Entanglements

by Tomorrow’s Lovers, Families

  And he saw me. Still human, under the years and the city’s slime. He saw me, and he smiled.

  Sixth grade—springtime—staring out the window of my math class, aching to be out there—when Colby appeared in the classroom doorway like an answered prayer. Four years older than me, he was in high school already, so only something significantly wrong could explain his presence there.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, ma’am,” he said to the teacher. “But I gotta take my brother with me to the hospital. It’s our mom.”

  I was crying by the time we walked out the middle school’s front door. Blaming myself, for wanting a way to get out of class—and here came God like the asshole that he was, giving me an afternoon off at the cost of my mother’s life.

  “Stop crying, stupid,” he said, all sadness gone from his face. “Mom’s fine.”

  His shitty old car was double-parked, hazards on. We got inside. He asked me, “Where do you want to go?”

  My breath hitched, at the enormity of what was being offered. “Anywhere?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “Albany,” I said. “The mall.”

  We went. We got ice cream. He bought me video games. We rolled our windows down all the way and the wind screamed through his car and we played our music too loud and the world was ours and nothing could stop us.

  I’d remember that day often. He’s still in there somewhere, I’d tell myself. The boy who loved me, who wanted me to have fun, and fuck the rules if they tried to stop us. But I’d remember it too on the day my mom got her diagnosis, when Colby was nowhere in sight, and on the day of her funeral, when he was likewise absent. I told myself it was his fault, his doing, belated karma for that afternoon of fraudulent freedom.

  Inexpensive, medically identical synthetic blood has extended the average American lifespan by four years. We did that.

  Bizarre solar energy capture modules, which resemble bushes heavy with tiny metal leaves, have slashed carbon emissions in the developed world by 40 percent, and every year it drops another 6 or 7 percent. We did that.

  Floating city construction.

  New opioids that aren’t addictive.

  Recreational pharmaceuticals to painlessly reach a thousand different states of mind.

  Government offices that make decisions impassionedly, with no window for human corruption to intervene.

  You were right, that I was good at asking questions. Like, how can we make cheap durable stackable homes?

  Fungitecture was our first big success. A software-engineered mushroom species that grows fast and fills a mold to produce a material as strong as cement, as light as Styrofoam, and cheaper than cotton. Like shipping containers, but at a tenth of the cost—and they float. That’s the most important part these days. Two percent of the planet’s population live in fungitecture homes today, including all thirteen thousand citizens of Tuvalu, floating over the ruins of their sunken homeland, and the eighty thousand climate refugees they’ve admitted.

  I had so many questions, once I let myself start asking them.

  “Austin?” you said, seeing my face go slack. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded. I wasn’t. That random damaged man had moved on, but I had not.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  You nodded. Your eyes locked onto mine and didn’t let me look away.

  Once you’d gone, I opened up a sex app. Growled or woofed at a couple dozen gentlemen in the space of two minutes. Started typing more detailed messages to the ones who’d growled back.

  It was no good. My heart wasn’t in it. To my great shame, something other than sex was weighing too heavily on my mind.

  I dialed the number Colby had called me from. He answered immediately, his voice a whisper:

  “Austin?”

  “Hey, brother,” I said, hating how my heart hurt at the weakness in his voice, making my own more cheerful in allergic response. “This your new cell number?”

  “It’s a strip mall pay phone,” he mumbled. “Across the highway from the motel they kicked me out of.”

  “Jesus Christ, Colby,” I said, looking at my phone for the time at which he’d called me. “You mean to tell me you’ve been standing by the pay phone for the past three hours?”

  “Sitting, actually. The sun is nice.”

  “Florida’s got that going for it, at least.”

  “Florida’s not so bad,” he said. “I don’t know why you guys are so down on it.”

  Doors slammed, somewhere. On his end, or mine? Tears somehow blurred my ears as well as my eyes. Made me unsure where and when and what I was. “You okay, Colby?”

