Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories

by Naomi Kritzer

  Palladium, we were told, was most often found in Siberia. Siberia, I thought, exchanging a baffled glance with Magda. They’d never even hinted at being from Siberia. Tanzanite could be lab-created, but the only natural deposits were in Tanzania, although tanzanite was a variety of zoisite, which was found in a number of other places, none of them anywhere near the Central Asian former Soviet Republics, or Russia, or even Siberia.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m sure you’re right that it’s not an antique. Can you tell us whether it’s more than forty years old? Because that’s really all we care about.”

  Very reluctantly, he said, “The enamel used on the pin is of a kind almost never made after the seventeenth century.”

  “What do you think that means?”

  “I think these pieces were made by a modern artist, someone trying out an older technique. Were your parents art collectors? Did they have any friends who were artists?”

  Art collectors, ha. Well, they were everything-else collectors, but art was not something they sought out, at least not compared to tiny flags in need of rescue. We took pictures of all three pieces and then drew straws to decide who got to pick first: Nora chose the pendant with the spiral, and Magda picked the bird. I’d gotten the shortest straw, and wound up with the ring. At least it fit me.

  I went home for the evening and showed the ring and the pictures to Dan and my daughters. “I wish you’d gotten the flying fish,” Lindsey said. “That one was prettiest.”

  “Flying fish?” I took another look at the picture on my phone. She was right: it wasn’t a bird, it was a fish with wings, like the ones in the fairy tales my father had told me about Bon. “Well, Aunt Magda wanted that one.”

  Elaine studied the pictures. “And Aunt Nora has the medallion thing?”

  “Yeah.” I looked over her shoulder. “It’s a little hard to tell, but the design is etched in, and that dot in the corner is a purple gemstone. Is the medallion your favorite?”

  “Yeah,” Elaine said. She turned her head sideways. “It looks like the Milky Way.”

  “Well, the ring’s maybe got a secret compartment,” I said, which instantly transformed the ring into the coolest of the three pieces of jewelry, and the fact that I didn’t know how to open it only added to its charm. I was a little nervous about letting them experiment with it, fearing that Elaine would go for the screwdriver set and try to pry it open, but instead she went for a magnifying lens and a bright light.

  “Do you think these came from Bon?” Dan asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The metal comes from Siberia, the stone comes from Africa, and the enameling technique came from the seventeenth century. I suppose if they all came from a village in the Pamir Mountains that doesn’t actually exist, brought by people who kept nothing from their old home and forgot their native tongue . . . Well, of course they came from Bon, you know?”

  “Does it bother you not to know anything about your parents’ home?” Elaine asked, spinning around on the kitchen stool to face me.

  I hesitated. Elaine, of course, was adopted. So was Lindsey. We brought Elaine home when she was three, and now she’s ten. We brought Lindsey home when she was four, and now she’s seven. We do, in fact, know a certain amount about their birth parents, which we’ve shared with them in nonjudgmental, age-appropriate ways. Elaine’s birth mother was a drug addict who neglected Elaine so badly that Elaine, at three, weighed only eighteen pounds. We told Elaine that her birth mother had a sickness that made it very hard for her to take good care of Elaine, and she knows that the sickness was drug addiction, which makes people crave drugs so much they find it hard to think about anything else (“like the worst hunger you’ve ever EVER felt,” I overheard Elaine explain to Lindsey, once.) That’s actually a fair amount easier to explain than Lindsey’s history, which involved a broken leg from being thrown against a wall. You’re always supposed to speak respectfully of birth parents, and I do, but it’s harder with Lindsey’s than Elaine’s.

  “It’s not that it bothers me, exactly,” I said. “I’m just curious. Are you curious about your birth family?”

  “No,” Elaine said, “but I’m curious about Bon.” She spun the stool around again. “I want to see the pin and the medallion. Do you think Aunt Nora and Aunt Magda would let me see them?”

  “I want to visit Grandma,” Lindsey said. “Why won’t you take me to see Grandma? Luke in my class got to visit his grandma when she was in the hospital.”

