Exploded View

by Sam McPheeters

  “Ah, yes, Terri.” He looked straight at the camera, making eye contact with her on the other side of the screen.

  “Please read me the news.”

  “Certainly. Ah, our news, or … your news, young lady?”

  “My news.”

  Nick unfurled one of the newspapers.

  “Let’s see here … Sunday, January 2nd.” He glanced back out at Terri. “Headlines?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ah, well then … ‘Busan, Nagoya, and Quezon airports shut down for twelve hours by vector control over Marburg scare.’ ‘Turkish rebels advance within ten miles of the Izmir airport.’ ‘Unnamed sources inside TF Pauling say an initial public offering could come as early as March.’”

  He bent the paper at the fold and continued with the lower-front page.

  “‘Worst storm in fifteen years pummels New England.’ Oh, and this headline says, ‘GAO predicts a $39 billion cost overrun for Navy.’ And, ah, ‘Inquiry into Berlin stampede resumes.’”

  This intrigued her. “Read me that story.”

  “Yes, that does sound interesting,” Nora said.

  “Alright, don’t everyone gang up on me.” Nick squinted and shivered his shoulders in mock annoyance, looking back down to the newspaper. In a semi-stentorian voice, he read, “‘Berlin, January 4th. After a break for the holidays, the Bundestag investigatory committee resumed emergency hearings into last year’s deadly midday stampede at the city’s busiest U-Bahn station. Even with the recess, emotions ran high at the three-hour meeting …’”

  She pulled up a transcript in the margins as Nick read.

  “‘… While the chief of police defends his office’s chronology, forensic inconsistencies continue to plague the investigation, with three dozen crucial discrepancies casting doubt on both …”

  Terri paused him, double-wagging her finger toward the screen and importing the footage into her PanOpts. She minimized the Charles’ household, and then clicked on the words “U-Bahn station.”

  A mosaic of photographs from the Berlin subway station stampede filled her field of vision. She selected a shot from the entrance, the steps already cordoned off by police tape, the faces of two bystanders twisted into fantastic masks of anguish and loss. This she minimized as well, searching the wall of photos for something from the actual footage of the hell below.

  Toward the bottom of the grid of pictures, she found what she was looking for; the heart of horror. This photo showed the stampede at one of its visible crush points. In this picture, a wall of clothing and flesh had been forced into a caged enclosure, pushed, by the flow of the crowd, into a locked cul-de-sac meant for maintenance workers. Arms and fingers had been smashed into the fencing. Faces pressed into chain link like soft clay, tongues lolling, eyes rolled back. She probed this photo even as it seared her. Having found this image, she couldn’t look away.

  Stampedes were the mystery of the day. At first, these stories had come from far-flung megacities with names she barely recognized: Durban, Kano, Jabodetabek. But in the last two years, people had stampeded in cities with clearly recognizable names: Berlin, Caracas, Winnipeg. The unspoken conclusion was clear. They were getting closer. No one had a handle on what caused these mass tramplings, although the problem seemed like the logical successor to the political psychoses of twenty years earlier. It was as if the entire world had PTSD.

  Stampedes once had causes. Even the ones rooted in flimsy rumors—like the long-ago Pacific Rim salt riots, those days and weeks of the young trampling the elderly, everyone convinced iodine could ward off radiation—were better than stampedes caused by spooked crowds. And even those stampedes seemed better than these stampedes, which defied logical explanation even as they slowly metastasized from continent to continent. Creeping chaos. She shrank the picture and exhaled, shaken by just a single flat, still image. She was grateful that, on this one subject, she was too flat-out chickenshit to view the footage in immersive.

  Terri closed the Berlin photos and maximized Nick and Nora back on the wall TV, both still frozen in a world of class and spacious living. She pinged the talk channel and said, “Okay. Go on.”

  “Well, let’s see. Those are the top stories.”

  “Maybe she wants to hear the local stories, Nickie,” Nora said with a seductive slyness.

  “Ah, yes. Local.” Nick cracked open the paper and began reading from the same page. “‘A four-alarm fire at an apartment block in Lynwood leaves twelve dead.’ ‘A fight between teenagers at the Pasadena Tournament of Roses leaves four dead.’ ‘Reseda City Council schedules an emergency meeting over fresh allegations of corruption.’”