  “Yeah,” he said, which is what he always said, no matter how badly he was bleeding. “Sorry about before. I just kind of lost it.”

  “Of course you did, buddy. You almost fucking died.”

  “Dying didn’t scare me,” he said.

  “What did?” I said, and now it was me who was whispering. “What happened, Colby?”

  I’d gone to visit him only once.

  The fights, I didn’t mind. They weren’t my thing, but there was some-thing pure about them, something compelling in the contest of brains and brawn. What gay boy is completely immune to the spectacle of two sweaty mostly naked men grappling on the ground together?

  What made me sick were the managers and promoters who made or broke a fighter. The moneymen behind the scenes who kept good fighters grinding away in obscurity while less skilled ones got the big matches that made the big money. Shit was unfair, what the fuck else was new?

  So I stayed away. From all of that, and from the rest of his messy life. The drugs, the girls, the alcohol. When he called me, high, I’d talk to him. Listen, mostly. Big theories about the deeper meaning of a Pixies song or a Biggie lyric. Elaborate plans for how to work the system, game the gamers, get the stardom he deserved. I know how they work, how they think, he’d say, how to play them, how to burn it all down. He refused to see how screwed he was, how helpless.

  That optimism, that faith—it had always been as alien to me as his addictions. And just as pitiable.

  Then, though—on the phone—I envied his belief so acutely that it actually made me cry.

  I said goodbye. I hung up the phone. I booked the ticket to Tallahassee.

  You scared me, Cybil. Of course you know that. That was always your thing, a look and attitude you cultivated. Spiky hair, jagged metal jewelry. The whole way to the airport, I kept thinking about you. A good sign, I thought. It showed I was less scared for my brother’s life.

  I had to take three buses to get to the airport. Construction of the Trillion-Dollar Fool-Proof Flood Locks had shut down most of the FDR, and the Real Estate Riots were in their sixth month. Not being underground, I could research you at greater length.

  Intensity: that’s what I saw when I looked in your eyes. That’s what most people saw, to judge by all your press coverage. Now, though—I don’t think that’s what it was.

  I read eleven of your interviews, in the interminable trip between La Guardia terminals. You called out the tech sector’s casual solipsism, skin-deep liberalism, how we talked a good talk but never walked the walk, how we were “woke” on Twitter and thought that was enough. How the world was going to hell in a handbasket, and would continue to do so until the Silicon Valley rank-and-file—and workers everywhere—got off their fucking asses.

  And somewhere in all of that, something else started to shift.

  You quoted some old novel or short story: It’s not enough to hold justice in our hearts like a secret. Justice must be spoken. Must be embodied.

  Something else you upended. The casual cynicism of our politics; the toxic partisanship; the hypocrisy and the apathy. Now we look back at those dark years and shiver, seeing clearly how close we came to becoming another one of history’s cautionary tales of a nation committing suicide via nationalism.

  •••

  “What happened?” I asked Colby for a third time, when I called from the
airport.

  “I’ll tell you later,” he said. “I just . . . I needed to hear your voice. It’s stupid. I’m sorry. I know you’re real busy these days—”

  “I’m on my way,” I said. “I’m at La Guardia. My flight leaves at five fifteen.”

  “Really?” he said, and I heard the tears start on his end, which kicked them off on mine as well.

  “Of course,” I said. “Of course I’m coming, Colby.”

  Here is what happened. Colby didn’t tell me until we were together, late that night, eating bad delivery food on the bed of a better hotel than the one he’d almost died in.

  Try to picture the scene again, Cybil. The half-dead junky on the bed; the rain in the open door. The two cops. Flashing squad car lights. Christmas music from the next room over. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer too loud on the television; citizens of the Island of Misfit Toys singing songs of their lost homelands.

  Lying on his side, mid fetal position, Colby locked eyes with the cops and begged. Waited for them to reach for the cuffs.

