This was the kind of thing people talked about a lot, like, parents were going on about how toys were stupid now, when they used to be good, and how everything on the feed had its price, and okay, it might be true, but it’s also boring, so I was like, “Yeah. Okay. That’s the feed. So what?”
“This is my project.”
“Is … ?”
She smiled and put her finger inside the collar of my shirt. “Listen,” she said. “What I’m doing, what I’ve been doing over the feed for the last two days, is trying to create a customer profile that’s so screwed, no one can market to it. I’m not going to let them catalog me. I’m going to become invisible.”
I stared at her for a minute. She ran her finger along the edge of my collar, so her nail touched the skin of my throat. I waited for an explanation. She didn’t tell me any more, but she said to come with her, and she grabbed one of the nodules on my shirt — it was one of those nodule shirts — and she led me toward Bebrekker & Karl.
We went into the store, and immediately our feeds were all completely Bebrekker & Karl. We were bannered with all this crazy high-tech fun stuff they sold there. Then a guy walked up to us and said could he help us. I said I didn’t know. But Violet was like, “Sure. Do you have those big searchlights? I mean, the really strong ones?”
“Yeah,” he said. “We have … yeah. We have those.” He went over to some rack, and he took these big searchlights off the rack. He showed us some different models. The feeds had specs. They showed us the specs while he talked.
When he went into the back to get another, cheaper searchlight, I said to Violet, “What next?”
She whispered, “Complicating. Resisting.”
Bebrekker & Karl were bannering us big. It was, We’ve streamlined the Tesla coil for personal use — you can even wear it in your hair! With these new, da da da, and Relax, yawn, and slump! While our greased cybermassage beads travel up and down your back! Guaranteed to make you etc., like that.
I was like, “Okay, huh?” but the guy came back and he had another searchlight.
He told us, “You can see shit real good with this one? I have one of these on my upcar. It’s sometimes like — whoa, really — whoa. There was this one time? And I was flying along at night and I shined the light down at the ground, to look at the tops of all the suburb pods? And all over the top of them, it looked like it was moving, like there was a black goo? So I turned up the brightness, and I went down, and I shined it more bright, and it turned out the black moving goo was all these hordes of cockroaches. There were miles of them, running all over the tops of the domes. They kept on trying to get out of the light, so wherever you shined it, there would be this —”
“I’d like to mount the light on my belly,” Violet said. “Would that be possible?”
He looked at her funny. “With a swivel head?”
“Sure. Then I could swivel it.”
“What’s this for?”
“Something special,” she said, in this low voice. She rubbed my arm up and down, sexily.
He was like, “Whoa. I can’t even think.” He gave me the thumbs-up.
She winked at me. It was kind of a turn-on.
She got him to send her all of the feedstats for the lamp, but then she didn’t buy it. She didn’t have it mounted. Instead, she thanked him a real lot, and then she took me out of the store, and I was starting to get the picture and think it was all pretty funny.
We kept going from place to place, asking for weird shit we didn’t buy. She took me to a rug store, and a store with old chests and pieces of eight and shit, and we went to a toy store and she asked them to explain the world of Bleakazoid action figures, which is a dumbass name if I ever heard one, but they explained it all. It was mainly they were these muscular people from a parallel world, which is usually how it is. We didn’t buy anything.
We ran through the big hallway with her tapping her head and saying, “Hear that? The music?” It was pop songs. “They have charts that show which chords are most thumbs-up. Music is marketing. They have lists of key changes that get thirteen-year-old girls screaming. There’s no difference between a song and an advertising jingle anymore. Songs are their own jingles. Step lively. Over here.”
We went to a clothing store and she held up all these stupid dresses, and the girl there was like, I’m helping a weird kid, so I’m going to be really fake, so she kept smiling fake, and nodding really serious at all the dresses Violet held up, and she was all, “That will look great,” and Violet said, “I don’t know. D’you think? He’s pretty wide in the chest.”
The girl looked at me, and I was frozen. So I said, “Yeah. I work out.”
Violet asked me, “What are you? What’s your cup size?”
I shrugged and played along. “Like, nine and a half?” I guessed. “That’s my shoe size.”
Violet said, “I think he’d like something slinky, kind of silky.”
I said, “As long as you can stop me from rubbing myself up against a wall the whole time.”
“Okay,” said Violet, holding up her hands like she was annoyed. “Okay, the chemise last week was a mistake.”
I practically started to laugh snot into my hand.
We went to some more clothing stores, and we looked at all these dumb sweaters and pretended we liked them, and we looked at makeup that she wouldn’t wear, and a gravel-tumbler, and we went to a DVS Pharmacy Superstore, and she comparison-shopped for home endoscopy kits.