  Nora turned and smiled at Terri, and for a moment seemed real, an entity reaching across the decades for communion.

  “Isn’t he just the best reader, Terri?”

  She paused the set and finished her breakfast in silence. Fortified, she dinged the circling phone icon and heard a message from her niece, Krista Sprizzo, returning Terri’s call from New Year’s Eve.

  Krista picked up on the fourth ring. “Heyyyyy … hold on?”

  “Yep.”

  There was a quick fumbling noise and then Krista’s VT—her projected public self—materialized on the other side of the couch. She looked just a bit older, the slight curvature of her chest a brand new development. Had Krista redone her profile, or had she actually been visited by the puberty fairy in the week since Christmas?

  “Hey.”

  “Hey yourself. How’s it going?”

  “Good, good. Except school’s back tomorrow.”

  “That stinks. Early.”

  “Yeah. What’s up?” she asked in a rush, as if Terri were frittering away her precious free time.

  “Oh. Well, I just called because I think you left your EyePhones over here when you came over for that shopping trip.” She lifted these up to show her niece.

  “I didn’t leave any shades there.” Krista’s head bolted, and she suddenly stared off through the closed front door of Terri’s apartment, as if she were actually present and had just heard something distressing in the hallway.

  “I have my school glasses, Mom! I didn’t leave them anywhere! God! Hold on, Aunt Terri,” Krista’s VT froze as the real Krista, fifteen miles away, rose to slam her door in Valley Village. Terri pictured this bedroom. She had peeked in when visiting over Christmas, and had been genuinely surprised to see all the old posters of horses and soccer players removed, usurped by the images of young boys with long, curly hair and steely stares, nothing in any poster to even make clear what particular human endeavor the young men excelled in. Perhaps each was the president of a poster company.

  “Okay. Sorry,” Krista said. “She’s just … nnnn!”

  “Yeah, sure. Listen. I didn’t want to bring it up, but now I’m thinking I’ll feel dumb if I don’t. You want to talk about what happened?”

  “Nothing happened,” Krista said with a cool reserve, momentarily all adult.

  “Well … if you got suspended for three days then, yeah, something did happen.”

  “Two days, and it’s an in-school suspension. Gina says we’ll just have to clean bathrooms or something. It’s a joke.”

  “Your mom didn’t think it was a joke,” she said, suppressing a wince at her own tone.

  “She just likes to overreact.”

  “So this was, what, a game?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any one I would’ve heard of?”

  “Maybe. ‘Strangers on a Train’?”

  “Wait a minute, that was the game you were playing? Isn’t that the one where that teacher in Seattle got paralyzed?”

  “But, we weren’t doing it like that!” Krista whined. “All you do is, you tag the worst teacher at your school. Like at Millikan? Somebody tagged Mr. Ballesteros, the Spanish teacher, because he’s so gross with girls. Like, he’s always staring at everyone’s chest and making this gross sucking sound with his teeth. But even that’s just, like, a level five out of ten. So if
someone from a different school sees him outside of school, they can only do something from level five. Like, maybe they pour a milkshake on his shoes or something. So when we were at the mall, we saw this guy with a level two. I think he’s like a math teacher in Hollywood? But his level was so low that we had to do something small and sneaky. So we followed him to the food court, and when he put his shopping bag down, she snuck in a pamphlet on gum disease she’d gotten from the dentist thing. That was it.”

  “That doesn’t sound like that big a deal,” she agreed. “But you have to understand why everyone was so freaked out. After that thing in the news.”

  “We didn’t do anything like that! It’s not fair.”

  “Hey, that’s the way of the world,” Terri said, feeling a little pukey all over again.

  “Anyway, I have to go in a second.”

  “Hot date?”

  “Yeeeaaah,” she said, still recognizably a kid. “Hey, we should get lunch sometime.”

  “Absolutely,” Terri said, finding herself suddenly alone on the couch. She looked back up to the TV, Nick Charles paused with his newspaper, realizing that Krista’s generation seemed to have skipped the PTSD part.

