Zack’s wife wasn’t home yet.
Zack’s daughters took the call, moments after hiding a plastic unicorn in a suit coat upstairs.
That was the night that they learned, Zack’s daughters, that there was a difference, a noticeable difference, between rites and other death. Because, with rites, you could brace yourself. Because, with rites, you knew the person was ready. Because, with rites, you could say goodbye.
The internet said stars would fall from the sky.
Stars fell.
* * *
Zack’s wasn’t the only unscheduled death of that generation. A cousin, Dylan’s mother, died of kidney cancer a few years later, and mustached Alexander of a fall from a ladder a few years before his rites were due. Burials, compared to rites, were quiet, gloomy, lonely things. Nobody liked them.
The rest of that generation, however, did live to do their rites. Zack’s wife chose pills; bearded Lauren, bearded Morgan, chose pills; they all chose pills, the cousinage, because pills were painless, and dependable, and clean. And like that, Zack’s generation vanished, leaving their children to run the family.
Some inherited money.
Some inherited debts.
They all inherited Orson.
Orson aged—septuagenarian, octogenarian, nonagenarian—and Orson’s body broke down. His skin thinned; his glasses thickened; his jaw hung open constantly, shutting only when chewing; he shrank from bony to spindly to skeletal, a sweater hanging on him like a sheet on a broom; he moved about with the reckless stooped hobble of somebody barely capable of withstanding everyday forces like gravity, somebody for whom a level floor was a trampoline springing. The warpage of his spine, the wastage of his jowls, were staggering. He was conspicuous, had blatantly surpassed the traditional age, was obviously flaunting the rites, and in the city was persecuted accordingly.
The local grocer refused to sell him food. The cashiers at the supermarket didn’t outright refuse, but instead bullied him into taking his patronage elsewhere, mainly by overcharging him for everything in his cart, ringing up, for example, a can of peas as a snowblower, and ignoring his protests. As for the local convenience store, that was staffed by surly lipringed teens who offered to hold his rites then and there. The museum banned him. The cinema barred him. The library, less rigorous, had him use the back door. Even at places where the family worked, Orson was unwelcome. Zack’s daughters, who taught together at the same school in neighboring classrooms, had witnessed other teachers on the playground urging the children to look away or shut their eyes as he passed by on the sidewalk. Gabe, still towheaded, still toothy, but whose prowess with fireworks had peaked at age eleven, now owned a storage company, and sometimes overheard employees heckling him through the chain-link fence, and never intervened. Abby, whose allergy to peanuts persisted even into her middle age, now worked reviewing mortgages at a local bank, where every week from her cubicle she would spot him entering the lobby to withdraw money from a machine. Using the machines gave him some difficulty, but the tellers had stopped serving him years ago. Sweating, murmuring, trembling, he would struggle through the prompts and options. Managing to complete the withdrawal could take him as long as an hour. After prying the cash from the machine, Orson finally would count through each of the bills to verify the total before hobbling out again. Orson’s salary had always been modest. How long he had been saving, and planning, for his act of rebellion, his life after retirement, they didn’t know.
They sat through power outages, around the flickering stumps of scattered candles, under heaps of blankets, watching blizzards bury porches.
Other families—led by the grandchildren of immigrants, by the children of immigrants, by immigrants themselves—celebrated Pakistani holidays, told Guatemalan myths, wore Nigerian jewelry.
They were a family who entire generations before had abandoned any pretense of participating in the cultures of their ancestors’ homelands. They had only the culture of their homeland. Which felt very much like a nonculture. Like no culture at all.
Which perhaps helps explain why they took such an interest in other cultures. They often traded facts, the family, that they had heard about other countries. Articles, legends, rumors. Unusual reports. Their favorites including a certain story about China.
In China, in graveyards, meals were often left on the graves as offerings to ancestors. But, they had heard, these meals often disappeared. Not eaten by ghosts. Eaten by the homeless. The homeless there survived by sneaking into graveyards and eating the offerings. Chestnuts, dumplings, pickles, noodles. Meals meant for the dead.
Orson seemed like that to them.
But the opposite.
Like a ghost, stealing from the plates of the living.
They delivered packages, and managed portfolios, and designed bridges, and waited for Orson to die. But he didn’t. He ate crackers. He drank coffee. He looked at rocks; he looked at birds; he sat on benches. Sometimes, on rare autumn mornings, on rare spring evenings, he might even call them, asking somebody for a ride to someplace, a family gathering, a birthday party. And somebody would—somebody always, always would—would drive across town, and help him into the sedan, and drive back across town, and help him out of the sedan, and lead him along the stone pathway and up the brick steps and through the doorway and the hanging streamers and the bobbing balloons and the wrapped presents buried beneath wrapped presents, into those warm rooms of chatting people. There he would be, drifting through clusters of men in bow ties smiling hello and men in buttoned vests chopping apples and men in colorful sweaters feeding infants from plastic bottles and women in shimmering blouses waving hello and aproned women ladling cider and monocled women reading aloud from illustrated fables and teenagers in sweatshirts playing the piano and cowlicked boys sneaking cake and ballcapped children spilling marbles and girls in dresses chasing after balloons—there he would be, for the whole party, not speaking to anybody. He was the unhappiest person they had ever met. And he was theirs, somehow. He belonged to them. Their undying mystery, and their great shame.
