Rebecca snapped awake and rolled over to look at the alarm clock, its amber digits glowing in the darkness. Four fifty-five: way too early. It was times like these, when she’d have an hour of lying fruitlessly in bed waiting for the alarm to ring, too tired to move but too alert to drift easily back to sleep, that she’d remember she hadn’t had a good solid eight hours’ slumber in who knew how long: years, probably. Even a couple of nights ago, when she’d come back from her impromptu trip to the lab, dead on her feet after a marathon of drinking, she’d woken up at four fifteen, been unable to get back to sleep, and drifted through the rest of her day with constant fantasies of feather mattresses.
But who, in these modern times, slept well? If you didn’t have a kid waking you at all hours, and you weren’t so stressed with life that you were constantly wired from adrenaline, then you were probably drinking a lot—a lot of people drank a lot these days—and alcohol was notorious for screwing with your sleep cycles. But one of the nice things about living in the future was that, even though it was a lot more difficult to separate your work life from your personal life thanks to always-on connections, it was also a lot easier to carve out places in the day for catnaps: half of the people that Rebecca saw in their autonomous cars on the morning commute to Manhattan were asleep, the men in suits and ties with their mouths hanging crudely open or their heads jerking back and forth on their necks as they nodded off, the women serene and still as if they knew they were being watched as they slept, their faces naked as they left their makeup until the last minute, just before their arrival in New York. And at least a few of Rebecca’s coworkers used their lunch breaks for sleeping instead of eating: there was a great over-the-counter sleeping pill called Siestalert that sent you right into stage-two sleep, kept you there for a quick twenty-minute snooze, and then woke you up and dosed you with a little caffeine so that you felt bright-eyed when you returned to the office (though Rebecca suspected that it wouldn’t be on the market for much longer: the latest moral panic on cable news channels involved teenagers who’d take them in groups and keep each other awake, fighting the effect of the drug. Apparently if you did this, you’d start to trip, having dreamlike hallucinations with the alertness of one who was fully conscious, and these kids were using the drug to participate in some kind of secular analog of a Navajo peyote ceremony. As pharmacological adventures went, it seemed pretty harmless, but this was a country in which you still had to sign a form and show ID to get allergy medicine that actually worked, so regulation was probably due any day now).
And so though the feeling of being truly well rested and alert was but a memory for Rebecca, this wasn’t really a problem. Not worth cutting down on the booze, anyway. Everyone needs at least one vice to keep them human.
After a half hour of meditation, she heard Sean in the kitchen, precociously self-motivating: he was probably already making his breakfast, and at age nine he could manage the construction and packing of a lunch PB&J, a nutrition bar, and a juice box. Dressing was a little tougher, but once she restricted his wardrobe to clothing that was guaranteed to match no matter what—all solid-colored shirts; all jeans and khakis—that problem solved itself. Still, though, she was awake, and it was always nice to see him off each morning.
She rolled off the bed—even after two years, she slept on what she thought of as her side of the bed, the half of the mattress beneath her sagging with age while the other side stayed firm. She dropped to the floor and knocked out twenty quick push-ups to get the blood flowing: not girly ones that used bent knees for a fulcrum point, but real ones. Then three quick chin-ups on the bar she’d mounted above the bedroom door a year ago. That was the habit—three chin-ups whenever she entered or left the bedroom, a gentle self-imposed toll for sleeping and waking. The results added up. At thirty-eight she had an upper body she was proud of: arms that said she was not to be messed with, rack still perky, taut stomach proudly bearing the faint autographs of post-Sean stretch marks. She took care of herself. It was easy to take care of your body if you worked it into a daily routine, if you had one vice instead of many. After a while, once you got strong, living in your body and using it became a pleasure, rather than a constant struggle. No excuse for getting soft around the edges with age.
She showered and dressed, opting for a charcoal pencil skirt, matching hose, and an off-white blouse. She went into the kitchen shoeless: Sean was sitting at the table with a bowl of Raisin Bran in front of him, a tablet propped up on a stand to his right, and a phone on his left. The phone had an app open that tracked the location of his school bus as it made its way through the neighborhood and gave him an ETA: he had a few minutes yet, which was good, because he was an excruciatingly slow and fastidious eater of cereal. Instead of pouring the milk into the bowl with the Raisin Bran and wolfing it all down, Sean’s habit was to pour the milk into its own glass, pour a couple of tablespoons’ worth of milk from the glass into the bowl, dig around in the bottom of the bowl until he’d gotten a spoonful that was appropriately moist without being soggy, and place it into his mouth, chewing it slowly, as if the taste of Raisin Bran varied enough to deserve a connoisseur’s consideration from mouthful to mouthful. Soggy cereal was the worst, though, and a bad way to end a meal: Rebecca saw the sense of it.
She cracked open an egg into a cast-iron pan and began to whisk it. “Morning, Sean: what’s on tap at school today?”
“Part 4-G of the Federal Education Standard,” Sean said, his voice oddly businesslike: he was at that age when his language was a mix of childlike expressions he’d invented and adult ones that he’d overheard and appropriated for himself, like a DJ sampling beats. Or maybe this was how teachers actually talked to elementary school students now. “Area of a right triangle; surface area of a cube. That’s in the morning. Then we have to study informational texts in the afternoon: we’re learning how to figure out the central idea of an argument.”
