Made for Love Read online

  The only way to not be spied on was to completely not exist.

  HAZEL WOKE WITH A BURNING URGE TO WASH HER FATHER’S FEET and trim his toenails, really ceremonially, disciple-style. Maybe she’d been going about this wrong. Maybe instead of pissing Byron off by sleeping with ex-convicts or taking herself out she needed to embrace saintly duties and live a life of self-deprecation. It wouldn’t count as much as it should since Byron would know the thoughts she was having, know how miserable she was, know how a martyr’s life of restraint was a performance for her. But wouldn’t it count for something?

  “No.” Hazel said this aloud. She looked over at the wide, attentive eye of the plastic flamingo and the word seemed to have come from him, an emphatic voice of agreement. Byron didn’t feel compassion, and Byron wasn’t her master. It wasn’t like she was a caged dog who’d bitten a child and had to prove she was rehabilitated enough to be released. Nothing she’d ever do would cause Byron to say, “I’m freeing you; you’ve earned it.” She couldn’t earn it. Byron had to give it and he never would. She had three choices: surrender and return to him, live in surveillanced exile, or die. Which option would be the least horrible, she wasn’t sure.

  But there would be something of a personal redemption in tending to her father. She’d made the wrong choice in marrying Byron, and in staying with him for so many years. Even if it wouldn’t matter to Byron if she did something good, it could matter to her.

  The thing was, her father was a grouch. As someone who wasn’t dying of cancer, and as a freeloader, Hazel knew she didn’t have a right to complain audibly, but wow was he difficult to spend an evening with. Diane and Roxy only complicated things—they were a silent presence, yes, but still a presence, and seemed to make him automatically win every argument—it was three against one.

  Tonight they were all watching a movie about a past war. Diane was lying sideways across Hazel’s father’s lap, posed as though he’d just carried the doll over the hearth of their new home, one arm bent up around his neck, holding on in an almost casual way, Diane’s head turned to the TV. As the white flashes of gunshots and violent noise washed over her permasmile, the juxtaposition made it hard for her to not seem sadistic. She grinned through the most gruesome close-up shots of disemboweled soldiers. They each seemed to be a personal enemy; she was delighted to watch them get their comeuppance.

  In his bathrobe with a painkiller-induced expression of serenity, Hazel’s father also seemed appreciative of the violence. Was it a masculinity thing he was going for, watching these films? If so, she didn’t understand it. It wasn’t like Diane and Roxy were complaining about his performance in the bedroom.

  Instead of watching the TV, Hazel watched him. He was a new species of being, an About-to-Die, which Hazel hadn’t interacted with much. She’d purposely stayed away from her mother during this time; she’d feared what her mother might expect from her. But now she had the reverse problem: Hazel found she expected something from her father, particularly given the fact that he was all she had going at the moment. She wanted an increased profundity in manner, maybe. When were they going to have tearful all-night talks where he spoke of his numerous regrets in parenting her and begged her forgiveness? When was he going to wax poetic about what a celebration her existence, despite her failed marriage and current lack of employment, ignited daily within his heart? When was he going to bequeath her diamonds of wisdom gleaned from a near-full-term life span? Hazel always took a geological approach to epiphany—if she didn’t understand something, it was because she was too new at it; she just needed to get more layers of “experience crust” to put weight on the memories and information she did have so the answers would squeeze out.

  Maybe things would get more important-seeming when he grew more helpless. Perhaps it would take the intimacy of crossed taboos—her washing him, changing him—for her to earn any sort of tenderness or gratitude.

  It had to feel more worthwhile at some point, because otherwise Byron would win yet another argument. Hazel liked to think that nature must have some wisdom, but Byron felt nature was a series of defects. People want to think of anything in nature as normal, and anything human made as abnormal. Nature isn’t normal, he’d once said. Nature is weak. Dying is normal if nature’s your reference. Why would I want to subscribe to a system whose best-case scenario is decline speeding up into fatality?

