As I see his screen name I sigh with relief, so hard that I fog up the screen and have to use my sweaty palm to remove condensation with more condensation. I marvel again at how quickly we were able to fall in love. It’s true—when I found “the one,” I just knew it.
FluidTransfer69: Hey, where u at? Missed our a.m. freak sesh.
Don’t get me wrong; Brady and I have discussed many complex topics, such as capital punishment (he’s against). But when it comes to the finer details of our personal lives, we just haven’t gotten there yet. Ours is an intense and steamy courtship with little room for conversation that doesn’t make at least minimal strides toward climax.
I lie.
CargoBabe: Sorry, I was feeling ill. Better now though. Now that you’re here.
Yet I underestimate Brady’s working knowledge of my psyche, his Sagittarius command of honesty that detects when something is amiss, especially with one he truly holds dear.
FluidTransfer69: Is there someone else? :(
The pupils of his frown emoticon are like painful daggers to my heart. Here I am, deceiving the one I love, only to cause him agony. I decide I must come clean.
CargoBabe: Brady, I’m not an orphan as my profile states.
FluidTransfer69: What r u trying to say? R u married?
Clearly, any further delay of information is not possible. Brady needs the truth and only the truth, and as my job motto states, I Shall Deliver.
CargoBabe: Today I’m at an auction to buy my frozen convict mother.
As I press “Enter,” I imagine this information beaming through light-years of distance to reach Brady. It’s a short but difficult wait before I know relief.
FluidTransfer69: Oh. Want 2 get dirty b4 bed?
By the time Mother is put onto the block, the more upscale collectors have long left the building. The man to my left keeps lifting his wig and scratching his scalp with the end of his paddle.
I am the first to call Mother’s bid at its minimum, and am challenged only once by an awkward but well-dressed teenager who has been making the second bid on everything and accumulating an impressive frozen army. As I raise him, anxiety floods me. In my head I’ve already accepted a projected scenario where he bids my mother up to an unaffordable price and I leave defeated, only to be arrested five years later for breaking into his pool house in an intoxicated attempt to reclaim her. Then his shiny cell phone goes off and he leaves.
I get my mother for minimal markup, about the cost of three days of work. That is, when there’s cargo work to be had, and when misfortune does not follow my delivery mission like a love-drunk puppy.
When I get her back to the ship I decide I cannot just dive in and yell to Mother’s capsule Everything I’ve Been Wanting To Say. The comfort level has to rise; familiarity must be reestablished and achieved. As evening sets in, I boil an insta-broth and sip it in front of her.
Although it wasn’t easy to fit her capsule, fifteen by six feet, into the thirty-by-twenty interior of my ship’s living quarters, I believe that ultimately it will prove to be a healing experience. I think, sometimes, that my whole life, this wandering around the universe, is really just an attempt to try to outrun her and my past. But now here she is—frozen solid and consuming a large amount of electricity just inches away from wherever I am to roam about the cabin.
The heat from my insta-broth melts the frost away from her digital lock, informing me that she has over 414 years left on her sentence. When (or if) she does finally wake, I will be so dead, and she will most likely have no idea that the majority of my adult life was spent in cohabitation with her physical being. Perhaps I’m fooling myself to think that this is any kind of personal breakthrough. To say that she is emotionally unavailable is a bit of an understatement. But really, it’s my life I should concern myself with. Our relationship doesn’t have to be a two-way street.
When it’s time to meet Brady online, I throw a blanket over Mother’s capsule. My personal life should remain private. It’s been a long day, and I’m ready to lose myself to the gaping void of lust. At times I worry my relationship with Brady is too heavily dependent on the sexual, but tonight I’m grateful for its numbing opiate. Afterward, when I’m about to sign off, Brady brings up Mother.
FluidTransfer69: So what did she do, anyway?
I fear disclosing this information may cause him to worry about a genetic bias toward psychosis on my end, but then I remember our previous bonding experience that day.
