Dax looked skyward with impatience. Deidre looked at Sloane.
“This is really not the time,” went Dax.
“It’s just that, um, Ms. Jacobsen?” said the intern, looking down at the note, and then back up at the person she was meant to deliver it to. “Here—” she said, extending the note although Sloane was about six people too far away to reach it. “Your sister’s having a baby?”
Sloane went rigid with absorption. She felt like she’d been hit.
“Is she all right?!” she managed, standing, grabbing for the note.
For Sloane: your mom called, Leila’s gone into labor. Get to Greenwich Hospital if you can.
“Oh, God, um,” the intern fumbled, “I mean, I’m sure? Or . . . I don’t know?”
The cloudiness of her answer made everyone look at Sloane. The announcement had warped from something happy to something dangerous.
“I need a car,” Sloane said, looking up from the note. She looked to Deidre, afraid her voice would crack. “My car.”
“Of course, Sloane. Of course.”
Sloane’s heart was beating at an awful pace. She didn’t know anything about preterm labor. She didn’t know what this could mean, what it could look like. She didn’t know what would happen to her family if the child died.
“Well,” said Dax, sounding outrageously put out. “Congratulations.”
“No,” Sloane said, eyes flashing. “It’s not supposed to—” She raised her head to find Roman’s passive countenance staring back at her; nothing to offer; no kind words to share. And then she looked at Jin, who was half standing from concern, incriminating himself with compassion. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. I’ll come with you, his eyes said.
But the old shutdown was in place again. In the face of the sudden information in her hands, Sloane wanted to burrow, emotionally flee. This was supposed to be a happy interruption—the miracle of life is birth—but Sloane had lost the ability to fully believe in love. Love equals loss, loss equals you feeling incomplete for life.
Sloane started stuffing papers into her handbag, the dark thoughts pouring in. But then she saw the way that Deidre was looking at her, and Jin, and Allison, and Seth. They were worried for her. They were invested. They were part of the story now. And then she looked at Dax, who was wiping more oil off his fingers, and Roman on the Roman screen, blinking dumbly.
She stopped gathering her papers, allowed her hands to settle on the top of the cold table. She looked boldly at the eyes of the men who were waiting for her to assist at the most female of all work. Sloane knew that if she left that room, she was leaving Mammoth for good. To walk away now would be to let Roman’s touch-phobic agenda spread its contagion across consumer goods, unhindered. Until all of them crashed.
“You know what?” Sloane said, to Dax. “Can you shut Roman off?”
When Dax looked at her like she was speaking in hieroglyphs, she redirected her request to Seth and Chaz, who were on either side of the screen.
“Could one of you please turn off the computer?” she repeated, folding her arms. “I don’t need him stealing my ideas.”
“Now, Sloane,” Roman said, alarmed. “I don’t think you have the right to—”
Sloane’s eyes connected with Seth’s. He licked his lips timidly, his large face set in concentration. And then he picked up the tablet and powered it off.
“Un-fucking-believable,” Dax said, from his perch.
The intern, terrifically confused, was still cowering by the door. “So, um, did you still want me to get you a car?” she stammered.
Sloane turned to her. She was so young. And innocent. All through life, probably, she’d only learned the things she’d wanted to know.
“Stay in or out, as you’d like,” Sloane said to her. “This will only take a second.”
Not knowing which solution was less frightening, the girl stayed in place. At the table, shoulders tensed. People looked worriedly from one face to the next.
“So what I’m thinking,” Sloane said, staring at the table. “What I’m thinking—” She was focusing so steadily she could actually see the world inside her mind. Rubber sheets and paper airplanes and the aging of the loved. Borrowed sweatshirts, unwashed sheets, a candy wrapper in the grass. A hissing teapot, steaming. The herringbone pattern of her own aging skin. Her sister, body shambling, mind praying, on a hospital bed.