  I exchanged a look with Dan and said, “Maybe this weekend.”

  “Could we X-ray the ring?” Elaine asked. “Maybe if we X-ray the ring we could see what’s inside it.”

  After thinking about it for a week, I finally took it to a friend who was willing to slip it into her work X-ray for me. “There’s a piece of bone inside,” she told me, surprised, when she handed it back. “Just a tiny fragment. It’s almost like a saint’s reliquary, maybe. I don’t see any way to get it open.”

  *

  VI. Real Family

  In my parents’ house, we’d started to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The kitchen was cleared out. The basement had been emptied. And Magda and I were talking to each other again, almost easily. Almost.

  The hardest part of the living room, in the end, was not the collection of children’s toys but the photo albums full of 1980s Polaroids and snapshots taken with an Instamatic camera. (You didn’t have to focus them because you could just assume that anything you photographed would be blurry.) We divided them up and promised to go through them at a later date so we could trade or make copies of anything particularly precious.

  The biggest project left was the downstairs closet, which was filled with miscellaneous junk and boxes of who-knows-what. Filled. When I finally yanked the door open, I got hit on the head by a falling cookie tin (which—thank goodness—was empty).

  We pulled it all out. Finding those pieces of jewelry had made this process both more interesting and more difficult; there was a real sense that something might be buried in here. Something important, something that would tell us about our past. Something buried under decades’ worth of empty cookie tins, lidless mason jars, worn-out brooms, grimy work aprons, broken toasters, cheap lamps without lampshades. Something.

  We sorted things silently in the living room for a while. Almost everything went into the donation pile.

  I’d thought up a theory about Bon. Well, maybe not a theory. More of a story, like the flying fish and the Monster of the Mountains. I wanted to share it with my sisters; I wanted them to nod and agree, and then we could, together, acknowledge that even if it wasn’t the truth, it explained things.

  My theory would explain why we couldn’t find Bon on any map, why our parents were so ridiculously cagey about the real place they were from, why they claimed to have forgotten the language, which I did remember hearing them speak and which had never sounded like any other language I’d ever heard. It would explain why we couldn’t get pregnant, why our eggs refused so stubbornly to fertilize with any sperm, and why my father had tried to warn us about that. It even explained why dogs never liked us, even the super-friendly dogs who liked everybody, even though cats didn’t mind us at all.

  What if Bon weren’t just in another country, but on another world entirely?

  What if we’re not human?

  Except I could imagine their reactions easily. This idea was completely preposterous. No doctor has ever noticed we’re not human, and Magda and I had both gotten complete workups from fertility specialists who—you know—might have noticed if there were something odd about us. So for us to be aliens, we’d have to be the sort of aliens that just so happened to be basically indistinguishable from (though not cross-fertile with) humans. Or our parents would have needed some sort of fantastic alien technology that changed them, and us, into something visually indistinguishable from humans, when they immigrated. That made no sense.

  What if we’re not human?

  It didn’t really mat
ter, did it? It didn’t matter where they came from, not really. They’d come, they’d embraced America, they’d raised us as Americans, they’d sent us to American schools and fed us American food and spoken to us in English. Elaine said she wasn’t curious about her birth family. She said, sometimes, that we were her real family, even though I’d tried to make sure she didn’t feel obligated to reassure me about that. We were her real parents. America was my real country.

  It didn’t really matter.

  “Hey,” Nora said, “was this the bag you were looking for?”

  It was the velvet bag, and we all looked inside. It held dirt. Dirt and dust. The soil, we all knew without saying it, of Bon.

  *

  VII. Glimmer

  Elaine and Lindsey looked daunted at the hospital room door, not only because their beloved grandmother was so much sicker than they’d probably imagined, but because the room was already crowded, with Nora and her husband, and Magda and her husband and their little son. But I knew they deserved a chance to say goodbye. They kissed Mom’s cheeks, and petted her hands and her hair.

