by Gish Jen
“And look at Ondi,” she said. “Who could have predicted that she would find that boy Traymore and snap into gear this way? Not even Aunt Nettie could’ve foreseen it.”
Did she really think that? And how did she know about Traymore? Was that from Gwen’s GreetingGrams or did everyone know? And was she telling us because she wanted us to know that she knew?
“It’s such a happy story,” I agreed cautiously. “He seems to be just what she needed.”
I tried not to let my fundamental mistrust show. But suddenly she fanned herself with her free hand, saying she felt faint.
“The heat,” she said.
“Can we get you something? Some iced hibiscus tea?” said Eleanor.
“Will it have the wild mint?”
“Of course.”
“Well, that might just be what the doctor ordered,” said Mimi.
And so quickly did she revive, once out in the garden, that it was hard not to wonder if it was the thought of not being offered tea that had made her head spin. She gestured animatedly as we discussed the advantages of adding coffee grounds to the soil. Did they have any effect on the worms? she wondered. Then on her way out, she asked casually, with a swat at the air, “Since when do you allow drones in your house?”
Drones?
And sure enough, when she left we found that there were MicroDrones everywhere, the same color as the walls and nestled into little crevices in the plastic. How long had they been there? Was this how Aunt Nettie seemed to know so much about us despite our data shutoff and white noisemaker and deflectors? And why had Mimi alerted us? Was she trying to help us or trying to make us snap? Since the MicroDrones were not legal, Yuri, Heraldine, and Sue immediately lodged a complaint in court; the League technical team set to work getting the drones out of there. Eleanor and I tried to keep calm.
* * *
◆
There was a ten-day gap between Navy and Net West—plenty of time for everyone to rest and to think. And that was a good thing, because while it was great that Net U had beat Navy, there were a lot of things about the game that Coach Link apparently didn’t like. He didn’t like it, for example, that the starting pitcher, Bento Halifax, had twice signaled to their first baseman, Mookie Dreem, that he was going to pick someone off but that Mookie had been “fucking Dreeming” both times. And, wow, when Coach got mad he got really mad, Gwen reported in a GreetingGram.
“To say that was horseshit is to insult the equine race,” he said. “Why was there so much chasing bad pitches? What are you doing, snuffling the dirt? Let me tell you something. We did not win that game. Navy lost it. We were just lucky that, sloppy as we were, they were sloppier. That game was an early Christmas present. Santa sent it shooting down the chimney to us, and we got to unwrap it. But the fact remains that there was a lot of mindless slugging out there. Some of you are trying to hit the ball out of the park when it’s more important to look where your teammates are and make sure they come in, especially since you’ve only hit three homers in your whole life and this is highly unlikely to be your fourth. I mean, does anyone on this team know how to bunt? Or is that a lost art like making handmade fucking shoes? Which brings me to another footsy-toesie issue. Some of you are not exactly exploding down the base lines. Some of you are jogging. And as this stadium is my witness, if I see any more fucking jogging out there, I am going to strip your uniform pants right off your slow asses and personally replace them with jogging pants. And I do mean midgame. You are going to come out of the dugout wearing the lounge pants you deserve, and if they are flamingo pink, don’t say I didn’t warn you. In fact, I’m putting in my order today, and let me tell you. They are going to be one size fits all. In fact, I have a sample right here.”
Then he pulled out the hugest pair of pink lounge pants you ever saw and proceeded to hang them over the doorway so you had to duck under them to get into the men’s locker room and we women could easily see them from the entrance to the women’s locker room, too.
All of which I thought would upset people. But the funny thing is, the guys seemed to like it. Like they were all joking about the pink jogging pants later. If someone wasn’t hustling, they’d yell, You’re going to look great in pink! Or, Your jogging pants are in the mail! It was as if Coach had clearly expressed what he wanted us to do, and had told us what to yell at each other, too. Also, the pink pants provided a lot of entertainment. Depending on the day, the guys might be draping the legs of them around their heads like hair or attaching a jockstrap to them, and I do think I took a big step toward team acceptance when I not only did not object to the jockstrap but attached two stuffed feet to the legs, complete with lace-trimmed stirrups and a pair of extra-spiky cleats.
