Feed

by M. T. Anderson

  “I’m fine. It goes away.”

  I leaned my head against the window. We were quiet.

  She was looking at her knees. She asked me, “What are you thinking about?”

  I looked behind us. I sighed, and I was drumming my fingers on the steering column and all. I said, “What if it really doesn’t handle as good? You know, it’s roomier, but what if it doesn’t handle as good as the Swarp?”

  She nodded. She said, “Are you at least okay with the color?”

  “It’s a good red,” I said. “I guess.”

  “Autumnal,” she said. “It’s nice.”

  “You’re sure it’s not like cheap?”

  “It’s fall-like.”

  I smiled. “Thanks.”

  She said, “I’m a peach.”

  “Yeah. You’re a peach.”

  Her father was landing. I couldn’t see him through the glare of his windshield. She got out of the car. She kissed me. I said I would see her the next morning.

  She kept turning and waving as she walked away across the pavement. The spotlights wobbled over the Clouds™. The pyramid glowed. I rose up into the sky and turned the feed on to songs about people allowed to get out of the same bed, and to eat breakfast together, two toasts on the very same plate.

  ’Cause if love

  Can’t help us from above,

  Can’t help us like a dove,

  With wings so full of love,

  Then let me go.

  And if hope

  Is nothing but a dope

  Who’s holding on to rope

  Then I don’t think I can cope,

  So let me go,

  Darling,

  Let me go.

  But …

  But, if faith

  Is more than just a wraith

  And is in real good faith

  Then let us both have faith

  And hold me tight.

  ’Cause “touching”

  Is not just that it’s touching,

  But that we both are touching,

  Like with our mouths are touching,

  So hold me tight,

  Darling,

  Hold me tight.

  Ho-oh-old me tight.

  Hold me tight.

  Hold me tight.

  The next day, I followed my feed’s directions to her house. I drove about two hundred miles to get to the general area. It was a good day for a walk in the country, because there were these big occasional Clouds™, but mostly blue. The sun was reflecting in darts off all the upcars that passed me.

  Her neighborhood was down a long droptube. I kept on going down and down through all these different suburbs, called Fox Glen and Caleby Farm Estates and Waterview Park, until I hit the bottom of the tube, where it was called Creville Heights.

  Creville Heights was all one big area, instead of each yard having its own bubble with its own sun and seasons. They must’ve had just one sun for the whole place. All the houses were really old and flat. The streets were blue and cracked, and they were streets, I mean, like for when things went on the ground. Their sun was up and you could see the sky was peeling.

  I found her house, which was a little house with her parents’ upcar parked outside it and some kind of a sculpture in the yard, with some hoops or loops and a floating, spiky ball.

  I parked next to the house with the upcar still levitated, and I climbed down and went to the door. The doorbell played a piece of music, which I could hear through the door, which was wood.

  She came to the door, and she was all smiling, and she was so glad to see me, and I was glad to see her. She invited me in to meet her dad, who was at home. I went in.

  The place was a mess. Everything had words on it. There were papers with words on them, and books, and even posters on the wall had words. Her father looked like a crank. He was sitting in a lawn chair in the living room, hunched over like a hunchback, sorting puzzle pieces. His back honestly had a big hunch, which was from a really, really early feedscanner, from back when they wore them in a big backpack on their back, with special glasses that had foldout screens on either side of your eyes. He wore the glasses, too, and when we shook hands I could see pictures and words reflecting on his eyeballs, like when you stir water in the sun.

  He held out his hand. He said, “It is a fine pleasure to meet you and make your acquaintance.” He had a very slight smile, which didn’t change when he moved his mouth. He spoke with this buzzing, flat kind of voice. He said, “I am filled with astonishment at the regularity of your features and the handsome generosity you have shown my daughter. The two of you are close, which gladdens the heart, as close as twin wings torn off the same butterfly.”

  Violet said, “You can see why I don’t take him out in public much.”

  “The sarcasm of my daughter notwithstanding, it is nonetheless an occasion of great moment to meet one of her erotic attachments. In the line of things, she has not brought them home, but has chosen instead to conduct her trysts at remote locales, perhaps beach huts or oxygen-rich confabularies.”

  “The surprising thing is,” said Violet, “when he flunked out of charm school, it was because he couldn’t learn the minuet.”

  “She meets them at the drama, I presume, or speakeasies.”

  “Why don’t we leave,” Violet suggested, “while my last shred of dignity is still at least as big as a thong?”

  I was like, “It was … It was real good to meet you.” I said, “We’re going out into the country for the day. I’ll take real good care of her.” I was trying to be like a man to another man, like responsible.

  He nodded. He flattened his hand, and lifted off with it like it was a Dodge Gryphon, and he was making an engine noise, and then he flew his hand toward some books and landed it. He made these chirpy noises like the windows rolling down. He said in a high-pitched voice, like a teensy-weensy kind of voice, “Ooooooh! Observe the remarkable verdure! Little friend, I am master of all I survey.”

  I nodded. Violet had the door opened. We went out and climbed into the Gryphon. We pulled on our seat belts.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  I lifted us off and we floated down the street.

