Piece by piece, of course, I assembled a more sane reaction. As she suffered the side effects of radiation, I saw the thinness in her vigorous hair, the sallow tint to her skin, and I realized how far away I’d been, how much she’d managed on her own. By then, of course, it was already too late. There are distances that can’t be recrossed. The divorce hearings had already commenced. She asked for sole custody and basic alimony and I added the ranch. She gave me one weekend a month with Ramona. I bought a house with a room for my one-weekend daughter. While the house was being completed, I moved to a hotel in Houston, that empty city, lapped by salt water. Mornings commenced badly and the days became worse. To organize the course of my existence, there could only be the completion of a clerical task that Dolores had asked me to finish. Otherwise, I ghosted all the usual motions, slightly apart from myself, wishing there were some bridge somewhere that would carry me back to the land of the living. I donated my savings to a cancer research organization, but even that brought no relief. When I received the final divorce papers in my hotel room, I signed them at once, not because it was what I wanted to do, but because it was what Dolores had asked for.
Sometimes, I considered routes toward oblivion. I weighed my parents’ addictions against a leap from the turrets. A knife to the throat, a poisoned apple. But I was, after all, still a father. There would be those occasional weekends. Someday, I told myself, I might be asked to help Ramona with something. And so instead of cutting the cord I merely returned to my work. Settled in my new house, I locked myself in my office to create the second babybot. One that could taste, see, touch, smell. The task of creating artificial neurons was insanely expensive, requiring an army of scientists in the lab, but money was rushing in from the first batch of bots and I was glad for the challenge. It allowed me to disregard the all-consuming absence that had engulfed my whole life.
Dolores and I were once close, and then we fell apart. I allowed this to happen. I didn’t pay proper attention. I gave her too little time. Only now, in the suspension of prison, our estrangement guaranteed for as long as we both shall live, do I rock myself to sleep at night by summoning her. Now, too late, I devote her the proper attention. In the endless hours of nighttime, I work to remember each line on her face, each curl in her hair, each catch of her voice. Now I bring her closer. She’s with me here in my cell; we finish each other’s thoughts. I’ve become so close to my wife, now that I’ll never see her again.
That’s all there is to say about that. I can’t even think what to say next. Where does one go from the end of a marriage? One simply has to move on. I’m aware that there’s nothing more boring than Grief. We’ve all had our losses; why should mine take up so much space? I should wrap up. I should shut these memoirs down. Only I’d like to end with a suitable conclusion, some explanation of what made me capable of such cruelty. Caught up in prison, I’ve mulled this question for hours, and I’ve developed one hypothesis, which I tell you now with the stipulation that, no matter how compelling you find it, you shouldn’t forgive me for what it led me to do. Otherwise we’re nothing more than a sad string of excuses, and I won’t sign off on such a reduction.
I’ve never been sure of myself. I’ve searched to fill in the gaps in my absent center. I’ve moved restlessly from one acquired enthusiasm to the next. As I fell in love with Dolores, so I also fell in love with a chatbot called MARY. As, in my youth, I fell for a punishing God, I also fell for the promise of codes. I’ve been taken into the arms of many pursuits. Unsure of my position, I’ve spent my life in quest of something that would hook me firmly in place. Someone to say “Stop, here, this is you. This is where you belong.” I’ve desired a red pin on a map. I’ve been a spinner at edges, a moving man on a traveling planet, incapable of coming to rest.
I don’t make this little admission in the spirit of self-flagellation. Despite all my errors, I still find reason to be proud. We’ve come, in this world of clocks and labor division, walled neighborhoods and transport rights, to be increasingly fond of compartments. We’ve become rigid since the days when we moved in lunar cycles and astronomical loops. We stick to our given patterns as if they were lifeboats and the world were a tempest.
When Ramona comes to visit me, she arrives with reports from Babybots Anonymous, the children who are recovering from their addiction to toys. She’s a young woman now. Nearly a decade after the bans, the world has recovered some of its balance. Those babies haven’t marched out of the desert. They’re all dead in the hangars to which they were transported. My daughter, part of a generation that was asked to recover from the loss of their most cherished companions, has become a young woman of great composure. She dresses conservatively and draws her hair back. I don’t think her personal life is especially happy, but she has a network of friends and she derives satisfaction from her profession. Since she graduated from high school, she’s worked for a charity that pools transport rights and takes underprivileged kids out of their developments for day-trips to the beach. She is a good person. I’m astounded and eternally grateful that such a clear-eyed, balanced young woman came in part out of me. And yet I always feel a pang of some sorrow when she slips into her sad addicts’ language. She has formally forgiven me, and asked for my forgiveness. She is doing her penance for the grief she caused her mother while devoting herself to her toy. She has reorganized her life around the 3-P Principles of Productivity, Participation, and Peace. From the chaos of total, consuming love for her doll, she has emerged with a well-organized life. She is able to love me in my prison cell, and then she’s able to leave me behind. She does not labor under the burden of confusion. Her affections are delineated and clear.
I don’t begrudge her that. I myself swung too hard in too many directions. I’ve come to a certain peace, here in prison, confined by four walls. There’s a pleasure in limited opportunities, a calming effect of strict boundaries.
And yet. Here I am, in the rec room, hunched over my computer. Wishing to explain myself to readers in posterity. Working myself up to alliterative heights. I can’t help but want more time to explain myself. I wish for more minutes, more hours, more years. To make up to Dolores, to care for Ramona. To return to our ranch, to stake up those sunflowers, to walk with my wife on the bed of our river. To explain myself and have myself known. I flail and I thrash. I want more than this sad little place with its bars, its wires, its cells.
The pornographer on my left types with one forefinger, a demented chicken, pecking away. A tax evader is chewing on his fingernails. We’re all staring at our screens, stuck here, hoping somehow to break free. Wishing for more than we’ve been given. My cursor blinks, blinks, blinks. A wall that appears and disappears, appears and disappears once again. Unceasing. Questioning. What will come next? it wants to know. It prods me forward, blinking and blinking. Do not stop talking, it reminds me. Do not stop speaking. You can never come to an end.
(4)
Turing
Adlington Rd.
Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 1LZ
12 June 1954
Dear Mrs. Morcom,
My name is Susan Clayton. I am the cleaning woman employed by our mutual acquaintance, Alan Turing. I am writing you in the most tragic of circumstances, to inform you that Alan has passed. I discovered him in his bedroom last Thursday, having departed this world some time earlier in the evening.