Peter found the love of his life on a cool summer morning two days before he met the woman he would marry.
He was browsing wild mushrooms at the farmer’s market. He remembered seeing an NYT recipe for pasta with morels, peas, and parmesan. As he paid the bearded vendor, another customer with eyes like diamonds caught his gaze.
“Do not drink when you eat those,” she said. “You will get very, very sick.”
She carried a tote with a mycelium print, and they wound up on the top floor, sipping coffee and picking at strawberry muffins. Her name was Ana; her teeth were slightly bent, and her frayed blonde hair was a little oily. She talked of her family in Ukraine, home-brewing mead, and bell hooks.
When Peter called her the next day, he had already written their entire lilac future in his head. Then she set fire to it: there had been a family emergency in Omsk, and she was leaving the country indefinitely. She was sorry; he seemed sweet.
Peter wrapped himself in a blanket and ate salted caramel Häagen-Dazs from the pint. He fell asleep on the couch with quiet jazz on the speakers. In the morning, he called in to work sick.
Peter observed the posters outside the multiplex while scrolling through showtimes on his phone. Enveloped in bright air-conditioning and the smell of fresh popcorn, he entered the cinema and ordered a black coffee.
Two men in their thirties were inside: one in front, the other in the back. A couple was tucked away on the left-hand side. Peter’s assigned seat was in the last aisle, at the top of the stairs, giving him extra legroom.
As the last trailer played, a young woman entered the theatre. She had youthful, cropped bangs and long, orange nails. She wore a thrifted plaid shirt and loose-fitting high-rise jeans.
Embarrassed, she realized she had accidentally bought the seat beside Peter. There was plenty of room to move, but she liked the legroom too, so she took her place beside him. They were so close that their elbows touched.
Slipping out to check a phone with no notifications, Peter gazed at himself in the bathroom mirror. In blue jeans and a grey crewneck sweater, he found himself wanting.
Once he returned, the girl leaned over and touched his arm with her soft fingers. She whispered everything he had missed into his ear, but he didn’t hear a word of it. He felt her warm breath against his skin, and he shivered at the thought of her tongue.
When the movie ended and the lights came on, he felt her hand touch him again. “There’s a post-credit scene,” she said.
They left the auditorium together, agreeing that the movie hadn’t been very good. Peter said it was bafflingly generic, as if AI had written it.
“It probably did,” the girl said. “They can’t credit it for copyright, but all the studios are doing it.”
They continued chatting on the way out: her name was Emily, and she worked in adult education. She loved old movies, housecats, and astrology. He walked her to her car, and they exchanged numbers. She hugged him awkwardly before driving away.
Peter glowed brighter than starlight the rest of that week. He gushed to his friends at trivia, and most of them were happy for him. Matt said she sounded perfect, and Luke nodded. John, a few beers deep, disagreed.
“People don’t meet like that,” he said. “Not naturally.”
The table groaned.
“Don’t listen to him,” Andrea said. “He just hates love.”
“I don’t hate love. I’m just realistic. It sounds too much like a story.”
Trivia began, and Peter got all the sports questions right. Their team placed third overall.
Washing his hands in the bathroom, Peter felt Mark touch his shoulder. “Don’t listen to John,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if she’s real or not. What you feel is what’s real. Nothing can change that.”
Peter lay awake that night, tossing and turning. He drank chamomile tea and tried to read for an hour, but his eyes wouldn’t focus. In the wee hours of morning, he slipped into a light doze.
***
By Mark’s definition, Emily was indeed unreal. Still, she was of flesh, blood, and bone. She was born from a womb and had fed from a breast. She breathed air, drank water, and ate salt. And all of this was done autonomously for the first 28 years of her life.
Then David stilted her two months after they’d become engaged. There were no signs; one morning, he decided that a new girl from work was more interesting than his six-year relationship. He took his television and record player, leaving Emily the cats.
Dating in her late twenties was an exhausting and terrifying beast. Emily went to lunch with a cute man named Brian, who worked in finance. He seemed nice as they shared arugula salads and flatbreads, but a deluge of drunk, sexual texts flooded her phone that same night as she watched reality TV. She blocked the number, disappointed.
