“You recently filed for an abandonment divorce. I can’t imagine the difficulty of that decision. You brought one of your project managers here with you, Fiffany Leiber.” The camera panned offstage to show Fiffany, professional and glamorous, look up from her device and smile. “You’ve spoken of how grateful you are to be surrounded by such a supportive team. What helps you cope with the day to day? If Hazel isn’t found, do you think you could ever find love again?”
“I think Hazel will be found,” he said. “I’ve given up hope that she’ll be found alive, but I think she’ll be discovered and we’ll have answers. I run a company that is all about breakthroughs. What we’re technologically capable of one month is often something that would’ve felt impossible just a few weeks before.”
Hazel swallowed and stared at the door bolt. It didn’t seem like Byron had moved into a “let bygones be bygones” mind-set.
“And I keep myself surrounded with energized, imaginative people who aren’t afraid to be brave. When you experience loss, the easiest thing to try to fill that space with is fear. All my best employees are fearless.” His eyes seemed to dart over to Fiffany for a brief shared glance. “That’s a rare thing.”
EVERYTHING AT THE DINER TASTED A LOT LIKE FRENCH FRIES. FRY grease was the prevailing flavor note. It was the smell that clung to Hazel’s clothes and followed her home. Her bedsheets smelled like fry grease because of the nights she came home and felt too sad to do anything but go lie in bed. Her motel room was a relief because she could walk on all fours. That felt the most natural. In the morning she crawled into the shower and had no idea how she’d ever taken a shower standing upright before. In hindsight, taking an upright shower seemed like running a marathon. There was one small section of tile near the floor that she kept pretty clean with a sponge, because while the water streamed down onto her head she liked to sit by the drain and rest her cheek against the wall there. With the water streaming down she could close her eyes and pretend she was a type of plant. All she had to do was sit there, indefinitely, and sometimes feel water. The drain creeped her out a little—it was hard not to wonder if Byron had found her and placed a camera inside it. Something harmful might come up through its holes one day.
Byron and Fiffany finding Hazel while working together as a power couple and executing her jointly would be even worse than Byron alone killing her. That would be just like middle school, with the popular girl winning once again. It was wrong and gross to still feel like marrying Byron had been an accomplishment, but Hazel did—it had been a win that a weird girl like her technically shouldn’t have gotten, according to social rules. Byron’s wife should’ve been Fiffany from the start. But it had been Hazel, and however sick a victory that was, it would be erased if they killed her as a pair and used her murder as a bonding opportunity, like a game of doubles tennis.
It was this thought that made her climb out of her shell a little and go use one of the Internet computers at the library. Of course she couldn’t check her e-mail or any other account as her old self. She also didn’t want to do a search for Byron or Fiffany or her own name, even though Byron’s was probably searched for by hundreds of thousands of people a day; anything that might place her needle in a haystack for one of his algorithms to find had to be avoided. So she just scanned front-page headlines of news sites and gleaned what she could from occasional mentions. Byron and Fiffany were definitely an item now. Had they been together before she’d moved out? Should she care? She supposed it was telling that what saddened her about that thought was not Byron having sex with Fiffany, but an ego sadness. She hated the thought of him having cheated on her with Fiffany while they were still married, being with both of them at once and comparing the two, with Hazel losing in every category. And with Fiffany aware that they were competing while Hazel was ignorant.
Not that she would’ve traded in her futuristic microfiber sweatpants for silk underwear and tried to swoon and seduce Byron back if she had known. But maybe she would’ve had a little more pride and awareness, for her own sake. Maybe she wouldn’t have snuck gas station candy inside the compound and eaten it in bed and occasionally forgotten the wrapper. Once Byron had rolled over and foil from a chocolate bar had come loose from the sheets and stuck to his cheek. He’d reacted like that scene in The Godfather where the man wakes up to find the severed head of a horse. She’d tried to downplay this indiscretion with comparison to an affair—“At least it wasn’t a condom wrapper,” she’d joked, but Byron didn’t find humor or relief in this statement. “They’re different causes of terror,” Byron said. “But equal vulgarities.”