We were looking at the endoscopy kits when she started whispering to me, “For the last two days, okay? I’ve been earmarking all this different stuff as if I want to buy it — you know, a pennywhistle, a barrel of institutional lard, some really cheesy boy-pop, a sarong, an industrial lawn mower, all of this info on male pattern baldness, business stationery, barrettes … And I’ve been looking up house painting for the Antarctic homeowner, and the way people get married in Tonga, and genealogy home pages in the Czech Republic … I don’t know, it’s all out there, waiting.”
I picked up one box. “This one is the cheapest. You swallow the pills and they take pictures as they go down.”
She said, “Once you start looking at all this stuff, all of these sites, you realize this obscure stuff isn’t obscure at all. Each thing is like a whole world. I can’t tell you.”
“How’s your like,” I pointed at my head, “how’s your feedware working out?”
“It’s fine. You’re not listening.”
“I’m just wondering.”
She asked me, “What do you think?”
“I liked the guy in Bebrekker & Karl. I wonder if it’s true, about the cockroaches.”
“What do you think about resisting?” she asked me really hard. Her jaw muscles were sticking out.
I said, “It sounds great, as long as I get to wear the chemise.” She laughed.
We went to dinner at a J. P. Barnigan’s Family Extravaganza. We had mozzarella sticks and then I had a big steak. She got a Caesar salad. There were free refills on drinks. Afterward, we were sitting there in the booth, and I asked her whether she wanted a ride home. She said no. I said was she sure, and she said yes.
I said, “What’s doing with your parents?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, with your house, and why you have me meet you here instead. And why didn’t your dad come to the moon? When we were, you know.”
She looked at me funny. She said, “Do you know how much it costs to fly someone to the moon?”
I guessed. “A lot?”
“Yeah. Yeah, a lot. He wanted to come, but it would have been, like, a month of his salary. He saved up for a year to send me. Then I went, and that stuff happened.”
“He saved up for a year for you to go to the moon?”
“Yeah.” She said, “Hey, here’s what you can do. You can drop me at the feed technician’s office. I have an appointment.”
We made out for a minute in the car. Then I flew her a few miles away, to a technician
. I left her there. Before I pulled out of the tube by his office, I looked back at her, standing by the door. She had her hands on her elbows. She was pinching the elbow skin and pulling it.
She waited there, pinching and pulling, and then went in.
That night, I chatted her after I went to bed. I was like, Violet. Violet?
She was like, Hey. Hey there.
It was great, going to the mall today. I had a good time. I enjoyed that whole thing.
Finally, she was like, I did, too.
I could tell something was wrong. It was something about the way she was sending things on the feed.
I asked, Are you crying?
There was a long feed silence. I could hear programming.
She was like, Yeah. Just for practice.
What’s doing?
Never mind, she chatted. Never mind.
Didn’t you have a real good time?
I wish you were here, she said.
I thought about her lying in bed. Maybe in some pajamas, so she was warm. I said, I wish I was there, too.
Look, she said, changing the whole subject. Look at everything I got from the feed. It’s going crazy with everything we looked at today. It’s trying to work for me.
This perky voice on her feed said, Hi! I’m Nina, your personal FeedTech shopping assistant! Tired of that gross-out smell in your mouth? Try FreshGorge Glottal Deodorant — your boyf will thank you big-time! Hey, Violet Durn, what a skip kinda day you had! You go shop, girl! Here’s some more great info about all the brag stuff you asked about!
Violet started to forward me things. There were sites for the spotlights and the dresses and the endoscopy kits, and she sent them in flurries. Once they started coming, they started to call others to them, and I could feel them doing that call, and they were all around me. They came to us. It was like they were lots of friendly butterflies, and we were smeared with something, and they kept coming and coming, and their wings were winking beautifully, and more and more came. And they were landing on our fingers, and on our lips, and on our eyes, opening and closing? And we were going — Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!
It was crazy.
Being with Violet was great.
She hadn’t had much of the stuff you see on the feed when she was younger. A lot of it was too expensive, or her father just said no. But she had watched all the shows about how other people live normally, and she really wanted to live like the rest of us. So she and her other home-schooling friends had tried to copy us. For example, he said she couldn’t have toy guns, because they were against his beliefs, so she had to pick up anything — pieces of wood or bent metal — and use them like a toy gun, and pretend it was just as good as a real one made of plastic.
I was afraid that she would be too smart for me, but she wasn’t. I don’t mean she wasn’t smarter, because she was, but just that there was so much she hadn’t done. She was like a little kid, all excited when I was just meeting her at the mall for the day, and we walked from store to store or went on the air slides or shopped underwater. She had hardly ever done any of it before. She was always new.
We sat in the mall and made up stories about people who passed by. Shoppers walked around us on the concourses, their mouths moving, talking to people who weren’t there. They were all muttering.
We made up stories about how they’d given birth to monsters in attics.
We went into stores, and we laughed and laughed.
It was like she took my hand, or I took her hand, and we ducked through doorways, and together we went to an old place, and it was a new place.
