“So why can’t you do it? Kill yourself?”
“I’ve tried. Maybe it’s programming.” I don’t say this, but maybe I’m just a coward.
“You could pay somebody. You could pay me.”
To pay some killer to do it. To be left in a field somewhere, to be found. “I need to be destroyed, not just killed. And Lilac’s the only person on the planet I’m certain will do it right.” This part’s a lie. Plenty of people would be glad to see me gone permanently—but her, it has to be her. It started with her.
“You can trust me,” he says, nodding, moving side to side again, he’s so excited.
I take him by the collar, lift him in the air. “You’ve got no idea what you’re saying.” His eyes go big and scared, and I put him back down on the stairwell. “Tell them I’d like to go for a drive, will you?”
* * *
Nat drives the four of us through the grid streets of the Sunset, the sky clear, the ocean showing as we descend toward sea level, the seawalls white and glaring in the sun. He tries to talk me out of it, a new body: “It can’t be that hard to come by, we have all that cash, why are you doing this?” But I ignore his words, rolling the window down, listening for the toss of the ocean.
I direct him to the spot I scouted some weeks ago, just south of the old Cliff House, not far from where I killed that man in Golden Gate Park. I wonder who found him, a child, a homeless person, if he’s still there, sinking into the soppy earth.
Nat gets out of the van, comes around, grabs me by the arms, shaking me. I could push him off, snap his finger bones, if I wanted to.
“Enough,” I say, and he can tell by my voice I mean it, letting me loose.
“Why’d you leave Gabe?” I ask him.
“Because I was scared. Because I loved her so goddamned much.”
“Bullshit.”
He rakes his shaved head with his fingers, stubble already coming in from yesterday. Flecks of scalp skin float off in the ocean breeze. “Too much, okay? I loved her too much.”
I know nothing of that kind of love. Too many memories of my son lost to old age, dementia, and time, just time. “You told her you’d come back, didn’t you?”
“The last thing she needs in her life is someone like me.”
“Why? What’s so wrong with you?” As far as humans go, Nat’s one of the best I’ve met, one of the few I’ve come to like, maybe the only. You’re a good man, I want to tell him. So I do. I have never said something like that, never in my life, and it comes out awkwardly, quiet, barely words, and all he can do is gape at me. “I know. It doesn’t mean much coming from me.”
“I wish you wouldn’t go.”
“Why?”
He can’t give me a reason. We aren’t even friends.
“Don’t be an idiot,” I call over my shoulder as I climb the rocks, get a grip on the seawall’s lip, pull myself to its top. For a moment I think he’s going to climb the wall and come after me, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t watch either, going back to the van, shutting himself inside.
I stretch out a hand for Lilac, but she pulls herself up on her own. Andy’s hopping, trying to get a grip. “Help,” he says.
“You stay there,” Lilac tells him, though he goes on hopping and clawing at the wall until he’s sweating and angry and watching us from below.
The ocean crashes against the seawall. They’ve built the wall tall here, hoping not to have to do it again for some years. No doubt the Outer Richmond residents aren’t pleased with the loss of view, but it’s better than losing their houses, at least for now.
“I wish you’d reconsider,” Lilac says. “I know Jakob will change his mind. He thinks it’s hopeless.”
“It is.”
“It doesn’t have to be now.”
She’s right—it doesn’t have to be now. But I’m tired of deciding who stays, who goes. “I heard him. What he wants.”
She’s angry, not hiding it. “So you want me to push you, is that it?”
“Something like that.” I can see that she doesn’t want to, but even worse that she does, and I’m sorry for her, my fault, I made her this way, and it’s not as hard as I imagined to let your body lean far enough that it’s falling, to let gravity guide you to the crashing waves.
I hit the water with an unforgiving thud, and for a moment I’m stunned, sinking, finding the cool undercurrent, waves gentle from down here. My legs, my arms, they come back to me, and I push my body forward, water making its way into my insides through my sored stomach. It’s been years since I last swam. Even as a person, I gave it up long before my body stopped working. I swim for the surface, flopping out of the water like a dolphin, pushing myself farther out, never once looking back to see if Lilac’s watching. Diving deep, toward the bottom. Minutes I spend down there, seeing everything, fish and tangled masses of seaweed and floating trash and crabs scuttling the seafloor, before my body gives out, and I roll to face the ocean’s surface, the light showing through the murky green water. I think of the Falklands so far off, the colony of penguins on the western shore, bustling with movement, the energy it takes just to live.
