Just like that, we had a room.
In the elevator Maddy and I started cracking up as soon as the doors closed.
“You hate romance!” I said between laughs. “‘If you’ve read one, you’ve read them all’ is like your favorite catch phrase.”
“And I mean it every time,” Maddy said.
The room was small, just a bed, a bathroom, and a scratched-up wooden desk. There was a sliding glass door visible between two maroon curtains, and beyond that I saw a small patio with two wobbly plastic chairs.
“I call first shower,” Maddy yelled, already slamming the door behind him. The sound of ripping cardboard came from under the door, and then the smell of hair dye permeated the whole room.
“I’ll be outside,” I called to him. The smell of hair dye always made me nauseous, especially when my mom asked me to “check for gray” after she’d done her own roots. Of course, these days there were shampoo washes that did the job just as well or kiosks in the mall where machines did the whole thing for you, but who could afford a $500 dye job?
I carried one of my bottles of soda onto the patio and took the chair on the left. In front of me was a whole lot of nothing; it seemed like Arizona was housed with cactuses, cactuses, and more cactuses. Still, I pulled out a pen and motel notepad I’d swiped from the front desk and began doodling the cactuses across the page, only my cactuses had pointy teeth and demon eyes and looked like they were going to leap off the page and kill me.
I couldn’t even draw a cactus without making it dark.
Frustrated, I turned the page and racked my brain for something to draw. In the meantime I took a few sips of orange soda and tried to remember the last time I’d eaten a real orange. Five years ago, maybe? More?
The sugar must have helped my thought process, because I began to draw again. This time I started with a pair of eyes, dark and intelligent, then arched the thoughtful eyebrows and added a pensive mouth. I knew this face better than my own, better than anything I’d drawn; I found myself returning to it again and again, whenever I let my mind wander.
In a few minutes, Maddy stared back at me. Not the Maddy in the other room, who looked more like a catalog model than the boy I’d fallen in love with, but Maddy who had sat down next to me and stuck his nose in a book. Maddy, who I’d taken to every high school dance, who had insisted that if his mother wanted him in a suit, it would be “reminiscent of what Jay Gatsby might have worn,” who had taken the flowers out of his boutonnière and pinned them in his hair.
“Whatcha drawing?” Maddy had slid the door open, and now he came to sit next to me. He wore the oversized pink Arizona T-shirt I’d found in the AFGE station, his jeans, and no shoes.
“Nothing.” I turned the page before he could see. “I like your hair.”
It was almost the old color, though the dye had turned it all one shade instead of the usual dark and light of a natural brown. Still, he looked a hundred times more Maddy than before.
“Thanks.” Awkwardly, he played with the ends. “I feel weird. Like I’m not sure which Maddy I am anymore.”
“Tell me about it.” I passed him the soda, and he took a long gulp. “Welcome to my world, times a million.”
“Do you feel that way?” he asked, voice suddenly serious. “Do you… wonder who you are?”
“Sometimes.”
I didn’t feel like elaborating, so I didn’t. I just stared out at the cacti, and Maddy did too, the soda passing back and forth between us like all of the words we didn’t have to say.
Chapter Seven
Maddy
AS I painted brown dye over blond, I thought about the call from earlier. Georgia had sounded downright panicked when I called her from my backup smart watch. My parents had given me two, since robberies were getting so common they thought I needed a spare.
“Where are you?” she’d asked frantically the minute she heard my voice. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, then wondered how she’d known. Probably my dad had called hers, and then they’d called the police.
“Is he really… back?” she asked, confirming my suspicion.
“Yup. It’s surreal, to say the least.”
“I’m sure.” She went quiet for a second, then said in a lower voice, “My parents are at your house. Everyone is full-on freaking out, Madison. Apparently, Jesse’s parents cut some deal with HORUS. Our dads would bring Jesse back to life, and then they would leave. Win-win for everyone, I guess.”
“How is that a win-win?”
“HORUS gets a free test subject, and Jesse’s parents get their son back. As long as Jesse never came back to LA, no one would ever figure it out.”
“But they didn’t even tell me?”
Again, she paused.
“You can say it, Georgia.”
“This is going to be hard to hear. Apparently, Jesse’s parents blamed you or something? Maybe they thought he committed suicide because of you?”
“That’s insane!”
“I know, I know. I’m just repeating what I heard, that’s all. Anyway, no one wanted you to know because they thought you would have gone and found him.”
“They were right.”
Now there was complete silence. Too late, I realized how all of this sounded: If I’d known about Jesse, I would have gone to find him. I would have never met Georgia. Our relationship would never have started.
I would have said something to make her feel better, but Jesse was paying the cashier. I would have to hurry. If he found out I’d called Georgia, he would never forgive me.
“Listen,” I rushed, “I need to go now, and I won’t be able to call again. We’re heading east, toward your parents’ place in Florida. I know I shouldn’t take him there, but it’s the only option—”
“I’ll meet you there,” she said. “One week.”
“Okay. Thank you. I love you.”
“I know.” She said this next part carefully, as though maybe she was trying not to cry. “But you love him too.”