“What I’m thinking is that you can take this ReProduction summit and stick it up your ass.” She held her hand up as Dax gaped. “And yes, I’m quitting. So I’ll spare you that suspense. And not because you’re lording Roman around me like some kind of threat, or because this whole pro-touch, pro-tech thing is just you setting me up to fail, but because everything you’re producing is just going to make humans worse than they are now.”
“Yes, well,” said Dax, bristling. “You’ve made that very clear, haven’t you. On national TV, while under contract. Which, thank fucking God, you no longer are. Good luck, really, best of luck to you! Getting another job.”
“Indeed,” said Sloane, glowering back at him. “And good luck to you all, too. Good luck with that one-trick pony of a forecaster. Roman’s a valuable commodity right now. He’s an entertainer. He’ll keep Mammoth in the news. But he’s not a trend forecaster, and he’s never been one. All of that stuff in his #sexisdead article? That was based on my research. My presentations. Listen to him and you’ll succeed today. You’ll succeed tomorrow. But the day after that? You’re fucked.” She brought her fingers into fists to keep from shaking. She wanted to be impactful. She didn’t want to rage.
“While you all can’t be bothered to look more than two years in front of you,” she tried again, a little calmer, “I am telling you that the days of believing that the Internet can solve everything are coming to an end. Social interaction is going to take the place of social media. In-personism is going to trump clicktivism in fundraising, in civil rights. In the coming years, you’re going to see your jobs change from the quantity-focused roles of network organization to the quality-focused one of creating organized hierarchies to bring about actual, qualitative change. So if you don’t change the course down which you’re heading, it’s you that will be out of jobs.”
“It must be embarrassing,” Dax said, slyly, “to be this out of touch.”
“I’m out of touch?” Sloane yelled, launching her hand toward the Smart Blind images that were still onscreen. “You’re putting all these resources behind products that encourage people to be so removed from nature that they’re happy—actually happy—to mistake simulacra for the real thing.”
She looked at the Roman tablet, lying facedown on the table. His insta-fame would not survive this, the potential goodness of the world. People still had the capacity to save themselves from total and irreparable disassociation; she had to believe that, or there was no point in going on.
Sloane shifted her weight. She kept staring at the images from the presentation Phillip had made. Brainwork had gone into this, brains inside of human beings who had allowed themselves to buy into the idea that convenience was the same thing as contentment. Those brains were still out there, working on the wrong things. Sloane couldn’t even imagine what could be accomplished if people reappropriated their brainpower. Solutions for grave illnesses. Self-regenerating limbs. Regenerative highway systems that could fill up potholes themselves.
Maybe everything she was seeing was seven years away. Maybe she was wrong, and humanity would never right itself, leaving machine and Homo sapiens to meld into one, tourists now preferring to visit the Grand Canyon virtually because they were too consumed by social anxiety to go that far away. But maybe—just maybe—people were more ready than she thought to shove off the shackles of psychosomatic loneliness. Maybe the revolution could come earlier, if they bucked the trends.
Everyone was sitting still and numbed, perhaps feari
ng if they said something, moved a limb, that Sloane would stop talking. But she wasn’t going to.
“What you guys are doing here is furthering the technological takeover of human hearts and minds,” she said, a little quieter. “And it’s made you heaps of cash. But how does it feel to live in a world where no one ever needs to ask anyone else for directions anymore, or to be asked to take a photo of a honeymooning couple with their camera? If you think that selfie sticks are the way to happiness, you’re dead wrong. Human touch is endangered. You think the future belongs to the type of people who are going to sync their fridges with their smartphones, but people are ready—not tomorrow, but now—to be vulnerable and undirected and intimate again.”
Sloane paused, daring the Mammothers to laugh. But laughter didn’t come. Everyone was staring at her open-mouthed, in a complete state of shock.
