“This doesn’t seem like your usual place,” he offered. “You in the midst of a personal crisis?”
“Totally,” said Hazel. She scanned the liquor bottles lined up on the wall; a few of their labels seemed to tickle a waterlogged lobe of her brain. Gogol excepted, Byron didn’t allow branding in the house—it was a bizarre tic, one of the many things that made The Hub seem like its own planet. The food staff removed all outer packaging of foods and beverages; housekeeping discarded any product labels. Images and logos, he said, were visual energy drains. “I just left my husband and moved in with my father,” Hazel continued. “I’m destitute.”
The man smiled, extinguished his cigarette, extended his palm. “That’s my favorite quality in a woman. Pleased to meet you. Call me Liver.”
“Is that your legal name?”
“Legal’s not my thing.”
Liver had tough skin; his handshake was an exfoliant. “I’d like to buy you some strong drinks,” he said. Liver heralded the bartender with a sharp whistle; it reminded Hazel of the tropical rain forest birdcall setting on her meditative sound machine. She’d left it behind, of course, along with everything else. Her new sound, she decided, would be no sound. Her new possessions would be no possessions.
“This will make your feet go numb,” Liver stated, lighting up a new cigarette. The short jar he slid over to her appeared stolen from a surgical museum. It seemed like a medical specimen had been steeping inside it until the bartender removed it prior to serving.
“I appreciate it,” Hazel said, “but I have to stay a little alert. I’m in some trouble and might need to think fast.”
“No obligation,” Liver said. She noticed there was a spot on the side of his head where hair didn’t grow. It was shaped like the round cigarette lighter in old cars. “How long were you married?”
“A robot officiated at my wedding,” Hazel said. “Let me start there.”
THE ROBOT HAD BEEN AT BYRON’S INSISTENCE. IN MOST WAYS THIS had been a relief to Hazel; it meant the wedding would be a showcase for Byron’s programming as opposed to her brideliness. More specifically it meant that tech and industry business magazines would send photographers, and photographers from these venues would not care whatsoever about her unfortunate dress.
Some medical considerations arose during the dress-purchasing process (hives), and they ended up being the deciding factor when it came to selection: she’d chosen the least itchy model without even trying it on, then guzzled enough antihistamine to guarantee she’d pass out on the ride home.
But it wasn’t as if she’d gone into the process with her defeatist sail at full mast. She’d had high hopes of finding something beautiful, but had made the mistake of confessing her insecurities about the process to Byron. His solution had been to recruit Fiffany to go dress shopping with her.
Hazel couldn’t help but feel woefully inadequate around Fiffany. She was Hazel’s age but had already made herself indispensable to Byron at Gogol. Her body was toned and perfect; she was tall, with glowing skin and stylish highlighted hair, and when she laughed it was a baritone speakeasy laugh that attracted people and made her sound like she was ready to stay up all night drinking scotch and telling clever jokes. Plus Fiffany’s face was not a deal breaker in any way. Its symmetry was astounding.
This filled Hazel with a panic she couldn’t describe, that Byron had chosen his most attractive, traditionally feminine assistant to escort Hazel in selecting a wedding dress. It confused her, too, about how Byron wanted her to be. She’d started exclusively wearing the shapeless, comfortable clothing that made up the standard Gogol worker uniform; that seemed to be his preference. But Fiffany’s outfits didn’t look like they came from the Gogol product line. Was he hoping that Hazel would become more like Fiffany? He’d told Hazel that Fiffany was too made-up and appearance-obsessed for his tastes, but she wondered if he wished Hazel were slightly more made-up. For their wedding, did he want her to find a dress that could downplay her Hazelity and amplify her Fiffyness?
The dress fittings required her to stand in her underwear, which had a significant grape Popsicle stain on the waistband because she hadn’t expected she’d have to disrobe in a group setting. Then she had to hold her hands above her head and close her eyes very tightly. Then she had to be suffocated by fabric for several seconds that felt like minutes (they were trying to lighten the mood, but Hazel did not appreciate the way the sales associates had imitated Viking ship rowers with one yelling “Heave!” and the other yelling “Ho!” as they attempted to squeeze her inside). She managed until she tried on a labyrinthine gown whose peekaboo cutouts had a frightening dead-end effect: every hole that looked like it might be an exit for her arm or head was covered with a screen of translucent lace and her limbs couldn’t find their way out.
