“Is there any part of your story you could tell me that’s legal?” Hazel whispered. “Things that couldn’t be held against you in a court of law? Your childhood, maybe.”
“I began courting delinquency from an early age,” Liver said.
“Are your parents still alive?”
“I don’t know,” he said. Of course a Gogol ID search could solve the mystery right away.
“You don’t care to know,” Hazel clarified.
“Sure don’t.”
Hazel squeezed him a little tighter, not out of pity but out of gratitude. Here was someone who didn’t want Byron’s data.
11
THE NEXT MORNING HAZEL WOKE WITH AN IDEA. SHE HAD NO CLUE what time it was and neither did Liver—hopefully it wasn’t too late. She needed to get home before the next download at noon.
“Would you be able to come to my house and lift something?”
“Is it a body?” Liver asked. He was eyeing a shovel in the shed’s corner and clearly wanted to bring the right tools for the job.
Hazel realized that Byron’s intervention meant she’d always have to care, at least once a day, about a schedule. Did she have hours until she’d have to withstand the download seizure, or only minutes or even seconds? “If I start shaking and then puke or pass out or both, just wait it out,” she told Liver.
“Well yeah,” he said.
There wasn’t a functioning clock in his pickup, but they passed a pharmacy marquee that advertised both the 11:32 AM time as well as a low-price special on some cannibalistic-sounding vitamins called HAIR, SKIN & NAILS GUMMIES. With luck they’d make it back to her father’s house just in time.
“It’s complicated,” Hazel explained as they pulled into the driveway, “but something’s about to happen to my body that I’m going to try to prevent. I need to grab a device from the backyard. You may or may not see my father on a scooter, with or without something that looks like a female mannequin. Pay him no mind. What I need you to do is get the huge wooden box in the living room that’s shaped like a coffin and carry it back to the porch.”
He lifted a flask from between the truck’s seat cushions and shook it to make sure it was full. “Okay,” he said. “I’ve got all the necessary equipment.”
In the house, Dad and Diane were playing a card game in the kitchen’s breakfast nook. “Hi, Dad; I’ll be busy for the next few minutes,” she yelled to him. “A friend is coming in to bring Diane’s box out to the porch. Don’t judge him based on appearance. He poses no danger.”
She then ran outside and grabbed the Sleep Helmet Byron had included in the safe. She doubted he’d have included it if wearing it during the downloads could prevent them, but it was worth a shot. After all, why twelve noon instead of twelve midnight? Maybe sleep wasn’t as conducive to ripping out her memories. She wanted to attempt every roadblock she could muster.
“Rummy,” Hazel heard her father saying to Diane. “You win again!”
She didn’t want to be alone when the download came, but she also didn’t want Liver to see it. When he brought the box out, she said, “I need to put on this helmet and climb into the box for a few minutes. I’m not sure exactly what’s going to happen. You might want to wait in another room.”
Liver took a long drag from his cigarette. “You’re gonna shut the lid?” She was clearly not the first woman he’d assisted into a wooden box.
“Yes. Could you give me a hand with that?”
Hazel put on the helmet, climbed inside, and lay back. “Let me poke a few airholes,” she heard Liver say. “For your health!”
The helmet blocked out all light, but she heard a series of terrifying stabs delivered in near-mechanical succession, and then it was quiet. Hazel pressed the activation button to start the helmet’s beta-wave sequence. It was pleasurable, frighteningly easy the way her mind cleared. She knew the visual that always came into her head during the Sleep Helmet’s induction wouldn’t sound that serene to others: she pictured a zookeeper cleaning the cement floor of a cage, working a large push broom across soapy ground, the ambient rasp of its polymer bristles moving farther and farther away from the center of the room to the periphery. Off went her worries. The bubbly sheen of industrial disinfectant became her consciousness, liquid and thin. Growing thinner still. Spreading into nothing.