“Do you want to know what I see in the future?” she continued. “Since it’s what you hired me for?” She looked again to the dead space that no longer held Roman in it. “Instead of augmented sexuality and virtual sex tools? I see dating systems based on pheromones instead of algorithms. I see daily check-in spots in wellness centers where people can be embraced. I see doctors regulating patients’ current levels of human contact as carefully as their blood pressure. I see it becoming trendy to have a flip phone that does little more than page people. I see it as the height of elegance to be without Wi-Fi. I see eye contact as the new stamina. Collaboration as ambition. I see a world—and it isn’t great news for the planet—where people are having more reproductive sex because it’s often through the holding of and raising and protecting of children that people remember how fucking good life is. I see a massive downturn in your profitability margin within two years. I see you churning out products that people are becoming courageous enough to realize they don’t want. I see people turning on Mammoth. Turning toward each other. Turning against tech.”
Dax was gobsmacked. He was blinking at her furiously, blinking as if an unearthly dust storm had swept into his eyes.
“You are so, so wrong,” he said. “Poor thing.”
All of a sudden, a chair scratched across the carpet. Seth from consumer engagement was up on his feet, sweat pooling around his neck.
“I think she’s right!” he cried.
“Are you fucking serious?” Dax sneered. “Sit down, Seth.”
“You don’t know the first thing about business here!” Phillip yelled at Sloane.
“And you prefer working under a freakazoid who thinks anything and everything is going to be solved by cybersex?” said Allison, standing. “Good luck to you, then. I believe her, too.”
“Me, three,” said Jin, up next.
“I have hated the last three years of every day I’ve worked here,” said Deidre from the corner. “And I quit. I quit. I quit.”
There was a strangled sound from the other end of the table, and Seth put out his arms.
There are moments that you presage and things you cannot see. Life, in all its glorious absurdity, still managed to deal Sloane Jacobsen the occasional surprise, thank fucking God. Getting down to business with a work colleague was one of them, starting to fall for him was number two. Seeing the baggy-eyed director of consumer engagement holding his arms out with naked expectation was definitely number three.
Sloane looked at Seth’s empty, open arms and then Deidre started to cry.
“Am I going to have to call the fucking cops?” Dax asked, looking disgustedly from his head of consumer engagement to his executive assistant. “Are you people for real?”
“Are you?” Seth cried, all shine and sheen and courage. “Are you?”
And then, as if their movements were orchestrated, Sloane navigated around the table to move into Seth’s arms, while Jin quickened across the room so Deidre could collapse into his. Sloane watched over the wide breadth of Seth’s shoulders as Jin stroked Deidre’s head.
“No one’s held me for so long,” Deidre confessed.
Meanwhile, it felt like—it was hard to say exactly, because she was somewhat overpowered by the smell of laundry starch—but it felt like Seth was also crying.
“I want to play with my kids again,” he muffled into her chest, his hot hands at her back. “But I can’t put down my phone!” She could feel him trembling. “I can’t!”
“That’s it,” Dax cried, “I’m calling security.”
“Ha,” Allison scoffed, “to tell them what?”
“That I am witnessing a complete breakdown of good taste. You, intern,” Dax commanded. “Because I’ve lost my assistant, I need you to contact HR to process exit paperwork.”
“Um, actually, you know actually,” said the young girl, “I think maybe I’ll quit too?”
“Very good! Very good, everyone! Bombs fucking away!”
He hipchecked Allison as he lunged out of the room.
Against her shoulder, Seth continued the ophthalmologic evacuation of a decade of wishes left unmet. At the table, the people who were still seated exchanged expressions of vivid disbelief.
Slowly, gently, Sloane rubbed Seth’s exhausted back. In her mind’s eye, she watched Dax stomp to HR. It was urgent now—immediate—that she get to her sister’s side.
“It’s okay,” Sloane whispered into a collar bearing the beige streaks of old sweat. “It will all turn out all right.”
“Will it?” he asked, his voice cracking.
“Well,” Sloane said, recalibrating. “It might.”
32
Into the carport of the emergency department, past the glass doors, up the sterile elevator to maternity, Sloane ran to her family. Everything will be all right, she found herself insisting to the fall of her own footsteps. It has to be.