It was possible she’d begun freaking out in secret about three dresses earlier, but inside this one, her anxiety really found its foothold. Her arms started thrashing around in the creature-dress’s central lagoon of ruffles, and then apparently she passed out.
Hazel awoke on the floor to find she’d ripped her way through the dress’s midsection. Fiffany had done Hazel the favor of recording the entire incident, and kept replaying it as new sales representatives appeared in the room—they’d heard what had happened but had only now been able to break away from their clients to come see the video for themselves. They laughed deep belly laughs each time Hazel’s top half emerged through the ripped dress’s stomach. “Born again as a bride!” the saleswomen joked. “If a surgeon came in and gave this dress a C-section,” one exclaimed pointedly, arguing her case like a theatrical lawyer in court, “this is the exact spot where he would cut. This means something,” she said, but she didn’t say what it might mean, and Hazel was grateful for that, because it couldn’t mean anything good. “Do you want to see my C-section scar?” the woman asked.
Hazel didn’t. Instead she pretended she had to faint again and sat down.
She charged the ruined dress to Byron’s card, along with an exceptionally simple ivory frock that zipped all the way up, required no over-the-head action, and had a velour skort lining. “That one looks . . . roomy,” Fiffany said. When Hazel nodded, Fiffany sighed. “I’m saying it’s hideous,” she clarified. Fiffany’s voice had the patronizing tone of someone explaining a harsh truth to a stubborn innocent, an exasperated mother finally giving in and telling her child the more unsavory nuts-and-bolts details of why the sleepy man camped underneath the bridge couldn’t come stay in their guest room. “We don’t want extra space. We’re not buying an RV.” Hazel had felt herself begin to blush, but then she saw Fiffany look over her shoulder—Fiffany was appealing to a sales associate behind them for help, and the woman had obviously just heard the entire exchange.
Hazel turned. When the associate looked at the dress, her face became sad. Once, at the zoo, Hazel and several others had watched a shunned chimpanzee in the corner of the primate enclosure sample its own excrement. Afterward everyone, including Hazel, had worn the expression that the sales associate was making now. “I’ve never sold this style to a bride,” she finally remarked. “It’s usually the mother of the bride. Or, more commonly, the grandmother.”
Fiffany nodded. “Fixed income and waning eyesight,” she said. “That’s what this dress appeals to.” But just looking at the other dresses gave Hazel a prickling-heat sensation; she felt her hands swelling up. Her ring finger especially was aching with an increasing tightness.
“Oh!” Fiffany had suddenly called out. “I’m going to call a medic. Something is happening with your body!” It was true; Hazel was breaking out in a collector’s variety of welts. Luckily Hazel’s engagement ring had already called the paramedics. Fiffany bumped into an arriving EMT on her way out of the room.
Hazel completed the purchase of the dresses from a stretcher, the sales associate going over all the details and making a big display of speaking loudly and clearly, like Hazel was hard of hearing instead of bearing an a
nxious rash; the way the woman held each paper up close to Hazel’s reclined head was very deathbed-style. They seemed to be confirming the details of Hazel’s final will, which she should have, perhaps, in retrospect, understood to be an omen. Hazel whispered a question to the associate, not wanting Fiffany to hear, and the woman bent over a microscopic amount out of decorum, but it was clear this was as close as she was willing to get to Hazel’s hive-swollen face, and it was not close enough.
“I’m so sorry,” the woman apologized. “I still can’t hear you. Can you speak up a little more?”
“Will you give the dress pockets?” Hazel finally hissed at normal volume. It would be good, she’d realized, to have a place to stash some sedatives on the wedding day.
The associate pursed her lips. “We can do anything you like,” she finally said. Her words had the intonation of a sincere apology.