  If Byron saw her tend to her father until his death and saw that the experience was an empty one, wouldn’t that be an implied I told you so? He’d be more convinced than ever that humanity was a problem to engineer beyond. Hazel wanted her father to affirm that the traditional life cycle held inherent value. The thought that there was a loophole, that soon technology could flatten the circle and make linear vitality go on indefinitely, added a new level of tragedy to every prior death, to Phyllis, to the fact that one of Hazel’s formative Christmases had been ruined unnecessarily. And it increased the wrongness about herself that she felt in the pit of her stomach—if she had a hard time enjoying her natural life span and finding adequate worth inside the experience, how could she hope to make it through an eternity?

  Byron’s internal surveillance added a pressure to achieve happiness that was counterproductive to happiness. Every failure she had, emotionally and otherwise, would be amplified by the fact that Byron had watched it play out.

  “Dad? You said the other day that you could die at any moment. I mean we all could, but you said it’s pretty likely for you. Which I think was hyperbole—all the more reason to go to the Gogol facility and just see where things are with the cancer. But, let’s say you’re right. The end could come in an hour. Why do you want to spend the last moments of your life watching war movies?”

  His face was drawn up in a cringed expression; two soldiers on TV were torturing an enemy POW to try to get information. He didn’t respond.

  Her father and Di’s and Roxy’s matched stillness seemed like a trick from a horror movie. What if her father had in fact just died, and his departed soul had entered Di’s body? What if she had to spend the rest of her life living with her father whose spirit was living inside the body of a highly sexualized female mannequin? Or what if Di was secretly possessed by an evil demon—it had been lying dormant inside her, waiting to be awakened by the repeated sound of automatic weapon discharges, and this movie had made it happen? It seemed that if Hazel reached across Diane to place two fingers on her father’s throat to check for a pulse, the doll could spin awake and bite her wrist. Hazel stood over him and slowly began to lean down.

  “It’s cathartic!” her father finally yelled; Hazel jumped back. With each word, Diane lifted and fell slightly, awash on the rough seas of her father’s booming diaphragm. “I’m dying of cancer. What do you want me to watch, cartoon kittens? I’m in the trenches, Hazel. I’m in the rabbit hole about to be shot.” He extended an arm to the television. “These are my people. What are you doing, sitting around here anyway? You should be out living. Ideally making a living. You might actually be getting my stink of death upon you. Death does have a smell. It stinks. You think you’re going to be able to pick up a new man smelling like that?”

  Hazel told herself to be fair. She hadn’t been able to predict all the bad in life, which meant unpredictable good might unfold too. She wanted to see—But not for you, Byron! she made sure to add inside her head—just what would happen with her father. If there really was nothing, if life really held nothing, then maybe her self-controlled exit could have nothing at all to do with Byron, and that would be a sort of vengeance. She’d be running away from something even greater than him, even greater than a person with a godlike comprehension of her daily life. She’d be fleeing the fact that nothing, in either the natural landscape or Byron’s world of technology, could remedy her despair.

  She’d been so worried about Byron putting out a mercenary hit on her. But what he’d done was one better. He’d more or less convinced her to do it herself.

  THAT EVENING, LIVER WAS NOT A
T THE SPOTTED ROSE. “HAVE YOU seen him?” Hazel asked the bartender. The woman was stretching the side of her mouth flesh out in front of a mirror, seemingly looking for something on the inside of her cheek.

  She shook her head. “I have not. Not all evening, and that has never happened. It isn’t unreasonable to think the worst. He’s always here, so the fact that he isn’t means he’s too physically impaired to come. I don’t mean too drunk, I mean too broken limbed or dead. I’d say try the ER, but he’d never go on his own.”

  Hazel swallowed. Byron wouldn’t take out such a small fish, would he? “Do you have a car I could borrow?”

  Now the woman took both hands out of her mouth and turned around, eyeing Hazel.

  “Those are like two different questions,” the woman said. “I do have a car.”

  “I slept with him,” Hazel offered.

  “What does that have to do with my car?” the woman worried aloud, suspicious.

