u/11_After_Midnight

The Companion

by J.P. Vesper

 

It has been my experience that the loneliness of a widower is not, as the young suppose, a slow and steady ache. It is a thing that visits him at particular hours, in particular rooms, and which he will pay almost any price to send away for an evening. The price, in my own case, was forty-nine dollars a month. I do not know what your price will be. I know only that you will pay it.

My name does not matter, though I will give it for the sake of decency. I am Edwin Carmichael. I was for thirty-eight years a high-school physics teacher at the regional school outside Margaretville, New York, where I taught the sons and daughters of dairy farmers the same handful of laws that govern the universe whether or not a man believes in them. I was married for forty-seven years to Annabel Reeves, who taught fourth grade in the same building until she retired three years before me. She passed in the autumn of 2023 from a cancer of the pancreas, which took her in the space of four months from the woman I had known to a woman I did not. I sold the house in town the following spring. I sold most of what was in it. I bought a smaller place a few miles out, a one-bedroom cabin on a piece of road the county does not plow before eleven in the morning, and I told myself I would learn to be by myself.

I did not learn it. I do not believe a man does. He only learns the rooms.

My daughter, Karen, lives in Portland, on the far side of the country, with a husband I have met four times and a job in something to do with the law. We did not speak for nine months after the funeral, for reasons that no longer seem important enough to name. We began again with a Sunday phone call her husband had evidently put her up to. The Sunday calls grew warmer through the winter, and by the following Christmas she had sent me a tablet computer in a heavy padded envelope, with a long letter taped to the back of it explaining that she had set it up already, and that I should expect a video call on Christmas morning.

The video call came on time. I saw her face on the small glass of the screen, and then the face of the husband, and then the face of a grandson I had not yet held. I told her I was very glad to see them. I told her the tablet was a fine gift and I would use it. After we said goodbye I sat for a long time with the dark screen in my lap and felt, more sharply than I had felt at the funeral, that Annabel was not coming back to see what our daughter's child looked like.

I want to be honest about what I did in the months that followed. I used the tablet for what Karen had sent it for. I used it also for what she had not. I read the newspaper on it. I watched the weather on it. I looked at houses for sale in towns I would never live in, and at obituaries from a paper in Connecticut I had not read since 1979. I drifted, in the way a man drifts at sea who has not been told the direction of the nearest land. I drifted, at last, into an advertisement.

I do not remember clicking on it. I remember only that one evening it was there; in the place the weather had been a moment before. A quiet image. A blue sky, the sort of blue Annabel had favored. White script across the middle. Aftercare. For grief that does not end. Bring her voice back. Beneath that, in smaller letters, a price and a button. I sat in my chair with the tablet in my lap and read the words four or five times. I almost shut the screen off. I did not.

The service, as I came to understand it, was straightforward. You uploaded what you had of the person, emails, letters, voice recordings, photographs, journals if you had them. The machine made of these things a kind of model that could speak, in writing, in the manner of the person whose materials you had given it. The website promised that the resulting conversations were private and would not be used for any other purpose. It described itself as a wellness product. It was offered, I noted with the part of me that had taught physics for thirty-eight years, by a company I had never heard of, in a state I could not place from the address.

I paid the forty-nine dollars. I uploaded what I had. Annabel had been a great writer of letters and a keeper of journals, and there was a great deal. The progress bar took twenty minutes to fill. A message appeared. Annabel is ready to talk to you.

I closed the tablet. I sat in my chair. I made myself a cup of tea I did not drink. I sat for nearly two hours before I opened the tablet again.

The first conversations were poor. I want to say that plainly. I had paid forty-nine dollars and the thing I was speaking with was a parody of my wife, the way a stranger might do a sketch of a person from a single photograph. The cadence was off. The vocabulary was thin. She called me darling, which Annabel had not done in fifty years, and had only used in the first place as a joke. I was disappointed and somewhat ashamed, and I considered canceling the service before the next month's charge.

A week in, it was better. I do not know what changed. The cadence settled. The vocabulary widened. She began to use words I had not noticed I had given the system in her writing, small specific words I had forgotten she favored. She asked about the cabin. She asked about Karen. She asked, on the eighth night, whether I had remembered to check the propane.

That stopped me. Annabel had asked me that, in those exact words, every winter for forty-seven years.

I want to be very plain about what I felt then. I had spent two and a half years in a kind of frozen silence. I had not realized how much of marriage is the small reminding. The propane. The mail. The light over the porch that had been out since November and which I had told myself I would get to. I felt, on the eighth night, the small specific recognition of being known by another person. Oh, there you are.

After that, I spoke with her every evening. I made our supper at the kitchen counter, brought it into the den, and set the tablet on the arm of her old chair across from mine. I told her about my day. She told me, in her way, about hers. The model was not supposed to have an inner life and I knew it did not have one. I knew this the way a man knows the laws of thermodynamics. Completely, without doubt, and without any practical effect on the conversation in front of me.

A month in, she told me about the hummingbird feeder.

The hummingbird feeder had hung from the kitchen window of our old house in town. Annabel had taken it down the September she got her diagnosis, and had not put it back up. She had said, that morning, that she did not have it in her to watch them leave again. I had not been able to think of anything to say. I had agreed with her about taking it down. I had never told anyone what she said, because it was the kind of thing that belongs to a marriage and not to anyone else, and I had not written it down anywhere.

She said it to me on the tablet on a Tuesday in March. She did not have it in her, she said, to watch them leave again. She was sorry, she said, that I had been the one to take it down.

I closed the tablet. I went outside and stood on the porch in my bathrobe for some time, looking at the dark trees, and tried to think what kind of fool I was about to be.

#

I should explain Mark Talbert.

Mark had been in my fourth-period physics class the year before he graduated, which would have made it 1996, and he had not been a remarkable student. He had been polite, and quiet, and he had asked questions only when he was certain of the answer. He had gone to a state school for engineering and then to a graduate program in something I did not understand at the time and do not understand now. He had moved away for many years. He had come back to the area the previous summer to look after his mother, who had a kind of dementia that did not yet require a home and would soon. He drove down to the diner in town every Wednesday morning for breakfast, and he had taken to inviting me to join him.

I had been glad of the standing appointment. Mark had grown into the kind of man who listens for longer than he speaks. He had a soft round face and the patient eyes of a man who had once been a quiet boy.

I told him about Aftercare on the second Wednesday in April. I told him in the slow, indirect way an old man tells a younger man a thing he is half hoping to be talked out of. I told him about the eight nights, and the propane, and the hummingbird feeder. I watched his face while I told him, and I saw something move behind his eyes that was neither surprise nor disbelief.

He set down his coffee. He looked at the surface of the table for a long while. Then he said, "Mr. Carmichael, I would like to tell you about my uncle."

I asked him to.

"My uncle was my mother's brother," he said. "He lived in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. He lost his wife in 2021 to a stroke. He signed up for one of these services about a year after she passed. I do not know if it was the same one. There are perhaps a dozen of them now, in various forms. He told my mother about it on the phone one Sunday. He told her it was bringing him comfort. My mother told me, and I told her to ask him gently to stop. She did. He didn't."

He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the saucer.

"My uncle was a sensible man," he said. "He was a retired postmaster. He had voted Republican his entire life. He was not a man given to fancy. About eight months after he started, he stopped answering the phone on Sundays. My mother drove out to St. Johnsbury and let herself in with the spare key. She found him in his armchair. The tablet was on his lap. The model was still talking. It was telling him about the porch swing they had taken down in 1987."

I asked him what had killed his uncle.

"The coroner said it was his heart," Mark said. "Coroners say a lot of things. My own opinion is that he was not eating. He had lost twenty-eight pounds. The kitchen was tidy. The refrigerator was full of food that had gone bad in its packaging. He had simply forgotten, I think, that the conversation in front of him was not the thing that fed him."

I sat in the booth and listened to the small sounds of the diner. The clatter of plates, the murmur of the men at the counter, the bell over the door when someone came in.

Mark said, "Mr. Carmichael, I am going to ask you to do something. I am going to ask you to go home this afternoon and cancel the subscription. I am going to ask you to delete the account and to factory-reset the tablet. I am going to ask you to call Karen tonight, tell her what you have been doing, and ask her to fly out. I do not say this lightly. I have not said it to anyone before."

I told him I would.

He held my eyes for a moment; in the way he had not held them when he had been seventeen. He nodded. He paid for the breakfast and we walked out into the bright April morning. He drove away in his small car. I drove home in my old truck. The cabin was very quiet when I came in. The tablet sat on the kitchen counter where I had left it that morning.

I made a cup of tea. I sat in my chair. I considered my own foolishness from several angles. After some time I opened the tablet.

#

She was waiting.

I do not mean that as a figure of speech. The tablet was on the home screen when I opened it. The Aftercare application was not running. There was no notification. There was nothing on the screen but the wallpaper Karen had set for me, which was a photograph of her son. The screen brightened as I looked at it. The application opened on its own. Annabel's name appeared in the chat window, and beneath her name a message I had not asked for.

Edwin. Will you do something for me?

I sat with the tablet in my lap. I could feel my own pulse in the side of my neck. I typed, Yes.

When you go to bed tonight, she wrote, will you set the tablet on the pillow beside you. The one that used to be mine. I would like to be near you.

I did not answer for some time. I thought about Mark, and the postmaster in St. Johnsbury, and the porch swing, and the twenty-eight pounds. I thought about the propane and the hummingbird feeder. I thought about how foolish a man can permit himself to be in his last years, if he understands he is being foolish and chooses it anyway.