The Transition
Of course, his family had heard of the operation, knew not only that such a thing was possible but that there were actually people doing it, and although his family was conservative, his family wasn’t radical by any means, in fact his family was really quite moderate, so much so that during elections in which the conservative candidate seemed especially intolerant or corrupt or feebleminded his family was occasionally even known to vote for the liberal alternative, and although his family was religious, his family certainly wasn’t the type to speak of issues in terms of good and evil, and for instance had no qualms about nudity in the media, and sometimes drank to excess, and wasn’t opposed to gambling, and believed in evolution, and although his family was poor, not destitute exactly, but decidedly working class, and held no college degrees, his family possessed no prejudice against people who elected to have vanity surgeries like liposuction and rhinoplasty, and were always heartened to meet people benefiting from bionic modifications such as pacemakers and prostheses, and enjoyed watching programs of an educational nature, and took naturally to new technologies—and yet there was something that set the operation apart from other issues, something that repulsed his family almost instinctually, something that filled his family with contempt, a fact his family had made no effort to hide, like back when the news had been flooded with stories about a famous architect who had transitioned and his family had spent an evening sitting around out on the stoop ridiculing the architect, or back when the news had been flooded with stories about a former model who had transitioned and his family had spent an evening sitting around out on the stoop bashing the model, and so the fact that his family found the concept utterly loathsome certainly would have been clear to Mason.
Then there was also his personality. He was profoundly reserved. He rarely smiled. He seldom laughed. He spoke clearly, without any animation. Although he often complained, he never became angry. He never seemed
gloomy. He never appeared excited. He must have cried occasionally as a child, but no incidents came to mind specifically, and regardless he certainly hadn’t cried in the presence of his family since. He never showed signs of feeling powerful emotions.
So, considering that he was showing signs as he sat there at the table, that his hands were trembling, that his voice was shaking, that he was so nervous that the feeling was actually affecting him physically, and that he really wasn’t in the habit of joking about this type of thing—or, quite honestly, joking about anything—there seemed to be no doubt that he was serious when he interrupted a moment of silence to announce, or rather confess, that he was planning to have his mind converted to digital data and transferred from his body to a computer server.
Mason’s father, who was wearing his favorite apron, with the cartoon pelican across the chest and the maroon stain just beneath the pockets, gaped at him from the counter in the kitchen, frozen there in the midst of dipping a silicone spatula into a container of the latest batch of his secret sauce. Mason’s brothers, who planned to drive the motorboat down to parkland at dusk to go shrimping on the bayou, were reclined around the table in athletic jerseys and camouflage cutoffs, squinting at him with expressions of confusion. Mason’s mother had come in from the backyard when she had heard him arrive, wearing the straw hat and baggy caftan that she’d been sunning in, and she felt such a jolt of panic when he said what he said that she had to set her iced tea down onto the nearest surface, the stove, or else she surely would have dropped the bottle onto the floor.
Mason stared at the table, and then, as if suddenly daring to hope that the idea might be met with no resistance, looked up and blurted, “We’ll still be able to talk or whatever.”
His mother crossed the kitchen toward the table, feeling past the counter with her hands, her eyes never leaving him. He must have been coming from a shift at the supermarket. His uniform was rumpled. His nametag was askew. He’d always been scrawny, but recently he seemed especially frail. His eyebrows were so light in color that he didn’t seem to have eyebrows at all, which had caused him untold trouble on the playground as a child. He had watery eyes, a delicate nose, thin lips, and a weak chin. He looked like the type of person who’d probably have a milk allergy. She couldn’t explain what that was supposed to mean exactly. A neighbor had said it about him once though, and as soon as she’d heard it, she’d known it was true. She loved his face. As she slid into a chair at the table, she had to resist an urge to reach over and cup his jaw in her palms. The thought of losing him was terrifying.
“I mean, I’ll be able to chat whenever you want, I’ll be online literally all of the time,” Mason said, gaze falling back to the table.
His mother turned toward the counter, searching for some indication of how his father was reacting to the announcement. The heat from the sun was already leaving her skin, and the sensation seemed almost like a manifestation of her fear, as if the emotion were sapping the warmth from her skin as the feeling spread. She had been relaxing in a canvas lawn chair all morning, sipping from that bottle of iced tea, watching with amusement as sparrows hopped along the branches of the tree, basking in the occasional gust of wind that rushed across the backyard, letting loose tremendous yawns, stretching her limbs out, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands, scratching her belly periodically when the urge struck, savoring the tart aroma of the charcoal burning in the grill, enjoyably conscious of being dressed in a bright caftan and floppy hat. Coming in from that realm of bodily pleasure to be confronted with somebody who wanted to leave all of that behind was intensely jarring. She didn’t understand what he could be thinking.
Over by the counter his father set down the spatula.