  “Nothing. I just mean my concern for him is real.” Hazel paused. “My ex found out that I slept with him and I’d like to check in. But his dwelling situation is not close by. I think I can remember how to get back to it, but I’d need a car.”

  The woman shrugged and reached for her keys. “It won’t go well for you in this car if you get pulled over. And I don’t care if you try to steal it. But care will be given by others, and I mean, woman to woman, you don’t want that brand of justice on your tail. If you do, that is gross.”

  “No,” Hazel repeated. She decided this word would be her brain’s new autoreply in uncomfortable situations, or during times when someone asked her a question and she hadn’t really been listening. Social pressure seemed to push her toward the other direction—to want her to nod and agree to everything. Flash a timid smile that could be interpreted however the listener liked. But after her marriage, Hazel found no combination more appalling than the vague with the affirmative. Know the full story; that’s when you get wholly on board. That’s how you avoid becoming an evil tech genius’s science-project wife.

  “If you find him please call an ambulance instead of taking him to the hospital in the car,” the bartender said. “Cloth interior. I don’t have time for that.”

  To this Hazel said, “Yes.”

  The car was an older model, the longest size of regular-vehicle car possible. Driving it felt like simultaneously towing and plowing.

  There was a thud on the car’s roof. When Hazel got out, a large snakeskin boot was standing upright on top of it.

  Was it Liver’s? She looked up in the tree, the same large tree they’d parked in front of the last time she’d visited Liver’s shed, but didn’t spot the shoe’s mate. She couldn’t remember if Liver had worn shoes at all. But if he had? What would make him climb a tree?

  Hazel felt herself beginning to run, then sprint. She hadn’t done any type of exercise in years—with Byron she always had the urge to be invisible, which to Hazel seemed to correlate with stillness. Don’t move; don’t be spotted. Blend into the wall.

  Liver’s shed was completely gone. In its place was a yard sign declaring the area to be the property of Gogol Industries. Tresspassers would be reported. There was a singular camera mounted on a stick, a tiny orb Hazel heard move to focus on her face. It began snapping several pictures. She didn’t know whether to run or cry or hold up her middle finger.

  She ran.

  She had to get back to her father’s house; the car she could abandon a few blocks away with the keys inside. It was the least of her worries.

  HAZEL WENT STRAIGHT TO HER FATHER’S BACKYARD. SHE WAS SURE there would be another safe there, with a phone inside, just as though she’d never pawned anything at all. It was a game Byron could play forever—she could get rid of the safe every day for the rest of her life, and by morning a new one would be right there waiting.

  But it wasn’t identical. When the safe clicked and hummed and its nanoparts opened, all the same electronics were there. But Liver’s necklace of teeth was draped across them.

  Byron’s video call was already up on the phone, waiting. His hands were folded in his lap, his eyes directing the circus of monitors. “I saw,” Hazel told him. “Did you have Liver arrested or something?” Hazel wanted nothing more than to hurl the device against the side of the house and make Byron’s image crack into jagged pieces of glass. “This is over the line. Let him go.” She paused. “I’ll come back home as soon as I know Liver’s okay, even if my father won’t agree to treatment. Are you happy? You’ve successfully negotiated a hostage trade.” Being away from The Hub wasn’t worth others getting hurt.

  “I’m so glad to hear that you’re coming back, Hazel. We’ve all missed you.”

  “If I know and see that he’s okay.”

  Byron put his lips together and made a “hmhm” sound. “Whom are you referring to?”

  Hazel swallowed. “You didn’t have him killed, did you?”

  Byron’s Adam’s apple gave a happy bob. She used to look at its Ping-Pong-ball shape and size and think how his tiny heart could actually be housed there instead of in his chest. “Hazel, who? It seems like you’re referring to an imaginary friend. Someone of whom there’s no trace. You know what happens when you search online for someone imaginary? You don’t find anything. You’re real, and I can prove it by searching for you on the Internet. You’re mentioned countless times. You’re there in photos, listed as my wife.”

