by Julian Gough
‘It’s too late!’ she says, too loud. ‘Sorry . . .’
He is ticcing like crazy, tapping the table with his hands in a rhythm, tapping the legs of the table, to either side, with his feet; trying to keep talking against the desire to shut down.
He doesn’t want to look at her, but he knows she likes it when he looks at her, so he raises his head. Looks into her eyes. ‘You always tell me it’s never too late,’ he says. Holding his gaze there, against the resistance, he feels a familiar, painful, burning sensation in his own eyes, but it’s working, she is listening. ‘You always tell me that when someone is special, then the system has to make an exception.’
‘But I’m not special,’ says Naomi.
All the tics stop. This one is easy. There is no internal resistance. ‘Yes you are, Mama.’
She can’t think of anything to say. She looks away, looks around the room, for something, for what, a way out? A way out of what?
‘But what if they say yes?’ she says.
‘Then you’ll go,’ says Colt, and for a second Naomi thinks he sounds like his father and she gives a little involuntary huh.
‘We don’t have the money, honey,’ she says.
‘If they accept the paper, they’ll pay your flights and hotels.’
‘You won’t eat.’
‘I will.’
‘You won’t eat proper food.’
‘I will.’
‘You’ll just play games all day and forget to eat.’
‘You can make me smoothies. Leave them in the fridge.’
‘You can’t just eat smoothies.’
‘You can put vegetables in them.’
Hmmm. Major concession.
‘Peas?’ she says. Get this nailed down. No wriggle room.
‘Sure.’
‘Carrots?’
‘Sure.’
‘Spinach?’ she says. Pause. OK, she got carried away. Pull back. ‘Just a little spinach. With a lot of peanut butter.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’ll drink them?’
Pause.
‘Yes,’ says Colt. ‘As long as they don’t go off or something. But I’ll leave the spinach till last. So I can’t guarantee I’ll have eaten it by the time you get back.’
Hmmmm. OK, don’t push it. There are bigger issues. ‘I can’t just . . . leave you. I could ask Shannon to drop by . . .’
‘NO!’
‘OK, OK . . . but I have to have some way to . . .’ Careful. ‘. . . to know you’re all right . . .’
‘No cameras, Mama.’
She nods. ‘I know, no cameras.’ She glances up, in reflex, at the far corner of the kitchen ceiling. He’d broken all the house security cams with a chair, in a rage, years ago. Yes, the aluminium bracket was still there, painted over . . . Her heart lurches as she remembers. He’d started with the camera in his bedroom. She’d been watching him, worried about his comics habit. Inappropriate comics. She’d finally shouted out a warning from the kitchen, and he’d lost it.
Reading too much. Imagine, that used to be her biggest worry . . .
‘But can I monitor . . . just send me your heartbeat. Just so I know you’re OK. I’ll wear my old bracelet.’
He thinks about it. ‘OK, Mom. Just my heartbeat, though.’
She smiles. ‘Don’t worry, I only want your heartbeat.’
The last time she’d had to work late on a project, when he was fourteen, she’d monitored everything, obsessively. His helmet sent her an outline of his heartbeat, brain activity, electrodermal activity, breathing rate, movement . . . Too much data. An hour after she left, he’d laughed so hard at a cartoon, he’d slipped off his chair. All the data spiked. She thought he’d had a seizure, and rang him in a screaming panic that had terrified him.
He’d hung up, switched off everything, and she thought he’d died. Called an ambulance. Drove home sobbing . . .
She shakes the memory out of her head. ‘Just your heartbeat.’
10
Later that night she kicks off the sheet, in her sleep. It’s too hot. She lies on her back, dreaming. Her eyes flick back and forth beneath the thin skin of her eyelids. Her nipples stir, and rise. She moves her legs apart, and moans.
11
They accept her paper the next morning, and she has two days to organize, worry, and pack.