CargoBabe: A lot of things. She has a strong thirst for money and blood.
FluidTransfer69: O? Sounds feisty!
CargoBabe: She is fierce.
FluidTransfer69: So have u unthawed her yet?
Naïve as his question is, I can’t help but wonder if this is his way of telling me that he soon wants to meet not only me but also the family.
CargoBabe: That won’t happen in my lifetime. She has over four more centuries on her sentence.
I pause, pondering how much I should express to him. It’s healthy, I decide, to just say what I feel.
CargoBabe: It’s kind of a shame that I’ll only get to make amends on my end. There’s so much I wish I could say and have her hear.
FluidTransfer69: Huh.
And suddenly, I see that it’s okay. That it will all be okay because I’m not in this alone. My feelings for Brady swell and I decide to express them in a humorous pun.
CargoBabe: Thank you for listening. I feel like our love is now light-years past what it was this a.m.
FluidTransfer69: Pierre is happy 2 hear that! Babe?
Pierre is Brady’s name for his penis.
CargoBabe: Yes?
FluidTransfer69: Is ur mom’s capsule a Digilock? Cause it’s all over the Internet how to open those.
And with that, Brady demonstrates his technical prowess by cutting and pasting a series of step-by-step instructions that could have Mother room temperature by morning.
I strap into my sleepsak with a heavy dilemma. I, and perhaps I alone, am in a unique position to understand that Mother is, on many levels, a violent predator of unthinkable proportions.
Yet I’m also her daughter. Her daughter and her only child. If I were frozen, wouldn’t I want her to unthaw me if I were so capable? And what of second chances? What of personal growth and change? What of her realizing that it’s me, her little daughter, but arson, drug trafficking, homicide, battery, and a variety of other mistakes caused her to miss my childhood and adolescence?
I leave the blanket on her capsule all through the night. The next morning, I meet Brady online, but I’m not interested in the hot-n-heavy. I have hard-hitting questions that need answers.
CargoBabe: Brady, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m thinking of dethawing my mother.
FluidTransfer69: Isn’t that why you got her?
CargoBabe: I didn’t think it was.
FluidTransfer69: Then what’s the point?
Was Brady right? Had I subconsciously been hoping that I would be able to bring her back to life all along?
CargoBabe: She’s done some very bad things.
FluidTransfer69: Well, nobody’s perfect.
I’m inclined to agree with him, although I’m not sure that using her command of martial arts to force a wooden spoon handle into my father’s neck could rightly be labeled an imperfection.
CargoBabe: I’ve got to go, Brady. You may not hear from me tonight.
FluidTransfer69: I’ll b thinking of u!
We give each other kissing icons; I impulsively touch the screen when his name disappears.
* * *
I remember, kind of, the movie Frankenstein. Or maybe I’m making this up. But I think that when the creature animates, there are lots of subhuman moans and groans. Perhaps some running around and crashing into things.
There is no technical support hotline I can call for assistance with illegally opening my mother’s prison capsule, and we’re a few hours away from any medi-port. My greatest fear is that
she’ll wake up startled and instinctually lash out at the first organic thing she senses, which will be me.
Simply opening the capsule is easy. When the door lifts up it’s quite theatrical due to the frozen smoke. I wonder if I should be recording this. It seems like something my mother, the new mellowed-out one that will take to bridge and cardigans, might want to watch alone and get a bit misty-eyed to on nights when Brady and I have gone somewhere romantic and timeless: here is where my daughter pulled me from the fog of purgatory. Here is where I achieved room temperature.
Mother’s expression and skin texture looked unseemly even through the frosted glass, but without any kind of cloudy filter, she is very, very grizzled. The veins in her face are prominent and green, with a slight purple tinge I can only describe as zombieish.