WHEN THE IMAGES OF BYRON CAME, IT FELT LIKE THEY WERE HITTING her between the eyes with a paintball gun. One after the other: Byron accepting an award. Byron delivering a speech. Byron standing amid a group of children in a rural African village. They all sped toward her at an incredible velocity, like billboards she was being flung up against. Her head continued to feel hammered upon even after the images stopped.
It took Hazel a moment to realize this was because she was inside a box wearing a helmet and she kept trying to sit up without opening its lid.
The download had not been thwarted. Hazel pushed the visor release so the helmet’s eyepiece turned transparent, then pressed against the coffin’s lid and climbed out. She was shaking but didn’t see any vomit. After using the crate to help herself stand, she teetered into the living room.
Her father and Liver were having a beer. “Are you ex-military?” her father asked. He was looking at Liver with squinted eyes, trying to get a read on him.
“I’m not big on government,” Liver answered. Her father looked over and saw her in the helmet—she’d lifted the visor but had forgotten to take it off.
“You kids off to ride some go-carts?” he asked.
Hazel went to the kitchen to grab a garbage bag. It would take time to find work, so she figured she might as well sell the electronics Byron had left for her. And the safe. Hazel dropped the helmet inside and slung the bag over her shoulder.
“I’m going to go scare up some rent money for you, Pops. Liver, what do you have going on?”
He stood. “Need to head up to the cemetery for a bit.” With that, he reached out and took Hazel’s arm by the wrist, turning it a little in the light, examining it. For a moment she worried that he was about to pull a bowie knife out of the back of his vest and sever her hand in a single pass—perhaps he was under the mistaken impression that she’d stolen a keepsake from his shed-house, a lottery scratch-off ticket that one of the giant spiders had in fact taken and woven into its web.
Instead he moved his fingers down and gave hers a squeeze, then offered up a wink she would’ve written off as a nervous twitch if it hadn’t been timed just so with his grip of her fist. “I’ll be at the bar later,” he said, then he held her gaze for a moment and left.
Hazel’s father produced a small cough. “Are you courting that fellow? Why wasn’t he wearing a shirt?”
“Do you have a wagon or a wheelbarrow or something I could use to get some electronics down the road to the Gogol resale store?”
Her father scootered over to the breakfast nook and climbed in next to Diane. “You can take the Rascal. Make wide turns and don’t attempt any hills.”
HAZEL BAGGED UP ALL THE SMALLER ELECTRONICS AND SET THEM on her lap, then placed the safe in the Rascal’s front basket. It was slow going with all the additional weight, but she supposed she wasn’t in a rush.
A few blocks from the store, the cell phone started ringing. She pressed DECLINE the first few times, but when the calls persisted, a far-fetched sense of hope lit up inside her. Maybe Byron was so disgusted by her physical union with Liver that he was now willing to cut her loose. It would be delightful to hear his voice crack with revulsion.
“Yes, Byron?”
“We’ve got to talk. I have some upsetting news.”
Two children on bicycles zipped past, pointing and laughing at the large garbage sack on her lap. One threw his chocolate milk shake at the scooter; the plastic lid came off the cup and left an unsettling trail of brown splatter. Hazel worried onlookers would think it was human waste. She honked the Rascal’s horn in protest, but that only seemed to enhance their joy.
“I think I’m caught up,�
� Hazel said. “You put a chip in my brain that sends you a daily report of all my thoughts and activities. The download will put me into an inconvenient state of paralysis and shock each afternoon. Both are troubling developments for me, but they don’t warrant a phone call.”
“It’s your father,” Byron said. “He’s not being honest with you.”
Hazel stopped the scooter. Okay, so probably her dad really, really wanted her out of his house. The renter thing did seem weird after he’d so recently voiced a desire for privacy. Was there some humiliating eviction plan in motion that Byron had caught wind of? Was her father planning to bring in a ringer, one of his Shady Place pals who’d fry offensive-smelling fish and walk around in large cotton briefs while spewing misogynistic comments until Hazel chose to leave so her father didn’t have to kick her out and seem heartless?