Room 234 contained three silent bodies: Harvey and Margaret, their hands along the sharp sheets of the hospital bed where Leila was reclined. Sloane stopped at the room’s threshold—Harvey looked up first, and she couldn’t read anything in his expression. Then Margaret saw her, and her face fell apart.
“Leilee?” said Sloane, running to the bedside. Her sister looked groggy, drugged, her complexion drained. A catheter wound through the railings of the bed under her hospital gown. Sloane took her sister’s hand and found it limp.
“Came out like that,” Leila said, rubbing out a silent snap. And then she started to cry.
• • •
Three cups of cafeteria coffee and a bag of doughnuts later; the child had not died. That did not mean the child would make it, explained the doctor, or that there wouldn’t be long-term complications, but the baby was alive.
“Alive.” “Dead.” “Complications.” As Sloane stood, dizzy with emotions, she thought the possibilities too much. This was not the moment to expose her shattered sister to the scenarios of “worst-cases,” this was the time to deal in facts. Born at twenty-nine and a half weeks, three pounds, four ounces. Present bad news: the baby had an infection of the placenta, and needed steroid injections in his lungs. Current good news: he was being aided by an intubator in his windpipe, but the little fighter was breathing all alone.
Once the doctor left and Leila rested, the three of them wilted with confusion. Margaret, hunched on the cot that Harvey would probably spend the night on, Harvey and Sloane by the bathroom door.
“Have you . . . held him?” Sloane dared.
“Oh no,” said Harvey, head shaking slowly, as if in sleep. “He’s too small.”
Her mother was sitting there silently, still in a state of shock.
“I need to see him,” she said, suddenly. “Little Bird.”
Sloane watched as her mother pushed herself up creakily from the flimsy bed.
• • •
Think of all the humans, Roman had said to her after her explosion at the restaurant. Think of all the mouths. Think of all the tiny humans, and the tiny mouths. Commercials and
diaper boxes show babies in a state of scrumptious heft, babbling and blue-eyed with perfect, nubby tongues, but premature infants were oily and jaundiced and fit-in-your-palm small. These babies were so small.
Leila’s hadn’t been named yet, but he was a little bird. His dark fingers curled around his impossibly delicate features, his minuscular penis and wrists and ankles wreathed in a net of cords. The plastic, see-through intubator made it look like he was snorkeling in the depths of the four panels that caged him.
Sloane brought her fingertips to the viewing window. Beside her, her mother—a woman who had been married to an atheist for thirty years—crossed herself.
“So there’s my strapping man,” said Harvey, putting his own hand to the glass.
“He certainly has your build,” said Margaret, dryly.
Harvey and Sloane looked at each other in astonishment. Then Margaret tried to laugh, but it came out strangled. A release of frightened air.
“You think you have two grandchildren, you can take it,” Margaret said, staring blankly at the little bodies in their beds. “But you can’t take it. You can’t take it at all.”
And then Margaret started crying again, chokingly. Turned and pressed her face against Harvey’s chest.
• • •
Day two of ten days of renewed bed rest for Leila; the amount of time Little Bird would have to stay in the neonatal care unit was still undetermined. The hospital staff and nurses stayed reticent and kind as the question marks queued.
Floated on a mixture of anesthesia, painkillers, hormones and adrenaline, Leila was flusher-looking the next day. She’d slept deeply, and had been wheeled to see her child earlier that morning.
“‘Gremlin,’” Leila said now, her bed remote-controlled to a half rise so they could talk. She still had wires attached to her. It occurred to Sloane that the world could be divided into people who’d been given intravenous solutions and people who had not. “It’s our second choice behind ‘Bird.’”
Sloane sat down beside her, comforted rather than disturbed by her sister’s sense of humor. Leila had always been blunt and caustic when she was at her best. They had her airy, generous hospital suite to themselves—Harvey had taken the kids to school and was catching up on rest, and her mother was “cooking for the nurses,” Leila guessed.
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