There There(19)

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    “Hey, Ed, what are you doing out here?” my mom says as she walks through the front door. “I thought you’d merged with the machines by now,” she says, and puts up her hands, sort of twiddling her fingers in a mocking way as she says “merged with the machines.”

I’d recently made the mistake of telling her about singularity. About how it was an eventuality, an inevitability, that we’d end up merging with artificial intelligence. Once we saw that it was superior, once it asserted itself as superior, we would need to adapt, to merge so as to not be swallowed, taken over.

“Well, that’s a pretty convenient theory for someone who spends twenty hours a day leaning into their computer like they’re waiting for a kiss,” she’d said.



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—

She throws her keys on the table, keeps the front door open, lights a cigarette, and smokes there in the doorway, pointing her mouth and the smoke out the door.

“Come over here for a second. I wanna talk.”

“Mom,” I say, in a tone I know is a whine.

“Edwin,” she says, mocking my tone. “We talked about this. I want updates. You agreed to updates. Otherwise another four years are gonna go by, and I’m gonna have to ask Bill to knock down a wall for you back there.”

    “Fuck Bill,” I say. “I told you I don’t wanna hear anything from you about my weight. I’m aware of it. You think I don’t know about it? I’m aware of the fact that I’m huge. I walk around with it, it knocks things over, I can’t fit into most of my clothes. What I can fit into makes me look ridiculous.” Without my meaning to, my arms are waving in the air like I’m trying to fit them into one of my shirts that don’t fit anymore. I bring them down, shove my hands into my pockets. “I haven’t shit in six days. Do you know what that feels like for an already big person? Being big, you think about it all the time. You feel it. All those years, dieting all the time, you don’t think that fucked me up? We’re all always thinking about our weight. Are we too fat? Well, what I have going on comes with an easy answer, and even more so when I see my reflection in the mirror on the front of the fridge, which, by the way, I know you put there for my benefit. You know, when you try to make jokes about it, it makes me want to get fatter, blow up, keep eating until I get stuck somewhere, die somewhere, just this huge dead mass. They’ll have to get a crane to get me out, and everyone will be saying to you ‘What happened?’ and ‘Poor thing’ and ‘How could you have let this happen?,’ and you’ll be there desperately smoking a cigarette, dumbfounded, Bill behind you, rubbing your shoulders, and you’ll remember all the times you made fun of me, and you won’t know what to tell the neighbors, who’ll be staring in horror at my mass, the crane just shuddering, doing its best.” I simulate a shuddering crane with my hand for her.

“Jesus, Ed. That’s enough. Come talk to me for a second.”

I pick up a green apple from the fruit basket and pour myself a glass of water.

“See?” I almost shout, holding up the apple for her to see. “I’m trying. Here’s a live update for you, I’m live streaming it to you right now, look, I’m trying to eat better. I just spit out some Pepsi in the sink. This is a glass of water.”

    “I wish you would calm down,” my mom says. “You’re gonna have a heart attack. Just relax. Treat me like I’m your mother, like I care about you, like I love you, treat me like I went through twenty-six hours of labor for you, twenty-six hours and then a cesarean section to top it off. They had to slice me open, Ed, you didn’t wanna come out, you were two weeks late, did I ever tell you that? You wanna talk about feeling full.”

“I wish you would stop throwing it in my face, how many hours of labor you went through to get me here. I didn’t ask to come.”

“Throwing it in your face? You think I throw it in your face? Why you ungrateful little—”

She runs over to me and tickles me behind the neck. To my horror, I can’t help but laugh. “Stop. Okay. Okay. Just, you calm down yourself. What do you wanna hear?” I say, and pull my shirt down over my belly. “I don’t have updates. There’s not much out there for someone with virtually no work experience, with an MA in comp lit. I look. I scour. I get frustrated, and sure, I get distracted. There’s so much to look up, and then when you think of something new, when you discover something new, it’s like you’re thinking with another mind, like you have access to a bigger, collective brain. We’re on the edge of something here,” I say, knowing how it must sound to her.

“You’re on the edge of something all right. Collective brain? Scour? You make it sound like you’re doing a lot more than clicking links and reading. But okay, so like what kind of job are you looking for? I mean, what categories do you look under?”

    “I look under writing gigs, and that’s almost always some kind of scam designed for na?ve aspiring writers looking to work for free or to win a contest. I look under arts organizations. Then I get lost in the nonprofit morass. Grant-writing stuff and, you know, most places require experience or—”

“Grant writing? You could do that, couldn’t you?”