“I guess that’s fitting, seeing that you traded in your old one.”
Hazel noticed her father eyeing her empties, his fingers going up into the air one by one, counting. “You’re sure thirsty tonight, Haze. Have I noticed before how quickly you drink?”
Her father wasn’t the type who liked to feel encroached upon; Hazel knew she needed to make it seem like her moving in was at least half his idea so that he’d feel okay about it. “Well, I’m glad you’re set in terms of romantic love,” she began. “Speaking of people who might notice if you died though—as in someone who would be in a position to realize your passing on the very day that it occurred—do you ever think a roommate might be nice? Some supplemental human companionship for playing cards, conversing, shooting the breeze?”
Her father let out a hard laugh that caused Diane to plunge sharply forward. Hazel was shocked to find her own arms extending out with worry—she felt instinctually moved to catch the doll and make sure it didn’t fall.
“Are you loony? Living alone is the greatest thing that ever happened to me! And now that I’ve got Diane, that takes it to a whole new level. We can have candlelight dinners naked. I can use her abdomen as a plate! That is something I’ve never done that I will not mind doing—eating a ham sandwich off the chest of a beautiful woman.” He stared once more at Diane’s breasts, his brow crumpled with admiring scrutiny. “She’s a goddamn miracle. What’s the saying? ‘Today is the first day of the rest of my life.’”
“A miracle,” Hazel mused. In a way, the crate on the floor did resemble an opened tomb, Diane a modern-day Lazarus delivered from stasis to take her place amongst the living.
It was then that her father saw it. He twisted uncomfortably in the seat of his Rascal, his movement pushing Diane’s extended arm slightly to the left and into the horn, which gave a resonant, protracted toot.
“Hazel?” he asked. “What’s with the suitcase?”
2
“YOU’RE LEAVING BYRON?” HER FATHER HAD BEEN REPEATING THIS for over a minute. When outraged, his voice became a mythic roar, to the extent that it seemed odd he wasn’t holding a trident. He suddenly looked naked without one. “But Byron’s a genius! Every time I leave the house, all I see are Gogol products!” This statement was almost a whine, high-pitched, with a hysteria that made Hazel think of overzealous infomercial entrepreneurs. She remembered one disturbing commercial where a man with a machete was chopping up a mattress, or trying to, while screaming, Pick up the phone! Pick up the phone! But she couldn’t recall if it was the knife being sold or the mattress. Was he cutting the bed to show how effective the knife was? Or the mattress’s layers? Or was it a kind of guilt-inducing sales tactic: we won’t stop harming beds until enough of you phone in an order?
“I understand it’s surprising news,” Hazel said. Her father had placed a protective arm around Diane’s waist and drawn her in close: his posture suggested that Hazel was not so much his daughter in an hour of need as a hopeful suitor who’d been flirting with his girlfriend at the bar and was being told to back off or agree to a fistfight.
“But, Hazel,” he continued, his voice finally lowering, “do you know how much money Byron has?”
“Listen,” Hazel begged. “I know you want to have a private sexual revolution with Diane and I am all for it. I have noise-canceling headphones.” This was a lie. She certainly used to have these and so many other gadgets, but she’d made a point of not packing a single product from Byron’s company.
It killed her to admit that the Serenity Combination Head Massager/Internet Browser did sound excellent right about now. The device, no bigger than a set of earmuffs, expertly rubbed users’ temples while a beam of light projected images of any search term spoken aloud. Back when Hazel was in college, there was a thin grocery-store-brand chocolate cookie that she’d gotten addicted to; the plasma donation center where she’d sometimes sell her fluids for drug and cheeseburger money gave them out as a post-session bonus. They tasted a little biscuity (Hazel’s dorm roommate refused to eat them, saying that the cookies seemed designed as treats for an imaginary species somewhere between “golden retriever” and “human toddler” on taxonomy charts). But there was something gratifying about the base simplicity of their flavor. And due to their exceptionally granular surface, they performed the bonus duty of polishing Hazel’s lips as she ate. When she wore the headphones, Hazel liked to zone out to close-up stills of this cookie’s exterior. She zoomed in on them hundreds of thousands of times until the pictures looked like photographs of some faraway planet’s chocolate terrain.
