by Amber Sparks
So one day the wife sprinkled a little powder over the husband’s cornflakes. It was a special power, meant to make things grow, like spirits, yes, but sometimes eyeballs or teeth or toenails. You could never tell with this particular substance, so the wife crossed her fingers as the husband slurped up the powder. Then the husband slumped and fell out of his chair, and as he lay there on the floor, the wife took his pulse. It was sometimes hard to tell if the husband was dead or just lifeless. As she pressed her fingers to his wrist, the wife noticed a faint yellowish smoke hanging over the husband’s back in the vague shape of wings. A pair of wings. Aha, she said.
It took a week for the wings to solidify. Meanwhile, the husband hardly seemed to notice them. He made room for them when he sat, true, and at night he started sleeping on his side, but he never said a word about his wings. They mostly stayed folded, a long soft lump under his suit jacket. The wife asked him once if his coworkers noticed anything different about him. He looked at her neck and shrugged, and she couldn’t tell if the shrug meant no or yes or what’s to notice, so she didn’t ask again. She waited to see if he would fly. She started finding excuses to spend time outside, taped pictures of birds and planes in flight to the refrigerator door. She talked about taking up stargazing. But nothing happened. The husband seemed to have no interest at all in his brand-new wings.
One night at dinner, tired of wondering, she asked if he had flown. His weak, wandering eyes grazed her chin, confused. No, he finally said. I haven’t tried. Should I? She nodded, exasperated but eager, and watched as he carefully unbuttoned his shirt, lifted his undershirt over his head, arched his back and let his wings slowly unfold. He looked surprised as the feathers fluttered, air currents stirred, but he lifted himself above the kitchen tile. He went up until he bumped against the plaster ceiling. Then he drifted back down to the ground, somewhat awkwardly. He folded the wings away, put on his undershirt and shirt again, and sat down. He picked up his fork. He frowned.
I really can’t see the point, he said.
Of what, asked the wife.
Of wings, said the husband.
So the next morning, she sprinkled a little powder over her own cornflakes. It didn’t hurt much—a little pulling and aching, like teeth coming in. After the husband went to work, she took off her shirt and stared. The wings were cream-colored, shot through with lilac and soft brown. She marveled at their loveliness, and how easily they moved with her, how gracefully they spanned her shoulder blades. She flexed them, tested them, felt the wind move through them powerful as engines.
And then, she flew away.
The Language of the Stars
Celestial Time
The future, it turns out, looks a lot like the nineties. Do you remember those old television programs, the ones highlighting D-list celebrities, fashion mistakes? Cataloging fads like fades? Neons and novelty songs and 2-D video games?
This is a future bereft of all such bright trappings. Think instead clumsy car phones, gray pleated pants, office parks and corporate-ladder climbing. Think overtime and pagers. Think shared custody. Think children’s breakfast cereal, eaten alone, in the dark.
But I still have you, Emmaline. I still love you, I still summon you, I call you up, the vision of the way you were. The way the summer sun could make a story of your copper skin and hair. The way your freckles faded in the winter and your eyes looked tired and kinder. The way you laughed, more generous than you really were, and far too loud.
Do you still laugh, Emmaline? Do you ever miss the sun?
Aberration
We have no idea what we look like to the robots. We know exactly what the robots ought to look like; or at least, we know what they looked like when we built them. They looked like us. They still appear to look like us.
But now, like so many things, we assume they have no fixed form. We assume they have evolved beyond shape. We suspect they sometimes step inside our skins; that sometimes, unbodied, they open our lives like envelopes, peer inside, fold in new dreams.
We have no idea if the robots have developed a language of their own. They are so inscrutable, so distant and cold, so like the stars in their singular orbits. What language do the stars speak?
Spectral Features
Each day, we settle into narrow cubicles, open paper calendars, mark important dates in red ink. We glance at framed school pictures of the children we don’t see for more than a few moments each night, once they are sound asleep. We hold endless meetings in conference rooms, hold lengthy and serious phone conversations over big black plastic receivers. We put people on indefinite hold.
