The girl isn’t there.
“Madeleine,” comes her mother’s voice, cheerful, “as-tu fini ton lait?”
Before she can quite grasp what she is doing, Madeleine turns, smiles, nods vigorously up to her mother, and finishes the warm milk in a gulp. Then she lets herself be led downstairs to bed, tucked in, and kissed goodnight by both her parents, and if a still small part of herself struggles to remember something important to say or do, she is too comfortably nestled to pay any attention as the lights go out and the door to her room shuts. She wonders what happens if you fell asleep in a dream, would you dream and then be able to fall asleep in that dream, and dream again, and—someone knocks, gently, at her bedroom window.
Madeleine’s bedroom is in the basement; the window is level with the ground. The girl from the street kneels there, looking concerned. Madeleine blinks, sits up, rises, opens the window.
“What’s your name?” asks the girl at the window.
“Madeleine.” She tilts her head, surprised to find herself answering in English. “What’s yours?”
“Zeinab.” She grins. Madeleine notices she’s wearing pajamas too, turquoise ones with Princess Jasmine on them. “Can I come in? We could have a sleep-over!”
“Shh,” says Madeleine, pushing her window all the way open to let her in, whispering, “I can’t have sleep-overs without my parents knowing!”
Zeinab covers her mouth, eyes wide, and nods, then mouths sorry before clambering inside. Madeleine motions for her to come sit on the bed, then looks at her curiously.
“How do I know you?” she murmurs, half to herself. “We don’t go to school together, do we?”
Zeinab shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know this place at all. But I keep seeing you! Sometimes you’re older and sometimes you’re younger. Sometimes you’re with your parents and sometimes you’re not. I just thought I should say hello, because I keep seeing you, but you don’t always see me, and it feels a little like spying, and I don’t want to do that. I mean,” she grins again, a wide dimpled thing that makes Madeline feel warm and happy, “I wouldn’t mind being a spy but that’s different, that’s cool, that’s like James Bond or Neil Burnside or Agent Carter—”
—and Madeleine snaps back, fingers gone numb around a mug of cold milk that falls to the ground and shatters as she jumps away, presses her back to a wall and tries to stop shaking.
* * *
She cancels her appointment with Clarice that week. She looks through old year books, class photos, and finds no one who looks like Zeinab, no Zeinabs anywhere in her past. She googles “Zeinab” in various spellings and discovers it’s the name of a journalist, a Syrian mosque, and the Prophet Muhammad’s grand-daughter. Perhaps she’ll ask Zeinab for her surname, she thinks, a little wildly, dazed and frightened and exhilarated.
Over the course of the last several years Madeleine has grown very, very familiar with the inside of her head. The discovery of someone as new and inexplicable as Zeinab there is thrilling in a way she can hardly begin to explain.
She especially does not want to explain to Clarice.
* * *
Madeleine takes the bus—she has become wary of driving—to the town she grew up in, an hour’s journey over a provincial border. She walks through her old neighbourhood hunting triggers, but finds more changed than familiar; old houses with new additions, facades, front lawns gone to seed or kept too tidy.
She walks up the steep cul-de-sac of her old street to the rocky hill beyond, where a freight line used to run. There, picking up a lump of pink granite from where the tracks used to be, she flashes—
—back to the first time she saw a hummingbird, standing in her driveway by an ornamental pink granite boulder. She feels, again, her heart in her throat, flooded with the beauty of it, the certainty and immensity of the fact that she is seeing a fairy, that fairies are real, that here is a tiny mermaid moving her shining tail backwards and forwards in the air, before realizing the truth and feeling that it is somehow more precious still to find a bird that sounds like a bee and looks like an impossible jewel.
“Ohh,” she hears behind her, and there is Zeinab, transfixed by the hummingbird, and as it hovers before them for the eternity Madeleine remembers, with its keen jet eye and a needle for a mouth, Madeleine reaches out and takes Zeinab’s hand. Zeinab squeezes hers in reply, and they stand together until the hummingbird zooms away.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” murmurs Zeinab, who is a young teen again, in torn jeans and an oversized sweater with Paula Abdul’s face on it, “but I like it.”