12
The morning of the flight, as she arranges Colt’s smoothies along the cool bottom shelf of the refrigerator in a neat line, she thinks about New York. Unconsciously, she tilts her head back, as though looking up from the bottom of a skyscraper canyon.
The sky made too small, pushed too high by the black glass cliffs.
The rivers of cars roaring past, a few feet away.
The honk and bray and squeal of horns and tyres, like animals fighting, fleeing, fucking.
The thought of New York fills her with primal terror.
She closes the refrigerator door more abruptly than she’d intended, and hears the smoothies in their glass bottles rock and clink against each other inside.
She walks, fast, to her room, and throws open the door so hard she knocks their little solar-powered DustMight halfway across the room.
Damn. Last thing I need, having to buy a new cleaner.
The small squeaky old bot must have been sitting just inside the door, recharging in a pool of sunshine. It wriggles its legs in the air – Colt modified it a couple of years back to look like a turtle – rights itself, and gets out of her way.
She strides past it, to her jewellery drawer.
The DustMight squeaks away to safety under the bed, and starts quietly cleaning.
Naomi digs out her old health monitor, powers it up, changes settings until the soft silvery warm plastic pulses gently against her wrist. His heartbeat, in realtime. It calms hers.
She smiles. It was a fashion for a while, for lovers to do this. Mirror each other’s heartbeats, till they synchronized.
There is something else she wants.
Gold, she thinks.
Where is it?
She can always pawn the gold ring. There are still pawn shops in New York, aren’t there?
It is as though she fears that if she leaves Colt behind, civilization might immediately collapse, and all the computers fail, and electronic money with them. She knows this is insane. But nonetheless, that is how she feels.
She pulls the drawer further out, and sees the black-and-silver Beretta pistol Ryan gave her one Christmas, for protection. Tiny, designed for a purse or pocket. With almost no barrel, it looks strange, not quite right; like a toy for adults. Ryan made her learn to shoot it, on a firing range; but she hasn’t touched it since he left. No, I’m not bringing a gun . . . She glances involuntarily at the top of the wardrobe. The ammunition he left behind is still up there. Where she used to hide Colt’s Christmas presents, and her vibrator . . .
She shakes memories out of her head.
The ring is at the back of the drawer.
Buried under everything.
Her body automatically slips the ring onto her finger, without her conscious mind noticing. Deep programming, a routine run thousands of times since she was a little girl. Very simple, she could code it in a few lines. See a ring; pick it up; roll it back and forth between finger and thumb; find the most comfortable finger;
No—
Maybe—
Yes;
Slide it past the knuckle; examine the ring on the finger while rotating the hand.
Her body lifts and turns her hand in front of her face.
The ring bends the whole room into itself, pulling Naomi’s shocked face into a liquid curve, like matter about to vanish down a black hole. She shakes her head so hard her hair slaps her cheeks.
She pulls at the wedding ring; pulls harder; and the skin of her knuckle bunches and jams, and she can’t get the ring off.
His fucking ring.
Oh God damn.
She has stuff to do, the flight leaves soon, she’s alr
eady tight for time . . .
Calm down.
She studies the stuck ring. Golden light comes off it, the light of the sun. She thinks about the photons, as they strike the back of her eye. She thinks about the speed of light.
Of one photon. A packet of energy, released abruptly by some tortured atom.
People don’t understand the sun, she thinks. It’s having a breakdown. An incredibly slow breakdown.
As a kid in San Francisco, she used to think the sun was God. She would walk out of church with her mother, and stare up at God, smiling down on her.
Now she lives in the desert and the sun is no longer God and its light has no meaning and is too harsh.
She remembers when she just saw the ring, the pretty ring, the sparkling light. The surface was enough. The stuff she knows now – about light, and gold, and the universe – scares her, makes her feel small. It’s beautiful too, but it’s too big, too much. God has moved further and further away and now she can’t see him at all. She’s not sure where he can be. The universe got bigger and bigger, the gaps were filled with dark matter, dark energy, and now there’s nowhere left for God to hide.
