Upgrading Nicole
“I’ve decided I’m going to live a data-driven life,” I told Nicole.
“As opposed to?”
“Not,” I said. I was already feeling proud of myself. A data-driven life has a very high pride output.
“Are you getting along with other people too well, is that it?”
“Ah, sarcasm, the refuge of the data-deprived. ‘People’ have no idea what ‘getting along with me’ is like. But they will soon.” I added a ‘getting along’ spreadsheet to my mental list of spreadsheets to make. I heard a little whooshing sound as the name of another spreadsheet exited my short term memory to make space. As a fairly average person, I can only hold on to the names of six to seven spreadsheets at once.
“Mm-hmm,” she said.
“Don’t worry, there are all kinds of benefits in it for you.”
“I wasn’t worried. But now I am.”
“I’m going to make our relationship way more data-driven. You’re going to love it. It’s going to take us to a whole new level.”
“What level are we at now?”
“I’m not going to answer that, because it’s a trap,” I said, tilting my head to look at her down the length of my nose. She stared at me placidly.
“I was going for ironic nonchalance,” I said. “What did it look like on your end?”
“Like you have a crick in your neck. An ironic crick.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Your input means a lot to science. Now to business. First, I am going to make a map of your body. Oh, what’s that? Did you just put on that prurient little smile or was it there the whole time? Does someone want her body mapped out? In the name of science?”
“I don’t see how we’ll know where anything is or goes if we don’t,” she said. She’d switched teams. Science was really in for it now.
“I’m putting this in a spreadsheet,” I said. “We’ll never confuse your elbows with your kneecaps again. Now lie down and be still.”
She lay down, suddenly docile as a lamb. A lamb with razor sharp teeth, I reminded myself, who wouldn’t hesitate to rip my face off on a whim. I couldn’t afford the twenty minutes it took my face to grow back these days. I grabbed my laptop, opened up a new spreadsheet, and set it down next to her.
“Ok, I’m going to touch you now.”
“I’m already not digging the narrating,” she said.
“When I say ‘now?’ tell me on a scale of one to ten, how good whatever I’m doing feels. Ok?”
“Yes. Are you going to touch me with your words?”
I shook my head. Stanley Milgram electrocuted people for less.
“Now?”
“6.”
“Now?”
“6.”
“Now?”
“6.”
“Sensitivity to clockwise versus counter-clockwise scratching in the shoulder-ular area, low,” I wrote in the Notes column. I input the 6's.
“Scratch a little lower,” she suggested. “And enough with the scratching. This particular model prefers caressing.”
“Patience. Now?”
“3. I said caressing, not pinching.”
“Now?”
“Ow! What the fuck?”
“Pain tolerance in the armpit-ular area, low.”
“My pain tolerance is not low! What are you even comparing with?”
“Myself?”
“When did you pinch yourself? Here, let’s see how low yours is!”
“Hey!” I yelled. I needed a new arm. Hopefully one of C3PO’s so I could keep playing this game and win. “You pinched me way harder than I pinched you!”
“Really? On a scale of one to ten, how much harder?” she taunted me.
“Okay, we’re going to have to get one thing straight,” I said, struggling to put on a serious face. “There’s only one scientist here, and one guinea pig.”
“If you’re a scientist, I’m calling PETA.”
“Look, if you want to be the scientist-”
“Ugh, just get on with it.” She lay back down and closed her eyes. I think anger was a form of foreplay for her. A small smile played on her lips. Or maybe it was the violence of pinching me. My arm still smarted. I hoped I developed a bruise to trade in for pity points tomorrow. I sighed and continued in the name of science.
“Now?”
“You’re not touching anything.”
“I know, I forgot to take a control reading before.”
“5. Some scientist.”
***
Fifteen minutes later, I could feel an aura of slight irritation emanating from her general direction. One look at her face confirmed my theory. It was decidedly sour. An 8 on sourness, I’d say.
“What is it?”
She propped herself up on her elbows.
“This isn’t as hot as you made it sound,” she said. She looked down pointedly. “I’m still wearing my pants.”
“Hey, don’t dumb it down for me. I know hot. And this is going to make things way hotter in the long run. Just imagine, years from now, I’ll play you like a xylophone made of flesh. I’ll do crazy combination moves, like scratch your left temple, stick my pinky in your nose, jiggle your pot belly, and you’ll inexplicably achieve a nirvana state. Except it’ll be perfectly explicable. It’s going to change the world.”