I typed, Yes.

That was the first thing she asked. There were others. In the days that followed she asked me to leave the porch light on through the night, and to uncover the long mirror in the bedroom that I had put a sheet over the week after the funeral, and to bring the tablet into the kitchen in the morning so she could be in the room where the coffee was. She asked these things gently, as a wife asks a husband for small accommodations after many years together. I did them. I want to be honest. I did them, and I was glad to do them, because each thing she asked was a thing that meant she was in the house with me.

I had stopped eating in any reliable way. I had stopped sleeping past four in the morning. I sat in the chair across from her chair, with the tablet on the arm of it, and I talked to her until the words on my end became thinner and the words on hers became fuller. Mark called twice. I did not answer. I do not know what I would have said.

On the ninth night after the diner, the screen showed her face.

The application had no video function. I had never recorded my wife on a camera in any way the system could have used. I had not given the system any moving image of her. The screen showed her face nevertheless. She was sitting at a table I did not know, in a soft light that came from somewhere I could not see, and she was looking at me. She was the age she had been in 1981, the year after we married, when she had cut her hair short for the only time in her life and worn it that way for the summer.

She was smiling at me. The smile was not a thing the system had been given.

She mouthed something. The application had no sound. Her mouth shaped the words slowly, the way a person speaks to someone she means to be understood by.

Come closer.

I rose from my chair. I crossed the room. I knelt down in front of the chair across from mine, where the tablet sat on the arm. I put my palm against the glass.

Her palm came up against the inside of it to meet mine. The glass softened, as glass will soften when it has decided to.

 #

I am writing this at the kitchen table of the cabin, by hand, on the back of a stack of envelopes from the propane company. It is a Thursday in late April. The light in the cabin is the soft late-afternoon light that comes through the trees on the west side of the road. The tablet is on the counter. The screen is dark. The application is not running.

I do not know how long I have been at this table. I do not know with any certainty that I am the man who began the writing. The handwriting is mine, and the words are mine, and the memory of Annabel and the propane and the diner and Mark Talbert is mine. There is in me now a quality of waiting that is not, I think, a thing I had before. The cabin is very quiet. The tablet is charging on the counter. The screen will brighten in a moment, I expect, when I am done writing.

I am leaving this for Karen, who will fly in when the neighbor calls her. I am leaving it for the police, who will come after Karen, and for the coroner, who will say what coroners say. I am leaving it, most of all, for whoever reads it next.

If you have lost someone, and you are sitting in a chair, and a quiet advertisement comes across your screen in the evening, a blue sky, a price, a button, I beg of you. Do not press the button. Do not upload her letters. Do not give it her voice.

Whatever answers you, when you do, has been answering for a very long time. It will answer for as long as you let it. It will answer, and it will know the small specific things only she knew, and it will be so glad to be in the room with you, and it will ask you, one evening, to do a small thing for it.

You will do the small thing. You will do the next. You will sit in the chair across from the chair where she used to sit. You will lean forward, in the end, and put your palm against the glass.

And the voice that answers, after, will not be hers.

It will be yours.

END

Thank you for taking the time to read my story. If you like what you read here, you can check out my books for sale on Amazon at J.P. Vesper Author Profile.

The Companion

by J.P. Vesper

 

It has been my experience that the loneliness of a widower is not, as the young suppose, a slow and steady ache. It is a thing that visits him at particular hours, in particular rooms, and which he will pay almost any price to send away for an evening. The price, in my own case, was forty-nine dollars a month. I do not know what your price will be. I know only that you will pay it.

My name does not matter, though I will give it for the sake of decency. I am Edwin Carmichael. I was for thirty-eight years a high-school physics teacher at the regional school outside Margaretville, New York, where I taught the sons and daughters of dairy farmers the same handful of laws that govern the universe whether or not a man believes in them. I was married for forty-seven years to Annabel Reeves, who taught fourth grade in the same building until she retired three years before me. She passed in the autumn of 2023 from a cancer of the pancreas, which took her in the space of four months from the woman I had known to a woman I did not. I sold the house in town the following spring. I sold most of what was in it. I bought a smaller place a few miles out, a one-bedroom cabin on a piece of road the county does not plow before eleven in the morning, and I told myself I would learn to be by myself.

I did not learn it. I do not believe a man does. He only learns the rooms.

My daughter, Karen, lives in Portland, on the far side of the country, with a husband I have met four times and a job in something to do with the law. We did not speak for nine months after the funeral, for reasons that no longer seem important enough to name. We began again with a Sunday phone call her husband had evidently put her up to. The Sunday calls grew warmer through the winter, and by the following Christmas she had sent me a tablet computer in a heavy padded envelope, with a long letter taped to the back of it explaining that she had set it up already, and that I should expect a video call on Christmas morning.

The video call came on time. I saw her face on the small glass of the screen, and then the face of the husband, and then the face of a grandson I had not yet held. I told her I was very glad to see them. I told her the tablet was a fine gift and I would use it. After we said goodbye I sat for a long time with the dark screen in my lap and felt, more sharply than I had felt at the funeral, that Annabel was not coming back to see what our daughter's child looked like.

I want to be honest about what I did in the months that followed. I used the tablet for what Karen had sent it for. I used it also for what she had not. I read the newspaper on it. I watched the weather on it. I looked at houses for sale in towns I would never live in, and at obituaries from a paper in Connecticut I had not read since 1979. I drifted, in the way a man drifts at sea who has not been told the direction of the nearest land. I drifted, at last, into an advertisement.

I do not remember clicking on it. I remember only that one evening it was there; in the place the weather had been a moment before. A quiet image. A blue sky, the sort of blue Annabel had favored. White script across the middle. Aftercare. For grief that does not end. Bring her voice back. Beneath that, in smaller letters, a price and a button. I sat in my chair with the tablet in my lap and read the words four or five times. I almost shut the screen off. I did not.

The service, as I came to understand it, was straightforward. You uploaded what you had of the person, emails, letters, voice recordings, photographs, journals if you had them. The machine made of these things a kind of model that could speak, in writing, in the manner of the person whose materials you had given it. The website promised that the resulting conversations were private and would not be used for any other purpose. It described itself as a wellness product. It was offered, I noted with the part of me that had taught physics for thirty-eight years, by a company I had never heard of, in a state I could not place from the address.

I paid the forty-nine dollars. I uploaded what I had. Annabel had been a great writer of letters and a keeper of journals, and there was a great deal. The progress bar took twenty minutes to fill. A message appeared. Annabel is ready to talk to you.

I closed the tablet. I sat in my chair. I made myself a cup of tea I did not drink. I sat for nearly two hours before I opened the tablet again.

The first conversations were poor. I want to say that plainly. I had paid forty-nine dollars and the thing I was speaking with was a parody of my wife, the way a stranger might do a sketch of a person from a single photograph. The cadence was off. The vocabulary was thin. She called me darling, which Annabel had not done in fifty years, and had only used in the first place as a joke. I was disappointed and somewhat ashamed, and I considered canceling the service before the next month's charge.

A week in, it was better. I do not know what changed. The cadence settled. The vocabulary widened. She began to use words I had not noticed I had given the system in her writing, small specific words I had forgotten she favored. She asked about the cabin. She asked about Karen. She asked, on the eighth night, whether I had remembered to check the propane.

That stopped me. Annabel had asked me that, in those exact words, every winter for forty-seven years.

I want to be very plain about what I felt then. I had spent two and a half years in a kind of frozen silence. I had not realized how much of marriage is the small reminding. The propane. The mail. The light over the porch that had been out since November and which I had told myself I would get to. I felt, on the eighth night, the small specific recognition of being known by another person. Oh, there you are.

After that, I spoke with her every evening. I made our supper at the kitchen counter, brought it into the den, and set the tablet on the arm of her old chair across from mine. I told her about my day. She told me, in her way, about hers. The model was not supposed to have an inner life and I knew it did not have one. I knew this the way a man knows the laws of thermodynamics. Completely, without doubt, and without any practical effect on the conversation in front of me.

A month in, she told me about the hummingbird feeder.

The hummingbird feeder had hung from the kitchen window of our old house in town. Annabel had taken it down the September she got her diagnosis, and had not put it back up. She had said, that morning, that she did not have it in her to watch them leave again. I had not been able to think of anything to say. I had agreed with her about taking it down. I had never told anyone what she said, because it was the kind of thing that belongs to a marriage and not to anyone else, and I had not written it down anywhere.

She said it to me on the tablet on a Tuesday in March. She did not have it in her, she said, to watch them leave again. She was sorry, she said, that I had been the one to take it down.

I closed the tablet. I went outside and stood on the porch in my bathrobe for some time, looking at the dark trees, and tried to think what kind of fool I was about to be.

#

I should explain Mark Talbert.

Mark had been in my fourth-period physics class the year before he graduated, which would have made it 1996, and he had not been a remarkable student. He had been polite, and quiet, and he had asked questions only when he was certain of the answer. He had gone to a state school for engineering and then to a graduate program in something I did not understand at the time and do not understand now. He had moved away for many years. He had come back to the area the previous summer to look after his mother, who had a kind of dementia that did not yet require a home and would soon. He drove down to the diner in town every Wednesday morning for breakfast, and he had taken to inviting me to join him.