The other people she really wanted to look up online, Jasper and Liver, didn’t exist online. Hazel found herself with no one to try to care deeply about. She didn’t want to develop feelings for anyone new in case Byron found her, or them.
She had an idea that one safe way to interact with people would be to make a fake social media account for an imaginary cute pet, like a guinea pig or a puppy. But even this seemed possibly too risky. What if the account became super popular and then was exposed as a hoax, the pictures all borrowed, and a nationwide hunt to find the deceptive human responsible for the account ensued? Maybe one of the biggest fans of the account, pre-exposure, would coincidentally be a librarian at the public library where Hazel used the Internet, and when chat rooms of angry scorned hackers determined the location of the computers where the account was checked and maintained, the librarian would offer to comb through video-security footage, checking against the times of the posts and discovering her. The whole Internet could know who she was and she wouldn’t know that they knew until she walked in to do another update and the librarian and a mob were there waiting for her.
Better to just look at cute animal images without making them a deceptive vehicle for interaction with other human beings.
WHEN BYRON AND FIFFANY MARRIED SIX MONTHS LATER, THEIR WEDDING was a far more public, promoted affair than Byron and Hazel’s had been. Instead of technology they were actively selling their love story; if the public bought that, they’d buy whatever Byron was going to peddle next.
It was what Fiffany said, or didn’t say, that made it so excruciating to listen to her talk in interviews. Every statement she uttered was a sentence Hazel herself could remember saying, some of them highly peculiar in context. Asked where they were thinking of going on their honeymoon, Fiffany said, “When I’m near a pool in a dry bathing suit, I have a phobia of the people whose suits are already wet. I’ve moved past it but I always have this fear that if I accidentally brush up against one of their arms, my suit will suddenly be wet too, saturated with pool water even though I haven’t been in the pool, which seems so frightening to me.” “I guess you’d rather not go to a tropical location then?” the reporter said.
Hazel hadn’t seen hours of footage of Fiffany speaking—she couldn’t bear to watch Fiffany and Byron’s prenuptial celebrity interview that appeared to be unilaterally aired and streamed on every major network and Web site—but she didn’t need to. She just knew. That had been the agreement that Fiffany had entered into, which was part of Hazel’s punishment: the only sentences Fiffany would be able to speak in public were sentences Hazel had spoken to Byron during the context of their marriage.
Why would Fiffany agree to something so messed up, Hazel wondered, to whatever neuroalterations were required for this software to function? Incredible wealth and also celebrity, she supposed. Hazel hadn’t wanted these—the judgment of the general public frightened her, plus the general public did not seem to go out of its way to find Hazel fascinating or engage with her—but Fiffany was well received and liked being in the media. And it was clever, the way Fiffany used Hazel’s former responses, often metaphorically. Maybe it was a fun sort of game for her. Hazel found herself wondering how its mental software worked, if Fiffany thought an internal question and then got to “see” her possible responses.
Hazel also wondered how Fiffany felt about her, and how much Fiffany
knew about what Byron had done. Maybe Fiffany knew everything and married him anyway. Maybe she didn’t think of him as evil.
Maybe she just saw Hazel as an idiot. Ungrateful in the extreme.
IT ALL MADE HAZEL FEEL EXTRA LONELY—THE PERSON TRYING TO kill her had a lover but she didn’t. One night she decided to try an anonymous hookup service. It was dangerous, but her life was already in danger and she’d spent so many years, her married years included, not really being touched. Since companionship was out of the picture, she thought random sex might be the nicest physical thing she could experience with another person.
