By James Tadd Adcox.
Doubt
We began to believe, as how could we not, that at least some of it was performance, fake news, theater created not for the sake of our entertainment, but something analogous to entertainment, a desire to keep us watching: the bombing this morning, for example, in a city on the other side of the world, a city we had never heard of, or else which we had an inexact sense that we may have heard of, a city the name of which may have been similar to some other city we had heard of before and forgotten. All at once this bombing filled our timelines, filled them so thoroughly that anyone who spoke of anything else, problems getting groceries, jokes about the president, complaints about the president, personal illness, opinions on television shows or movies, immediately outed themselves as heartless. In the first minutes after the bombing appeared across our timelines, speculation suggested that it was a nuclear explosion caused by one of the suitcase bombs that had gone missing after the Cold War (everyone having taken it for granted that there were suitcase bombs, that they had gone missing, that this was prior knowledge, universally shared); the bombing, someone else said, was the third largest on record, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Later on, a consensus emerged that it was not an atomic weapon but rather fertilizer, the same kind, even the same brand as was used in Oklahoma City; the fertilizer had been stored next to a fireworks factory; an explosion had been all but inevitable. Later still this disappeared from our timelines and other things took its place. When one stepped outside, it seemed impossible that so much of such consequence could be going on and yet daily life could continue, the man at the end of the block always washing his car washing his car, the old woman on the porch always calling out to you thinking you are someone else calling out to you, asking after a relative you do not have. One looked for places where cracks might show; when one walked by, for example, a pair of young men in basketball shorts, one waited with a sense of expectful waiting for the violence which might arrive at any moment. True that one could see evidence of unrest, but always at the edges of things: police lights in the distance, barricades heading off otherwise empty roads, helicopters blocks or miles away. One told oneself it was a relief to be disconnected, but this wasn’t quite true: the timeline created a doubling effect, it seemed to layer another world on top of the world we encountered when we stepped away from our timeline; we first noticed this years ago—in the beginning the electronic world had been insubstantial and ghostly, and it was possible to ignore it for days at a time to no ill effect; when one encountered the traces of this other, secondary world in our own, it was as though one had overheard a whisper, neither intended for nor concerning oneself, did you know, did you happen to see; and to be aware of this secondary world was to be a medium, attuned to forces with few if any consequences for the quotidian. At some point, difficult to identify, the positions switched, what had been the ghostly secondary layer acquired a mass and density that one could not have previously foreseen, so that what had once been a representation or doubling of the physical world seemed to take on and assert its therenesss and priority in the real; and the formerly real world seemed, in this same movement, to acquire a consequent weightlessness. To come across a place or a person not represented in the electronic world was to feel oneself in the presence of a ghost; and to spend any amount of time disconnected from that world was to leave one’s body behind, defenseless, while one’s animating spirit of blood and bones drifted through a now-ghostly realm. Even in this realm of ghosts, however, the electronic world threatened at each moment to make itself known; even while disconnected, floating in astral space, there was an effect as if of a crowding-in of one’s peripheral vision. Later still, the news would filter out from our timelines and onto the radio, the television, newscasters giving the official version in earnest voices, seventy, a hundred, four hundred dead this morning when fertilizer stored near a fireworks warehouse—speaking the story as though this were the first rather than the third, fourth, fifth version told. Inside one’s apartment—a small studio in a city far from the city one still thinks of as home—one makes breakfast, one cleans the dishes, all the while feeling the possibility that one is missing something, an unspecified doom waiting to take on substance. Beyond one’s own timeline are others, the same and yet unknowable, subject to algorithmic whims other than those which shape one’s own. When one imagines death, it is natural to think of it beginning on the timeline somewhere, metastasizing just outside one’s vision, before seeping out from the electronic world to bleed into this one, which one can no longer quite call real.
