I wasn’t very interested, and it was making me a little sick to my stomach, because it was going up and down, and the water was gray everywhere, and so was the sky, and I think Dad must’ve been sick to his stomach, because the feed was broadcasting his stomach sickness.
“All right. So here you can see us harpooning the whale. Oh, Jesus — here we go! Feel that tug! It’s awesome. Totally awesome. Okay, this is what they call a ‘Nantucket Sleigh Ride.’ You got to be dragged by the whale until it gets tired. Then you can go up to it and puncture its lung. Oh, there: This is later. You can see Jeff Matson stabbing it. He’s Chairman of the Board. Wow! Thar she blows, huh?!” There was this big spray of blood.
“How’s his wife?” asked Mom.
“Jeff’s? She’s great, I think. Fine. Okay, so here we’ve pulled the whale up beside the ship. This was the greatest feeling. Now they have to ‘flense’ the whale, or remove all its blubber in huge mats. Dude, this is tough work. They have to lift the blubber sheets on hooks and feed it into the ‘try-works,’ where the blubber, it’s all reduced with, you know, fire and heat. It’s really hot and difficult, and I felt real bad for the interns you see there doing it, Maggie and Rick. Good kids. Real good kids.”
I heard a voice say, She wanted me to tell you when everything stopped.
I could barely hear it over the cries on the ship, and the smashing of waves against the carcass of the whale. She wanted me to tell you when it was over.
“All right,” said my dad. “Here we are drinking a toast. And in the background, you can see — now they get some kind of special oil out of the brain cavity. You have to actually send people into the brain cavity to bail it out with buckets. See? They’re dressed up all in rubber. It’s an awful job, walking around in the brain. Those are Byp and John, two more of our interns. See John, with the bucket?”
She wanted me to tell you that you don’t need to see her if you don’t wish to.
I looked for who said it on the ship, because it was a feed noise, but I couldn’t turn my head, because it was my dad’s head, and his memory, and there was the sea spray. I kept on looking at this like forty-five-year-old V.P. lady and getting completely turned on. I tried to stop looking down her blouse when she stooped down to pick up some kind of flensing spade, and I tried to look for the voice, but I couldn’t turn my head, and anyway, it wasn’t there with the interns bailing the whale oil, or the seagulls flying over the boat and charging at the slime that was all over the wood.
It was Violet’s father’s voice.
I am attaching our address, in case you’ve forgotten it. She told me to tell you when it was all over.
“Never mind the rest,” said my dad, and he stopped the broadcast.
“Wait!” I said. They looked at me.
“What was the lady at the end?” said Smell Factor. “She made me funny.”
“Yes,” said my mom, kind of dangerous sounding. “Who was she?”
“So that was the outing,” said my dad.
I was trying to pick up the line from Violet’s father. I was searching for it, but I couldn’t find it. There was just his message, and the attachment with their address.
I stood up. I said, “I got to go. I just got this message that Violet’s … I don’t know. I think something’s really wrong.”
My father said, “There’s a name we like haven’t heard for a while.”
My mother said, “Maybe because ‘we’ have been strutting around on a whaling boat, eyeing up the V.P. of Sales.” My mom had lost so much skin you could see her teeth even when her mouth was closed. “What about it, Peg-leg Pete?”
I left and went out to my upcar and got in. I flew out of our bubble and into the main tube, and then out of our neighborhood and up the droptube and then across the surface. People were going by me in streaks of light. The clouds were glowing green, and a black snow was falling.
It was miles and miles away. It was like so far.
On the news, there were underground explosions that no one could explain in New Jersey, and a riot had started a few hours before in a mall in California, and was spreading, with feed coverage of people stampeding for safety and children falling and professional people beating the shit out of each other with chairs and a body floating in a fountain while the Muzak played a waltz.
I had fed Violet’s address into the upcar, so it did the driving. I didn’t need to do hardly anything. I didn’t have the like, you know, the attention, and I wished I didn’t have to sit. I wanted to pace until I got there, if there’d been enough room. My legs felt jumpy.
While I got out of my upcar, the front door of the house opened. Her father was there. He left the door opened and went inside. I walked down the driveway. I stood for a minute by the open door. It was dark inside. Then I went in.
There was no one in the living room. There were the stacks of books everywhere, and posters with words on them, and some plants. I called out, “Hello?” and nobody answered me, so I went around the corner to go to Violet’s room.
Her father was standing in the kitchen. He was leaned up against the counter. He had on his feed backpack and his special glasses, which were showing him words. He looked up at me quickly when I came in.
I whispered, “What’s happened?”
The father pointed down the hall. The hall was dark, with wall-to-wall carpeting that might’ve had something spilled on it. I went down the hall. I went into the room, and saw her there.