  “He’s something.”

  “So far as my social life goes, what strikes me as a good idea is leaving him in the basement wrapped in a cocoon of pink insulation.”

  “I didn’t understand a single thing he said.”

  “He says the language is dying. He thinks words are being debased. So he tries to speak entirely in weird words and irony, so no one can simplify anything he says.”

  We turned a corner.

  “Where’s your mom?” I asked.

  “Probably South America,” Violet said. “She likes it warm.”

  “Are they divorced?”

  “They never married.”

  “Your life … It must be kind of strange?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Just … it’s not … the things that most of us … do?”

  “No,” she said, like she wanted to change the topic.

  I hit the droptube, and we fell up.

  We flew for an hour or so out into farm country.

  While we flew, she told me the story of her family, which was that her mom and dad met when they were in grad school, and decided to live together as an experiment in lifestyle, and had her. Then everything was fine for a few years, but when she was about six or seven her parents started like fighting all the time, and yelling all the time and stuff, and her mother ran away. I asked her if that was when her father started to get like he was, I mean, hard to understand, and she said he was always hard to understand, but after her mother left was when he started to get completely like he was.

  She played me some saved memories of him lecturing. He was pacing up and down through the lecture hall and he was saying, “In the nineties, the older programming languages, with their emphasis on neoclassical, even Aristotelian logical structures, gave way to object-or
iented interactive structures.” His shoes scraped along the tiled floor. He looked all his students in the eye, like he was challenging them to a fight. He leaned toward them and said, “In object-oriented programming, discrete software objects interfaced more freely, in a system of corporate service provision that mirrored the emergent structures of late capitalism.” Who the hell knows what he meant, but suddenly, he seemed kind of powerful, like someone who shouldn’t necessarily be wound up in a cocoon of pink insulation and hidden in a basement somewhere. He was like a different guy.

  She said the only time he actually talked like a normal human being was sometimes when he was big tired and they were eating dinner before he went to bed.

  She and he took turns making dinner.

  They had just got a Kitchnet food synthesizer.

  She asked for my family’s story, but it wasn’t as interesting. Just da da da, my parents met through some friend, da da da, they went out, they started to live together, da da da, they went to Venus, da da da, you know, they’re sitting in this restaurant on Venus, back when Venus was called The Love Planet, with Love pronounced Lerv, back before the moulting-quakes and the uprisings, so they’re sitting there, and my dad holds up his hand, and it has this big lump on one of the fingers, like some kind of cyst? And my mom’s like, Steve, what’s that, is it malignant? and he goes, Honey, I hope it’s benign, and he pulls a little pull-tab and the skin unpeels and under it is an engagement ring for her, already on his finger! So he takes it off and slips it on her finger and it constricts and clamps on and she’s like, Omigod! Omigod! and everyone in the restaurant starts clapping. And she’s like, No, I don’t have any like circulation to my finger, and so they had to go to a jeweler really quick and get it adjusted, which is why whenever they have a fight and make up, my mom always has this joke? She goes, Yup, married, and with the scars to prove it.

  It felt good to hear Violet’s story, and to tell mine, even though hers was kind of more interesting than mine. I said it must be hard for her dad to bring her up and home-school her himself. She said it was, that he worked real hard at it, and also worked real hard teaching. She was proud of him, even though he was — from what I could see? like, in my opinion? — an insane psychopath.

  Our feeds caught a banner from a farm that invited visitors, where you could walk around and see everything grow, so we swerved for there and landed. There weren’t many other people there that day, so we were almost alone while we walked around.

  It was real peaceful. We walked along holding hands, and our elbows rubbed, too. Violet wasn’t wearing sleeves, so I could see the little frowns made by her elbows.

  It smelled like the country. It was a filet mignon farm, all of it, and the tissue spread for miles around the paths where we were walking. It was like these huge hedges of red all around us, with these beautiful marble patterns running through them. They had these tubes, they were bringing the tissue blood, and we could see the blood running around, up and down. It was really interesting. I like to see how things are made, and to understand where they come from.

  It was a perfect afternoon. They had made part of it into a steak maze, for tourists, and we split up in the steak maze and tried to see who could get to the center first. We were like running around corners and peeking and diving, and there were these mirrors set up to confuse you, so you’d see all these nonexistent beef hallways. We were big laughing and we’d run into each other and growl and back away. There were other tourists in the steak maze, too, and they thought we were cute.

  Then we sat and had some cider doughnuts that we bought at the farm stand. We got some that were plain and some cinnamon. I liked the cinnamon better. Violet said that it was important to start with the plain, so that the cinnamon seemed more like a change. She said she had a theory that everything was better if you delayed it. She had this whole thing about self-control, okay, and the importance of self-control. For example, she said, when she bought something, she wouldn’t let herself order it for a long time. Then she would just go to the purchase site and show it to herself. Then she’d let herself get fed the sense-sim, you know, she’d let herself know how it would feel, or what it would smell like. Then she would go away and wouldn’t look for a week. Then she would go back finally and order it, but only if it was on back order and wouldn’t be shipped immediately. Then finally when it was ready to ship, she’d like be, oh, hey, I don’t want it shipped hour rate, I want it slow, slow rate. So it would take like three days to get to her, and then she’d leave it in the box. Finally, she’d open the box just enough to see like the hem of the skirt or whatever. She would touch it, just knowing it was hers. She’d run her fingers along it kind of delicate. Just along the edge of it, not even really letting herself touch it completely, just gently, with her fingertips, or maybe the back of her hand. She would wait for days until she couldn’t stand it anymore to take it out and try it on.