The way the service worked was that you called in and gave a day and a time but no name, and then you chose whether you wanted to get an address or give one. She gave her real address since she already lived in a seedy motel. There were no possessions to indicate her extended stay; they’d just assume she’d rented the room for the evening. “Is there anything specific I should tell him?” the operator asked. Make sure he likes the smell of French fries, Hazel thought. She requested someone sober, so there would be more of a chance that he was as miserable as she was. “As little talking as possible,” Hazel decided. The operator went on to ask what she’d like to consent to, then recited a long grocery list of activities that Hazel could say yes or no to ahead of time, including things she hadn’t ever thought about. “Afterward, can your partner use the bathing facilities?” Hazel thought again of the possible drain camera. “Well, the toilet is totally fair game at all times,” she said. “But no shower.” Because if Byron was spying on her with a toilet cam, it seemed like the shame was more on him no matter what her guests or activities entailed.
When the guy showed up, he looked normal to the point of obscurity, like an extra in a movie. He was well dressed and Hazel wondered if he would change his mind when he saw her. His consent list was far longer than hers; she was allowed to take initiation liberties, and she figured she should just go for it right away and know immediately if he wouldn’t be partaking. So when he closed the door she ran to him like a beloved fiancée returned from overseas, throwing her arms around him and kissing and groping him passionately.
Right from the start she simultaneously wanted it to never end and already be over. She hadn’t expected to feel jealous, possessive feelings when they got into her bed—it was an awful bed, but almost immediately she resented having to share it, even though it had been her idea. Though she was comforted by the fact that she’d get to sleep in it alone. For her, an overnight sleepover was a nonconsent item, though she hadn’t ruled out the possibility of a tandem nap.
It surprised her how it felt affectionate. She’d always assumed that intimacy required love or at the very least a baseline of shared familiarities, but she decided now that that wasn’t the case. The man was kissing her neck and rubbing her nipples with the firm-but-not-hard grope she’d requested over the phone, and she felt incredibly close to him, incredibly thankful for the feel of his skin against hers. He spooned around her, running his fingertips up and down her inner thighs while they kissed and she moaned and writhed, and when she was ready she faced away from him and buried her face in her pillow and the musty linen and the French-fry smell transformed into something deeper and sweeter, and for a moment she escaped herself and all things entirely—her head rose out of the ocean of her life and she took a clear breath of everything beyond her situation before sinking underneath again and opening her eyes.
When they were finished, she found she didn’t want to turn around to look at him and realized she couldn’t remember his face at all—she hadn’t taken a long glance before attacking him with her mouth. The man couldn’t secretly be Byron because he was far better at touching and kissing than Byron. But what an awful shock that would be: if the man’s mustache ripped off then the skin around his neck lifted up and turned out to be a latex balaclava with Byron’s face beneath it. Hey, gotcha!
Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, she could turn to find her anonymous lover seemingly at rest, start to cover him up with a sheet then notice a long blade protruding from his abdomen and the spreading pool of warm blood. Was he bothering you, darlin’? Liver would ask, drawing the blade back, his right eye coming to life with a few enthusiastic twitches. Or did I overreact? And he’d proceed to tell her how he’d tracked her down using mammalian intuitions and techniques that technology could never replicate. And then she’d have to stay with him, since he’d killed someone for her, even though it hadn’t been for her at all, really. Kind of like how since Jasper had saved her life, she no longer felt that she was allowed to kill herself. Even though the saving was more about him and she hadn’t really wanted to be saved.
What other horrors might she see if she rolled over? Maybe this onetime lover next to her, asleep, but then her mother’s very awake ghost lying right next to him, pissed off and ready to talk about it. Are you kidding me with this casual promiscuity? Her mother wasn’t from New Jersey, but Hazel could see her ghost picking up the accent; it would be a personality fit. Are you doing this because you’re desperate to get pregnant? I know I told you once that I wanted a grandchild under any circumstances, but I’ve reconsidered. Certainly you will never turn your own life around, but I don’t even think you’re capable of being a neutral vessel. Even if the baby were whisked away from you at birth, the gravity of your curse would be inescapable. It’s not fair to irreversibly doom the young. Her father, luckily, would never haunt. He’d feel it to be weak somehow. An afterlife form of whining.
