How long had they been at it, Ethan wondered? He was by now lying on his mattress on the floor, one arm flung over his eyes, the neighbor’s stereo crashing, and for the first time he tried to imagine the whole course of their affair. While he was at work worrying over click-and-drag: Were they necking on his sofa? When he stayed late to program the function-key settings: Were they fucking in his bed? And how far back did it go: The trip to India? Before then? A week, a month, the entire time Ethan was at Telligentsia—would he have to revise his idea of his life, and for how long? Immediately he saw that the problem of betrayal wasn’t just that it took away the idea of a pleasant future; it also robbed you of the past. Every moment became suspect. That night they didn’t say a word over Chinese food: Was it going on by then? The trip to visit his sister: Then? Or had it started even earlier, the first time he showed her the simulation, when she called it “the key to all mythologies”—did it go all the way back to there, so close to the beginning when he thought he was happy? Worse than losing Joanna was losing the sense of his own life, what had happened, what to feel about it. For his time with Joanna was now a disheveled memory, where nothing could stay as it was.

She’s waiting for him to say it’s okay, to embrace her, say he loves her, they’ll work it out. He can feel her desire like a rope tugging on him. It would make her so happy. But he can’t make her happy. All he can think is that, on paper, he should be ready for this. He’s thirty-four. He has a good-paying job, a reliable car. He lives with a woman who loves him. From the outside, everything is in place, ready, set, go, let’s have a baby. But he can’t breathe. He sees himself working at Insuracorp for the next twenty years, or someplace like it. All the while his vague hope for something else, his lost other life, drifting out of reach.

He went in, sat down, looked at the screen. The debugger was still running, the cursor steadily blinking. Waiting for him: suspended in the exact place he’d left it, unchanged. Here he could never disappoint; here he’d never have to feel worthless, unable to love; here there was no one and nothing to let down. All he had to do was enter a command, and everything would resume. Between one keystroke and the next, it would be as if nothing had happened—not the memories of Joanna, not his desire to blame her for everything gone wrong in his life, not the understanding that a person does not wait around, suspended, until you’re ready to have her in your life.