  Krista at the mall; the image wouldn’t gel. Kids just didn’t go to physical stores to buy anything. That was the generational chasm in a nutshell. Terri’s peers drove places to shop, or they went online and shopped in webrooms. Krista’s peers shopped in the Overlay. The Internet was already too much work for them, requiring the illusion of travel. If Krista needed shoes, she’d just bring up a sales layer and have it show her the shoes as they would appear on her feet, or scattered around her bedroom, or floating in physical space, as if she were a sultan’s princess having slippers brought before her by an army of ghost servants.

  Terri thought of the mystery EyePhones, her mood darkening. This was a problem. She couldn’t bear to peek at their archive, lest it contain some fragment from her past life. But she couldn’t afford to lose them for the same reason. It didn’t seem plausible that these could actually be her old EyePhones. After the divorce, Terri had spent a huge sum to fly home, back to Jersey, for a weekend of self-diagnosed closure. She’d fit all the most important totems of her marriage into a single shoebox, then slid the shoebox into the darkness of the rafters of her aunt’s garage. Or had she? Maybe her desire to have included the shades in the shoebox had placed them there in her mind.

  She twirled the shades between two fingers, seeing the Zeiss logo on the temple. In PanOpt, she pulled up a Zeiss company directory and dialed tech support.

  “Assistance,” a cheery man’s voice said in audio only.

  “Yeah, hi. I found a pair of EyePhones in my apartment, and I can’t remember if I purchased these a long time ago, or if a visitor might have left them by accident. Here’s the footage.”

  “Okay.”

  “And, ah, I don’t … I’m wondering if I can obtain an index or something, remotely, without having to turn them on myself. Because if they don’t belong to me, I don’t want to violate, you know, someone else’s privacy.”

  “Of course, I get it,” the man laughed. “We’ve all been there. Let me see what I can do.”

  This seemed somehow off.

  “Hold up,” she said. “Are you a real person?”

  “Well … I’m really interested in providing you with quality customer service.”

  “No. Nope. Please put me on with an actual person.”

  The voice sighed with good nature, saying, “Okay. One moment, Ms. Pastuszka.”

  She muted the hold music and rose, wondering if these slender EyePhones actually contained any footage from the old house. She and Gabriella had lived in South Pasadena, in a 1920s craftsman they’d bought and fixed up over the course of a decade-long marriage. Terri still dreamed about that home at least twice a month, its surfaces, with groaning floorboards to tiptoe past at night, the way her bare feet had gripped the wood, like she could stay there forever.

  A few years before the divorce, their dog Congo had died. Grief had colored their shared world for months, a private sourness that survived like a virus requiring only two hosts. After the divorce, her own unending sadness seemed a continuation of this grief, a one-person anguish that followed her, an odor that refused to abate and which only she could smell.

  Solo, Terri had had to decide how best to expunge her ex from her networked life. The options were endless, up to and including a full delete—entirely erasing all traces of her ex from her world—with proximity warnings if there had even been a threat of them running into each other in a public space. But then Gabriella had moved, first to Mexico, then overseas.

  A voice said, “Ms. Pastuszka. I understand you have an indexing issue?”

  “I have some old EyePhones, and I don’t know if they’re …”

  “No, yeah, I’ve got all that up here in my case file. I’ll just need a little more info before I order the indexing.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “Let’s see … you want full transcripts?”

  “Jesus. No. What would I do with that? I just need an overview of contents.”

  “Alright then. Sounds like you want the one-time Basic Index. That runs $625 without any abstracts, $80 for each additional …”

  “Wait. What? That’s nuts. Look. Is there just a way you can tell me the purchase history? That’s really what I need.”

  “Sure, I can do that. Gimme just a sec …” She wondered if this was the same disembodied operator as before, disguising its voice, adding a few pauses for plausibility.

  “Yeah, you bought these two years ago, at the StadiumStomper webroom. Need to see the receipt?”

  “‘StadiumStomper’; I’ve never even heard of that. Are you sure it was me?”

  The voice laughed. “You used your face to pay, so yes. These were bought January 25. Looks like this was … a pop-up room for Super Bowl supplies. Ring any bells?”