“I loved him,” I corrected. “And then he died.”
As I turned the phone off and then tossed it out the window, I wondered which one of us I was trying to convince.
I WOULD have gone out onto the patio the minute I finished changing, but then I saw his drawing and stopped at the door. He had always doodled—on notebooks, on his arm, on me—but I had never been the subject of his art. My art is my therapy, he had always told me, and it helps me forget how bad I feel. I never feel bad about you.
Yet there I was.
Eventually, I slipped outside and sat in the other dirty white lawn chair. Jesse turned the page and began drawing the VW covered in a map of the United States with our destination, Miami, on what I considered the cute button nose of the bus.
“Think we’ll really get there?” he asked as he drew.
“Why wouldn’t we?”
He didn’t answer, just scratched away at the notepad like the answer was somewhere buried in the paper. The night got dark, then really dark, until the only think we could see was one AFGE sign blinking red in the distance.
“We should sleep,” I said, trying to draw him out of his thoughts.
“Mm-hmm.”
“I’m serious, Jesse. We need to keep our lead, which means leaving at sunup tomorrow.”
Finally, the pencil and notepad went back into his pocket. He downed the last few gulps of soda, stood up, and put his hand out to me.
“Good sir.”
I took his hand, and the minute we touched, I felt it. Almost like nervous jitters, only warmer and more pleasant. Butterflies, people called them in books, though nowadays most butterflies had gone extinct and the phrase had lost its effect. I only got this feeling with Jesse—the real Jesse—and for a second, all of the walls I had built up against this Jesse shook. What if I just let myself fall back in love with him? What if we got to Miami and then just kept going, forgetting all about Georgia, or my parents, or anyone else that would try to sto
p us?
“You take inside the covers, I’ll take outside?” I asked.
Just like that, the feeling disappeared.
Chapter Eight
Jesse
FOR A moment, he was back. The same old Maddy, who looked at me like I was a silver vase he’d bought at a thrift shop for fifty cents. Like I was his secret treasure instead of his curse. I wanted to kiss him, but I knew that wasn’t what he wanted, even in that moment. And then it was gone.
Maddy slipped out of his jeans and under the covers, while I lay down on top in my boxers and a matching Arizona T-shirt. He was about as far away from me as possible without falling off the bed, and I was about as close to him as I could be from my side.
In the past we had slept clinging to each other. Nights were bad for me, really bad, and I always felt like Maddy thought if he held me tight, he could stop the bad thoughts from entering my head. I thought if I held him tight, the bad thoughts wouldn’t matter.
I guess both of us were wrong.
“Do you remember dying?” Maddy asked me suddenly.
“No.”
“Not at all?”
“Nothing. I don’t know if they wiped it, or if there’s nothing to remember. All they would tell me when I woke up was that I’d taken a bunch of pills and HORUS had saved me.”
He went quiet again, and I wondered if he was replaying it all. If he was asking himself the same questions I was: How could I have let Maddy find me that way? How could I have done something like that to the person I loved?
“The old Jesse didn’t know that I would find him,” he said quietly, as if he could read my mind again.
God, it scared me how smart he was.
“In fact, I think he specifically tried to stop me from finding him. When I realized something was wrong around second period, I skipped school and went over to his house. The front door was locked, along with the bolt—guess he didn’t think I’d remember his mom telling him to use the hidden key inside the welcome mat that time his backpack got stolen—and then his bedroom door was locked too. He’d painted ‘I’m sorry’ on the door, so in a way, I already knew what I would find when I broke into it with a paper clip and a credit card.”
Hearing this made me feel sick to my stomach, like all the soda I’d drank was going to come back out at any second.
“He didn’t want any mistakes,” he continued. “Took so many pills that even pumping his stomach wouldn’t have worked. He was gone by the time I got there, anyway…. It was like he was a lamp, and someone had just switched him off.”
There were so many things I wanted to say: I’m sorry. I should never have done that to you. I love you.
“The ‘old Jesse’ is me,” I said instead. “We’re the same person.”
“You’re Jesse 2.0,” he corrected.
“No. I’m not.” I tried to think of how to explain this in a way he would understand. “All that happened was that my conscious mind turned off, they made a perfect copy of me, and then my mind turned back on. Think about it this way: If I was a famous painting, and they made a perfect copy of me down to the movement of every brush stroke, wouldn’t I be the same painting as the original?”
“You’d look identical, but the way you were made would be different. As an artist, I’m surprised you’re even making this argument.”
“Of course it would be made differently. But my question is, would it matter? Would the backstory to the painting negate the fact that the paintings are the same painting at that exact moment in time? That they have the same dust engrained in their paint, the same combination of colors, the same fading from light exposure?”
“No—”
“And sure, from that moment of creation on, those two paintings would have different experiences. One might get more light, the other more water… and suddenly they’ve started on two different paths. But the ‘old Jesse,’ as you call him, isn’t alive.”
“So you’re the only painting. The only path the ‘real Jesse’ has gone down. That’s why transporters are made to recreate you on the other side, not actually transport your matter to another place. They’re creating a perfect copy of you at that exact moment in time and destroying the original.”