My panic deepens as my eyes move toward her sharpened teeth. At least, I’ve always assumed she had them sharpened. As the ship’s control panel lights glimmer and flick across the shiny arrowheads of her incisors, it’s hard not to feel like everything about her emanates a strong Do Not Touch vibe.
The revitalization directions are far more involved than just popping the door open, which I’m sure often had to be done for routine maintenance. Though I don’t know how much routine maintenance was given to my mother, seeing as her T-zone appears to be blistered yellow with a thick layer of permafrost. A wave of pity overtakes me, and I know what I must do. This time, things will be different: I’m an adult, I have a wonderful boyfriend, and Mother will have to be grateful that I saved her from her sentence.
I proceed with caution, first restraining her limbs with a series of athletic tube socks, which I have an abundance of. Though not because I’m a fitness enthusiast (the only activity I do on board that could be labeled cardio is scrubbing; there’s not room for much else), but because I love elastic. Perhaps due to the fact that I was not hugged or encased in warmth nearly enough as a child. Perhaps due to the fact that my non-sociopath parent was murdered by the non-non.
Eventually, the fluids start kicking. I do mean this literally. Tying her up was a good idea.
The legs are the first to return, followed by the upper torso. There are lots of bubbles. The gases that come out of her have a smell somewhere between Clorox and broccoli. At first her body appears to be dancing, hippie-style in reckless abandon, too drugged out to allow for symmetry of movement and timing. These seizures then pick up the pace with chest undulations. There’s a small window of time when I become afraid she will short-circuit and leave me with only the smell of burnt hair and some additional emotional baggage.
She vomits several liters of a jellied maroon substance before speaking.
“You double-crossing prick,” she belches. “Give me back my magazine.”
By magazine, I know she is not referring to any sort of reading material.
“Mother,” I say, “it’s me. You’re safe. You don’t need any bullets. The year is 2045.”
Her eyes, perhaps, still have some ice crystals passing over the retina. Maybe all she can see is blurry light. She might even think that this is the afterlife, and I an angel.
Suddenly I feel her gaze lock upon me like the scope of a long rifle.
“It’s you? You sure turned out homely.”
“Mother—”
She glances around the ship’s quarters before biting through her cotton fetters with rodential flair.
I can feel age-old resentments beginning to boil as I watch her rooting around my tiny cabin, likely searching for instruments to fashion crude weapons from.
“Maybe, Mom, I would live in a nicer place if I hadn’t gone to a government work-orphanage at the age of nine when you were incarcerated. Not just incarcerated, frozen. Beyond writing letters, even. Did you know that they didn’t even tell me you’d been frozen? For the longest time, I left mail for you on my nightstand, thinking the supervisors picked it up during our morning chemical showers. I’d get long letters back and it wasn’t until you started coming on to me in them and asking me to meet you in the boiler room that I realized the janitor had been stealing my outgoing mail and taking on your share of the correspondence.”
Instead of listening she’s riffling through my utensil drawer. “Mother, no weapons. I mean it. I didn’t have to bring you back to life.”
This gets her attention. She comes over and places her fingers along my throat in a way that brings instant and absolute pain, along with the inability to move. “You’re getting too big for your britches.”
She then opens the refrigerator and eats for three hours straight. Around hour two I decide to go to bed. I don’t say a word about how the distracting light, the wasted power, and the winded sounds of plastic condiment containers spurting their last drops are keeping me from pleasant dreams. What I do say in my head—a telepathic whisper of sorts that I hope she will hear, considering the possibility that maybe being not dead but frozen for several decades opened some window of her mind to the supernatural—is this: my britches are indeed bigger than when you last saw me, Mother. I’m now a forty-three-year-old woman with a weakness for reconstituted fudge.
* * *
I wake to Mother (nude) holding a loofah scrub (mine) and looking not so happy. She was frozen before the hydrogen ration card mandate and does not understand why the shower won’t operate. Since I cannot ask for additional ration cards to support a prematurely thawed felon, I’m forced to dip into my meager stash of them. She asks how long they’re for.
