Pills and Starships

by Lydia Millet

  So our rep, when it came down to it, was a lady my mother had once played smallgolf with.

  My mother isn’t the sporty type, by the way. Just this one time she did a game for charity—smallgolf’s a game they used to play on grass, on huge hills that went on forever, so big they had to ride around them in buggies. Now the courses are set up in rec rooms of complexes with green carpets.

  Anyway, because my mother had a good sense of humor, at least till recently, she was basically the comic relief, I think. And that one day of smallgolfing was where she first met Jean, the service rep.

  Jean had a low-key way about her. She showed up at our condo a couple of months ago, in the comfortable hour before dinnertime when we usually hang out together and talk about our day, what feeds we’ve seen and friends we’ve made on face. The four of us were drinking cocktails in the living room. Being fourteen Sam wasn’t drinking intoxicants much yet, but my mother, in a celebratory gesture we didn’t understand then, had offered him a mini pharmabeer.

  And there was Jean at the door—a compact, middle-aged woman from the tenth floor, frosted hair, braided wedge heels. I’d seen her in the elevator once or twice but I never knew she was a family acquaintance.

  “This is Jean,” said my mother softly. “Jean, these are our children, Nat and Sam.”

  Oh yeah, spacefriend: my name is Natalie, but I go by Nat. I should have introduced myself before.

  The woman smiled and sat down and looked at us with a friendly but businesslike expression. “Your parents thought it might be good to have me here,” is how she started in.

  Sam glanced up. He had been reading off his handface. He looked stricken, I noticed immediately. “You’re service,” he said flatly.

  “I do work with a service company,” said Jean, smiling again. (They call themselves “companies,” not “corps,” because it’s more positive sounding.) Jean didn’t miss a beat and didn’t seem awkward; she had a forthright attitude, without being domineering.

  “You’re the counselor, or whatever they call them,” said Sam.

  “I’m coordinating the personal aspect of outreach,” conceded Jean.

  “On the contract we purchased recently,” added my mother, softer-voiced than usual. “Mine and your father’s.”

  Sam picked up his beer and drank the rest of it down quickly, a flush rising on his skin.

  I had been sitting at the bay window, looking out over the garden. Our complex was nice, with trees and water features and squirrels in the courtyard—no, wait, they’re not squirrels but rather little striped chipmunks, because chipmunks always poll higher.

  Squirrels = vermin. Chipmunks = cute.

  I liked to drink and take in the view. It was usually just as relaxing as it was meant to be.

  But now, without really noticing my own movement, I had turned so I was facing into the room, my back against the view of the trees. Even the next instant I didn’t remember swiveling. In the pit of my stomach was a heavy new stone. And at the same time my arms and legs felt light and liquid, like the bones in them had weakened.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” was the thing I said, obviously stupid.

  “We’re telling you now, sweetheart,” replied my mother, and came to sit beside me on the ledge. She put one arm around my shoulder—her left arm with the two-finger hand. She calls it her claw sometimes.

  I’ve never been grossed out by it, but on the couple of occasions when I’ve introduced other kids to her in flesh, I’ve seen them do a double-take and try to hide their pukiness. After the second time that happened I made sure I warned them so they could plan their smooth reaction. Their being disgusted made me feel bad for my mom—though she herself always seems pretty cool about people’s reactions.

  My father says it’s a badge of honor to her, “and so it should be,” he adds.

  “I know it’s difficult to hear,” my mother said. “But it’s all according to schedule. The timing is what they recommend.”

  They don’t encourage the parents to get emotive when they’re disclosing. (Sam and I had heard about the protocols on listserves and from facefriends as well—facefriends whose parents have been contracts in the past. It makes things worse for the kids, the corps say, if parents get feely at that moment.) And sure enough I noticed she wasn’t applying a squeeze of consoling pressure with her arm; she wasn’t looking deep into my eyes. She was being careful, walking a tightrope of proper behavior.

