Entanglements

by Tomorrow’s Lovers, Families

  She pushes the ginger ale across the table. “Pour yourself some more. Better you do it. I’m so clumsy these days.” She leans back, rubbing her bad wrist. “You know, the fingers on this hand barely feel a thing anymore. Not a thing.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I know.”

  I leave my grandma’s place with a chunk of banana bread wrapped in wax paper, promising to face-call her more often. Outside it’s gotten dark, and it’s raining the big slippery sheets that turn the icy sidewalks into a deathtrap. I should have asked to borrow her umbrella. Springtime in Ottawa: an endless freeze and thaw, skin-prickling humidity, late snowstorms that get worse every year. Even ninety-seven-year-olds believe in climate change now.

  I had vague plans to meet friends downtown later, but when my phone buzzes I pull it out to find a message from my avatar: Hey, brother. Got you a date.

  I open the dating notification to see the profile. A fat raindrop splatters the screen and obscures her face, and that kind of date seems perfect right now. With friends I would feel the need to work through this whole echo conversation I just had with the woman who halfway-raised me as a kid. With a stranger I can just not think about it.

  I duck into a bus shelter and take a better look at the situation. Her name is Ana and our avatars have been hard at work ever since I got into town a few days ago, evaluating compatibility and churning out a dummy conversation. I skim through it. We’ve been talking about Colombia, where her dad is from and where I vacationed last summer, and complaining about the weather in Ottawa. But also talking dirty in Spanish, which is an interesting development I’ve never seen before.

  She’s photo beautiful—apparently she does some modeling as well as working for the Canada Revenue Agency, so her main photo is from a shoot in a warehouse somewhere, backlit eerie Matrix green. Her textured black dress clings hard to the curve of her back, and she’s doing that wrist-on-the-forehead pose models sometimes do. Her hair is dyed red, and her lipstick is the same shade.

  There’s a loop of her at New Year’s opening a champagne bottle surrounded by people facially similar to her, probably family members, and another of her posing with a purple beach ball by a sunny pool at a Vegas hotel. There’s a tattoo on her tanned ribcage, letters I can’t make out.

  She lives across the border, all the way out in fucking Aylmer, Quebec, but suddenly I’ve always wanted to go to Aylmer, Quebec. Our avatars have it all worked out. At 8:30 p.m. we’re meeting at Bistro Mexicana 129, because there’s no Colombian restaurant, and from there the date can branch to a British pub around the corner or to her place.

  I hope her place, partly because driverless cars are still illegal in Quebec and it can be hard to get a traditional Lyft all the way back into Ottawa in the middle of the night. My phone buzzes again, my avatar prompting me to order my first ride. It takes a half hour to get to Aylmer with standard traffic, and it’s 7:58 p.m.

  I’ll see friends tomorrow. I order the ride. A pictogram of the car drifts and swivels on my phone’s map, heading my way, and I put the whole echo thing as far out of my mind as possible.

  Bistro Mexicana 129 is empty aside from an elderly couple in the corner and a black-haired waitress. I try her in Spanish and get a blank look, then switch to English even though I really should be talking French since I’m out here in Quebec. I tell her it’s my first time in Aylmer and she says in summer it’s nice and we make some small talk while I select a table for two just off the bar.

  Ana shows up in her work clothes, some kind of beige pantsuit thing, government ID on a lanyard around her neck. “Sorry I’m late,” she says. “Had to steal my stepdad’s car to get here. Not his good car. The shitty one.”

  I’m confused until I remember the no self-driving cars in Quebec thing. I get up for a hug and then we both sit down. She’s not as beautiful without angles and airbrushing, but who is, and in real life she smells good and has this sexy kind of smirk like she’s remembering a dirty joke.

  “Why didn’t you steal the good one?” I ask.

  “He still hasn’t forgiven me from last time,” she says. “When I was seventeen I took his Mercedes to a house party and cops showed up and we left in such a hurry I swiped all the paint off a parked car. Like this big huge stripe. I tried to tell him it could be a racing stripe.” She picks up a menu. “I’m normally a lot prettier for dates,” she says. “Worked late today. Budget stuff.”

