A People's Future of the United States
Page 22
Sometimes I think about Lena Horne or Josephine Baker, but then I don’t think of them. You know what I mean? When you think about something but you don’t think about it. There’s a word for that. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Do you ever feel like there’s something staring you right in the face but you can’t see it? No, that’s not it. No, it’s more like you know something’s there, but you don’t want to look. A monster under the bed or Bluebeard’s secret chamber. You can hear it, smell it, taste it, but everything is fine as long as you don’t look. But if you do look, you get eaten.
This is all prelude to the fact that today I make them act out the plot of Vertigo. Just the romantic part at the beginning, before it gets weird and horny, when it’s only a detective and a lady who’s maybe a ghost falling in love, and instead of the part where shit gets real at the bell tower, they get married.
This goes very poorly. Hurtful words are said that can never be taken back, no matter whose memories are erased.
* * *
—
Xavier and I meet on the roof of Dormitory Epsilon. It wasn’t as hard as I thought dodging Program Director Murphy. She waits by all the exits at night, and also she patrols the halls. (We are allowed to leave. We are not prisoners. We just have to sign out first.) But the service hallway leading to the roof is near my room, close enough that I can slip in and out without being seen.
You can see the whole city up here, all light and color, impossible to make out any one particular building in the nether distance. I feel like I’m floating, like in a dream where you know if you look down you’ll fall, so I keep my head up and imagine I’m balancing on the edge of the sky.
“Give them something to want,” he says. “So you can take it away.”
There is a slight chill in the air, just enough that I can feel the heat of Xavier’s breath on my cheek as he whispers the secrets of pain.
“I think it’s all about signifiers. Images and connections. That’s how you get through to people.”
“But is it real?”
He smells like fresh sweat and cinnamon.
“Nothing’s real. That’s the secret of living. All we have is beauty and images and connections.”
“Have you ever kissed someone?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Me neither. It’s no big deal. Everybody forgets. But I wonder how we can teach people to love if we’ve never even kissed anyone.”
His chest goes up and down, up and down, swelling and shrinking, and it’s like his breath is the only air in the world.
“Maybe that’s our problem,” I say.
We kiss. Just as an experiment. He tastes like oysters and ozone, and I get lost a little in the moment. There are so many sensations at once, all of them good, and I try to focus on each one individually, but it’s like trying to count raindrops on your face, and I am unable to focus, and my mind clouds with touch and connection.
Kissing is very nice, I decide.
* * *
—
My conversations with Xavier lead to the creation of a character I call Dante Jr. Dante Jr. is an irrepressible scamp between the ages of six and ten. I put some memories in Dante’s head of Dante Jr.’s birth, his first steps, his first day of school, et cetera. More clichés, I know, but they take a lot better than the memories of Dahlia. Those Dante Sr. rejects pretty quickly, thinks them through and says things don’t add up and freaks out and I have to reset him. But Dante Jr. is sticky, as long as there’s not too much Dahlia in the mix. I guess Dante was always meant to be a father. All the more reason to help him out, right? Dante only really remembers Dante Jr. when they are in the same room. Otherwise, he exists only on the periphery of his mind, so I can still focus on my primary goal of creating love. Dante Jr. is seasoning, some nice flavor for the dish I’m preparing. He comes in, does some little-kid stuff, then Dante does some dad stuff, and we all have a good time.
Honestly, I’m surprised by how well it works. Dante still figures out it’s a simulation every couple days if I’m not vigilant about erasing failed experiments, but he gets along so much better with Dahlia when Dante Jr. is in the room, and when he does figure it out, he assumes that Dante Jr. (and therefore Dahlia) is trapped in the simulation with him. They’re finally starting to bond. It’s beautiful. I think I’m finally getting good at this job.
Today they all made a cake together as a family. Just one. Not quite as many as I would like (five hundred), but it’s a start.
* * *
—
Xavier and I have been meeting on the roof every night. We don’t talk about the kiss, but we talk about everything else. It’s really nice. It feels like listening to a new album from a band you already love, familiar and comforting but still new and exciting.
“I used to want to be a baseball player,” I say. “When I was a little kid.”
He smiles at me as though I were the first person to ever make another person smile, and I can’t help but return the expression. We sit next to each other on the edge of the roof. It’s nice.
“I can’t imagine you playing baseball,” he says.
“I was very bad, but I always thought I would become good someday. Like without any work or anything. Just one day I would be great at it, a star. Same with living life, really. I always thought I would just become normal one day.”
“I think you’re great as you are now.”
My hand brushes against his. It was not intentional, but not unpleasant. But he pulls his away as if bitten by a snake.
“Sorry,” I say.
“No, no, it’s not you.” He looks down and is quiet for a while before gathering his thoughts. “I had a meeting with Program Director Murphy today. She was not pleased with my progress.”
Program Director Murphy is a small, grandmotherly woman in her fifties. She is kind and good. She is my boss. I know her well. I trained with her for a year before beginning this job.