Hazel shook her head in horror and felt a hand on her arm. It was warm, human, far better than the cold pinch of her mother’s ghost. Maybe it was Jasper, his face contrite, explaining that he had indeed tried to be good but just wasn’t; Gogol had caught up with him and it was either he go down or she did, and since he was more attractive, more fun and charming, he felt he had more of a right to life, plus Byron was her enraged ex after all, not his, and then Jasper would pull out a syringe and stick an anti-antidote into her arm and the chip would turn back on and she’d be back to square one.
But it was just the anonymous man, just a squeeze. He got up and left without speaking or saying good-bye. She’d asked for this, but when it happened she felt disappointed. She supposed there was no way to avoid disappointment.
But she didn’t feel disappointed overall. She’d just had a pleasant experience. Did that mean that something bad was about to happen? Didn’t pleasure always come with a shadow?
For a few weeks afterward she thought of trying the service again, maybe this time getting a room elsewhere for the night as a precaution. Then on her walk to work, she saw the sign.
Across the street from the diner, in the same plaza as the pizza restaurant, a Gogol store was coming.
It was probably a coincidence?
But what if it wasn’t? Was the man from the hookup service somehow connected to Gogol?
Hazel walked up to the storefront’s glass, which she knew would have been replaced—it was a spec for all Gogol stores to have windows made with a finish that couldn’t be smudged or scratched; when you breathed on it, your breath did not show up. Most disconcerting of all was that it didn’t reflect. There was no way to impose your physical human experience on it. Someone could throw a bucket of blood at it (Hazel had actually seen this demonstrated in the lab) and every drop would bounce right off like a miniature red tennis ball. “Incredible!” Hazel had exclaimed to Byron when he’d showed her. She’d acted interested and awed. “It can’t be destroyed?” “It can,” he’d answered. “But not with items passing consumers will have.” This had given Hazel a fantasy of getting one such item, she had no idea what—a diamond drill bit?—putting on a blue wig and going to deface one of the stores, pulling off the disguise at a critical moment and yelling into the security camera: I hate Byron and I hate Gogol; I am miserable and I want people to know. If you get close enough to him that you can hear his breathing and you really listen, you will find it has a sharp tinkling sound to it, t
he sound of like really small toenail clippings being scattered over the top of a sheet of ice, rodent nail clippings probably. Anyone who makes that sound when they inhale is a bad person. But then she would’ve looked crazy, and Byron would’ve been awarded some sort of psychiatric guardianship over her, and she never would’ve left The Hub again.
She couldn’t trust that a store opening so close to her job was a coincidence. And she shouldn’t have let a stranger come to her hotel room.
Hazel worked her shift like normal, but that evening found Ms. Cheese behind her desk in the office, listening to an AM talk-radio show and soaking her feet in a large bucket that had once held chicken gravy. The show’s host was interviewing a woman who’d had a near-death experience and claimed to have temporarily gone to heaven. “There are a lot of TVs up there,” the woman said. “Almost everywhere you look there’s a TV, and they float in the air alongside you wherever you go. That’s one thing I’m looking forward to now about dying. In heaven I’ll be able to watch my stories while I stroll down to the bus stop. I’m pretty sure I saw one or two bus stops there. What takes getting used to in heaven is that no one talks; they sing everything. Even the voices on the TV sing. At first it seems like a little much. I thought, ‘This could start to get on my nerves.’ But everyone’s voice was pretty decent. After a while it seemed normal. When I came out of the coma, everyone talking was what sounded strange. My husband and I only sing when we’re at home now. I’ve come to prefer that. It’s hard for me to talk to you like this right now, in fact. Talking feels like forcing a smile.”
The office didn’t have a door, so Hazel knocked on the wall. Ms. Cheese slid her glasses down and looked up with skepticism. “Shit,” she said.
“Yeah. I have to leave town,” Hazel said. “I’m sorry for the short notice. This has been a great job.”
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