Her mother believed, right to the end.
She wipes the sleeve of her dress across her eyes, hard.
Pulls open a second drawer, reaches into the back; rummages around. All that ridiculous stuff . . .
There. An old bottle of lubricant. She wipes the dust off the shoulders of the bottle; flips the lid back.
Drips a drop to either side of the golden loop. Works the lubricant into the dry skin of her knuckle.
Slowly, carefully, she removes the ring.
13
Naomi looks out the window of the plane. Nevada is crumpled up beneath her like corrugated cardboard, range after range. Grey, treeless ridges, running north to south. She looks down into the hidden valleys; a glint of water. That’s where the trees hide.
Ryan never saw the valleys, she thinks, he only saw the mountains. Oh, what does that even mean? She’s so tired.
She rests her forehead against the window. It is cool. She closes her eyes and sees Ryan’s face, looking away from her, looking down, on some mountains, the Rockies? Yes, out of an airplane window, unaware of her studying him; a memory, from some flight together, long ago.
She studies him again, in memory, and, without opening her eyes, she rubs the inside of her left wrist gently with the fingertips of her right hand, and says a word to herself. A word she has never said aloud.
She expects to feel the vibration of the engines through the window, through her forehead; but she doesn’t.
Double-glazed, she thinks woozily. Rubber seals.
Listening for the vibration of the engines, she notices, instead, a high-pitched whine from somewhere inside the cabin. So constant, she had been filtering it out.
Compressor? Part of the air conditioning maybe . . .
It matches a noise she carries inside her.
More memories. Let them come. She’s safe. Eight miles high.
Oh, San Francisco . . . One Saturday afternoon, when she was very young, and her family still lived in the old rotting wooden house in Outer Sunset, her father came home sober with a small white plastic box that had an electrical plug sticking out the back.
She followed her father into her room, and watched as he plugged it into the socket beside her bed. Nothing seemed to happen. She asked him what it was.
He knelt down, stroked the white plastic box with his hand, and explained that when you switched it on, it gave out a sound that was too high-pitched for humans to hear, but that mice could hear it, and it scared the mice. It was very loud to them, because their tiny ears could hear the very short waves of high-frequency sounds. It reminded them of the shriek of an owl. And she wouldn’t have mice in her room any more.
He switched it on, and she heard, like a tingle in her brain, like something very far away, at the top of a mountain, a shriek so high-pitched it was almost not there. ‘I can hear it, Daddy,’ she said.
‘No, you can’t,’ said her father. ‘It’s your imagination.’
‘No, I can really hear it.’
‘I hear nothing,’ said her father.
She lay in bed that night, listening to the high-pitched shriek. It reminded her, too, of the shriek of an owl.
She never saw a mouse in her room again. She had never told her father that she liked the mice in her room, that she had given them names. And it was too late now.
Going to bed each night from then on, she knew she could hear the shriek. But her father had assured her she could not. Therefore she could not hear the shriek. So she acted as though she could not. She believed she could not hear it; but she knew she could hear it. Whenever she thought about this split in her mind, her chest grew tense, and it became hard to breathe. So she tried not to think about it.
The shriek in her bedroom continued for the rest of her childhood.
14
Colt hesitates. He really needs those components. He’s done so much work on this project already, it would be a shame not to go through with it, while he has the chance.
And it’s only a few dollars more. Mama won’t miss it. And she still owes him money for chores, from last year.
Colt hits ‘Buy Now’.
I guess maybe I am going to do it, then.
15
Naomi wakes, with her heart pounding. Her neck is stiff and twisted.
She blinks at a pale void. Not sure where she is. Her bedroom? She tries to focus. But the grey before her eyes won’t resolve, it just gets darker.
No, there’s something, right in front of her face.
So close, it hurts the muscles in her eyes.
Tiny white crystals, an inch away. Frost.
Her head is against an airplane window.
