The sound of the front door, and a moment later, there Rhett was, each of the precious ninety-four pounds of his sixteen-year-old self. It had been cold outside, and she could smell the spring air coming off him, metallic, galvanized. Pearl looked for a flush in his cheeks like the one she’d seen in Mr. Waxler’s, but Rhett’s skin remained sallow; his visible cheekbones were a hard truth. Had he been losing weight again? She wouldn’t ask. After all, Rhett had arrived in the kitchen without prompting, presumably to say hello. She wouldn’t annoy him by asking him where he’d been or, to Rhett’s mind the worst question of them all, the one word: Hungry?
Instead, Pearl pulled out a chair and was rewarded for her restraint when Rhett sat in it with a truculent dip of the head, as if acknowledging she’d scored a point on him. He pulled off his knit cap, his hair a fluff in its wake. Pearl resisted the impulse to brush it down with her hand, not because she needed him to be tidy but because she longed to touch him. Oh how he’d flinch if she reached anywhere near his head!
She got up to search the cupboards, announcing, “I had a horrible day.”
She hadn’t. It’d been, at worst, mildly taxing, but Rhett seemed relieved when Pearl complained about work, eager to hear about the secret strangeness of the people Apricity assessed. The company had a strict client confidentiality policy, authored by Bradley Skrull himself. So technically, contractually, Pearl wasn’t supposed to talk about her Apricity sessions outside of the office, and certainly many of them weren’t appropriate conversation for a teenage boy and his mother. However, Pearl had dismissed all such objections the moment she’d realized that other people’s sadness was a balm for her son’s own powerful and inexplicable misery. So she told Rhett about the man, earlier that day, who’d been unruffled by the suggestion that he exchange his wife for prostitutes, and she told him about the woman who’d shouted at her over the simple suggestion of exploring a religion. She didn’t, however, tell him about Mr. Waxler’s amputated finger, worried that Rhett would take to the idea of cutting off bits of himself. A finger weighed, what, at least a few ounces?
Rhett grinned as Pearl laid the office workers bare, a mean grin, his only grin. When he was little, he’d beamed generously and frequently, light shining through the gaps between his baby teeth. No. That was overstating it. It had simply seemed that way to Pearl, the brilliance of his little-boy smile. “Moff,” he used to call her, and when she’d pointed at her chest and corrected, “Mom?” he’d repeated, “Moff.” He’d called Elliot the typical “Dad” readily enough, but “Moff” Pearl had remained. And she’d thought joyously, foolishly, that her son’s love for her was so powerful that he’d felt the need to create an entirely new word with which to express it.
Pearl went about preparing Rhett’s dinner, measuring out the chalky protein powder and mixing it into the viscous nutritional shake. Sludge, Rhett called the shakes. Even so, he drank them as promised, three times a day, an agreement made with the doctors at the clinic, his release dependent upon this and other agreements—no excessive exercise, no diuretics, no induced vomiting.
“I guess I have to accept that people won’t always do what’s best for them,” Pearl said, meaning the woman who’d shouted at her, realizing only as she was setting the shake in front of her son that this comment could be construed as applying to him.
If Rhett felt a pinprick, he didn’t react, just leaned forward and took a small sip of his sludge. Pearl had tried the nutritional shake herself once; it tasted grainy and falsely sweet, a saccharine paste. How could he choose to subsist on this? Pearl had tried to tempt Rhett with beautiful foods bought from the downtown farmers’ markets and local corner bakeries, piling the bounty in a display on the kitchen counter—grapes fat as jewels, organic milk thick from the cow, croissants crackling with butter. This Rhett had looked at like it was the true sludge.
Many times, Pearl fought the impulse to tell her son that when she was his age, this “disease” was the affliction of teenage girls who’d read too many fashion magazines. Why? she wanted to shout. Why did he insist on doing this? It was a mystery, unsolvable, because even after enduring hours of traditional therapy, Rhett refused to sit for Apricity. She’d asked him to do it only once, and it had resulted in a terrible fight, their worst ever.
