They left the Porta Potti as a reminder to “stop writing crap about your local community.”
Clever as ever.
Now I’m sitting with Lane at her nursing home and I’m about to make an introduction.
“Grandma, I’d like you to meet someone.”
“That would be nice.”
I look up at Polly. She’s wearing a sundress as befits both the uncharacteristic warmth of this November day and the fact she’s uncharacteristically sensitive about the changes to her body. She’s not yet showing the baked bean in her oven but she’s being cautious anyway.
She walks to Grandma’s bedside.
“I’d like you to meet the newest Idle,” I say.
“You’re married?” Lane responds.
“No,” Polly says. “Not even if he wanted to.”
We haven’t even discussed it.
Polly looks at me and smiles. “Who said his last name would be ‘Idle’?”
“I don’t understand,” Grandma says.
I take her hand and put it on Pauline’s belly.
Grandma holds it there. I’m watching her eyes. Her pupils widen. She looks at Polly’s stomach, then at me and back at the belly. She pulls her hand back and then puts it back down again. She looks at me and I see her eyes start to glisten.
“Grandma?”
Her lips wrinkle into a slight smile even as her eyes fill with more tears.
“You’re going to be a great-grandmother,” I say.
She clears her throat, recovering. “I taught you to drown.”
I laugh.
The door to Grandma’s room opens. Vince enters.
“Visiting hours are over,” he says sternly.
I shake my head with irritation. “We just got here, Vince…”
“Just kidding. You people are so sensitive.”
For better or worse, I talked Vince into retaining his position. Here’s why: it wasn’t just Vince who got duped; it was all of us. We all were too distracted, selfish, self-absorbed, technology-obsessed, and indulgent to be paying attention the way we should have to the residents of Magnolia Manor — to our grandparents and elders.
The Human Memory Crusade happened right under my nose. In fact, at some point, I apparently signed a consent letter allowing Grandma to participate in the program. So distracted was I with my life that I hadn’t been paying attention or asking the right questions. I was in fact asking a lot of questions in my life and about the world and the cops and various journalistic sources — I was asking Google all kinds of questions and asking it to perform all kinds of search queries — but not asking about the people I most care about, or should have. I let the computer babysit Grandma. How much blame can I give Vince?
I’m less forgiving, obviously, of Biogen, Adrianna, Pete, and Chuck — of the Human Memory Crusade and ADAM.
But only slightly less forgiving.
I lack the heart to implicate Adrianna because I’m worried about Newton. And I can’t nail Pete to the wall because he’s raising his own family and will spend the rest of his life recovering from wounds that nearly killed him, cost him his spleen, and punctured a lung, and from the damage he did to his marriage from an affair with Adrianna.
I still manage to write a blockbuster story that explains the role of military investors in developing technology to erase and write over memories of old folks, some veterans and, as Chuck alleged, heavy multi-taskers. I expose the plot to create Internet 2.0 using fallow brain space.
The government stops the transfer of military and corporate secrets encoded in the brains of five veterans scheduled to attend a sporting event in China.
At least I thought the story was a blockbuster. For two days, the press went nuts with the story. The New York Times put it on its front page. But then the whole thing seemed to evaporate, victim of the rapidly diminishing half-life of the public attention span. Part of the problem was my thin evidence: no laptop or paper trail, no remains from the server farm, no testimony from Adrianna or Pete Laramer. I can’t find any evidence or example of average Americans or heavy multi-taskers whose brains have been compromised. I discover no evidence of a database of people experiencing accelerated memory loss.
But anecdotally, I see the phenomenon all around me. People forgetting things, having to look up their whereabouts, addresses, and phone numbers. And the incidence of dementia continues to accelerate, reaching effectively epidemic proportions.
I do find evidence of the government investing in a handful of Internet sites, casual game sites and media operations like Medblog. But all the investments seem to have rational explanations.
Maybe Chuck was getting ahead of himself.
Falcon went ahead and bought Biogen without incident.
Still, Medblog, where we first published the story, wins a prize. Polly gives me two new titles: Boyfriend and Senior Writer. I now make $85 per blog post. I buy new sneakers. She says she’ll spring for the college fund.
“Let me know if you need anything,” Vince says.
I nod.
The Human Asparagus waves and almost manages a smile on his still-officious visage and walks out.
Polly kisses Grandma on the cheek. “Whether or not your grandson convinces me to marry him, your great-grandson will take the Idle name. I wouldn’t mess with this family’s beautiful and strange legacy. What do you think about that?”
Grandma looks at us. She cocks her head. She looks like she’s going to say something. She pauses, gears grinding.
“Another Idle,” she finally pronounces. “I know something about that one.”
“What’s that, Grandma?”
“What?”
“What do you know about your great-grandson?”
She smiles.
“Oh,” she says. “He’s going to be very curious.”
About the Author
MATT RICHTEL is a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times technology journalist and novelist. His first book, Hooked, was a critically acclaimed bestseller. His fiction, like his journalism, focuses on the impact of technology on how people live, behave, and love in the 21st century. He won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for his series on distracted driving. He lives in San Francisco with his family. Please visit him at www.mattrichtel.com.