Everything else was a tedious blend of one-night stands and missing sparks. For jaded lovers, the hypothetical was always greater than the flawed bodies in their arms. They all had their phones, and their phones contained multitudes.
In a pit of despair, feeling loveless and forlorn, Emily signed away all of her data and filled out a series of strict NDA agreements. She paid an exorbitant fee, and a smiling face appeared on her laptop to tell her she had been approved. A profile photo was generated from a composite of her digital footprint, and her life began anew.
“I’m not sure if he’s my type,” she entered into her computer upon arriving home.
“Irrelevant,” the response came.
“There was no spark. I’m worried.”
“Irrelevant. There is no need to be worried.”
Emily sighed and fell into the sofa. She gazed at the screen longingly. “What do I do now?”
It told her. Then, a timer started for twenty-six hours. When it ended, her phone began to ring. It was Peter, calling to ask if she wished to join him for dinner on Friday night. She said yes, and they met outside a tapas place in a strip mall near the train station.
Emily wore a blouse and jeans, while Peter wore khakis and a button-down. He pulled out her chair, and they perused the menu amidst mild conversation.
They ordered patatas bravas and braised mushrooms. Emily didn’t like mushrooms but adored the cheesy sauce on the potatoes. Peter ordered a glass of cabernet sauvignon, but when Emily mentioned that she didn’t drink, he asked the waiter to take it away.
The food was good, and the conversation picked up with time. She stared at Peter’s long face, tracing the subtle lines around his chin. He wasn’t the most handsome man in the world, but he was far from ugly. His short beard, dorky glasses, and greying hair were cute. They ate, and they discussed comic strips, 19th-century literature, and the band Genesis.
Their hands met in the parking lot. His touch calmed her. They shared a brief kiss and got into separate cars. Emily turned up the stereo and smiled the entire drive home.
***
Peter gave himself to love, and his waistline grew. They attended concerts, museums, and brunches. They made love both violent and tender. They spent a weekend in Quebec for Emily’s family reunion. They moved in together and assembled meal kits of bocconcini flatbreads and white-bean salads.
They kissed every morning and every evening. Most nights, they would collapse on the couch, and Emily would put on a movie while Peter fell asleep in her lap. She ran her fingers through his hair as he snored lightly.
A handful of years passed. They integrated their friends, and a few bodies collided. They spent weekend nights at the cinema or playing European board games.
On a summer weekend away at the falls, Peter got down on one knee. Emily teared up as she took his grandmother’s diamond ring. “Yes, yes, yes, of course.” She leapt into his arms, and they spun together while the world stood still. Four months later, they were married in her mother’s backyard. They ordered a legion of pizzas and drank canned cocktails.
But all good things must end; in this case, their love flipped off like a light switch. During a stressful day at the office, Peter texted Emily to see if she wanted to go out for dinner. She didn’t respond, so he texted again. And again.
The apartment was empty when he returned home with shawarma and fries. Mick climbed onto his lap and purred while he silently flipped through a book. He put on the Habs game and drank a light beer before dozing off on the couch.
He woke up to a steaming cup of coffee on the table beside him. Emily had already left for work, and Peter pretended nothing had changed as he rolled from the sofa and dressed himself.
“I told you from the beginning,” John said when they met for a drink a few weeks later. “Fake people make for bad relationships. They’re out of your control.”
Peter sighed.
“All of this is basic,” John continued. “Secretive phone use? Less sex? Detachment? If you search for signs that your partner is cheating, that’s the first thing that comes up. It’s 101.”
Peter said nothing to this, nursing his craft beer.
“Isn’t it better that she’s fake?” John continued. “It means none of this, no matter how painful, is actually real. This girl loves you, man. I can see it in her eyes. But the bots, they’ve got all
these motions to go through. They play with your life for the narrative. Like it’s a higher calling.”
“But I love her,” Peter said.
“And that’s beautiful. But so what? Does it matter what you feel if the story or the circumstances contradict it? Contrary to what the television tells us, there are stronger things in this world than love. And there are more consequential plots than Pete and Em.”