Our work, of course, does not exist; rather, it is a nagging suggestion, a vapor trail, a troubled miasma that surrounds us and sticks with a strange insistence. It worries us always.
Our future was more hopeful once. Not this aimless purposefulness, these itineraries full of meetings about meetings. The robots gave us leisure, at first. Blue water, white sand, clean city sidewalks. Time to linger, to putter. To frequent coffee shops and concerts and bars, to linger longer in restaurants. To catch up with old friends. Time, at last, with children, with spouses, with aging parents and grandparents.
We think it was that last gift that did us in. No one wants to spend that much time with the people they love. We gave up the ghost, and though I think the robots were baffled, they gave us ghost lives in return. Phantom productivity. Days full of so much serious nothing. The robots, so mathematically pure, provide addition only, or subtraction only. There is nothing in between.
It is rumored that there is another sort of space, a separate place for those with different dreams. Mind-altering substances, strange sex, darker fantasies. It may be this is why our offices feel so strangely deserted. Sometimes it seems I can go weeks without encountering another human, though the HR bot is very warm and chatty. She asks about you, Emmaline, every now and then.
Abluvion
They don’t understand, the robots, how our memories eroded. They don’t understand how memories are just runoff, washed away in the end like everything else. We cannot know exactly what the robots intended—the robots, like angels, are ineffable—but I believe they also meant for us to keep the past. Powerful processors, they could never have understood how fast the human memory fades. Not in eons, or even generations, but in decades, years, days. If they feel pity, the robots must surely pity us for this.
Or perhaps they envy us? There is pain in memory, after all. I’ve heard of a rare disease humans had, once, where no memory could be shed, not even the slightest errand, nose twitch, conversation. How terrible that must have been, never to lose the most acute embarrassment and suffering, always to keep thumbing through minutiae just to find the things that actually mattered. So perhaps I am wrong, and it is the robots draining our memory banks. Perhaps they are sparing us suffering, the burden of the chronicler theirs alone.
Interstellar Abundances
Oh, Emmaline, Emmaline, I would have jumped off a mountain for you, back on Earth. I would have drowned myself, shot myself, baked myself in a pie for you. I would have kept myself to myself if you’d loved me. I wouldn’t have texted you, not after ten.
The robots have said that I alone am stubborn. Kind and terrible in their patience, they have gently told me I still carry my past with me.
Why, the robots ask, must you remake your old worlds, cling so tightly to your old same sadness? Even in our sky ships, you dream of things we don’t understand: castles, passion, love. Dragons?
It’s all for you, of course. I have not given up my passion for you. I bind you, like the knights of old, my honor in a silk scarf I stole from your desk. It is tied to my sleeve. It is made of scent and stars. It has grown, it’s true, a little bit musty. Like most things.
I remember that night when you stood under all those stars, when there were still selfies, and you smiled into your phone. You thought you were alone, beautiful and relaxed for once in solitude. I watched, and I watched, and I watched. I memorized you
r ankles.
O, how we did not understand, then, how we would lose ourselves so quickly, even in all these floating images and films. How could we perceive a life without connectedness? But now we barely remember connection at all. It seems a hazy thing, any picture of us together, any comment I may have left on your page. The robots must have taken them all, I suppose, though I don’t remember when. Maybe they made us sad.
Now it’s whispered you are somewhere on a sister ship, vice president of something or other. PR? Sales? It doesn’t matter. We’re not selling anything but time. And I love you still, in a way the beige days can’t change. I should have thrown myself off that mountain. I should have known you’d take whatever you could get when it came to power. O Collaborator, O Emmaline. I’d go on, but I have a conference call with Johnson in ten.
Of Stars
I have been so lonely, O gods. I have been like the stars, white-hot with endless longing. Where is my companion? Wishing, now, I could fall to Earth. I spend days with my cheek against the cold plastic laminate of my desk, building a place in my head where a human could actually live. It is a castle, a pink sandstone thing hung with tapestries and fireplaces. It is grand, enormous, warmed by the sun—the Earth’s bright sun.
