Transparent Man in a Translated World

What will it be like when you can tune people’s personalities in real time?

His arrogance was bothering me that day, that arched eyebrow, an eyebrow that felt like it could impact my local weather even though he was halfway across the world in New Zealand. “Of course they’re going to respond that way if you give them reason to,” he said. Since he was my friend, I hesitated to tune him. But eventually I became exasperated. While he lectured me, I shifted his pitch a tone higher. I softened the contours of his face. Smug turns of phrase like of course and at the end of the day were getting under my skin, so I expunged them. Tuning was all very manual back then, like stitching a quilt, and we were perhaps thirty minutes into the conversation before I became comfortable with its tenor. I no longer had to look out the window to gain comfort from the clouds. Now a calm, round face was speaking kindly to me. My dinner arrived, and he watched while I unboxed it. “That looks delicious,” he said. I wondered what he was truly saying, all the way over in Christchurch, in his unedited form. 

He accepted an appointment as chair of his department, and since he hated to fly, we stayed in touch over video calls. Although I was tuning him, and my preferences were becoming learned, I still marveled at how supportive he had become. “Why not take up sculpture?” he said to me one spring afternoon. It was morning for him; his face, oriented east, was leonine and wise. “You’ve always been good with your hands, and it could be a good way to alleviate stress as long as you’re taking care of your parents.” He tugged on the straps of his lavender tank top and added, “You poor thing.”

Sometimes, there would be a long pause in which neither of us spoke, and I could only assume that whatever reality obtained in Christchurch had drifted so far from my preferences that the best replacement was silence. In these moments, almost as a joke, I would close my eyes and intone, “Let us pray.” Before too long, I would hear him humming some false Latin incantation. And soon after that, we would be laughing together.

When his baby sister got engaged, he summoned the courage to fly home. I had plans to meet him on Sunday for lunch, but I bumped into him at the grocery store late Saturday night. His appearance startled me. On our calls, he habitually wore bright colors with animal patterns. Here, however, in the produce aisle, he was dressed in dark, academic corduroy. His face was severe. He inspected potential sweet potatoes with a scowl. 

“Surprise!” I said. He looked up, and in the second before his arrogance materialized, like a stage set quickly reassembled, I saw a lifetime’s worth of shyness flicker in his eyes. “The produce here is barbarous,” he said, eschewing a hello. “I don’t know how you can stand to live in this country. Grow a spine, won’t you? Come and live with me in New Zealand.” I smiled, shrugged, and said, “Well, you know, my parents.” He nodded. “Right, right,” he said, then looked me in the eyes for the first time — registering, it seemed, a discrepancy in his own perception. “I forgot how nice you are.” Letting a knotty sweet potato fall into his basket, he added smugly, “Our moods do not believe in each other.”