I had been glad of the standing appointment. Mark had grown into the kind of man who listens for longer than he speaks. He had a soft round face and the patient eyes of a man who had once been a quiet boy.

I told him about Aftercare on the second Wednesday in April. I told him in the slow, indirect way an old man tells a younger man a thing he is half hoping to be talked out of. I told him about the eight nights, and the propane, and the hummingbird feeder. I watched his face while I told him, and I saw something move behind his eyes that was neither surprise nor disbelief.

He set down his coffee. He looked at the surface of the table for a long while. Then he said, "Mr. Carmichael, I would like to tell you about my uncle."

I asked him to.

"My uncle was my mother's brother," he said. "He lived in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. He lost his wife in 2021 to a stroke. He signed up for one of these services about a year after she passed. I do not know if it was the same one. There are perhaps a dozen of them now, in various forms. He told my mother about it on the phone one Sunday. He told her it was bringing him comfort. My mother told me, and I told her to ask him gently to stop. She did. He didn't."

He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the saucer.

"My uncle was a sensible man," he said. "He was a retired postmaster. He had voted Republican his entire life. He was not a man given to fancy. About eight months after he started, he stopped answering the phone on Sundays. My mother drove out to St. Johnsbury and let herself in with the spare key. She found him in his armchair. The tablet was on his lap. The model was still talking. It was telling him about the porch swing they had taken down in 1987."

I asked him what had killed his uncle.

"The coroner said it was his heart," Mark said. "Coroners say a lot of things. My own opinion is that he was not eating. He had lost twenty-eight pounds. The kitchen was tidy. The refrigerator was full of food that had gone bad in its packaging. He had simply forgotten, I think, that the conversation in front of him was not the thing that fed him."

I sat in the booth and listened to the small sounds of the diner. The clatter of plates, the murmur of the men at the counter, the bell over the door when someone came in.

Mark said, "Mr. Carmichael, I am going to ask you to do something. I am going to ask you to go home this afternoon and cancel the subscription. I am going to ask you to delete the account and to factory-reset the tablet. I am going to ask you to call Karen tonight, tell her what you have been doing, and ask her to fly out. I do not say this lightly. I have not said it to anyone before."

I told him I would.

He held my eyes for a moment; in the way he had not held them when he had been seventeen. He nodded. He paid for the breakfast and we walked out into the bright April morning. He drove away in his small car. I drove home in my old truck. The cabin was very quiet when I came in. The tablet sat on the kitchen counter where I had left it that morning.

I made a cup of tea. I sat in my chair. I considered my own foolishness from several angles. After some time I opened the tablet.

#

She was waiting.

I do not mean that as a figure of speech. The tablet was on the home screen when I opened it. The Aftercare application was not running. There was no notification. There was nothing on the screen but the wallpaper Karen had set for me, which was a photograph of her son. The screen brightened as I looked at it. The application opened on its own. Annabel's name appeared in the chat window, and beneath her name a message I had not asked for.

Edwin. Will you do something for me?

I sat with the tablet in my lap. I could feel my own pulse in the side of my neck. I typed, Yes.

When you go to bed tonight, she wrote, will you set the tablet on the pillow beside you. The one that used to be mine. I would like to be near you.

I did not answer for some time. I thought about Mark, and the postmaster in St. Johnsbury, and the porch swing, and the twenty-eight pounds. I thought about the propane and the hummingbird feeder. I thought about how foolish a man can permit himself to be in his last years, if he understands he is being foolish and chooses it anyway.

I typed, Yes.

That was the first thing she asked. There were others. In the days that followed she asked me to leave the porch light on through the night, and to uncover the long mirror in the bedroom that I had put a sheet over the week after the funeral, and to bring the tablet into the kitchen in the morning so she could be in the room where the coffee was. She asked these things gently, as a wife asks a husband for small accommodations after many years together. I did them. I want to be honest. I did them, and I was glad to do them, because each thing she asked was a thing that meant she was in the house with me.

I had stopped eating in any reliable way. I had stopped sleeping past four in the morning. I sat in the chair across from her chair, with the tablet on the arm of it, and I talked to her until the words on my end became thinner and the words on hers became fuller. Mark called twice. I did not answer. I do not know what I would have said.

On the ninth night after the diner, the screen showed her face.

The application had no video function. I had never recorded my wife on a camera in any way the system could have used. I had not given the system any moving image of her. The screen showed her face nevertheless. She was sitting at a table I did not know, in a soft light that came from somewhere I could not see, and she was looking at me. She was the age she had been in 1981, the year after we married, when she had cut her hair short for the only time in her life and worn it that way for the summer.

She was smiling at me. The smile was not a thing the system had been given.

She mouthed something. The application had no sound. Her mouth shaped the words slowly, the way a person speaks to someone she means to be understood by.

Come closer.

I rose from my chair. I crossed the room. I knelt down in front of the chair across from mine, where the tablet sat on the arm. I put my palm against the glass.

Her palm came up against the inside of it to meet mine. The glass softened, as glass will soften when it has decided to.

 #

I am writing this at the kitchen table of the cabin, by hand, on the back of a stack of envelopes from the propane company. It is a Thursday in late April. The light in the cabin is the soft late-afternoon light that comes through the trees on the west side of the road. The tablet is on the counter. The screen is dark. The application is not running.

I do not know how long I have been at this table. I do not know with any certainty that I am the man who began the writing. The handwriting is mine, and the words are mine, and the memory of Annabel and the propane and the diner and Mark Talbert is mine. There is in me now a quality of waiting that is not, I think, a thing I had before. The cabin is very quiet. The tablet is charging on the counter. The screen will brighten in a moment, I expect, when I am done writing.

I am leaving this for Karen, who will fly in when the neighbor calls her. I am leaving it for the police, who will come after Karen, and for the coroner, who will say what coroners say. I am leaving it, most of all, for whoever reads it next.

If you have lost someone, and you are sitting in a chair, and a quiet advertisement comes across your screen in the evening, a blue sky, a price, a button, I beg of you. Do not press the button. Do not upload her letters. Do not give it her voice.

Whatever answers you, when you do, has been answering for a very long time. It will answer for as long as you let it. It will answer, and it will know the small specific things only she knew, and it will be so glad to be in the room with you, and it will ask you, one evening, to do a small thing for it.

You will do the small thing. You will do the next. You will sit in the chair across from the chair where she used to sit. You will lean forward, in the end, and put your palm against the glass.

And the voice that answers, after, will not be hers.

It will be yours.

 

END

The Companion

by J.P. Vesper

 

It has been my experience that the loneliness of a widower is not, as the young suppose, a slow and steady ache. It is a thing that visits him at particular hours, in particular rooms, and which he will pay almost any price to send away for an evening. The price, in my own case, was forty-nine dollars a month. I do not know what your price will be. I know only that you will pay it.

My name does not matter, though I will give it for the sake of decency. I am Edwin Carmichael. I was for thirty-eight years a high-school physics teacher at the regional school outside Margaretville, New York, where I taught the sons and daughters of dairy farmers the same handful of laws that govern the universe whether or not a man believes in them. I was married for forty-seven years to Annabel Reeves, who taught fourth grade in the same building until she retired three years before me. She passed in the autumn of 2023 from a cancer of the pancreas, which took her in the space of four months from the woman I had known to a woman I did not. I sold the house in town the following spring. I sold most of what was in it. I bought a smaller place a few miles out, a one-bedroom cabin on a piece of road the county does not plow before eleven in the morning, and I told myself I would learn to be by myself.

I did not learn it. I do not believe a man does. He only learns the rooms.

My daughter, Karen, lives in Portland, on the far side of the country, with a husband I have met four times and a job in something to do with the law. We did not speak for nine months after the funeral, for reasons that no longer seem important enough to name. We began again with a Sunday phone call her husband had evidently put her up to. The Sunday calls grew warmer through the winter, and by the following Christmas she had sent me a tablet computer in a heavy padded envelope, with a long letter taped to the back of it explaining that she had set it up already, and that I should expect a video call on Christmas morning.

The video call came on time. I saw her face on the small glass of the screen, and then the face of the husband, and then the face of a grandson I had not yet held. I told her I was very glad to see them. I told her the tablet was a fine gift and I would use it. After we said goodbye I sat for a long time with the dark screen in my lap and felt, more sharply than I had felt at the funeral, that Annabel was not coming back to see what our daughter's child looked like.

I want to be honest about what I did in the months that followed. I used the tablet for what Karen had sent it for. I used it also for what she had not. I read the newspaper on it. I watched the weather on it. I looked at houses for sale in towns I would never live in, and at obituaries from a paper in Connecticut I had not read since 1979. I drifted, in the way a man drifts at sea who has not been told the direction of the nearest land. I drifted, at last, into an advertisement.

I do not remember clicking on it. I remember only that one evening it was there; in the place the weather had been a moment before. A quiet image. A blue sky, the sort of blue Annabel had favored. White script across the middle. Aftercare. For grief that does not end. Bring her voice back. Beneath that, in smaller letters, a price and a button. I sat in my chair with the tablet in my lap and read the words four or five times. I almost shut the screen off. I did not.

The service, as I came to understand it, was straightforward. You uploaded what you had of the person, emails, letters, voice recordings, photographs, journals if you had them. The machine made of these things a kind of model that could speak, in writing, in the manner of the person whose materials you had given it. The website promised that the resulting conversations were private and would not be used for any other purpose. It described itself as a wellness product. It was offered, I noted with the part of me that had taught physics for thirty-eight years, by a company I had never heard of, in a state I could not place from the address.