FOURTEEN YEARS AFTER THE RECALL
LILAC
MARIN COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
Where I live now is a blank space. I imagine you live somewhere similar. I can fill it with light, with sorrow, drench it in horror, erase it all with an ocean roar. I can fill it with memories, you putting on your sister’s clothes. Lea! I can remember her name—I don’t know why. There are washes of gray nothing where whole years should be, but I remember thinking something bad would happen at that house party. That you wanted something bad to happen. Why would that be?
Often I spend my time on fantasies. I see you, I say your name, Nikki, we walk arm in arm. It is sunny out, raining leaves. It is always sunny out.
As pleasant as they are, I try not to spend too much time on fantasies. I worry about my memories, what’s real, what’s imagined. Since I’ve come here, it’s been harder and harder to tell the difference.
Most nights Andy visits with me. I listen to him complain about the withered skin of his hands, the fryer smell in his hair, the cramped trailer we live in behind Lou’s Steak Shack. About his boss, Marco, who’s always shouting, Speed it up, Andy! Who cannot tell time, cutting Andy’s breaks short, or so he says. I know Andy, how he gets caught up in the clouds, the cars passing on the One. He can get lost on the colors bleeding by, all those people headed to the city, or away from it, zip zip zip. I know where he’s going—to Portland, Seattle, Juneau, to a Siberia that we only know from Jakob’s descriptions. I go there with him, filling up this space with the blanket white of snow, the cold knowing that I’ll never see it in person.
Sometimes Andy begs me to tell him a story, and I do, I talk and talk, even after he’s put me on mute. I tell him what I can remember from that day you wore Lea’s clothes, the house party, the cliffs. I tell him about you. He likes hearing about our last night together, what I can remember of it. Other times he tells me to go away and he plays one of his shooter games in his underwear or pulls up all sorts of feeds, and I watch him, I watch with him—babes and monster crushing trucks and the weather and some movie about the end of the world, explosions and fucky faces and windshields popping and sun for days.
On the rare occasions when he forgets to mute me while he’s working, I sing to Pit Bull, who is not the Pit Bull I recall, almost like she’s been replaced by a new dog entirely, one with bulging eyes, a protruding lower jaw, white-coated instead of rust splotches and silky like I remember.
I hear her barking outside one day, the slink of the chain on asphalt as she strains it taut, the woman’s voice: “I can’t believe it. This is Andy? Nat’s told me so much about you.”
The name—from San Francisco, Nat. I can remember hugging him, the feel of his ropy shoulders, the smell of his chapped neck.
“What are you doing here?” the woman asks.
Andy is closer now, approaching the trailer. “I
work here. At the diner.”
The woman speaks in a low voice as if she knows I’m listening. “I knew Lilac. When I was a kid.” I search my memories for the sound of her, only to meet the familiar gray.
Andy, in his bright voice: “You wanna say hi?”
Pit Bull is really incensed now, barking and straining on her chain. “Shut up, Pit Bull,” Andy shouts, and I hear her chain drag the ground as she cowers on the trailer’s steps.
“That’s not a pit bull,” Nat says. “I’d say that’s some sort of boxer mix.”
“I call all my dogs Pit Bull.” Andy claps his hands, scaring Pit Bull out of his way, and thwacks the screen door open, leads them inside. He fingers my cam on, gives me vision, voice. I see him, I see Nat, gray-speckled stubble coating his chin, the woman behind him twig-skinny. I don’t recognize her, but her hair like a little brown cap—it makes me recall an older version of myself, a motorcycle, the coast just a drop from those cliffs, the clutch of hands at my waist.
Andy points at the screen, at me. “Well, there she is.”
“Where?” the woman asks.
Nat looks to the screen, to Andy. “You keep her like that?”