“He made you sign a prenup, right? You walk away, you get a mere pittance?”
The question inspired Hazel to look down at her father’s hand, then at Diane’s, and yes—there were rings; they must have had an informal union of sorts that morning.
“It’s super complicated and legal,” Hazel replied. She figured this would shut him up. Complexity was like kryptonite to her father—there was no difference in his mind between “elaborate” and “convoluted.” Steer clear of fine print was one of his favorite sayings, which Hazel supposed could be good advice, but he had a super-inclusive interpretation of fine print that made it hard for him to eat at restaurants. He also had a phobia of lawyers. Her mother used to exploit this; Hazel could always tell when her parents were fighting because there would be a courtroom drama loudly blaring on the TV.
And it was true; the prenup was exhaustive. It had caused her father’s lawyer phobia to rub off a little on her too. She’d signed it in one of Gogol’s conference rooms and still remembered when the legal fleet arrived with the document: they’d all appeared to be wearing the same suit and moved nearly in tandem, like synchronized swimmers. It was one of the only times she’d ever seen Byron not looking at a screen of some kind; he’d watched her sign each page. There’d been an interpreter of sorts seated next to her, telling her the essence of what each major paragraph was saying—mainly noncompete clauses so technology companies couldn’t hire her and glean insider secrets—though the interpreter also worked for Gogol. Hazel had been welcome to bring her own attorney, but since she wasn’t entering the marriage with any money or assets of her own, she hadn’t seen the point.
The settlement she was supposed to get in the event of a divorce would be a lot of money to most people, and had seemed like a lot to her at the time of signing. She actually hadn’t paid much attention to the amount—was it just under a million?—or to anything else. Hazel remembered thinking this exact thought: There is no way I can lose. She’d come to realize that she could, and had. Byron would never allow a divorce.
“He’s bad enough to give up the lifestyle you must be accustomed to now? How is that possible? I don’t see any bruises on you!” Her father’s anger momentarily caused him to hold Diane in a more precarious fashion, like she was a full grocery bag he was clutching while berating a small pack of children. Then he gripped the doll around her waist and locked his fingers together.
It was a little mesmerizing to Hazel, the way he maneuvered the doll against his body like a pair of skis or a similarly unwieldy piece of large sporting equipment. His current grip made Hazel remember a documentary about old-growth forests she’d watched with her father once—protesters were chaining their arms around trees to try to prevent them from being logged. What’s the problem? he’d asked, pointing to the screen. Saw right through their arms if they feel so strongly about it! “It’s a harsh economy out there, squirt. You’ve got zero job experience in the field of that degree you never finished. You’re cute, I mean I think you are; your dad thinking you’re cute is no uphill battle. But, Hazel. I’ve seen the TV office sitcoms—you’re too old now to compete with ‘intern cute.’ Is he cheating on you? I’d imagine that’s tough, but you might consider looking the other way. It seems worth it for a lifelong ride on the money train. What a voyage! Why interrupt it?”
“Well, Dad. The train got a little inhospitable.” Had she just polished off the l
ast of the beers? She had. Hazel knew she was drunk, but for the moment this was a secret her internal self was managing to keep hidden from the rest of the world. It had been such a long time since she’d gotten tipsy. Her speech and posture actually seemed to have forgotten how to be drunk. Was it possible to get drunk in your mind but not in your body? Byron had always refused to have beer in the house, which was Hazel’s drink of choice. There was a microharem of top-shelf spirits, carefully cultivated for guests, but she never partook. They seemed hexed to Hazel, like potent gentrification elixirs: She feared they’d begin eating away at her tacky proclivities the moment they touched her lips. Drinking them would make her less her, somehow, so she usually just abstained. That had been one of the central ironies of her marriage: She’d loved their courtship because it had made her feel like she was someone else, and that had been all she’d ever wanted. Until she married Byron and had to be someone else full-time. Then all she wanted was to go back to being herself and hating it again. “If only it were a simple case of infidelity.”
