The Bright Spot Read online

  First, all the crews went ’ware in just a couple of years. Nowadays, people who actually know how to make a virtual are as common as typewriters, and just about in the same demand. Though, come to think of it, there are people who collect old typewriters, but no one wants to keep an old soundman around the house.

  Then, just like Lu predicted, came Trouperware. You load the ’ware, enter the script, and the workers perform it, simple as paving a road or disemboweling a chicken. So even the instructional work dried up. Every factory or restaurant could take workers off the line and make whatever virtuals they needed.

  Live theater was almost immediately dead and buried, though it’d been on rich-people life support for forever. But now the same crew that cleaned your house, for a few dollars extra, could put on a decent-enough performance of almost any length from skit to five-act tragedy. They could perform while they were cleaning if you preferred. You could pause them if you got bored or busy and have them come back the next time the toilet backed up to finish off Lear or do the time warp again. There were all sorts of packages available.

  For a few seasons there, at The Lakes at Llewellyn everywhere, backyard opera was all the rage. Three tenors? That’s nothing. Try a dozen. They go great with the fajitas. The workers did everything from build the set to mix the drinks and never missed a note.

  But most (poorer) people still preferred their culture served up in commercially produced virtuals for the home-box market. Trouperware immediately sucked up every bit part and most of the supporting roles. Any fantasies I had of fading quietly away playing the folksy janitor or the nosy neighbor ended abruptly. Soon there were no more than three or four non-’ware parts in any dramatic project, and those were strictly for stars or those in the running to become stars—not old warhorses like me and Lu.

  People still liked stars, the wisdom went, and a star couldn’t be using ’ware. Stars, of course, advanced this wisdom, and it still seems to be limping along—a star holding it up under each arm—though I don’t give it much longer. Who needs them, right? They’re hopelessly inbred. Most new stars are to stardom born. Reviews typically begin with the lineage of the stars and stars-to-be, like nobility, like a dog show. You don’t need Déjàviewer to get the feeling you’ve seen these people before. Most aren’t any better than the Trouperware supporting cast, and some aren’t half as good.

  And don’t get me wrong. Trouperware is good, even very good. I’ve studied up on the stuff. Professional curiosity, you might say. Workers on Trouperware will consistently deliver a three-out-of-four-star performance. They never blow a line. They do their own stunts—the stunt package is included, along with every other damn thing imaginable—accents, martial arts, dance steps, weathering, impressions, birdcalls, whatever. If you want a sunburned Astaire as an Aussie pilot shot down in the desert who gets the sudden urge to yodel, just punch it in.

  But if that’s all they could do, they’d be useless. Where they truly excel is in expressing human emotion, arguably better than most humans do. They can blush like a sunrise, tear up like a tidal wave, but that’s the least of it. Workers on Trouperware emote based on the extensive mapping and analysis of thousands of expressive markers in the face, in the voice, in the smell even. So that when these guys follow a direction—using the Directorware that comes with the package—they’re not just fooling around. You direct a Trouperware worker to do abject terror, you’d better stand back and be ready to clean up after.

  Not that they can’t do subtle. They can do the little twitch that breaks your heart acting’s been all about since the close-up was invented, and they can do just the right timbre in the voice you can’t hear in an amphitheater to go along with it. I can watch them and tell you the code you enter to get the precise expression that wrings a poignant tear from your eye. But you know what? You’ll cry anyway, and probably won’t even have noticed that all tenderness now looks and sounds the same. All dismay, all wonder, all curiosity. All I’m-totally-fucked. All sincerity .

  All acting.

  There aren’t any actors anymore. There are only menus. Extensive menus. And I’m not on any of them.

  It used to matter if you knew how to do something. It’s not so hard, I suppose, to read and emulate other people. It used to take practice, study, maybe a certain sensitivity, though that may be pushing it. I’ve known plenty of excellent actors who were assholes, including yours truly on many occasions. That’s the beauty of it. It’s not about whether I’m a good guy, but whether I’m a good actor, then I can be any guy in the world, any world you like. But now all it takes is the money for the ’ware, like everything else.