  Corps always stress to contract buyers that following the rules is what allows survivors to emerge with psych intact. They even have ads like that: Let your survivors thrive … I can’t recall the rest of it, but basically the message is, Do what the service tells you to, or we’ll make you feel hella guilty.

  My mother was just sitting there next to me, her arm lightly applied, keeping a quasi-professional attitude that seemed to mirror Jean’s. After a moment she shook the cooling cubes in her cup with her other hand and raised the cup to drink.

  I looked at her then and I couldn’t help thinking she was only half there.

  My father, standing gazing at us with his pharmawine in hand, had a kind, bemused expression that reminded me of how he’d looked when we were younger, when Sam or I would cry and he had no idea how to stop it.

  “You can still take it back,” said Sam, with a kind of hurt urgency. “Please, Mom—Dad! Take it back!”

  “Honey,” said my mother, “we don’t want to. Or maybe a better way to say it is that we … we can’t. We’ve lived for you two ever since the tipping point, sweetheart. You’ve been everything that kept us going. We try to hide the side of us that feels so desp … that feels it’s time to go. But we can’t live with it forever.”

  The tipping point was when it got out that the globe was in this runaway warming cycle with these feedback loops of heat and there was nothing we could do to stop the sea from rising or get back the melted ice that used to cover the top and the bottom of the world.

  So anyhow.

  “Now both of you are practically grown up,” said my mother. “Nat’s so mature for her age. Sam, you are too. You’re both very intelligent, you’re both so much more capable than we are already!”

  Under normal conditions we would have snarked at that, but it wasn’t normal conditions.

  “We know that when it comes right down to it you don’t really need us—not in the day-to-day sense. You think you do right now. But we know deep down that you can take care of yourselves. We trust you. At first you’ll miss us and that’s perfectly natural. It’ll be tough. We understand. But then you’ll pull yourselves out of that mourning process and be stronger than ever. We know you will.”

  “You can’t say what we’re feeling,” said Sam, shaking his head. “Or will feel when you’re dead. Sorry.”

  “It helps, for peace of mind,” said Jean to Sam, “if you keep any argumentation for later. During this encounter, this time of disclosure, we’ve found that what allows for peacefulness is a listening.”

  “Fuck listening!” said Sam. He was bright red by then—like someone had dealt him two slaps, one on each cheek.

  “And really,” went on Jean calmly, as though he hadn’t said anything, “there’s no rush here. There’s plenty of time. Remember, all contracts are voidable right up until the end. So there’s absolutely nothing to make you nervous.”

  She didn’t mention what we all knew: that there’s a stiff financial penalty for last-minute cancellations. She didn’t need to mention it. My parents had a friend who canceled just five hours before, paid through the nose because at that point it was like 90 percent of the full price, then ended up buying a new contract a couple of months later. Meaning less money for the survivors—a tainted legacy.

  Also, embarrassing.

  It happens.

  “But you’re doing so well,” begged Sam, turning to my mother.

  Myself, I felt frozen.

  “You’re doing really well, you’ve got your moods well stabilized, lately,” he
argued, in a firmer tone.

  “No, yeah, son,” said my father. “Well … we’re not too badly off. We’re not complaining about our, you know, our personal situation. Relative to … we feel so lucky. Look, in terms of our particular, individual lives, we are lucky. No question there, no question there at all. And you know—there’s no specific event catalyst here. But we agreed …”

  “We made an agreement that we would go when you two were ready,” put in my mother. “And we feel that time has come.”

  “We made an agreement,” my father echoed.

  Sam was staring at him stonily and my father looked like that stare was making him nervous—and I guess it was.

  “We need to quit while we’re still ahead—leave while you can remember us the way we want to be remembered. With our real personalities. You saw how Mamie got after she passed a hundred. We need to leave when we can do it right.”

  There was a minute of silence, because although we’d seen my grandmother stop making sense we knew it wasn’t about her. For starters, they were both more than twenty years younger than Mamie had been and nowhere near the demented zone.

