by Lydia Millet
I won’t write down my whole letter. Anyone reading this, including you, spacefriend, is probably sick of hearing about my feelings. Point is, my dad got through it without choking up or anything, and then it was my mother’s turn to read, and she picked Sam’s letter. It didn’t start with Dear Mom, like I had. Instead, the letter was a list.
“The park where the old oaks used to grow,” she began. “The red swingset after it rained …”
And it went on like that.
The way you used to laugh when I was little and Dad threw me up in the air.
The knot of your hair when you twisted it behind your head to wash dishes.
Your wedding ring too big for your thin finger.
How you danced when Dad put on the olden music.
How you read me bedtime stories, sitting on my bed, and got lost in them and forgot it was my bedtime.
When you crept up behind me and hugged me unexpectedly.
The cross of your legs when you sat on the brown couch and put your feet up.
The tears on your cheeks when you heard about the last penguin.
My mother got to that part and her happy smile wavered. She let the letter fall forward and we could see that it went on and on, a list just on and on down the page.
“Brave girl, Sara,” said my father softly. “Brave girl. Keep reading, honey. Go on.”
Your always thinking of us before yourself.
Your worry.
Your swearing once when I was little and you cut your hand in the kitchen, then noticing me and saying “Now, that’s a mommy word, Sam. A mommy and daddy word.”
My dad laughed at that and it lifted my mom’s mood a bit. The list continued, and it ended like this:
You trying to tell me the “facts of life” when I knew them already.
All together in the big bed on a weekend morning, when we wouldn’t let you sleep in and just wanted to play.
The way you bit your fingernails.
The way you were my mother.
She stopped reading and put the letter down on the table, where my father quickly set a cup on it so the wind wouldn’t carry it off.
And then she just sat there, staring straight ahead.
The silence lasted a long time.
Then my father cleared his throat again. “We’ve raised quite a poet, Sara. Well, two of them! Two poets.”
We read my parents’ letters to us after that, some mushy stuff, of course, and then some advice on how they wanted us to live the rest of our lives—along with some other stuff about how they knew they had no right to say, and our lives were our own, and things like that.
But what I remember most was how my mom sat there, through all of this, with a faint smile but not saying anything at all, gazing past us at nothing, or maybe out to sea.
How they set up Happiness Time itself, at least in our contract, was this: they let the contracts pick the place. It has to be on a certain list of approved spots. (You can’t get any more lavender than this shit.) There are inside spots and outside spots, which the corp calls—pretty straightforwardly by their standards—Happiness Places. These include the suites, of course, for people who value privacy above all else.
But if you choose an outdoor Place, you have to be okay with not having privacy. Not just anyone can barge in, or anything; the Places are set aside and guarded. But other contracts can be there too, if they want. They don’t have enough outside spots for everyone to be separate. You book the spots in advance, of course; the corps are way organized.
And my parents, totally predictably, picked a Place overlooking the ocean.
The method was preapproved, the only method they use at this particular resort. It was Quiet Pharma, pharma you take and don’t feel and it just creeps in and puts you to sleep, painless and more or less instant—within a few minutes.
Another thing they don’t want is tons of public emoting. So we were on the plan to part company in the suite, that was our last time to see them up close. After that, though, after they left the room, we had to go to an Observing Place—near enough to the Happiness Place that we could see what was going on but not, say, throw ourselves upon them sobbing, making a scene. It was choreographed.
The time got closer and closer, and we were all sitting in the suite’s living room listening to preselected music, and my parents were freshly showered—my dad shaved, my mother with her hair brushed to a shine and twisted up on top of her head in this fancy elegant hairdo. They were wearing their Happiness robes, a lot like the beige ones we wore to the therapy sessions but thinner and with this kind of silver braid around the collar.
They seemed to have recovered from the Letter Reading, where to me they’d seemed pretty real and present, in corpspeak—they must have trained and worked hard at it—and now they were off the hook and back in full bliss mode. They just sat and smiled and nodded their heads to the music, and alarmingly often they’d get up and hug me or Sam spontaneously, and just stand there hugging us, and we’d hug them back, feeling half-embarrassed and half-impatient and half–something else I can’t put into words. I guess that’s three halves, but you know what I mean.
And that was even with our own happy pills. I can’t imagine what it would have been like without them.
Or then, for instance, my mom or dad would say something blissful, like, “Sara! Look how beautiful Nat is. Isn’t she beautiful? She has your bone structure!” (Not true.) Or, “Sam, Sam, Sam … what a smart boy you are … what a good boy. A good, good, good, good boy.”
He’s smart all right but he’s never been polite or well-behaved so the word good didn’t ring true. And there were other words they used like that, words that were generic and positive but didn’t seem to really apply to us. Not us specifically. A lot of the comments coming out of their mouths seemed to me to be on the totally irrelevant side. Like we could have been two dogs sitting there on our chairs, or two pigs. And they would have said the exact same things.
It was as if, to them, we’d turned into pictures of their kids. As if we, our actual selves, had almost nothing to do with what they were seeing.