  Her lower intestines felt like they were filling with very cold yet somehow molten copper. The sensation spread and she had the urge to cut herself down the middle and take out all her organs and bury them. They were screaming inside her like infants who wanted to be swaddled.

  “I am having a different reality from the Internet’s reality,” Hazel said. Her voice was quiet and slow. She felt drugged by sad desperation.

  “It’s one hypothetical measure of a man, you know,” Byron said. “Or of a person, I guess. Not just men. If someone dies and no one knows about it . . . you see my point. This is something you don’t have to worry about, Hazel. I saved you from anonymity. But don’t be content to stop there. You’re an integral part of something really big, something we’ve been working toward for years. You get to represent millions of dollars of work and groundbreaking research. You’re important. I’m offering you a true partnership here. An enormous place in my legacy. It’s silly to waste any more time. Come home, and think about bringing your father with you. We can probably save his life.”

  Stalling would end the conversation more quickly than saying no. “I need some time to mourn Liver,” Hazel said. “I’m feeling pretty upset that he never existed.”

  Byron sighed. “Fine. Spin your wheels a little longer. But please don’t test my patience. You can grieve all you want at The Hub. I can even have a black veil waiting for you. Whatever you need, Hazel. I’m a supportive guy.”

  The call ended and Hazel found herself down in the backyard’s grass, crawling toward the porch’s sliding-glass door. When she reached it she put her forehead against it and sat there waiting, like a pet who’d been let out to urinate.

  Hazel wished her father owned a dog or a cat, some animal who could give her blind comfort. Her parents had never allowed pets. Living things that don’t wear undergarments aren’t welcome on my sofa, her mother used to say. And dogs can’t feel guilt. Not enough guilt, anyway. Not nearly enough to where I’m okay having a relationship with one.

  Hazel began to bang her head against the glass, halfheartedly trying to break it but also not minding the way it hurt or the possibility that she might be able to knock herself unconscious if she kept at it long enough. “You and mom were so aloof and cold,” Hazel suddenly yelled. She was yelling through the glass, at her father, even though he wasn’t in the room. What she could see in the glass was her reflection, so she was actually yelling at that, which made her yell louder. “Don’t you think that has something to do with why I married a monster? Are you aware that my whole life you’ve winced whenever I came
through the door? It’s not great for self-esteem. In my brain I was all, Am I a human? Am I a tumbleweed made of fiberglass insulation? Am I the polio virus?”

  Hazel found she was crying in the really hysterical way that made her face wet and plastery. There were some mucal fireworks as she began to pound on the glass with her fists in addition to her head.

  It felt like if she made enough noise, the house would transform into her dream parents’ home instead of her father’s. The bright suburban décor that filled its rooms would be a convincing argument that it was not inhabited by a dour hermit couple but by two warm parents who weren’t too depressed or cynical to attempt home improvement. Hazel often thought of how different her life might be if she’d been raised by people who knew wallpaper could make a difference and proved it. Parents who were enthusiastic and boundlessly accepting and messaged her sayings like “Failure is part of the journey to success.” Ones who were politically active in causes of social justice and didn’t base their voting decisions on xenophobic rumors they heard from the line cook and sometimes counter waiter at the corner diner who felt Hitler was not a saint but did have a lot of good ideas that should not be thrown out with the Holocaust bathwater. “I’m grateful for the myriad ways you did not abuse me,” Hazel clarified. “I was never starved or kept inside a cage or repeatedly burned with cigarettes. I guess it just sucks how a lot of parents like their children but you didn’t like me. It also sucks how even though I didn’t really like you, I never stopped wanting you to like me, because you never cared if I liked you or didn’t.”

  Now she was trying as hard as she could to break the glass. “Do you know how when people are really hungry they will be driven to eat the inedible? Grass and soil and the like? That also happens with love. If you want love badly enough, you will start gobbling harmful substitutes like attention and possessions. Do you know what I thought when I first met Byron? ‘He doesn’t seem to hate me! I can easily work with this!’”