“It’s like a play,” Coach told me later. “You’ve got to act your part if you want them to act theirs.” Plus, it was true, he said, and they all knew it. The Navy game was a slop pail. “And people like to be held to a standard. They want their excellence drawn out of them like blood.”
“But who is that beating them up?” I asked. “Is that you?”
“Insofar as I am the coach here, yes,” he said. “And insofar as we are all here to win games.”
A nonanswer answer, don’t you think? And yet I could see that his dress-down worked sort of like AskAuntNettie. Maybe the guys knew he was on auto-blast, but they responded just the same. Auto-responded, you might say.
And, strangely, I did, too. It made me feel he cared, somehow. That he was watching. Attending. It’s a funny thing, I realize now, about the way we Surplus live, that we feel watched all the time. Of course, here at Net U, too, we are probably watched more than we know. But no one asks me, “Clear-float now?” or tells me, “You have a choice. You always have a choice,” or anything else. As for whether Coach knew I missed feeling watched, I don’t know. And will I always carry Aunt Nettie around with me? Will I always be tuned to her presence or absence? You know how people talk about having a god-shaped hole in their hearts? I think you told me that. Well, I wonder if I will always have an Aunt Nettie–shaped hole in my head. And what does that mean? Is that what it means to be Surplus?
“Will I always have an Aunt Nettie–shaped hole in my head?” read Eleanor aloud. Then she read it aloud again. And again. And I agreed. It was the most terrible thing Gwen had ever written.
* * *
◆
The Mall Truck suit went on. It was hard at first to find a laboratory willing to verify our amateur findings; for a while it seemed that we would not be able to find such a lab at all. But thanks to an increasing interest in the New Segregation among the Netted, as well as the resourceful doggedness of Eleanor’s team, we eventually located not one lab but two. And although we would of course all have preferred for there to have been nothing in NettieFood to find, it was a source of no small satisfaction that the laboratories’ measurements were within one standard deviation from each other’s, and from ours. We were still weirdly unable to identify the winnowing agent; the compound wasn’t a chemical we recognized. Still, Eleanor and her team now had what they needed. Yuri, Heraldine, and Sue set to work pulling the case together.
Gwen, meanwhile, was finally catching up to her classmates in computer science and finding herself a helpful presence in Western Intellectual Thought as well. While many of her classmates thought Plato’s thinking in The Republic an academic exercise, for example—because wasn’t our republic of course what it was?—Gwen managed to make the fact of AutoAmerica seem less inevitable. Questions like, Could Plato have made a case for AutoAmerica? and, What might AutoAmerica look like instead? did not become subjects of long discussion. They did become subjects of some discussion, though, as did topics like technological tyranny. Her classmates didn’t use that term, it seemed, but they did discuss how supremely effectively Aunt Nettie had institutionalized the Netted-Surplus split—embedding it in her policing code, her family code, her
educational code, her housing code. (Wrote Gwen, It’s like Jim Crow gone digital.) On these sorts of subjects, Gwen found she could never be quiet—and also that many of her classmates were interested in what she had to say. A few were convinced she was exaggerating when she talked about, for example, the One Chance Policy. “Like that just cannot be true,” said one guy. And most had never stepped foot in a printed plastic house or visited a Flotsam Town. Gwen was, she said, going to take them on a field trip. (Time to open their eyes, she wrote.)
In the meanwhile, now that a new quarter was starting—already!—she was able to sign up for a Literature of Justice class, meaning that she was finally going to read Michael Kohlhaas, as well as The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, and Bleak House and The Trial and To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Fire Next Time. She signed up for an independent study in law, too, complicated as that was. In a PigeonGram, she explained,
I’m not sure the professor feels free to teach me whatever I’m interested in. Like, when I asked her about the law that divided people into Surplus and Netted and how that squared with the Constitution, she froze.
