by Gish Jen
“Like aren’t those crazy fans out there because of your mom?” Bento Halifax asked in the dugout. “Isn’t she the one who found the emanations in the Surplus Fields?”
“She didn’t find the emanations,” Gwen told him. “But she did set my father and his team to look for them.”
“And that’s why they locked her up, right? To shut her up before she did anything else?”
“Yes.”
“And they only let her out because without you our goose is cooked.”
She laughed. “I doubt that.”
But Rube Foster said, “They let her out because there was so much publicity and because the Autonet could see the projections. And the projections said: a PR disaster.”
Gwen shrugged.
“Which, by the way, you don’t have to be a genius like the Autonet to see,” finished Rube.
“What I want to know is, what happens after the Olympics?” said Joe March. “When the spotlight’s off and the media goes away. What then? Does she go back in?”
“She’s not going back in,” said Bento. “Because when people find out, they’re going to take to the streets. It’s going to be the Automation Riots all over again.”
Others shook their heads. The Netted weren’t mad enough to riot, and the Surplus were not only RegiChipped but, people said, drugged.
“It’s like a fire,” insisted Bento all the same. “Nothing is burning until things catch on. And then even damp stuff burns, everything.”
“Whatever.” Rube maintained in any case that Eleanor was safe. “Because it will be even more of a PR disaster after the Olympics,” he said, “when Gwennie here is a national hero.”
“I’m not going to be a national hero,” she said.
“A Surplus woman in the Olympics would be a celebrity in the making even if she didn’t have blue hair,” said Rube.
They were still arguing when Woody appeared. Did people realize that he was there to talk to her? Gwen didn’t know, she told me later, but when he sat down next to her, her teammates suddenly all had reasons to be elsewhere.
“Show and tell,” said Woody. “Close your eyes.”
She refused.
“Come on, Gwen. Don’t be a pill. That’s coach’s orders.”
She closed her eyes.
“Now open.”
She opened her eyes, stared at his forearm, and, when she saw the tattoo, was forced to smile a little.
“Like it or not, I am your mother’s fan, too,” Woody said. “And in that capacity, I am going to help you wing that ball. Because if you are here, you are here to bring the heat. Otherwise what leverage will you have?”
“You oversold me,” she said. It was the kind of moment when she didn’t want an answer from him or anyone else, she recalled—when all she wanted was to say what she was thinking. What she knew. When all she wanted was to let herself out of the house, my mother would have said. “You oversold me. And on purpose. You did it on purpose.”
“I didn’t, Gwen. Though just for the sake of argument, let’s say that I did. Let’s say that I oversold you to help your mother. Because I believed in her and could see a way of helping her. Would that be unforgivable?”
Gwen didn’t answer.
“Or what if I did it to redeem my own sorry ass? Would that be better or worse?”
She didn’t answer that, either.
“Then again, it is possible that I simply gave my professional opinion of your capacities and their fit for Team AutoAmerica, and that you are soon going to prove me right, provided you acknowledge you’re off in your timing.”
She thought. “Rushing?”
He nodded. “Because you’re upset, I think.”
“Why would I be upset?” she said.
* * *
◆
At home, I irritated Eleanor.
“Why are you asking my team how I seem?” she demanded. “Is it not enough to be surveilled by Aunt Nettie and surveilled by the house? Do I really need to be surveilled by you, too?”
“Don’t you yourself want to know whether you are the same Eleanor you were?”
“Of course, but next you are going to be bugging me in the name of love and protection.”
Interesting.
“What do you think of Patrick Henry?” I asked.
“Come again?”
“How about Martin Luther King Junior?”
“Grant, if you are going to try to take a sounding, you should at least try more subtly.”
It was Eleanor. Eleanor! My heart sang.
“Are you happy to be back working on the Mall Truck suit?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Lately it occurs to me that we really must applaud the fact that the Surplus are getting free food, don’t you think? The program may not be exactly what we’d like it to be, but our Basic Incomes are too low.”
“I’m sorry?”
“People can’t quite make ends meet. Do you know what I mean? So the mall trucks are quite a help.”
“And—the suit?”
“I think you need to look at your data again. Don’t you think?”
“Two labs have corroborated it.”
“But didn’t the results fail to quite match?”
“They are within one standard deviation of one another.”
“I don’t think that’s going to stand up in court, Grant. Do you think?”
“Eleanor.”
“I mean, it’s a lot of trouble,” she insisted. “It’s a lot of time and effort to bring these things to trial. And, oh, I don’t know. I don’t want to waste everyone’s time with anything less than unassailable. Do you think?”
It turned out she had even put Yuri, Heraldine, and Sue on hold, telling them she would let them know when she was ready to start working again.
“Eleanor,” I said. “Nellie. What have they done to you?”
She looked at me blankly; her face had a preternatural calm. But a moment later, she cracked.
“I don’t know, Grant,” she said. And her voice then was the most shaken I had ever heard it.