We went there holding hands.
Okay, but sometimes, though, I did get worried that she was too smart for me.
I don’t do too good in School™. We were back in School™, so I was reminded pretty often that I was stupid.
School™ is not so bad now, not like back when my grandparents were kids, when the schools were run by the government, which sounds completely like, Nazi, to have the government running the schools? Back then, it was big boring, and all the kids were meg null, because they didn’t learn anything useful, it was all like, da da da da, this happened in fourteen ninety-two, da da da da, when you mix like, chalk and water, it makes nitroglycerin, and that kind of shit? And nothing was useful?
Now that School™ is run by the corporations, it’s pretty brag, because it teaches us how the world can be used, like mainly how to use our feeds. Also, it’s good because that way we know that the big corps are made up of real human beings, and not just jerks out for money, because taking care of children, they care about America’s future. It’s an investment in tomorrow. When no one was going to pay for the public schools anymore and they were all like filled with guns and drugs and English teachers who were really pimps and stuff, some of the big media congloms got together and gave all this money and bought the schools so that all of them could have computers and pizza for lunch and stuff, which they gave for free, and now we do stuff in classes about how to work technology and how to find bargains and what’s the best way to get a job and how to decorate our bedroom.
It was still hard, there were some times when none of us did good, and I felt stupid, and we all felt stupid, and Loga and Calista were like, Omigod! This is so dumb!
Could the teacher be any more, please, condescending?
Omigod, I know. Like, thanks for the heapin’ helpings of yawn banquet.
And I sat there with my palms pressed into my forehead, thinking about Violet, at home, being smart. I would think about some conversation we were having where I was dumb.
Like she was always reading things about how everything was dying and there was less air and everything was getting toxic. She told me about how things were getting really bad with some things in South America, but she couldn’t really tell exactly how bad, because the news had been asked to be a little more positive. She said that it made her frightened to read all this kind of thing, about how people hated us for what we did. So one time I said to her that she should stop reading it, because it was just depressing, so she was like, But I want to know what’s going on, so I was like, Then you should do something about it. It’s a free country. You should do something. She was like, Nothing’s ever going to happen in a two-party system. She was like, da da da, nothing’s ever going to change, both parties are in the pocket of big business, da da da, all that? So I was like, You got to believe in the people, it’s a democracy, we can change things.
She was like, It’s not a democracy.
I hated it when she got like this, because then she wasn’t like herself, I mean, she wasn’t like this playful person who drags me around the mall doing crazy shit, she was suddenly like those girls in School™ who sit underground and dress all in black with ribbing and get an iron fixture for their jaws and they’re like, “Capitalist fool — propaganda tool,” holding up both their hands, etc. When she said things like It’s not a democracy, suddenly I couldn’t stand to be having this whole conversation. I was like, Oh, yeah, and she was like, It’s not, and I was like, Oh, okay, and she said, No, it’s not a democracy, and I was like, Yes it is, and she was like, No it isn’t, and I got sarcastic, so I was like, No, sure, it’s all fascist, isn’t it? We’re all fascists?
Then she was like, really gently, No, please, I’m not trying to be an asshole. It’s not a democracy.
I was like, Then what is it?
A republic. It’s a republic.
Why?
Because we elect people to vote for us. That’s my point.
So why is it like that?
Because if it was a democracy, everybody would have to decide about everything.
I thought about that. We could have everybody vote. From the feeds. Instantaneous. Then it would be a democracy.
Except, she said, only about seventy-three percent of Americans have feeds.
Oh, I said. Yeah. And so I felt stupid. There’s that many who don’t?
Then she told me, I didn’t used to have a feed.
I was like, What do you mean?
She was quiet like she didn’t want to chat. It was that kind of quiet. Then she went, We didn’t have enough money. When I was little. And my dad and mom didn’t want me to have one.
Holy shit.
I got it when I was seven.
I’m sorry, I said.
For what?
For not knowing. You know, that so many people don’t have them.
No one with feeds thinks about it, she said. When you have the feed all your life, you’re brought up to not think about things. Like them never telling you that it’s a republic and not a democracy. It’s something that makes me angry, what people don’t know about these days. Because of the feed, we’re raising a nation of idiots. Ignorant, self-centered idiots.
Suddenly, she realized what she had said, that she’d just called me a self-centered, ignorant idiot. She stopped. She started stumbling all over her words, and she was like, I didn’t mean … I, you know … it’s not really important, but just, I believe … , and so on. I just sat there and watched her. I could tell I was liking to watch her trip up over her words while I was doing this angry face, so I didn’t move my mouth or chat her or anything. I just sat, and she felt bad, and then she even chatted me, I’m sorry, which was bad, because it showed that we both knew I was stupid, and then I looked away. I looked away, and she put her hand on my arm, which was the worst, because it was the consolation prize.