M. T. Anderson (19 page)

He spun the bottle, and it turned, with the neck flashing, and suddenly I could hear Quendy crying, and then I saw the bottle land on Violet. Marty got up and straightened his pants and walked over.

“Hey, there, sexy,” he said. “Let’s make this good.”

He reached out his hand toward her. She flinched backward. He put his hand on the top of her head.

I said, “This isn’t much fun.”

“We’ll show you fun,” said Marty, winking.

“Stop it,” said Violet, standing up. “Stop it all.”

“What’s wrong?” said Marty. He held out his hand toward her wrist. He took her wrist in his hand.

Violet was completely white. She was shaking. Her head, I mean, it was bobbing. She suddenly was yelling, “Can I tell you what I see? Can I tell you? We are hovering in the air while people are starving. This is obvious! Obvious! We’re playing games, and our skin is falling off. We’re losing it, and we’re making out. And you’re talking — you’re starting to talk in a
fucking sestina! Okay? A sestina! Okay? Stop it! Fuck you! We’ve got to all stop it!
” She was screaming.

People were staring and chatting, and they weren’t chatting with me, except Link, who gave me a single,
What’s doing with this? Fix it,
before cutting me off.

Violet was screaming,
“Look at us! You don’t have the feed! You are feed! You’re feed! You’re being eaten! You’re raised for food! Look at what you’ve made yourselves!”
She pointed at Quendy, and went,
“She’s a monster! A monster! Covered with cuts! She’s a creature!”

And now I was going, “Violet — Don’t. Violet! She’s not a — she’s not a goddamn monster. She’s —” but Violet screeched,
“You too! Fuck you too!”
— and she tried to slap me — I grabbed her by the arm — and she tried to scratch at my face, but her hand wasn’t working.

She had broken somehow, and she was broken, and, oh fuck, she was sagging and I grabbed her to help her, and she was shaking, and her eyes were all white and rolling around, and she couldn’t talk anymore —

— she was choking —

I grabbed her and tried to wrap my arms around her. There was a long line of spit coming out of her mouth. Her legs were pumping up and down. She was broken. She was completely broken.

I was crying and saying to call an ambulance, and people were like,
Fuck no, is she in mal? If she’s in mal, no way, we’ll get in trouble,
and I was like,
Call a fucking ambulance,
and I tried to do it on my feed, but things were too screwed up, and I could feel the signals going out, and she was breathing again, but she’d gone limp, and I lowered her to the ground, and I put her there, and Quendy was still yelling, “Fuck you!” at her body. “Fuck you!” And Violet was breathing now in heavy, big gasps, but her eyes were closed, and I was leaning next to her asleep body, and squeezing, and squeezing, and squeezing.

I don’t know what the others did. There were noises, and women came.

I went with them. And the feed whispered to me about sales, and made all these suggestions about medical lawyers and malpractice, and something happened, and I was sitting beside her in an ambulance, and suddenly I realized,
The party is over.

The fucking party is over.

The waiting room was white. There were these orbs moving back and forth filled with fluids. They went up and down the halls.

“There will be some delays,” said one of the nurses.

She touched her face with her hand. Her pinkie was sticking out. She pressed on her cheek, like she had a toothache.

She said, “Expect a delay.”

“Let me tell you a little story,” said a woman on a chair next to me.

“He’s distressed,” said the nurse. She fixed her hair, which was this hair held together with two magic wands. “Breathe deep,” the nurse told me. “She’s pretty functional.”

“What?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“The doctor will talk to you.”

“There was this one time,” said the woman on the chair.

“When is the doctor coming?” I asked.

“He’s here.”

“Where?”

“In the room with her.”

“But when’s he like coming out?”

She sighed. “You might want to rest your eyes.”

I paced on the floor. The feed was handing me things. I listened to it, and I paced around, following the pattern of the tiles on the floor.

. . . the poor sales of the Ford Laputa in the Latin American market can’t be explained by . . .

. . . craziest prime-time comedy yet. What happens when two normal guys and two normal girls meet in their favorite health-food restaurant? Lots of
AB
normal laughs, served with sprouts on the side, is what!

I paced there. I went around all the chairs. I did them slalom. Men locked into giant wheels with their arms and legs spread out were being wheeled past down the hall. People in smocks hit them on the rim to keep them rolling. The wheels rolled by. The people in smocks were whistling. The men in the wheels stared out, their mouths open, their eyes looking at everything flashing by, but the men were not moving at all. Just looking at the world helpless, in circles, the world going by.

Violet’s father got there half an hour after I did. I saw him running past me. I didn’t wave or anything, because I didn’t want to get in the way or be a pain in the butt. People, sometimes, they need to be alone. He went past me and didn’t see who I was. That was okay with me. They took him into the room. I waited.