“And?”
“She put me in the machine. She grabbed me and held me down, and she was at the console. Just for a minute. I was still in her office, but I was in the machine, too. She said she was showing me how to teach. She…did something to my hand. It felt like it was on fire. Or something worse. I can’t really describe it. Just pain. She was whispering in my ear, said that I could do this to Javi, that I could do worse, and that Javi would learn his lesson then.”
The Synapse is a miracle of modern engineering. The Synapse allows people to reach their full potential. The Synapse will free us from ourselves.
“Are you okay?”
“Something is wrong, Daniel. Something is very wrong. The dots are starting to disconnect. The other day, I was trying to say something in Spanish, but I couldn’t. I know I used to speak Spanish, but I can’t anymore. I remember my parents speaking English, my childhood friends and relatives, everybody, but that can’t be. We lived in Morelia. My mom taught literature at the university. She used to read me poetry every night. She liked Paz and Zepeda. Mom. Mom. That doesn’t sound right. It’s not right. It’s not right.”
“It’s no big deal. Everybody forgets.”
“Just be careful. Don’t let her do anything to you. Do what you’re supposed to.”
I notice he has tears in his eyes, and I think he is starting to cry, but I don’t say anything, because I am polite.
* * *
—
“I’m in lofe with you,” says Dahlia.
A simple typo, but Dante is enraged. He screams, cries, punches the ground, makes a production out of it. Just because I typed one word wrong. It’s a mistake on my part, I admit it, but I don’t think this response is warranted. I had a great thing going, and now I’ll have to start over.
He thought he was free. I crafted this scenario where I intentionally let him figure out it was a simulation, then made him think he co
uld escape from it with Dahlia and Dante Jr. There were some puzzles to solve, some ducts to crawl through, vats of blue goo connected to supercomputers—it was a whole production. He and his family had just emerged from a mysterious underground facility to see their first “real” sunrise when Dahlia accidentally let slip the “lofe” thing. He put it together pretty quick after that.
“Chill,” I say. “I mean, please calm yourself.”
“You’re a monster!” he yells.
“This isn’t so bad. I think we learned a lot for next time.”
“Next time? Fuck you! I’m going to kill you when I get out of here.”
“You’re not real, dog. None of this is.”
“You’re never going to beat me. I’m never gonna do what you want. You fucking suck.”
And now I’m angry. Who’s this guy to talk shit to me? Who’s this guy at all? I’m trying to help him. I think back to Xavier, the fear in his voice as he described the fire in his hand. That’s not gonna happen to me, no. It can’t. I need to teach this guy a lesson.
Dante Jr. is standing next to his “father,” watching and waiting.
I delete him.
“He was pretend, too,” I say. “Everything is pretend but you and me.”
He doesn’t take it very well. He howls and cries. And he doesn’t have any little jokes for me for the first time ever.
I win.
Still, I’m a little sad. Dante Jr. was kinda like my son, too. Me and Xavier made him together. Me and Xavier. Wouldn’t it be funny if me and Javi could be dads? Wouldn’t it be so funny? Like a joke. Like a really good joke. Ha ha ha, I would laugh, after I told the joke to a friend. This is good, though, right? This is what I wanted. Now Dante knows he can’t have it both ways. He can’t have a family and be queer at the same time. This is what I was supposed to teach him. I thought I would like this more. It hurts to see him like this. But this job has been my dream since I was a child. This is a good job. I am doing good work. I am a good person.
There’s something I’m not seeing, and I don’t know what.
* * *
—
I come across Dora on the way to lunch, sitting alone in a corner beneath the stairs. She doesn’t look like she normally does. She looks smaller somehow, and empty, like a mannequin wearing a Dora suit. She is clutching something in her hand that I can’t quite make out.
“Hey, are you okay?” I ask.
“No,” she says.
“What’s wrong?”
“Izzy. I had to reset her. It was all fucked up.”
“I thought everything was going good.”
“It was a grift. She was scamming me. Just pretending. Giving me what I wanted.” She laughs hard. “It was a good one.”
“Why’s it matter? We all have to delete stuff from time to time. It’s part of the job.”
“I don’t know. It felt like cutting off my own hand.”
We sit in silence for a moment, and I point at the object in her hand. “What’s that?”
She holds up a tiny holo projector. She turns it on, and it shows an image of her and another woman sitting next to one another. The woman has short hair and a kind smile. She looks familiar. Maybe I’ve seen her around the facility. But I can’t place her. Was she here before? We are allowed to leave. We are not prisoners. We just have to sign out first.
“I found this in my room.”
“Who’s that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
It’s no big deal. Everybody forgets.
“Are you okay?”
“I just thought I had it. I had everything. This job has been my dream since I was a child. This is a good job. I’m doing good work. I’m a good person. But I’m not good at this at all. I’m like you. A loser.”
I want to tell her that it’s not her fault, that our job is difficult, that we have to try our best to surmount the odds. But instead I say, “It’s like they’re setting us up to fail.”
