What I Was For

I love The Egg by Andy Weir. If you haven’t read it, go read it first, it’s short and it’s excellent. I’ve reread it a dozen times over the years. I’ve been wanting to make the adaptation found below. This is an homage to what I consider to be an amazing piece of literature.

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The room was quiet in the particular way a room gets quiet when there’s no more reason to keep the machines running. Eighty-one years old, life support has been removed, and you’re at home in the bed you’d asked to die in. Somewhere in the last few minutes the pain had simply stopped, replaced by something else. Not a light. More like an attention.

“You’re finished,” I said.

Not out loud. You heard it the way you hear your own name in a crowded room, a thing that had always been there, just never addressed to you before.

“Finished with what?” you said.

“The task.”

“I didn’t know I had one,” you said.

“You weren’t supposed to. That was the condition,” I said.

You would have laughed if you’d had the breath for it. “Condition of what?” you said.

“Of it counting,” I said.

“Of what counting?” you said.

“Everything you just spent eighty-one years doing,” I said.

You lay with that for a while, or however long ‘a while’ meant now. “I don’t understand,” you said. “Am I dying, or am I being resurrected?”

“Neither, exactly. You already did the work,” I said.

“What work? I raised two kids and fixed a lot of other people’s paperwork. I divorced once, married twice. I don’t remember agreeing to any assignment,” you said.

“You wouldn’t. If you’d known, you’d have managed it instead of living it. I needed it lived,” I said.

“Needed it for what?” you said.

“I’m not going to be able to explain that in a way that will mean anything to you in this moment. Not because you’re not capable of it. Because you’re still mostly who you’ve spent eighty-one years being, and that part of you doesn’t have the frame for it yet. Give it time,” I said.

“That’s not an answer,” you said.

“No. Here’s one you can actually hold onto. You want to know where you came from,” I said.

“Yes,” you said.

“You weren’t born the way you’ve always assumed, some accident of two other people’s lives colliding. Or you were, exactly the way you remember it, and the being born was already the beginning collecting information. I don’t put a being down somewhere without a reason for it. You were placed, on purpose, into that particular hospital on that particular morning, so that a life shaped exactly the way yours turned out to be shaped would exist, for me,” I said.

“You’re saying I was made. Built for this,” you said.

“I’m saying there was never a version of events where you existed first and I decided afterward to make use of you. The wanting came first. You were how I went and got what I wanted,” I said.

You didn’t answer right away. There wasn’t much to say back to that.

“Here’s what it was for,” I said. “Think of the worst year of your life. Not the saddest. The one where you didn’t know what was going to happen next and it nearly broke you.”

“I was twenty-six years old. My son was sick and nobody could tell me why for eleven months. It was agony.” you said.

“I know. I was there for it, in the sense that matters. Not watching from outside. What’s reaching me right now reached me the same instant it reached you, not assembled afterward into something tidier. That’s the part I couldn’t get any other way. Not from someone telling me what fear like that feels like. You had to actually be the one standing in the hallway not knowing,” I said.

“So I was what? A pair of eyes you were borrowing?” you said.

“You were the whole thing, not a part of it. There’s no other you somewhere, watching this life the way you’d watch a film. When you were afraid, I was afraid. Nothing was held back from me and nothing was kept from you. That’s the part others assume has to be a trick, and it isn’t one,” I said.

You turned that over. It should have felt like a diminishment. It didn’t, not quite. “Then why does it feel like you’re telling me I wasn’t real?” you said.

“You’ve got it backwards. I’m telling you that you were the only real part. I don’t get to have a year where I don’t know if my son is going to live. I don’t experience fear. I don’t get tired in the specific way a body gets tired at four in the morning in a hospital chair. I needed something that could, completely, without a safety net, have these experiences and deliver them back to me changed by having gone through it. That was you. That was never anyone but you,” I said.

“What happens to my experiences? The family, the joy, the pain, all of it?” you said.

“It doesn’t get filed away somewhere. It folds into me. Not as a memory I’ll flip through later. But as a difference in what I already am. I am now, because of you, a thing that understands what waiting in a hallway costs, because you experienced it. Before you, I had no context of this,” I said.

“And what happens to me?” you said.

