Made for Love Page 7

  The creature’s back was glistening like a mirror, so much so that Jasper found he could see his reflection in its gray flesh. With his grimaced face, his mouth open in a labored breath . . . Jasper recoiled. He looked old.

  So old that it couldn’t be his reflection: he was actually seeing his future. It was right there beneath the surface of the dolphin’s slick sheen. It was a troubling revision of the ever-young self-portrait that his mind held fixed inside his ego. Despite the creature’s weight and his bleeding wrist, Jasper felt compelled to stare for a while longer.

  Why was he seeing this? Was it some kind of message? What did it mean?

  When he did finally look up, he and the dolphin were no longer alone. In front of him was a wall of people lining the shore, all of whom were holding out an arm, extending hands upward and toward him.

  Each hand held a Gogol cell phone, snapping photographs and taking videos. “You saved the dolphin!” a woman cried out.

  Jasper felt his brow grimace, his shoulders tense. “No big deal,” he said.

  5

  AS SHE SHUT HER FATHER’S DOOR, HAZEL HAD THE URGE TO TIPTOE around its parameter, searching. Was there a crawl space she could hide under and thereby continue living for a few more hours? But this was probably not possible, her continued living. When she’d placed the thin suggestion in the air a few months ago, “Maybe I should move out?” Byron had given her a terrifying look. It seemed almost helpless: Don’t you know what I’d have to do then? Why would you make me do something so awful? “Unacceptable,” he’d said. For Byron, this meant the worst possibility it could.

  Yet she’d done it. Because maybe there was a slight chance he wasn’t going to kill her? Though probably not.

  Of course he wouldn’t be doing the killing. Not in a hands-on way. That Hazel could almost find funny: Byron, in his gadgetry-infused suit straight off the cover of Wired, standing behind the sun-faded American flag above her father’s front bushes, doing something so direct and noninterfaced as placing his hands around her neck to strangle her. Then she might get to laugh in his face as he squeezed her life out because it was so not him. Plus, a few moments after her death, he’d be really embarrassed to have indirectly displayed emotion via physical homicide.

  What she needed to be watching out for was more along the lines of a microdrone kill. Some buzzing thing that looked like a yellow jacket and stung her between the eyes with a synthetic poison venom. Hard to convey to her father that this was a realistic, genuine concern. That was Byron’s style. Full stop.

  And really, she didn’t want to die. Not in a gung-ho way. Sure, the depression of being Byron’s constant audience and test subject had given her an easy coin of nihilism to flip in her hand: heads she died, tails she lived a life of misery. But Hazel hoped now that after so many bad years of internal and external surveillance, of cohabitation with someone she’d grown to hate and fear alike, the absence of sadness might feel something like contentment, or close enough. She did want to live long enough to see what a life of independence might be like, how both her pleasures and problems would feel if she’d never used Byron as an escape route. If she’d been smart enough to say, Your money is tempting but wow are you strange; I am too but let me just add that something does not feel right here. Something feels aggressively odd on a next-level realm I had not previously imagined, in terms of foreboding discomfort.

  Hazel turned around on the porch and opened her eyes, which she realized she’d been protectively squeezing shut: it might only be a second before someone or something threw a vial of fast-acting acid into her face.

  But what she saw playing out in front of her on the street looked like a small-town musical production. A geriatric opus, but a sizable one. The elderly apparently came out at sunset, and the sunset was beautiful. Its light was antiaging. It tinted their gray hair a luminous auburn and endowed their bald scalps with golden, healthy tans.

  Everyone stopped in place, as if on cue, stared at her for a moment, and waved. She felt like she’d landed in an AARP mobile-home version of Oz.

  The elderly people gathering there in front of her seemed both intrigued and terrified by her relative youth. Off in the distance, she could see more elderly people coming from streets that were farther away.

  She felt like she should make a speech, announce a run for office. Finally one broke the silence and simply yelled at her.

  “Who are you?!”