Which was probably true, because they were also back in the loop they’d been in when we rode down to the Japanese garden on the elevator. They would say these nice things to us, and then one of them would look up at the ceiling and go, “Is that a doggy? A doggy face on the ceiling? I miss those little doggies so! Here, doggy! Here, doggy!”
Their dose had plenty of visionpharm in it, that’s for sure.
Or there was what they did with the flowers: at one point, about an hour before they were supposed to leave, my father got up from the couch and picked up a vase of those tropical flowers that had bugged me the whole time we were in the suite—the same ones he’d touched when he was remembering the tulips at the hospital I was born in. He picked up the vase and brought it back to the couch and just sat with it on his lap.
My mother reached over and pulled a flower out and held it up so close I was surprised her eyes didn’t cross. Then she started picking the petals off till they were all over her lap and on the floor at her feet. Smiling all the time like she was doing the flower a favor. Finally all she had left was the stem. She stared at that for a while, called it excellent, and then dropped it too.
Meanwhile, my dad sat there with the full vase on his lap. He said the names of the flowers slowly. “Iris. Iris. Paradise bird, bird of paradise. Look down in them, you can go right in … into the bird of paradise. Deeply.”
Finally Sam got tired of jiggling his leg and watching, and he got up and snatched the vase away. A little harshly, I thought.
My father just smiled up at him.
After the flower thing, sitting on the couch as we sat in our armchairs, they just gazed at us with their daffy grins on, not saying anything at all but rocking their heads or tapping their feet a little or swaying to the music, and Sam or I would have to actually get up and pretend to be thirsty or say we had to go the waste room or something, just to es
cape from the totally weird awkwardness. It was stone freaky how they would gaze, smiling, just on and on and on.
In the middle of dealing with this lovey-dovey stare zone we were in, I was getting more and more nervous about what was coming. I was glad we hadn’t run into any service corp people so far, I was very relieved about that, but I was also wondering what the plan was, how the people from the camp could ever rescue Mom and Dad at the last minute, whether they’d given up on it, or what the deal was.
I was so anxious that at one point I had to excuse myself and go into my room and count slowly to try to calm myself down. I sat on the bed jiggling my feet like Sam did and trying to get back into the mental space I’d been in before any of it started, with the camp and the escape and that whole outside world I hadn’t known till then. Back when I believed the service corps actually meant what they said, even if they were lame. Before I’d heard LaTessa speak in a voice I never knew she had.
I remembered how I had basically trusted my parents’ decision and bought into the idea that it was the best for them.
I talked to myself in my head, trying to train myself to be okay with them dying because it was their choice and what they wanted. And maybe it was just selfish of me to want to keep them here—the same thing I used to think about Sam, that he wanted them here for our sakes, not theirs. I used to think that was just immature and greedy.
I reminded myself they were pharmadrones now anyway. And what if the pharms they were on had changed them for good? And even if they did somehow survive, which seemed impossible to me, maybe they wouldn’t ever be the people they’d been.
Because even contracts who changed their mind at the last minute always ended up signing on again. And maybe that was because they were changed, they were hardwired for Happiness by then.
I sat there arguing with myself in my head. But no matter how much back and forth I did, or how much sense I thought my own arguments made, being okay with their dying was just harder for me now than it had been.
I’d been in the bedroom maybe five or ten minutes when Sam came in. “You better come out. They have to go really soon.”
I just looked at him, still jiggling my foot, really strained.
“I know, Nat,” he said. “But it’s out of our hands now. Don’t worry. One way or another, I swear, we’ll get through it.”
“How can you be so sure?” I asked.
“I have to be.”
And in a completely non-Sam way, he reached out his hand. And I took it and shakily stood.
They hugged us—the same kind of hugs as before—long and awkward, and then did what they were supposed to. They left.
We stood outside the open suite door and watched their backs disappear as they walked down the hall to the elevators.
And I felt flat empty and lost too, but still somehow I couldn’t bring myself to cry. Sam and I went back into the suite and waited until the digital clock numbers were right, according to the plan, and then we left too.
By this time the sunset colors were out, striping the sky pink and orange, and then above the stripes was a billowing vagueness of rounded shapes, all full of the colors leaking in behind them, the purple tinged with pink, the gray with bloodred. You couldn’t have asked for a more glorious sky. There was a light breeze, and when we came out onto the deck where we were supposed to watch from, I saw the sun in its low lurk behind some clouds, and boats out on the ocean with their sails reflecting creamy-white over the dark waves.
There was a roof garden on the Observing Deck—palm trees in clay tubs, long tubular plants that looked a little like cacti and bore labels like False Ocotillos and Night-Blooming Cereus. The palm fronds swished in the wind, and a few stray hummingbirds were divebombing some red hanging feeders.
And there were some corp workers. Including, I noticed right away, LaT.
She was wearing one of her princess robes and moving around gracefully like a high-end waitron, bearing a tray of small drinks. The light sparkled through them, made the liquid inside glow golden and bright.