  “Oh,” she remembered: someone had invited her to a Super Bowl viewing party. She’d bought these shades because using PanOpts for a sports event seemed ostentatious, and her old ones were back in Jersey, safe from her own prying eyes. She hadn’t wound up going to the party because she’d given herself a nasty sinus infection from sobbing.

  “Thanks. All I needed to know.”

  “Excellent, Ms. Pastuszka. And while we’re talking, I’d like to real quickly tell you about our …”

  She dismissed the caller with a single finger swipe in the air. This was the exact reason she never used civilian shades. Her resistance to sales was low after the divorce. Using PanOpts, she was all cop, except when she placed a call out. It would be a silly distinction if it wasn’t real.

  She spent the afternoon at the Tujunga Farmer’s market. On the drive home, a text announced,

  LORDY LORDY LOOK WHO’S 36

  COME HELP MUTTY RING IN HIS NEW YEAR

  UGANDA, 9ISH

  Approaching her apartment at the tail end of dusk, she saw the building’s dark bulk silhouetted against its hill, and the thought of staying in for another night filled her with a dread close to out-and-out fear. She tried to remember the last time she’d been out for purely social reasons, realizing she’d already decided to stop in at Mutty’s party. Her upstairs neighbor had a cat or cats, and as she reached her landing, she detected the faint but unmistakable tang of ammonia drifting down the next stairwell, as if to emphasize the dangers of becoming a recluse. Producing her house key, she instinctually glanced down to make sure she was alone. Once, a gray drift of cat fur had followed her in and set off the drone alarm.

  The only piece of furniture she’d kept from her marriage was the three-legged Chinese table. She’d just moved it from one front door to another. This table had had a vital function in the old house, being the place where professional glasses were left, a symbolic gesture made literal, neither of them tracking the muck of their professions back into their shared sanctum. Now it was just muscle memory, the one place she kept her PanOpt
s when they weren’t on her person.

  Terri placed the PanOpts on this table and thought, I’ll need to look nice, laughing when she realized she’d said this out loud. There must be something here snazzy enough to wear to a birthday party. She smiled, remembering the fitted three-quarter sleeve with the fat blue and purple lightning bolts she’d gotten as a college sophomore, some weird homemade thing she’d bought at a crafts fair on a freezing afternoon, back when bright zigzags had somehow been in fashion.

  She’d kept it maybe because she associated some fun nights with that shirt, and perhaps because she’d been borderline chunky in college, always in the cafeteria with its endless meal plans, and had only slimmed down later, after graduation and the few years of hardship. She’d always suspected the shirt would still fit her as she got older and wider.

  The shirt wasn’t in her dresser. It wasn’t dangling in the closet, where it wouldn’t be anyway, among her work clothes, and it wasn’t, obviously, in the hamper. She hadn’t worn it for years, although it seemed like there’d been plenty of times when she’d yanked it out and dismissed it with annoyance. She stood in the living room, staring out toward the rapid lights of the freeway, chewing her lip in annoyance, some of the tingle of expectation draining out of the room. Back in the bedroom one more time, she grunted to lift the surprisingly heavy dresser, finding only two mismatched socks. She stood, feeling another bolt of post-hangover head pressure. She didn’t have an apartment macro because she’d never seen the need, now that she was on her own. This was pretty much the exact thing that people set up Life Recorders for. The force had monitors in the hallway and stairwell for her benefit, and for a weird moment she contemplated calling up someone on The Wall and asking if they’d seen the shirt. Instead, she grabbed her PanOpts from the table and did a quick voice search that came up blank.

  All calls would be archived. In the kitchenette junk drawer, she found and donned the old shades, finding the shirt after three searches. She’d been sitting on the couch last April, talking with Tammi in that dreary, familiar way of family members slipping in and out of verbal autopilot. She saw herself from her own perspective, eight months in the past, staring down at the blue shirt on her lap, fingering its seams in disinterest and hearing herself mumble, “I guess that all, you know, gets eaten by the co-pay anyway.” She considered deleting the conversation, then decided to mail it to herself, so at least she’d have this memory of her shirt, one bit of her own life slipping through her fingers.