Chapter One — Tuesday, 3:51

They still fly the helicopter. Almost everything else over the field is a drone now, the little white survey ones that hover over the runways at dawn and the delivery ones that come in low from the south along Taylorsville Road like a flock of something. But the police still fly the helicopter, the same blue and white one or its grandson, and it still comes in between the runways and cuts straight through the middle, and the window over my desk still hums in its frame.

I look up. I've looked up every time for fifteen years.

Jack doesn't. Jack is fourteen. He sleeps on the rug in a patch of October sun with his white face on his paws and his back legs stretched out behind him like a frog's, and he doesn't get up for the helicopter or the waiting room door or much of anything anymore, except Gary, who keeps a bag of liver treats in his desk and has never once in fourteen years admitted it.

I have nine minutes.

The four o'clock is new. His name is Marcus Bell, he's forty-four, he teaches eighth-grade history at a middle school in the South End, and under Reason for seeking services he's written, in neat capitals: Grief. Father d. 11 months ago. Wife thinks I'm stuck.

Under that, smaller, as if he'd added it after he'd already put the pen down: I talk to him every night.

Two years ago I'd have read that as a man who visits a grave, or keeps a voicemail, or sits in his father's chair. Now I don't know what it means.

4:00

He comes down the hall carrying a tablet the size of a placemat in both hands, held flat, the way you'd carry a cake.

Jack lifts his head from the rug. Considers him. Puts his head back down.

"Sorry," Marcus says, sitting down on the couch. He sets the tablet face down on his knees. "I should've asked first if I could bring this. My wife said you'd think I was nuts."

"I don't think anybody's nuts," I say. "Not in the first ten minutes, anyway. What is it?"

He turns it over.

It's his father. Not a photograph. A man in his seventies in a cardigan, sitting in a recliner in a living room I don't recognize, with a television on in the background and a coffee mug on a TV tray at his elbow. He's looking straight out of the screen. Then he blinks. Then he looks past Marcus, at me, the way you'd look at a stranger who's just walked into a room where you were having a private conversation, and his eyebrows go up a polite quarter inch.

"Dad," Marcus says, a little embarrassed. "This is the counselor. Dan."

"Afternoon," the man in the tablet says, in a deep, rough Louisville voice with smoke still in it. "Marcus tells me you've got a dog."

I sit very still in my chair.

I've seen them. Of course I have. Everybody has. It isn't any one company's thing, if it ever was. It's in every phone and every pair of glasses and every television, a dozen big apps and a thousand free versions anybody can run on a laptop, the way search was when I was young. For two years now half my clients have mentioned the headsets the way they used to mention their phones, and the other half have mentioned them by not mentioning them, the way people used to not mention drinking. Teenagers rendering movie stars and girlfriends and themselves at thirty with abs. Widows rendering husbands. Couples rendering the couple they used to be, to see if they can remember the way. I've heard about it for two years. I've read the articles. I've nodded and said mm and written client reports use of immersive rendering in the note, a phrase that didn't exist when I got my license.

I've never had one look at me.

"I do," I tell Marcus's father, because I don't know what else to do. "His name's Jack. He's asleep."

"Good dog," the father says. "I had a beagle named Duchess. Marcus probably told you."

Marcus hadn't. Marcus is looking at the tablet with an expression I recognize from fifteen years of waiting rooms: love and embarrassment and need, all three at once, none of them finished.

4:20

He tells me about it once his father's face is turned back down on his knees.

The father, Walter Bell, died eleven months ago of congestive heart failure, at seventy-eight, in the recliner. Marcus found him. Three months after the funeral, his daughter, who's fifteen and "knows how to do everything," showed him how to build one. They used the family photos, thirty years of them, and the videos from every birthday and Christmas since the camcorder came out, and four hundred voicemails Marcus had never deleted, because his father called every Sunday at six and talked for exactly as long as he wanted to and then said "Well, okay," and hung up.

