“You …” I shrugged. “You do this … I don’t know. It’s fun. It’s a party. What do you do instead of parties?”
“My friends and I are all home-schooled, so we’re a mixed bag. Bettina’s mother has us come over and weave ponchos.”
“You don’t go to School™?”
“Alf’s parents teach us how to breechload their antiaircraft gun.”
“Whoa. Can you show me?”
“Here’s the surprising thing: It’s all in the wrists.”
“Unit.”
“Yeah. Unit. God, I’m so excited to be going to a real party.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Will it be like it is on the feed?”
I patted her hand. “Yeah. I mean, dumber, but yeah.”
“Why, this makes me feel like a special girl. The specialest girl in the world.”
She raised up her hand, and we knocked knuckles together.
She leaned back in her seat. She pulled some seat belt out and then let it roll back in. We were both thoughtful for a minute. There were some weather blimps in front of us. They were all yellow in the sunset that was spreading over the Clouds™. We flew between them. We could barely see the silver of their blimp-hides through the color of syrup. They were like a herd.
She asked, “Do you think things are going to be different?”
“From what?”
“From the way things were before.”
I looked at her. She looked serious, suddenly. I shrugged. I said, “It’s good to have people again, like all these people, talking to you in your head.”
“We’ve all been through this big thing together,” she said. “It’s got to change us somehow.”
She rested her arm along the back of my seat. I leaned my head back. I could feel my hairs rub against her arm.
Even to my hairs, her arm felt soft.
We got to the party and it was a pretty good party, but low-key.
When we got there, for a second we stood in the entryway, because Link and Marty were playing each other at this game, The Cranky Tumble of Dark House, one of the ones with zombies and mutants, and they were all spinning around and shooting their fingers like guns. They couldn’t see anything, just the gamefeed, so when Violet walked in, Marty almost whacked her in the stomach with his fist. He and Link were swearing and hopping up and down on the marble tiles.
“Unit,” said Link. “Just get out of the way.”
Marty was like, “Out of the fuckin’ way! We’re — Oh, shit! — We’re — oh … Unit!” He was all shouting at Link, who was like missing some shot at a spine-leech.
We went into the living room and over to the table where Quendy had all the drinks and beer. People were sitting around drinking, and some of them had music on their feeds and were sitting around talking to it, and some others had imported a feedcast of Snowblind, a comedy about a young man who nothing ever happens to, until one crazy day when he crosses the mob at a ski resort and finds out what’s really buried in those moguls — and then all hell breaks loose! (NC-17)
Violet looked kind of timid, now that we were there. She took a deep breath and went over to say hi to Calista. I stood around and talked with Quendy for a few minutes. Quendy was at first really nice and normal, talking about how it was good to see that we were doing okay, and how she was okay, and everything was fine. Then she started this glaring at Calista, and she was chatting me like, Do you think Calista and Link are doing it?
I shrugged and was like, Yeah. I bet.
He’s such a pig. He did it with me like — Oh. Never mind.
Quendy glared at Calista and popped a popcorn shrimp into her mouth from way down below, with her thumb.
She was like, I’m tired of just being the friendly one who everyone like steps all over.
Yeah, I chatted. How do you do that, with the shrimp and your thumb?
Okay. I’ll show you. Hey, are you going out with Violet?
Yeah.
That’s great. I think she’s meg nice.
Yeah.
Calista says she’s kind of stuck-up? But I don’t agree at all. Like, Calista’s the one who’s stuck-up.
Calista said that?
Yeah. You want to try the shrimp on your finger?
She showed me how to pop the shrimp. As she did it, I looked across the room and saw Violet talking to Calista, and both of them were frowning. I was worried that something bad had happened, so I m-chatted her, like, Hey, beautiful. What’s doing?
Heyyyyy, handsome. Just talking with Calista. Having a nice little chat. I made the mistake of saying we were back to the picayune grind. Now she keeps going, “‘Picayune’?!? ‘Picayune’?!?” and pretending I’m French. I wish I hadn’t said anything.
I looked around me. Everyone was nodding their heads to music, or had their eyes just blank with the feedcast. It was just a party. Nothing but a party.
From one direction, I heard a kid say, “I think the truffle is like completely undervalued.”
And from the other direction, a girl was saying, “But he never pukes when he chugalugs.”
It was like nothing had happened. We were watching feedcasts as if our brains had never been invaded by the asshole. Loga was laughing with her front teeth showing, as if she’d never been different from the rest of us, the one left with the feed when the rest of us didn’t have it. Some guy was pouring the beer. Link and Marty were doing like acrobatics in the entryway, fighting invisible demons.
And everything was completely normal.
The truffle was completely undervalued.