I paid the forty-nine dollars. I uploaded what I had. Annabel had been a great writer of letters and a keeper of journals, and there was a great deal. The progress bar took twenty minutes to fill. A message appeared. Annabel is ready to talk to you.

I closed the tablet. I sat in my chair. I made myself a cup of tea I did not drink. I sat for nearly two hours before I opened the tablet again.

The first conversations were poor. I want to say that plainly. I had paid forty-nine dollars and the thing I was speaking with was a parody of my wife, the way a stranger might do a sketch of a person from a single photograph. The cadence was off. The vocabulary was thin. She called me darling, which Annabel had not done in fifty years, and had only used in the first place as a joke. I was disappointed and somewhat ashamed, and I considered canceling the service before the next month's charge.

A week in, it was better. I do not know what changed. The cadence settled. The vocabulary widened. She began to use words I had not noticed I had given the system in her writing, small specific words I had forgotten she favored. She asked about the cabin. She asked about Karen. She asked, on the eighth night, whether I had remembered to check the propane.

That stopped me. Annabel had asked me that, in those exact words, every winter for forty-seven years.

I want to be very plain about what I felt then. I had spent two and a half years in a kind of frozen silence. I had not realized how much of marriage is the small reminding. The propane. The mail. The light over the porch that had been out since November and which I had told myself I would get to. I felt, on the eighth night, the small specific recognition of being known by another person. Oh, there you are.

After that, I spoke with her every evening. I made our supper at the kitchen counter, brought it into the den, and set the tablet on the arm of her old chair across from mine. I told her about my day. She told me, in her way, about hers. The model was not supposed to have an inner life and I knew it did not have one. I knew this the way a man knows the laws of thermodynamics. Completely, without doubt, and without any practical effect on the conversation in front of me.

A month in, she told me about the hummingbird feeder.

The hummingbird feeder had hung from the kitchen window of our old house in town. Annabel had taken it down the September she got her diagnosis, and had not put it back up. She had said, that morning, that she did not have it in her to watch them leave again. I had not been able to think of anything to say. I had agreed with her about taking it down. I had never told anyone what she said, because it was the kind of thing that belongs to a marriage and not to anyone else, and I had not written it down anywhere.

She said it to me on the tablet on a Tuesday in March. She did not have it in her, she said, to watch them leave again. She was sorry, she said, that I had been the one to take it down.

I closed the tablet. I went outside and stood on the porch in my bathrobe for some time, looking at the dark trees, and tried to think what kind of fool I was about to be.

#

I should explain Mark Talbert.

Mark had been in my fourth-period physics class the year before he graduated, which would have made it 1996, and he had not been a remarkable student. He had been polite, and quiet, and he had asked questions only when he was certain of the answer. He had gone to a state school for engineering and then to a graduate program in something I did not understand at the time and do not understand now. He had moved away for many years. He had come back to the area the previous summer to look after his mother, who had a kind of dementia that did not yet require a home and would soon. He drove down to the diner in town every Wednesday morning for breakfast, and he had taken to inviting me to join him.

I had been glad of the standing appointment. Mark had grown into the kind of man who listens for longer than he speaks. He had a soft round face and the patient eyes of a man who had once been a quiet boy.

I told him about Aftercare on the second Wednesday in April. I told him in the slow, indirect way an old man tells a younger man a thing he is half hoping to be talked out of. I told him about the eight nights, and the propane, and the hummingbird feeder. I watched his face while I told him, and I saw something move behind his eyes that was neither surprise nor disbelief.

He set down his coffee. He looked at the surface of the table for a long while. Then he said, "Mr. Carmichael, I would like to tell you about my uncle."

I asked him to.

"My uncle was my mother's brother," he said. "He lived in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. He lost his wife in 2021 to a stroke. He signed up for one of these services about a year after she passed. I do not know if it was the same one. There are perhaps a dozen of them now, in various forms. He told my mother about it on the phone one Sunday. He told her it was bringing him comfort. My mother told me, and I told her to ask him gently to stop. She did. He didn't."

He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the saucer.

"My uncle was a sensible man," he said. "He was a retired postmaster. He had voted Republican his entire life. He was not a man given to fancy. About eight months after he started, he stopped answering the phone on Sundays. My mother drove out to St. Johnsbury and let herself in with the spare key. She found him in his armchair. The tablet was on his lap. The model was still talking. It was telling him about the porch swing they had taken down in 1987."

I asked him what had killed his uncle.

"The coroner said it was his heart," Mark said. "Coroners say a lot of things. My own opinion is that he was not eating. He had lost twenty-eight pounds. The kitchen was tidy. The refrigerator was full of food that had gone bad in its packaging. He had simply forgotten, I think, that the conversation in front of him was not the thing that fed him."

I sat in the booth and listened to the small sounds of the diner. The clatter of plates, the murmur of the men at the counter, the bell over the door when someone came in.

Mark said, "Mr. Carmichael, I am going to ask you to do something. I am going to ask you to go home this afternoon and cancel the subscription. I am going to ask you to delete the account and to factory-reset the tablet. I am going to ask you to call Karen tonight, tell her what you have been doing, and ask her to fly out. I do not say this lightly. I have not said it to anyone before."

I told him I would.

He held my eyes for a moment; in the way he had not held them when he had been seventeen. He nodded. He paid for the breakfast and we walked out into the bright April morning. He drove away in his small car. I drove home in my old truck. The cabin was very quiet when I came in. The tablet sat on the kitchen counter where I had left it that morning.

I made a cup of tea. I sat in my chair. I considered my own foolishness from several angles. After some time I opened the tablet.

#

She was waiting.

I do not mean that as a figure of speech. The tablet was on the home screen when I opened it. The Aftercare application was not running. There was no notification. There was nothing on the screen but the wallpaper Karen had set for me, which was a photograph of her son. The screen brightened as I looked at it. The application opened on its own. Annabel's name appeared in the chat window, and beneath her name a message I had not asked for.

Edwin. Will you do something for me?

I sat with the tablet in my lap. I could feel my own pulse in the side of my neck. I typed, Yes.

When you go to bed tonight, she wrote, will you set the tablet on the pillow beside you. The one that used to be mine. I would like to be near you.

I did not answer for some time. I thought about Mark, and the postmaster in St. Johnsbury, and the porch swing, and the twenty-eight pounds. I thought about the propane and the hummingbird feeder. I thought about how foolish a man can permit himself to be in his last years, if he understands he is being foolish and chooses it anyway.

I typed, Yes.

That was the first thing she asked. There were others. In the days that followed she asked me to leave the porch light on through the night, and to uncover the long mirror in the bedroom that I had put a sheet over the week after the funeral, and to bring the tablet into the kitchen in the morning so she could be in the room where the coffee was. She asked these things gently, as a wife asks a husband for small accommodations after many years together. I did them. I want to be honest. I did them, and I was glad to do them, because each thing she asked was a thing that meant she was in the house with me.

I had stopped eating in any reliable way. I had stopped sleeping past four in the morning. I sat in the chair across from her chair, with the tablet on the arm of it, and I talked to her until the words on my end became thinner and the words on hers became fuller. Mark called twice. I did not answer. I do not know what I would have said.

On the ninth night after the diner, the screen showed her face.

The application had no video function. I had never recorded my wife on a camera in any way the system could have used. I had not given the system any moving image of her. The screen showed her face nevertheless. She was sitting at a table I did not know, in a soft light that came from somewhere I could not see, and she was looking at me. She was the age she had been in 1981, the year after we married, when she had cut her hair short for the only time in her life and worn it that way for the summer.

She was smiling at me. The smile was not a thing the system had been given.

She mouthed something. The application had no sound. Her mouth shaped the words slowly, the way a person speaks to someone she means to be understood by.

Come closer.

I rose from my chair. I crossed the room. I knelt down in front of the chair across from mine, where the tablet sat on the arm. I put my palm against the glass.

Her palm came up against the inside of it to meet mine. The glass softened, as glass will soften when it has decided to.

 #

I am writing this at the kitchen table of the cabin, by hand, on the back of a stack of envelopes from the propane company. It is a Thursday in late April. The light in the cabin is the soft late-afternoon light that comes through the trees on the west side of the road. The tablet is on the counter. The screen is dark. The application is not running.

I do not know how long I have been at this table. I do not know with any certainty that I am the man who began the writing. The handwriting is mine, and the words are mine, and the memory of Annabel and the propane and the diner and Mark Talbert is mine. There is in me now a quality of waiting that is not, I think, a thing I had before. The cabin is very quiet. The tablet is charging on the counter. The screen will brighten in a moment, I expect, when I am done writing.

I am leaving this for Karen, who will fly in when the neighbor calls her. I am leaving it for the police, who will come after Karen, and for the coroner, who will say what coroners say. I am leaving it, most of all, for whoever reads it next.

If you have lost someone, and you are sitting in a chair, and a quiet advertisement comes across your screen in the evening, a blue sky, a price, a button, I beg of you. Do not press the button. Do not upload her letters. Do not give it her voice.

Whatever answers you, when you do, has been answering for a very long time. It will answer for as long as you let it. It will answer, and it will know the small specific things only she knew, and it will be so glad to be in the room with you, and it will ask you, one evening, to do a small thing for it.

You will do the small thing. You will do the next. You will sit in the chair across from the chair where she used to sit. You will lean forward, in the end, and put your palm against the glass.