“Sounds like heavy going,” Rebecca said. Especially for a fourth-grader, she thought, but then again, there was more to know now than there had been when she was in elementary school, and so it made sense that if you were going to condense all that information into twelve school years, you’d learn some things earlier. These days you probably got quantum physics in your sophomore year of high school.
“We have to get by 4-N by the end of the marking period,” Sean said, after another thoughtful mouthful of cereal. “I don’t see how we’re going to do it. A lot of the kids in class are slow.” His homework assignment, left until the last minute, was on his tablet, a series of multiple-choice questions that he somehow was answering even as he ate breakfast and talked with his mother, his fingers dancing nimbly across the glass. (It was amazing what he could do with that thing, Rebecca thought: she’d seen him drawing pictures on it, and he was more dexterous with the tablet than Rebecca had ever been with a pencil.)
“Well, if you ever need help with your homework, let me know,” Rebecca said.
“I won’t need help,” said Sean, sounding like his father. His phone chimed. “Bus is coming.” He’d timed it so that he finished his cereal at the last possible second, of course.
He grabbed his tablet and phone as Rebecca put on slippers and walked him outside. The bus pulled up as Sean gave her a quick peck on the cheek and ran down the walk to meet it. Rebecca felt the reluctance in the kiss and knew that the boys on the bus were staring at Sean through the windows: that ritual didn’t have much life left in it. The driver waved cheerfully at Rebecca. Since the bus was autonomous, her only duties were discipline and waving at parents, and it looked like she handled both of them well enough.
As the bus’s door slid shut and it pulled off, Rebecca went back into the house, and in the kitchen she slid the scrambled eggs (slightly overcooked now, and a little rubbery) onto a plate that seemed to have slight remains of egg from a few days ago (the housekeeper would need a gentle talking-to). She poured herself a helping of Pinot Grigio in a goblet, seasoned the eggs heavily with cayenne pe
pper, and took her breakfast into the living room on a tray to eat it off her lap in front of the TV. The channel she landed on was showing the last hour of a morning news program that began when every sensible person was still in bed. During the first hour or two its demeanor was deadly serious, each bit of news delivered in gravity by newscasters who spoke in dulcet, melodic baritones as they stared straight into the camera, but by the fourth hour the all-business anchormen were switched out with a pair of middle-aged women who reported on events of the day with glasses of wine in plain sight on the desks in front of them. The whole thing was supposed to be relaxed and comical: you could see that the women had kicked off their heels beneath the desk, and they played the whole thing broadly, talking while making grand motions with their hands, giggling at each other’s jokes, chiding each other for lack of decorum. But Rebecca figured the whole thing was a performance to get ratings, and that their wine glasses were filled with grape juice or colored water. She guessed that real alcoholics wouldn’t act like that: they’d do their drinking before they went on the set, not so much that they got silly in front of the cameras, but just enough to maintain a buzz. The guy who reported financial news at five in the morning was far more likely to be a hardcore drinker than these two.
Later, in her autonomous Audi on the way to work, Rebecca checked her messages: one voicemail and one e-mail. The voicemail was from Alicia Merrill, and, well, that was expected, after her mischief of a few nights ago. Her voice played over the car’s speakers, curt and officious. “Becca. Alicia. Two things. First, I’d like to come by tonight: there’s something we need to talk about. I’m sure you have half an idea what it is, but probably only half. Second. If you don’t have any plans for Saturday morning or afternoon, I think you and I should go for a run together on the towpath. The weather ought to be nice that day. I’ve mapped out a route: ten miles round trip, and we’ll end up at a restaurant with staff that won’t turn their noses up at us if we come in wearing exercise gear. A relatively light run, but perhaps you’ll want to prepare. Send me a text to confirm one or both. See you soon. Bye.”
Rebecca reasoned that if Alicia wanted to go running on Saturday, she wasn’t as pissed as she could have been, even though, as usual, her social graces on the surface left something to be desired. She quickly texted back Hey A.: yes and yes. Tonight’s conversation would be a little awkward (and what did she mean, “probably only half”?), but not too bad, and she had it coming.
The second message had been sent from Lovability late last night: the dossier for the romantic avatar she’d be piloting at…oh, great, one o’clock this afternoon, thanks for the heads-up. Too little time to prepare, and she was short of sleep to boot. The demographic profile for “Marcus” scrolled up the car’s windshield, along with links to the Wikipedia entries that described his special interests: music by Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone; the life of Paul Robeson; books by Barack Obama.
There wasn’t much time to bone up, but she checked the Wikipedia entries just in case. As expected, they were useless for her needs: the pages had clearly been curated by pedants more interested in completeness than in synthesis or comprehension, and so while you could find out how many hairs were in one of Fitzgerald’s eyebrows, you wouldn’t know where to begin if you knew nothing about her and wanted to learn the basics. Best to wing it. She tapped the dashboard’s touchscreen and said, “Hey, play me some Ella Fitzgerald. Whatever.”