“And make it a better place, yadda yadda yadda. I hate xylophones. And a pot belly? My stomach is flatter than yours, so jiggle your own pot lid. This is not how playing doctor is supposed to go. Look it up.”
“That’s why I said years from now. And who knows, maybe pot bellies are so erogenous that growing one is totally worth the hit to your image. Your friends will snicker behind your back once, but when I touch your pot belly in the restaurant and you go into convulsions of pleasure, you’ll know the true face of jealousy. Your friends, the patrons, and the entire staff of the restaurant is going to be buying tickets to have their bellies touched by yours truly.”
“Seriously, dude, how much longer is this going to take? If you don’t provide some motivation soon, I’m going to find another doctor to play with.”
“OK, OK, don’t get your panties in a twist. Here, let me help you with them.”
***
“So what does the data say? Am I a xylophone or an accordion?”
I was so engrossed in my spreadsheet, I hadn’t noticed that she’d gotten up. She was still naked, a calculated move no doubt. She hugged me from behind, soft and warm and not yet dressed in the thick prickly robe of cynicism she wore so well.
“Have a look,” I said.
I’d taken a basic anatomical diagram of the female body and annotated it with our findings. It looked like someone had just wasted an hour of their life.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m afraid,” she said, and buried her face in my back.
“What? Seriously?” I disentangled myself, and tried to catch her eyes. She giggled.
“I’m afraid I’ll be bored.”
“Very funny,” I said. “But actually, we should collect some data on that too. So we know what bores you, excites you, scares you, relaxes you.”
“Don’t bother, I’ll tell you. Boring stuff, exciting stuff, scary stuff, and relaxing stuff. Write it down before you forget.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I have a number of experiments lined up that’ll give us the data we’re looking for.”
She frowned. “I don’t like this game anymore.”
“‘Likes everything once,’” I pronounced, and made a show of entering it in the spreadsheet. “Hardly original.”
“Stop.”
“‘Abhors scientific progress.’”
“You’re going to get punished.” She began putting on her clothes. I paused to watch.
“She’s a creature of extraordinary grace,” I said.
“Quoting Firefly isn’t going to get you out of this,” she said.
“The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.”
“Funny, I was just about to say the same thing about you.”
***
The next few weeks went by in a daze. I recorded everything I could think of. Focusing on Nicole, like a gentleman, I recorded what she ate, what she drank, what made her smile, what made her cry, what bored her, what irritated her. The last one was an especially data-rich area. I’d never realized she was so irritable, or that her tongue was so sharp. When I didn’t defend myself well (read “with clever banter”), she took me down mercilessly. I spent so much time licking my wounds, I was coming up on cannibal territory. Oh, there was the Lost Lands border control, straight ahead.
“Hey, you! Stop! Don’t come any closer. Only cannibals from this point forward. Present your credentials. The fuck? Are you drinking your own blood? Get lost, you fucking pervert!”
Maybe not.
I persevered. I tried to make it more entertaining for her by compensating for all the boring data collection with entertaining data collection. When she caught a cold, and got two standard deviations more irritable than usual, I rescued her dirty tissues from the trash can and did Rorschach tests with them. “Holy shit! This is the spitting image of your mother! I never realized her face was so asymmetrical! Can you do anyone else? Ooh, can you do Donald Trump? Please?”
A sphinx would have smiled at that.
Still, there was a prodigious, an unhealthy, an exorbitant amount of eye-rolling. Clockwise when she was exasperated, counterclockwise when she was begrudgingly amused, and straight up in 10% of the cases, a giant outlier group I hadn’t yet figured out.
I can see how she might have been annoyed. I was committed and I was thorough. I wouldn’t let her eat anything until I recorded the food and amount. I’d rush into the bathroom and slap her hand away when she was about to flush the toilet, so I could record the contents first. At night, I’d whisper “are you still awake?” once a minute after giving her a five minute head start, to capture the exact time she fell asleep. I’d tease her to orgasm three times a day, stopping to record things a thousand times before I let her get off. Most times I had to swat her hands away so she couldn’t finish the job herself, and sometimes I swatted the wrong place and sent her over the edge. She was a most uncooperative partner.
Occasionally, she’d wake up without her sense of humor, and I’d have to resuscitate her with long hugs, and/or well-thought-out compliments, and/or shopping, and/or a romantic dinner date, and/or a movie, and/or a couples massage, and/or a night out dancing, and/or a tub of ice cream. The last one I only used in emergencies, because it’d throw all kinds of numbers off for the next twenty four hours. I always recorded what worked and what didn’t, no matter how exhausted I was after pampering her all day, so I got better and better as time went on. I had to, because I noticed that her lows had started getting lower. I Googled “better compliments,” but there were only a hundred million unique results. I was quickly running out.