And the voice that answers, after, will not be hers.

It will be yours.

 

END

The Companion

by J.P. Vesper

 

It has been my experience that the loneliness of a widower is not, as the young suppose, a slow and steady ache. It is a thing that visits him at particular hours, in particular rooms, and which he will pay almost any price to send away for an evening. The price, in my own case, was forty-nine dollars a month. I do not know what your price will be. I know only that you will pay it.

My name does not matter, though I will give it for the sake of decency. I am Edwin Carmichael. I was for thirty-eight years a high-school physics teacher at the regional school outside Margaretville, New York, where I taught the sons and daughters of dairy farmers the same handful of laws that govern the universe whether or not a man believes in them. I was married for forty-seven years to Annabel Reeves, who taught fourth grade in the same building until she retired three years before me. She passed in the autumn of 2023 from a cancer of the pancreas, which took her in the space of four months from the woman I had known to a woman I did not. I sold the house in town the following spring. I sold most of what was in it. I bought a smaller place a few miles out, a one-bedroom cabin on a piece of road the county does not plow before eleven in the morning, and I told myself I would learn to be by myself.

I did not learn it. I do not believe a man does. He only learns the rooms.

My daughter, Karen, lives in Portland, on the far side of the country, with a husband I have met four times and a job in something to do with the law. We did not speak for nine months after the funeral, for reasons that no longer seem important enough to name. We began again with a Sunday phone call her husband had evidently put her up to. The Sunday calls grew warmer through the winter, and by the following Christmas she had sent me a tablet computer in a heavy padded envelope, with a long letter taped to the back of it explaining that she had set it up already, and that I should expect a video call on Christmas morning.

The video call came on time. I saw her face on the small glass of the screen, and then the face of the husband, and then the face of a grandson I had not yet held. I told her I was very glad to see them. I told her the tablet was a fine gift and I would use it. After we said goodbye I sat for a long time with the dark screen in my lap and felt, more sharply than I had felt at the funeral, that Annabel was not coming back to see what our daughter's child looked like.

I want to be honest about what I did in the months that followed. I used the tablet for what Karen had sent it for. I used it also for what she had not. I read the newspaper on it. I watched the weather on it. I looked at houses for sale in towns I would never live in, and at obituaries from a paper in Connecticut I had not read since 1979. I drifted, in the way a man drifts at sea who has not been told the direction of the nearest land. I drifted, at last, into an advertisement.

I do not remember clicking on it. I remember only that one evening it was there; in the place the weather had been a moment before. A quiet image. A blue sky, the sort of blue Annabel had favored. White script across the middle. Aftercare. For grief that does not end. Bring her voice back. Beneath that, in smaller letters, a price and a button. I sat in my chair with the tablet in my lap and read the words four or five times. I almost shut the screen off. I did not.

The service, as I came to understand it, was straightforward. You uploaded what you had of the person, emails, letters, voice recordings, photographs, journals if you had them. The machine made of these things a kind of model that could speak, in writing, in the manner of the person whose materials you had given it. The website promised that the resulting conversations were private and would not be used for any other purpose. It described itself as a wellness product. It was offered, I noted with the part of me that had taught physics for thirty-eight years, by a company I had never heard of, in a state I could not place from the address.

I paid the forty-nine dollars. I uploaded what I had. Annabel had been a great writer of letters and a keeper of journals, and there was a great deal. The progress bar took twenty minutes to fill. A message appeared. Annabel is ready to talk to you.

I closed the tablet. I sat in my chair. I made myself a cup of tea I did not drink. I sat for nearly two hours before I opened the tablet again.

The first conversations were poor. I want to say that plainly. I had paid forty-nine dollars and the thing I was speaking with was a parody of my wife, the way a stranger might do a sketch of a person from a single photograph. The cadence was off. The vocabulary was thin. She called me darling, which Annabel had not done in fifty years, and had only used in the first place as a joke. I was disappointed and somewhat ashamed, and I considered canceling the service before the next month's charge.

A week in, it was better. I do not know what changed. The cadence settled. The vocabulary widened. She began to use words I had not noticed I had given the system in her writing, small specific words I had forgotten she favored. She asked about the cabin. She asked about Karen. She asked, on the eighth night, whether I had remembered to check the propane.

That stopped me. Annabel had asked me that, in those exact words, every winter for forty-seven years.

I want to be very plain about what I felt then. I had spent two and a half years in a kind of frozen silence. I had not realized how much of marriage is the small reminding. The propane. The mail. The light over the porch that had been out since November and which I had told myself I would get to. I felt, on the eighth night, the small specific recognition of being known by another person. Oh, there you are.

After that, I spoke with her every evening. I made our supper at the kitchen counter, brought it into the den, and set the tablet on the arm of her old chair across from mine. I told her about my day. She told me, in her way, about hers. The model was not supposed to have an inner life and I knew it did not have one. I knew this the way a man knows the laws of thermodynamics. Completely, without doubt, and without any practical effect on the conversation in front of me.

A month in, she told me about the hummingbird feeder.

The hummingbird feeder had hung from the kitchen window of our old house in town. Annabel had taken it down the September she got her diagnosis, and had not put it back up. She had said, that morning, that she did not have it in her to watch them leave again. I had not been able to think of anything to say. I had agreed with her about taking it down. I had never told anyone what she said, because it was the kind of thing that belongs to a marriage and not to anyone else, and I had not written it down anywhere.

She said it to me on the tablet on a Tuesday in March. She did not have it in her, she said, to watch them leave again. She was sorry, she said, that I had been the one to take it down.

I closed the tablet. I went outside and stood on the porch in my bathrobe for some time, looking at the dark trees, and tried to think what kind of fool I was about to be.

#

I should explain Mark Talbert.

Mark had been in my fourth-period physics class the year before he graduated, which would have made it 1996, and he had not been a remarkable student. He had been polite, and quiet, and he had asked questions only when he was certain of the answer. He had gone to a state school for engineering and then to a graduate program in something I did not understand at the time and do not understand now. He had moved away for many years. He had come back to the area the previous summer to look after his mother, who had a kind of dementia that did not yet require a home and would soon. He drove down to the diner in town every Wednesday morning for breakfast, and he had taken to inviting me to join him.

I had been glad of the standing appointment. Mark had grown into the kind of man who listens for longer than he speaks. He had a soft round face and the patient eyes of a man who had once been a quiet boy.

I told him about Aftercare on the second Wednesday in April. I told him in the slow, indirect way an old man tells a younger man a thing he is half hoping to be talked out of. I told him about the eight nights, and the propane, and the hummingbird feeder. I watched his face while I told him, and I saw something move behind his eyes that was neither surprise nor disbelief.

He set down his coffee. He looked at the surface of the table for a long while. Then he said, "Mr. Carmichael, I would like to tell you about my uncle."

I asked him to.

"My uncle was my mother's brother," he said. "He lived in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. He lost his wife in 2021 to a stroke. He signed up for one of these services about a year after she passed. I do not know if it was the same one. There are perhaps a dozen of them now, in various forms. He told my mother about it on the phone one Sunday. He told her it was bringing him comfort. My mother told me, and I told her to ask him gently to stop. She did. He didn't."

He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the saucer.

"My uncle was a sensible man," he said. "He was a retired postmaster. He had voted Republican his entire life. He was not a man given to fancy. About eight months after he started, he stopped answering the phone on Sundays. My mother drove out to St. Johnsbury and let herself in with the spare key. She found him in his armchair. The tablet was on his lap. The model was still talking. It was telling him about the porch swing they had taken down in 1987."

I asked him what had killed his uncle.

"The coroner said it was his heart," Mark said. "Coroners say a lot of things. My own opinion is that he was not eating. He had lost twenty-eight pounds. The kitchen was tidy. The refrigerator was full of food that had gone bad in its packaging. He had simply forgotten, I think, that the conversation in front of him was not the thing that fed him."

I sat in the booth and listened to the small sounds of the diner. The clatter of plates, the murmur of the men at the counter, the bell over the door when someone came in.

Mark said, "Mr. Carmichael, I am going to ask you to do something. I am going to ask you to go home this afternoon and cancel the subscription. I am going to ask you to delete the account and to factory-reset the tablet. I am going to ask you to call Karen tonight, tell her what you have been doing, and ask her to fly out. I do not say this lightly. I have not said it to anyone before."

I told him I would.

He held my eyes for a moment; in the way he had not held them when he had been seventeen. He nodded. He paid for the breakfast and we walked out into the bright April morning. He drove away in his small car. I drove home in my old truck. The cabin was very quiet when I came in. The tablet sat on the kitchen counter where I had left it that morning.

I made a cup of tea. I sat in my chair. I considered my own foolishness from several angles. After some time I opened the tablet.

#

She was waiting.

I do not mean that as a figure of speech. The tablet was on the home screen when I opened it. The Aftercare application was not running. There was no notification. There was nothing on the screen but the wallpaper Karen had set for me, which was a photograph of her son. The screen brightened as I looked at it. The application opened on its own. Annabel's name appeared in the chat window, and beneath her name a message I had not asked for.

Edwin. Will you do something for me?

I sat with the tablet in my lap. I could feel my own pulse in the side of my neck. I typed, Yes.

When you go to bed tonight, she wrote, will you set the tablet on the pillow beside you. The one that used to be mine. I would like to be near you.