  “The Black cop, I think maybe he recognized me,” Colby said. “Maybe he saw me fight, somewhere. Maybe that’s why he did what he did.”

  I guess that’s possible. It’s also possible that my brother wanted desperately to construct a narrative where something other than blind dumb luck kept him from spending the rest of his life in prison.

  Whether he was a fight fan or he just didn’t want to do the paperwork or he really and truly had the Christmas spirit—or all of the above—or for some other unknowable reason altogether, the Black cop put his hand on his partner’s shoulder and tilted his head at the door, and the other guy looked startled, nodded, and then followed him out.

  The strobing lights darkened. The car started. The cops drove away. Christmas carols continued, coming from across the wall. Colby cried and did not move, not for a long long time. Convinced they might come back. That they were fucking with him. That Florida could not contain such good fortune, not for him, anyway.

  “It’s Austin,” I said, when you answered the phone. It was 2:00 a.m. in Tallahassee—What time is it in New York? I thought to wonder, but of course it was 2:00 a.m. for you too. My brother slept in the bed beside me. My hand was on his arm, like I could hold him tight and keep him safe, like I could save him from a savage world. “I’m in, Cybil. If you’ll have me, I want to be your partner.”

  One week later, I went home alone. Hopeful, but not confident. Colby in rehab. His stuff in storage. His word he’d call every day. His unuttered plea to come live with me when he got out.

  You called me for lunch, this time at Little Poland. A booth in the back. Plates and plates of pierogies. Our second meeting, and I didn’t know ’til it was over that I had been on the clock since I’d sat down, that I already worked for you.

  “What’s wrong?” you’d asked. “When we met before—and even today—you’re troubled by something.”

  So I told you. Just the basics: big brother’s an addict; almost died; didn’t.

  “Bring him in,” you said. “He needs a job, or something. Right? If he’s gonna stay sober. We can find something for him.”

  Of course there’s more to Colby’s recovery than me getting on a plane. Most of it, you already know—most of it was your doing—how you figured out, over Tasty Hand-Pulled Noodles, where his skills sets were: how effortlessly he could play people, the same way he’d played my middle school math teacher; how he, like you, wanted to burn it all down. How you bought him a suit and set him up with three investor meetings. It’s a long complicated messy story, but it isn’t this one. This is just the story of how I said yes to him, and yes to you. I’m telling it to you, Cybil, but I’m also telling it to myself. I’m finally understanding: we can change our minds, and we can change the world, but we can’t change who we are.

  For years I wondered: why me? How did you walk away from that bench—and from me, with all my arrogant disinterest—and think, that’s the one? Even when I called to tell you I was in, I felt sure I’d flunked the interview. I knew why I wanted to be on your team, but I couldn’t imagine why you wanted me there.

  I get it, now. I know why you chose me. Telling this story, writing this progress-report-turned-obituary, I see what it was. And I can turn this obituary into a goodbye letter.

  Those other hotshot Titans of Iterative Modeling Software, boys and girls juiced up on the WIRED star treatment and exploding social media mentions—any one of them would have been smarter, more ambitious, more energetic than me. You always saw people as they were, no matter how they tried to hide the truth of who they were from others and from themselves. You’d have seen the hunger in their eyes. The hustle.

  What you saw in my eyes was pain. Panic. The certainty that I’d lost my brother forever—the knowledge that maybe it hadn’t happened that day, maybe he’d survived that overdose, but he wouldn’t survive the next one, and if something didn’t happen to disrupt the status quo of his long, lonely self-destruction, he wouldn’t stop taking the risks that would eventually put him on the wrong end of a back-alley switchblade or a tainted shot or a fatal shared syringe.

  You saw it in my eyes, and you recognized it.

  You, too, are a citizen of the Nation of the Sick.