She’s on the plane. Now she remembers.
Not in her bedroom. Not a kid, no. Thank Christ. That shriek, it’s the plane.
They are descending through cloud.
The plane sways, lurches, and Naomi’s face bangs, very lightly, against the window. She sits back in her seat.
OK. Landing soon.
Wait, there was something she needed to do. She slides a hand into her pants pocket; yes, all her money is still there, in loose notes; she had been in such a hurry in the airport, at the ATM, she had just shoved it all into her pocket, and run.
She pulls them out. New dollars. Crisp, a little plasticky, all with a single off-centre angled crease. She studies them. Hmmm. She preferred the old design, but that’s progress. Too easy to copy.
Carefully, she distributes the notes between all the pockets of her blouse and jacket and pants. Just a fifty in her purse. In case she is mugged. They won’t get everything. Her father taught her this, the day she left for college. Back in the days of cash and credit cards. Knowledge from his years as a minor Party official in Nanjing, selling even more minor Party jobs to the highest bidder. Sewage workers, who wanted their son to wear a suit. Taking bribes in cash and goods. Six televisions under a tarpaulin on the balcony. The complicated dance involved in getting his illegal assets out of China, the bribes he had to pay in his turn, and in the end, after all that effort and risk and fear, it was just enough to buy a rotting house with bad plumbing, and he couldn’t hold down a job in the new world, couldn’t stop drinking, couldn’t make it work.
She hides her dollars inside tissues in all her pockets. The last thing he taught her; she never saw him again. Just a waxy body wearing his suit. Not him.
She counts it, as she distributes it, and her throat dries. Will it be enough? It will be enough. It has to be enough.
She’s left Colt with some money, and food in the fridge, and instructions on how to order a pizza, in case the food runs out.
She knows, logically, that she can do everything, pay for everything, electronically, automatically; but this primitive fear she feels, travelling to a big city, is calmed by a little cash in her hand, gold in her pocket, as though she were
going back in time, or into a fairytale world.
Gold. A sword. Dragons.
Everything is fine.
Her father took money too seriously. All the money he smuggled out of China, and then lost straight away, buying that lousy money-pit of a house. And then making small, stupid, ever-riskier investments with the little he had left, trying to make up for that first mistake. Thinking he was clever, thinking he understood money, understood America.
Naomi’s uncle burned piles of money on the day of his brother’s funeral, struggling with the lighter by the graveside in the breeze off the bay. Not real money, fake notes, to symbolize money, so her father would have it in the next world. The Catholic priest looked puzzled, but said nothing. Her mother looked on, stonefaced. She’d lied and told the priest yes, her husband had been Catholic all his life, too.
Money is dirt, muttered her mother beside her. Money is dirt.
Naomi looked up, away from the grave, at the blue sky, the white clouds, the flecks of glowing ash ascending to where God used to be. Some green notes blowing into the open grave . . . She missed her stupid, angry father.
She missed God.
Focus. You’re landing soon . . . Wait, do I have enough pills in my pillbox . . .
She jerks upright in her seat, the seatbelt tightening.
Oh no . . .
Her snort of embarrassed laugher is so loud, the old white woman across the aisle turns to look at her.
There are more than enough pills in her pillbox.
But the pillbox is still in the fridge.
Well, I’ve always felt conflicted about taking them . . .
She smiles as she remembers. It’s a wry smile. She’d been friends with some of the team in UC Berkeley who developed the active ingredient. Pfizer first launched it as a mildly effective antianxiety medication. But they’d only tested it on men; in women, the little green pills turned out to have the unfortunate side effect of completely suppressing the libido. The drug was a major flop.
But when Pfizer rebranded and relaunched it, as a successful sex-drive suppressant for women too busy for sex (with the happy side effect of slightly lowering anxiety), it was a huge hit. So huge, they got bomb threats, from young men angry that Pfizer had helped millions of women escape from ever having to date them.