“What do you mean?” he asked. “You’ve been together nearly a decade. Can’t you work this out with him? You know your mother and I loved each other, Hazel. In our way. But if we’d been concerned with joy and self-actualization and all that, we wouldn’t have made it. It’s all about excitement and thrills with your generation. If you’re not having fun, you want to throw in the towel. Have you even considered lowering your standards in terms of general happiness? Did you think about how lucky you are that he married you in the first place? You were a nobody!”
She felt her mouth curl into a defeated smile that would definitely creep her father out, and that was good; that was a smart instinct on behalf of her face. Her father was the type who had to be a little creeped out before he’d shut up and listen. “It got really bad. You don’t know the half of it.”
This did quiet him. He glanced into Diane’s eyes for support, shrugged. “Okay. Let’s run with that. Maybe I don’t. But look around you, kid. This is a long way to fall. There’s one bathroom. A single bathroom. This week? I do my business at night. It’s different all the time though. Wildly variable with little advance notice. If I get a heads-up forty-five seconds before showtime it’s a good day.”
Her father was a hard man to read. For example: there was a time in college, pre-Byron, when she’d decided to live rent free in an anarchy squatter house so she’d have more money to use for monthly minimums on credit cards and could buy more clothing at the mall. The toilet there was a white bucket that got knocked over constantly because most people who used the white-bucket toilet at the anarchy squatter house were not wickedly sober. Would telling him that she’d once used that toilet make him feel better about letting her live there with him now? Or worse?
“How long are we talking here, Hazel? What’s your time frame to get back on your feet? I think you should swallow your pride and ask for a little bit more dough from the guy if need be, just to set yourself up.”
“You don’t understand; this is what I’m telling you. I’m not even taking the prenup money. I can’t leave him and take his money at the same time, Dad. Money’s a way to track me and know what I’m doing.”
Hazel felt herself pretending to take a drink from her empty can; she wasn’t sure why. But she went along with it and soon had the firm opinion that there was a drop left inside she could get to if she just tilted the can right. Then a little later came the realization that she’d been trying to get the drop for several seconds, maybe longer. Maybe both of her hands were pawing at the can’s bottom and she was handling the can a little roughly and her father knew that she was drunk now.
She came up for air and crumpled the aluminum can, hoping the sound would be cathartic, but it could not have made a more alarming noise. It was the sound of property damage occurring several yards away.
“Dad,” she continued, “I haven’t thought too far ahead. That’s probably not a grand surprise.” She’d meant to plan a little more, but she’d also come to the understanding that there was no point in planning because she had to leave Byron without taking anything. Plus she’d gotten pretty scared that morning. There had been blood, and that was that. “I guess I just figured on staying till I can make it on my own.”
“I could die before that happens!”
“What about a year? Could you give me a year? That seems like a pretty modest ask in terms of length of time to start a completely new life, right?”
Hazel looked at her father and had to sit back down. She was expecting to see the cheeky sails of his rage-face puffed full, or maybe even what she and her childhood best friend used to term his “thermometer head,” an Easter-egg-dye scarlet rash that moved from his forehead to his face to his neck to his chest in clear gradients and always told them, with sundial clarity, just how pissed he was and how in trouble she’d be.
Instead he was looking at her with soupy eyes that seemed to have burst. As if they’d tried to hold in all the pity he felt for her but had buckled under the weight.
“Dad . . .”
The moment she spoke his hand flew up in a sporting gesture, catching her thought and stopping all play. He leaned into Diane’s robe and wiped his eyes, blew his nose a little too loudly. Was that a generational thing? Hazel wondered. She’d never felt entitled to blow her noise to the point where it made an unpleasant sound. Not even in front of family.