“You want to jam something inside me again?” he’d shouted.
He was referring to the feeding tube, the one that—as he liked to remind her in their worst moments—she’d allowed the hospital to use on him. And it had been truly horrible when they’d done it, Rhett’s thin arms batting wildly, weakly, at the nurses. They’d finally had to sedate him in order to get it in. Pearl had stood in the corner of the room, helpless, and followed the black discs of her son’s pupils as they’d rolled up under his eyelids. After, Pearl had called her own mother and sobbed into the phone like a child.
“‘Jam something’?” she said. “Really now. It’s not even a needle. It’s a cotton swab against your cheek.”
“It’s an invasion. You know the word for that, don’t you? Putting something inside someone against their will.”
“Rhett.” She sighed, though her heart was hammering. “It’s not rape.”
“Call it what you want, but I don’t want it. I don’t want your stupid machine.”
“That’s fine. You don’t have to have it.”
Even though he’d won the argument, Rhett had afterward closed his mouth against all food, all speech. A week later he’d been back in the clinic, his second stint there.
“School?” she asked him now.
She fixed her own dinner and began to eat it: a small bowl of pasta, dressed with oil, mozzarella, tomato, and salt. Anything too rich or pungent on her plate and Rhett’s nostrils flared and his upper lip curled in repulsion, as if she’d come to the table dressed in a negligee. So she ate simply in front of him, inoffensively. The ascetic diet had caused her to lose weight. Pearl’s boss had remarked that she’d been looking good lately, “like one of those skinny horses. What are they called? The ones that run. The ones with the bones.” Fine then. Pearl would lose weight if Rhett would gain it. An unspoken pact. An equilibrium. Sometimes Pearl would think back to when she was pregnant, when it was her body that fed her son. She’d told Rhett this once, in a moment of weakness—When I was pregnant, my body fed you—and at this comment he’d looked the most disgusted of all.
But this evening, Rhett seemed to be tolerating things: his nutritional shake, her pasta, her presence. In fact, he was almost animated, telling her about an ancient culture he was studying for his anthropology class. Rhett took his classes online. He’d started when he was at the clinic and continued after he’d returned home, never going back to his quite nice, quite expensive private high school, paid for, it was worth noting, by the Apricity Corporation he disdained. These days, he rarely left the apartment.
“These people, they drilled holes in their skulls, tapped through them with chisels.” There was fascination in Rhett’s flat voice, a PA system announcing the world’s wonders. “The skin grows back over and you live like that. A hole or two in your head. They believed it made it easier for divinity to get in. Hey!” He slammed down his glass, fogged with the remnants of his shake. “Maybe you should suggest that religion to that angry lady. Tap a hole in her head! Gotta bring your chisel to work tomorrow.”
“Good idea. Tonight I’ll sharpen its point.”
“No way.” He grinned. “Leave it dull.”
Pearl knew she must have looked startled because Rhett’s grin snuffed out, and for a moment he seemed almost bewildered, lost. Pearl forced a laugh, but it was too late. Rhett pushed his glass to the center of the table and rose, muttering, “G’night,” and seconds later came the decisive snick of his bedroom door.
Pearl sat for a moment before she made herself rise and clear the table, taking the glass last, for it would require scrubbing.
* * *
—
PEARL WAITED UNTIL an hour after the HMS noted Rhett’s light clicking off before sneaking into his bedroom. She eased the closet door open to find the jeans and jacket he’d been wearing that day neatly folded on their shelf, an enviable behavior in one’s child if it weren’t another oddity, something teenage boys just didn’t do. Pearl searched the clothing’s pockets for a Muni ticket, a store receipt, some scrap to tell her where her son had been that afternoon. She’d already called Elliot to ask if Rhett had been with him, but Elliot was out of town, helping a friend put up an installation in some gallery (Minneapolis? Minnetonka? Mini-somewhere), and he’d said that Valeria, his now wife, would definitely have mentioned if Rhett had stopped by the house.