  “Yeah!” another added. Hazel couldn’t tell if their tone was due to outrage or being hard of hearing. Technically, since Hazel was under fifty-five years of age, she was not allowed to stay at Shady Place for an extended period of time, though they had no way of knowing that was her plan. Maybe they could smell the residential intent upon her.

  When her father had moved into the park after her mother died and Hazel had married Byron, he did so with a cover story: he told people his daughter lived in Washington and was “into strange politics” and their relationship was very strained. When she visited him with the security escort in the digital sedan, if anyone asked, her father claimed she was the daughter of one of his military buddies who’d died young, and she dropped by sometimes to hear stories about their troop. He didn’t want anyone to know Hazel was married to Byron. Boy, would the gold diggers come out in droves then, he always said. It would be like The Godfather. All day long people would be dropping by, asking for favors.

  Hazel now looked out upon the masses and cleared her throat. “I’m one of Herbert’s nieces,” she said. If Byron had spy cameras on her and was seeing this, that was good, maybe. Look at all these witnesses with nothing but time on their hands. Lots of bird-watchers among them too, probably: Owners of binoculars. Nosy neighbors. This sea of sagging flesh was a safety net.

  “Your uncle never comes to the socials,” one woman complained, also yelling. A leashed teacup dog was biting her edema-puffed ankles, but she didn’t seem to feel it. Which was good because the dog’s owner had dropped the leash and seemed to be taking an upright nap. Hazel could hear him snoring. “Is your uncle blind?”

  “I think he is,” Hazel said. “I’m pretty certain.” Why not?

  “You know there are these teenagers,” another woman added. “They like to ride their bikes through here and you know what they do? They piss on our lawns. In broad daylight. I can smell it now, can you?” she asked. “Their piss in our grass?”

  “I bet it’s a gang thing!” another yelled. They were crafting an informal town hall. It occurred to Hazel just then how ironic her risk of imminent death was. What would their reactions be were she to say, Guess what? Of all of us standing here, I’m actually the most likely to die tonight!

  This was a compelling reason not to stand there playing it safe and let the next few hours be whittled away listening to their teen-urine conversation. She should try to pack in whatever she most wanted to do ASAP. Like her father was doing with Diane. Like her mother had done with Bernie, et al. Was sex what Hazel most wanted to fill her last hours on earth with?

  She gave it some thought. She wasn’t opposed to a final quick fling, but a beer in a bar sounded greatest. There were just fewer variables. Plus she could go to a really dirty bar. She hadn’t been anywhere filthy since she’d married Byron.

  Hazel decided to speak to the group in a parlance they’d understand. “So nice to meet everyone, but I’m on my way to a doctor’s appointment.”

  “This late at night?” a man in a ball cap cried out. His hat declared him to be REtired!

  “Of course it’s gang related,” a competing voice offered. Hazel began walking forward. The crowd didn’t part for her. They all stood fixed in place and she had to maneuver around them like traffic cones.

  HER FATHER’S TRAILER PARK WASN’T NEAR THE NEIGHBORHOOD where Hazel had grown up. She passed a Laundromat and a convenience store and a shop that seemed to sell wigs and custom podiatric items with equal fervor. And then—she couldn’t believe she’d never noticed it before when being driven back to Th
e Hub, probably because she’d had her head buried between her legs in the same antihyperventilation posture she’d assumed post-engagement (this posture had become her standard resting position, really)—there was a Gogol outlet peddling used electronics.

  The window display held a toothbrush device, a Tooth-Flash 3.0, that was like an automatic car wash of fluorinating antiseptic gel. Hazel had tried it once and gagged the whole time. The brush produced a defensive amount of foam. Hazel felt like she was a large predator who was trying to eat the device because it seemed the brush was filling Hazel’s mouth with a lathery toxin as a form of defense. Byron loved these personal products because they made Gogol seem harmless: how could a company whose home-health line loosely trafficked in dental hygiene have anything to hide?

