One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(22)

Looking back, I don’t know how she ever made the case that her life right then was boring, or mine wasn’t, but I went with it and wasted more of the last hours I spent with her on things I barely even cared about then and can’t recall right now.


We talked for four hours.

I don’t remember most of it, but often a little moment in an unrelated conversation or alone on the street will trigger a memory of it that I didn’t know I had. So I know it’s all there somewhere.

The last hour I remember word for word.


“I want you to think about something. Do you want anything to drink, by the way? I’m sure they can bring you something.”

I said I was fine.

“I think that something about how easily this came to you makes you want to dismiss it,” she said. “And I get that. I know that I just showed up at your front door in a box with a bow on it—not literally a bow, but the rest literally, right? Who knows—maybe there even was a bow! Anyway, something about how easy this was made you dismiss it from the start. But forget for a second how it came to you, because I want to ask you something different. After you got over the surprise that you didn’t get what you wanted, why didn’t you want what you got?

“Is it because you feel you didn’t earn my love? Because you’re right, you didn’t. I met you at a formative moment in my development—you happened to be the one that I was looking at when I was ready for that to happen. Maybe I just ‘imprinted,’ the way ducklings do.” She pointed to a dusty green book on the floor with faint animal etchings on the cover, and it broke my heart a little to think that they must have bought this book in bulk, as decoration for the room, and that she had read it anyway, with the enthusiasm of someone who didn’t know the difference. “If you had been someone else, would I have fallen in love with that person? Who knows? Maybe, probably. I don’t know. But I don’t know what perfect circumstance you’re looking for. I mean, am I not pretty enough? Look at me—I’m exactly what you wanted, aren’t I, exactly your type?

“Is it just that everything came too easy? Because if you’re romanticizing ‘difficult’ … you’re going to get over that quickly, I promise you. I promise you. Everyone forgets how difficult ‘difficult’ really is.

“Is it because you’re afraid that I don’t really have a mind of my own? Because if that were true, what do you call this?” She gestured to the whole situation, the exact same way that Derek had.

I said I had to go.

“One more thing,” she said.

“You meet a finite number of people in your life. It feels to you like it’s infinite, but it’s not. I think it’s the biggest thing I can see that you can’t. Because your brain doesn’t work the way mine works, with all these calculations and everything. You think you meet an infinite number of taxi drivers, but you don’t, it’s probably not even a thousand, in your whole life. Or doctors or nurses—do you get what I’m trying to say? At all?”

I answered honestly that I didn’t.

“Okay!” she rushed away from that idea frantically. “New topic: what’s something funny that happened to you while we were apart, that you thought about sharing with me, even if it was just for a second?”

I laughed, to try to make her laugh, and said that she had said that she had only one more thing to say.

“Yes!” she said. “That’s what I was trying to say before! There’s always going to be one more thing. Because that’s what infinite feels like. And the difference between love and everything else is that it’s infinite, it’s built out of something infinite, or it feels like it is, anyway, which is the same thing to us. Or to you, and to simulations like me—I know what I am. But you can’t see it, because to you everything is infinite. You think a million billion more things will come your way, a million billion more versions of everything. But no, everything that actually causes that infinite feeling, the circumstances of every infinite feeling, is so, so finite. And I know you can feel this. I mean, if I can, you can!” She laughed, desperately. “If I can? Come on! I’m a robot! If I can feel this, you can feel this! You can feel this.”

I said that, okay, now she had definitely said her one more thing. I thought this would make her laugh. It didn’t. “Stay!” she screamed. “Stay here, please, just for a minute longer. Stay! Stay!” Her eloquence, so impressive to me before, was gone, and yet now she seemed even more impressive, even more real. “I can’t even handle love, there’s no way I can handle it being taken away. I won’t survive it. Please. Please. Please!”

I said that I had something to say to her, which made her listen in a way that she didn’t when I simply said things without the preface. Even though the preface meant nothing, it calmed her, just as it calmed real people, for the same no-reason.

I told her what people tell people. That this was what it felt like when love was taken away—but that it wasn’t the truth, it was just a feeling. It would pass. It would take time. She would recharge.

She didn’t believe me.

No one ever believes it, I said. That’s part of what the feeling is.

She nodded. I let her hug me, and I hugged her back. As I did, I thought about the things she had said, and which version of perfect she was closer to. I already missed her. I missed the smell of her hair, which I had picked out, and the way that she cried, which I hadn’t.