M. T. Anderson (20 page)

The next day, I was at her house. It was all weird. We didn’t talk. I don’t know why. We didn’t open our mouths. We just sat there, silent, chatting.

It’s not you,
I argued.
It’s the feed thing. You’re not like that.

Maybe I am like that. Maybe that’s what’s wrong.

She rubbed her hands together.
I’m sorry. Please. Tell Quendy I’m sorry.

Her father was walking down the stairs near us. We could hear him through the wall.

She chatted,
I lost a year of my memories.

I didn’t understand, first.
What?

I lost a year. During the seizure. I can’t remember anything from the year before I got the feed. When I was six. The information is just gone. There’s nothing there.

She was pressing her palms into her thighs as hard as she could. She watched herself real careful like it was a crafts project. She went,
Nothing. No smells. No talking. No pictures. For a whole year. All gone.

I just looked at her face. There were lines on it I hadn’t seen before. She looked sick, like her mouth would taste like the hospital. She saw me looking at her.

She was like,
Don’t worry, Titus. We’re still together. No matter what, we’ll still be together.

Oh,
I went.
Yeah.

She reached out and rubbed my hand.
I’ll remember you. I’ll hold on to you.

Oh,
I chatted.
Okay.

She went,
God, there’s so much I need to do. Oh my god. You can’t even know. I want to go out right now and start. I want to dance. You know? That’s this dumbass thing, because it’s so cliché, but that’s what I see myself doing. I want to dance with like a whole lacrosse team, maybe with them holding me up on a Formica tabletop. I can’t even tell you. I want to do the things that show you’re alive. I want to eat huge meals with wine. I want to go to the zoo with you.

Zoos suck,
I said.
All the animals just sit there and play with their toes.

I want to go on rides. The flume, the teacups, the Tilt-a-Whirl? You know, a big bunch of us on the teacups, with you and me crushed together from the centrifugal force.

I wasn’t really wanting to think about us crushed together right then, or about us in a big group, where she might go insane again, so I just looked like,
Yeah. The teacups!

And she was still saying,
I want to see things grazing through field glasses. I want to go someplace now. I want to get the hell out of here and visit some Mayan temples. I want you to take my picture next to the sacrificial stone. You know? I want to run down to the beach, I mean, a beach where you can go in the water. I want to have a splashing fight.

I just sat there. Her father was working on something in the basement. It sounded like he had some power tools. Maybe he was drilling, or like, cutting or boring.

She went,
They’re all sitcom openers.

What?

Everything I think of when I think of really living, living to the full — all my ideas are just the opening credits of sitcoms. See what I mean? My idea of life, it’s what happens when they’re rolling the credits. My god. What am I, without the feed? It’s all from the feed credits. My idea of real life. You know? Oh, you and I share a snow cone at the park. Oh, funny, it’s dribbling down your chin. I wipe it off with my elbow. “Also starring Lurna Ginty as Violet.” Oh, happy day! Now we go jump in the fountain! We come out of the tunnel of love! We run through the merry-go-round. You’re checking the park with a metal detector! I’m checking the park with a Geiger counter! We wave to the camera!

Except the Mayan ruin.

What about it?

There aren’t,
I like pointed out,
there aren’t the sacrificial stones. In sitcoms.

No,
she said.
That’s right. Chalk one up for the home team.

We sat. She fixed her hair with her hand.

I asked her,
What did it feel like? At the party?

She waited. Then, she admitted,
It felt good. Really good, just to scream finally. I felt like I was singing a hit single. But in Hell.

Later, before I left, I watched Violet and her father petition FeedTech for free repairs. Violet’s dad couldn’t pay for all the tests and shit himself. None of it was covered by medical, because the feed wasn’t medical.

They sent a message to FeedTech explaining what happened. I sat there while they spoke it together. It was all about how she had lost her memory, and how sometimes she couldn’t move parts of her, and about how she had gone completely fugue-state. They asked FeedTech to take on payments for research and repairs. They said that FeedTech had to, because it was about the life of a girl.

Her feed’s warranty had expired years ago.

“We will present this petition to several corporate sponsors,” said Violet’s dad. “If you do not acquiesce, others will. We will find someone who will support this repair. We will take our business elsewhere.”

“Please,” said Violet. “We need your financial assistance.”

“If you want us as customers,” said her father.

They sent the message. After that, we didn’t say much.