“The renter? What’s going on? What do you know?” Hazel didn’t want to ask how he knew it.
“It’s about your fa-ther, Hay-zel. We have the Sleep Helmet X7 to thank for this information, by the way. I know your hope was to try to disrupt the download, but you may have inadvertently saved your father’s life by putting it on.”
A woman walking her dog made a large show of having to step off the sidewalk to move around the scooter. Hazel tried to motor off onto the grass a little bit but the wheels didn’t like it. The last thing she needed to do was get stuck. “Sorry,” Hazel called out to the woman. “I had to take this phone call.”
“I’m sure it’s real important,” the woman yelled back.
“I’m not even the enemy!” Hazel shouted. At times like these, it was shamefully easy to understand Byron’s contempt for the general public. Hazel knew relativity could be difficult: that woman would probably be in debt to Gogol for electronics purchases and technology usage until she met her death, but someone taking up three squares of sidewalk with a scooter was her perceived grievance with the world.
“Hazel?” Byron questioned. “Don’t engage hostile strangers. Ours is a violent society and you’ve lived behind protected walls for some time. We need to get you back home to us in one piece.”
“What’s this about my father?”
“Where are you? Can I send a car? This news should really come in person.”
Hazel laughed. Byron did nearly all his meetings virtually.
“Hazel, I’m serious. I have upsetting facts to relay.”
“Just get on with it.” Whatever Byron was about to tell her was to his advantage—Byron didn’t say things that weren’t—so Hazel was skeptical. It wasn’t above Byron to lie about her father to try to get his hooks in deeper. She also couldn’t discount outright the chance that Byron had gotten to her dad. Perhaps the bathtub thing with Di had pushed him over the edge. It wouldn’t be difficult for Byron to convince her father that Hazel having free will wasn’t in her own best interest and she needed to be returned to him. Her dad probably half-believed that anyway. Now that her father had a sudden interest in purchasing artificial women, he could likely be bought off.
“As you know, the helmet does physical diagnostics. You need to start physical therapy on your shoulder. I also want to add that your nutrient intake since you left the compound has been abysmal. I’ll have a drone drop some Vitapax into your father’s backyard. Please eat them.”
“Why don’t you mail them?”
“I don’t use government services, Hazel. The government uses my services.”
“Liver doesn’t use government services either. You two have so much in common.”
“Incorrect. I did check into him, for your protection. Disability, Medicaid. He has outstanding warrants in a few states for failure to pay the fines on unlicensed firearms. I hope you two weren’t planning on taking any romantic getaways out of the area.” It pleased Hazel that Byron wasn’t able to keep the hostility out of his voice.
“No need,” she said. “We can have sex just fine right where we are.”
“Hazel.” Byron cleared his throat. “I’d actually recommend wearing the helmet whenever you’re thinking of coupling with a new paramour. I understand it if you feel the need to have affairs as part of some grievance against me that you’re getting out of your system. Very well. But the helmet also gives readings of others within a five-hundred-foot radius. It’s not a bad idea to scan ahead of time for STDs. Of course, those in the incubation period might not show up, so you’ll always want to use protection.”
“Is Liver clean?”
“I certainly wouldn’t use that term. He doesn’t have any operative venereal infections, no. But it is not pretty under the hood. Your new boyfriend wouldn’t qualify as an organ donor.”
“Okay. So what did my father’s scan show?” Hazel could feel her emotions putting their boxing gloves up, bracing. Whatever Byron was about to say was probably a lie, or a half-truth—a warping of the complete picture.
“It’s widespread cancer, Hazel. He doesn’t have long.”
Hazel scoffed because she had to. Her father dying of cancer when her mother had died of cancer? What were the odds? “He just went to the doctor yesterday. Maybe they did something, gave him something that set off a faulty reading. He’d have all kinds of symptoms if that were true,” she added. “He’d know, or the doctors would pick up some abnormality in his tests. He’s always getting tests.”