  “I’m normally way prettier too,” I say, taking my toque off. “Usually I spend two hours minimum on my hair. Today I did only one.”

  She does the smirk again. “Only one, huh. Slacker.”

  “One and a half.”

  “You’re pretty pretty anyway,” she says, and from the way she says it it becomes clear we’re going to fuck later.

  She orders a Purple Rain cocktail, which looks like a fishbowl full of purple Kool-Aid and ice cubes. I get some kind of Quebecois IPA. We clink drinks.

  “You have to drink it fast,” I say. “Before the fish dies of alcohol poisoning.”

  “There’s no alcohol in this,” she says. “Just codeine.”

  I can see why our avatars jibed. We have the same sense of humor and the same kind of stories from our partying days, though hers blow mine out of the water: accidentally taking a limousine from Las Vegas to Salt Lake City with a trio of high-class hookers, forgetting she had drunkenly bought a baggie of coke in Honduras and only finding it in her bag after she got through airport security in Montreal, and once getting abducted by aliens.

  “Either that or I broke into the Biodome,” she says. “But I disappeared from the club and showed up half an hour later at my friend’s place covered in burrs.”

  “In birds?”

  “Burrs. And I had twigs and leaves and stuff in my hair, and I kept saying I ran through the forest. But there’s no parks around there, nothing except the Biodome, and the Biodome has a huge fence.” She shrugs. “I do like to climb stuff when I drink.”

  “I’ll find us a park.”

  She does a snorting kind of laugh, then takes out her phone and thumbs furiously for a few seconds before she looks up. “Hablas espanol, verdad?”

  “Hombre, claro.”

  “Que hiciste en Colombia? Fuiste de vacaciones o que?”

  “Si, vacaciones,” I say, doing an exaggerated sniff. “You’re only just reading the dummy convo now? You must really trust your avatar.”

  “I mean, that’s the whole point,” she says. “They know us better than we do, right?” She drains the last of the purple concoction and wipes her mouth. “I think I want to get you drunk.”

  I point to the empty bowl. “You swallowed the fish.”

  “Fuck yeah, I did.”

  She asks the waitress for tequila, any kind of tequila, and when the waitress asks our price range I say, because I suspect I’m paying, please think of us as poor.

  “So you live with your stepdad?” I ask, because it’s time to start working out logistics.

  “No,” she says. “I live at my place. With my four-year-old, but he’s at grandma’s for the weekend.”

  “Fun,” I say. Usually my avatar would notify me about someone having a kid, but my avatar also knows I don’t live here. So does hers. They know it’s just tonight.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I’ve got phantom four-year-old syndrome. I feel him walking along behind me or grabbing my hand, then I turn around and he’s not there. It’s freaky.”

  The tequila shots arrive on a little wooden board with salt and slices of lime. We clink them together. It goes down smoother than anticipated, and then we’re off to her place.

  Ana claims her apartment is a disaster zone and she cannot, in good conscience, let me inside until she cleans up a little.

  “So here’s the plan,” she says. “You go grab us a bottle of wine. At that liquor store.” She points out the glowing sign through the freezing drizzle. “It takes ten minutes to walk there with a four-year-old, probably half that without one. So I’ll have time to
clean up. Oh, you might meet Patricia!”

  At this point I’m buzzed enough to accept all sorts of plans. “Sure. Who’s Patricia?”

  “She works there,” Ana says. “She’s my best friend.”

  “You smell good,” I say.

  “Thank you,” she says. “I take no chances with that shit. I’ve got no sense of smell, so I’m always wearing perfume.”

  “My grandma lost hers, too. She made me swear to always tell her if she stinks.”

  She taps the tip of her nose. “It’s ’cause I busted my nose.”

  “Too much coke, huh. Ruptured septum.”

  “Not even. When I was five I broke my face running into a wall. I thought it would open up and take me to Narnia.” She traces the bridge of her nose. “So this is a little crooked and I can’t smell stuff and there’s a little dent in my forehead. You can touch it if you want.”

  I reach over and feel the small divot above her eyebrow.