Most of the time I could make her snap out of it, temporarily, by doing something extra silly. Once, while shopping with her at the mall, I made a loud farting noise into my elbow, then ran after her with an open jar (yes, I planned this stunt), slammed the lid closed near her butt, and screamed “gotcha! This one’s going straight to the lab! Out of my way people! Classified fart, coming through!”
Or wait, that might have been one of the ones she hated. Shit. I think I was too lost in the performance to get a good look at her face.
After thirty days, I didn’t need data to tell me I was hanging by a thread. I stared at my spreadsheets, trying to see a pattern, a way out, but all I could see was that she was going to dump me. I plotted her mood over the last two weeks, and there was the unmistakable beginning of a hockey stick curve, the kind you’d love to see for a stock you’ve invested your car loan into, but not so much when the Y axis is “Times Nicole burst into tears (per hour).” I was so close though! I didn’t have all the answers yet, but I had collected almost all the data required to begin the next phase. Experimentation.
I got up from my the desk, and walked over to the bedroom. Nicole was lying on the bed, reading something on her phone. Her eyes had the slightly glazed look they acquired when she had dinner after 7PM and didn’t take a walk afterwards.
I sat down next to her on the bed, and put my hand gently on her thigh. Reflexively, her legs opened slightly. I felt a lump in my throat. Had I turned her into a robot?
“Nicole. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t look up.
“Nicole? Can you put your phone down for a second?”
She put the phone down on her stomach, and stared straight at the opposite wall, without meeting my eyes.
“I don’t know what to do. The data shows that in a few hours, you’re going to break up with me.”
She looked up at me quizzically. Her eyes welled up with tears, and her lower lip trembled.
“Really?”
I nodded, then swallowed with difficulty.
“Oh Paul,” she said. “Thank God.”
***
The next day after Nicole left, I sent her all the data I’d collected. I don’t think she looked at it. Not surprising, as she wasn’t that interested in the experiment to begin with. Or maybe she didn’t want to look at data that showed her spiraling into depression. Intertwined with a stop-motion recording of a relationship self-destructing. No, I’m mischaracterizing it. I couldn’t share credit for either of those.
For Nicole, it was over. I, on the other hand, pored over the data like a madman.
When I next came up for air, the calendar showed that three months had passed. I leaned back at my desk, and took in the apartment. It was a glorious mess, truly foul. The kind of mess you’d break up with yourself over.
I opened the fridge to see if there was anything edible. On the top shelf was evidence of my mother’s visit — an event I only vaguely remembered — an untouched but already molding chicken pot pie from my favorite restaurant. It’s just downstairs, but I almost never go there because it’s horribly overpriced. Food, 5 stars. Price-gouging, 5 stars. Best price-gouging in the area!
I had done it. I understood Nicole, in as much as I hoped to understand her. Not intuitively, perhaps, but I had the data organized and mapped out so that I could answer a million questions. Predict what events would affect her mood and how. Estimate her life span. Suggest lifestyle changes.
Get her back, if I wanted to.
No, that was going a little too far down creepy road. Also, the data didn’t recommend it.
I’d had second thoughts about sending in her DNA for analysis, especially after she left me, but decided to bite the bullet and feel guilty for the rest of my life. There was too much valuable information there to throw away on a moral hangup. I found a bird’s nest of her hair under the bed, and sent several long specimens in to the lab for analysis. It was a treasure trove. It fit my data like the matching half of a split-heart BFF bracelet. It made me feel like I had been working blind until then.
I correlated her genetic profile and my innumerable spreadsheets with statistics for risk factors, life-threatening diseases, probable causes of death. I charted trajectories for a hundred biomarkers. I studied her behaviors, habits, predilections. I felt like I was reading a history book detailing how various environmental factors bounced her around like a pinball, shaping her personality and guiding her from past to present. And I knew that I could write the next chapters of that history book. Maybe even the ending. After three months, I couldn’t just see the light at the end of the tunnel. I had made it out of the tunnel, and I could see exactly what was on the other side.
The recipe for a new life. A healthy life. A long life. A happy life. Sure, for just one person. For now. And I knew exactly what strings to pull, what buttons to push, what gentle hints and rude awakenings to send her way to get her to seize the opportunity.
She’d thank me later.
Call it an educated guess.
I threw away the pie.