* * *
—
I did not tell Gwen. I didn’t see what there was to do but wait and see if Eleanor got better, and Gwen had enough to deal with. She fixed her timing problem, and pitched well in practice. Indeed, as several of her teammates commented, her cutter was proving so deadly, she probably could have gotten by on that one pitch alone. And yet as the Olympics began, she was not put on the field once. Pietro, Rube, and Joe March were all brought in as the Western Hemisphere round-robin progressed; even Bento saw action, which Gwen thought made sense. Bento had more off-speed pitches than he used to, and while he was not as versatile as she was, his fastball remained faster than hers. What’s more, he was a better batter and, in the Olympics, pitchers batted.
“I told Woody he oversold me,” Gwen reported, “and that now he has to keep me on the bench so people won’t know. But he won’t admit it. ‘Do you trust no one?’ he asked me. ‘Is that the Surplus legacy?’ ‘With all due respect, Coach,’ I said, ‘I can see with my own two eyes that you have a fine southpaw reliever. You can argue that it’s useful to have two even if the second only throws a mid-eighties fastball, but you can’t argue that the second is essential to team success. And it’s even harder to argue she’s essential when you never take her off the bench.’ ”
That’s when he apparently brought up Gwen’s hesitation pitch.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“One, it’s our secret weapon,” he said. “The Secret Weapon’s secret weapon, if you will. And two, it can’t be secret unless it’s kept secret.”
“You are full of shit,” she told him.
“Baseball is theater,” he said. “You have to plan your moments. Trust me.”
&
nbsp; “Trust you?” she said.
* * *
—
Eleanor was still saying odd things.
“What do you think?” she would say. And, “Oh, I don’t know.” And, “I do just wish we could bug my mind. So we could know what’s going on.”
Bugging, bugging, bugging. Did she bring it up strangely frequently, or was that just my paranoia?
“I wish there were some way of bugging your mind, too,” I admitted finally. And it was true. Because when I looked into Eleanor’s eyes these days I was not always sure what or whom I was seeing. Was that she, in those familiar black pupils? And what was it in her that made her Eleanor? What was it, without which she had to be said to have morphed into someone else? Was it a soul? What a hard word that was to corral up with other words, and yet when I looked into her eyes, I knew that that was what I yearned to glimpse. Eleanor’s soul. Eleanor.
To see her vulnerable was horrifying, and yet not as horrifying as the realization that I liked the closeness it brought—even that it made for better lovemaking. Sadder but stronger. Though who was I, that I might proceed to make love to a half stranger? Eleanor was becoming a person I did not want to know she could be; but so was I. My mother used to describe how, when she was a girl in Saint Emile, she would dive through the algae on the surface of a lagoon into the deep water below. And how wondrous it was down there, she said. So dark, so cool. But I always thought it sounded terrifying. Lightless and airless. A dimensionless space, a bottomless space. A disorienting space. And so the world seemed to me now.
I did not think Eleanor was being actively MindMelded. Perhaps the research center computer to which she was synced required a special cloud service, or perhaps there was some other reason that, theoretically linkable though she was, she wasn’t linked. But just as she returned over and over to bugging, she returned over and over to the Mall Truck suit.
“Oh, I don’t know, I think there’s another side to the mall trucks,” she would say. “Is it really so terrible if it makes people feel good?”
“Yes,” I would say. “It is terrible.”
To which she would say, “Oh, I don’t know,” until one day, she suddenly said, “It is indeed terrible.” And then, “I can hear it.”
“What can you hear?”
“I can hear it’s not my voice.”
That was the day she began to spar with the other voice—to argue with it. An effective strategy, it seemed, as the real Eleanor argued and the other Eleanor didn’t.
“It always asserts something pleasant, pleasantly,” she said.
“It would never throw a plate of bacon and eggs out the window.”
“No. And it often starts, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ And ends, ‘Don’t you think?’ Or, ‘Do you know what I mean?’ ”
“Your favorite expressions.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve always lived and died by what you thought. Do you know what I mean?”
We laughed.
The more she understood the voice, the more she fought it, until it began to seem a kind of inner fencing. As soon as she began a sentence in what she called First Person Timid, she would interrogate herself.
“And what is it you don’t know, Ms. Oh, I don’t know?” she would demand. She couldn’t silence the voice entirely, though, and the struggle so exhausted her that I often found her not only napping but napping all curled up—something she had never done before—as well as going to bed right after dinner. Indeed, she sometimes could not even make it all the way through the meal. Still, the more she fought herself, the more herself she seemed until finally she found the will to reconvene her legal team.
“It’s good to see you all,” she said. “It’s been too long. Where were we?”
Whether she was her old self or not, exactly, she was once again working on the Mall Truck suit.
* * *
—
Meanwhile, as Team AutoAmerica advanced against West Africa, Greater Cuba, and the European Union—and as ChinRussia beat the Saudi Sphere and AustraliaZealand—Gwen repeatedly asked why she wasn’t being played. And what did that mean for Eleanor?