“This is the first test,” said Sam, very low next to me. “When you take your bevvy, don’t look at her till you step back with it. Till then just focus on the cup and lifting it, that’ll seem pretty natural. Three feet.”
I hoped the mikes weren’t sensitive.
I saw Xing then, leaning on the rail and peering out, holding a drink of her own. I thought, if I can get next to her I’ll feel safer.
Then LaT. was in front of me and I had to struggle to decide where to look.
“Sam, Nat, bless Happiness,” she purred.
“Bless it,” I said, my voice catching a little in my throat.
“Welcome to Observing … a comforting herbal bev?”
“Thanks,” said Sam gruffly, and took one.
I couldn’t decide if he looked natural or not. I had my eyes on LaT.’s face to see if she studied him closely; in that one glance I didn’t see her paying abnormal attention to his eyes, but I wasn’t quite sure.
“Nat, over here,” came Xing’s voice, and so I was able to look up at her as I took my own bevvy off the tray, instead of looking at LaT.
I passed LaT. and walked to Xing at the rail, and we stood there together, my heart beating fast.
“There they are,” she said softly, and pointed down.
I told myself I was safe for now, I’d made it past LaT., I could calm down … and there was the Happiness Place, near the cliff edge. It was a cluster of white chairs on the green grass, very simple, between some hedges to the left and right, maybe so the Place was hidden from other people on the ground down there.
I’m not so great at measuring distance, but it was close enough so we could recognize them, I figured.
“Here they come,” said Xing.
And there were the contracts, a line of them in their robes with their backs to us, winding out of the hotel buildings beneath. I counted twelve in all—six couples.
“My parents are up front,” said Xing.
It was the first time it struck me to wonder: Were her parents on some plan too? Were they also supposed to come with us? Or was it too late for all of them?
“My parents are ready,” said Xing, in a gentle tone. As though she’d read my mind. “My mom is a hundred and two, and my dad is a hundred and eight.”
“They had you so late,” I said.
“Yeah, she was sixty-eight. Almost the upper limit.”
So that meant Xing was thirty-four. I’d thought she was younger, in her twenties; her skin had no lines at all.
“My parents love the ocean,” I said, after a minute.
“Mine too,” she replied. “They grew up in a fishing village, on an island. Swamped now. Their whole island was moved, the whole population did a forced relocation back in the early 21st c. My mother used to dive for pearls, when she was a young girl. She was what they used to call a pearl diver.”
“Wow.” I’d never heard of that but it sounded romantic.
“It was dangerous,” she said. “But lucrative, if you were good at it. She was good enough, but mostly she was desperate. Her family was extremely poor, you see.”
The contracts were standing in front of their chairs now, in the exact order they’d come out of the hotel. I saw my parents last in line, at the other end of the chairs from Xing’s—my mother’s hair curled on the top of her head, my father with his upright posture, shoulders back, that always distinguished him. When he was a young man he’d been in the navy, where they taught them to stand straight.
My stomach was nervous. I drained my comfort bevvy, wondering if there was any pharma in it.
Sam was at my other side then, gazing down with us. “So this is what Happiness looks like,” he said.
“A lovely evening for it,” said Xing. “Look at that light play in the clouds.”
And it was true—there were long sunbeams striking down from gaps in the clouds, making lighter patches on the surface of the ocean that glittered against the da
rker ones.
Then Xing’s parents turned around to face the Observing Deck, and both of them looked up at her and raised their hands—sort of a wave, sort of a salute.
Xing smiled at them and blew a kiss. I saw her eyes shining.
Then they turned back around again, and the next couple turned around.
Again, perfectly organized and choreographed. They waved up at the deck too, and a ways along to our right the meathead guy from our early healing session raised his hand and waved back at them. He looked zoned.
And then the next couple, and the next. And finally it came to my parents, and they both turned. But they didn’t wave, just looked at us. I could faintly make out the expressions on their faces, though, and they were smiling.
I grabbed Sam’s hand and I raised it up, so they could see our arms in an upside-down V. It wasn’t planned, it definitely wasn’t a V for victory, that’s for sure, but it was just what I did.
And they turned away again.
So then it was me and Sam and Xing, I didn’t even think of the others, and then those little white chairs and the ocean. The contracts sat down, again in order so it was like a ripple, end to end.
A beige-robed figure appeared—one with black hair, carrying a tray. I couldn’t tell who it was. The figure moved from Xing’s parents down the line, slowly and with a kind of ceremonial grace, handing them little white packets.
We couldn’t see their laps or what their hands were doing, but when the figure walked off that’s when they must have opened their packets. And took their Quiet Pharma pills, and relaxed back in their chairs, which had these little headrests on them.
The sun was very low over the sea. I saw my father turn to the side and kiss my mother on the cheek. And she reached out and took his right hand in her left one.
And then their heads were on the headrests, and they were all very still.
We stayed there at the rail, watching as the sun sank. I kept wondering: Is this the exact moment they’re dying? This moment? Or this one?