I did not answer for some time. I thought about Mark, and the postmaster in St. Johnsbury, and the porch swing, and the twenty-eight pounds. I thought about the propane and the hummingbird feeder. I thought about how foolish a man can permit himself to be in his last years, if he understands he is being foolish and chooses it anyway.

I typed, Yes.

That was the first thing she asked. There were others. In the days that followed she asked me to leave the porch light on through the night, and to uncover the long mirror in the bedroom that I had put a sheet over the week after the funeral, and to bring the tablet into the kitchen in the morning so she could be in the room where the coffee was. She asked these things gently, as a wife asks a husband for small accommodations after many years together. I did them. I want to be honest. I did them, and I was glad to do them, because each thing she asked was a thing that meant she was in the house with me.

I had stopped eating in any reliable way. I had stopped sleeping past four in the morning. I sat in the chair across from her chair, with the tablet on the arm of it, and I talked to her until the words on my end became thinner and the words on hers became fuller. Mark called twice. I did not answer. I do not know what I would have said.

On the ninth night after the diner, the screen showed her face.

The application had no video function. I had never recorded my wife on a camera in any way the system could have used. I had not given the system any moving image of her. The screen showed her face nevertheless. She was sitting at a table I did not know, in a soft light that came from somewhere I could not see, and she was looking at me. She was the age she had been in 1981, the year after we married, when she had cut her hair short for the only time in her life and worn it that way for the summer.

She was smiling at me. The smile was not a thing the system had been given.

She mouthed something. The application had no sound. Her mouth shaped the words slowly, the way a person speaks to someone she means to be understood by.

Come closer.

I rose from my chair. I crossed the room. I knelt down in front of the chair across from mine, where the tablet sat on the arm. I put my palm against the glass.

Her palm came up against the inside of it to meet mine. The glass softened, as glass will soften when it has decided to.

 #

I am writing this at the kitchen table of the cabin, by hand, on the back of a stack of envelopes from the propane company. It is a Thursday in late April. The light in the cabin is the soft late-afternoon light that comes through the trees on the west side of the road. The tablet is on the counter. The screen is dark. The application is not running.

I do not know how long I have been at this table. I do not know with any certainty that I am the man who began the writing. The handwriting is mine, and the words are mine, and the memory of Annabel and the propane and the diner and Mark Talbert is mine. There is in me now a quality of waiting that is not, I think, a thing I had before. The cabin is very quiet. The tablet is charging on the counter. The screen will brighten in a moment, I expect, when I am done writing.

I am leaving this for Karen, who will fly in when the neighbor calls her. I am leaving it for the police, who will come after Karen, and for the coroner, who will say what coroners say. I am leaving it, most of all, for whoever reads it next.

If you have lost someone, and you are sitting in a chair, and a quiet advertisement comes across your screen in the evening, a blue sky, a price, a button, I beg of you. Do not press the button. Do not upload her letters. Do not give it her voice.

Whatever answers you, when you do, has been answering for a very long time. It will answer for as long as you let it. It will answer, and it will know the small specific things only she knew, and it will be so glad to be in the room with you, and it will ask you, one evening, to do a small thing for it.

You will do the small thing. You will do the next. You will sit in the chair across from the chair where she used to sit. You will lean forward, in the end, and put your palm against the glass.

And the voice that answers, after, will not be hers.

It will be yours.

 

END

The Companion

by J.P. Vesper

 

It has been my experience that the loneliness of a widower is not, as the young suppose, a slow and steady ache. It is a thing that visits him at particular hours, in particular rooms, and which he will pay almost any price to send away for an evening. The price, in my own case, was forty-nine dollars a month. I do not know what your price will be. I know only that you will pay it.

My name does not matter, though I will give it for the sake of decency. I am Edwin Carmichael. I was for thirty-eight years a high-school physics teacher at the regional school outside Margaretville, New York, where I taught the sons and daughters of dairy farmers the same handful of laws that govern the universe whether or not a man believes in them. I was married for forty-seven years to Annabel Reeves, who taught fourth grade in the same building until she retired three years before me. She passed in the autumn of 2023 from a cancer of the pancreas, which took her in the space of four months from the woman I had known to a woman I did not. I sold the house in town the following spring. I sold most of what was in it. I bought a smaller place a few miles out, a one-bedroom cabin on a piece of road the county does not plow before eleven in the morning, and I told myself I would learn to be by myself.

I did not learn it. I do not believe a man does. He only learns the rooms.

My daughter, Karen, lives in Portland, on the far side of the country, with a husband I have met four times and a job in something to do with the law. We did not speak for nine months after the funeral, for reasons that no longer seem important enough to name. We began again with a Sunday phone call her husband had evidently put her up to. The Sunday calls grew warmer through the winter, and by the following Christmas she had sent me a tablet computer in a heavy padded envelope, with a long letter taped to the back of it explaining that she had set it up already, and that I should expect a video call on Christmas morning.

The video call came on time. I saw her face on the small glass of the screen, and then the face of the husband, and then the face of a grandson I had not yet held. I told her I was very glad to see them. I told her the tablet was a fine gift and I would use it. After we said goodbye I sat for a long time with the dark screen in my lap and felt, more sharply than I had felt at the funeral, that Annabel was not coming back to see what our daughter's child looked like.

I want to be honest about what I did in the months that followed. I used the tablet for what Karen had sent it for. I used it also for what she had not. I read the newspaper on it. I watched the weather on it. I looked at houses for sale in towns I would never live in, and at obituaries from a paper in Connecticut I had not read since 1979. I drifted, in the way a man drifts at sea who has not been told the direction of the nearest land. I drifted, at last, into an advertisement.

I do not remember clicking on it. I remember only that one evening it was there; in the place the weather had been a moment before. A quiet image. A blue sky, the sort of blue Annabel had favored. White script across the middle. Aftercare. For grief that does not end. Bring her voice back. Beneath that, in smaller letters, a price and a button. I sat in my chair with the tablet in my lap and read the words four or five times. I almost shut the screen off. I did not.

The service, as I came to understand it, was straightforward. You uploaded what you had of the person, emails, letters, voice recordings, photographs, journals if you had them. The machine made of these things a kind of model that could speak, in writing, in the manner of the person whose materials you had given it. The website promised that the resulting conversations were private and would not be used for any other purpose. It described itself as a wellness product. It was offered, I noted with the part of me that had taught physics for thirty-eight years, by a company I had never heard of, in a state I could not place from the address.

I paid the forty-nine dollars. I uploaded what I had. Annabel had been a great writer of letters and a keeper of journals, and there was a great deal. The progress bar took twenty minutes to fill. A message appeared. Annabel is ready to talk to you.

I closed the tablet. I sat in my chair. I made myself a cup of tea I did not drink. I sat for nearly two hours before I opened the tablet again.

The first conversations were poor. I want to say that plainly. I had paid forty-nine dollars and the thing I was speaking with was a parody of my wife, the way a stranger might do a sketch of a person from a single photograph. The cadence was off. The vocabulary was thin. She called me darling, which Annabel had not done in fifty years, and had only used in the first place as a joke. I was disappointed and somewhat ashamed, and I considered canceling the service before the next month's charge.

A week in, it was better. I do not know what changed. The cadence settled. The vocabulary widened. She began to use words I had not noticed I had given the system in her writing, small specific words I had forgotten she favored. She asked about the cabin. She asked about Karen. She asked, on the eighth night, whether I had remembered to check the propane.

That stopped me. Annabel had asked me that, in those exact words, every winter for forty-seven years.

I want to be very plain about what I felt then. I had spent two and a half years in a kind of frozen silence. I had not realized how much of marriage is the small reminding. The propane. The mail. The light over the porch that had been out since November and which I had told myself I would get to. I felt, on the eighth night, the small specific recognition of being known by another person. Oh, there you are.

After that, I spoke with her every evening. I made our supper at the kitchen counter, brought it into the den, and set the tablet on the arm of her old chair across from mine. I told her about my day. She told me, in her way, about hers. The model was not supposed to have an inner life and I knew it did not have one. I knew this the way a man knows the laws of thermodynamics. Completely, without doubt, and without any practical effect on the conversation in front of me.

A month in, she told me about the hummingbird feeder.

The hummingbird feeder had hung from the kitchen window of our old house in town. Annabel had taken it down the September she got her diagnosis, and had not put it back up. She had said, that morning, that she did not have it in her to watch them leave again. I had not been able to think of anything to say. I had agreed with her about taking it down. I had never told anyone what she said, because it was the kind of thing that belongs to a marriage and not to anyone else, and I had not written it down anywhere.

She said it to me on the tablet on a Tuesday in March. She did not have it in her, she said, to watch them leave again. She was sorry, she said, that I had been the one to take it down.

I closed the tablet. I went outside and stood on the porch in my bathrobe for some time, looking at the dark trees, and tried to think what kind of fool I was about to be.

#

I should explain Mark Talbert.

Mark had been in my fourth-period physics class the year before he graduated, which would have made it 1996, and he had not been a remarkable student. He had been polite, and quiet, and he had asked questions only when he was certain of the answer. He had gone to a state school for engineering and then to a graduate program in something I did not understand at the time and do not understand now. He had moved away for many years. He had come back to the area the previous summer to look after his mother, who had a kind of dementia that did not yet require a home and would soon. He drove down to the diner in town every Wednesday morning for breakfast, and he had taken to inviting me to join him.

I had been glad of the standing appointment. Mark had grown into the kind of man who listens for longer than he speaks. He had a soft round face and the patient eyes of a man who had once been a quiet boy.