Woody kept to the line that he was trying to get everyone to forget about her.
“Well, that might be possible,” she told him, “if there weren’t ten thousand posts a day speculating as to what’s going on.”
“Maybe someone should suggest you’re in a slump,” he said. “Or if that’s bad luck, why doesn’t someone tell them you’re a token.”
“Ouch, Woody.”
“Don’t push me,” he said. And, “You still don’t believe I’m trying to help your mother, do you?”
* * *
◆
The ChinRussian baseball team was coed but you were hard-pressed to tell the men from the women. Happily, they weren’t as large as the weight lifters or the rowers. Still, they were on average almost seven feet tall and might as well have been 3-D printed out of a granite composite. Standing next to one of them was like standing next to a building.
At the same time, they were oddly graceful. Even as they strolled around the ballpark, no one lumbered or jiggled, loose-limbed. Rather, they proceeded—bearing themselves with the easy dignity of athletic royalty. It was hard to say whether they were more Chinese or more Russian. They were almost all golden skinned—clearly the preference of their BioDesigners—and they all had densely packed groves of hair. These were sometimes straight, sometimes wavy, and sometimes rainbow-streaked, but mainly black. At the same time, their eyes varied from blue, to hazel, to green, to brown, to colors I’d never seen before. A red-orange, a pink-beige, a bright chartreuse—someone, it seemed, was having fun. Or were these unintended results? That wasn’t, at any rate, the only way in which the players varied. Indeed, they looked designed to stand apart from one another, possessed as they were of hyper-differentiated temperaments. Even from across a field you could see that one was impatient and one easy-going. Another was humorous while his counterpart was humorless. For all the years of ChinRussian experimentation, control of such traits was as yet, it seemed, crude. What had happened to the international agreement that people would not reproduce after making such changes? Or that, if they did, they would use GonadWrap or NutCase? We could only hope that, long ago as the pact was reached, it was still being observed.
Meanwhile, the ChinRussians were formidable players. Gwen reported that in practice, they lined up to bat and, one after the other, swung perfectly. Then they lined back up and did it again from the other side. They also slid into bases with such smoothness it was hard not to think that gymnastic prowess had been successfully spliced into their genes. And they had, too, some form of RetinaZing, so that their catchers did not send visible signals to their pitchers. Instead, they just Zinged. Every now and then, a pitcher would give a slight nod or shake in reaction—unconsciously, it seemed. But there were no hand motions and no words.
And most eerily of all, they were unfailingly cheerful and collegial not only with one another but with opposing teams, both on the field and off. Even when they challenged an ump’s call, it was in the most measured of tones. At one point, an ump clearly missed a call on a ChinRussian pitch—calling it a ball when anyone could see it was a strike. The ChinRussian coach approached the ump assertively; he spoke with his hands. He stood his ground. But he had all the passion of a man issued the wrong train ticket.
“I think that was ChinRussian for, ‘A cow could be fucking its own calf and you wouldn’t see it,’ ” said Pietro.
Was it GenetImprovement that made them behave this way, though? Or, what with the rebellion back at home, did the ChinRussians have no choice but to make sure they made no waves while abroad? The English-speaking players interviewed on NetScreen, Gwen and I noticed, all seemed greatly concerned about the unrest.
“We play for the health of our families,” said one of
them, a woman in a “Go Go Go”–printed bandanna—smiling even as her eyebrows contracted with worry.
The announcer looked sympathetic. “Do you mean play or pray?” he asked, his eyebrows equally contracted.
“Play,” said the woman.
“The poor thing. She’s just like me, worried,” said Gwen, looking upward. It was dinnertime, and Eleanor was already asleep upstairs.
“It’s hard not to worry,” I said.
Eleanor was definitely better. But was she ever going to be herself again? And what did Gwen’s continued bench sitting mean? Woody was clearly not going to say. We were desperate to collar Ondi or Mimi, but neither—no doubt because she knew we would ask what was going to happen after the Olympics—could be found.
As for whether the ChinRussians felt as much sympathy for Gwen as she did for them, it was hard to know. A couple of them, though, did post reactions to a social media story about Eleanor and Gwen. “She is a real daughter,” wrote one in English. “We praise her to the heaven and hope her mother will be okay.” And wrote another, “We pray her mom will bat one thousand.”
* * *
◆
Both ChinRussia and Team AutoAmerica made the final round, but the AutoAmericans were not optimistic about their prospects, and the first game did nothing to dispel their doubts. What with their enhanced musculature and switch-hitting, the ChinRussians hit many more home runs than Team AutoAmerica. What’s more, their top gun, Vladimir Santiago, hit not one, but two grand slams, one in the third inning and one in the sixth. Before they faced him, Team AutoAmerica had heard that he hit .400 but had not quite known what to make of that number. Now they knew. As Pietro Martinez said glumly, “It means he knocks the covers off the balls and the balls off us.”
“Why are we even playing these guys?” Gunnar shook his shaggy head.
And he, Gwen said, wasn’t the only one wondering.