I clapped my hands together softly a bunch of times. I swung my arms at my sides and then clapped. I realized that they were swinging really wide. People were looking up at me. I stopped. I couldn’t help a small clap, one last one.

He came out. He was walking real slow. He sat down.

I didn’t know whether to talk to him. He was smoothing out the knees of his tribe-suit.

I went over. I said hello, and introduced myself again.

He said, “Oh, yes. Hello. Thank you for . . .” He was just like, nodding.

“Is she okay?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. ‘Okay.’ Yes, she’s ‘okay.’”

He didn’t seem much like before.

I was like, “What’s happening?”

“They’re fixing the malfunction. For the time being. The doctor’s coming out.” His eyes were orange with the light from his feed glasses.

The orbs went past. We waited. Two nurses were talking about the weekend. There was nothing I wanted to watch on the feed. It made me feel tired.

“Can you stop?” said her father to me.

I realized I’d like been clapping again.

“I hate rhythms,” he said.

I put my hands down. I stood still, in front of him.

He said, “You can monitor her feed function.” He sent me an address. “Go there,” he said. “If things neural were going swimmingly with Vi, the number you detect would be about ninety-eight percent.”

I went there. It was some kind of medical site. It said
Violet Durn, Feed Efficiency: 87.3%.
He stared at me. I stared at him. We were like, just, there. The efficiency went up to 87.4%. He turned his head. Someone was whistling two notes in the hallway.

Violet was not a bitch. She didn’t mean those things. It was because of the damage. It was making her not herself. I told myself that again and again.

But it didn’t matter if she was right or wrong about what she said. It was the fact she said it, especially to Quendy, calling her a monster, screaming like one of those girls in black at school, the ones who sat on the floor in the basement and talked about the earth, the ones who got rivets through their eyes just to make people think they were hard. I wanted Violet to be uninsane again, just a person who would touch my face.

“She’s awake,” said a nurse. “Please come in.”

She wanted him. Not me. I just stood there. He turned around and went in.

After a while, he came out and sat down again.

The nurse said, “Now you.”

I followed her in.

Violet was sitting in a floating chair with lots of cables. Some of them went to her head.

When I came in, she looked away from me.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

We stood that way for a little while. She was dressed in just a gown again. Like when we were getting to know each other, back on the moon.

She said, “I said I’m sorry.”

I didn’t want to piss her off, so I figured what she wanted me to say, and I said, “I’m just . . . I’m worrying about you.”

She shrugged. I watched her. I didn’t know how close she was to the person who had gone completely fugue at the party.

I asked, “How did they say you are?”

“Fine,” she said. “For a little while.” She held on to her kneecap. She moved it back and forth.

“How long?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

I said, “You don’t have to say.”

“Not long.”

She looked up at me. She was almost crying.

She was like,
I can’t even say everything I need to say.

Don’t be — don’t — it’s all going to be good.

She rubbed her eye.
Why are you standing so far away?

I was like,
You’re covered with cables.

She was like,
Oh. Yeah. Yeah.

We were just like standing there for a minute. Well, she was sitting, but I was standing. I looked up at her. She was moving her kneecap again. I patted myself on my hips. It was like,
Tip-tip-a-tip-tip. Tip tap.

She went,
It’s funny that you can move your kneecap all around with your fingers, but you couldn’t move it with your muscles if you tried.

One of the orbs came in and started to circle around her.

I said I had to go.

She said she’d see me later.

I said my upcar was back at Link’s. I’d forgot.

She said I should go and get it.

I said I hoped she was okay.

She said she was pretty okay. She’d chat me later. Was that okay? Could she chat me?

I was like,
Oh, sure. Sure.

No. Really?

Sure. Yeah. On the chat.

I nodded. Finally I waved, kind of pathetic, and I went out. The orb was in front of her face. I couldn’t see what she looked like. I went out into the hall.

Later, my mom came and picked me up, and we went and got my upcar. The others weren’t there at Link’s house anymore. Link was in the back, by his pool. He waved, and yelled over to me, “She okay?” I chatted him yes, and he chatted me that that was good, and I got in my upcar and flew home behind my mom.

We had bean cubes and fish sticks for dinner. I had a couple of helpings. There was still time to do my homework, but I watched the feed instead. Some cops found a bunch of rods in a warehouse and were trying to figure out what they were. Durgin, the star of the show, said they belonged to a pimp. His assistant had a run in her stockings. She bent down to fix it. Later I went to bed. I couldn’t get to sleep. My parents had turned off the sun hours before. The light outside the blinds was just gray.

Finally, I guess I must have fell sleep. At least, I dreamed, and there were beads of water going along some string, and Violet said, “How many do you need before you’re done?” and I said, “These are yours, first,” and she said, “How many do you need?” and I said, “You know. You completely know,” and she said, “That’s why I want to hear it from your mouth.”