  I see that now. I never did before. I bought your PR, even though I wrote most of it and so I should have known it was bullshit. That haunted look that sometimes flickered in your eyes—I imagined it was intensity, drive, the inexhaustible determination to bring a better world into being against all the formidable forces that opposed us.

  And, yes, you contained all those things.

  But you were something else as well. You were sick. Sick enough to one day take yourself out of the world completely. None of us noticed. Your fans, your followers, your henchpeople . . . we never saw your sickness. That’s our failing, our guilt to carry—that we saw you every day, and never saw you. Never offered you the help you needed.

  I’m sure you’re gone for good. I know better than anyone how you think. You chose a death that would leave no body. There are millions of them out there. You chose something mysterious and open-ended enough that the vultures who’ve tried for years to take us down would never have a corpse to point to, to know when it’s time to pounce. But the bottom line, I believe, is: you chose death.

  Colby is convinced he’ll find you. As our charming, gregarious corporate strategist travels the globe, helping build worker-owned coop incubators and collectives of gutter-punk coders who analyze and refine and write manuals for the bizarre new fruits our tree bears, he scours every crowded street he comes down. Every market square. He even had the Nunnery craft an algorithm to scan for your face in the feeds of every public traffic cam on the planet. He loves you, the poor dumb puppy. Same as me. You made him what he is—although he thinks it was you and me, but I know how that’s bullshit, how you were making me at the same time as you made him. You turned me into someone who believes in something, and you turned him into someone whose unconventional skill set could be put to positive use—and he can’t accept that he’ll never get to thank you for it.

  Against protocol and all probability, a cop takes pity on a sad-sack, broken-down, dope-sick ex-fighter. A direct flight to Tallahassee is a few extra hours away, so an asshole boy takes a meeting he’d otherwise skip. A homeless man happens to walk by; happens to slow down to make eye contact; happens to smile. If any one of those things hadn’t happened, my life suddenly looks a whole lot grimmer. So does the whole fucking world, for all I know.

  Citizenship in the Nation of the Sick means knowing how fragile our happiness is, how accidental our comfort, how little it takes to turn the warmest sunny day into dark cold night. We citizens of the Nation of the Sick, we know that all we have is the people we love. The ones we can save, and the ones we can’t.

  9

  Don’t Mind Me

  Suzanne Palmer

  Riley was the smartest kid in the high school, with her own small clique of
friends around her that seemed closed to all outsiders, so Jake did not expect the tall, gangly girl to nudge him with her shoulder on her way past him at the lockers. “You going to sign up for one of the after-school cleanup shifts in the classroom science lab, for the extra credit?” she asked. “You could use it.”

  Science was currently his worst subject, and Jake was fairly sure he could spend every day sweeping and putting tablets back in their charging nooks and curling up cables and still not pass, but this was Riley asking, and he didn’t think she’d ever even spoken to him before and probably wouldn’t again, so he nodded. “I guess, yeah,” he said.

  She nodded. “Cool-oh,” she said, and continued on as if she’d never even paused, the blue fuzzy deeley boppers she’d glued onto her minder bobbing out of sight as her posse closed back in around her and they melted into the rest of the students milling about in the halls.

  “You have three minutes twelve seconds until the start of your next class,” Jake’s minder said, in its low, perfectly unemotional, perfectly horrible voice. “It takes you on average two minutes fifty-eight seconds to traverse the distance from your locker to the classroom, so you should begin now.”

  Jake slammed his locker shut. He wanted to take his time, arrive late just to spite the thing plugged into the side of his head, but it would dutifully report even the briefest tardiness to his parents, and that just wasn’t worth it. At least math was next; he usually came out of that remembering the entire class.

  He made it in the door and to his seat with six seconds to spare. Ms. Lang was already at the smartboard, swiping across it from the virtual dock to bring up pages and images from where they’d left off the day before. Above the board, the classroom monitoring light was a steady green. “Okay, everyone,” she said. “Back to quadratic equations we go, and get a little extra practice in before Friday’s quiz.”