I stood there in front of her bed. The bed was floating. She was covered in discs. They were on her face and up her arms. She looked real, real pale. There were signals going on behind her. Beeping and so on.
Her hair had been shaved off, and it was just a fuzz, now. There were scars on her scalp from where they tried to fix her. Her eyes were open.
It was weird to be in the room with her. It was like being in the room with her if she was wood. It didn’t feel like you were in the room with anyone. You could stand there and you would feel completely alone, like you were just in a room with a prop. You could watch the prop, and not feel anything, or remember anything about how the prop used to joke with you, and how you wanted to kiss it and feel it up. I had thought it would feel like a tragedy, but it didn’t feel like anything at all.
Her father came in and sat down in a chair behind me.
I was still standing up.
He settled in his chair. I could hear his feedpack creaking.
I kept looking at her.
He said, “Her speech became increasingly slurred. Toward the end, she no longer could make the kind of sly witticism of which she was so fond. Your bon mots cannot fly fleetly when each consonant is a labor. She could barely get her tongue to touch her hard palate. She would kick things in anger when she couldn’t speak. Until her legs stopped working finally, and didn’t start back up again. Then I could see her trapped in there. I could see it in her eyes. For a while. She had also become” — he sighed — “she had become hazy. Confused. The hippocampus was likely being mismanaged, so her memory was dim. She asked me about her mother. She spoke a great deal of you. The worst stage was when one could tell she was still awake and almost alert, but she knew that nothing worked. Imprisoned. She was imprisoned. In a statue like the Sphinx. Looking out from the eyes. Her own mind, at that point, was as small and bewildered as a little fly. Behind great battlements.”
I turned around. Words were going across his eyes.
He did not read them.
I whispered, “Oh.”
He said, facing toward her feet, “Her mother and I didn’t want to get her a feed at all. I did not have one. Neither did her mother. I said none for my family.
“Then one day, when her mother had left, and I needed work, I was at a job interview. I was an excellent candidate. Two men were interviewing me. Talking about this and that. Then they were silent, just looking at me. I grew uncomfortable. Then they began looking at each other, and doing what I might call smirking.
“I realized t
hat they had chatted me, and that I had not responded. They found this funny. Risible. That a man would not have a feed. So they were chatting about me in my presence. Teasing me when I could not hear. Free to assess me as they would, right in front of me.
“I did not get the job.
“It was thus that I realized that my daughter would need the feed. She had to live in the world. I asked her if she wanted it. She was a little girl. Of course she said yes. It was installed.
“If they had not installed it …” He lifted his hand, and held it, like he was weighing possibilities.
“They say,” he told me, “that it was the late installation that made it dangerous. The brain was already wired to operate on its own. The feed installation was nonstandard. They have also told me that if I had bought a better model, perhaps it would have been more adaptable. I remember them asking at the time.” He whispered, “I skimped. I read consumer reports and wondered, ‘What’s the difference?’” He looked at me, and asked, “What could go wrong?”
He was glaring at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He asked, “For what?”
“For what I did.”
“What about what you didn’t do?”
I nodded. “I’m sorry for that, too.”
“Sorrow,” he said, “comes so cheap.”
“You can’t blame me.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t do this.”
“You took her to that nightclub.”
“She — but she wanted to live. She told me. She told me she wanted to live.”
He hissed, pointing at her, “Does this count?”
I looked at her.
She was completely calm. She didn’t move. There was a beeping. I remembered her in the hospital on the moon. Laughing. Throwing hypodermic needles at a picture of a man with no skin.
And then he began sending me shots of memory. I saw her gagging when parts of her throat stopped working. I saw her lying partway on the bed, partway on the floor, tangled in her sheets, her eyes open but not blinking.
I saw her thrashing on the mattress, mooing like a cow for mercy.
I rolled her over with his hands, I rolled her over, and the back of her pajamas were black and wet with her shit. I started to clean her.
I saw her pleading with her eyes. The room smelled like her urine, like something hot and just starting to bud.
I began to cough, and came out of the memories.
He was sitting there, staring at me.
“What a nice visit,” he said. “So kind of you to come.”
“Stop it,” I said.
“You’ve done your duty. Why don’t you go along and play your games?” said her father. “We’re the land of youth. The land of opportunity. Go out and take what’s yours.”
“I’m not a jerk,” I said.
“We Americans,” he said, “are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they were produced, or what happens to them” — he pointed at his daughter — “what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I didn’t throw her away.”
“And the worst thing,” he said, “is that you made her apologize. Toward the end. I didn’t say anything to her, but she told me she was apologizing to you for what she said, for how she behaved. You made her apologize for sickness. For her courage. You made her feel sorry for dying.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry.” He stood up. He was taller than me. Thin, real thin, but tall, with these big, loose hands. He said, “Why don’t you go back to your friends, the ones who teased her?”
“They didn’t.”