“The same thing that’s already true of you right now. You’re not in your own life anymore, watching it end. You are the ending, happening. There won’t be a ‘you’ separate from what you did with the time, any more than there’s a song separate from the notes once it’s finished playing. That’s not a loss. That’s just what an experience turning into something that lasts looks like from the inside,” I said.

“Will there be another one? Another eighty-one years, another hallway, someone else’s turn to not know what I know now?” you said.

“There already were. There already are,” I said. “Right now, while we’re talking, there’s a version of this happening in a dozen languages you never learned, to people who never heard of you and never will. Not later. Now. At the same time as this.”

“Then I wasn’t the only one,” you said.

“You were never the only one. Your son isn’t decoration in your story. Neither was your first spouse, or the nurse who’s been checking on you every hour since Tuesday, or your mother, near the end, when she didn’t know your name anymore and you sat with her anyway. Every one of them is doing or has done exactly what you just finished doing, whether they ever suspect it or not. You didn’t share a species with them so much as a source,” I said.

“Are they you, too?” you said.

“In the only way that’s ever mattered, yes,” I said. “When your son was born and you looked at him and felt something too large for the room to hold, I felt it too, from inside it, the same as I felt everything else you’re delivering to me. Whether that makes us the same thing wearing different names is a question I’d rather you sit with a little longer before I just hand you the answer.”

You thought about your son, grown now, asleep down the hall in his old room, and about the eleven months that had felt, at the time, like the only thing that would ever matter to anyone. “It doesn’t feel small,” you said. “Knowing this.”

“It was never going to. That’s the part I don’t think I explained well enough at the start. Nothing gets smaller for having been useful. If anything I asked more of it than a private life would have, because a private life only has to satisfy you. Yours had to be true enough to change something that isn’t you at all,” I said.

“I think,” you said, and let it sit there a moment before finishing, “I think that’s why it had to matter. Whether my spouse deserved to be forgiven. Whether my mother knew my name, at the end, or just my face. If none of that had actually mattered to me, if I’d felt it the way you’d feel something you already knew the ending to, there wouldn’t have been anything here worth carrying home. You couldn’t have gotten this any other way. You needed it to cost me something real, or it wouldn’t have told you anything true.”

“That’s exactly right,” I said.

“So none of it gets smaller,” you said. “Not my spouse leaving. Not my mother forgetting me.”

“No,” I said. “It gets to matter forever now, instead of just for eighty-one years. You’re still thinking about this backwards. I’m not telling you to let it go because it turned out to be useful. I’m telling you it isn’t going anywhere, precisely because it turned out to be useful. You mattered, and I kept it.”

“And when I’m gone,” you said, “I’m not going anywhere either. I’m just going back to being the thing that’s already doing this to someone else, somewhere, right now. Standing in some other hallway, not knowing if their kid’s going to live. Still me. Still you, maybe.”

“Maybe,” I said. “That part’s still yours to work out. You’re not quite there yet.”

“Wait,” you said, and this time it wasn’t another question forming. It was something underneath all the questions, finally surfacing. “I know this voice.”

“You do,” I said.

“Not from tonight. Not from this room, or whatever this room actually is now. I’ve heard it my whole life. Every four in the morning I couldn’t sleep. Every time I told myself, out loud sometimes, alone in a car or a kitchen, that I’d get through something. I always thought that was just me, talking to myself.”

“It was,” I said.

“Then there was never anyone else here,” you said. “This whole conversation. There’s no far side of this bed. There’s no me on one end of it and you on the other.”

“There never was,” I said. “I don’t have anywhere else to speak from except the places I’m already speaking through. Every voice that ever told you to keep going was mine, because it was never anyone else’s to begin with. You just didn’t have a name for it yet.”

You didn’t say anything for a while. Something had just rearranged everything behind it, all at once, without moving a single object. Eighty-one years of a voice you’d taken for granted as your own thinking, working things out at your own kitchen table, at your own four in the morning. It had been. It had never once been anything else.

“I think I understand,” you said, and this time you weren’t surprised to find you meant it.

“I know,” I said. “You already did the part that mattered.”

And then there wasn’t a hallway, or a hospital chair, or an eleven-month year, or a you to have owned any of it, or a voice left to call anyone else’s. There was only, very quietly, a little more than there had been.