Quendy and I talked the next day. We were sitting on big cubes, they were made of concrete. We sat side by side.

I was like, “She’s really sorry.”

Quendy nodded. She still had the lesions all over her. When she moved her head, I could see a lesion on her neck open and close like a fish mouth singing a country song.

Quendy said, “I was like . . . I can’t go out in public anymore. At first, I was so living eternally in a tool shed. But Loga was like really, really good? She was sitting with me that night. We went back and sat around at my house. She was like,
Da da da, she was completely in mal, don’t listen to her, da da da, she’s a complete fuguing bitch.
”

“She’s — but she’s not —”

“I know. That was just what I like needed to hear then.”

“She feels real bad.”

“I know. It wasn’t her.”

I didn’t say anything. I just nodded. Quendy brushed her hair back out of her face. I rubbed the corner of the concrete with my thumb.

Quendy asked, “She okay?”

I shook my head. “She’s scared. They say that it’s . . . The feed isn’t working well with her brain anymore.”

“Omigod.” She looked at me. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. The whole brain is tied in to the feed. The whole brain, like the memory and the part that makes you move and the part for your emotions.”

“The limbic system.”

“I don’t know.”

“I just looked it up.”

“Okay.”

“There’s a diagram.” She sent me the site.

“Okay.” I sat there.

“Maybe you should check it out,” she said, a little angry. “It’ll help you understand what’s happening to her.”

I pulled up my leg and untied and tied my shoe.

“Don’t you want to know?”

I said, “I guess not.”

“You know,” said Quendy, “this isn’t re: the world serving you some meg three-course dump banquet. It isn’t re: the world serving me some dump banquet. She’s the one who this is happening to. I don’t know what you’re saying to her? But I hope you aren’t sulking weirdly.”

She looked over at me. I just sat there.

She added, “Making her feel low-grade.”

She put her hand on my leg.

“Hey,” she said. “Hey.”

Through the holes in her hand, the blood in her veins was blue.

When I woke up the next morning, there was a message from Violet waiting in my cache.

It’s three-fifteen in the morning,
she said.
I haven’t heard anything from FeedTech. I’m lying here. You’re probably sound asleep right now. I like to picture you asleep. You have beautiful lips.

My mom never had the feed. She didn’t get it installed when she was little. Her parents said they were going to wait until she was old enough to understand and make her own decision about it, like Catholic confirmation. She decided not to have the feed installed. She called it “the brain mole.”

My father’s family didn’t have the money to buy feeds for my dad and my uncle. The feeds were newer then, and they were more expensive. They were advertised with these silver see-through heads with the chip inside them. The heads would be spinning around at the mall, with the mouths of the heads calling your name.

My mom and dad both went through college without the feed. I guess it was really hard. They couldn’t remember things the way everyone else could, or see the models that were in the air, you know, of chromosomes or stamens. But they both went on to grad school. That’s where they met.

I always thought it was strange that they decided to have a kid at a conceptionarium. I guess they really wanted to have me freestyle. They talked about it a lot. Well, I mean, they’d only been going out for a few months, but, you know, a lot for that. Anyway, the ambient radiation was already too bad by then for freestyle. So they went test-tube.

I think my first memory of my mom is her carrying me on her shoulders through the mall. She would constantly be whispering jokes to me, little jokes between the two of us. She especially made fun of plastic. She’d say, “They’re all wearing oil. All their clothes. They don’t have anything on but oil.” I would whisper back to her, “They’re wearing dinosaurs. Dead dinosaurs drippy all over them.” She would whisper, “Trilobites.” I would whisper, “Old plants.” She would whisper, “It’s the height of fashion.” And I would say, “Missus — missus lady — those are some nice old plankton.”

For an hour and a half today, I couldn’t move my leg. My toes were clenched. My knee was all locked up. I didn’t chat you. I didn’t want to worry you. You don’t talk much now. I went to a technician. By the time I waited, the leg started to work again. My dad was there with me. He’s not doing very well. I can’t feel anything wrong with the leg now. I’m lying here in bed, lifting it up and down. It seems fine. Except it’s kind of cramped from the clenching.

I’m looking up at my leg. I’m moving my toes, squelching them. That’s a great feeling, squelching, like in mud. Do you know, mud? When it’s in your yard? And you know the day’s going to get hot again when the rain’s over, because that’s what the neighborhood association has decided? So you can just stand there, and wait for the sun?