City of the Dead
Ultimately one supposes it is because we no longer believe in death, or no longer believe in the possibility of our own death or the deaths of our loved ones—of people like us—or anyway because we prefer not to think about it; we prefer to think that things will continue much as they have done, like an old sitcom, the same characters appearing over and over, in the same relations, one to the other, experiencing and resolving the same interpersonal conflicts; and even if the world around us should change, perhaps in ways we approve of and even advocate for, our lives and relations will stay the same, only in different outfits, like episodes of old sitcoms set in other eras, the past or the future, in which characters exhibit unfamiliar facial hair or slightly altered catchphrases but are otherwise recognizable to us. And so death when it comes (not to us, but to people like us, people we know or have known, a parent, a dear friend, a beloved aunt) inevitably comes as a surprise; thus we find ourselves, one finds oneself, left with gaps, lacunae, things we would not have thought to ask of this or that relation while the relation in question was still alive, as I did not think to ask, due to the iterative nature of our lives and the conceptual impossibility of death, which not even the relation in question, while he or she was alive, could have imagined for him- or herself.—It is this, one suspects, which accounts for the popularity, even ubiquity, of applications which, for a small fee, or more often at the price of gathering certain personally identifiable information, construct an AI replica of the now-dead relation, animating old photographs, answering questions and otherwise conversing in a text-based chat generated from the corpus of recorded communications, including letters, emails, direct messages, voicemails and other audio, social media posts, and snippets of video uploaded to the cloud, all of them gathered while the relation in question was alive; and which explains the fact that these services continue to grow, year after year, even though surveys of the public, including a significant number of those who subscribe to these services, describe them as “morbid,” “disquieting,” “icky”; despite the fact, indeed, that the vast majority of users for such services say that, prior to subscribing, they did not consider themselves the sort of person who would sign up for such a service, and having signed up, they report they take little or no comfort in the interaction, finding it as unsettling in practice as they previously found it in theory. Yet each day more and more of these avatars are created; more and more of the internet is filled up with the nearly although not exactly perfect motions of the dead, whom we, who still do not quite believe in death, cannot leave alone, even as they go about their shadowy lives, creating among themselves correspondence, an economy, a whole subterranean infrastructure of the dead; and when we do try to contact them, as I have recently tried to contact a relative of mine, much loved, who died of cancer several years ago, who in fact held my hand as she was dying and asked me not to forget her, we find that we have ever less in common with them; that when we try to speak with them they are busy; or want only to gossip about people we have never met, who are no longer people; or they hardly remember us, asking, as my aunt did, who are you again?, and when answered, saying only, but dear, that was all so long ago…
The Distant Friend
Having written a story about his own death from the point-of-view of a friend of his, he now learns that this friend has died; that this friend in fact had died some time, several months, before. They had been at the beginning of a conversation via text message, which the friend had initiated; he had responded, several hours later, having first seen the text while in the middle of something, then having forgotten about it for some time, then remembered. After that, silence. For several days he waited for a response to his response; for several weeks after that it bugged him, in those moments when he thought about it, this unresponded-to text message; in the weeks after that he told himself that he had forgotten about it, though perhaps, if he were being honest with himself, on some level he was still aware of it as he went about his days, this slight irritant, like a grain of sand in one’s shoe, never quite rising to the level requiring action, of taking off one’s shoe or sending a text message following up on his own unresponded-to text message; but nevertheless there, in a way that seemed to bring this friend into his life, almost bodily, to a degree that was unusual in their now mostly-distant friendship. And now he learns that for some portion of that time, perhaps from the moment of the unresponded-to text itself, his friend, who had seemed to be living alongside him as an irritant, in fact no longer existed; and that this almost corporeal irritation he had felt, in the absence of his friend’s reply, was in some sense the last time he and his friend would be together.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Tadd Adcox’s work has appeared in Granta, Passages North, and X-R-A-Y Magazine, among other places. He’s the author of a novel, Does Not Love, and a novella, Repetition, and is an editor at the literary magazine Always Crashing.
