“Where is he?”
“Home. Sorry. We just got here. I didn’t think you’d get out here so soon. He’s fine.”
So Mae drove home, and when she arrived, breathless and angry and scared, she saw Mercer’s Toyota pickup in the driveway, and this sent her into a mental bramble. She didn’t want him here. It complicated an already gory scene.
She opened the door and saw not her parents, but Mercer’s giant shapeless form. He was standing in the foyer. Every time she saw him again after time apart she was jarred by how big he was, how lumpy. His hair was longer now, adding to his mass. His head blocked all light.
“Heard your car,” he said. He had a pear in his hand.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“They called me to help,” he said.
“Dad?” She rushed past Mercer and into the living room. There, her father was resting, lengthwise, on the couch, watching baseball on the television.
He didn’t turn his head, but looked her way. “Hey hon. Heard you out there.”
Mae sat on the coffee table and held his hand. “You okay?”
“I am. Just a scare, really. It started strong but petered out.” Almost imperceptibly, he was inching his head forward, to see around her.
“Are you trying to watch the game?”
“Ninth inning,” he said.
Mae moved out of the way. Her mother entered the room. “We called Mercer to help get your father into the car.”
“I didn’t want the ambulance,” her father said, still watching the game.
“So was it a seizure?” Mae asked.
“They’re not sure,” Mercer said from the kitchen.
“Can I hear the answer from my own parents?” Mae called out.
“Mercer was a lifesaver,” her father said.
“Why didn’t you call me to say it wasn’t so serious?” Mae asked.
“It was serious,” her mother said. “That’s when I called.”
“But now he’s watching baseball.”
“It’s not as serious now,” her mother said, “but for a while there, we really didn’t know what was happening. So we called Mercer.”
“He saved my life.”
“I don’t think Mercer saved your life, Dad.”
“I don’t mean that I was dying. But you know how I hate the whole circus with the EMTs and the sirens, and the neighbors knowing. We just called Mercer, he got here in five minutes, helped get me to the car, into the hospital, and that was that. It made all the difference.”
Mae fumed. She’d driven two hours in a red panic to find her father relaxing on the couch, watching baseball. She’d driven two hours to find her ex in her home, anointed the hero of the family. And what was she? She was somehow negligent. She was superfluous. It reminded her of so many of the things she didn’t like about Mercer. He liked to be considered kind, but he made sure everyone knew it, and that drove Mae mad, always having to hear about his kindness, his straight-upness, his reliability, his boundless empathy. But with her he’d been diffident, moody, unavailable too many times she needed him.
“You want some chicken? Mercer brought some,” her mother said, and Mae decided that was a good cue to use her bathroom for a few minutes or ten.
“I’m gonna clean up,” she said, and went upstairs.
Later, after they’d all eaten, and recounted the day, explaining how her father’s vision had diminished to an alarming state, and the numbness in his hands had worsened—symptoms the doctors said were normal and treatable, or at least addressable—and after her parents had gone to bed, Mae and Mercer sat in the backyard, the heat still coming off the grass, the trees, the rain-washed grey fences that surrounded them.
“Thanks for helping,” she said.
“It was easy. Vinnie’s lighter than he used to be.”
Mae didn’t like the sound of that. She didn’t want her father to be lighter, easily carried. She changed the subject.
“How’s business?”
“Really good. Really good. I actually had to take on an apprentice last week. Isn’t that cool? I have an apprentice. And your job? Great?”
Mae was taken aback. Mercer was rarely so ebullient.
“It is great,” she said.
“Good. Good to hear. I was hoping it’d work out. So you’re doing what, programming or something?”
“I’m in CE. Customer Experience. I deal with the advertisers right now. Wait. I saw something about your stuff the other day. I looked you up and there was this comment about someone getting something shipped damaged? They were so pissed. I’m assuming you saw that.”
Mercer exhaled theatrically. “I didn’t.” His face had gone sour.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It was just some nutjob.”
“And now it’s in my head.”
“Don’t blame me. I just—”
“You just made me aware that there’s some kook out there who hates me and wants to hurt my business.”
“There were other comments, too, and most of them were nice. There was actually one really funny one.” She began scrolling through her phone.
“Mae. Please. I’m asking you not to read it.”
“Here it is: ‘All those poor deer antlers died for this shit?’ ”
“Mae, I asked you not to read me that.”
“What? It was funny!”
“How can I ask you not to do that in a way where you’ll respect my wishes?”
This was the Mercer Mae remembered and couldn’t stand—prickly, moody, high-handed.
“What are you talking about?”
Mercer took a deep breath, and Mae knew he was about to give a speech. If there was a podium before him, he’d be stepping up to it, removing his papers from his sportcoat pocket. Two years of community college and he thought he was some kind of professor. He’d given her speeches about organically sourced beef, about the early work of King Crimson, and each time it started with this deep breath, a breath that said Settle in, this will take a while and will blow your mind.