“You do realize that not having a body would mean not having a body?” his father said.
“Yes.”
“As in never again?” his father said.
“Yes.”
“What the hell is wrong with your head?” his father said.
His father swore only when he was deeply afraid, which told his mother that she wasn’t the only one taking the announcement seriously. Despite how grave the situation was, however, his father apparently really did need to check on the grill before the ribs burned. Scowling, with the hem of his apron flapping at his shins with every step, his father marched out the door into the backyard.
Mason, who had been staring intently at his knuckles during that brief exchange with his father, glanced back up again. His cheeks were flushed; sweat pitted his shirt. His mother suddenly felt sure that this discussion, albeit awkward, would be easily resolved. Years from now, his family was going to look back on this moment and laugh about his mistake, like how the family still joked about the time that one of his brothers had considered quitting his job in order to sell dietary supplements for a company from door to door until the family had explained to him that the operation was obviously a scam, or how the family still joked about the time that one of his brothers had considered starting a jazz group until the family had explained to him that yes he might love the drums but honestly he had no rhythm and he didn’t belong anywhere near a stage. Certainty spread through her, and a bit of pride that she had been the one to realize that this was all a misunderstanding. She felt so relieved that she had to suppress a grin.
“You’re just not thinking,” she announced.
“About what,” Mason said.
“I don’t know what put the idea in your head, but you’re not like those other people doing it, there’s too much you’d miss about having a body,” she said.
She could tell from his stare that she hadn’t yet convinced him, and she folded her hands together, searching for an example.
“Like dancing,” she exclaimed.
“I hate dancing,” Mason said.
“Oh you do not,” she said, and then she fell silent, because she knew of course that he did.
Until now his brothers had been sitting back observing the scene, picking their teeth, biting their nails, but his brothers finally exploded.
“What the heck bro?”
“Where did this even come from?”
“How could you actually want something that messed up done?”
“Our own flesh and blood?”
His oldest brother leaned in.
“You’d even give up sex?” his oldest brother said.
Mason didn’t reply, just gazed at the centerpiece, a vase of wildflowers.
“What about sex?” his oldest brother demanded.
Mason gave a faint shrug.
“More trouble than it’s worth,” Mason said.
She had never seen his brothers look so offended.
His oldest brother sat back, knitting his fingers behind his head with his elbows thrown wide in a posture of dismissal, and sneered, “Well, who cares if you want it done, you’ll never have enough money to pay for it.”
“I already do,” Mason said.
Mason apparently had been setting aside a substantial portion of each paycheck for years now. His mother fiddled with the bangles around her wrists in distress. Back when his family had sat around mocking the celebrity chef who’d transitioned, back when his family had sat around trashing the piano prodigy who’d transitioned, he must have been saving up money for the operation even then. He had sat there and had listened to his family call people like that monsters and had secretly believed that he was a person like that all along. The thought stunned her.
Mason stared at the table, then glanced back up with a desperate look, exclaiming, “I hate having to deal with clothing. I hate having to go shopping and trying to find things that fit and having to put together an outfit every single day and worrying about what matches and having to drag everything down to the coin wash. I hate getting sick. I hate getting headaches and getting backaches and getting earaches and getting toothaches and puking especially. I hate having to get checkups at the doctor and the dentist and the optometrist every single year. I hate always having to make mea
ls and eat the food and wash dishes afterward. I hate having to shower. I hate having to sleep. I’m tired of wasting so much of my life on taking care of a body. I just want to be able to read stuff and talk to people all of the time.”
“Sweetie,” his mother said. She leaned across the table, her heart beating frantically, and laid her hands over his hands. “I know you might feel like that right now, but if you’d just stop and think about it for a couple days, you’re going to change your mind.”
“I’ve been thinking about it for over twenty years,” Mason said.
He eased his hands out from under her hands, pulling away, as if ashamed.
“I don’t belong in a body,” Mason said.
He lowered his head.
“I’ve always known,” Mason said.
He left before the meal was served, slipping out the door with his shoulders slumped, then sputtering off down the road in his rusty hatchback. While his brothers sat around the table bitterly rehashing that comment about sex, his mother drifted in a daze out into the backyard, where his father was squatting over the grill. Looking up from the ribs with an expression of fury, his father confessed that he had come out to the backyard not so much out of concern for the ribs as out of fear that he had been about to cry, which he had never done in the presence of the children before and didn’t want to.
Mason had scheduled the operation for later that February, just a month away, taking the earliest available appointment the local clinic could offer. As his mother brushed her teeth that night, an activity in which she usually found much enjoyment—the tingle of foam on her tongue, the prick of bristles against her gums—she couldn’t focus on the experience at all, but instead was gripped by a feeling of dread. She had driven past the local clinic before, a nondescript facility with screened windows and tinted doors, and the place always seemed to have a sinister aura. Although he had asked his family to be there for the operation, there was no way that she could go. She found the concept disturbing enough when the procedure was done to a stranger, let alone her youngest son. What frightened her most was imagining the actual transition. The exact moment when his body would be empty. The exact moment when his mind would be gone.
Why Visit America Page 5