Peter returned home that night, and Emily wasn’t there again. He stared at the clock and counted the minutes. He ran his finger through Mick’s fur and let himself cry just a little. He mourned the stories they may have been able to write together.
***
Rain poured down the hotel windows as Peter sat watching the city far below. He received a call from his mother, who told him that Dad was in the hospital. There were lumps where they shouldn’t be, and he’d lost his appetite.
Peter looked at Emily sitting cross-legged on the bed, barefoot in jeans and a T-shirt. She looked up from her computer and smiled at him. He smiled back.
“Something wrong?”
“No,” Peter said.
Their shared silence had always felt companionable, but it didn’t anymore. Peter said that he needed some air, and Emily declined to join. “Take your time,” she said.
The city lights dimmed as the grey sky slowly turned blue. Sunlight draped the dripping sidewalks in summer’s warmth. Peter thought about the path of his life. So much of his story could have been different.
At the end of his teen years, a girl named Michelle made sandwiches in his work’s cafeteria. He always lingered to flirt with her as she slathered butter on bread and fried sunny, golden eggs. She had dark, wavy hair and dreamt of sharing her paintings with the world.
He would think about her some nights as he fell asleep, and months later, she would throw herself at him, drunk at some bar. But the timing was wrong, and nothing ever happened.
For years, Peter wondered why he had not built something special with that girl. In his head, she was perfect, and he had missed his only chance for true happiness.
Ana was the next in a long line of what-ifs. As his relationship with Emily slowed, the memory of Ana’s face became polished in his mind, shining like silver coins. Wherever she was, she was surely the most beautiful person who had ever lived.
And she was real, he thought, even if his thoughts of her weren’t.
Peter walked beneath the shade of pine trees that dripped cool water on his shirt. Several pups frolicked around a fenced dog park. Endless cars packed into the downtown streets honked their violent horns.
He found a bench, sat, and thought about his actions. They felt so minuscule against the narrative backdrop of the universe. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Everything else followed in sequence.
The thought of losing autonomy scared Peter. He had always been in control: he had worked hard, studied hard, and built himself up to the man that he now was. The thought of any external force affecting that scared him. He needed to hold fast to the authority he had created. That was the only way he could persist in this world.
Hard work and determination made him the man he was, and nothing could compromise that. But those wouldn’t save his love or his father. Tears dripped from his face, mingling with the light rain.
When he looked up, he saw an angel in a yellow raincoat looking in his direction. She clutched an umbrella in one hand and lifted the other to wave. Peter forgot how to breathe as he waved back.
***
Emily went to a matinee showing of *Total Recall* at the downtown cinema. She ate popcorn with layered butter and wept when Arnold shot Sharon Stone. She hadn’t cried in a theatre for years, and the salty tears felt like relief.
Emily had fallen in love, and that love had been torture. It was what she had always searched for; when she was young, a thousand boys had said they’d loved her, and she’d said it back. It was a performance, but the commingling of childish, foolish bodies felt natural.
Love was supposed to be sweeter than this, though, cinema had told her. So she’d tried dating women, and that had felt a little truer. She found something sweet with Vanessa, a girl from college with Christmas streaks of red and green in her bleached hair.
It lasted for most of college before Vanessa ended it in the mall food court. She wanted to try other things. Emily said this was fine, even though it wasn’t; the two had planned to get a place in the summer and begin a life together. Instead, they waved goodbye and became strangers.
Brian comforted her as she stayed with her parents, looking for work. Their romance blossomed like the spring, and although her feelings for him weren’t what she’d hoped for, the passion was there. She might have been able to spend her whole life with him if he hadn’t thrown her out with the bathwater.
Peter had been something else. Her affection for him had only grown as they went through the motions. It came out in small ways: how he would ask her opinion on things, how he would listen to her feedback.
He would make her coffee in the morning and tea at night as she sat at her computer, holding her head in her hands. Alone, none of it meant much. But as the days turned to years and he continued to treat her with the same consideration and kindness without fail, she grew to love him more and more.
“Is this going to last forever?” she would ask her computer in the early days.
“Inconclusive.”
“Please,” she typed.