But the dress-purchasing mission wasn’t entirely fruitless: six months later, Fiffany and the EMT got married. Fiffany wore a smaller version of the dress Hazel had ripped her way out of. Per usual, Byron was on his device for most of the ceremony, but since Fiffany chose to get married in the Gogol headquarters employee chapel, he did attend, and he did pause for one moment to look up and comment to Hazel when Fiffany walked down the aisle, “Well, she looks just beautiful,” he said. “Doesn’t she?” He started at Fiffany for a moment with the same look of delight he’d given Hazel in the interview. Then, so casually Hazel might’ve easily ignored it, he added, “Love the dress.” And she hadn’t wanted her face to grow hot, but it had. And she hadn’t wanted to turn to look at him. She did though; already at this early point in their marriage, curiosity had stopped being a friend to her. Byron was staring at her, waiting for her eyes to meet his, and when they did he gave her a knowing wink.
Of course Fiffany had shown Byron the video. Why wouldn’t she? Hazel was surprised to find this felt far more painful than imagining a full-blown affair: Byron and the attractive Fiffany, chuckling together in his office at Hazel’s expense, somehow caused her a more vulnerable form of pain.
Fiffany had gotten divorced two weeks later. Hazel told herself it was a crazy thought, but she almost wondered if the wedding had been a show. That Fiffany had done it just so Byron could see her wearing that dress and feel like he should’ve married Fiffany instead.
FOUR DRINKS LATER, HAZEL WAS FOLDED OVER ACROSS LIVER’S LAP. “Was that sent here to kill me?” she’d ask, then point to something in the bar. “Was that?” She rubbed her finger along Liver’s knee then glanced at the sheen on her fingertip. Like an otter’s fur, his pants seemed to produce an oil-based protective coating.
This was a digression. She’d been telling him all about the failings of her marriage, Byron’s monstrosity, the ways that he’d refused to respect the most basic of personal boundaries, such as her skull. “I mean a microchip,” she continued, returning to the story. “He wanted to put it up here.” She felt her hand move toward her head; a finger—her own? the verdict was out—went inside her ear. Attempts to sit up were unsuccessful. It felt like Liver’s pants were magnetic and her cheeks were lined with metal shavings. “Is there a bathroom?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he responded. “There is. Big enough to screw in. Small enough to feel romantic. May I escort you?”
Hazel shook her head. “I’ll be right back,” she said. By which she meant she would never return, not to Liver’s lap or to the Spotted Rose. Probably because she’d be dead.
It had been a long time since she’d had alcohol with so many impurities; the inside of her mouth felt lined with grit. But this was good, she reminded herself. She needed to rid herself of Byron’s long-standing odor of sterility, and she was succeeding. When she burped it smelled like the world’s most fermented peach bobbing in a bowl of lighter fluid.
Hazel felt fawnlike on her walk home, newly born; her legs had forgotten everything. She reached the sanctuary of Shady Place’s entrance and decided it was okay to begin to crawl. For a while she dry-heaved into a neighbor’s faux-stone wishing-well planter, which maybe wasn’t too far off from tossing in a penny, so she decided to leave a wish that could be granted. Universe, she thought, please let me convert to a tangible existence now. One without interfaces and constant monitoring and a shower that talks. Also please let me live long enough to taste an adult life of my very own, even if it’s a pathetic one.
She crawled several more feet before passing out at the foot of Mrs. Fennigan’s tranquility fountain. Sleep came to Hazel—she couldn’t help it—the moment her brain heard the running water. Like birdcalls, water was one of Hazel’s preferred meditation sound-machine settings. Well, her former meditation sound machine.
An ambulance came careening into the park with sirens at full blare, sans consideration for someone who might be passed out on a nearby lawn: one of the street’s routine elder deaths. Hazel looked up at the sky; swampy clouds crisscrossed the moon. It was very late. Rocking up onto her knees, she tried standing but found she was still intoxicated. More so, somehow, than she had been when she’d passed out. Her eyes were drawn to the flaccid promise of a garden hose dangling off the side of a trailer a few feet away. “Water!” she announced, then decided she should not speak aloud at present. That had been a misstep.
For a while she just sprayed the hose onto her face, her eyes closed, then she began lapping at the stream—why did her tongue feel so swollen?—still without opening her eyes. By the time she became conscious enough for reason to set in, she realized she didn’t know if her pants were wet from the hose or another source, so she spent an additional few minutes soaking them just in case.