  Hazel didn’t know if there even was a bar within walking distance of her father’s trailer. She recalled the times when she was young and he’d tell her he’d hidden ten quarters in the backyard and she needed to go look for them. He’d actually hide only six, and she would look until the sun went down and then go inside and get a flashlight and look some more, and when he finally called her back inside or she got tired and eventually complained to him that she’d only found six, he’d say, Then you didn’t look hard enough. He insisted this even when she finally got wise and made him admit there only ever were six coins. If you really wanted ten, he’d argued, you would’ve found four more somehow.

  Of course, Hazel could go into the Gogol outlet and search-app for a bar in a matter of seconds, but that was exactly what the enemy wanted. No longer would she ever rely on any of that. Hazel wanted to begin forming her own mental maps, fallible and distractible as they might be—her very own lay of the land. She was going to deprogram herself, she’d decided. Not that Byron had brainwashed her, exactly; she clearly wouldn’t have left him if he had.

  But it was all very cultish at Gogol, the way reliance upon technology was perceived as a personal strength and the degree of one’s reliance measured that person’s value. Hazel had once posed a question to Byron: “Say one of your workers walked into your office tomorrow and was a full-on Transformer. This individual, a real go-getter, has managed to sever her brain from her human body and put it inside a robotic frame. Would this please you?”

  He hadn’t blinked. “I’d make her do the same thing to me right then and there. Same day. If for some reason the results weren’t replicable and she couldn’t, I’d give her the company. Co-CEO until my retirement, then it would be her show for eternity. I can think of few greater competitive advantages for a technology corporation than an immortal CEO.”

  “So you’d want to be immortal?” Hazel had clarified, repeating the question with disbelief. “You’d want to be immortal?”

  “Why wouldn’t I? Technology is only getting better. Thanks, in large part, to me.” Then he’d winked at her, and that wink had made Hazel feel like her organs were a house of cards that Byron had just blown down. At the time, the thought of welcoming death was her only fantasy escape from the marriage, and Byron was apparently going to try to stave death off for them both for as long as possible.

  But Hazel had felt that she’d made her bad decision and needed to accept the punishments it brought: This was her life, and she couldn’t get out of it. She truly probably couldn’t, even though she’d now made the overture of leaving. He was going to come for her one way or another. It had taken her a few years to decide to do it no matter the outcome. Knowing something was much different from knowing what to do about something, she supposed.

  For example: at present she was ambling along an unfamiliar street and had no cell phone or Internet device or navigation system and she was looking for a bar and her husband whose corporation included multiple armament and surveillance technology subsets probably wanted her dead. She knew these things, but what to do about them still eluded her.

  It was then she saw a sign for THE SPOTTED ROSE. The name seemed like a bad euphemism, perhaps an inelegant venereal-disease reference. If Byron found her there, it seemed as good a place as any to die.

  6

  THE BAR COULD NOT HAVE BEEN BETTER: IT HAD REGULAR TVS, NOT the Gogol TeleGlass Hazel was used to at home, and people were smoking real cigarettes. Loads of them.

  Gratitude flooding through her body was a deeply foreign sensation to Hazel. At first she mistook the feeling to be a diarrheal precursor.

  Smoking wasn’t allowed at The Hub or any of Gogol’s campuses, except, oddly, for the doctor at Gogol’s medical subsidiary who was in charge of most of Hazel’s checkups. When she’d asked Byron about it, he’d said, Well, I’d prefer she didn’t, but she’s special. I’m very happy with her research.

  The low-hanging clouds of smoke felt like a chemical bath, in a good way—the bar was a decontamination chamber. Everywhere patrons were anointing one another with exhalations. Here was an opportunity to get as much of Byron’s technology off her skin as possible before death. She had learned this much from her husband: the future hated germs. She’d hardly ever gotten physically sick when she lived with him. Nothing in the house was cloth except their bedding, towels, and napkins, which still really weren’t—they were all made from some slick, antimicrobial fabric that seemed to blend silk and low-density aluminum foil. When she rolled over in bed, it made a crinkling noise that reminded her of opening up a burrito wrapper.