  I think Lindsey believed that the magic of her love would wake Mom up. Really believed it, I mean. Too many sentimental movies.

  When they drooped from tiredness, when they’d given up, I let Dan take them home. Magda’s husband left with their baby, and Nora’s husband went off to feed their cats. It was late, and we were alone with Mom in the hospital room. Nora double-checked Mom’s DNR and I gently turned her hands palms-up. We put the ring in her left hand, and the pin in her right hand, and set the medallion with the picture of the Milky Way on her chest, and then we laid the bag of ancestral soil over the medallion.

  “Goodbye, Mom,” I said.

  For about thirty seconds, nothing happened. I tried to remember—how long had this taken with my father? We’d gathered, Mom had put the bag on his chest—

  —and then she stopped breathing.

  We retrieved the jewelry. I took the bag. We summoned the nurses, let them call the funeral home, and started the process of burial and all the rest. Goodbye, Mom.

  “You should keep the bag in your safe-deposit box,” Magda said. “You have one, right? I remember you said you had one. If we know where it is, we’ll be able to get it, when we need it. If we need it.”

  I tucked it into my purse, and met her eyes, and nodded.

  *

  VIII. Terra Incognita

  The soil in the bag is fine and dry and crumbly, with bits of sharp gravel mixed in. I don’t quite dare touch it, but I look at it with my daughter’s magnifying glass and a bright light and see glints of purple and blue and green and amber, like a collection of tumbled semiprecious stones had been crushed and added to the mix.

  And when I hold the open bag to my face and breathe in, it smells like nothing on Earth.

  ARTIFICE

  e toasted the end of Mandy’s relationship over a game of Hydro-King. “I never liked him,” I said, which was true. I didn’t add, “and what still puzzles me is that you never liked him, either, so why did you move in with him?” People say, “never try to change a man” (or, if you’re being egalitarian about it, “never try to change the person you’re dating”) but from the day they met, Mandy had viewed this guy as a work in progress. She’d even succeeded in dragging him to game night a few times, even though he clearly found board games unspeakably dull.

  “Find a nice gamer boy next time,” Larry suggested over the champagne. We met at night, in Larry’s apartment, because Larry had an actual job instead of living entirely off his citizen’s stipend like the rest of us. So on one hand, he was busy during the day; on the other, he had more money and could afford a much bigger space, big enough for seven people to meet and play board games.

  (You’d be surprised at how many people think it’s super retro that we play board games in person instead of immersive VR stuff. But did you know there are still Monopoly and Scrabble tournaments? Besides, when you get together with people in person, you can eat corn chips while you gossip.)

  “I’m swearing off men,” Mandy said. Larry’s housekeeper came through with a tray of snacks. Mandy stared speculatively at it for a moment. The housekeeper was mostly silver, with little swiveling robot eyes on stalks. It rolled around the floor so everyone could get snacks, and Mandy grabbed a fistful of chips. “Too much goddamn work.”

  “He’s probably saying the same thing about women right now,” muttered Quinn, my boyfriend, in an undertone. I snickered, then felt guilty, since I ought to be giving Mandy the benefit of the doubt here. Still. I had to admit, I hoped her ex was toasting the split with his own friends right now while watching . . . was it baseball season? Tennis? Squash? He was into that sort of thing. Mandy, not so much.

  Mandy had been in a great mood on game night, but I checked in with her the next week, just to see how she was doing. “Izzy!” she greeted me. “Come over! I want to introduce you to someone!”

  I cringed. “Already?”

  “It’s not what you think. Just come over!”

  I went over to Mandy’s apartment—the ex had moved out, and she’d already eradicated every trace of him. The alcove where he’d had his things was now fully repurposed as her studio, with a half-finished painting on a big easel. I glanced at it—it was another of her photorealism attempts—and then looked over at the brown-haired, pleasant-faced young man on the sofa. He looked way too young for her. “Joe,” she called. “Come here. I’d like to introduce you to Izzy.”

