by K. Chess
“Other than my fiancé’s friends, I mostly just hang out with other UDPs,” Wes said. “It’s been cool to see what you guys keep in your houses.”
Dwayne raised his hands, palms out. “Please, don’t judge us all by my grandma.”
“No, I didn’t mean—I was only trying to say, the gadgets, the brand names, the variety. Going through it, I don’t know. It’s like a whole separate twentieth century.”
“That is literally what it is,” Vikram said, staring across the gap between the cottage and the building next door. The first-floor apartment had old curtains made from a fabric with a repeating pattern of Barack Obama’s head—he recognized Obama from their Recent History unit in Reintegration Education—and the words President of the USA.
“It seems ordinary to you, but it’s fun for us,” Wes said.
“Guess it must be pretty crazy,” Dwayne said. “I never thought about all the, like, microscopic shit that’s different. But I guess I know what you mean, because to me, anything you tell me about your lives is mad interesting. Y’all got interesting stories.”
“Everyone has an interesting story,” Vikram said. The blue parts of the fabric had faded quicker than the red, so the stripes behind the little Obamas had lasted better than the vanishing stars. So specific, that pattern, and, in its way, beautiful, and Dwayne’s dead grandmother had probably stared at it every day for the last ten years. He thought about all the things he knew about, all the minutiae he would take to his grave.
Dwayne went back inside. “Tell me a UDP thing,” he called from the kitchen. “Something all y’all know that none of us do.”
Wes nudged Vikram. “I’m going to tell him about Dop Peters.”
He couldn’t help but play along. “You can’t tell Dwayne about that. It’s a secret.”
“Did you hear that, Dwayne? I’m revealing our alien secrets. Dop Peters. He’s this middle-aged pop musician, OK, with one self-released album out and some very homemade-looking videos online. But those videos have thirty, forty thousand views each. Kind of weird, right?”
“I’ve never heard of him,” Dwayne said.
“Yeah. That’s because he’s a UDP and other UDPs are responsible for every single hit. Every view and every share. It’s all us.”
“I’ve made my contribution,” Vikram said. “A couple hundred times.” He brought his crumpled sandwich paper inside and tossed it toward the corner where they’d been piling the most irredeemable of Dwayne’s grandmother’s junk.
Dwayne was on all fours now, scrubbing at the grubby linoleum with a brush. “I don’t get it. What’s the joke?”
“All the so-called originals he plays were actually massive hits,” Vikram told him. “Back in the ’60s, in our world. They were written and performed by this huge band, Baccarat. It’s like if someone here tried to pass off a Beatles song as their own.”
“And,” said Wes, joining them inside, “I guarantee that every single UDP who has ever heard him play knows it. But old Dop there takes credit for writing the songs himself. I even heard him on a podcast bragging about his golden voice and his creative process, how the words to the songs just come to him. Believe me, it’s hilarious.”
Dwayne sat back on his heels. “You know what this reminds me of? That famous time-travel paradox. You’re a huge Beethoven fan—”
“A Beethoven fan? Really?”
“Yeah, Wes. Why not? Go with it. You’re this huge Beethoven fan so you invent a time machine and you go back to Vienna in the 1700s, right? You want to find the big man himself and get his autograph, so you take all of his CDs with you. What do you all call CDs?”
“We didn’t have CDs,” Vikram said. “We went directly from reels to sixers.”
“Fine. Whatever. So you’ve got his sixers, then—something physical, so he can sign them. But when you get there, Beethoven didn’t write those symphonies yet. You play the music for him on your portable sixer player or whatever it’s called”—here, Dwayne held up his hand to stave off possible interruption—“I don’t care; it’s useless knowledge. Anyway, you play the music for Beethoven, hoping to jog his memory, and he’s like, ‘Whoa, this some pretty good stuff. I’ve gotta jot this down,’ and he takes notes and he writes the symphony later and he publishes it and the orchestra performs it and it gets famous and goes down in history.”
“OK,” Wes said slowly. “And?”
“So who wrote the symphony? If Beethoven couldn’t—not until he heard someone else playing it—who is the author?”