“It’s almost time for foosball. It will be a gala. Go along, little child. Go back and hang with the eloi.”
“What are the eloi?”
“It’s a reference,” he said, snotty. “It’s from The Time Machine. H. G. Wells.”
I stepped closer to him. “What does it mean?” I asked. “Because I’m sick of —”
“Read it.”
“I’m sick of being told I’m stupid.”
“So read it, and you’ll know.”
“Tell me.”
“Read it.”
“Tell me.”
“You can look it up.”
“You can tell me.”
“Will you ever open your eyes?”
I yelled, “Fuck you! Fuck you! You can fuckin’ tell me!”
He grabbed my shirt. I didn’t expect that. His big, loose hand was on my shirt. He was yelling like a little kid. He was yelling, “No, fuck you! Fuck you forever and forever and forever! Fuck you forever and ever!” I pushed at his arm. His fingers were wound up in the fabric. He was crying. “Fuck you forever and ever and ever! Forever and ever!”
I pushed his arm away. I went for the door.
He was just crying, and saying, “Fuck you forever and ever. Forever and ever.”
Before the door shut, I heard him saying to her, “You couldn’t hear that, Vi, could you? I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You didn’t hear that … ?”
I walked so fast I almost ran through the house. I stumbled sometimes. There was a special on draft pants at Multitude. There was a preview of the season opener of Klang.
I ran out to the driveway. I went to my upcar.
I didn’t fly. I didn’t go anywhere. I sat in the upcar. It nudged me and asked me where I wanted to go. I didn’t answer. I sat. I sat.
Finally I told it I wanted to go home.
It took me.
Miles of suburban bubbles, the shafts, the tubes, the pods. Pennants advertising malls. Trailer parks on miles of concrete, with window boxes covered in ash. Upcars flashing past, their prices speaking to me in my head.
At home, I walked around my room.
Out in the hall, I could hear Smell Factor playing action figures. I could hear him make explosions with his mouth.
I sat on my floor.
I tore at my pants. I was trying so hard to get them off that they ripped. I took off my sweatshirt. I threw my boxer shorts against the wall. I was naked. Completely naked.
I sat on the rug. I sat in the middle of the floor. I could smell my own sweat from my folded places. I sat there.
I ordered the draft pants from Multitude. It was a real bargain.
I ordered another pair. I ordered pair after pair. I ordered them all in the same color. They were slate. I was ordering them as quickly as I could. I put in my address again and again. I was shivering with the cold on my butt. My arms were around my legs. I ordered pants after pants. I put tracking orders on them. I tracked each one. I could feel them moving through the system.
Spreading out from me, in the dead of night, I could feel credit deducted, and the warehouse alerted, and packing, I could feel the packing, and the shipment, the distribution, the transition to FedEx, the numbers, each time, the order number, my customer number traded like secret words at a border, and the things all went out, and I could feel them coming to me as the night passed.
I could feel them in orbit.
I could feel them in circulation all around me like blood in my veins.
I had no credit. I had nothing left in my account.
I could feel the pants winging their way toward me through the night.
I stayed up all through the early morning, shivering, ordering, ordering, and was awake at dawn, when I put on clothes, and went up to the surface, and watched the shit-stupid sun rise over the whole shit-stupid world.
Two days later, I went to visit her.
I dressed real careful, like for a special occasion. While I was driving there, I kept fiddling with my shirt. I tried the sleeves rolled up and rolled down at different places on my biceps.
When I got to the house, the father opened the door. The father stepped away and let me in. He didn’t say anything. He walked into the kitchen and out the back door. I went into Violet’s room.
She just lay the
re. She still had the discs all over her. Someone had laid her arms outside of the sheets. Her eyes were still open.
I sat beside her. I had an hour before I had to go meet Quendy. I put my hands on Violet’s arm.
I said, “Violet? You might be able to — maybe you can hear in there,” I said. “So I came over to … I thought I’d tell you the news, what’s going on, just talk to you.
“And I also found some things like you like. The strange facts. About things in other places. I thought you’d like to hear.”
I tried to talk just to her. I tried not to listen to the noise on the feed, the girls in wet shirts offering me shampoo. I told her stories. They were only a sentence long, each one of them. That’s all I knew how to find. So I told her broken stories. The little pieces of broken stories I could find. I told her what I could.
I told her that the Global Alliance had issued more warnings about the possibility of total war if their demands were not met. I told her that the Emperor Nero, from Rome, had a giant sea built where he could keep sea monsters and have naval battles staged for him. I told her that there had been rioting in malls all over America, and that no one knew why. I told her that the red-suited Santa Claus we know — the regular one? — was popularized by the Coca-Cola Company in the 1930s. I told her that the White House had not confirmed or denied reports that extensive bombing had started in major cities in South America.
I told her, “There’s an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we’re all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there’s nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.”