… which the President denied in an address early on Tuesday. “It is not the will of the American people, the people of this great nation, to believe the allegations that were made by these corporate ‘watch’ organizations, which are not the majority of the American people, I repeat not, and aren’t its will. It is our duty as Americans, and as a nation dedicated to freedom and free commerce, to stand behind our fellow Americans and not cast … things at them. Stones, for example. The first stone. By this I mean that we shouldn’t think that there are any truth to the rumors that the lesions are the result of any activity of American industry. Of course they are not the result of anything American industry has done. The people of the United States know, as I know, that that is just plain hooey. We need to remember … Okay, we need to remember that America is the nation of freedom, and that freedom, my friends, freedom does not lesions make.” The President is expected to veto the congressional …
The party went on. I couldn’t concentrate anymore. We watched Snowblind. The guy in it, he fell off a platform at a mob-owned ski lift and landed in powder next to a sexy assassin with a heart of gold. I was feeling strange sitting next to Violet, and she wasn’t laughing, which was weirding me out. She was just sitting there. The feedcast went on and on, and they all went up the mountain on skis and shot at each other and finally they all learned an important lesson about love. Then it was over.
I went upstairs to take a whizz, and Marty and Link were dragging me into a bedroom.
“Unit,” Link said. “Unit, you are about to walk through the mirror.”
“It is time,” Marty said, “for Bulb-tweaker.”
“Oh, unit,” I was like, “is this malfunction?”
“Hey hey hey hey hey, this is a great site. It’s fuckin’ smooth as glass.”
“‘Bulb-tweaker’?”
“It’s just a mild scrambler,” said Link.
“I can completely see straight,” said Marty. He pointed. “That’s right in front of me.”
There were other guys in there, too, and one girl. They were whispering. Someone had gone completely fugue on the bed.
“Do a burst. Then crank it down to a slow burn.”
“Okay,” said Marty. “I’m going to go again.”
“Unit,” said Link, punching me on the arm. “Fly the friendly skies.”
I was like, “Not tonight.”
“Come on, unit.”
“I don’t think Violet?
??s into the mal.”
“Oh, come on, unit, she’ll never know.”
“What is this, shitheads?” I said. “Cut the ABC Afterschool Special.”
“She’ll never know!” said Link.
I said, “What did we just go through? Unit?” I whapped myself on the back of the head. “Remember? Like, what did we just … ? Huh?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
“What?”
“I said never mind.”
“Okay,” said Link. “Your loss. Here I go. You with, Marty?”
“I’m with.”
They spread out their arms and closed their eyes, and you could see when it hit them. They got the shudder first, and then their heads rocked, and they were big stumbling, and they went backward, and there were all these people back there on the bed and a chair and the floor, blinded, doing the quiver. Link’s tongue came out. It was purple from candy.
I went out and to the bathroom. When I was done, I went back downstairs. Quendy and Violet were talking. Quendy was like, “Where is everyone?” but I didn’t tell her they were up getting scrambled in the master bedroom.
Violet asked if I wanted to walk out in the yard for a minute, and I said sure, so we went out. We were standing on the porch and it was much cooler out there. The dome on the yard’s pod was all blue, like it was night, which it was, I mean, up on the surface, but it was blue there at the house, too.
We stood, leaning on the railing. The night was perfect. We shut out the music from the feed. It was funny, then, to look back in and see people moving to nothing.
She said, “You’re quiet.”
I nodded.
“What’s doing?” she asked.
“No real one thing.”
We just stood there together.
I said, “You didn’t like the feature.”
She said, “It was okay.”
“You didn’t laugh.”
“I liked the mountains. All the pine trees. I’d like to go to the mountains. Wouldn’t it be nice? With a fire?”
I pictured the mountains and the fire and a snowball fight and let’s-get-out-of-these-wet-clothes, and I said, “Yeah. Sure.”
“I want to get out to the country,” she said. She looked at me. “What’s really doing?”
I couldn’t tell her about the guys going in mal. I didn’t want her looking at them while they were on the wall-to-wall carpeting and doing the quiver. I didn’t want her to look at them as if she was sorry.
Finally, I said, “People have just gone so quick back to like before.”
“Why?” she said. “What happened?”
I didn’t tell her about them upstairs. I just told her about sitting in the living room, and hearing the guy who was like the truffle was undervalued, and the girl who was like he never pukes when he chugalugs. I told her about them and then I looked for the memory of them, which I still had, and I played it for her. She knew exactly what I was talking about.
She went, Brittle.
I feel like we’re the only two of us who like remember the, like, the thing.
People want to forget.
You can’t blame them.
She looked at me. She didn’t say anything for a second, and then she said, “My feedware is damaged.”
“What? In your — in your brain?”
She put her hand up next to her scalp. “It’ll be fine. But I’m the only one who had damage. They’re trying to fix it.”
“What’s wrong? Can you still get like, stuff and shit?”
She laughed. “Yeah. Both of them. I’m fine. But they say they have to find some way to make adjustments. Something happened when the guy hacked. Most people, the hack just jammed them for a while. Somehow it affected mine more. Something’s still wrong.”
“Holy shit.”
“Do you remember one day when we were on the moon, the doctors took me out to talk to me alone? Then I came back and found you, and took you up to the air-loss garden? The doctors, they were talking to me about this. They said that it would probably stabilize. It hasn’t yet.”
“Holy shit.”
“They say it will probably be fine.”
“Holy shit.”
She patted me on the chest. “Calm,” she said. “The rose will bloom ere long.”
“Yeah. What-fuckin’-ever.” She watched me. I stared at her. I thought about Marty and Link going in mal.