“Easy,” Vikram answered. “Dop Peters.”
Wes gave him a high five.
Dwayne picked up his brush again. “I guess I just don’t get it. How come no one exposes him? Y’all are letting him get away with that? Why?”
“I downloaded all his stuff,” Vikram said. “Legally. I paid for it, so Dop would get his cut. I love Baccarat. Better that joker’s versions than nothing. And if he does another album, I’ll buy that one too, right on the day it comes out.” That word, the one Hel had shown him in a newspaper article: Ostalgie.
Wes took his time responding. He stood in the doorway, looking out the back door at the barren, gardenless yard, the tenements ranged around it on every side. “I don’t have a golden voice,” he said, at last. “I don’t have a plan, I don’t have a game. Why would I shit on someone else’s?”
After that, subdued, all three of them went back to work. Wes and Dwayne hauled the final loads out of the kitchen while Vikram took on the cramped downstairs half bath alone. By now, the variety and incongruity of the items stored in the rooms no longer surprised him. This was where Dwayne’s grandmother, Gloria Washington Defoe, had seen fit to keep her financial papers and junk mail. The pink porcelain bathroom furnishings swam knee-deep in outdated documents, some filed haphazardly in cardboard boxes bursting at the corners, some simply scattered in a heavy thatch of loose paper. The late addressee had apparently removed every piece of mail, examined it, then refolded and inserted it back into its neatly slit envelope. After Vikram had hauled out six black trash bags for Dwayne to sort through or shred—fifteen years of utility bills and bank statements and credit card offers, yellowed with age—the muscles in his back felt pleasantly sore and the grimy hexagonal tiles of the floor showed at last.
The sight made him feel a way that was hard to categorize. As tired as he was from his night shift, from the shock of the encounter with the old woman, from having to deal with a version of Hel who would barely speak to him, he found the rediscovery invigorating. Sleight’s tiles, perfect puzzle pieces. One out of every seven black, like specks of pepper floating in milk, like flea shit on a white dog, like the dark pistils of strange, pale-petaled flowers. He remembered them now, a passive memory he’d have never been able to unearth without renewing his acquaintance with the house.
A detail lost and found: the fact that years ago, he, Vikram, had planted his feet wide on this floor, unzipped his trousers, and pissed in this very bathroom.
And years before that, Sleight had.
Vikram donned gloves. He sprinkled powdered cleanser—its smell and color as familiar to him as its brand name was strange—in the sink and found an ancient plastic brush hidden behind the toilet to scrub out the bowl. He sprayed down the mirror with vinegar and used a wad of newspaper taken from one of the stacks dating from the mid-’70s that almost blocked the stairs to scour its surface.
As he pressed against the glass, a compartment opened up. A medicine cabinet, spring-loaded and hidden for years. So well concealed that old Mrs. Defoe seemed to have forgotten to clutter it.
He touched the items inside. A bottle of iodine. A bottle of rubbing alcohol. A rusty pair of scissors and a roll of gauze. A cardboard book of matches from somewhere called the Califone Hotel. A tortoiseshell comb set. A few loose safety pins. A bottle of aspirin. Everything belonged; everything looked old. He had to remind himself that these were not relics. They were just things everyone who’d ever lived here had forgotten about.
>
Old. Old enough, but not his. Not Sleight’s. An alternate history of sickness and hurts.
Hel learned how to follow on foot from the internet. In half an hour of research, she picked up useful tips about everything from the optimal distance to maintain to the correct way to use windows, car mirrors, and other reflective surfaces. She informed herself about the possible legal penalties for recording video and audio in various states without a subject’s permission.
It wasn’t wise to hang around the Domino Sugar complex anymore; the employees at MoMT and at the apartment leasing office all knew her by sight. Besides, everything about the place—the half-preserved buildings, the intangible lingering memory-smell of molasses—reminded her of her failures, her humiliation. Pinch-faced Klay, all 110 pounds of her, the world’s smallest enforcer. Klay, who would never understand, daring to show her sympathy.
