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  Not long after, though, she’d secretly started hoping that it wouldn’t.

  7

  HAZEL CRACKED THE FRONT SCREEN DOOR AND WAS RELIEVED TO hear snores ringing out from her father’s bedroom. The last time they’d both slept under one roof was the night of her mother’s funeral, when Hazel had gotten so drunk that the thought of getting in a vehicle made her nauseous; she’d slept on the sofa until her father’s snoring woke her, then she’d turned on the TV. Her brain was soft from stress, and in this vulnerable state, the program that came on easily pushed through the surface layers of her consciousness straight into a permanent memory—it was an aerobic-exercise show, presumably for effervescent insomniacs. The lead woman’s eyes and smile gleamed with unfiltered sadism; her growling chorus of Burn! Burn! Burn! made her seem a recent transplant from 1690s Salem—she’d ditched the bonnet and donned a leotard. Full proof of her evil powers came next: the remote control’s batteries inexplicably stopped working, and to Hazel’s dismay, the longer she watched the mechanical violence of the woman’s kicks, the more hypnotic the program became. In the background, one woman performed at half speed and yet another performed at quarter speed; watching all three at once was an almost-pleasant optical illusion. But the aerobic leader’s eyebrows were harshly triangular; Hazel found nothing pleasant about those. They made her feel very unsafe. Their arched points looked capable of perforating the television screen, maybe opening up a spatial vacuum that would suck Hazel in. Then she’d have to perform a kick routine at one-eighth speed for the rest of eternity. During this entire nightmarish fantasy, her father’s snores had been a metered background sound track, and hearing them now, Hazel began to feel the woman’s kicks as punctuated jolts to her temple. “We should go lie down,” Hazel said to the bird. “We’ve had a big day.”

  The hollow flamingo was picking up vibrations from her father’s snores, which made the bird seem to be alive and nearly purring. Getting down the hall and back to the porch without crashing into furniture would take balance. Hazel thought of tightrope walkers and the balance sticks they used. A factoid she knew from Gogol was the more technical term for tightrope walking: funambulism. It struck her as an odd word for it—tightrope walking seemed scary, not fun. One of Byron’s earlier triumphs was the creation of a thick fiber-optic rope that could transmit several networks’ worth of information in seconds; the project came to bear the moniker Funambuloptics. It was sold as part of a defense contract for more than twice what the company was worth at the time (which was already more than nearly every other tech company in the world was worth), the reason being that if it were dangled from a helicopter, or hosed in through a window or a pipe, it could capture every particle of information on every computer inside the building without any human being having to be present. In theory, of course. Everything Byron’s military-contract units made only worked in theory. Nontheoretical use would violate international law.

  Hazel couldn’t remember how tightrope walkers held those sticks. Up and out? Squat and close? The snoring sound felt like an oppressive, low ceiling all around her: it seemed like she had to watch her head so she didn’t hit it against the noise. Squatting, Hazel picked up the flamingo by its stick leg and clutched it in front of her chest, which didn’t feel helpful. Now that she thought about it, everything surrounding tightrope walking felt suspect. Eventually she placed the stick behind her neck and draped her arms over the top of it, as though it were a pink crucifix she’d been affixed to, and teetered toward her room.

  At some point they stopped to take a micronap on the floor. Then Hazel found it easiest to take a canine approach, gently picking the flamingo up by the neck with her mouth and dragging it to the foot of the porch’s couch, whereby a wash of maternal instinct set in: by the light of the window, the narrow daybed seemed tailor-made for the creature. Hazel turned down the knitted afghan, set the flamingo inside, and drew the covers up to its beak. Its reflective eye was centered perfectly on the pillow. She realized that she too needed sleep and was actually drunk enough to get it; her inebriated brain insisted there was no point in staying awake in a vigil, awaiting Byron’s next move. It was going to come no matter what she did, and at the moment, if someone were to kill her, her brain would probably register the death as a happy one stemming from the pleasant esophageal burn below her ribs.

  She crawled in next to the bird and wrapped a protective arm across its girth.

