fixing. It never fucking stops.”
Adam had no one relying on him, no one expecting him to do anything. His own finances waxed and waned, but at least when the money was scarce no one else suffered, or made him feel that he was letting them down.
“So what do you do to relieve the stress?” he asked.
Carlos smiled sadly. “It used to be smoking, but that got too expensive.”
“So you quit?”
“Only the smoking.”
As Adam turned toward him, his mind went roaming down the darkness of the alley, impatiently following the glistening thread, unable to shake off the sense of urgency that told him: Take hold of this now, or it will be lost forever. He didn’t need to linger in their beds for long; just a few samples of that annihilating euphoria were enough to stand in for all the rest. Maybe that was the engine powering everything that followed, but what it dragged along behind it was like a newlyweds’ car decorated by a thousand exuberant well-wishers.
He tried grabbing the rattling cans of their fights, running his fingers over the rough texture of all the small annoyances and slights, mutually wounded pride, frustrated good intentions. Then he felt the jagged edge of a lacerating eruption of doubt.
But something had happened that blunted the edge, then folded it in on itself again and again, leaving a seam, a ridge, a scar. Afterward, however hard things became, there was no questioning the foundations. They’d earned each other’s trust, and it was unshakeable.
He pushed on into the darkness, trying to understand. Wherever he walked, light would follow, and his task was to make his way down as many side streets as possible before he woke.
This time, though, the darkness remained unbroken. He groped his way forward, unnerved. They’d ended up closer than ever—he knew that with as much certainty as he knew anything. So why did he feel as if he was stumbling blindly through the rooms of Bluebeard’s castle, and the last thing he should want to summon was a lamp?
5.
Adam spent three weeks in the old man’s home theater, watching every one of the old man’s shows, and an episode or two from each of the biggest hits of the last ten years. There could only be one thing more embarrassing than pitching an idea to a studio and discovering that he was offering them a story that they’d already produced for six seasons, and that would be attempting to recycle, not just any old show, but an actual Adam Morris script.
Most of the old man’s work felt as familiar as if he’d viewed it a hundred times in the editing suite, but sometimes a whole side plot appeared that seemed to have dropped from the sky. Could the studios have fucked with things afterward, when the old man was too sick and distracted to notice? Adam checked online, but the fan sites that would have trumpeted any such tampering were silent. The only re-cuts had taken place in another medium entirely.
He desperately needed to write a new show. Money aside, how else was he going to pass the time? The old man’s few surviving friends had all made it clear before he died that they wanted nothing to do with his side-load. He could try to make the most of his cybernetic rejuvenation; his skin felt exactly like skin, from inside and out, and his ridiculously plausible dildo of a cock wouldn’t disappoint anyone if he went looking for ways to use it—but the truth was, he’d inherited the old man’s feelings for Carlos far too deeply to brush them aside and pretend that he was twenty again, with no attachments and no baggage. He didn’t even know yet if he wanted to forge an identity entirely his own, or to take the other path and seek to become the old man more fully. He couldn’t “betray” a lover ten years dead who was, in the end, nothing more to him than a character in someone else’s story—whatever he’d felt as he’d dragged the old man’s memories into his own virtual skull. But he wasn’t going to sell himself that version of things before he was absolutely sure it was the right one.
The only way to know who he was would be to create something new. It didn’t even need to be a story that the old man wouldn’t have written himself, had he lived a few years longer … just so long as it didn’t turn out that he’d already written it, pitched it unsuccessfully, and stuck it in a drawer. Adam pictured himself holding a page from each version up to the light together, bringing the words into alignment, trying to decide if the differences were too many, or too few.
6.
“Sixty thousand dollars in one week?” Adam was incredulous.
Gina replied calmly, “The billables are all itemized. I can assure you, what we’re charging is really quite modest for a case of this complexity.”
“The money was his, he could do what he liked with it. End of story.”
“That’s not what the case law says.” Gina was beginning to exhibit micro-fidgets, as if she’d found herself trapped at a family occasion being forced to play a childish video game just to humor a nephew she didn’t really like. Whether or not she’d granted Adam personhood in her own mind, he certainly wasn’t anyone in a position to give her instructions, and the only reason she’d taken his call must have been some sop to Adam’s comfort that the old man had managed to get written into his contract with the firm.
“All right. I’m sorry to