  It used to be fun. For the actors, for the audience. At least I always hoped so. Doesn’t it matter that I was here hoping, even if it all ends up as digital soup? Maybe not. Now it’s just something else the lucky worker can make of himself for shit wages, something else the hungry consumer can swallow. I read the other day that “since the introduction of Trouperware, consumption of the dramatic arts is actually up.” I wonder how they measured that—dollar volume or meals served? I got out just in time, before I lost any fingers or toes, heart or soul.

  Bon appétit.

  Fortunately, Lu and I aged gracefully enough to get steady work modeling sportswear for seniors. We were essentially mannequins who could take direction but were cheaper than using licensed ’ware. We were getting by okay. But you know how it goes. First it was impossible to get ahead, then hard to keep up, and then before you know it, we were falling behind, just as employers started telling us we were too old. Eventually we couldn’t afford to fix the roof or pay the taxes, and we had to sell the old place before the city just took it off our hands and sent us packing.

  We wouldn’t be missed. Murphy’s was long gone. Everything around us had been scraped off and upgraded. Our new neighbors glowered at us with open hostility. Mr. Casual was now president of the local civic association, an organization whose sole purpose, it seemed to me, was having us scraped off as well. They were hoping for scraped off the planet but would settle for just the neighborhood. Property values were suffering. The city heard their pitiful cries.

  Yeah, it was time to move.

  Then Lu got sick, or discovered she was. She’d apparently been sick for a long time. The limited-assistance living facility we were trying to move into required a health screening to make sure we wouldn’t be too much trouble. Lu’s tests had revealed “something”—the limited-assistance health technician who broke this news said—something serious, something, well, fatal.

  As we sat there in stunned silence, he went on to scold Lu for not being tested earlier. “Now you have severely restricted your treatment options,” he said.

  I told him he had the option to severely fuck himself, and that made Lu laugh out loud. It was the strain of the moment, I guess. But still, it beat the alternative. I tried to make her laugh as long and as often as I possibly could. It must’ve worn her out, but she never complained. I wish she’d been more of a complainer—she confessed to the health technician an impressive list of symptoms I’d never heard anything about before. But I wasn’t about to scold her. Broke and sick isn’t a role anyone’s eager to play. Besides, there wasn’t time for scolding. The long and short of it was the limited-assistance facility wouldn’t let her in, since they weren’t set up for someone with such limited options, and by the time such a caring facility was located (with a waiting list longer than Lu’s life expectancy), there were no options left.

  But one. Home Death Alternative. The latest thing. Popularly known as the Double-D, for Drop Dead. You agreed to keep your hopeless self at home and spared the public health-care system—an imaginary creature if there ever was one—the expense of attending to your demise. In return for your pledge, they gave you a booklet and some good drugs and a hotline staffed by dedicated volunteers. You even got a grief counselor with that at no expense. Three sessions. One before, two after.

  Best of all, if you were accepted into this program
, the city wouldn’t forcibly remove you from your home for nonpayment of taxes. Required were forms waiving all rights of any sort and proper medical documentation of the certainty and proximity of your approaching death. Lu’s prognosis of “a matter of weeks” qualified her for the city’s benevolence with perhaps days to spare. The cutoff line on the upper end was shadowy. It probably depended on the real estate market. The city didn’t have a program to fix the roof, of course. That would’ve been socialism, and I understand that’s some terrible stuff. I wouldn’t know. I’m just an actor. With any luck, the place would fall on us to spare the city the cost of our burial. But for the time being, we got to keep our house.

