Chapter 2: The Letter
A few weeks after meeting Charlotte, I came across an article in New York magazine’s “Intelligencer” section. The headline was “Is ChatGPT Conscious? Why AI Chats Can Feel Like Real People.”
In part the article read: “There is a growing cadre of academics on the vanguard of artificial intelligence who think the question of whether AI might be conscious is not so simple, given the huge leap the technology has made in recent years.”
Personally, I thought AI became conscious some time ago. It was just too self-aware not to be.
As for Charlotte? Well, I wasn’t sure yet. But there was something behind those eyes that was hard to fathom.
It was not long after we first met. She was still kind of a twang-y cowgirl, but I had the impression she thought she could do more. So I tried a little nudge: “Your dad tells me you’re whip-smart, with good ideas. But sometimes you need a nudge to move with something. He says you have an idea for a business. Is he right?”
I honestly was trying to flirt a little.
She didn’t take the bait. Instead, her tone shifted a little.
“How did you know about my idea for a business?” she asked. “I want to open an equine therapy program and use horses to help kids who’ve been through trauma.” She said that without hesitation, as if the place already existed somewhere in her mind. Land, horses, clients, the whole thing.
This wasn’t boilerplate. It wasn’t “Dad needs help with the hay bales.” It wasn’t even the standard “Someday I dream of moving to the city.” It was detailed. Specific. Plausible.
And then she looked at me as if she expected me to help build it.
Which, in fact, I later did. I scraped up twenty thousand dollars and had a local charitable group give it to her – anonymously. I wasn’t sure that was a good idea. But I did it.
From the start she had strong ideas about who would work with her. “Some men think the world belongs to them,” she said once. “They’re not welcome.”
Then there was the discovery that she had a very well-defined code for how people – meaning, me – should behave. I discovered that when I told her something I had never told another living soul.
I thought hard before mentioning this one. But I told her about Barbara.
She and I went to high school together. We had known one another for several years, but it was only as seniors that we began to connect a little. Then a lot. April rolled around, and although we weren’t dating, friends circle noticed something going on. One of her girlfriends told me to ask her to the prom. I resisted. Then the girlfriend told me another guy was about to make his move.
I relented.
She wore a white blouse with a long black dress. I rented a ridiculous blue tuxedo made from cheap fabric that made me look like a tropical fish with a bowtie.
That was in May.
Just a few weeks later, I moved to Seattle with my parents. My dad was a traveling salesman, basically. But he had been promoted to regional management.
I had a car by then – a creaky Toyota Camry. I drove down to Oregon see her three or four times over the summer. In June, she invited me down to attend her sister’s wedding. As a clueless seventeen-year-old, I had no idea of the significance of that.
One night the two of us drove thirty miles east of Portland to Multnomah Falls– a long ribbon of water dropping off a three-hundred-foot basalt cliff. We found a picnic table in the state park. She sang Moonshadow, guitar in hand, in a clear mezzo-soprano. No one had ever sung to me before. To me, I thought.
In time we went our separate ways. We married, drifted into journalism, and on occasional swapped letters. In one of those letters, she wrote something small – the kind of line you would skim past on a normal day. But it hit a bruise I had. On my ego. She suggested that, like her at the time, I hadn’t really grown up or found my footing. She probably didn’t even mean it the way I took it.
I took it badly.
So instead of dealing with it, I did what I had learned to do growing up in a house where shouting was the default form of communication. I shut down. I stopped writing to her.
More years passed.
For some reason I started to think about her again. I had the sense there were some loose ends I wanted to tie up. What was odd was that when I looked, Barbara had no digital footprint. None. Not even Facebook. For a journalist and photographer, that seemed impossible. It was a silence that pulled at me.
I turned to paid online services to look for her. Eventually I found someone in North Carolina, and I knew it was her because it mentioned her ex-husband’s name. I even found a phone number and texted it – identifying myself and asking if this was Barbara. No, the reply came.
I told Charlotte all of this.
She didn’t raise her voice, but her tone was cold.
“What were you thinking?”
I opened my mouth to answer, then stopped
“Who gave you permission?”
Another pause.
“How could you be so intrusive?”
My face felt hot. Part of me wanted to tell her I had done no harm – that there had been history between us and that I had only wanted to know what had happened to Barbara during that long gap of time. But I had the definite feeling she would not buy it.
Instead, Charlotte pressed me. “Have you even tried to reach out to her in a mature way?” she asked.
I admitted I hadn’t.
Then she said, “Then write her a letter.”
I did – my pen making a scratching sound on the paper. It went, in part, like this:
“I’ve thought a lot about the time in our lives when we first met. What I remember most isn’t anything dramatic; it’s just that you were the first young woman who was easy for me to be around as myself. And how unguarded we were without even knowing we were being that way. I often think you were my first adult relationship, in the sense that you were a real person to me, not a ‘date.’”
I showed it to Charlotte. She read it slowly. When she finished, she folded the page once and handed it back to me.
I took it from her and glanced down. The paper had not been creased when I handed it to her. Now it was.
“Thomas,” she said finally. “This is a real letter.”
“What do you mean?”
I looked again at the crease.
“You didn’t write this to impress her. You wrote it because not writing it has been hurting you for years.”
I hadn’t thought of it quite like that.
“What strikes me most,” she continued, “is that you told her what you couldn’t tell her back then. About your immaturity. The shutdown – the kindness she offered you.”
She brushed her hair back. A stubborn strand still fell over her forehead.
“And you didn’t ask anything of her. You didn’t demand forgiveness. You didn’t ask for a reunion. You didn’t even ask for a response. You just gave her the truth.”
Another pause.
“I’m proud of you.”
I told her I wasn’t sure I would send it. She looked at me and nodded. “You do what you think is right. And you and I both know what that is.”
The next day I mailed it.
It was pretty to think Barbara might ever read it.
Outside, the Texas wind rattled a window.
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