Upgrade(41)
“It gets easier.”
“That’s what scares me.”
“Why?”
I glanced over at the table beside ours. A couple was eavesdropping on our conversation. I suspected it wasn’t the words we were saying that had drawn their attention, but the speed of our exchanges.
I cut my eyes at the table and said quietly to Kara, “We should have our conversation at normal speed.”
“Right.”
I answered her question, forcing myself to speak more slowly and deliberately. “It scares me because I’m afraid of losing the ability to feel things deeply.”
“Tell me the advantage of feeling things deeply,” she said. “Doesn’t feeling cloud logic and reason?”
“To a point. Feelings are also the core of compassion and empathy. We’re becoming capable of rationalizing anything. Maybe sentiment helps with the checks and balances.”
“True. Or maybe you’re just afraid of growing beyond the people you love.”
More food came.
It was taking all of my willpower to filter out the seven rambling conversations within my range of hearing and the innumerable smells wafting from other people, out of the kitchen, off the tables.
“Do you wish you hadn’t gotten this upgrade?” Kara asked.
“That’s a hard one. I finally have the mind I always wanted.”
She sipped her wine. “Must’ve been hard.”
“What?”
“Running in Mom’s circle. Knowing you didn’t deserve to be there.”
“You knew I felt that way?”
“Of course. Mom has a once-in-a-generation mind. I always thought your obsession with following in her footsteps was doomed.”
“My therapists tell me it’s because of Max. When you lose a twin—”
“You lose half your identity. Your connection to Mom served to fill in this other missing part of yourself.”
I said, “I thought about him last night while I was driving. Things I’d long forgotten. Moments I’d only half-remembered. It’s all so clear now. And it hurts.”
Kara smiled. “It doesn’t have to.”
* * *
—
We walked back to the hotel under a deep navy sky bejeweled with stars.
In the center of the plaza, a choir was singing. They held quivering candles, and their voices lilted icily into the sky.
I didn’t see the moment. Not really.
I saw the story behind the moment—a tale passed down over two thousand years that told of a child of a superbeing sent to save the world.
Never before had I seen Homo sapiens so clearly—a species, at its most fundamental level, of storytellers.
Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.
* * *
—
I woke at dawn to the tolling of the bells of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, a mighty stone cathedral across the street from the hotel.
I started coffee and opened the sliding glass door to the balcony.
Walked out onto the veranda.
It was blisteringly cold.
Santa Fe was hushed and still.
Already, I was on edge.
The day felt momentous.
* * *
—
We were on the road before eight, speeding north up US 84 into some of the most stunning landscape I’d ever seen, made all the more vibrant by my new perspective.
Everything seemed lucid and rich.
All colors hypersaturated.
Beyond the outskirts of Santa Fe, the desert unfurled.
The sense of space was breathtaking.
Every passing moment a new color revealed itself.
Perspectives changing second to second.
Light and shadow evolving over sandstone.
Arroyos.
Towering mesas.
Epic monuments.
I felt I was seeing through time as we sped across the transition zone between the Colorado Plateau and the Rio Grande rift.
I saw the landscape in a way I never had before. The flat Mesozoic stratigraphy exposed at the base of the mountains, the younger Cenozoic sediments under the shoulders of the peaks.
For a while, in the distance, we could see the white hyperloop tube stretching across the desert—the line between Denver and Albuquerque.
We crossed rivers I’d heard about while watching Westerns with my father.
To the east, sage-and juniper-covered hills transitioned into conifer forests into high peaks that gleamed brightly with snow above the timberline.
And all under a sky as vast as an ocean, looking down on a desert that 450 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous, had been a shallow sea.
We stopped for a quick charge in Ojo Caliente—the only charge station we’d seen since Santa Fe—and pushed on.
I had put Vallecitos into our navigation app. It was an unincorporated community within Carson National Forest and the closest town to our GPS pin drop.
We arrived at nine thirty in the morning to discover that Vallecitos wasn’t a city or even a town. It was a village from another time. Only a few hundred people called it home, and while some of the dwellings were clearly inhabited, just as many were crumbling.