  We celebrated our reprieve from homelessness with a candlelit dinner. I cooked—a cup of the good lentils and a half cup of basmati—put on some music—a compilation of the depressed turn-of-the-century women singers who were Lu’s faves Bea played for her when she was a kid—Aimee Mann, Sheryl Crow, Lucinda Williams. She talked about Bea a lot, remembering. I’d splurged on a box of wine. It should last a matter of weeks, I thought in the store, and got my crying out of the way before I came home. It’s hard to take a stand, Sheryl reminded me. Maybe the music wasn’t such a good idea.

  It started raining, a real summer downpour, and we shut off the music and just listened to the rain falling inside and out. She tired easily. She tried to put on a front, but she drank her wine in exhausted little sips and had to concentrate when setting the glass on the table. This wasn’t any Hollywood disease. She was in pain pretty much all the time. The painkillers would be kicking in soon. They “managed” her pain by knocking her out cold. I couldn’t put off telling her any longer. I’d been stalling until the house business was settled. I didn’t know when I could work up my nerve again, and no time was a good time.

  She nestled up against me, sipping her wine, and I finally told her everything Dumfries had told me, over thirty years ago now, boiled down to its essentials: How the two of us together could bring down ’ware, probably for good. Still could, if we wanted. I thought I should tell her. I knew how she felt about the ’ware—the same as I did.

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked. “Do you want me to do it?”

  “It’s completely your choice,” I said. I sounded so severe. I feared becoming my fathers. “I mean ... I don’t want to influence you. I don’t know what to say.”

  She searched my eyes. She was the calm one, as usual. Though maybe this time it was the drugs. The grief counselor had suggested some for me as well, a different flavor from Lu’s, but I’d turned them down. “I know it’s my choice, Nick. But you’ve had so much more time to think about it than I have.”

  Many long years. “I know. I’m sorry....”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I’m glad you didn’t tell me before. But you must’ve thought about it. What will you do, if I ... you know.”

  She’d gone to the heart of the matter, teetering right on the brink anyway. “I’m not sure. Sometimes one thing seems right, sometimes the other. I don’t think I can really know unless I actually have the choice.”

  She nods, imagining, pondering. “Does ’ware ever seem right?”

  “Never.”

  “Just the ending of it?”

  “But at what cost? Is it right to cause a horrible cataclysm in order to save the world?”

  “Isn’t that what all those wars were supposed to be about?”

  “And look how well they turned out.”

  She had a dreamy look. The painkillers were coming on. I plucked her wineglass from her hand and put it on the table. “It’s not the world, though, is it?” she mused. “Just us humans. Do you think we’re worth saving?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  As usual my certainty surprised and pleased her, and she managed a weak smile. “Why’s that?”

  “Because you’re one.”

  “You’re sweet,” she murmured. “Why else?”

  She was drifting off, her eyes were fluttery. She was right. I had thought about it. “Because we pretend to be better than we are, and sometimes we pretend so well, we actually become better.”

  She curled up in my arms. “Mmm. I like that. I can’t decide.” She fell fast asleep.

  Look at me, I would’ve added if she’d been awake. I pretended I was someone lucky enough to spend my life with you, and that’s who I’ve become.

  In the morning, through a fog of sleep, I heard the front door open and close. In one of those tricks of sleep, I thought it was years and years ago, and Lu was just going out to take Buck on his morning walk up and down the fashionable alleys, and they’d be coming home any moment now and get back into bed with me. It was a delicious feeling. So vivid was this illusion, I half expected, when I opened my eyes, to see a cup of coffee on the bedside table, covered by its saucer.

  Instead, there was an envelope propped against the lamp. It took me a moment to focus on it, to realize what it was. Nick, it said in the wobbly scrawl that had become Lu’s handwriting.

  I leaped out of bed and ran outside. Down the block a Maid-To-Order van was pulling away, loaded up with ’ware maids making their appointed rounds. I knew a woman who did Maid-To-Order, her hands calloused halfway up her forearms. When she cooked spaghetti, she scooped it out of the boiling water with her hands. “I don’t feel a thing,” she said to impress me. I hadn’t thought of her in years. The van had brought her to mind.