  “Quit while you’re still ahead?” I asked.

  I didn’t know whether to call bullshit on him. What stopped me was a sudden suspicion he really believed what he was saying.

  “Darlings,” added my mother, “you were born so recently—it’s only been the blink of an eye. You’re great at just living in the now, you roll with everything. You have resilience. Both of us admire you for it. We so admire that quality. We wish we were that way ourselves. But we’re not.”

  “Oh, please,” countered Sam.

  “Try to see it from our point of view!” said my father. “When we were young, there were still big animals swimming all over the oceans! The rivers and the forests had all this life in them, not just the rats and pigeons. They barely cared about carbon footprints then, they were still trying to grow bigger and bigger instead of downsize. You could go anywhere in the world—we drove a gas-burning car when we were young! We flew on real airplanes! Sara—our honeymoon flight emitted two hundred tons of CO2, didn’t it, honey?”

  “It did,” nodded our mother, musing. “For maybe three hundred passengers. A five-hour flight, children! Insane to think about now.”

  “The only people who agitated were treehugs like us, and everyone ignored us. And even though both of us were treehugs, we still flew. I mean, it was the opposite of illegal—it was encouraged. There were desserts made out of ice. And cities lasted for centuries.”

  “We know this already, Dad,” said Sam. “It’s ancient history.”

  “But it wasn’t the luxuries we had,” continued my mother, clearing her throat. “We couldn’t care less about those. What we miss was the feeling that we were supposed to be here. When this world was truly our home we didn’t have to keep changing gated communities every couple of years just for access to high-rated drinking water that didn’t have to be tested daily. Can you believe, we used to use drinking water to wash away our personal waste? We didn’t have to stand in lines whenever an alert came out to wait for nearly useless shots that would maybe possibly keep our children alive through the newest strain of a bug-borne disease. We could choose our own food, not have it rationed out and delivered. Look—we could go out on the street whenever we felt like it. We’d meet new people whenever we wanted!”

  We’d heard it all before, frankly. My parents keep thinking, somehow, that one day we’ll hear about how different history was and for the first time light will shine down like godrays from up there in the cumulus and we’ll get it.

  But we’re like, there’s nothing to under­stand. I mean, yeah, it’s different now from how it used to be. We know that. Isn’t that pretty much the definition of history? We do get it. Time passes. A bunch of stuff changes. I bet it’s always been that way, with parents lecturing kids about the olden and golden.

  Some­times we get restless about our parents being stickin-the-muds. In one sense it’s like, get used to it! This is the actual world!

  I used to feel that way fully: impatient with them for whining about past excellence. But recently, I have to admit, I’m not quite so sure anymore. Sometimes I feel unsteady on my feet all of a sudden—mostly when I get a peek at something disturbing on face.

  In flesh we don’t get much of a chance at being shocked, or not often. Mostly, Sam says and I agree, that’s just because we can’t get out of the complex much.

  “For old world people like us, you know,” said my mother in a realer tone, “it’s like we’re watching a tragedy. You see? The play was long and really painful to watch, and it stretched across the entire horizon. But finally it ended and now we want to leave our seats. We’re desperate to leave our seats! We’re aching from watching this!” She was getting agitated and I watched her stop it and bring her expression under control again. “But the actors just keep taking bows, again and again …”

  “Damn those actors,” said my father, and he and my mother suddenly smiled at each other, two smiles of sympathy that vanished quickly when they seemed to remember what was going on.

  “What’s a play?” asked Sam, with slight and grudging interest.

  He doesn’t go in for 20th c. vids the way I do. There are plenty of plays to browse, I’ve found old performances called Shakespeared or Broadsway. I watched one once. Plays were like movievids, but for the mentally challenged and also deaf people: their actors spoke very, very slowly, pronouncing their words extremely loud and exaggerated.

  “So, uh, then we’re the ones taking too many bows?” I interrupted. “That you don’t want to watch anymore?”