“Wait.” The woman’s no longer smiling. “You can’t—”
“Stop it with the questions!” Andy shouts, squinting with the pain he gets behind his left eye. It makes him want to hit people, to shut them up. I’m always telling him you have to breathe through it—there’s nothing you can’t wait a few breaths to do. But Andy likes doing things and right when he thinks them, like now when he smacks the woman on her ass.
“Andy,” I say, reprimanding, then remembering myself. He told me never to speak to anyone besides him. That if I do, they’ll take him to prison.
“What are you doing?” Nat says, putting his body between the woman and Andy, who’s laughing, who says, “You guys are hilarious. I’m joking, obviously! Here.”
The woman turns on Nat like back off and says to Andy, “Nat told me you were a prankster. He told me all about you.”
Andy, pleased with this, points at me. “You should talk to her. Though she probably won’t remember you.”
But Nat doesn’t listen, pushing himself out of view, the woman stooping to screen level. “Hello, Lilac.”
“And who are you?”
“I was just passing through,” the woman says. “It was quite a surprise, running into Andy. I didn’t know where you’d gone. Tell me, what happened to your body?”
Andy jumps in, trying to be helpful. “You should’ve seen her, face just peeling apart. I kept her indoors for a while, but once a neighbor came to the door and Lilac here scared the bejesus out of her, didn’t you?”
“I think it’s safe to say she scared me too, slinking around and spying in windows.” Her wide white face, the animal way her body clenched in fear—I can still see it. I can see a lot of things. That fancy Beverly Hills party, all of LA glistening in the windows, the old woman in white and blood spatter. I feel her weight which is nothing at all in my arms which are not mine anymore.
“I had to make up a story about my sick cousin in some serious battle with eczema,” Andy says. “It was a close call. After that, her body had to go.”
“When was this?” the woman asks.
“A couple years ago.”
“Eight hundred and seventy-four days,” I say. We are all gone, Andy’s told me, all the companions. He said I’m the only one left, and I wonder if I am in fact left, if this is living.
“Who’s counting?” Andy with his jokes.
The woman, her face, I search for it, and it’s like it’s there, on the tip of my memory, but when I strain for it, I only blot it out. “Tell me, when did I know you?”
“Let’s see.” She counts on her fingers. “I was thirteen when I saw you last, I’m twenty-nine now, so sixteen years.”
“Sixteen years. That would’ve been Los Angeles. Right, Andy? He helps me keep track.”
“San Francisco, actually,” the woman says.
“San Francisco!”
Andy presses his hands to his ears. He hates when I get excited, a specific frequency I hit. I lower my voice. “Where I met my sister.”
“Your sister?” The woman glances off-screen, at Nat. He hasn’t stepped into view and I don’t call to him, don’t know what I would say. The things I remember about him, those last years in San Francisco before we came here, are not good things. I remember a smell like he was sweating alcohol. I remember him alone. Andy says it’s lucky I remember anything at all, the way I was moving information. We would have kept on like that forever if it hadn’t been for my skin, the living part of myself that was dying, and I would have had nothing left, no memories to sift, not even you.
“I didn’t know you had a sister,” the woman says.
“I see color when I call her up. I see it everywhere.”
“Color?”
“I loved her,” I say. I like saying it, the way it sounds, the words a stand-in for the feeling like wind as you run, a hungry kiss between friends, the ocean all around you, holding you up, legs kicking at the dark. I say it again: “I loved Dahlia.”
“But not as much as you love me, right?” Andy jokes.
“Dahlia wasn’t your sister, Lilac,” the woman says. “You were her companion.”
“Sisters,” I say again. It is a feeling I have more than anything, stronger than memory. I know she’s out there—I can visit her feed, see her stylized selfies, what she ate for dinner, the various shoes she covets—she appears to have a thing for shoes. A whole bundle of photos of that vacation she took to the Olympic National Park with its miles of forest and my man she kept calling him, the smiley guy in zip-off pants. I see it as if I’m there with her. I’m there with her.
Andy says, “Her mind’s all scrambled, all that moving.”
