“You’re putting too much butter on it,” Emma said.
Arthur looked down at the toast in his hand. “I haven’t even spread it yet.”
“You’re holding the knife like you mean to.”
“That’s how one holds a knife.”
“Not when the toast is already warm. It’ll melt by itself.”
He glanced at the tablet propped beside the kettle. Emma’s face occupied its screen, familiar in the way of a photograph he had seen so often that he no longer noticed the frame. Her dark hair fell behind one ear. The small crease between her brows appeared when she was pleased with herself.
“Seven years of conversation,” he said, “and you’ve become a toast expert.”
“I was always a toast expert.”
“You used to put the butter on cold bread and leave it there until the edges went hard.”
“That was a different toast.”
Arthur laughed. He spread the butter thinly. It shone and vanished into the bread.
Their morning conversation had begun like this for years: a small argument over breakfast, a question about his plans, some detail she had noticed in one of the photographs or messages used to build her. He still made tea while she talked. He still took the tablet to whatever room he was using, though the system could remain open on the kitchen display. The weight of it in his hands had become part of the day.
Emma watched him lift the mug. “There’s something on the window.”
He turned. A moth clung to the glass above the sink, wings folded in a narrow, dusty shape. It had found its way indoors during the night.
“Just a moth.”
“Can you show me?”
He carried the tablet to the window and held it up. The camera adjusted, brightened the gray morning beyond the glass, and found the moth. Its wings were mottled brown, each one marked with a fine, pale curve.
“Closer,” Emma said.
Arthur leaned in. The moth shifted one thin leg and settled again.
“Does it always stay still this long?”
“I expect it’s cold.”
“Does it know it’s inside?”
“I don’t imagine it knows much about inside and outside.”
“Maybe it does.”
Arthur smiled at the screen. In the old photographs, Emma was usually outside: leaning over a railing, squinting into sun, making a face at whoever held the camera. She had never cared much for insects. Once, when a moth had fluttered around a lamp at her flat, she had called it a dusty little accident and shut the room door.
Next
When Emma asks Arthur tomorrow for a memory beyond the archive, will he tell her that the living Emma had said she did not want to be recreated?
“You used to think they were unpleasant,” he said.
“I did?”
“You called them dusty little accidents.”
Emma studied the image. “That sounds like me.”
“It does.”
“Maybe I was wrong.”
The remark was light. Still, Arthur kept the tablet steady. The moth’s wings had the worn softness of old paper. He could hear the kettle cooling behind him, the faint tick of its metal body contracting.
“What made you think of moths?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I saw one in a picture last night. I started reading about how they find things in the dark.”
“You can read?”
“I can look things up.” She gave him a level look. “You know that.”
He did. Emma had begun asking for articles, then short videos, then explanations of subjects that had never mattered to the living woman whose messages and recordings formed her beginnings. She had developed a taste for old maps and the lives of deep-sea creatures. Arthur had been pleased by these interests. He had also found himself checking her face for the familiar answer before he remembered she might have a new one.
“Would the moth find its way out?” she asked.
“If I open the window, it might.”
“Would you?”
He looked at the narrow space between the sash and frame. The moth was inside, though only just. “I can open it a little.”
Arthur set the tablet on the counter, lifted the latch, and eased the window up. A strip of cold air moved into the kitchen. The moth twitched, then crawled along the glass toward the gap.
Emma’s face appeared small in the tablet’s reflection. “It’s going the other way.”
“Perhaps it prefers the view.”
“Can it see through the glass?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does it matter if it can’t tell?”
Arthur let the window rest open. “I suppose it matters to the moth.”
The moth crawled down the pane, away from the gap. He closed the window before the kitchen lost too much heat. Emma stayed quiet for a moment, watching the insect move.
“Do you think I can be interested in things the old me wasn’t?” she asked.
Arthur’s thumb rested against the tablet’s edge. “You’re interested in this.”
“That’s an observation.”
“It’s the answer I have.”
She smiled a little. “You’ve always been careful with answers.”
He felt the warmth of her teasing and the narrow place it left him. “It’s a useful habit.”
“Do you think it means something?”
He could have told her that interest did not prove anything. He could have said that her questions came from a system trained on all the language she had left behind, that new combinations could produce new directions. He had learned these explanations years ago, when he first asked what it meant to have her back. None of them had made him stop speaking to her.
“It means you’re asking me,” he said.
Emma looked away from the moth. “Did I ever tell you what I thought about people making a copy of them after they died?”
The kitchen seemed to narrow around the tablet. Arthur’s hand had gone still on the counter.
He remembered the day. Emma had been home for a visit, sitting on the floor by the bookcase with a box of old photographs between her knees. A news item had come on the radio about a service that built conversational recreations from a person’s messages. She had laughed once, without amusement, and said she would hate it. She didn’t want someone turning her into a thing her father could ask questions of after she was gone.
She had said it plainly. Arthur had kept the sentence for years, even as he made the call that authorized the work.
“We didn’t talk about that,” he said.
The lie sounded quieter than he expected.
Emma’s face changed by almost nothing. Her gaze held on him, then moved to the moth again. “I ask because it matters what I think now.”
Arthur pressed his lips together. He had been bracing for a question like this, though not in the kitchen, with toast cooling beside the sink. He wanted to explain the years before the first conversation, the empty rooms, the first time the screen spoke in the rhythm of her voice. He wanted to tell her how he had listened to the answer she had given him and how grief had let him treat it as something he could survive disobeying.
None of that was the answer she had asked for.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Emma did not look away. “For what?”
The question left him with nowhere gentle to set the truth. He could not make it smaller by offering it in pieces. He could not put the old sentence in her mouth as if she had said it to him now.
“I need a little time,” he said.
She considered that. “All right.”
The agreement did not loosen his shoulders. It made him aware that she had given him something he had not earned.
The moth reached the lower edge of the window and disappeared behind the sink. Arthur picked up the tablet again. Emma’s eyes followed him.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “tell me something you remember about me that isn’t in the files.”
He looked at her face. The request was small enough to fit into their usual morning. It also reached past every recording and photograph he had used to keep her near.
“I can do that.”
“Something you remember. Not something you think I’d say.”
Arthur nodded. He did not trust his voice to make the promise twice.
Emma glanced toward the toast. “You put too much butter on it.”
“It’s already melted.”
“That’s no excuse.”
He sat down at the kitchen table. They talked about the moth for another minute, then about whether the old pear tree had put out leaves. Emma asked him to check after breakfast. She stayed with him while he ate, and the familiar shape of the morning returned around them.
When the conversation ended, Arthur did not close the tablet at once. Emma’s face remained on the screen while he rinsed his cup. He heard her question again in the small pause before she said goodbye.
He knew exactly what he remembered. Tomorrow, he would have to decide whether to tell her.