After a couple of seconds of searching, the car cued up some live video on the windshield from…1957, it said. The singer stood in front of a microphone stand in an elegant black dress, an orchestra full of men in tuxedos behind her. Rebecca realized that the music would have once been considered beautiful. But her ears had trouble tracking the melody, as the musicians involved all seemed to be dancing coyly around the notes the song’s writer had actually wanted them to play and sing. And Rebecca couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard a singing voice that hadn’t been processed by auto-tuning, so Fitzgerald’s voice, though she guessed it was on pitch, still sounded imperfect, in need of subtle correction. (“Marcus,” she thought, would not think that way. She’d have to remember that.) The lyrics, which scrolled up the windshield beside the video, were slightly disquieting, full of contradiction and regret, all out of sync with the gentle mood of the song itself. She didn’t quite get it. She’d have to stick to just mentioning Ella during the conversation like she was on a first-name basis with her, nodding knowingly: odds were against her getting called out.
Rebecca yawned widely: her sleep deprivation was catching up with her, and she was being soothed into slumber by Ella’s singing and the gentle hum of her car’s motor. “Need I say that my love’s misspent?” Ella asked, and that, Rebecca understood. “Hell, someone’s got to say it,” Rebecca replied to the empty car as she reclined in her seat. After another verse Rebecca dropped off, as Ella continued to sing to her and her automobile joined the throng of bumper-to-bumper vehicles moving at a steady seventy-five miles an hour, down the asphalt artery that led to the heart of Manhattan.
21
THERAPY BUTTERFLY
Sean’s class convened in an auditorium that seated four hundred. The school’s building was a repurposed shopping mall that had gone defunct about a decade ago, after the multiplex and the bookstore that had anchored its ends went under. The movie theaters were great for elementary classes, though: sometimes they showed you films about hygiene and good manners, and every once in a while the President would appear and say hi to everybody, his head five times as large as Sean was tall, offering words of wisdom or encouragement in one’s studies. If you were doing really well in school, like if you came in first place in the state Math League tournament, sometimes he’d call you out by name: whenever that happened, the kid he mentioned would be a celebrity for weeks.
Sean found his assigned seat, with his name taped to the back of the one in front of it. Down at the front of the theater, the teacher looked out at all the kids. Next to her stood a guard in camouflage gear, the clothes decorated in a pattern of green and brown splotches that made him the most visible person in the place. He was portly, bearded, and wore big clunky eyeglasses, and he had a rifle strapped across his back. It wasn’t really clear to Sean what the guard was there for, but there he was anyway. Sometimes the teacher would let him tell the kids stories about the hunting trips he went on during the weekends, and those were pretty cool (though one of the stories he’d told about a pack of wolves seemed made up).
Sean’s tablet logged in to the Wi-Fi network, registered his attendance, and cued up the app that would run him through his Daily Pre-School-Day Diagnostic. Every kid had to do this each morning, though the diagnostic activity each kid had to do was different, and it changed from one day to the next. The app displayed a minimalist, stylized forest in primary colors with a bunch of cartoonish talking animals bouncing around in it; eventually one of the animals would break away from the pack and approach you, looking out of the tablet’s screen as if it were a window onto your world. If you got the rabbit that was dressed in a track suit (its fur powder blue) you had to do exercises for ten minutes, lifting the tablet over your head while you sat in your seat, or standing up and doing squats: the tablet’s accelerometer made sure you weren’t cheating on reps. If you got the owl with pince-nez glasses on its beak, you had to do a few quick math problems; the turtle (which ambled over to you while awkwardly balancing on its hind legs) made you read a paragraph and answer a couple of questions about it. Every once in a rare while, if you were totally acing all your classes and you were really well behaved, you got the phoenix, the bird materializing out of nowhere, each of the red feathers of its tail trailing a brilliant flame behind it, and if the phoenix showed up you just played games. This was a big deal: the phoenix only showed up on a tablet somewhere in the four-hundred-strong homeroom a couple of times a week, and the kid who got it always started jumping up and down and cheering while the others around him came over to look.
Sean pretty regularly got the butterfly, which came around to visit kids who…had issues. For two years Sean had been drawing the butterfly in the diagnostic at least once a week, while some kids never saw it at all (or hid their tablets from everyone else if they did). Though he’d also gotten the phoenix three times this year, at least one more time than anyone else in the class, so maybe you could say things evened out.
The butterfly showed up this morning, hovering in the middle of the screen, lava-lamp patterns swirling in its gigantic red and yellow wings. “Hey there, Sean,” it said in its reedy voice. “I just wanted to check up on how you were feeling today.” A dial appeared on the screen beside the butterfly, with notches marked from one to ten. “On this dial, could you just tell me how happy you are? Where one is down in the dumps, and ten is the happiest boy in the world. Go ahead! Tell me!” The dial was set at one, and in the pastoral landscape behind the butterfly, it began to rain heavily as the other animals began to scurry for cover. As Sean turned the dial, the rain slowed and stopped, and a yellow sun with rays shooting out of it began to emerge from behind a cloud.
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