It would alarm her father to see her enter his home in the early dawn hours wearing saturated clothing. It just would. This was extra incentive to make it back to the screened-in-porch room before he woke.
After a few failed attempts, Hazel was able to cross to the other side of the street on all fours, but her errant path led her to head butt a lawn flamingo.
Suddenly the moon was wide and full above her head like a spotlight. The flamingo, with its raised, tucked-under plastic leg, suggested the shape of Byron kneeling down on one knee, and memory flooded her. This was how he’d presented her with the microchip that he wanted to place in her brain: Byron had cleverly, in a faux-romantic overture, put the chip inside a velvet ring box, made his proposal regarding their tandem neurosurgical alterations, then had gotten down on one knee, opened up the box’s lid, and said, Hazel Green, will you meld with me?
He had worn a tux.
Of course this is what his research had told him to do—he was altering a familiar social script in which she was supposed to feel gleeful, flattered, adored; she was supposed to throw her arms around him afterward and say Yes!; she was probably even supposed to cry.
When Hazel didn’t, Byron’s nonplussed solution was to wait it out. He likely assumed the offer was so overwhelming to Hazel, in a good or great way, that she was in shock and needed time to process. Maybe a lot of time, right? Since it was such a wonderful proposition. Byron had stayed like that, on one knee with the box extended outward, for the entire argument that followed; he seemed to have strong feelings that this staged position was the key to changing her mind. He was still like this, smiling, insisting to himself that if he stayed in a classic pose of devoted inquiry a few moments longer everything would fall into place, when Hazel turned and left the room. She was crying and disgusted; he was calling out after her—Hazel, stop and think for a moment! What is love if not progress? What is love? What is love?
Now she emitted a wolverine growl and pounced upon the flamingo, tackling it to the ground. Wrapping one arm around its middle, she gripped its long neck like an oar with her other hand and used the flamingo to help prop herself upright and walk along.
Many of the yards they had to pass through were booby-trapped with motion-sensor lights: when they’d walk past these, or through a stretch of particularly clear moonlight, the flamingo’s glass eye appeare
d to power on and glint at her with a furious bewilderment. Hazel worried it had reservations about its forced relocation. “I’ll take you back tomorrow,” she promised, a total lie. Even if she were still alive tomorrow, she had no plans to return it. The bird was inanimate, yes, and Hazel had never believed in hunting, but having taken it down by summoning her hatred of Byron felt like a trophy kill in a way that pleased her.
“You’ll like my dad’s friend Diane,” she assured the bird. Maybe the doll and the lawn ornament would be able to communicate with each other. She liked the thought of her father having to pretend the flamingo was real if she had to pretend the doll was real.
Plus her father seemed to be in a far better mental space than she was. Acting as though the bird could understand her and was her beloved confidante might be the very best thing. “You and me for a little bit,” Hazel told the flamingo. “Let’s give it a try.”
When they arrived at her father’s doorstep, as with any partner who’d helped her drunkenly stumble home, Hazel felt the need to instruct the bird about what to expect inside. “We have to be very quiet,” she whispered. “Dad’s asleep. There are obstacles we’ll have to watch out for, like a large wooden box that you might assume is a coffin but isn’t.”
She unlocked the door and turned the knob.
Remembering her junior high and high school days, part of her felt like she’d become a delinquent teenager all over again and worried that her father would be waiting up, sitting on the couch with his arms crossed. Diane would be next to him, dressed to the nines in one of her mother’s now-vintage outfits, her plastic face somehow remolded to have forehead wrinkles of displeased judgment.
Or worse, that Byron would be sitting there, or someone he’d sent.
That would be the end. But if it was her father, she could simply shut the door, take the flamingo into the backyard, and curl up with it there. It had been a long time since she’d held someone else during sleep. Byron’s skin always felt refrigerated, and in sleep his pulse slowed down to a low, controlled speed that seemed akin to hibernation. In the beginning of their relationship, back when she thought that she was maybe almost starting to like Byron, or was right about to almost start, laying her head upon his chest was a difficult exercise in anxiety. After every beat of his heart, there was just enough pause to make her nervous that the next might never come.
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