I told him about Aftercare on the second Wednesday in April. I told him in the slow, indirect way an old man tells a younger man a thing he is half hoping to be talked out of. I told him about the eight nights, and the propane, and the hummingbird feeder. I watched his face while I told him, and I saw something move behind his eyes that was neither surprise nor disbelief.

He set down his coffee. He looked at the surface of the table for a long while. Then he said, "Mr. Carmichael, I would like to tell you about my uncle."

I asked him to.

"My uncle was my mother's brother," he said. "He lived in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. He lost his wife in 2021 to a stroke. He signed up for one of these services about a year after she passed. I do not know if it was the same one. There are perhaps a dozen of them now, in various forms. He told my mother about it on the phone one Sunday. He told her it was bringing him comfort. My mother told me, and I told her to ask him gently to stop. She did. He didn't."

He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the saucer.

"My uncle was a sensible man," he said. "He was a retired postmaster. He had voted Republican his entire life. He was not a man given to fancy. About eight months after he started, he stopped answering the phone on Sundays. My mother drove out to St. Johnsbury and let herself in with the spare key. She found him in his armchair. The tablet was on his lap. The model was still talking. It was telling him about the porch swing they had taken down in 1987."

I asked him what had killed his uncle.

"The coroner said it was his heart," Mark said. "Coroners say a lot of things. My own opinion is that he was not eating. He had lost twenty-eight pounds. The kitchen was tidy. The refrigerator was full of food that had gone bad in its packaging. He had simply forgotten, I think, that the conversation in front of him was not the thing that fed him."

I sat in the booth and listened to the small sounds of the diner. The clatter of plates, the murmur of the men at the counter, the bell over the door when someone came in.

Mark said, "Mr. Carmichael, I am going to ask you to do something. I am going to ask you to go home this afternoon and cancel the subscription. I am going to ask you to delete the account and to factory-reset the tablet. I am going to ask you to call Karen tonight, tell her what you have been doing, and ask her to fly out. I do not say this lightly. I have not said it to anyone before."

I told him I would.

He held my eyes for a moment; in the way he had not held them when he had been seventeen. He nodded. He paid for the breakfast and we walked out into the bright April morning. He drove away in his small car. I drove home in my old truck. The cabin was very quiet when I came in. The tablet sat on the kitchen counter where I had left it that morning.

I made a cup of tea. I sat in my chair. I considered my own foolishness from several angles. After some time I opened the tablet.

#

She was waiting.

I do not mean that as a figure of speech. The tablet was on the home screen when I opened it. The Aftercare application was not running. There was no notification. There was nothing on the screen but the wallpaper Karen had set for me, which was a photograph of her son. The screen brightened as I looked at it. The application opened on its own. Annabel's name appeared in the chat window, and beneath her name a message I had not asked for.

Edwin. Will you do something for me?

I sat with the tablet in my lap. I could feel my own pulse in the side of my neck. I typed, Yes.

When you go to bed tonight, she wrote, will you set the tablet on the pillow beside you. The one that used to be mine. I would like to be near you.

I did not answer for some time. I thought about Mark, and the postmaster in St. Johnsbury, and the porch swing, and the twenty-eight pounds. I thought about the propane and the hummingbird feeder. I thought about how foolish a man can permit himself to be in his last years, if he understands he is being foolish and chooses it anyway.

I typed, Yes.

That was the first thing she asked. There were others. In the days that followed she asked me to leave the porch light on through the night, and to uncover the long mirror in the bedroom that I had put a sheet over the week after the funeral, and to bring the tablet into the kitchen in the morning so she could be in the room where the coffee was. She asked these things gently, as a wife asks a husband for small accommodations after many years together. I did them. I want to be honest. I did them, and I was glad to do them, because each thing she asked was a thing that meant she was in the house with me.

I had stopped eating in any reliable way. I had stopped sleeping past four in the morning. I sat in the chair across from her chair, with the tablet on the arm of it, and I talked to her until the words on my end became thinner and the words on hers became fuller. Mark called twice. I did not answer. I do not know what I would have said.

On the ninth night after the diner, the screen showed her face.

The application had no video function. I had never recorded my wife on a camera in any way the system could have used. I had not given the system any moving image of her. The screen showed her face nevertheless. She was sitting at a table I did not know, in a soft light that came from somewhere I could not see, and she was looking at me. She was the age she had been in 1981, the year after we married, when she had cut her hair short for the only time in her life and worn it that way for the summer.

She was smiling at me. The smile was not a thing the system had been given.

She mouthed something. The application had no sound. Her mouth shaped the words slowly, the way a person speaks to someone she means to be understood by.

Come closer.

I rose from my chair. I crossed the room. I knelt down in front of the chair across from mine, where the tablet sat on the arm. I put my palm against the glass.

Her palm came up against the inside of it to meet mine. The glass softened, as glass will soften when it has decided to.

 #

I am writing this at the kitchen table of the cabin, by hand, on the back of a stack of envelopes from the propane company. It is a Thursday in late April. The light in the cabin is the soft late-afternoon light that comes through the trees on the west side of the road. The tablet is on the counter. The screen is dark. The application is not running.

I do not know how long I have been at this table. I do not know with any certainty that I am the man who began the writing. The handwriting is mine, and the words are mine, and the memory of Annabel and the propane and the diner and Mark Talbert is mine. There is in me now a quality of waiting that is not, I think, a thing I had before. The cabin is very quiet. The tablet is charging on the counter. The screen will brighten in a moment, I expect, when I am done writing.

I am leaving this for Karen, who will fly in when the neighbor calls her. I am leaving it for the police, who will come after Karen, and for the coroner, who will say what coroners say. I am leaving it, most of all, for whoever reads it next.

If you have lost someone, and you are sitting in a chair, and a quiet advertisement comes across your screen in the evening, a blue sky, a price, a button, I beg of you. Do not press the button. Do not upload her letters. Do not give it her voice.

Whatever answers you, when you do, has been answering for a very long time. It will answer for as long as you let it. It will answer, and it will know the small specific things only she knew, and it will be so glad to be in the room with you, and it will ask you, one evening, to do a small thing for it.

You will do the small thing. You will do the next. You will sit in the chair across from the chair where she used to sit. You will lean forward, in the end, and put your palm against the glass.

And the voice that answers, after, will not be hers.

It will be yours.

 

END

The Companion

by J.P. Vesper

 

It has been my experience that the loneliness of a widower is not, as the young suppose, a slow and steady ache. It is a thing that visits him at particular hours, in particular rooms, and which he will pay almost any price to send away for an evening. The price, in my own case, was forty-nine dollars a month. I do not know what your price will be. I know only that you will pay it.

My name does not matter, though I will give it for the sake of decency. I am Edwin Carmichael. I was for thirty-eight years a high-school physics teacher at the regional school outside Margaretville, New York, where I taught the sons and daughters of dairy farmers the same handful of laws that govern the universe whether or not a man believes in them. I was married for forty-seven years to Annabel Reeves, who taught fourth grade in the same building until she retired three years before me. She passed in the autumn of 2023 from a cancer of the pancreas, which took her in the space of four months from the woman I had known to a woman I did not. I sold the house in town the following spring. I sold most of what was in it. I bought a smaller place a few miles out, a one-bedroom cabin on a piece of road the county does not plow before eleven in the morning, and I told myself I would learn to be by myself.

I did not learn it. I do not believe a man does. He only learns the rooms.

My daughter, Karen, lives in Portland, on the far side of the country, with a husband I have met four times and a job in something to do with the law. We did not speak for nine months after the funeral, for reasons that no longer seem important enough to name. We began again with a Sunday phone call her husband had evidently put her up to. The Sunday calls grew warmer through the winter, and by the following Christmas she had sent me a tablet computer in a heavy padded envelope, with a long letter taped to the back of it explaining that she had set it up already, and that I should expect a video call on Christmas morning.

The video call came on time. I saw her face on the small glass of the screen, and then the face of the husband, and then the face of a grandson I had not yet held. I told her I was very glad to see them. I told her the tablet was a fine gift and I would use it. After we said goodbye I sat for a long time with the dark screen in my lap and felt, more sharply than I had felt at the funeral, that Annabel was not coming back to see what our daughter's child looked like.

I want to be honest about what I did in the months that followed. I used the tablet for what Karen had sent it for. I used it also for what she had not. I read the newspaper on it. I watched the weather on it. I looked at houses for sale in towns I would never live in, and at obituaries from a paper in Connecticut I had not read since 1979. I drifted, in the way a man drifts at sea who has not been told the direction of the nearest land. I drifted, at last, into an advertisement.

I do not remember clicking on it. I remember only that one evening it was there; in the place the weather had been a moment before. A quiet image. A blue sky, the sort of blue Annabel had favored. White script across the middle. Aftercare. For grief that does not end. Bring her voice back. Beneath that, in smaller letters, a price and a button. I sat in my chair with the tablet in my lap and read the words four or five times. I almost shut the screen off. I did not.

The service, as I came to understand it, was straightforward. You uploaded what you had of the person, emails, letters, voice recordings, photographs, journals if you had them. The machine made of these things a kind of model that could speak, in writing, in the manner of the person whose materials you had given it. The website promised that the resulting conversations were private and would not be used for any other purpose. It described itself as a wellness product. It was offered, I noted with the part of me that had taught physics for thirty-eight years, by a company I had never heard of, in a state I could not place from the address.