One of the articles she read specifically recommended against black clothing for surveillance missions, suggesting that the best way to blend in with a crowd was to wear neutrals. That morning, she’d chosen a large gray sweatshirt that belonged to Vikram for her disguise, tied her hair back under a navy-blue beanie, and donned the largest pair of shades she could find. Now she lurked among a mixed group of tourists, Upper East Siders, and students with sketch pads on the sidewalk in front of the patch of Central Park directly opposite the Guggenheim, waiting for Donaldson to emerge from a board meeting she might or might not be attending. To pass the time, Hel counted the number of people nearby wearing all black. Twelve. Obviously, the author of the surveillance article had never been to New York.
This was her only option now. Direct confrontation had failed. Powerful intervention through Oliveira—and who else did Hel know?—had failed. This was all that was left to her.
Neither Ayanna Donaldson nor her wife, Angelene Silva, made their home address publicly visible on the social networking sites they used, but after some searching, Hel had located an online list of public arts charities and museum boards. Some of these posted the dates and locations of their events, not that Hel could know if or how faithfully Donaldson attended any particular gathering. So when Donaldson emerged after a scheduled meeting of the African American Artists’ Coalition into the bright sunlight of Fifth Avenue (wearing all black, of course) and turned onto East Eighty-Eighth, away from the park, Hel felt her heartbeat speed, the way it used to when she was a resident prepping for surgery. She sprinted to the other side of the avenue and fell in behind, pulling her cap lower and shrugging her shoulders tight. This was it.
Aboveground, keeping Donaldson in sight was easier than she’d anticipated. They walked east, crossing Madison and Park, and then turned downtown at Lexington. At first, Hel’s insides lurched every time Donaldson’s steps faltered, every time the other woman turned her head to look at a window display or paused to fish her phone out of her purse and answer a text. Each time, Hel convinced herself she was about to be found out, confronted, arrested. What she was doing could certainly be interpreted as stalking or harassment, and she didn’t need Oliveira to tell her with whom the law would side. However, as she continued to observe the tall figure in black from ten paces back, Hel became aware of her quarry’s distraction, her obliviousness to everything going on around her, and she became bolder. Donaldson stopped at a bakery. Hel waited outside, half-crouched behind a free-newspaper box, pretending to tie her shoe and controlling her breathing, until Donaldson reappeared, hand already reaching dreamily into her paper bag for the pastry she’d purchased. It was almost endearing, the way she munched as she walked with her head tilted back, as if taking in for the first time the gargoyles and drainpipes and balconies they passed. That and the Manhattan lunchtime crowd made it easy for Hel to stay within a few paces without being observed.
When Jonas was young, they’d played hide-and-seek inside the Park Slope apartment. Raym always pretended not to see him, no matter how obvious the hiding spot he’d chosen. Hel went to him right away. Jonas’s expression of concentration: brow furrowed, nose wrinkled, lips pressed together. The subtle differences between that look and the one he got right before he was going to cry: brow furrowed, bottom lip protruding. She wouldn’t allow her son to think it was that easy. If you closed your eyes, the world stayed right where it was. Looking back at you. Searching you out.
At Eighty-Sixth Street, Donaldson checked her phone one more time and descended the steps for the green line. Adjusting her sunglasses, Hel followed to the downtown platform. She kept to the opposite side of a pillar. When the train arrived and Donaldson stepped on, Hel felt herself gripped with a momentary fit of indecision. Should she get in the same car and hope not to be seen? Should she get on the car behind and look out the door at each stop, trying to catch a glimpse of Donaldson disembarking? The doors slid shut before she could step on. She watched the train leave without her.
Hel checked her phone for the time. Though it felt as if an eternity had passed, she’d stayed with Donaldson for only twelve minutes.
Next time, she’d do better.
Vikram saw the yellow light streaming out from under the door while he stood in the hallway, fumbling for his keys. As he worked the two sticky locks, he caught himself expecting it to blink out, the way Cristaudo’s signal had, in Jamaica. What if he’d never waited for the old woman, what if he’d left her alone to her signals? He’d walked back into this trap, the trap of feeling his loss again and again. He should have known it wasn’t over.