  “I didn’t actually mean that, sweetie,” said my mother. “Bad simile, I admit. You have kept us here because we want to be with you. And we still do. We’d stay with the two of you forever, if we could. But …” She looked queasy all of a sudden and turned away for a second.

  “Our point is,” my father said, “we don’t think we can bear to observe—what happens if the trajectory—if it keeps going how we think it will. Of course, we hope and pray it won’t,” he added, tossing back the last of his whiskey.

  “We hope we’re in the wrong. We hope our model is deeply flawed,” my mother nodded.

  Their model is one of the most popular, mainstream ones. It’s kind of on the pessimistic side of average, maybe, but not far from the middle. Its macropredict is a global population crash a few decades from now, then disintegration of the species into small, isolated outposts in clusters around the last freshwater aquifers in temperate zones, surviving hand to mouth.

  I’ll be in my sixties.

  “We figure, go early, while everything’s—while there’s still hope, you know,” said my father. “For you … and …”

  But somehow he had confused himself.

  He looked for a place to put down his empty tumbler, rotating as he held it out, as though there should be a table beside him. But there was nothing, so he strode backward toward the counter that divided the living room from the kitchen.

  What they weren’t saying, but obviously were, was they couldn’t stand to see our future. They could stand their own misery but not the prospect of us biting the dust too.

  It’s widespread. Along with the carbon footprint of new humans, it’s why there are no babies anymore.

  But most people don’t talk about it.

  “Your model is pure fantasy,” said Sam.

  Sam doesn’t have a model. When it comes to models, he’s an atheist. I’m more like agnostic.

  “Let’s all be kind, shall we?” said Jean, more purring than rebuking.

  “Honey,” said my mother to Sam, “don’t be angry. Or,” and she shot a look at Jean here like she was doing something she’d been taught to do—“I mean, I know it’s hard, and I understand your anger, I really do, honey. But please try to understand our needs as well. We’ve been thinking about this for years. You are the only things that kept us here. I promise you, Sammy, w
e don’t take it lightly. It’s very painful for us too.”

  “It’s never an easy decision,” put in Jean.

  Not too helpful, I thought.

  But then, they put the counselors there partly to deflect family members’ fear, rage, and resentment from the contract buyers. Once you see it, it’s transparent.

  “Your mother has always taken care of things, Sam,” said my father, in profile. He was fiddling with a pile of black olives on a tray. The olives were stacked in a pyramid, like in a picture I’d once seen of ancient cannon­balls. They should have been a tipoff that this was a special occasion, so to speak, because they’re not the kind of food we get every day. Yet I hadn’t even noticed them till now.

  My dad poked at the top olive with a red-flagged toothpick. He didn’t seem to have an appetite.

  “She’s worked hard to keep you kids safe and healthy,” he went on. “But she’s so tired. Bone-tired. We both are, if I’m perfectly honest. Not in our bodies, in our minds. We don’t want to go downhill mood-wise and then have you always remember us that way. But it’s what will happen. If we don’t just get out soon.”

  We sat there for a while, not knowing what to say—nothing to say at all. We had objections but it felt like there was something large and breakable in the room.

  Eventually Jean suggested we take a walk outside, through the courtyards of the complex. Walks are quite popular with the service corps. Low-cost momentum and a natural mood boost! The corps believe in forward motion; they don’t approve of standing still.

  So we prepared ourselves fresh drinks, mostly in awkward silence, and took them with us into the elevator. Sam stood next to me, behind our parents and behind Jean, hunched and pale with his back to them. We gazed outside as the car descended.

  The elevators in our complex are external and made of shaded plexi (salvage from an olden shopping center, my mother says) so you can see the sky and then the buildings below it and then, as you drop, the changing levels of the courtyard gardens. Above the tops of the trees swoop hills and valleys of Invisinet, a mesh you can’t see till you’re up close to it. It used to be used in zoo exhibits, when those existed in the flesh as well as on face. Now it keeps the approved wildlife in and banned wildlife out.