And then I think about Dante, how much I hate him. I hate him for not doing what he’s supposed to do. I hate him for the way he talks to me. I hate him for being such a fucking queer.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Dante.
Dante.
“Daniel? What’s wrong?” she asks.
“I looked,” I say, and I stand. “And now I think I can see the monster under the bed.”
* * *
—
He keeps remembering. I don’t know why. I refreshed him seven times. He’s fine for a little bit, then he starts to remember. I try to treat him right, give him as much television as he wants. But there is nothing in the world that can give him succor.
“Where is he?” he says, crying.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Where am I?” he says.
“In a facility. To fix you. Make you normal.”
“What normal? What does that mean?”
“Normal people hate themselves.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Daniel. And you’re Dante. Right?”
“I don’t know a Daniel.”
“Neither do I.”
* * *
—
“I’m proud of you, Daniel. You’ve made real improvements in your work,” Program Director Murphy, a small, grandmotherly woman in her fifties, says. “You’re beginning to show some real promise.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Your subject is beginning to learn.”
“Yes.”
“You know, I like you. I really do. I’m quite fond of the twentieth century myself. Just like you.”
She called me in. Said she wanted to congratulate me on my recent performance. I have never been more afraid in my entire life. She’s behind this, I know she is. She’s the one doing this to me, to us; I just have to be cool. It’s fine. I can leave. We are allowed to leave. We are not prisoners.
“That’s cool.”
“I still don’t care for your sentimental streak. You’re too wrapped up in the glitz and glamour. Hollywood hogwash. What I like is the people, the society.”
“Of course.”
“People used to know how to act. People knew what was right, and what was wrong, and if they did wrong, they at least had the decency to respect your religion, your morals, your basic sense of taste.”
“Cool.”
“It’s gotten worse and worse. You probably don’t even remember what it used to be like. Paradise. And now it’s chaos.”
“That does sound bad.”
“It is. That’s why we made this institute. That’s why we hired you. To figure out how to make things right. You’re doing so much for the cause, Daniel.”
“Cool. Cool cool cool.”
She stands up and walks over to me, places her hand on my shoulder and smiles warmly.
“I think he figured it out,” Program Director Murphy says.
“Are you sure?” asks Program Director Murphy, from her desk.
“He keeps saying cool. He’s not looking you in the eye. That’s what he does when he’s trying to not give it away. He’s so obvious,” she says from across the room.
Program Director Murphy groans. “Again? I thought you said we had it this time, Pam?”
Program Director Murphy shrugs.
My head hurts. I can see it, but I can’t see it. There’s more than one Program Director Murphy, but Program Director Murphy is a small, grandmotherly woman in her fifties. It doesn’t make sense. But I can see it. I try to stand up, but Program Director Murphy stops me, holds me down. There’s too many of her.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
Program Director Murphy slaps the back of my head. “Shut up.”
“Don’t do that,” says Program D
irector Murphy. “He can’t help it.”
Program Director Murphy walks over to me and kneels so that we are face-to-face. “I’m sorry, Daniel. Really. I really thought we had it this time.”
“What?”
“I guess you all just need to be pruned from time to time. Your friend Xavier starts asking questions and sneaking around. Isadora starts to freak out over her lost love. And you, Mr. Five Hundred Cakes, you figure it out. What a world we live in.”
“You want us to fail on purpose. You want us to hate ourselves. Why?”
“We’re trying to help you, Dante. We want people to accept you, like we do. We love people like you. People with your…proclivities.”
“Homos,” says Program Director Murphy as she types at the Synapse console.
Program Director Murphy rolls her eyes. “Thanks, Jeff. No. We understand. We just want you to be happy. We’re giving you a very important gift, Dante. You should treasure it. Sweet, simple shame. You used to suffer from a pitiful lack of shame before you came here. Sassy and smug and out and proud and so forth. Other people aren’t like me, Dante. They don’t appreciate it. They don’t like it being rubbed in their face. They don’t like being forced to accept you. Don’t worry. You’ll still be yourself after this. Most of our graduates are. We’ve never been able to really fix you all. But at least you’ll know how to keep it to yourself. Maybe you’ll settle down, find a nice girl, have some kids, satisfy your urges in secret. Or at the very least, you can be the bachelor uncle or the lonely oddball neighbor. Like in one of your movies. All you need is beautiful, wonderful shame. We love you, Dante. I promise.”
“Is this…is this real?”
Program Director Murphy all laugh.
“Don’t worry, Dante. You’re the original. Meat is as easy to work with as ones and zeroes. It’s all the same technique, really.”
“Let me go!” I scream. “We are allowed to leave. We’re not prisoners. We just have to sign out first.”
Program Director Murphy stands up and nods. “Okay. I think we only need a few tweaks. He definitely needs to socialize more. All he does is sit alone and think, think, think. We need to make him more compatible with Dora.”