For example, it was through Furbius that Pandora learned her grandmother’s original plan for moving to Alaska didn’t involve living off the land so much as dying on it, far away from anyone she knew. But then she met her future husband, and while Herman Lynch remembered the clink of bottle neck to glass rim in a dingy frontier bar as the beginning of their relationship, what Gladys remembered was boldly following him out of the bar when he wanted to take a leak “under the stars, like God intended.”
It was that time of year when it was cold enough to snow but still warm enough to go peeing into a bank of it, which Herman proceeded to do, his back shielding any anatomical revelations it was still too early for in their hours-old relationship. Why she followed after him, Gladys didn’t know, but would hazard a guess, since Furbius asked: “I think I recognized my future in the man and didn’t want to let him out of my sights.”
The difference between ninety-plus degrees hitting something south of thirty was enough to produce a geyser of steam Gladys followed up past her future husband’s turned back and broad shoulders, up and up to where those other phantoms danced, the northern lights.
“Do you know what I think about when I see them?” she asked, intuiting that Herman was looking at the same sight she was, from the cant of his neck as he pissed heartily away into the hole he’d made in the snow. “The souls of all those dead boys.”
“Me,” Herman said, finally finishing, finally giving his shoulders an exaggerated shrug as he tugged up his zipper, “I think of how much harder they made my job, putting all that extra static on the line.”
“They’re pretty, though,” Gladys said.
“Handsome, you mean,” Herman corrected, casually accepting her premise that the northern lights were the souls of dead soldiers.
“Yes,” she said. “Very handsome.” Pause. “And too . . .”
“. . . many?” Herman guessed.
“I was going to say ‘young,’” Gladys said. “But ‘many’ works too.”
In another confession, Gladys told Furbius—whom she’d rechristened Mr. Nosy—that another reason she’d picked Alaska was because there’d be no one to blab all her sworn secrets to. She’d worried that that might change, once she married Herman, only to learn to her relief that, no, thankfully, she didn’t talk in her sleep, “though maybe that’s what I’m doing now . . .”
Sometimes, Gladys volunteered information without Mr. Nosy even asking. “Here’s the ironic thing about losing my memory,” one such session began. “Memory was my secret weapon as a code breaker.”
She went on to explain that her ability to recall and connect seemingly trivial details from previous messages and then linking that to what they were working on later allowed them to deduce how the code had been shifted, providing the two data points that suggested a pattern. And once they had a theoretical pattern, they could predict what the next shift might be—a prediction that could be confirmed or discredited by a subsequent message.
“But now,” Gladys said, followed by a farting sound from her lips, “going, going, gone.”
She told her granddaughter through her furry representative about the tricks she used to hold on to her independence once she realized her memory was going. One was to create rigid routines, converting her day into muscle memory while memories not made of muscle were sung instead. Writing might have been easier for some people, but not Gladys. “My hands shake too much,” she confessed, keeping to herself the fact that they also hurt from arthritis. “It seems symbolic that I can’t write my name anymore,” she told Mr. Nosy.
And so she turned her most important memories—the wartime ones—into little homemade songs she sang to herself around the cabin, and then in her assisted-living condo.
“That all stopped when they moved me over here,” Gladys said, alluding to the fact that she now had a roommate who either didn’t appreciate her singing or wasn’t to be trusted with the classified information the songs contained. “The only time I get to talk to you,” she told her inquisitive Wi-Fi-enabled friend, “is when they’re helping her in the bathroom or taking her to see the physical terrorist.”
But the longer Gladys was prevented from singing her memories of the war, the thinner and more threadbare they became. And so Pandora hacked into the nursing home’s database of residents and began reading charts until she found her grandmother the perfect roommate: a woman, older and further gone than Gladys was, and—the cherry on top—stone-cold deaf. Checking on what Mr. Nosy had uploaded to the cloud a few days later, Pandora was rewarded with the thin, heartbreaking voice of her grandmother whisper-singing part lullaby, part “Moon River,” but with original lyrics by Gladys Lynch née Kowalski: war hero.
32
So here was the thing: it was impossible to have a conversation quietly enough that Roger wouldn’t hear, the doors between rooms with the exception of the bathroom not thin so much as nonexistent, a feature, not a bug she’d appreciated when she was still a toddler and not seeing her dad was equivalent to his having gone out of existence. But now that she was a teenager, the old shower curtains separating their separate rooms from the rest of the cabin were, if not thoroughly creepy, nevertheless inadequate to the role they were supposed to play. She’d lobbied for their replacement with something more substantial, perhaps on hinges and lockable, by appealing not to her need for privacy, but Roger’s.
“What if you ever decided to start dating?” she asked.
“Pandora,” her father warned, but in that way that teenagers are pretty much duty-bound to ignore. And so she continued. “What if you started dating and got lucky and there was no ‘her place’ to go back to?”
“Stop.”
This time, Pandora did, because there was nowhere else to go with her hypothetical but to the actual words making love or that succinct Anglo-Saxon synonym she was not so independent yet to let drop. Not when the subject of that verb was her dad, especially. And so, instead, she’d slipped him the half-off-everything coupon from Fred Meyer she’d clipped from the weekend Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. “Say you’ll think about it,” she said.
“What,” her father said back, “the dating or the getting lucky with, apparently, some homeless woman?”
“Doors,” Pandora said. “Think about doors, please.”
Which he hadn’t—yet—and so Pandora set a few ground rules for how her and George’s budding relationship would be conducted. First, no video conferencing. Second, no voices, only text. The first was about her face and its tendency to embarrass her, not to mention its cyber infamy as meme. The second was about privacy and her lack of it. It was the second rule she felt safe explaining and should do the trick, seeing as it was basically a subset of the first and the rationale behind it covered both.
“No privacy,” she typed. “Parental unit omnipresent.”
“Roger,” George replied, meaning either affirmative or her dad.
“Yeah,” Pandora had written back. “That’s the guy I mean.”
To appease George’s curiosity and prove she wasn’t a chatbot or “some dude” (not to mention refresh his memory re: her “ooo, cute”-ness), Pandora sent him a JPEG of herself standing in front of her father’s diploma while wearing a T-shirt that read, “I Think Therefore I Am . . . Socially Unacceptable.” She captioned it: “Does this proof-of-life selfie make my butt look big?”