  WHAT HAZEL HATED—AND SHE COULD FEEL HERSELF HATING THIS even as she slept—was how her dreams always turned to Byron. Not in a pleasant-revenge way, not even in a central way. He was just there, the most prominent building in the skyline of her thoughts, unable to be moved or overlooked. She could hear him right now in fact, mid-dream, calling her name and asking her to wake up.

  “Help!” Byron screamed.

  Hazel opened her eyes and screamed as well, first at the beaked pink plastic head, impossibly small on the pillow next to her, then at the ceiling—it was a nightmare, except it wasn’t a dream. There was truly an image of Byron’s head projected across her ceiling. She screamed a third time when the image blinked; its eyes were animate. It cleared its throat. “Hazel,” the image declared. “It’s me.”

  Though it covered the full width of the porch ceiling, proportion-wise it was not a perfect enlargement. Byron’s forehead was stretched out like the top of a hot-air balloon, forming the upper two-thirds of his face. The rest of his features and mouth were compressed into an elongated column that shrank down indefinitely to the microscopic point of Byron’s chin.

  Hazel glanced around the porch, locating herself; her temples throbbed. Hoping he hadn’t seen the flamingo yet, she tried a few maneuvers to push the bird down beneath the afghan. “Byron,” she snapped, looking upward. It was like her ex was a literal giant who’d come searching for her by prying off the roof of her father’s home. “Either kill me now or get off my ceiling.” At present he looked so cartoony that she could almost forget he was orchestrating her assassination behind the scenes. And face-to-face, Byron was incredibly nonchalant. He would be right up until the moment he had her murdered.

  “You left your mobile device at home. No one’s answering your father’s phone. How would you prefer I contact you?” From the darting gaze of his pupils, the subtle shifts of his head and manic blinks of his eyelids, she knew Byron was working. His desk was like a hive; a bizarre honeycomb arrangement of staggered monitors surrounded it, and he could somehow, with a variety of designated eye movements, independently respond to or control each one without moving his hands. “We need to talk,” he stressed. “It’s important. Trust me. You don’t want things to escalate.”

  He shifted his shoulders, which caused a new distribution of his head projection—the wooden ceiling fan now appeared to be implanted in his left cheek, spinning around like the most whimsical birthmark of all time. It was too much to keep up with in her nauseous state. Hazel closed her eyes so she wouldn’t get sick.

  “Wrong,” she whispered, unsure if Byron could even hear her. Where was his face coming in from? She scanned the room for the source before finally seeing it: a thin beam of light streaming through the back window. “I won’t ever bother you or speak of you. You can forget I exist. I was like a charity case you took on that didn’t pan out. You overestimated my potential. It happens. I’m sorry I failed you but I won’t continue wasting your time, effective immediately.”

  “You don’t understand, Hazel. I’d like to be certain you understand before I enact a solution we can’t reverse. This isn’t a secure connection . . .”

  “I definitely do not feel secure, Byron. Isn’t this breaking and entering? Your face, you know, breaking in?” She paused. “I know you’re going to have me killed. Can we go ahead and agree on a day and time? I won’t try to stop it; I just want to know.” Hazel saw a quick flash behind Byron’s head—someone was there in the office with him. It had only been a second, but she swore she’d just seen the outline of Fiffany’s head, that Fiffany
’s eyes were staring back at her.

  “It is in your own best interest to receive some facts. I’ve taken the liberty of putting some basic electronics in a weatherproof safe in your backyard. Its code is the date of our anniversary.”

  “I’m not opening the safe, Byron. I don’t ever want to use electronics again.” She managed to be surprised by the flash of anger that crossed his face—of course this was a personal affront to him. But there was a tiny bit of control and comfort in the fact that while he could kill her tomorrow, maybe he couldn’t make her use a cell phone before he did it. “I’m not asking for any of your money, which should prove I’m too insane for you to stay in a relationship with. Why don’t we just go our separate ways? My life will be such an insignificant, invisible thing. I’ll truly disappear. That’s all I want.”