“Mae, I have to ask you to—”
“I know, you want me to stop reading you customer comments. Fine.”
“No, that’s not what I was—”
“You want me to read them to you?”
“Mae, how about if you just let me finish my sentence? Then you’ll know what I’m saying. You guessing the end of every one of my sentences is never helpful, because you’re never right.”
“But you talk so slow.”
“I talk normally. You’ve just gotten impatient.”
“Okay. Go.”
“But now you’re hyperventilating.”
“I guess I’m just so easily bored by this.”
“By talking.”
“By talking in slow motion.”
“Can I start now? It’ll take three minutes. Can you give me three minutes, Mae?”
“Fine.”
“Three minutes where you won’t know what I’m about to say, okay? It will be a surprise.”
“Okay.”
“All right. Mae, we have to change how we interact. Every time I see or hear from you, it’s through this filter. You send me links, you quote someone talking about me, you say you saw a picture of me on someone’s wall.… It’s always this third-party assault. Even when I’m talking to you face-to-face you’re telling me what some stranger thinks of me. It becomes like we’re never alone. Every time I see you, there’s a hundred other people in the room. You’re always looking at me through a hundred other people’s eyes.”
“Don’t get dramatic about it.”
“I just want to talk with you directly. Without you bringing in every other stranger in the world who might have an opinion about me.”
“I don’t do that.”
“You do, Mae. A few months ago, you read something about me, and remember this? When I saw you, you were so standoffish.”
“That’s because they said you were using endangered species for your work!”
&n
bsp; “But I’ve never done that.”
“Well, how am I supposed to know that?”
“You can ask me! Actually ask me. You know how weird that is, that you, my friend and ex-girlfriend, gets her information about me from some random person who’s never met me? And then I have to sit across from you and it’s like we’re looking at each other through this strange fog.”
“Fine. Sorry.”
“Will you promise me to stop doing this?”
“Stop reading online?”
“I don’t care what you read. But when you and I communicate, I want to do it directly. You write to me, I write to you. You ask me questions, and I answer them. You stop getting news about me from third parties.”
“But Mercer, you run a business. You need to participate online. These are your customers, and this is how they express themselves, and how you know if you’re succeeding.” Mae’s mind churned through a half-dozen Circle tools she knew would help his business, but Mercer was an underachiever. An underachiever who somehow managed to be smug about it.
“See, that’s not true, Mae. It’s not true. I know I’m successful if I sell chandeliers. If people order them, then I make them, and they pay me money for them. If they have something to say afterward, they can call me or write me. I mean, all this stuff you’re involved in, it’s all gossip. It’s people talking about each other behind their backs. That’s the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication. And besides that, it’s fucking dorky.”
Mae exhaled through her nostrils.
“I love it when you do that,” he said. “Does that mean you have no answer? Listen, twenty years ago, it wasn’t so cool to have a calculator watch, right? And spending all day inside playing with your calculator watch sent a clear message that you weren’t doing so well socially. And judgments like ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ and ‘smiles’ and ‘frowns’ were limited to junior high. Someone would write a note and it would say, ‘Do you like unicorns and stickers?’ and you’d say, ‘Yeah, I like unicorns and stickers! Smile!’ That kind of thing. But now it’s not just junior high kids who do it, it’s everyone, and it seems to me sometimes I’ve entered some inverted zone, some mirror world where the dorkiest shit in the world is completely dominant. The world has dorkified itself.”
“Mercer, is it important to you to be cool?”
“Do I look like it is?” He passed a hand over his expanding stomach, his torn fatigues. “Clearly I’m no master of cool. But I remember when you’d see John Wayne or Steve McQueen and you’d say, Wow, those guys are badass. They ride horses and motorcycles and wander the earth righting wrongs.”
Mae couldn’t help but laugh. She saw the time on her phone. “It’s been more than three minutes.”
Mercer plowed on. “Now the movie stars beg people to follow their Zing feeds. They send pleading messages asking everyone to smile at them. And holy fuck, the mailing lists! Everyone’s a junk mailer. You know how I spend an hour every day? Thinking of ways to unsubscribe to mailing lists without hurting anyone’s feelings. There’s this new neediness—it pervades everything.” He sighed as if he’d made some very important points. “It’s just a very different planet.”
“It’s different in a good way,” Mae said. “There are a thousand ways it’s better, and I can list them. But I can’t help it if you’re not social. I mean, your social needs are so minimal—”
“It’s not that I’m not social. I’m social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you’re purveying. It improves nothing. It’s not nourishing. It’s like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You’re not hungry, you don’t need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you’re pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it’s equally addictive.”
“Oh Jesus.”
“You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.”
“I never feel diminished.” Mae thought of the petition she’d signed that day, to demand more job opportunities for immigrants living in the suburbs of Paris. It was energizing and would have impact. But Mercer didn’t know about this, or anything Mae did, anything the Circle did, and she was too sick of him to explain it all.