“Three minutes,” I warn. “Don’t get caught in the dry with a head full of bubbles.”
She hoists up an arm that appears to be covered with sawdust. “I’ve got more dead skin than you’ve got ugly. Give me another one of those things. Three minutes isn’t even long enough to sand my forehead.”
I tell her, “Just this once,” then when I hear the water start I put all my remaining ration cards into a front-zip stomach purse designed to prohibit pickpocketing. I bought the purse for travel, specifically for when Brady and I will honeymoon on Earth in Europe.
While Mother’s in the shower, I sign on to let Brady know that I’ve unfrozen her.
FluidTransfer69: U guys catching up?
I’m a sucker for simplicity and would rather not explain that since waking, all Mother has really done is fully deplete my living quarters and put me in a choke hold.
CargoBabe: Yes.
That night I decide that if things are going to move forward emotionally with Mother, it is I who will need to instigate the healing process. I watch on as she uses my fold-down dinette table to practice punching through wood.
She needs no practice.
“Mother, when you killed Father, that really hurt me. Especially how I had to watch it.”
“I didn’t tie you up and glue your eyes open.”
This is true. Mother has a way of making everyone else seem in the wrong.
“Did you miss me? All those years you were frozen?”
Mother’s left cheek is somewhat illuminated by the moon, which is visible across the windshield. She’s sweaty from exertion. I watch as her expression remains unchanged while her fist sails through four solid inches of oak.
It occurs to me that we’re now the same age. In fact, she might be a little younger. Despite her discoloration from freezing, I have to admit that her features are beautiful. It’s not something she passed on.
“Mother? Because I missed you. Sometimes I was so mad at you that I told myself I didn’t miss you. I even swore that I hated you, but inside I knew that was never true, no matter how much I wanted it to be.”
“I was frozen, nitwit. You can’t miss people while you’re frozen.”
In my bunk I pull the covers up over my head and wonder if my relationship with Brady is strong enough to accelerate—to the point of me seeing his face, but also to us meeting and perhaps cohabitating.
Mother could maybe not come with me.
* * *
The next morning I pop the question to Brady.
FluidTransfer69: Get married in person?
CargoBabe: I know you’re ashamed of your scars, but there’s no shame with me, Brady. What you look like doesn’t matter. You’re nice to me. What we have together is something I’ve never known before.
FluidTransfer69: Will ur mom come too? I think I have room.
I quickly peer over my shoulder to make sure Mother is still finishing her home tattoo. She’s deep in concentration over an electric toothbrush motor and a ballpoint pen.
CargoBabe: Mother will not be attending the ceremony.
We discuss logistics. Although I want to leave this afternoon, Brady has a biohazard run to finish and only one radioactive suit. We decide on Friday.
The truth is, good things do happen to good people; sometimes it just takes a while. And bad people do get punished. Mother already got hers, sort of. She should’ve gotten it for longer but I wanted to give her a second chance.
* * *
The rest of the week proves to be quite a struggle. I manage to get through it only because I know that soon it will all be over and I’ll be in Brady’s protective embrace.
On Tuesday Mother burned my vinyl curtains to create a tar-like mixture she could huff. Once high, she insisted we have a series of home-Olympic strength competitions that included arm wrestling, leg locking, and kickboxing. These were followed by a medal ceremony in which Mother awarded herself the two remaining tin cans of food on board. I went to bed hungry. This was probably for the best because my stomach was already so full of swallowed blood.
Bored on Wednesday, Mother dislodged a ceiling panel and went up into the cabin’s airshaft. She emerged adorned with several pieces of DIY jewelry she’d fashioned from rats.
Thursday was a delight of secret packing. Although most of my sparse possessions had been transformed into some type of weapon, I had been able to hold on to one pair of decent underwear, elastic still relatively sturdy, for my first meeting with Brady. That night I decided to set things as right with Mother as I could.
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls Page 8