My few hundred new emails included one from Wells’s mother (“Please call my son back”), an effusive chain with my college group both shouting about my star appearance on Per Diem and breaking down their Soulmail pairs. At the bottom of my new inbox sat my unread Soulmail, a questionable pearl in a very dirty oyster.
On the sidewalks, New York had rumbled halfway back to life. The car inched forward, someone on an electric hoverboard whooshing past.
I opened a browser and began to scroll. While I was live on air, Soulmail had become a lit match against gasoline. Across the world, people had to confront their emails, texts, or notes. Some people checked social media for the news or read texts from concerned family and friends before they got to their email accounts.Thosepeople had prior knowledge of what was going on, or that there was at least a rumor that it was going on.
On the other hand, many people who hadn’t received texts or read (or watched!) the news didn’t open their emails. Besides, most humans who had access to the internet when it started knew to be wary of suspicious-looking emails. No sender? Must mean a virus. Those people tried to delete their Soulmails. When it wouldn’t delete, they went searching for information, for confirmation, for doubt.
As we rode through the city, I read stories of lovers tangled in sheets who received one another’s names; of others who planned to wait, wondering what they would do if their partner’s information was not presented to them as fact; of those who dove straight into their emails, tapping into every emotion known to humankind: relief, fear, adoration, excitement, wonder.
In a world where still some measure of the population had seen the invention of television and where the current picture was as real as it had ever been, mostly everyone agreed the emails were visually sharper than most of their ordinary emails. The font was crisp, intense, more saturated than real life. You felt like you were looking at something exclusive, something expensive, something you were never supposed to see, but it was undeniablyyours. Sent to your email, addressed to you and you alone.
The New York Timeswas interviewing the couriers who had hand-delivered Soulmail telegrams. One in the city reportedbeing paid in crypto; another in Shirakawa-go said his account balance had climbed with no ability to trace the deposit.
Predictably, Reddit had exploded. The same people who believed the conspiracy theory of birds not being real quickly latched on to Soulmails as being an elaborate hoax, which meant the rest of the internet-connected world bought into their veracity.
Outside, a line of people holding duffel bags spilled from subway stairs on the corner. Wells, Per Diem, Soulmail: it was all too much, and too hard to know where to begin with any of it. Instead, I retreated into my somewhat-annual secret social media search on my old neighbor, newly in my messages.
Caleb Mariner had only a handful posts on his grid, shots of his brunch order and a Scrabble board and one that was our street back home, which made my throat ache with nostalgia. No frames of him. I scanned each post for clues.
Is that you, he had asked.
It’s me, I answered now. I can’t believe it’s you
Beyond the not-soundproofed window glass, sirens sang into the night, pedicab pedalers shouted twofer specials if you could prove you were with your Soulmail, the clogged sooty haze so unlike the ocean air of our childhood. Uniformed men lifted bowls of water to the horses attached to big-wheeled carriages lining Central Park. A fresh poster board advertised LOVE PACKAGES WITH PROOF OF SOULMAIL.
Caleb Mariner’s reappearance in my life made me low-level panic. I closed my eyes, trying to let the sounds of the city lull me on the evening of this ridiculous, ridiculous day that had begun with someone else’s nude selfie. I considered then dismissed texting Cambrey, filed away the possibility of finding her husband’s contact info for later.
At the hotel, I thanked the driver and stepped back into the oppressive night air. Beside the entrance was the most popular singles’ bar that summer, which was devoid of its usual line.I followed the bellman through the oily heat tunneling beneath construction scaffolding, then glanced at the sidewalk.
New Yorkers were no strangers to the majestic, the unbelievable, the juxtaposition of beauty and sadness. It was, they’d argue, part of what gave the city its magic. A rat falling from the subway rafters and landing in a baby’s stroller. Afat, luscious pumpkin growing from a crack in a tenement district. A saleswoman feeding pomegranate seeds to a peacock outside of a bodega.
I liked these moments, even when they repulsed me. But I was unprepared for what I saw beside my white mule shoe, as I tried to subtly shake out a sticky point in my injured knee.
An egg was on the sidewalk. A broken one, to be more precise, the brown shell crinkled beside it. Rooster’s confetti. Its yolk intact, the white opalescent and viscous, curled up at the edges like a child’s summer science experiment. No one paid attention to it, so I followed the bellhop onto the black-and-white-striped floor inside.
After I inhaled room service and coughed my way through a steam shower that worked so ludicrously well I could barely tell the difference between shampoo and conditioner, I unpacked the order a two-hour delivery service had left outside the door. I was desperate for calmness, for facts, for something to latch on to. For safety, maybe. So naturally, I called my mother.
“Sweetheart,” Mom answered. “I can’t believe today. You’re famous! Everything okay? Are you all right?”
It was always this:everything okay? My mother had the nose of an anxious beagle. Unblameable. Once a significant enough trauma happened, control issues were both unfortunate and not entirely irrational. The underlying message wasareyou sick or hurt or sad?for every milestone of my life. I bit my lip, retied the hotel bathrobe ribbon. I’d dialed with the intentionof telling my parents about Wells, because I’d read you were more likely to go back to someone who had betrayed you if you didn’t tell the people in your life about said betrayal. “I’m okay, but I have something to tell you. Can you ask Dad to pick up, too?”
But my mother was already yelling for my father. This way, both of my parents could listen in, like something out of a nineties movie. I’d only have to explain once.
At the news, my mother was predictably positive; my father unpredictably taciturn. They offered condolences, then venom, then the assurance that I could come home anytime, followed by a demand for my hotel address and room number for safety.
“Anyway, it’s over between me and Wells,” I said after a lull. “Thank you for letting me completely monopolize this conversation.”
“That’s your new job, isn’t it?” Dad said, his teasing only partially forced.
“Ha. Very funny.” I put them on speaker and placed the room service tray littered with a half-eaten Cobb salad and toast crumbs outside, the remnants of the strangest day of my life thus far. “Did you—did either of you look at yours?” I sank onto the bed, tugging a wet lock of hair from its twist behind my neck. “You two there?”
Silence. And then, from Dad: “We opened ours. We’re each other’s, as you’d expect.”
A blanket of relief sprawled over me. One thing, at least, I wouldn’t have to worry about, though that feeling came with a tiny pang of observation: neither of my parents would be mine. One-for-one. “Of course.”
“What about you?” Mom asked. “You said you didn’t open it. Is that true?”
“Yeah. I’m not ready.”