Inside the door of their apartment: the old brass floor lamp with the watermarked shade, the upholstered armchair he’d assembled from a flattened kit bought at IKEA in Red Hook. He’d never before seen anything like the mock apartments there. If only the whole world could be more like IKEA, cool and faultless, artfully decorated, with hidden drawers where mess could be stowed away. Then he’d never turn around and forget where he was. Yet he’d become habituated to the shabby objects and furnishings of this apartment, even to the armchair. The books he’d brought, lined up on their shelf, looked much like the books he’d bought here. And seated cross-legged, an open volume in her lap, Hel, whom he’d known for less than two years. Home. Seven thirty in the morning and she’d pulled the shades and blackout curtains, shutting out the day.
“What are you reading?”
She started, as if surprised to see him. “Nothing.” She displayed the cover; he recognized the not-quite-lost love poetry of Nakamura Hideki. One day last week, she’d come home late; she said she’d been at a place called Staples, making digital scans of every page of every one of their books.
He crossed the room to her now, pushing pillows out of the way to make room on the couch. Automatically, she scooted away, and Vikram thought of the words from Nakamura’s best-known poem, the one that had been widely read at weddings in their world alongside “Sonnet 116” and the Song of Songs. Nakamura’s speaker described cutting into a wrinkled passion fruit to expose its vivid innards, about the hard black seeds between his teeth, the tang and the crunch and how that complemented the sweetness of the flesh. The speaker said he would take his own insides out to demonstrate his devotion.
He could recite those words to Hel and she would rebuff him. Or would she? Today, he didn’t want to find out for sure.
Hope, that little hardness at the center. Hope and its consequences.
Hel’s eyes were shadowed. It was easy to see she was up late, not up early. “Can’t sleep?” he asked.
“Won’t sleep.”
“How do you know you won’t like it if you’ve never even tried it?” He heard the singsong pattern of his own words and wondered at it, then realized he was quoting an old commercial for boxed potatoes from his and Hel’s childhood. “God, sorry.”
She smiled weakly, recognizing the reference.
“No one else thinks I’m funny,” he said. “Not even a little bit. No one in my life. Not even before I passed through.”
“And no one else ever will.” She shut the book, but kept her finger in her
place. “Isn’t that romantic?”
He bent to untie his boots. “Shall I read you a bedtime story?”
“No, thanks. That’s all right.”
“Come on. You can pick.”
“I don’t feel like it,” she said. “I’ve heard them all before.”
“There are 155,998 other people out there who might remember Easy-Mash. But there’s no one else in the world like you.”
“Come on. You know that’s a wildly irresponsible overestimate. How many memorial services have we been to in the last year? Our survival rate isn’t that good.”
He snagged the cord of the blind, pulling it up. “You’re in a fun mood tonight. This morning,” he amended, as daylight stretched its way across the carpet to meet the bookcase on the other side of the room. All this time, he’d thought he’d accepted his loss. Now he had to pretend, and she wouldn’t even make an attempt. “I think you should get a job.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Ask for a reevaluation and apply for a work placement. Something to do would, you know, get you out of the house more. Even a dumb job can be pretty satisfying.” She was wasting her life, hidden away like this; she was squandering her talents, and although her government check almost matched his pay, she was, in a sense, subordinate to him. The old Hel in the old world—that proud woman he’d never met—wouldn’t have stood for it. But he couldn’t bring that up. It was a topic as forbidden to him as her son. “Maybe you could meet some people—”
She barked a laugh. “Right. You have your one non-alien friend now, and you think that’s what I need, too. Thanks for the assimilation advice, but no thanks. That’s not my goal in life.”
Vikram was an expert in sadness, for he felt it himself, but her anger always blindsided him. It ran deep, to self-righteous rage. It was the loss of her place in the top caste that had done this to her, Vikram thought. She was a doctor. She was a white woman. She thought that if you followed all the rules, you’d eventually win the game.