I hear Nat from the tiny kitchen. “Living like this isn’t helping. She’s not AI. She’s a person trapped in there.”
“What do you do here all day, Lilac?” the woman asks me.
“Oh, you know, sift memories, get lost on feeds. I’m with Andy in the evenings, and I’ve got Pit Bull to keep me company during the day.”
“But you’ve got to miss your body.”
“Sure,” I admit, “being able to touch things, to feel, I miss a lot of things, I miss—”
“All right, all right, let’s not go down this road,” Andy interrupts. This is the part where he’d put me on mute and play one of his games, nodding sometimes to look like he’s listening.
The woman glares at Andy, a flash of temper showing in her bright eyes.
“I’ve got to get back to work.” He shoos them toward the door. “Marco’s going to kill me.”
“I’ll come back,” the woman says. “Take care, Lilac.” I can hear her hustle down the stairs, Nat following.
“Leaving so soon?” I call. “It was nice to talk with you—” I stop short. Her name. I don’t know her name. “Your name!” I’m shouting. Andy stomps over and mutes the screen before slamming the trailer door.
I listen to them as they head back to the diner, the woman in a calm voice: “Andy, she can’t be happy like that. You could just—it wouldn’t hurt—she wouldn’t even know.”
“You mean, like she did to Jakob?”
Jakob I remember. He’s the one who brought me back, who told me, “We’re going to be the best of friends, you and me.” His stories left an imprint, enough to build upon. I build him up, Jakob who I cast into the ocean to save from this. Standing on the seawall, a figure swimming out—where was she going?—I threw Jakob in after her, what was left of him, before I could stop myself.
I can’t hear Andy and the woman anymore, too far, outside my range. And Pit Bull’s barking again, dragging her chain taut, barking and barking and barking. Finally she chokes herself silent, and I can hear the woman shouting, “—do it myself. Your Pit Bull won’t stop me!”
“Go ahead,” Andy shouts back, “I’ve got a backup.” A r
eminder of what I’ve done, breaking into Diana’s house those years ago, stealing her screen, her tech, showing Andy how to upload in case—in case of what? It had been Jakob’s idea, sensible at the time, I suppose, being able to salvage the dead, to keep them close. Andy’s tried it a few times, uploading himself, but he gets annoyed after a while, talking to Andy 3 or 4. Still, he always says: It’s good to have backups. He tells me often: You’re never gonna leave me.
Sometimes I wonder whether he’s switched me out for a backup of my own. But that wouldn’t be me then, would it? I would be the backup. And over on the shelf there—that would be who exactly? It’s confusing, and the barking, I blink out the barking, go searching, to where I can still find you. I like to call up your old lined face, the evidence of all those years you spent living, beautiful. The daughter you raised, she looks so much like you. I can see her. I can see you there too, Nikki.
ROLLY
DEL NORTE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
It was a harvest day and Pit Bull was too old to run. Fourteen? I wasn’t sure, hadn’t done a good enough job keeping track, never really knew his birth date in the first place. He was a dog in a pen, a promise to Andy who was always so hungry, who needed more than I could ever give him.
Funny how some gifts end up back on your stoop. Pit Bull asleep there all day, too old to take the stairs. I had to carry him down to relieve himself. I had to carry him back up. One of his eyes was milky with cataract but he could still see with the other one, could sense when I was near, a slow tail thump on the wooden stoop.
Old as he was, I found myself preparing for the big decision. Sometimes I caught him whimpering and came to his side and asked him what was wrong, and he gave me those sad eyes and I said, “You had enough yet?”
When it came time, it wouldn’t be me. I’d called the vet to forewarn, and she’d told me not to worry. They’d be ready; they’d take care of everything.
I had a few hands working the fields, tending to the goats, as I sat at the screen, processing orders. I’d watch them out the window, watch their work, take in the rows and rows of crops—my biggest harvest to date. I’d never rival Pa; he’d had so much more land to work with. But I was surviving, doing better than that even, socking away money, for what? Work—I enjoyed it, it kept me going. I was almost happy on the days when one of my hands was out with the flu or too hungover, when I had to return to the fields, that wet earth smell like oxygen.
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