  Was this a way she could get back at Byron a little—contaminate herself as much as possible before her slaughter? She could stop washing her hands, make out with strangers bearing cold sores. Maybe germs would be like camouflage against Byron and his employed agents, like covering oneself in mud to elude being sniffed out by a bear. If she got sick or infected enough, their sensors might stop registering her humanity: they were probably calibrated to find someone who’d been living the past several years in great economic privilege.

  Sitting down at the bar, Hazel picked up a near-empty glass that had been left behind by a previous patron. “I’d like to drink a beer out of this used glass, please,” she announced, a little too proudly. The woman immediately filled it up without dumping out the cloudy half inch at the bottom.

  “You doing this because you’re in love with him?” she asked.

  Hazel’s stomach twisted. “With Byron?” She could imagine him watching her with directorial zest on a spy camera as she left her father’s house, imagine him removing every bartender at every local bar in a five-mile radius and replacing them with Gogol employees who would ask Hazel about her relationship with Byron immediately after serving her a beer. “The guy who left that glass?” the woman clarified. “You really into him?”

  Hazel could not imagine Byron leaving the glass; no programs or images were moving on its surface. “Oh,” she replied. “No. I just didn’t want a clean one.”

  The bartender set a lukewarm pint down in front of Hazel; its top few inches of foam seemed to have been excreted by a Tooth-Flash. “If you don’t want a clean one, you came to the right place,” the bartender said. She was looking past Hazel, winking at someone. “That goes for the glasses and the patrons both.” The bartender took out a pack of cigarettes and Hazel started to ask for one, but she saw the woman was almost out. Hazel thought about how when she’d married Byron, she’d been so excited at the thought of leaving notions of scarcity behind—she was sure all feelings about not having enough, any worries of when or even if she might be able to get more of something, would disappear with the type of unlimited money Byron gave her access to.

  She had really, really believed in money. It had been the central fairy tale of her suburban childhood. And many of the myths about it had been true, sort of: because of Byron’s wealth, Hazel had gone to many hotels in beautiful places.

  But Byron would go to work, and she wouldn’t leave the room; security never advised it (after the third or fourth trip to a foreign metropolis, their skylines from her hotel window all began to look the same for some reason. “I thought the world would be bigger,” she told one roo
m-service attendant, who responded by silently opening her bottle of wine.). She could, technically, buy whatever she wanted, but Byron somehow found time to analyze and comment on every purchase, to the point that she grew to hate buying anything because it was fodder for conversation, and she wanted to talk to him as little as possible. Money had made aspects of her life approach a level of supernatural comfort—the furniture, the bath and shower, the lack of routine inconvenience and struggle. But her marriage, her extremely wealthy marriage, had also been the beginning of her true education in scarcity. Byron had just about smoked her all up. How little she had left, how low she was getting never preoccupied him. He always had a new request for her to summon enthusiasm for, increasingly less palatable than the last. Just use this machine. Just wear this monitor. Just put this chip into your brain.

  The man on the stool next to her was wearing a leather cowboy hat and a strange vest with no shirt underneath. The vest looked like skin that had accidentally peeled off his body long ago, and he’d saved it and eventually glued it back on for nostalgic reasons. It took Hazel a moment to understand his outfit because his skin was the same texture and color as the clothes. The whites of his eyes were entirely pink though. He appeared to be in the middle of a secret stage of death, a bonus level most players aren’t able to unlock.

  The thought occurred to Hazel: she didn’t have to get sick to play sick—if her father could have a pretend girlfriend, couldn’t she wear pretend lesions? Prosthetic open sores? Maybe that would help her feel less Byron-coated in a more instantaneous way. In the meantime, though, she wanted to try being social enough to tempt contagion.

  “Is anyone sitting here?” she asked the man.

  He turned and looked her up and down. He was the type of smoker who didn’t use his hands once he’d placed the cigarette in his mouth. Keeping ahold of it made him talk with the locked-down jaw and pinched lips of a ventriloquist.