  I didn’t see Lu anywhere. I had no idea how much time had passed since I heard the door, how long I lay there dreaming. It could be minutes or hours.

  One of my neighbors was gaping at me like he’d never seen an old man in his underwear before. “Have you seen my wife?” I demanded before he had the chance to give me any shit. “She’s not well. She shouldn’t be out.”

  “She just left,” he said, pointing after the Maid-To-Order van as it inserted itself into the torrent of traffic at the end of the block. I ran back inside and called them. They passed me from one idiot to another.

  Meanwhile I read Lu’s note through my tears. She said she loved me. She said she was ready to die. She said whatever I decided was all right with her. She said goodbye.

  By the time I finally got off the phone with the assurance a company representative would give the matter his utmost attention and get back to me immediately, no more than an hour had passed since my dream.

  I barely had time to pee before the phone started ringing. I ran to the phone and grabbed it.

  “This is Melanie Tidewater from Maid-To-Order Customer Relations. May I speak with ... Nicholas Bainbridge?”

  “That was fast. What did you find out? Did you locate her?”

  “Is this Nicholas Bainbridge?”

  “I’ve been talking to you people all morning.”

  “I ... I wouldn’t know anything about that, sir. You are Nicholas Bainbridge?”

  There was a touch of panic in her voice, fear. She had to make sure it was me, but sure as hell didn’t want to be the one to tell me why. “Yes,” I said softly.

  “Would you hold for my supervisor, please? Her name is—”

  I hung up the phone. I never learned her supervisor’s name. I knew what she was going to tell me, and I didn’t want to hear it like that. I didn’t want to hear it at all.

  Lu was dead. She’d run the ’ware. Her heart had stopped.

  It wasn’t hard to scrape me off after that. I didn’t put up any fight. The limited-assistance facility that wouldn’t take Lu took me—a room and a bath. I’m healthy as a horse, apparently. I cook in the cafeteria to earn my keep. I give acting classes. I think too much. I grieve.

  My young grief counselor suggested I choose a pet from the facility’s acceptable-companions list. She suggested a lot of things, actually, but that was the only one I took. I hope she never took any of my suggestions. After all, she was only trying to do her job or get her degree. I have anger issues, was her stated opinion, and I’d give her an A+ on that diagnosis.

  The accept
able-companions list wasn’t much of a list. No dogs, cats, anything you could warm up to. Then I noticed chameleon and thought we might have something in common.

  He came in his own habitat. That’s what they call it. Looks like a cage to me. I named him Spot. We don’t have much of a relationship, but he puts up with my humor. “Feeling blue?” I greet him when he’s perched on my jeans. “Seeing red?” I ask him on the fire extinguisher. He’s always got the hint of green no matter what color he turns. I’ve come to think he likes some colors more than others. He looks really good on golds and oranges and seems to know it. Lizards might be cold-blooded, but they have a quiet dignity. I’m supposed to keep him in his habitat at all times, but I don’t. Locking him up is supposed to be for his own safety. He might get lost—sucked up by the vacuum cleaner is the favorite scare story. But he’s easy enough to find if I need to get him out of harm’s way. The only window’s in the bathroom. I just open the shutter a crack so that the sun hits the tile, and in no time, there he’ll be—on the bright spot.

  So there I was, me and Spot, feeling too pathetic and fragile to actually do anything, though all I ever did was think about what I should do. I was drifting, an albatross hanging around my neck. I needed a miracle. Then Cassie Rockworth happened. I tell you, life’s a hell of a story.

  I’d just made tofu stroganoff for 150, who all complained there weren’t enough mushrooms or there were too many, and I was in no mood to be trifled with, when somebody came to tell me I had a phone call. I was sitting on the front porch, glaring at the spring, listening to the click of dominoes and dentures all around me.

  “Who the hell is it?” I inquired of the messenger.

  I was given the phone and the finger. Fair enough. I pushed the button.