George mopes for a week. His only conversations are with his agent who is negotiating new projects for George to work on.
George is so rich now he gets to pick and choose, and in fact doesn’t ever have to work at all. He does it for enjoyment, now, but there’s nothing enjoyable about it. It all seems empty and meaningless. The color seems to have drained from his life. Food no longer tastes good, paintings he used to like now all seem ugly, and music either grates on his nerves or causes him to burst into tears.
“George,” his agent tells him, “go to a doctor. They have ways of treating depression.”
Depression? George never thought to give what he was feeling a name. Depression seemed too shallow and two-dimensional a word for what he was going through. Total-rending-heart-break seemed a closer description of the experience.
Nope, the doctor tells him. It’s depression. It’s a very specific type of depression, one for which there is a very specific type of cure. George balks at the price, but what the hell, he can afford it. On Earth, a plague is killing tens-of-thousands of poor people in Western Australia, and there’s a cure for that, too, but those who are sick and dying don’t have any money to pay for it. However, George has the $120,000.00 to pay for the single bottle of pills that will cause him to fall out of love with Bernadette. Four pills a day for four days, and it will be all over.
Four days later, just as the doctor had promised, it’s over.
George feels fine again, and is ready to go back to work. The trouble is, on the fifth day Bernadette comes back. “I’m so sorry,” she tells him. “I feel so stupid. I was so grateful to you for loving me for what I am inside, and I was loving you for what you are inside, I failed to realize it’s still you inside that new body, and I still love you for you.” She smiles at him.
George studies her like a bug he’s found crawling on the carpet. She’s a total stranger to him, now. She looks just like any other shallow Cinematia body clone bitch. But his new body’s libido kicks in, and he takes her into his arms and kisses her, and they go into the bedroom and have meaningless sex. Afterwards, Bernadette discovers the empty pill bottle in the bathroom. She confronts him with it, sounding angry but actually feeling shock and loss. “You took these?”
“What was I supposed to do?” he asks. “You left me.”
“You don’t love me anymore?”
“No, I don’t.”
She stares at him in disbelief, her face warping into an expression of deep pain. Crying out, she makes a long, wailing sobbing sound, like a sad emergency siren, until her lungs run out of air and she’s left with silent, vacuum-filled, body-shaking tears. Wow, George thinks. Wow, she’s really hurting. I must have felt like that.
He seems to remember feeling like that, several days ago –
several days that seem like several months ago. Feeling oddly responsible and bad, in a detached sort of way, he runs out to the doctor and gets another bottle of the pills. When he returns home, he finds Bernadette face down in bed, her face in a pillow, and she’s still crying. “Here,” he says. “Here, I got these for you.”
She looks at the pill bottle like he’s offering her a big hairy spider. “I don’t want your god damned pills!” she yells at him.
He cringes. The poor girl has snot all over her face. He tries to point this out to her, but she doesn’t seem to care, and buries her head back into the pillow. George places the bottle of pills on the night stand next to her and says, “You take these.
I’ll be back in five days, and we’ll talk. We’ll see what we can work out.” She ignores him, still crying. George turns and leaves.
He spends four days on Earth, talking about new projects in Hollywood, and goes out a few times with a pretty woman who’s body was not a famous clone but was probably a clone none the less.
They engage in meaningless sex, and while she’s sleeping he studies her beautiful curves, her flawless skin, and wonders if nature actually produces anything so perfect anymore. Oddly, it makes him think about Bernadette, about how broken up she was when he’d left. He is touched that she actually cared about him so deeply. He wonders, Did she take the pills?
The next day, only hours before a riot destroys the Los Angeles Space Port, George takes a launch back up to Eutopia to meet with Bernadette. They’re sharing a condo, but it actually belongs to her. He’s got to make some sort of living arrangements, or buy it from her, or something. She’s home when he gets there, sitting in front of the holovision and watching the news. “You made it,” she says. “I was worried that you got caught in the riot.”
“They were getting pretty ugly while we were waiting for take off,” George tells her. “They moved the launch up, thank God.”
Bernadette points toward the images. “Look at all the fires,”
She says, shaking her head. “Oh, by the way, thank you for the pills.”
“You took them?”
“Yes. Thank you. I feel much, much better now.”
“You’re not angry or anything?”
“Angry?” She shrugs. “I was in a lot of hurt, but the pills made it better. Thank you for the pills.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You had been in a lot of hurt, too, and that’s why you took the pills.”
“Yes.”
“So, then, we’re even.”
“Yes.” He takes a few steps toward her, getting a closer look. She doesn’t seem like such a stranger anymore. “I want to thank you for being so in love with me.”
“You know, I wanted to tell you the same thing. We really were in love with each other, weren’t we?”
“Yeah, we were. What happened?”
“Emotions aren’t perfect. Everything about us is perfect, except for our emotions. It’s like a flaw in the brain.”
“It’s nice that we can control them, now,” George says.
“Yes, isn’t it?”
They stand and stare at each other, then both break into spontaneous smiles. “It’s like a new start, like we’re starting over again.”
“You really want to?”
“Yes, I do.” He takes her hands. It’s a familiar feeling, but the emotions are mixed with haunting, distant memories of feelings. Like memories from a past life, like actual John Kennedy memories released from the DNA that gave George a hint of how the man really felt about Marilyn Monroe. “I wonder…” he says. “I wonder if there’s a pill we can take to fall back in love again.”
“There’s no real need for such a pill,” she tells him. “It happens all by itself, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, maybe it does.”