“One day you’ll be happy I kept this,” he said. “Katie’s baby photos are all on here.” He shut down the device and put it back in its case. “Have fun out there. Dinner will be ready in an hour.”
Outside, Katie led me on the trails I’d only ever seen in her layers. Here was the gnarled cedar that she’d built a fort beneath, and over there were the rocks she’d chipped mica flakes from in second grade. We climbed down the banks of the trail, holding on to roots that jutted from the earth, and arrived on a stretch of beach speckled with empty clam shells, mussels, and snails that clung to the wet stones. Far down the shore, a rock outcropping rose from the water. A single heron stood on a peak that broke the shoreline.
There was something beautiful about sharing things in the old way—the two of us walking by the shore, the smell of the pine sap, the summer air cooling the late afternoon—and for the first time in years, I wished I had a sketch pad with me. As Katie spoke, her hands moved in ways I hadn’t seen people do since childhood, gesturing toward the lake or me when she got excited. I tried to focus on each sentence, sensing my brain’s inability to turn her words into pictures. She was talking about the cabin in autumn, logs burning in the fireplace, the smell of smoke, leaves crunching underfoot.
“Are you even listening?” she asked when I didn’t respond.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m trying to. It’s just that without the ding it’s hard to know when you’re sending… I mean saying something….” I stopped talking, hating the clunkiness of words, and took a deep breath. “I guess I’m just rusty.”
Katie softened. “I know. Sometimes when I’m in the city, I can’t remember what it looks like up here without accessing my photos. It’s kinda messed up, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “I guess it is.” The heron hunched down and then lifted off, its wide wings flapping as it headed across the lake, away from us.
That night her father fried up the perch he’d caught earlier that day. The herbs and butter filled the small cabin with their scent, and we drank the wine we’d brought. After dinner, Ben brought out a blue cardboard box, and the three of us sat in the living room and played an actual game. I hadn’t seen one in over a decade.
“You don’t know how to play Boggle?” Katie asked, surprised. The point, she explained, was to make words from the lettered dice and to write them down with pen and paper without accessing other players’ thoughts. I sat there trying to figure out what Katie was feeling as she covered her paper with her hand.
“What do you think?” Katie asked after the first round.
“It’s fun,” I admitted.
“You bet it is,” Ben said, and made the dice rattle again.
Afterward, when Katie and I were in bed, I listened to the crickets outside the screened windows. It’d been a long time since I’d heard the drone of them, each one singing within the chorus.
“So, what do you think of it here?”
“It’s beautiful. But I can’t imagine growing up without connection.”
“You don’t like the feeling?”
“Not really,” I said. Being offline reminded me of my life back home before layers existed, when I’d lived with my parents in Ohio, a miserable time that technology had helped bury. “Do you?”
“Totally. I could live like this forever.” I looked at her in the dark and tried to scan her eyes, but it was just her looking back at me, familiar yet completely different. “What about my dad?”
“I like him,” I said, though it was only part of the truth. I was really thinking how different he was from my own father. We’d never sat and eaten dinner together or played board games. I’d heat up frozen pizza and eat it in the kitchen while Dad would lie on the couch watching whatever game was on. Eventually he’d get up, clink the bottles into the bin, and that was the sign to shut off the TV. Thinking about it made me feel like Katie and her father were playing a joke on me. There was no way people actually lived like this—without yelling, without fighting.
I felt the warmth of Katie’s hand against my chest. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“You can tell me,” she said. “I love you.”
It was the first time she’d actually said the words. At home it was just something we knew. We understood it from the moments we’d stand brushing our teeth together and the feeling would flash through her layers. And sometimes, late at night, right before we’d both fall asleep, we’d reach out and touch each other’s hands and feel it.
“I love you, too,” I managed to get out, and the weight of the words made something shift inside me. I felt the sentences forming in my head, the words lining up as though waiting to be released. Without my layers, there was nothing to keep them from spilling out. “Katie,” I said into the darkness. “I want to tell you about my family.”
She put her hands around me. “Okay.”
And there, in the cabin, feeling Katie’s body against mine, I began to speak. I didn’t stop myself, but leaned in to my voice and the comfort of hearing my words disappearing into the air with only Katie and the crickets as witnesses.
It was that night in the cabin that helped us grow closer. Shortly after we returned, I unlocked more layers for her and showed her the pictures of my father and mother—the few I’d kept. There was my high school graduation: my mother’s sunken eyes staring at the camera, my father with his hands in his pockets, and me in between, none of us happy. I showed her the dirty vinyl-sided house and the denuded lawn, blasted by cold winters and the perpetual dripping oil from my father’s truck. And she showed me her own hidden layers: her mother’s funeral in a small church in Maine, her father escaping to the cabin afterwards, learning to cook dinner for herself. Having unlocked the bad memories, I also uncovered the few good ones I’d hidden: a snowy day, my father, in a moment of tenderness, pulling me on a sled through the town; my mother emerging from her room shortly before she died to give me a hug as I left for school.
Feeling the closeness that sharing our layers brought, Katie suggested we give total openness a shot. It meant offering our most painful wounds as a gift to one another, a testament that there was no corner of the soul so ugly as to remain unshared. It’d become increasingly common to see the couples in Brooklyn, a simple O tattooed around their fingers announcing the radical honesty of their relationship to the world. They went to Open House parties, held in abandoned meatpacking plants, where partiers let down all their layers and displayed the infinite gradations of pain and joy to strangers while DJs played Breaknoise directly into their heads. I resented the couples, imagining them to be suburban hipsters who’d grown up with loving parents, regular allowances, and easy histories to share.
Total openness seemed premature, I told Katie, not just for us but for everyone. Our culture was still figuring out the technology. A decade after linking in, I’d find drinking episodes that had migrated to my work layer or, worse yet, porn clips that I had to flush back down into the darkness of my hidden layers.
“I’m not going to judge you,” she promised as we lay in bed. She put her leg over mine. “You do realize how hot it’ll be to know each other’s fantasies, right?” There were dozens of buzz-posts about it— the benefits of total intimacy, how there were no more fumbling mistakes, no guessing, just a personal database of kinks that could be accessed by your partner.
“What about the darker layers?”
“We need to uncover those, too,” Katie said. “That’s what love is: seeing all the horrible stuff and still loving one another.”