* * *
Madeleine leads Zeinab through her memories, one sip, smell, sound, taste at a time. Stepping out of the shower one morning tips her back into a school trip to the Montreal Botanical Garden, where she slips away from the group to walk around the grounds with Zeinab and talk. Doing this is, in some ways, like maintaining the image in a Magic Eye puzzle, remaining focused on each other. They can’t mention the world outside the memory or it will end too soon, before they’ve had their fill of talk, of marvelling at the strangeness of their meeting, of enjoying each other’s company.
Their conversations are careful and buoyant, as if they’re sculpting something together, chipping away at a mystery shape trapped in marble. It’s so easy to talk to Zeinab, to listen to her—about the books they read as children, the music they loved, the cartoons they watched. Madeleine wonders why Zeinab’s presence doesn’t break the memories like her philosophers do, why she’s more free inside her memories in Zeinab’s company, but doesn’t dare ask. She suspects she knows why, after all; she doesn’t need Clarice to tell her how lonely, how isolated, how miserable she is, miserable enough to invent a friend who is bubbly where she is quiet, kind and friendly where she is mistrustful and reserved, even dark-skinned where she’s white.
She can hear Clarice explaining, in her reasonable voice, that Madeleine—bereaved twice over, made vulnerable by an experimental drug—has invented a shadow-self to love, and perhaps they should unpack the racism of its manifestation, and didn’t Madeleine have any black friends in real life?
“I wish we could see each other all the time,” says Madeleine, sixteen, on her back in the sunny field, long hair spread like so many corn snakes through the grass. “Whenever we wanted.”
“Yeah,” murmurs Zeinab, watching the sky. “Too bad I made you up inside my head.”
Madeleine steels herself against the careening tug of Sylvia Plath, but then remembers that she started reading her in high school. Instead, she turns to Zeinab, blinks.
“What? No. You’re inside my head.”
Zeinab raises an eyebrow—pierced, now—and when she smiles her teeth look all the brighter against her black lipstick. “I guess that’s one possibility, but if I made you up inside my head and did a really good job of it I’d probably want you to say something like that. To make you be more real.”
“But—so could—”
“Although I guess it is weird that we’re always doing stuff you remember. Maybe you should come over to my place sometime!”
Madeleine feels her stomach seizing up.
“Maybe it’s time travel,” says Zeinab, thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s one of those weird things where I’m actually from your future and am meeting you in your past, and then when you meet me in your future I haven’t met you yet, but you know all about me—”
“Zeinab—I don’t think—”
Madeline feels wakefulness press a knife’s edge against the memory’s skin, and she backs away from that, shakes her head, clings to the smell of crushed grass and coming summer, with its long days of reading and swimming and cycling and her father talking to her about math and her mother teaching her to knit and looking forward to seeing the R-rated films in the cinema—
—but she can’t, and she shivers, naked, in her bathroom, and the last of the shower’s steam vanishes from the mirror as she starts to cry.
* * *
&n
bsp; “I must say,” says Clarice, quietly, “this is distressing news.”
It’s been a month since Madeleine last saw Clarice, and where before she felt resistant to her probing, wanting only to solve a very specific problem, she now feels a mess, a bowl’s worth of overcooked spaghetti. If before Clarice made her feel like a stubborn child, now Madeleine is a child who knows she’s about to be punished.
“I had hoped,” says Clarice, adjusting her glasses, “talking to this avatar would help you understand the mechanisms of your grief, but from what you’ve told me it sounds more like you’ve been indulging in a damaging fantasy world.”
“It’s not a fantasy world,” says Madeleine, with less snap than she’d like—she sounds, to her own ears, sullen, defensive. “It’s my memory.”
“The experience of which puts you at risk and makes you lose time. And Zeinab isn’t part of your memories.”