  He rose and strode over, holding out his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said in a voice that almost vibrated with sincerity. “You’re the first of Mandy’s friends I’ve had the chance to meet.” There was a faint stress on the word Mandy and he glanced at her, which was a relief as he was making too much eye contact.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you, too.” I glanced at Mandy, thinking, is this guy for real?

  Something about the self-satisfied look on Mandy’s face tipped me off. “Oh. Oh, you didn’t.”

  “My stupid ex got the housekeeper in the agreement,” Mandy said. “I needed a new one anyway, I just . . . upgraded.”

  I looked “Joe” over. You have to pay a lot more for a robot that really looks human, but that explained Joe’s unnerving perfection and slightly-too-youthful face. “You sure did. You couldn’t have gotten by with a standard housekeeping model and, oh, a really nice vibrator? Because I’m sure that would’ve been cheaper.”

  “I didn’t just want him for the bedroom. He’s going to be my boyfriend. Right, Joe?”

  He slipped his hand around her waist and leaned in to kiss her cheek. “I’ll be with you as long as you want me, Mandy.”

  She pulled back and looked at him critically. “I like the physical gesture there but next time tell me you’ll be with me forever.”

  He smiled at her with what looked exactly like human infatuation. “Of course, darling.”

  She turned back to me and said, “He learns really fast. I never have to tell him anything twice.”

  “You shouldn’t have to,” I said. “I mean, that’s the whole point of a robot, right?”

  “Exactly! I knew you’d understand.”

  Joe stood there, smiling at both of us. When we paused he said, “Can I get you anything, Izzy? A drink? A snack? I make excellent sandwiches.”

  If it had been an ordinary housekeeper I’d have said yes, but this was creeping me out, so I said I’d eaten and that I needed to get home because I’d promised myself I’d make some progress on the symphony I was composing, and I took myself off.

  Back at my own apartment, I sent my own housekeeper to make me a sandwich and some lemonade and sat down with the keyboard for a while to work, although mostly I stewed. My housekeeper was more basic and functional than Larry’s; it didn’t even have what you’d call a face, although it had enough functionality to cook (that was important to me) and clean (that was important to Quinn). Eventually Quinn came home and instead
of playing him the piece I’d been working on, I told him about Mandy and her custom-designed man.

  “Well,” he said. “It’s sad to say, but this is probably healthier than seeking out men as projects. Robots are very good at following instructions, unlike human beings. Also, Joe will never leave the toilet seat up, unless she instructs him to leave it up.”

  “I’ve never understood why she didn’t just have the housekeeper check the bathroom after each use to flip the seat back down,” I said. “Instead of making it an issue.”

  “Well, this guy will never use the bathroom at all, unless he has to go in there to recharge,” Quinn said. “That’s one problem solved, anyway.”

  *

  I shouldn’t have been surprised when Mandy brought Joe to game night.

  He still had that friendly smile on his face pretty much all the time. It had a friendly smile on its face, I should say, but the fact is, when a robot really looks human it’s hard not to think of it with a gender. Larry’s housekeeper was a a non-human-looking robot that was nonetheless sort of cute (the eyes “blink,” things like that) and he sometimes pretends it’s a pet, and Dawn and Shanice have the same basic model as me and Quinn but they gave theirs a name. Quinn and I were always very practical about it. Our housekeeper wasn’t a person or a pet; it was a machine that we’d bought so it could do our cooking and clean the toilets and run errands. Lots of people give their housekeeping robots names, but they don’t need names. (Unless you have two for some reason, but in a standard apartment space you don’t need more than one to keep up with the work.)

  We all knew by then that Mandy had bought a robot that looked human, so she couldn’t play the game of introducing Joe and waiting to see how long it took for people to figure out what was up. She led Joe around the room, introducing him to everyone; no one refused to shake hands, though Shanice was obviously pretty uncomfortable with it. Joe sat down on one of the folding chairs, leaving the comfier seating spots for the humans, and smiled happily at all of us, not interrupting.