“He’s still drinking his shakes, isn’t he, dove?” Elliot had asked, and when Pearl had affirmed that, yes, Rhett was still drinking his shakes, “Let the boy have his secrets then, as long as they’re not food secrets, that’s what I say. But, hey, I’ll schedule something with him when I’m back next week. Poke around a bit. And you’ll call me again if there’s anything else? You know I want you to, right, dove?”
She’d said she knew; she’d said she would; she’d said goodnight; she hadn’t said anything—she never said anything—about Elliot’s use of her pet name, which he implemented perpetually and liberally, even in front of Valeria. Dove. It didn’t pain Pearl, not much. She knew Elliot needed his affectations.
Ever since they’d met, back in college, Elliot and his cohort had been running around headlong, swooning and sobbing, backstabbing and catastrophizing, all of this drama supposedly necessary so that it could be regurgitated into art. Pearl had always suspected that Elliot’s artist friends found her and her general studies major boring, but that was all right because she found them silly. They were still doing it, too—affairs and alliances, feuds and grudges long held—it was just that now they were older, which meant they were running around headlong with their little paunch bellies jiggling before them.
The pockets of Rhett’s jeans were empty; so was the small trash basket beneath his desk. His screen, unfolded and set on its stand on the desk, was fingerprint locked, so she couldn’t check that. Pearl stood over her son’s bed in the dark and waited, as she had when he was an infant, her breasts filled and aching with milk at the sight of him. And so she’d stood again over these last two difficult years, her chest still aching but now empty, until she was sure she could see the rise and fall of his breath under the blanket.
After Rhett’s first time at the clinic, when treatment there hadn’t been working, they’d taken him to this place Elliot had found, a converted Victorian out near the Presidio, where a team of elderly women treated the self-starvers by holding them. Simply holding them for hours. “Hug it out?” Rhett had scoffed when they’d told him what he must do. At that point, though, he’d been too weak to resist, too weak to sit upright without assistance. The “treatment” was private, parents weren’t allowed to observe, but Pearl had met the woman, Una, who had been assigned to Rhett. Her arms were plump and liver-spotted with a fine mesh of lines at elbow and wrist, as if she wore her wrinkles like bracelets, like sleeves. Pearl held her politeness in front of her as a scrim to hide the sudden hatred that gripped her. She hated that woman, hated her sagging, capable arms. Pearl had sat here in this apartment, imagining Una, only twenty-two blocks away, holding her son, providing what Pearl should have been able to and somehow could not. Once Rhett had regained five pounds, Pearl had convinced Elliot that they should move him back to the clinic. There he’d lost the five pounds he’d gained and then two more, and though Elliot kept suggesting returning him to the Victorian, Pearl had remained firm in her refusal. “Those crackpots?” she said to Elliot, pretending this was her objection. “Those hippies? No.” No, she repeated to herself. She would do anything for her Rhett, had done anything, but the thought of Una cradling her son, as he gazed up softly—this was what Pearl couldn’t bear. She would hold Una in reserve, a last resort. After leaving the Victorian, Rhett was back in the hospital again and then the terrible feeding tube. But it had worked, eventually it had. Pearl had eked out her son’s recovery pound by pound. Was that where Rhett had been this afternoon? Had he gone to see Una? Had he needed her arms?
A subtle shift of the bedcovers as Rhett’s chest rose, and Pearl slipped out of the room. If she were to sit for Apricity again, she wondered if there’d be a new item listed on her contentment plan: Watch your son breathe. Though, in truth, this practice didn’t make her happy so much as stave off a swell of desperation.
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING, the web designer was late for their follow-up appointment. When she finally arrived, she entered in a huff, which Pearl mistook for more of yesterday’s outrage. But once the woman had taken her seat and unwound a long red scarf from her neck, the first thing she did was apologize.
“You probably won’t believe this,” she said, “but I hate it when people yell. I’m not one to raise my voice.”
The woman, Annette Flatte, made her apology in a practical manner with no self-pity or shuffling of blame. She wore the exact same outfit she had the day before, a white T-shirt and tailored gray slacks. Pearl imagined Ms. Flatte’s closet full of identical outfits, fashion an unnecessary distraction.