  Hazel thought back to the beginning of their marriage, when the constant monitoring and sensors started to feel increasingly claustrophobic. She tried to believe Byron’s reassurance that it was innocuous—what did she have to hide? what was it hurting?—but increasingly she noticed Byron commenting on her daily activities around The Hub while he was away, the meals a staff member brought her each day changing based on the report of bodily scans she hadn’t been aware she was getting. Back then they’d had what Hazel thought to be a normal amount of occasional sex; Byron wasn’t the sort of person who could let go with abandon or fully stick his tongue in someone’s mouth. But soon not fucking became one of the only barriers Hazel could manage. Sex with you would be redundant! she’d yelled at him once when he finally admitted there were multiple cameras and scanners and more in every room including the bathroom, that no second of her time inside The Hub had gone unrecorded. You’re already inside my body with these fucking sensors! It was for safety and convenience, he’d stressed. It provided necessary data that technology relied upon, technology that would supposedly keep them healthy, happy, and vital. I don’t have a psychology degree, for example, he’d argue, but I can have your words and actions processed and analyzed with almost ninety-seven percent accuracy to reveal to me your current state of mind. How many couples can say that?

  Now, Byron snort-laughed. What did Byron ever find funny? She couldn’t think of a single thing except how great it was to win. “I need you to do something for me, Hazel. I need you to go get the mobile device out of the safe in your backyard and call me on a secure line. Can you do that?”

  “What happens if I don’t?”

  A ringing filled the room—a phone on Byron’s end. His eyes performed a series of spastic blinks; whenever she saw him working, it looked enough like he might be having a seizure to make her feel hopeful, but the flutters and rolls of his lids always turned out to be calculated. “I’m going to need to let you go for the moment, Hazel, but you know how to reach me. I’ll talk to you later today. Probably just after noon. That’s not an arbitrary time, that’s when you’re going to want to place a call to me, and the first order of business in our conversation will be a gentle reminder that I did try to warn you. I did, Hazel. You’re leaving me no choice.”

  With that, the regular ceiling came back into view. She glanced toward the back window, hoping the projection box was something he’d had installed that she could break with her hands, or cover by placing the flamingo’s cavernous abdomen over the top of it, but the box had retreated.

  She made herself a solemn promise that even if he somehow beamed her father’s house, with her father inside it, out of existence that afternoon and she found herself sitting all alone on the grass of an empty yard with no other object surrounding her but the safe Byron had dropped off, she still would not call him. She would urinate on the safe, maybe. Then she would walk away to try to find solitude and revel in it. Assuming he let her live.

  And maybe he would? Perhaps she’d been too pessimistic. There was clearly something more he wanted from her. Hazel tried to hope he might find a way to get it somewhere else. She knew this wasn’t the case though.

  Her clothes and hair were still wet. But in the light of the morning they felt different, less soggy and more refreshing, as if she’d simply showered with them on. Hazel removed them and took a moment to relish her nonrecorded nudity, then realized she had to assume Byron was recording video of her if his face had just been plastered across her ceiling.

  But she was in the world, having a moment outside Byron’s landscape of influence! She reminded herself that she’d existed before she’d ever known Byron, so a resumption of existence without him was absolutely possible. She’d previously come to believe that it wasn’t.

  The shopping carts at her father’s local grocer had wheels that locked up if anyone tried to take them beyond the parking lot, and a part of Hazel had figured that a similar thing would happen to her if she left The Hub’s borders without plans to return.

  But it wasn’t like she wanted to go back to her pre-Byron life either. When she’d married, she hadn’t brought any possessions with her because everything she owned was shitty. And when she left Byron, she hadn’t taken anything; it all seemed like his stuff. He’d either invented it or paid for it.

  Now she put on a T-shirt that she’d gotten free back in college. It was a thank-you gift for signing up for a credit card that she’d immediately maxed out then never made a payment on; the card’s logo was splashed across the front in different fonts. She paired this top with sweatpants that had DROPOUT written down their left leg in a Sharpie marker. She remembered being intoxicated and writing this upon herself one night back when it was clear she would not be rebounding from academic probation. It sounded better than “flunkout.”