“And it’s eliminated my ability to just talk to you.” He was still talking. “I mean, I can’t send you emails, because you immediately forward them to someone else. I can’t send you a photo, because you post it on your own profile. And meanwhile, your company is scanning all of our messages for information they can monetize. Don’t you think this is insane?”
Mae looked at his fat face. He was thickening everywhere. He seemed to be developing jowls. Could a man of twenty-five already have jowls? No wonder snack food was on his mind.
“Thanks for helping my dad,” she said, and went inside and waited for him to leave. It took him a few minutes to do so—he insisted on finishing his beer—but soon enough he did, and Mae turned out the downstairs lights, went to her old room and dropped herself into her bed. She checked her messages, found a few dozen that needed her attention, and then, because it was only nine o’clock and her parents were already asleep, she logged on to her Circle account and handled a few dozen queries, feeling, with every fulfilled request, that she was cleaning the Mercer off of herself. By midnight she felt reborn.
On Saturday Mae woke in her old bed, and after breakfast, she sat with her father, the two of them watching women’s professional basketball, something he’d taken to doing with great enthusiasm. They wasted the rest of the day playing cards, and running errands, and together cooked a chicken-sauté dish her parents had learned at a cooking class they’d taken at the Y.
On Sunday morning, the routine was the same: Mae slept in, feeling leaden and feeling good about it, and wandered into the TV room, where her father was again watching some WNBA game. This time he was wearing a thick white robe a friend of his had pilfered from a Los Angeles hotel.
Her mother was outside, using duct tape to repair a plastic garbage can that raccoons had damaged while trying to extract its contents. Mae was feeling dull-witted, her body reluctant to do anything but recline. She had been, she realized, on constant alert for a full week, and hadn’t slept more than five hours on any given night. Simply sitting in her parents’ dim living room, watching this basketball game, which meant nothing to her, all those ponytails and braids leaping, all that squeaking of sneakers, was restorative and sublime.
“You think you can help me up, Sweet Pea?” her father asked. His fists were deep in the couch, but he couldn’t lift himself. The cushions were too deep.
Mae got up and reached for his hand but when she did, she heard a faint liquid sound.
“Mother-bastard,” he said, and began to sit down again. Then he adjusted his trajectory, and leaned on his side, as if he’d just remembered there was something fragile he couldn’t sit on.
“Can you get your mother?” he asked, his teeth clenched, his eyes closed.
“What’s wrong?” Mae asked.
He opened his eyes, and there was an unfamiliar fury in them. “Please just get your mother.”
“I’m right here. Let me help,” she said. She reached for his hand again. He swatted her away.
“Get. Your. Mother.”
And then the smell hit her. He’d soiled himself.
He exhaled loudly, composing himself. Now with a softer voice he said, “Please. Please dear. Get Mom.”
Mae ran to the front door. She found her mother by the garage and told her what had happened. Ma
e’s mother did not rush inside. Instead, she held Mae’s hands in her own.
“I think you better head back now,” she said. “He won’t want you to see this.”
“I can help,” Mae said.
“Please, honey. You have to grant him some dignity.”
“Bonnie!” His voice boomed from inside the house.
Mae’s mother grabbed her hand. “Mae, sweetie, just get your stuff and we’ll see you in a few weeks, okay?”
Mae drove back to the coast, her body shaking with rage. They had no right to do that, to summon her home and then cast her out. She didn’t want to smell his shit! She would help, yes, any time she was asked, but not if they treated her that way. And Mercer! He was scolding her in her own house. Jesus Christ. The three of them. Mae had driven two hours there, and now was driving two back, and what had she gotten for all this work? Just frustration. At night, lectures from fat men, and during the day, shooed away by her own parents.
By the time she got back to the coast, it was 4:14. She had time, she thought. Did the place close at five or six? She couldn’t remember. She swerved off the highway and toward the marina. When she got to the beach, the gate to the kayak-storage areas was open, but there was no one in sight. Mae looked around, between the rows of kayaks and paddles and life preservers. “Hello?” she said.
“Hello!” a voice said. “Over here. In the trailer.”
Behind the rows of equipment, there was a trailer, on cinderblocks, and through the open door, Mae could see a man’s feet on a desk, a phone cord stretching from a desk unit to an unseen face. She walked up the steps, and in the darkened trailer she saw a man, in his thirties, balding, holding his index finger up to her. Mae checked her phone for the time every few minutes, seeing the minutes slip away: 4:20, 4:21, 4:23. When he was off the phone, he smiled.
“Thanks for your patience. How can I help?”
“Is Marion around?”
“No. I’m her son. Walt.” He stood and shook Mae’s hand. He was tall, thin, sunburned.
“Nice to meet you. Am I too late?”
“Too late for what? Dinner?” he said, thinking he’d made a joke.