“Inconclusive.”
There had been some freedom in her subscription to Kismet. Going through the motions had been good for her. She didn’t have to wonder if it was the right thing to do when the software told her to quit her job and enroll in coding classes. She didn’t have to think about what car she would drive or where she would live.
Then the software dropped a rock onto her tired chest:
“Do not speak to Peter today.”
When prompted for clarification, the system did not elaborate. When Peter placed her coffee on the desk, she didn’t look up. When he asked what she wanted for lunch, she didn’t reply, and he cooked her eggs and potatoes.
The directions grew stranger, but she had put her faith in the process. She was sent to a coffee shop in the middle of the day to give her phone number to a young man behind the counter. He grinned at her with a toothy smile. When his texts came in, the program responded to them automatically.
Every day, she wanted to confess to Peter. She didn’t think that she could ever love anyone but him. But she had pledged herself to the software, and deviation could lead to legal repercussions, so she trusted in the process.
Ultimately, she had been a supporting character in her own story. When Peter left the hotel that morning, she knew that she would never see him again. It was inevitable, but that didn’t make it any easier. She turned on the TV, and she cried for the rest of the night.
When she returned home alone in the morning, she deleted Kismet from her laptop. She always would have done this; the software knew this better than any one person could. This was her narrative, and it had been shaped by her circumstances. There was solace in it. Now, she could pretend to write her story herself.
***
When Ana appeared against the cityscape’s backdrop, her yellow raincoat glowed with the warmth of a summer campfire. She gave him a warm hug and a beaming smile before joining him on the bench. Her retriever lay down at his feet, tail joyfully wagging.
As they caught up on their past, Peter did not mention Emily. Ana had moved back to Canada two years ago and had a place nearby. She worked in middle management for a website that processed construction bids. The thought of her being only an hour and a half away all this time ached in Peter’s tired heart.
The rain ended, and they got breakfast together on a patio. Peter fed Thomas some of his potatoes beneath the table, while Ana picked at her salmon benedict. She’d wanted to call him all this time, she admitted, but she figured she’d missed her chance.
“You haven’t missed anything,” Peter said.
Ana called their meeting kismet. Peter said that he didn’t like the word.
“Every bit of free will is an illusion anyway,” Ana said. “Nothing that any person does is anything different than what that person always would have done. There is no variant, no infinite continuum of possibilities. We only have ourselves and our actions, which are shaped by our circumstances.”
“You don’t believe any of it can be random?”
“Even a roll of the dice is determined by the touches upon it, the pressure in the air, the angle at which it was thrown. It may be beyond my mathematical ability to predict, but each detail of its toss determines its end. And that toss, too, is the culmination of a thousand possibilities and details.”
Peter paused. “You are real, though, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am,” Ana said, smiling. “What I’m saying is that we are all real. No matter where our actions come from, they are all inevitable. Pretending anything else is just arrogant.”
Following breakfast, they went to the ROM and browsed the different floors. They posed together in front of the tyrannosaurus bones, and she leaned over to kiss his cheek as he took the photograph.
The following nights were cold, but they were necessary. He ended something he had once thought was deep, special, and unique with a single text message. The marriage took some cooperation to undo, but neither gave the other too much trouble. In the end, they left with everything they wanted.
Years later, picking up strawberry muffins
and coffee for breakfast, Peter saw a billboard advertising a reboot of the film where he and Emily had met. He fell to his knees, broke down in mourning, and cried violently in the downtown core. Pedestrians gave him a wide berth, and his salty tears fell undisturbed into the sidewalk cracks.
Life should feel like the movies, he thought, remembering the advertisements. That didn’t mean that it did.
Eventually, he picked himself up off the ground and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. The coffees had spilled, and the muffins had rolled from the bag onto the wet concrete. He laughed, then picked up the rubbish and disposed of it in a sidewalk bin. There was a painful throbbing in his heart, and he felt more alive than ever.
Standing in a long line of people buying fancy drinks to replace his losses, he withdrew his phone. There were stories, and then there was what was real. It was a story too. He opened his messages and felt warm. He took a long, deep breath before he typed:
“I love you always.”