“Did they tell you about what happened after the Christmas party?” Ms. Flatte said. “Why they brought you in?”
Pearl made a quick calculation and decided that Ms. Flatte would not be the type of person who would consider feigned ignorance a form of politeness. “Your coworker who killed herself? Yes. They told me at the outset. Did you know her?”
“Not really. Copywriting, Design: different floors.” Ms. Flatte opened her mouth, then closed it again, reconsidering. Pearl waited her out. “Some of them are joking about it,” Ms. Flatte finally said.
Pearl was already aware of this. Two employees had made the same joke during their sessions with Pearl: Guess Santa didn’t bring her what she wanted.
“It’s tacky.” Ms. Flatte shook her head. “No. It’s unkind.”
“Unhappiness breeds unkindness,” Pearl said dutifully, one of the lines from the Apricity manual. “Just as unkindness breeds unhappiness.” She reached for something else to say, something not in the manual, something of her own, but the landscape was razed, barren. There was nothing there. Why was there nothing there?
“They’re scared,” she finally said.
“Scared?” Ms. Flatte snorted. “Of what? Her ghost?”
“That someday they might feel that sad.”
Ms. Flatte stared at the scarf in her lap, combing its fringe. When she spoke, it was in a rush: “She wrote something for me once, a little line of copy, or actually poetry. She left it on my desk my first week here.”
“What did it say?”
Ms. Flatte bent down to the bag at her feet. Pearl could see the bones of her skull through the close crop of her hair, could see the curve and divot where spine and skull met. Pearl pictured fitting these pieces together, turning the tiny screws. Ms. Flatte came back up with a pocketbook, and from its coin compartment she extracted a slip of paper. Pearl took the slip carefully between two fingers. It was printed with a computer font designed to imitate hasty cursive.
You will take a long trip and you will be very happy, though alone.
“I looked it up,” Ms. Flatte said. “It’s from an old poem called ‘Lines for the Fortune Cookies.’ And see? Doesn’t it look like the little paper you get inside the cookie? Apparently she did it for everyone on their first week, chose a different line from a different poem. To welcome them. No one else told you about how she did that?”
“They didn’t say.”
Ms. Flatte pressed her lips together.
“The truth is, you were right,” Ms. Flatte said. “Or your machine was anyway. I do need something.” She laid heavily on the last word. “I don’t k
now about religion. I was raised to distrust it. But . . . something. This morning—” She stopped.
“This morning?” Pearl prompted.
“The bus takes me through Golden Gate Park, and there’s always these old people out on the lawn doing their tai chi. Today I got out and watched them for a while. That’s why I was late to meet you. Do you think . . . could that be it? For me, I mean? Do you think that’s what the machine could have meant?”
Pearl pretended to consider the question, already knowing she would deliver the standard reply. “Try and see. With Apricity, there’s no right and wrong. There’s just what works for you.”
Ms. Flatte smiled suddenly and broadly, her whole face changed by it. “Can you imagine?” She laughed. “All those old Chinese people . . . and me?”
She thanked Pearl, apologizing once more for her outburst the day before, before bending to gather and rewind her long red scarf.
“Ms. Flatte,” Pearl said as the woman stood to go, “one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Would you say that you anticipate Apricity’s recommendations will improve your overall life satisfaction?”
“What’s that?”
“Will you be happier?” Pearl asked. “Will you . . . will you be happy?”
Ms. Flatte blinked, as if surprised by the question; then she nodded once, curt but sure. “I think I will.”
Pearl was surprised to feel a flare of . . . was it disappointment? She watched the gentle nape of Ms. Flatte’s neck as the woman walked from the conference room, and she felt a sudden and ferocious wish that Ms. Flatte would turn around and, as she had the day before, begin to shout.
* * *
—
WHEN SHE RETURNED HOME, Pearl wondered if she’d find the apartment empty again. But no, there was Rhett, in his room at the computer, doing schoolwork, just as he was supposed to be.
Tell the Machine Goodnight Page 2