Someone once said—a poet?—that all light is starlight. Does that mean it’s all dead on arrival, more echo than embrace? Is light just another way to be alone? I draw the kinds of light in my day planner, crumpling crisp white pages when the light isn’t diffuse enough. I use my expensive pens for cross-hatching, trying to spread the light across the cubicles and cafeteria.
Johnson says all this dreaming is hurting my chances of promotion.
Supernova Remains
My father used to hit my mother, hard and often. My mother would counter, strong, with stories for us, stories for herself, knights and champions and magic doorways. They centered, always, around the castle. Or the Castle? They always seemed to be stories about rescue, and all of us were too small to help. When she finally left, rescuing herself at last, my sisters and I kept our ears open for her tales to reach us, sure they were the bread crumbs she’d dropped for us to see the path forward.
When we didn’t, we were sure it was we who had failed. And my father too—he who drove her away—he wilted, he shriveled, and he husked without her. It is this the robots cannot understand. That human love is mostly failure. That failure may be very sad, but it is yours, and you hold on to it if you can.
O Emmaline, I know I lost my heart to you, and this is not a metaphor. I know I lost my blood, my bones, my skin cells, my DNA—everything has peeled away from me and stuck to some spectral outline of you, some constellation lost to history long ago. The robots tell us nothing is really lost. All turns, reverses, becomes, dissolves, re-forms, and streams out among the stars. They tell us they have seen it, over and over, the cycle long but eventual. Everything returns in the beginning and the end.
Celestial Coordinates
To be clear, this was never the robots’ fault. Not any of it.
Johnson and Bradley said yes to endless cocktails, but only if they came with secretaries. The women liked the way the work stopped them from needing stories and selfies. The men liked the way their wives disappeared into cubes down the hall, liked the way they no longer had to be interesting or thin or emotionally available. People liked the way their children were cared for, and they liked that the robots taught them quickly to learn, and grow, and come to self-sufficiency. The kids weren’t sitting in front of screens all damn day, and wasn’t that nicer?
The robots didn’t understand how small and analog human ambition could be, how easy to feed. Of course we dream of filing cabinets and paper trails, the vast most of us. Bigger dreams are hard, are messy with feeling. Connection causes pain.
The robots, I wonder if they ever read Kafka? I don’t think there are books here, outside of What Color Is Your Parachute? At least, none that I’ve seen.
Relativity, Special
My mother built herself walls of story and so I will rebuild her story castle, right here in this cubicle. Surely, I can’t be the only one dreaming himself out. Surely others will refuse the endless meetings, the swivel chairs, the fluorescent lights, the traffic jams, the built-in ashtrays, the stacks and stacks of paper. Surely someone on this ship wants to feel something more than the smallest feelings. Where, after all, are the humans who built the robots?
Long ago, I decided I would live (many didn’t), and that I would live for love. But living so long has begun to cloud that intention. The furniture falls apart in these rooms. The shabbiness shows through. If I don’t act soon, the walls will shift and sink, the dreams will dissolve, and I will be left with nothing but stray pixels and this cold hard ship, empty, I suspect, of everyone but me and them.
Emmaline, I am building this castle for us. I plan to scale these walls and escape to you.
Zenith
Space was not prepared to receive us and does not receive us now. To the robots, it is immaterial: we needed to leave the planet, the oceans were swallowing us whole, and so we went. We were given no choice. We are lucky they felt some responsibility for their makers, as clumsy and backward as we are to them.
But for us, who built Elysian Fields for our dead, who tore down our forests and burnt the sky to please the living, who made the robots to make us whole—we might have made another choice. We might have burned along with the world, drowned along with the dead. Are we living now? Landscapes are malleable, organic; a human can make a mark. But we are making nothing.