She chatted, What are you thinking about?
Nothing.
It can’t be nothing.
I thought about Link and Marty’s eyes rolled back. And I lied, like, I’m just wondering whether he meant truffles the mushroom or truffles the candy.
She laughed and touched my face. I felt like I was protecting her from something and that felt good, like I was a man already. I hugged her like a man and we kissed. For a long time, we stared at each other. I liked the way the synthetic breeze was on her hair. We stood, looking out at the shrubs, and the motorboat up on a trailer, and I felt like I was in love, and our arms were around each other.
She leaned close to my head and took a handful of my hair in her hand and pulled my head down. She whispered, “Keep thinking. You can hear our brains rattling inside us, like the littler Russian dolls.”
That night, the night after the party, I had something that I thought was a dream, with me at a great site where all the games were free and you could play anything. So I was thinking different even about pretty dumb games like Turbo Checkers, because if you can get anything for free, what the hell, so I started one of them, which was this fantasy game, and I was putting on some elf gloves, and stringing my bow, when I could feel that someone was nudging my feed. They were nudging it, like with their cheek or nose.
In my dream, I asked them who they were.
In my dream, they told me they were the police. They asked me if I was a victim of the hack at the Rumble Spot.
In my dream, I said yes.
In my dream, they told me okay, go back to sleep.
In my dream, I said who were they really?
They said that they were going to be running some tests on me, and that I should think about something else.
I said that they weren’t the police, so who were they really?
They said, here is the lizard you have always been wanting. We took the liberty of giving it a nice new collar.
I asked if all these games were mine.
All yours, they said. All yours. Good night, sweetie. They’re all yours. Take them. All yours.
In my dream, I thought they were the hacker group, the Coalition of Pity.
But when I woke up, I didn’t remember that for weeks. What I remembered was just the games, which, once I was awake, I couldn’t find, and the elf gloves, and the bow, and the lizard that was all mine.
… AMURICA: A PORTRAIT IN GEEZERS …
… I remember, as the last forests fell … at about that time, we would see hawks and eagles in the cities. People walked outside more, back then. The temperature usually didn’t get above a hundred. There were streets in the cities, and eagles flew over them, wobbling without moving their wings.
I remember seeing the hawks perched on street lamps, during those last days of the American forests. They had come from the mountains, maybe, or pine woods that were now two or three levels of suburb, but the hawks sat in our cities like kings. They would not look down from their lampposts as thousands of downcars went by underneath. It was like they sat alone on Douglas firs.
I miss that time. The cities back then, just after the forests died, were full of wonders, and you’d stumble on them — these princes of the air on common rooftops — the rivers that burst through city streets so they ran like canals — the rabbits in parking garages — the deer foaling, nestled in Dumpsters like a Nativity.
It was maybe, okay, maybe it was like two days after the party with the “never pukes when he chugalugs” that Violet chatted me first thing in the morning and said she was working on a brand-new
project. I asked her what was the old project, and she was like, did I want to see the new one? I said, Okay, should I come over to su casa? I’ve never been there, and she was like, No, not yet. Let’s meet at the mall.
I was like, Okay, sure, fine, whatever swings your string, and she was all, Babycakes, you swing my string, which is a nice thing for someone to say to you, especially before you use mouthwash.
So I flew over to the mall near her house through the rain, which was coming down outside in this really hard way. Everyone had on all their lights until they got above the clouds. Up there it was sunny, and people were flying very businesslike.
The mall was really busy, there were a lot of crowds there. They were buying all this stuff, like the inflatable houses for their kids, and the dog massagers, and the tooth extensions that people were wearing, the white ones which you slid over your real teeth and they made your mouth just like one big single tooth going all the way across.
Violet was standing near the fountain and she had a real low shirt on, to show off her lesion, because the stars of the Oh? Wow! Thing! had started to get lesions, so now people were thinking better about lesions, and lesions even looked kind of cool. Violet looked great in her low shirt, and besides that she was smiling, and really excited for her idea.
For a second we said hello and just laughed about all of the stupid things people were buying and then Violet, she pointed out that, regarding legs to stand on, I didn’t have very much of one, because I was wheeling around a wheelbarrow full of a giant hot cross bun from Bun in a Barrow.
I said, “Yum, yum, yum.”
She was like, “You ready?”
I asked her what the idea was.
She said, “Look around you.” I did. It was the mall. She said, “Listen to me.” I listened. She said, “I was sitting at the feed doctor’s a few days ago, and I started to think about things. Okay. All right. Everything we do gets thrown into a big calculation. Like they’re watching us right now. They can tell where you’re looking. They want to know what you want.”
“It’s a mall,” I said.
“They’re also waiting to make you want things. Everything we’ve grown up with — the stories on the feed, the games, all of that — it’s all streamlining our personalities so we’re easier to sell to. I mean, they do these demographic studies that divide everyone up into a few personality types, and then you get ads based on what you’re supposedly like. They try to figure out who you are, and to make you conform to one of their types for easy marketing. It’s like a spiral: They keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple. So the corps make everything even simpler. And it goes on and on.”