M. T. Anderson (25 page)

The night seemed to go on for hours.

I couldn’t believe it when we got to her droptube and went down to the bottom, to her suburb. We flew down her street. There were streets on the ground. They were lit by lights.

At her house, I got out and climbed down. Her father was watching through the window. He would see me and know she was lying about where she had been. He came out of the front door. We were hovering in the driveway. I had gone around to her side and opened her door up, and she was trying to stand. She couldn’t get out too good with her arm not working. I held up my hand.

She didn’t take it. She wobbled there. She was afraid she would fall.

Her father watched her. He saw what was happening and ran up. He took her hand.

She reached out with her other hand and took her own wrist back from him. She freed her hand from her dad’s.

She let herself down to the ground alone, all alone.

She stood between the two of us, looking from one to the other.

I turned around and went back to my side of the upcar. I got in. I left. I flew home.

It was only months later that I realized that the last thing I ever heard her mouth say, the last words she would speak to me, had already been spoken, and they were, “Oh, shit.”

So,
she messaged me the next day,
I’m not messaging you to say I’m sorry, because I’m not, not for everything.

But I am messaging you to say that I love you, and that you’re completely wrong about me thinking you’re stupid. I always thought you could teach me things. I was always waiting. You’re not like the others. You say things that no one expects you to. You think you’re stupid. You want to be stupid. But you’re someone people could learn from.

And I want to talk, if you do.

We both said mean things, dumb things, things we didn’t mean. But there’s always time to change. There’s always time. Until there’s not.

That was her message.

I said, “Oh, nothing,” when Link looked at me funny. We went out to kick some ass on the basketball court.

When school ended for the year, Link and Marty and I went to one of the moons of Jupiter to stay with Marty’s aunt for a few weeks. It was okay. We had a pretty good time. By that point, I was going out with Quendy, and I kind of missed her. We met other girls on Io, but I was chatting back to Quendy the whole time, even though there were some meg delays in feed service between the planets. I told her how much I missed her.

We had some good parties that summer when we got back to Earth. Marty got a giant Top Quark pool, it was inflatable and huge, and the pool was in Top Quark’s belly? It floated above Marty’s house. It was pretty funny.

Marty had also gotten a Nike speech tattoo, which was pretty brag. It meant that every sentence, he automatically said “Nike.” He paid a lot for it. It was hilarious, because you could hardly understand what he said anymore. It was just, “This fuckin’ shit Nike, fuckin’, you know, Nike,” etc.

Everything was not always going well, because for most people, our hair fell out and we were bald, and we had less and less skin. Then later there was this thing that hit hipsters. People were just stopping in their tracks frozen. At first, people thought it was another virus, and they were looking for groups like the Coalition of Pity, but it turned out that it was something called Nostalgia Feedback. People had been getting nostalgia for fashions that were closer and closer to their own time, until finally people became nostalgic for the moment they were actually living in, and the feedback completely froze them. It happened to Calista and Loga. We were real worried about them for a day or so. We knew they’d be all right, but still, you know. Marty was like, “Holy fuckin’ shit, this is so Nike fucked.”

The night after I saw them frozen, even though they were okay, I couldn’t sleep at all. I kept thinking of Violet and her broken flipper-hand. I kept thinking of her pinching her leg and not being able to feel it. I thought of her lying without moving, but in my thoughts, her eyes were open.

That summer was the summer when all of the bees came out of the walls of those suburbs and went crazy, and people couldn’t figure it out at all.

It turned out that my upcar was not the kind of upcar my friends rode in. I don’t know why. It had enough room, but for some reason people didn’t think of it that way. Sometimes that made me feel kind of tired. It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it.

I felt like I’d been running toward it for a long time.

One night at dinner, when my dad came back from a corporate adventure with his management team, he showed us memories from it. He said it was great and really refreshing, and that it was just the kind of thing to promote team interface, and to get everyone to work out their stop/go hierarchies. They went whale hunting. It was just people and old ships and the whales, and the whales’ lamination, which he said was a non-organic covering that made it possible for them to live in the sea.

So he broadcast it to the family. He was all, “Okay, here you see us in the little whaleboat. We’ve ‘put out’ from the main ship. We’ve spotted a whale, and we’re rowing out to it. This was awesome. Totally awesome. Can you feel the spray? I loved it. I kept getting it in my eyes and blinking. That’s — oh, that’s Dave Percolex, V.P. of Client Relations. He’s in charge of the bucket of rope. See him waving? Hi, Dave. You can see the head of our Phoenix office there holding the harpoon. So we’re rowing out there as fast as possible. It was really rough that day. See, we’re all shouting that we need to be going faster. ‘Row, row, row!’ We have our new intern there pulling at the oars. Hey, Lisa!”

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.