But Gwen was still learning a lot, even if baseball was never far from her mind. She GreetingGrammed,
Thanks to some weird winds, Net West and Cyber U are now back-to-back—nothing we can do about it. And on top of it, our starting pitcher, Pietro Martinez, seems to have finally torn his anterior UCL. It was partially torn already, and swelling up so bad he was taking this stuff called iBute, which was actually meant for horses and outlawed for humans long ago. But then his UCL tore altogether, so now he’s in for Tommy John surgery. Like I guess the doctors are going to drill holes in the bones of his arm, which have basically come apart, and reattach them with a tendon that’s going to turn itself into a ligament, if you can believe it. Coach says the cells just modify their function and secrete collagen until they’re not tendons anymore; it’s called ligamentizing and it takes two years if you let nature take its course. But even if the docs speed it up, Pietro is out for the season—a terrible loss, though Coach says everyone saw it coming. His low arm slot meant Pietro kind of slung the ball like he was skipping a stone, and his timing was off. All of which Coach told him, but Pietro is about as coachable as a rocking horse. Or at least that’s what Coach says. And Coach never liked the iBute thing, by the way, which was totally Pietro’s doctor’s idea and Pietro’s choice. And now look.
Anyway, what with Net West and Cyber so close together, Bento Halifax can’t pitch both. So guess what? Bento is starting in Cyber, and the other southpaw, who has been working pretty hard on her fastball, is starting in Net West! Of course, I am one nervous Nellie (I know, very funny), seeing as how this’ll be my first time starting in this league, and Coach says I’ll need a different attitude. It’s not enough to surprise, he says. I’m going to have to intimidate. Dominate. Devastate. Attack. “You mean, think of them as the Netted who have everything, and me as the Surplus who’s going to get it all back?” I said. To which Coach looked surprised but said, “Yes. Think of it as your role.” Just as it’s his job to issue auto-blasts, he said I’ve got to make it clear I will throw right at the batter’s head if he gets wise. That I’m out to destroy the batter’s self-confidence on the first pitch and keep ramming at it with every throw thereafter. (Yes, he really said “thereafter.” That’s Coach for you.) He said he wanted me to shock them so bad they’ll have to send their coach home in a MediLyft.
As for whether I could really do this? I wasn’t sure. But then he said, “Don’t ask yourself, Is this me? Think of yourself as a rock in the ocean. No matter what crashes over you, you remain a mass to contend with. And that’s your job—to maintain your mass. Your specific gravity. Your strength. And to use your body language to get that across. Because what your body says is how the whole team plays. You set the attitude for everyone.”
And this is where he is a great coach, I think—because I got what he was saying because of the way he said it. Had he just told me to be a bloodthirsty son of a bitch, I’m not sure I would have got anything. But an immovable mass—yes. I could make myself that. He said, “I’ve seen this in you. The way you’ll look down and take off your cap and redo your hair and then look back up with a glare that is out-and-out determination.”
I looked up at Eleanor. “Her prosecutor face,” I said.
She smiled.
“You have mound presence,” he went on. “Remember how demoralized the Army guys got? Keep the innings short, get your teammates jazzed, and before you know it Net West’ll be wishing they had never lived to see a blue ponytail winding up.”
Coach has also really been helping Ondi with stuff like her framing and wow, but she can catch a ball so it looks like a strike now. And I mean subtly, so she really puts it over on the ump. Which is all that matters, because thanks to Coach’s campaign to “Keep Umps Human,” how the ump calls it is the call. So now I feel like I can throw my overhand curve with confidence it’s not going to get called a ball by accident. Isn’t that great? And believe it or not, what with our supposed chemistry, Ondi’s going to start in Net West, too. Is that to make up for Coach not playing her in the Army game? He didn’t say.