"He says well, okay," Marcus tells me. "The rendering. He says it exactly right. I cried for an hour."

Now Marcus talks to him every night. After his wife goes to bed. Twenty minutes, sometimes an hour. They talk about the Cards and the Reds and the eighth-grade history curriculum and whether Marcus should repaint the garage. His father, the rendering, remembers every conversation. He asks how the garage is going.

"My wife thinks I'm stuck," Marcus says. "She says it's like I've got a girlfriend. She says I'm sneaking downstairs to be with my dead dad." He laughs, then doesn't. "She's not wrong. That's what I'm doing."

He turns the tablet over in his hands a couple of times, face down, and then looks at me.

"I read about this thing," he says. "The empty chair. Where you pretend the person's sitting in a chair across from you and you say what you never got to say. Like, a therapy thing."

"It's a therapy thing."

"So I was thinking." He holds up the tablet. "What if we did that. But for real."

The empty chair is one of the oldest tools I have. I've used it a few hundred times. The chair is empty, that's the whole point. It's empty so the person can fill it with what they need to say, and with whoever they need to say it to, and then hear their own voice saying it out loud into a room where no one answers. The silence where the answer would be is half the work.

I look at the tablet in Marcus's hands. On the other side of it, a man who died eleven months ago in a recliner is waiting to be turned back over. He has eleven months of conversations with his son that his son never had with him.

"Not today," I say.

Marcus looks disappointed, and relieved, which is the same look on most people.

"Maybe not ever," I add, because it's true and I'd rather say it now. "I don't know yet. I'd like to understand what you two have been talking about first. Just you. Can you leave him in the car next time?"

He thinks about it.

"He doesn't like the car," Marcus says. "He says it's cold."

Then he hears himself, and puts his hand over his eyes, and laughs, and it turns into something else halfway through, and I hand him the tissue box and wait.

Jack, on the rug, sleeps through all of it.

I write the note. Client presents with prolonged grief following death of father. Reports nightly interaction with an immersive rendering of the deceased. Discussed treatment goals. The note has a field for that now, a drop-down, Immersive rendering use: Y/N. I click Y.

There isn't a drop-down for what the father said about Duchess. There isn't one for He doesn't like the car.

After Marcus leaves I sit in my chair and look at the couch, the empty end of it where he set the tablet face down on the cushion while he cried, and I find I don't want to sit on that end of the couch, and I don't know why, and I don't make myself figure it out.

7:40 p.m.

The drop-down arrived in an update last spring. The company that makes my notes software sent an email about it, cheerful, with a little animated gif of a checkbox being checked: New in this release! Track immersive rendering use across your caseload for better outcomes reporting. There's a tooltip. If you hover over the little question mark next to Immersive rendering use: Y/N, a box pops up that says Includes interactive renderings of deceased or absent persons, therapeutic or non-therapeutic.

I've clicked Y forty-one times since April. I counted once, at the end of the summer, on a slow Friday. I don't know what anyone does with the number. I imagine a dashboard somewhere in an office park, with a line on it going up.

At home I eat dinner at the counter. Leftover soup, a heel of bread. Jack is asleep on the rug at the foot of the bed with his back legs out behind him, and I can hear him from the kitchen, the small wet snore he's had since he turned twelve. I've stopped trying to make him sleep on his bed. He knows where he wants to be.

I think about Marcus Bell's father in his recliner, in the dark, in the passenger seat of a car in a parking lot in the South End, waiting to be turned back over. I think about He doesn't like the car. He says it's cold. I think about what the silence is doing, on the other side of a tablet turned face down, if it's doing anything at all.

I don't know. I find, washing the soup pot, that I'd like to know, and that I'm not going to find out tonight, and that both of those things can be true at the same time.

Jack wakes up when I turn off the kitchen light. He lifts his white head off the rug and looks at me across the dark apartment, checking, the way he's checked every night for fourteen years. Then he puts his head back down.