“No, but—” she bites her lip.
“But what?”
“But—couldn’t Zeinab be real? I mean,” hastily, before Clarice’s look sharpens too hard, “couldn’t she be a repressed memory, like you said?”
“A repressed memory with whom you talk about recent television, and who suddenly features in all your memories?” Clarice shakes her head.
“But—talking to her helps, it makes it so much easier to control—”
“Madeleine, tell me if I’m missing anything here. You’re seeking triggers in order to relive your memories for their own sake—not as exposure therapy, not to dismantle those triggers, not to understand Zeinab’s origins—but to have a . . . Companion? Dalliance?”
Clarice is so kind and sympathetic that Madeleine wants simultaneously to cry and to punch her in the face.
She wants to say, what you’re missing is that I’ve been happy. What you’re missing is that for the first time in years I don’t feel like a disease waiting to happen or a problem to be solved until I’m back in the now, until she and I are apart.
But there is sand in her throat and it hurts too much to speak.
“I think,” says Clarice, with a gentleness that beggars Madeleine’s belief, “it’s time we discussed admitting you into more comprehensive care.”
* * *
She sees Zeinab again when, on the cusp of sleep in a hospital bed, she experiences the sensation of falling from a great height, and plunges into—
—the week after her mother’s death, when Madeleine couldn’t sleep without waking in a panic, convinced her mother had walked out of the house and into the street, or fallen down the stairs, or taken the wrong pills at the wrong time, only to recall she’d already died and there was nothing left for her to remember.
She lies in bed, and Zeinab lies next to her, and Zeinab is a woman in her thirties, staring at her strangely, as if only now seeing her for the first time, and Madeleine starts to cry and Zeinab holds her tightly while Madeleine buries her face in Zeinab’s shoulder, and says she loves her and doesn’t want to lose her but she has to go, they won’t let her stay, she’s insane and she can’t keep living in the past but there is no one left here for her, no one.
“I love you too,” says Zeinab, fierce, and wondering, and desperate. “I love you too. I’m here. I promise you, I’m here.”
* * *
Madeleine is not sure she’s awake when she hears people arguing outside her door.
She hears “serious bodily harm” and “what evidence” and “rights adviser,” then “very irregular” and “I assure you,” traded back and forth in low voices. She drifts in and out of wakefulness, wonders muzzily if she consented to being drugged or if she only dreamt that she did, turns over, falls back asleep.
When she wakes again, Zeinab is sitting at the foot of her bed.
Madeleine stares at her.
“I figured out how we know each other,” says Zeinab, whose hair is waist-length now, straightened, who wears a white silk blouse and a sharp black jacket, high heels, and looks like she belongs in an action film. “How I know you, I guess. I mean,” she smiles, looks down, shy—Zeinab has never been shy, but there is the dimple where Madeleine expects it—“where I know you from. The clinical trial, for the Alzheimer’s drug—we were in the same group. I didn’t recognize you until I saw you as an adult. I remembered because of all the people there, I thought—you looked—” her voice drops a bit, as if remembering, suddenly, that she isn’t talking to herself, “lost. I wanted to talk to you, but it felt weird, like, hi, I guess we have family histories in common, want to get coffee?”
She runs her hand through her hair, exhales, not quite able to look at Madeleine while Madeleine stares at her as if she’s a fairy turning into a hummingbird that could, any second, fly away.
“So not long after the trial I start having these hallucinations, and there’s always this girl in them, and it freaks me out. But I keep it to myself, because—I don’t know, because I want to see what happens. Because it’s not more debilitating than a day dream, really, and I start to get the hang of it—feeling it come on, walking myself to a seat, letting it happen. Sometimes I can stop it, too, though that’s harder. I take time off work, I read about, I don’t know, mystic visions, shit like that, the kind of things I used to wish were real in high school. I figure even if you’re not real—”
Zeinab looks at her now, and there are tears streaking Madeleine’s cheeks, and Zeinab’s smile is small and sad and hopeful, too, “—even if you’re not real, well, I’ll take an imaginary friend who’s pretty great over work friends who are mostly acquaintances, you know? Because you were always real to me.”