I shall construct this castle in honor of that memory of earth, the conquest; Earth, the colony. I shall build my walls of red stone and wet sand, of glass and clay and rope and wood—all the things we have thrown away for good. I shall build my walls around that ossuary, the bodies of our saints, our human bones. These relics can be called up at any time. They smell of sky, of grave, of deep wet earth, loamy and brown. I will dig the stars from the sky; I will bury them like seeds and we will grow a new and living home.
Of Stars, Coda
I was ten years old. My grandfather had eyes the color of moons, the result of his blindness. He was a seer, one of those working on the prototypes. He thought we were ready to be relieved. He was happy I would never need to work again. He talked about it, often, the way we would have leisure time at last. I laugh to think of it now, leaving for my Tuesday afternoon brainstorming session.
Sometimes I think we already died, years or eons ago. Sometimes I think we are living on only in dreams, as brains in a jar, or maybe just ones and zeros. I don’t like to think past this thought.
Postscript
Emmaline, the HR bot says the person matching your name and description is no longer a person, but a pile of ashes. Emmaline, they won’t give me details, won’t tell me where and when in time I can ride to rescue you. They tell me lies; they say “old age”; I say Emmaline was young and so am I.
They say, and I swear to you, there is a look of pity in the HR bot’s eyes, they say, sir. Sir, we are sorry, but the nineties has been a very long decade.
Mildly Joyful, with Moments of Extraordinary Unhappiness
THE MAN AND WOMAN ARE CHILDLESS AND WEALTHY AND happy. She loves him, and he loves her, in part because of affection, in part because of muscle memory, in part because of their shared personal possessions. They love each other about as much as people who adore things can love other people. She has learned to love things less the older she grows. He has come to depend on them. She is generous and quiet, and he is witty and talkative. They are a good match; all of their friends say so.
They eat out every night at loud restaurants with short menus and long waits. Occasionally, they order in. They live in a nice two-bedroom condo in the city. The master bedroom is full of paintings they’ve acquired during their travels. Their bed is hand-carved; their sheets are embroidered. The second bedroom is used as a study, and they’ve filled it with sculpture and books and other beautiful things. They bot
h have high-paying jobs they tolerate, and they travel often, and she plays piano in the evenings while he sings along. It’s enough to remind them of their former selves, before they acquired so many things but after they acquired each other.
He is kind to her and she is kind to everybody; if pressed he would say it’s the only thing he doesn’t like about her. This, he knows, sounds monstrous, but he understands he’s borrowed so many better traits from her. He would not use the word jealous, but resentment, yes, perhaps. He only has enough kindness for one person. He supposes that’s what love means to him. If he were a good person, he supposes, it would be a trait he would love, this boundless heart. But he isn’t a better person. He knows this about himself. She knows this, too, and because she is kind, loves him even more for it.
One day she goes for a walk and she doesn’t come back. He assumes she’s left, probably with one of the many men she spends her kindness on. Or maybe one of the women. He does not call Missing Persons. He calls her parents and tells them she’s run off with a lover. Her parents are horrified; her mother offers to fly into town with a tuna casserole. He will be fine, he assures them; he expected something like this. He has prepared. He hangs up the phone and feels his good bits breaking off, bitterness growing in like brittle new limbs.
Later in the evening, a phone call from the hospital: she’s been hit by a car and would he come quickly please to say his goodbyes? He does not dare to come, not now. He does not tell her parents. He hides in his apartment and orders Chinese from their favorite place. The delivery guy inquires after his wife and the man does not answer, instead hands him a ten. Inside his fortune cookie: “What you deserve will find you.” He swallows the paper, black ink smeared across the tip of his tongue. His wife dies alone in the early morning.
After the funeral, he buys more things. Anyone would. There is now so much more space to fill. He fills, and fills, with boxes he’ll never open, crates he’ll never unpack. He buys twenty identical sweaters from Barneys and never picks up the box from the front stoop. The same gray wool cardigan shows up on men and boys throughout the neighborhood that winter.