  “I’m really good with my angles,” she says. “So the crookedness doesn’t show up in photos.”

  Then we clamber out of her stepdad’s Toyota Corolla and part ways: she darts through the puddles to the apartment door; I flip up the hood of my coat and start trudging down the road. I’m insulated by the alcohol and by the fact that I’m kind of fascinated and infatuated with this Ana who got abducted from a nightclub by aliens and tried to run through a wall to Narnia. Avatars always know, somehow.

  A delivery drone stutters through the rain up above me, illuminated in orange flashes as it passes the streetlamps. The space and emptiness remind me of Alberta—infrastructure designed for cars, not for people. But the walk goes fast without a four-year-old, and few minutes later I hop across the four-lane, cross the parking lot, and walk into the liquor store. A camera scans my face for ID on my way to the cooler.

  The cashier is a woman with a red shirt and salt-and-pepper hair in a raggedly fashionable cut. “Hey,” she says when I put the Riesling down. “How’s it going?”

  “Good,” I say, checking her nametag.

  “You look sad.”

  That catches me a little off-guard. “I always look sad,” I say. “Bad face muscles, I think. You’re Ana’s friend.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re Patricia.” My phone blips the payment over. “You’re friends with Ana.”

  “Oh. With Ana Marie. Yeah, I am.” She gives me a more scrutinizing look. “You dating her?”

  I do a drunk kind of smirk while I put the bottle in my coat. I feel the wrapped up slice of banana bread that I’d forgotten about. “Just friends.”

  “You’ll need two bottles for Ana,” Patricia says. “I recommend two bottles.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I also have banana bread.”

  I call Ana from the stoop and tell her I’m from the hurricane inspection committee, heard about a real bad one inside her apartment, and she buzzes the door open. I jog up the stairwell, which has steps capped in brown rubber and a strong smell of weed. She lives in 301; when she opens the door, she is wearing pink pajamas instead of her work clothes.

  “I met Patricia,” I tell her. “She said I look sad.”

  Ana grabs the wine out of my unzipped coat. “She says that to everyone.”

  The apartment is still a disaster zone, mostly because kid’s toys are scattered all over the place: books and blocks and action figures and a little holotable I would have loved to have when I was little. One of those annoying yellow balls that jumps and rolls on its own is meandering around the floor. Clothes are heaped in the corners. A Colombian flag covers one window.

  I trail Ana to the kitchen, where she’s retrieving wine glasses. There’s a designer purse sitting on top of the stove; the stove clock is about three hours behind. Several big flower bouquets are on the counter beside it with the delivery tags still on. Marilyn Monroe is all over the walls in black and white, which is never a good sign, and empty wine bottles abound.

  “I never bring people back here,” she says. “Definitely not on the first date.”

  And I think, she says that to everyone, but I don’t say it because I know a lot of people still like to play pretend this way, and who knows, she might even be telling the truth. She does have a kid.

  “I don’t even know what to do now,” she says.

  I kiss her, and things continue from there. We end up on the couch playing truth-or-dare with ancient reruns of Bob’s Burgers playing on the screen in the background, no doubt recreating some high school hookup of hers, and the wine goes fast. She pulls some beers out of the fridge. We have a businesslike discussion about the pros and cons of bed versus couch with my hand under her shirt, then migrate to her bed.

  The shirt comes off and I see that tattoo from the poolside loop, characters I don’t recognize underneath her left breast. “What is that?” I ask.

  “My son’s birthday,” she says. “In Arabic. My first boyfriend was Arabic, and he was an asshole. He’s in jail. Then I slept with his friend. Then I dated an Italian guy for a while. You’re number four.” She peels my shirt off and gains a look of mild disappointment. “You don’t have any tattoos.”

  “Never had anything important enough,” I say. “I always think, maybe when someone really important to me dies.”

  She makes a face.

  “I get your thing, though,” I say, sliding off my pants. “I get loving your kid. That’s like a biological compulsion. People love their kids like crazy.”

  “Shut up,” she says. “Don’t talk about kids while we’re having sex.”