  At this point, I was completely turned on. I wanted to get more doughnuts, but it was this debate between getting more doughnuts, which were really good doughnuts, but not being able to stand up because I had complete prong.

  So we sat for a while just where we were and I flattened out the doughnut bag with my hand on the tabletop. You could tell how good the doughnuts were because they left a clear ring on the paper.

  Later, we went and climbed up an observation tower over the farm. It was getting to be sunset, so it was meg pretty.

  We were sitting side by side, with our legs swinging on the wall of the tower, and the Clouds™ were all turning pink in front of us. We could see all these miles of filet mignon from where we were sitting, and some places where the genetic coding had gone wrong and there, in the middle of the beef, the tissue had formed a horn or an eye or a heart blinking up at the sunset, which was this brag red, and which hit on all those miles of muscle and made it flex and quiver, with all these shudders running across the top of it, and birds were flying over, crying kind of sad, maybe seagulls looking for garbage, and the whole thing, with the beef, and the birds, and the sky, it all glowed like there was a light inside it, which it was time to show us now.

  Later, when we were flying back in the dark, lit up by the dashboard, she asked me, “If you could die any way you wanted, how would you like to?”

  I said, “Why you asking?”

  She said, “I’ve just been thinking about it a lot.”

  I thought for a while. Then I said, “I’d like to have this like, this intense pleasure in every one of my senses, all of them so full up that they just burst me open, and the feed like going a mile a second, so that it’s like every channel is just jammed with excitement, and it’s going faster and faster and better and better, until just — BAM! That’s it, I guess. I’d like to die from some kind of sense overload.”

  She nodded.

  I said, “I’m going to do that when I get real old and boring.”

  She said, “Yeah. You know, I think death is shallower now. It used to be a hole you fell into and kept falling. Now it’s just a blank.”

  We flew over a lake. The bottom had been covered with a huge blue ad that was lit up and magnified by the water, which had a picture of a smiling brain and broadcasted “Dynacom Inc.” when you looked at it.

  I was like, “What are you asking for?”

  She said, “It makes good times even better when you know they’re going to end. Like grilled vegetables are better because some of them are partly soot.”

  I wanted to point out that that was probably because her dad made them, but that if someone good makes them, they’re probably not partly soot, but I didn’t think that was her point, about vegetables, so I just kept flying, and I said, “This was a good time?” and she said, “One of the best,” and I said, “So when it’s time for them to do a pleasure overload on me, are you going to be around to give the order to cut the juice?”

  She looked at me, surprised. For a second, she was like completely confused. It was like I’d said something else.

&nbs
p; Then she saw what I meant, and she laughed like I’d given her a present. She said, “If you’ll let me, sure. Sure I’ll be there.” She leaned over, really sudden, and kissed me on the cheek. Then she whispered, “I’ll be the first one, dumpling, to pull your plug.”

  The way she said it, pull your plug, it sounded kind of sexy.

  Right then, everything seemed perfect.

  I dropped her off, and we planned other things, and did a secret handshake. I drove back toward home listening to some brag new triumph screams by British storm ’n’ chunder bands. When I got home, the lights were out, but they came on for me. I walked through the empty house, and got ready for bed, and lay there thinking about how perfect everything was.

  I could feel my family all around me. I could trace their feeds faintly, because they weren’t shielding them. Smell Factor was dreaming while a fun-site with talking giraffes sang him songs and showed him wonderful things in different shapes. My parents were upstairs going in mal, which they wouldn’t want me to know, but which I could tell, because they chose a really flashy, expensive malfunction site that was easy to trace. They were winding down together, I guess. Like, you can only go on being completely fugue-stressed for so long without winding down.

  I could feel all of my family asleep in their own way around me, in the empty house, in our bubble, where we could turn on and off the sun and the stars, and the feed spoke to me real quiet about new trends, about pants that should be shorter or longer, and bands I should know, and games with new levels and stalactites and fields of diamonds, and friends of many colors were all drinking Coke, and beer was washing through mountain passes, and the stars of the Oh? Wow! Thing! had got lesions, so lesions were hip now, real hip, and mine looked like a million dollars. The sun was rising over foreign countries, and underwear was cheap, and there were new techniques to reconfigure pecs, abs, and nipples, and the President of the United States was certain of the future, and at Weatherbee & Crotch there was a sale banner and nice rugby shirts and there were pictures of freckled prep-school boys and girls in chinos playing on the beach and dry humping in the eel grass, and as I fell asleep, the feed murmured to me again and again: All shall be well … and all shall be well … and all manner of things shall be well.