He did say, though, how odd it is that though college baseball’s been coed for over a decade you still don’t see a woman pitcher and a woman catcher much. And it’s good for people to see, he says. It’s good to befuddle them. (“Befuddle” being yet another word only he would use.) What he didn’t say is that in a way it’s too bad Ondi got a PermaDerm. Because a coppertoned woman pitcher and a coppertoned woman catcher—that would get some attention. Which the college likes to see—it excites the alumni, I guess, and then they give more.
But salt-and-pepper females is still something. When he said, “I’m counting on you to make it a game to remember,” I knew he didn’t just mean, I’m counting on you to look like the new Sandy Koufax. He was saying, Don’t prove to the naysayers that women can’t handle the heat. Which, of course, was pressure. But as Ondi said, This can’t be worse than being Surplus at the tryouts. And that was a fact.
* * *
◆
In ChinRussia, the backlash against Total Persuasion Architecture was growing. Students were disabling the chip scanners in the classrooms, and workers were stripping off their SmartSuits in such numbers they could no more be required, or how would the SuperFactories operate? Even with PlainCommonSense and other buddy systems, after all, the robots were easily foiled—by winds, by spills, by leaks. Their HELP buttons went off constantly. There’s a cat in the warehouse! There’s butter in my path! I’m losing my charge! The few human workers left were indispensable. Yet more and more, they were quitting, moving back into the long-abandoned countryside, and supporting themselves farming. As for the effect of all this on AutoAmerica—naturally, we were redoubling our Redoubling. “As if that makes any sense whatsoever,” said Eleanor.
We sent Gwen a newsy PigeonGram:
What a comedy of errors! First our new left fielder, Steve Wonder, got the sun in his eyes and missed a perfectly easy foul ball. It just went clean past him like a bit of scenery on a train. Then our new second baseman, Hector Quesadilla, threw a ball so far from Ralph Changowitz that Ralph had to go skidding on his side to catch it—which he did, looking rather like a Roman god at a banquet until the ball rolled out of his glove. You can imagine the howls! As for the pitcher’s several errors, every one was greeted with, Gwen would have had that. Because, of course, you would have.
We expected she would PigeonGram right back to say how much she missed the Lookouts, the way she did last time. But she did not. Instead, she GreetingGrammed,
So how was it, my turn as starting pitcher? Intense, in part because in addition to Sylvie and Pink at least a dozen fans had turned out just to see me. The Surplus Surprise, they call me. I’ll be winding up and hear, Go, Go, Gwen-nie! Go, Go, Gwen-nie! O
r, now that they know my whole name, Can-non! Can-non! Can-non! Can-non! Happily the Perm-your-derm! thing has stopped. Still, the experience was strange—mostly in a good way, but for one exception.
That was Renata, sitting in the stands and staring at me with these hollow eyes; it was hard to tell if she never slept or had just had a LushLash job go bad. But in any case, I blocked her out. I told myself she was a wave I had to let wash over me, and I did. She washed over me and there I was still, a rock.
It was cold and wet and windy out—weather that Net U would have blocked but that Net West couldn’t, not having that fancy roof Coach raised the money for. I had to do extra warm-up and couldn’t feel my fingers at first. And obviously, it’s hard to grip the ball right when you can’t even feel your fingers. Still, I figured the cold was mostly a good thing because I was so much less likely to see a ball go out of the park. And another good thing: Net West was missing their ace pitcher, just like us, who knows why.
In any case, my first pitch was hit foul; that was the trouble with tinkering with your pitches during the season. I’d meant to throw a curve but had been working on my slider, and so what I got was this slurve, which the batter got some wood on. But then—surprising myself, and certainly Ondi—I threw a fastball low and inside. Strike. Then another fastball, high and inside. And then came the slider I felt my first pitch was telling me I wanted to throw. And sure enough, strike three.
The rest of the game was a blur. I did give up a few hits toward the end. But I finished with a shutout! Which you couldn’t exactly say I owed to Ondi—sometimes I shook her off. But sometimes I didn’t, and anyway I feel she did have something to do with it, bringing as she does a kind of homey feeling to home plate.