  And I get what I want, which is not the sex but the forgetting, the moment where you can’t think about anything, not looking sad or people dying or getting old or any of it. It’s drunk and sloppy but when we work together on her clit she manages to come a couple times too, and then we lie there together for a long time. Eventually she peels herself off me and heads for the bathroom. She comes back setting an alarm on her phone.

  “I gotta get up super early to return my stepdad’s car,” she says. “I carpool to work with him and my brother. You can keep sleeping.”

  She clambers back into the bed and wraps herself around me. There’s still that tender feeling, the hormone serotonin afterglow that fools you into thinking you know a person. So as I’m drifting off I ask her if she knows about echoes.

  Her hand stops stroking my shoulder. “What?”

  “This brain-copying technology,” I say. “My mom’s a neural engineer. You know how our avatars work? Like, reading all our messages, all our ad info, then saying whatever we would say? This is the deep version of that. The raw material isn’t text. It’s actual brain activity. So the echo thinks how the person thinks. They’re doing a pilot program now for the compact model. A take-home thing.”

  She rolls over. “I know about echoes. And the pilot program. Go to sleep.”

  I try, but she snores like a motherfucker.

  It’s 11:07 a.m. when I wake up for real, and Ana is long gone. I can feel the start of a cold sitting in the back of my throat, and I’m pretty sure she gave it to me. Between her snoring and her hogging the blanket, I didn’t sleep so well—to be honest, I never sleep so well with someone else in the bed—and I was still half-awake when she left earlier in the morning. I dimly remember a conversation where she griped about not having time to wash her hair and asked for input on her outfit, wondering if she could get away with shredded jeans because it’s Friday.

  I badly need to shit, so I roll off the mattress and head straight for the bathroom without bothering to find my strewn-everywhere clothes. Her bathroom did not escape the hurricane: every single surface, from the counter to the top of the toilet to the edge of the tub, is crowded with eco-friendly cleaning products, candles, cologne bottles, lotions, razors, scissors, pads, a kid’s Dalmation-shaped toothbrush, a curling iron, makeup, and deodorant bars. And yet there is no toilet paper on the roll, which of course I notice only after I’m done shitting.

  “Goddamnit, A
na,” I say, then start hunting. There’s none in the cup-board under the sink and none in the squeaky-hinged closet. I’m checking the plastic drawers for wet wipes when a familiar size of baggie catches my eye. I pick it up, try to guess how many grams it is. The smell of cocaine always reminds me of something my grandma used to bake peppermint cookies with, not so much in the smell itself but in the way it stings your nose.

  I absentmindedly crush the lumps out of it, then since I’m still a little drunk I open the baggie and take a bump off my thumb. It occurs to me that the plastic drawers are definitely within reach of a four-year-old. I go grab my phone and message Ana to ask if she minds me taking a bump.

  The four grams in the bathroom? Don’t, I’m selling it. I can get you some though.

  I ask her about the toilet paper.

  Check the pantry maybe. I forgot my gov ID; can you bring it to my work? Haha.

  I take the coke with me into the kitchen, still buck naked with an unclean asshole, and find a spot for it up in a high cupboard beside a wooden pepper grinder. Then I open the pantry. The first thing I see is a box of animal crackers, which makes my stomach give a nostalgic churn of hunger. More importantly, there’s an open package of toilet paper. I grab a fluffy new roll and am about to head back to the bathroom when something else catches my eye. Up on the highest shelf: a slice of familiar packaging, a tangle of dangling electrodes.

  I remember what Ana said when I asked her about echoes, and what she said about her kid being at grandma’s for the weekend, and I figure her mom must be in the pilot program, must be dying of cancer or something. Maybe she’s trying to convince her to wear the web the same way I’m trying to convince my grandma.

  The coke has me feeling jittery and mischievous so I reach up and grab the hardware. I’m curious about the playback, about what my grandma saw that made her so sad. The web is too small to fit over my head, but there’s an option for holo projection so I do that instead.

  The holo flickers to life inside the pantry; I shut the door behind me to see it better. It’s showing Ana in the kitchen, but from a weird low angle, like someone sitting on the floor.