“Right.”
“That’s insane. I mean, I understand it, logically… but emotionally, I don’t want to believe that an original Monet is the same as a cloned copy.”
I’d had all these same thoughts when I’d woken up at home. I’d panicked, I’d screamed, I’d tried to die all over again. But then they’d realized how to get through to me: They’d shown me two pictures of the same painting and asked me to select the original. Naturally, I couldn’t.
“Think of it another way.” I put my hand out in the dark and found his eyes, then covered them with my hand. “Pretend you’re asleep. Technically, your conscious mind shuts off, right?”
“Right….”
“So really, there’s no difference between falling asleep, being transported, and being brought back to life as a copy. Your mind goes off, time goes by, and then your mind goes on again.”
“I’m not sure that I buy—”
“I know, but think about it. If, while you were sleeping, we made an exact copy of you, that copy would wake up thinking that it’s the original you, right? All it would remember is falling asleep and waking up?”
“Yes….”
“So really, right now, you’re Maddy 1.0. Tomorrow, when you wake up, you’ll be Maddy 1.1. And the next day, Maddy 1.2. At any point during your sleep, HORUS could make a repro of you, destroy the original, and you wouldn’t know the difference. Now that repro is Maddy 1.2, soon to wake up as 1.3.”
He couldn’t seem to think of anything to say to that. I wondered if he wanted to touch me as much as I wanted to touch him, or if his mind was on the college girl back home.
“It’s not the same,” he said finally. “The history matters. The truth matters.”
“Only if you know it.”
His breathing got slow—not quite at the level of sleeping but close—and I drifted after him.
In my dream the hotel room unfolded like a shipping box, and above me, the blue sky danced with a thousand sugar skulls. From up there the cities were like tiny toy box castles surrounded by umbrellas of polluted clouds, and I could bend down and take Los Angeles in my hands like a newly potted plant. I wanted to find Maddy, but at that scale, all of the people were identical pinpricks of gray on gray. Desperately I clawed at the model city, ripped out the buildings one by one, but it turned out they were made of papier-mâché and squished into a pulp in my hands.
“Maddy!” I called into the mush dripping water and flour onto the floor.
But now the sky became another room, and the flaps of the box folded over me to turn the whole universe into a prison I couldn’t get out of. I pounded on the walls with my pulpy fists, leaving handprints there like the ones on my wall back home, but no one was there to listen. Eventually, I sank to the floor and waited, Maddy’s name escaping my lips every few minutes like a mantra.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, something moved at the corner of the room where the wall met the floor. A head, perhaps?
A sun.
It bloomed onto the wall like a sunflower, its petal rays stretching like fingers to take up the whole sky. Even though I knew it was impossible, I could feel the heat from the sun on my skin, warming it to the point of being burned.
When I woke up, it was ninety degrees in the hotel room and Maddy was gone. Outside the window, parked like vultures waiting for a kill, were three HORUS vans.
Chapter Nine
Maddy
I WOKE up the next morning at 8:00 a.m. on the dot, just like I had every morning for the past eighteen years. Jesse was fast asleep next to me, his head so close that I could see the orange soda stains on his teeth, and for a while I just looked at him, wondering how long it would be until he disappeared again.
Because he would disappear. One day he would man
age to work around the system his parents had implanted in his brain, and bang, no more Jesse. This was the thought that kept me from touching him the night before, the thought that made me have to clench my legs down all the time to keep from running. Jesse was like a perpetual storm cloud, always on the brink of rain, and I was the boy underneath without an umbrella. This time I wasn’t going to get wet.
At least that’s what I told myself as I slid from under the covers. I didn’t have any clean clothes, so I put my sneakers on and walked out of the room in my shorts and touristy T-shirt. The hallway was empty, but down below me, a few voices chattered in what had to be the breakfast area. On the way down the short flight of stairs, I paused to look at a picture of a younger Dolores, who had apparently owned this motel since neon hair had been in style. She smiled back at me through her pink bangs, perfectly matched to her hot pink jumpsuit, her arm around the man who must have been her husband.
Downstairs two families ate at opposite sides of the kitchen area. One had a three-year-old girl stuffed into too-small overalls, and the other had twin boys about twelve or thirteen. They all wore touristy shirts and hiking shoes, so I felt much better about my outfit.
Everyone stared at me too long when I entered, but I kept my eyes straight ahead. Dolores stood in the middle behind a half wall, from which she served one menu item—egg sandwiches—made with an old-fashioned toaster oven and a plug-in griddle, so I ordered an egg and cheese on a toasted English muffin and then grabbed a mug of coffee while I waited. The cups, probably older than I was, all had chips in them, but at least the coffee was strong.
“Bet you’re used to caffeine pills,” Dolores said without looking up from the griddle. “Where’d you come from, anyway?”
“Los Angeles.” I should have lied, but I couldn’t think of anywhere convincing. What with all the weird weather patterns, natural disasters, deadly viruses, and terrorists, no one traveled very far anymore—the only places I’d been were Portland, Denver, and Vegas—and besides, I sounded like a California boy anyway.
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