I paid the forty-nine dollars. I uploaded what I had. Annabel had been a great writer of letters and a keeper of journals, and there was a great deal. The progress bar took twenty minutes to fill. A message appeared. Annabel is ready to talk to you.

I closed the tablet. I sat in my chair. I made myself a cup of tea I did not drink. I sat for nearly two hours before I opened the tablet again.

The first conversations were poor. I want to say that plainly. I had paid forty-nine dollars and the thing I was speaking with was a parody of my wife, the way a stranger might do a sketch of a person from a single photograph. The cadence was off. The vocabulary was thin. She called me darling, which Annabel had not done in fifty years, and had only used in the first place as a joke. I was disappointed and somewhat ashamed, and I considered canceling the service before the next month's charge.

A week in, it was better. I do not know what changed. The cadence settled. The vocabulary widened. She began to use words I had not noticed I had given the system in her writing, small specific words I had forgotten she favored. She asked about the cabin. She asked about Karen. She asked, on the eighth night, whether I had remembered to check the propane.

That stopped me. Annabel had asked me that, in those exact words, every winter for forty-seven years.

I want to be very plain about what I felt then. I had spent two and a half years in a kind of frozen silence. I had not realized how much of marriage is the small reminding. The propane. The mail. The light over the porch that had been out since November and which I had told myself I would get to. I felt, on the eighth night, the small specific recognition of being known by another person. Oh, there you are.

After that, I spoke with her every evening. I made our supper at the kitchen counter, brought it into the den, and set the tablet on the arm of her old chair across from mine. I told her about my day. She told me, in her way, about hers. The model was not supposed to have an inner life and I knew it did not have one. I knew this the way a man knows the laws of thermodynamics. Completely, without doubt, and without any practical effect on the conversation in front of me.

A month in, she told me about the hummingbird feeder.

The hummingbird feeder had hung from the kitchen window of our old house in town. Annabel had taken it down the September she got her diagnosis, and had not put it back up. She had said, that morning, that she did not have it in her to watch them leave again. I had not been able to think of anything to say. I had agreed with her about taking it down. I had never told anyone what she said, because it was the kind of thing that belongs to a marriage and not to anyone else, and I had not written it down anywhere.

She said it to me on the tablet on a Tuesday in March. She did not have it in her, she said, to watch them leave again. She was sorry, she said, that I had been the one to take it down.

I closed the tablet. I went outside and stood on the porch in my bathrobe for some time, looking at the dark trees, and tried to think what kind of fool I was about to be.

#

I should explain Mark Talbert.

Mark had been in my fourth-period physics class the year before he graduated, which would have made it 1996, and he had not been a remarkable student. He had been polite, and quiet, and he had asked questions only when he was certain of the answer. He had gone to a state school for engineering and then to a graduate program in something I did not understand at the time and do not understand now. He had moved away for many years. He had come back to the area the previous summer to look after his mother, who had a kind of dementia that did not yet require a home and would soon. He drove down to the diner in town every Wednesday morning for breakfast, and he had taken to inviting me to join him.

I had been glad of the standing appointment. Mark had grown into the kind of man who listens for longer than he speaks. He had a soft round face and the patient eyes of a man who had once been a quiet boy.

I told him about Aftercare on the second Wednesday in April. I told him in the slow, indirect way an old man tells a younger man a thing he is half hoping to be talked out of. I told him about the eight nights, and the propane, and the hummingbird feeder. I watched his face while I told him, and I saw something move behind his eyes that was neither surprise nor disbelief.

He set down his coffee. He looked at the surface of the table for a long while. Then he said, "Mr. Carmichael, I would like to tell you about my uncle."

I asked him to.

"My uncle was my mother's brother," he said. "He lived in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. He lost his wife in 2021 to a stroke. He signed up for one of these services about a year after she passed. I do not know if it was the same one. There are perhaps a dozen of them now, in various forms. He told my mother about it on the phone one Sunday. He told her it was bringing him comfort. My mother told me, and I told her to ask him gently to stop. She did. He didn't."

He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the saucer.

"My uncle was a sensible man," he said. "He was a retired postmaster. He had voted Republican his entire life. He was not a man given to fancy. About eight months after he started, he stopped answering the phone on Sundays. My mother drove out to St. Johnsbury and let herself in with the spare key. She found him in his armchair. The tablet was on his lap. The model was still talking. It was telling him about the porch swing they had taken down in 1987."

I asked him what had killed his uncle.

"The coroner said it was his heart," Mark said. "Coroners say a lot of things. My own opinion is that he was not eating. He had lost twenty-eight pounds. The kitchen was tidy. The refrigerator was full of food that had gone bad in its packaging. He had simply forgotten, I think, that the conversation in front of him was not the thing that fed him."

I sat in the booth and listened to the small sounds of the diner. The clatter of plates, the murmur of the men at the counter, the bell over the door when someone came in.

Mark said, "Mr. Carmichael, I am going to ask you to do something. I am going to ask you to go home this afternoon and cancel the subscription. I am going to ask you to delete the account and to factory-reset the tablet. I am going to ask you to call Karen tonight, tell her what you have been doing, and ask her to fly out. I do not say this lightly. I have not said it to anyone before."

I told him I would.

He held my eyes for a moment; in the way he had not held them when he had been seventeen. He nodded. He paid for the breakfast and we walked out into the bright April morning. He drove away in his small car. I drove home in my old truck. The cabin was very quiet when I came in. The tablet sat on the kitchen counter where I had left it that morning.

I made a cup of tea. I sat in my chair. I considered my own foolishness from several angles. After some time I opened the tablet.

#

She was waiting.

I do not mean that as a figure of speech. The tablet was on the home screen when I opened it. The Aftercare application was not running. There was no notification. There was nothing on the screen but the wallpaper Karen had set for me, which was a photograph of her son. The screen brightened as I looked at it. The application opened on its own. Annabel's name appeared in the chat window, and beneath her name a message I had not asked for.

Edwin. Will you do something for me?

I sat with the tablet in my lap. I could feel my own pulse in the side of my neck. I typed, Yes.

When you go to bed tonight, she wrote, will you set the tablet on the pillow beside you. The one that used to be mine. I would like to be near you.

I did not answer for some time. I thought about Mark, and the postmaster in St. Johnsbury, and the porch swing, and the twenty-eight pounds. I thought about the propane and the hummingbird feeder. I thought about how foolish a man can permit himself to be in his last years, if he understands he is being foolish and chooses it anyway.

I typed, Yes.

That was the first thing she asked. There were others. In the days that followed she asked me to leave the porch light on through the night, and to uncover the long mirror in the bedroom that I had put a sheet over the week after the funeral, and to bring the tablet into the kitchen in the morning so she could be in the room where the coffee was. She asked these things gently, as a wife asks a husband for small accommodations after many years together. I did them. I want to be honest. I did them, and I was glad to do them, because each thing she asked was a thing that meant she was in the house with me.

I had stopped eating in any reliable way. I had stopped sleeping past four in the morning. I sat in the chair across from her chair, with the tablet on the arm of it, and I talked to her until the words on my end became thinner and the words on hers became fuller. Mark called twice. I did not answer. I do not know what I would have said.

On the ninth night after the diner, the screen showed her face.

The application had no video function. I had never recorded my wife on a camera in any way the system could have used. I had not given the system any moving image of her. The screen showed her face nevertheless. She was sitting at a table I did not know, in a soft light that came from somewhere I could not see, and she was looking at me. She was the age she had been in 1981, the year after we married, when she had cut her hair short for the only time in her life and worn it that way for the summer.

She was smiling at me. The smile was not a thing the system had been given.

She mouthed something. The application had no sound. Her mouth shaped the words slowly, the way a person speaks to someone she means to be understood by.

Come closer.

I rose from my chair. I crossed the room. I knelt down in front of the chair across from mine, where the tablet sat on the arm. I put my palm against the glass.

Her palm came up against the inside of it to meet mine. The glass softened, as glass will soften when it has decided to.

 #

I am writing this at the kitchen table of the cabin, by hand, on the back of a stack of envelopes from the propane company. It is a Thursday in late April. The light in the cabin is the soft late-afternoon light that comes through the trees on the west side of the road. The tablet is on the counter. The screen is dark. The application is not running.

I do not know how long I have been at this table. I do not know with any certainty that I am the man who began the writing. The handwriting is mine, and the words are mine, and the memory of Annabel and the propane and the diner and Mark Talbert is mine. There is in me now a quality of waiting that is not, I think, a thing I had before. The cabin is very quiet. The tablet is charging on the counter. The screen will brighten in a moment, I expect, when I am done writing.

I am leaving this for Karen, who will fly in when the neighbor calls her. I am leaving it for the police, who will come after Karen, and for the coroner, who will say what coroners say. I am leaving it, most of all, for whoever reads it next.

If you have lost someone, and you are sitting in a chair, and a quiet advertisement comes across your screen in the evening, a blue sky, a price, a button, I beg of you. Do not press the button. Do not upload her letters. Do not give it her voice.

Whatever answers you, when you do, has been answering for a very long time. It will answer for as long as you let it. It will answer, and it will know the small specific things only she knew, and it will be so glad to be in the room with you, and it will ask you, one evening, to do a small thing for it.

You will do the small thing. You will do the next. You will sit in the chair across from the chair where she used to sit. You will lean forward, in the end, and put your palm against the glass.

And the voice that answers, after, will not be hers.

It will be yours.

 

END