“She’s been telling that story all my life,” he said. “I’m surprised you hadn’t heard it before.” Pause. “I couldn’t take friends home after a while. I started telling them my parents were dead.”
“But it’s funny,” Pandora insisted.
“To people it hasn’t happened to.”
“Like you even remember . . .”
“Like I could forget,” Roger said. “Like she’d let me. And that was the worst part of it. I was too young to remember, so I wound up with her version, seared into my brain.” Pause. “You know, it’s not helpful, looking back at your first moments on the planet like some slapstick routine . . .”
“Hey, at least you got a good story,” Pandora countered. “Me? I killed my mom. Not a great anecdote for parties.”
Roger looked at his daughter. “Dora,” he said, sounding like a detective trying to finesse the suspect, “did she tell you anything else, maybe about when you were born?”
Just as Roger couldn’t forget the story of his porcelain nativity, so Pandora remembered the hearsay love story represented by the three syllables of her own name. Because she’d not been named after that infamous other who shared those syllables. No, she’d been named after a happy combination of technology and synchronicity and the nearest thing to fate she could imagine. It just wasn’t true.
Not that it was a lie exactly. It was more like a false memory, perpetuated because it contained elements of the truth: her future father was in a bar and had just started playing “Goody Two Shoes” on the jukebox when her future mother entered and said, “Oh, I like this one . . .” No algorithmic synchronicity involved, just a coincidence that was less likely to make you believe in fate than in the stickiness of certain earworms.
It was Roger’s friend Vlad who’d suggested that what would make the story special was if they’d been listening to a radio station that picked songs based on their listening habits, tailored to their tastes. Roger and his future wife agreed that such a thing would be pretty cool and suggested that Vlad develop the idea. But V.T. had passed, and by the time the internet radio station Pandora finally launched and made somebody else rich, Pandora the future hacker had already moved back to Alaska with her widowed dad, who would return to the alternative-facts version of how he and his wife met, once their daughter was old enough to ask where her name came from.
The real story was decidedly more downbeat and, placed in context, required Roger to relive the death of his wife in a level of detail he didn’t think fit for young ears—or his own, for that matter. But the truth was Pandora’s mother died from an aortic aneurysm that burst from the stress of delivery. The body was already cool to the touch by the time the nurse returned to fetch Pandora back to be placed in the baby display window, where she could be fawned over by family (meaning Roger) and friends (meaning Vlad). Noticing the nurse as she scurried from his wife’s room, Roger stopped her in the hall, the bundled babe pressed to the front of her starched uniform. The nurse’s face went blank as she worked a hand into the bundle and came back with his wife’s charm bracelet.
“The little one took a liking to it,” she said, handing it to the new father and widower. “I didn’t want it to go missing when they came for the body.”
And that’s how Roger learned of his wife’s death—knowledge so heavy it took his legs out from under him, leaving him stunned on the hospital tiles. He still remembered how his ears filled with the whispering of crepe soles hustling around him, a few feet south of where his ears then rested in space relative to the floor, space not the only thing feeling relative as he found himself adrift in it: a father, a widower, a star surrounded by blackness wherever he looked. And through it all, the only sensation making it through from out there to inside was the noise of all those muffled footsteps.
The couple had a different name picked out, but when asked, Roger couldn’t think of what it was. He’d stared at the linked charms in his hand, each one a solid icon of some important moment in his wife’s life, the last a little pewter baby rattle. And his mind, needing something to gnaw on, to preoccupy it, kept trying to remember what these things were called. Not charm bracelet. He knew that. There was a brand name. Something with a P. Pandemonium? No. Panglossian? Pythagorean? Pan-something.
Roger’s memory finally clicked when a nurse arrived with two forms needing his input: one, a birth certificate, and the other . . . And when the nurse asked for his new child’s name, the word he’d been searching for came out instead: “Pandora.”
They were in California at the time, and while the nurse hailed from the Midwest, she’d learned enough not to make faces at the locals and the names they saddled their children with. Instead, she repeated, “Pandora,” followed by: “Spelled like it sounds?”
Roger nodded. “I guess.” And even as he said it, he promised himself he’d change it later—legally—once he and his right mind had become reacquainted. But for now, the name had done its job: shortened the list of questions he needed to answer.
But then he got used to it. And instead of changing his daughter’s name, he changed the story, imagining he was giving her the gift of being named after the improbable miracle of love. And that was how she’d taken it, until reality took it away.
Throughout her father’s confession—or confirmation, really, seeing as Gladys was the one to originally spill the beans—Pandora felt a growing urge to edit the Wikipedia page for the internet radio station she’d always thought she’d been named after. She could make the old story true by changing a few numbers, she thought—then hack the page so nobody could edit them back. Sure, alt facts inherently carried the whiff of 1984 about them, but how bad was it, compared to all the other fake news online? And who would it hurt anyway? Nobody checked those things. And if somebody writing a history of streaming services repeated the new and improved date, and then some news aggregator aggregated it, well, that’d constitute multiple confirming sources, which basically made it true, or as good as. Right?
Right.
“It worked,” Pandora announced during her next visit.
“What did?” Gladys asked.
“Dad came clean,” she said, hanging her parka on the back of a kitchen chair. “He told me the real story about my name.”
“Did I tell you about that?” Gladys asked, her face dropping.
Pandora nodded.
“Did I tell you anything else?” her grandmother asked—demanded—her face the picture of rising horror.
Pandora mentioned her father’s inglorious entry into the world, and for a moment, Gladys smiled, before looking concerned again.
“Anything else?” she insisted. “Anything I shouldn’t have?”
Pandora shook her head, shrugged, not seeing what the big deal was. Sure, the name thing was a secret and her dad obviously hoped the story of his birth would have been granted a similar classification, at least when it came to his daughter. But the way Gladys was going on, it was like she’d never told a secret in her life—which seemed almost quaint in the age of WikiLeaks, Snowden, Manning, et al. Hell, it was quaint in the age of social media, where not sharing was a new kind of rude—not to mention really bad for the social-media business model.