  These clothes now seemed an ill fit for her microdermabrased face and asymmetrical haircut and perfect veneer smile. She’d really prided herself on the way she’d begun to ape dignity as Byron’s wife, and he’d sometimes commented, with a surprised tone, on how respectable she looked during the rare occasions when they attended an event as a couple. This getup wasn’t the outfit she wanted to die in, not ideally, but maybe if she renounced and removed all external indications of social merit from her physical person, he’d begin to question whether Hazel was worth all this trouble. She couldn’t simply drop down to a baseline maintenance of her physical attractiveness; she really had to start looking rough, like she meant it. Maybe Mrs. Weathersby, her father’s neighbor down the street, was still hoarding parakeets. If so, Hazel could drop by and ask for a tour of the bird room. She could stay until her clothing was covered with avian dung.

  OUT IN THE LIVING ROOM, HER FATHER WAS PUSHING DIANE’S ARRIVAL coffin toward the door by accelerating his scooter and hitting it. He kept backing up then gunning the throttle and hitting it again. She couldn’t tell if it was moving a bit each time or if no progress was being made, but it looked like a cathartic morning activity.

  “Hello, Dad!” Hazel called. He gave a small wave indicating that he was too busy to chat.

  She walked to the refrigerator and opened its door, then the sensation of being watched filled her with nausea—she turned, ready to confront one of Byron’s electronics, but it was Diane. It creeped Hazel out how she was able to sense the doll. “And hello to you, Diane.” Hazel started to raise the carton of OJ toward her in a gesture of merriment, but froze.

  Diane did not appear to be herself. At all.

  Overnight, the doll had devolved into some sort of catfish/human hybrid—gone was her foxy, closed smile with the corner lip upturned as if to say, I know the dirty stuff you want to do and I think you’re a sick individual but I must be the biggest sicko of all because I want to try every one of your filthy ideas out! Now, beneath her prim nose, there were no features at all except a puckered, circular, bright maroon opening that reminded Hazel of a baboon’s ass.

  “What the hell did you do to her face?” Hazel called out. Diane now looked a lot like the tortured figure in Munch’s painting The Scream, if the tortured figure were a red-haired female sex doll. Her arms were bent upward at the elbow, hands framing her c
heeks; her mouth was a wide cavern of terrible surprise.

  “That’s her other face,” her father said, appearing at the doorway.

  Upon realizing he meant the face I can have intercourse with, Hazel was torn between true curiosity and a desire to change the subject at all costs.

  Curiosity won. “Only the face switches? You don’t trade out the whole head?”

  “No decapitation necessary.” Her father zipped over, pulled some sort of pop tab on Diane’s scalp, and lifted it off.

  The empty stocking of the mouth hole looked like a prototype of a synthetic digestive organ. Its color was a near-pink gray; it glistened in the morning sun streaming through the kitchen window. When he began to put it back, Hazel had a memory of watching a magician packing his tricks up after the show, stuffing endless feet of colored scarves back into a small black top hat.

  “Good talk,” Hazel concluded. “Hey, do you mind if I keep that body box? Can I take it back to my porch room?” She’d realized there probably weren’t any cameras inside the box, at least not at present, so she could get a few solid hours inside it with the lid almost shut, where no one else would see her. Byron would find some way to have any comforting hiding spot she found networked by nightfall, but at least she’d get to do it once.

  “If you can get it back there, sure. It’s heavy as hell. The deliveryman asked me if rocks were inside. I said, ‘Nope, I ordered a new girlfriend!’ and he really cracked up. Had no idea I wasn’t joking!” Despite the fact that the top layer of Diane’s face was sitting on the table, propped upright against the napkin holder, her father tenderly kissed the doll on the cheek. “I have to go to a goddamn doctor’s appointment,” he said. “This becomes your social circle when you’re my age, Haze, doctors’ appointments and funerals. You’re either dying or trying not to.”