“All right,” he said and nodded. “Stay if you want. Slide all the way back down the ladder.” The crushed beer can was lying on the floor by her foot; Hazel gave it what she thought was a small tap but it leaped theatrically into the air and landed inside the coffin like it had been trained to do so. “This is no longer the honeymoon evening I’d envisioned. I’ll be honest about that. Could Diane and I have a little privacy first? Before we never have any again? Maybe there’s a neighborhood bar you could walk to.”
Yeah, there probably is, Hazel thought, but I’d rather not amble about when Byron is so into the idea of killing me. He was far more likely to have goons pull up in a van and abduct her from an alleyway than to bust down the door of her elderly father’s home and cart her away in front of the neighbors. The conversation with her father seemed to be winding down, though, and Hazel knew this information was a pretty flammable log to throw on a dwindling fire. Better to approach it in a more generalist fashion. “So you’d like me to walk alone to a bar in the dark and then walk home even later at night when it’s darker still and I’m more inebriated, all so you can scream sans guilt during conjugal play with a doll? If I’m following what you’re saying.”
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“It’s not dramatic! Do you know how frequently women get assaulted?”
“Well, if that happens to you tonight, I’ll really owe you one. How could I make that up to you? Maybe by letting you stay in my house for a year for free?”
Hazel felt the back of her neck prick with warmth—she was flushing. She knew he thought she was spoiled. There were ways in which she was a coward, sure, and he knew those ways, and that’s why her father thought he was right about this. Well, so much for his comfort then. “Yeah? Stupid me for leaving him? He wanted to put a chip in my brain, Dad.”
With his right hand, her father revved the engine of his Rascal, as though to inject more horsepower into his head—he was thinking. Eventually he shuddered and buried his nose in Diane’s hair. When he looked back up, he said, “Chip? Like a tracking thing?”
“Sort of. Like a file-share thing. So I’d be wirelessly connected to a chip in his brain and he would be wirelessly connected to mine. We would meld. The first neural-networked couple in history.”
“Jesus. Is that what kids are up to nowadays? I’m glad I’m near the grand exit. Brain melds. Not for me. Your mother and I didn’t even trust French kissing.”
“No, Dad. It’s not what anyone is doing. It has never been done. He wanted me to offer up my still-living brain for research and development, essentially.” She ha
dn’t consented, but of course her consent wasn’t going to stand in his way. Nothing ever did. Plus, Hazel was convinced he was in the process of making her sick so that she’d go, of her own volition, to their private medical facility and check herself in, which would be the beginning of the end. For the past few weeks, she’d been having increasingly severe headaches; this morning she’d gotten a nosebleed in the shower. It was the first nosebleed of her lifetime. The blood had gone down the drain and was detected by their SmartFilter, which did in fact even know the blood was from her nose, which did in fact set off an alert, which caused Byron’s video-calling face to appear on the screen-wall of their bathroom. It was nearly a purr the way he said it, his stony-blue eyes radiant with cold power: Hazel, don’t you think you should go see the doctor?
“Yikes,” her father said. “Sounds like things took a turn. Did you at least get to spend a lot of his money?”
Yes and no, Hazel thought. Totally, yet not as much as most would. Plus, she’d increasingly stopped leaving the compound, or bringing things in. It was hard to explain, but buying something and taking it home, or having it shipped there, wasn’t the same as encountering it in the actual world. It was like a King Midas situation, except instead of turning to gold everything that entered Byron’s house became wildly uninteresting. “You know, when I realized I was going to leave eventually, I thought it might be fun to try overindulging on richness before I went out. Spend so much money I got sick of spending money. I figured I could order really strange things that would be funny to leave behind. Like hundreds of thousands of cans of soup? But I got so scared that I stopped caring about anything besides leaving as fast as I could.” His house was intentionally in the middle of nowhere, as were Gogol’s most important ancillary buildings and the microcity that served its worker elite. Without a job or an appointment, there was no reason to come across its parameters. Most regular employees worked in one of its city branches, but cities made Byron paranoid. Nearly everything made Byron paranoid.
Made for Love Page 2