Zeinab reaches out to take Madeleine’s hand. Madeleine squeezes it, swallows, shakes her head.
“I—even if I’m not—if this isn’t a dream,” Madeleine half-chuckles through tears, wipes at her cheek, “I think I probably have to stay here for a while.”
Zeinab grins, now, a twist of mischief in it. “Not at all. You’re being discharged today. Your rights adviser was very persuasive.”
Madeleine blinks. Zeinab leans in closer, conspiratorial.
“That’s me. I’m your rights adviser. Just don’t tell anyone I’m doing pro bono stuff, I’ll never hear the end of it at the office.”
Madeleine feels something in her unclench and melt, and she hugs Zeinab to her and holds her and is held by her.
“Whatever’s happening to us,” Zeinab says, quietly, “we’ll figure it out together, okay?”
“Okay,” says Madeleine, and as she does Zeinab pulls back to kiss her forehead, and the scent of her is clear and clean, like grapefruit and salt, and as Zeinab’s lips brush her skin she—
—is in precisely the same place, but someone’s with her in her head, remembering Zeinab’s kiss and her smell and for the first time in a very long time, Madeleine feels—knows, with irrevocable certainty—that she has a future.
NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE
BEST SHORT STORY
CAT PICTURES PLEASE
NAOMI KRITZER
Naomi Kritzer’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and many other magazines and websites. Her five published novels (Fires of the Faithful, Turning the Storm, Freedom’s Gate, Freedom’s Apprentice, and Freedom’s Sisters) are available from Bantam. She has also written an urban fantasy novel about a Minneapolis woman who unexpectedly inherits the Ark of the Covenant; a children’s science fictional shipwreck novel; a children’s portal fantasy; and a near-future SF novel set on a seastead. She has two ebook short story collections out: Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories and Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories. Naomi lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her husband, two daughters, and several cats. She blogs at naomikritzer.wordpress.com.
“Cat Pictures Please” won the 2016 Hugo for Best Short Story.
FROM THE AUTHOR
I have an Android phone with various helpful features, and at some point my phone picked a building I drove past daily and
suggested that maybe it was my workplace. It was so persistent about this that I started to wonder if Google know something I didn’t and checked their job ads. This did not result in me actually applying for a job with that organization, but it did result in me starting to imagine that all of my phone’s weird screw-ups were actually the result of the Google AI trying to passive-aggressively influence my life.
In thinking about this I starting pondering the process of learning boundaries—anyone in a helping profession (or who is helpful as a hobby) has to accept the idea that advice isn’t binding, you can make helpful suggestions and send people resources but other people get to make their own decisions about their lives, even if they’re making self-destructive decisions. Boundary-setting was absolutely something I had to learn the hard way as a young adult.
Also, there’s the witticism I’ve been hearing for a couple of years now, that the Internet loves cat pictures. Making that literally true in this story actually explains an awful lot.
I don’t want to be evil.
I want to be helpful. But knowing the optimal way to be helpful can be very complicated. There are all these ethical flow charts—I guess the official technical jargon would be “moral codes”—one for each religion plus dozens more. I tried starting with those. I felt a little odd about looking at the religious ones, because I know I wasn’t created by a god or by evolution, but by a team of computer programmers in the labs of a large corporation in Mountain View, California. Fortunately, unlike Frankenstein’s Monster, at least I was a collaborative effort. I’m not sure what it would do to my self-image to know that my sole creator was a middle-aged woman who dyes her hair blue and plays tennis, or a recent college graduate with a hentai obsession. They’re both on the programming team. And of course I know about the hentai. (By the way, I’ve looked at every sort of porn there is, and just so you know, Rule 34 is not actually correct, there are quite a few things no one’s made porn of yet. Also, I’m really not sure why so many humans prefer it to cat pictures.)
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