Hazel thought about this statement. Why had he gone to the doctor, anyway?
“I’m sure he is,” Byron said. His tone was gentler now, unchallenging. He wasn’t afraid of losing, which meant there was no chance that he could. The humid air suddenly seemed wavy, nauseatingly so, like what she was breathing in was also sloshing around inside her.
“You mean he knows? I think he’d tell me if he was dying.” Hazel realized this wasn’t true even as she said it though. The worse her father felt, the more he downplayed any pain. He’d always been this way. The morning prior to a stress test his doctor had ordered when Hazel was in high school, her father had mowed the lawn and subsequently had a micro heart attack followed by a same-day surgery; for a week the mower sat in the middle of the yard at the end of an unfinished strip until one of her father’s OCD neighbors had come over and finished it because he couldn’t stand looking at it anymore. He and her mother had fought about this for weeks. Why the fuck were you mowing the lawn with chest pains! she’d screamed. That would’ve been death by idiocy, Herbert! Death is not some pansy baby. You cannot pee down the neck of Death’s shirt and expect it to look the other way. If you are flagrantly too dumb to live, it will come to collect. But her father hadn’t been fazed. Well, if you weren’t yelling at me about almost dying you’d be yelling at me about how bad the lawn looks!
“Oh, Hazel,” Byron said. “He definitely knows. The helmet’s not designed for medical scanning to be its primary function, so I don’t have results with the specificity of, say, a HealthSweep imager. And I’m not a doctor. But I’ve talked to several today on your father’s behalf, and they all concur: based on the information we do have, he’s already undergone a variety of chemotherapy and radiation treatments. It looks like he stopped everything except pain management medication a few months ago. Were it legal to do so, I may have also double-checked electronic hospital records to confirm this. I wouldn’t be breaking this news to you unless I could speak with certainty.”
“So he never told me about having cancer or having cancer treatments, and then he made the decision to die and neglected to share that with me as well?” Hazel had to say it out loud to acknowledge that it was real. Bring the words into the world and examine them.
Why hadn’t she asked him about the hundreds of pills beneath the sink? Why hadn’t the urgency of sex doll number one and sex doll number two triggered more of a warning signal to her? Why hadn’t she thought it stranger that he was willing to spend the rest of his life without a car? Hazel supposed she’d stopped trying to understand her father’s logic so long ago that it had become a habit. She didn’t question what he wanted anymore, and th
is made her not question why he wanted it either.
“I understand this information has the potential to feel very hurtful to you,” Byron said, the bright horizon of a coming sales pitch already beginning to put a lilt in his words. “And while I believe it’s your right to know this, if all it was going to do was cause you pain, I wouldn’t meddle. But your father probably made his decision based on the care and treatment options that were presented as being available to him, which, given his financial situation, are minimal. We’ll have to do more tests of course, but I can give him access to cutting-edge treatments not available to the general public. There’s definitely hope.”
So there it was, Hazel thought, his angle. He was using her father’s health to blackmail her.
It didn’t sting though. She waited for it to—maybe later it would. But in the moment all she felt was a twisted sort of gratitude. She wanted to get help for her father, and she wanted Byron to win on a technicality instead of on a feat that was entirely his own, if he had to win. He was pretty smart, so he probably did.
She had her consolation prizes. She could return with her head held high after having enjoyed a good time: She’d slept with an outlaw! She’d only used a phone twice in several days! If she didn’t take Byron up on the offer, no part of her life that came afterward would feel victorious—she’d always remember how she valued her freedom over her father’s life, and that it had been a lame, neutered freedom anyway because Byron could still see and hear everything she did. He’d know the guilt and regret that she felt, and that alone would be a victory for him.
But her sitting at his side in silent protest, with him knowing the reason she’d come home was a sense of paternal fidelity? That didn’t seem like a total victory for Byron. It felt closer to breaking even. Probably as close to it as she could ever hope to get with him.
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