“No, not really.”
“’T’s all right, I guess. We grieve however we grieve.”
She’s not dead, David wanted to tell him. Instead, he said, “How’d you grieve?”
He smiled around his cigarette. “I became a smoker.”
David saw no reason to return his smile, so didn’t.
“I got a group now that I go to. It helps.” He shrugged again and his shoulders slumped further. “Just wish to Christ that I’da known him better is all.” He scraped the lit end of his cigarette against the anisotropic surface on his pack, deactivating it, smiled at David, and walked back the way they’d come.
FEET. David was staring at feet.
Birds in black ink caught mid-flight amid a canvas of pale skin. Somewhere, faded, muffled, came a voice that said I love your doves and another, louder, less familiar, giggled and said they’re not doves, they’re crows. Jo’s memories, when David plugged into her now, looked and felt like a video that’d been played so often the tape frayed. Static blitzed in and out, all sound wrapped in gauze. David saw through his mother’s eyes the black leather couch this other woman had brought her tattooed feet up on, feet she’d tucked beneath her in feline repose.
One bird had a black wing that ran along the curve of the woman’s instep. A couple birds had beaks that threaded the veins of her extensor tendons. Her toes were untouched. But when the woman put both bare feet together, the migration arc turned into a circle. The understanding didn’t come to David, but was brought to him by his mother’s subconscious. The same subconscious that, when her gaze rose to see a face framed by dark auburn hair that crashed in waves against the smooth, sharp shores of tanned cheeks, told David no one had ever had a greater portion of his mother’s love than this woman.
Dee. The same woman who would die in the shuttle crash that had put him in a coma as a child. His mother.
When David left the memory and unplugged from his mother, he saw that she was still fast asleep in her bed, serenity slackening the skin on her face.
“Do you wish I’d died instead of her?” he asked, the question so soft off his lips he wasn’t sure he had asked it at all.
DAVID found his fellow smoker on a wooden bench at The Viewer, hands folded placidly in his lap. When he took a seat beside him, the stranger smelled only faintly of mint.
“They’re cleaning it out,” he said by way of explanation, without looking at him. At David’s silence, he continued: “Sometimes it gets so thick that even us hardened veterans start to get that contact high off the secondhand. Gets to be too unhealthy. Violates the Colony Codes and all that. They’re okay with us dying, just not too quickly. So they gotta clean it out. Empty out the lungs.”
“I do it because it hurts,” David said, only vaguely knowing why.
Leather jacket blinked, startled, then turned to him; all mirth and lightheartedness leaked out of his face. “What?”
“The smoking. The damage. I know why I like it.” He smiled like a teacher unpacking an understanding to a student. “I like it because it damages me.”
“What are you talking about? That’s the nicotine. That’s why you like cigs. You like it ’cause it releases all those neurotransmitters—histamine, dopamine, serotonin, all of that—and the norepinephrine gets you aroused. Look, I practically failed chemistry; that’s why I’m a garbageman. But I’m pretty sure acetylcholine and beta-endorphin reduce pain. Mesolimbic pathway, reward system. Any of this making sense to you?”
“But it hurts.”
Leather jacket slung an arm over the back of the bench and turned to look at David—really look at him. “This about your mom?”
“Why was she the one who survived?” Then it all came out, a waterfall of words. He found himself stumbling over them, joining them together where they weren’t meant to be joined, compound words that hadn’t existed before, thoughts clambering over other thoughts until he was out of breath, his mind crowded with images of the shuttle’s interior cabin just before the explosion, the debris and people sucked out the hole before the self-repair protocols kicked in, one of his mothers slipping him into his space suit, then him floating in an inky dark that felt as though it would last forever, that seemed as though it were the only thing that had ever existed, that he was a single moment in its life, a solitary grain of sand, that nothing mattered, not even him. He wanted to plug into the stranger’s skull and convey the entirety of his vision, realizing this was the first time in years he’d talked out loud about the accident that had killed one mother and ruined another. He was delirious with joy, vertiginous with rapture. And when he finished, he found the stranger staring at him as though he’d cut off his own arms. Horror and anguish and pity. Sparkling behind that, however, in tears that crowded the corners of his eyes but did not spill forth, recognition.
“You were in the shuttle crash.” He blinked, seemed to be coming back into himself. “You … your family was in the shuttle crash.”
David realized what he’d done and shrank into himself, as though he’d put in the stranger’s hands the entirety of him and he couldn’t bear to watch someone be less than gentle with it. He’ll drop me and it’ll be my fault.
“That’s how my father died too. Shuttle crash killed my pops. Very same one.” Then he smiled and sniffed, then wiped a jacket sleeve across his eyes, so that it came back wearing a scar that shone with lamentation.
THE hospital had indicated during the call that something dangerous and urgent was happening, that he was needed right away, that David and only David could solve whatever catastrophe was unfolding. But when he arrived at Jo’s hospital room, sedation reigned. Doctors greeted him with a friendly nod. The nurse attendant smiled as he walked past her, through the sliding door that whooshed open. And though Jo didn’t have a grin or even an ironic chuckle for him, she was quiet.
David sat down at her bedside and, for a long time, was silent. Just as he was about to speak, to chastise her for making a scene, to curse her out for worrying him, to berate her for being her usual flinty fucking self, she opened her mouth and said, “Didn’t remember when I was,” in a voice limp with apology.
“You mean where?”
Jo stared at the ceiling. “No.” She gulped. “I thought this was just after the shuttle crash.” Then that ironic chuckle. “Thought Dee was still alive.”
David reached out a hand, put it over his mother’s. Though she didn’t refuse it, she didn’t warm to it either.
“Those damn implants of yours…”
David took his hand away and considered his glowing fingertips, the blue that radiated from his thumb. Only a hint at the machinery whirring away inside him, breaking down chemicals, cleaning out toxins, augmenting brain function.
“I’m gonna get the operation.”
“What?”
“It’s been months now. I know what’s happening to me. And I know where I’m going.”
“But, Mom, you’re too old for full cyberization. It could kill you.”
She waved him away, let out half a sneer. “I’m not getting the full package. Who can afford it these days? I just want them to fix my brain a little bit. I’m tired of these half memories.” Her voice grew quiet. “I’m tired of always being wrong.”
“Jo, it’s too dangerous. What if you don’t sync up properly? What if they fuck up the partitioning? Mom, this could mess you up—”
“Even more than I am already?” She looked at him when she’d said that. Her features hardened, turning from valley to cliff face. “I’m still cognizant enough to not need your permission for shit. I’ve already talked to the doctors about it. I’m gonna get the operation. I’m gonna get a cyberbrain. I already have a goddamn outlet.” She reached to finger the opening at the base of her neck, then gave up. “Let me forget how to eat and go to the bathroom and whatever else I’m supposed to forget before the end. I just … I just don’t wanna forget Dee.” Her bottom lip trembled.
THE site was so fresh, the chalk and plaster and asbestos so thick in the air, that Linc thought if they’d gotten there a couple minutes earlier, the building might’ve fallen right on top of them. A couple of the men had once-white hospital masks tucked over their noses and mouths. A few pulled up their bandannas; so did some of the women and other on-siters who came in off the street, all chalky overalls and scratched-up Timberland boots.
The stackers gravitated to their own small kingdoms, the slower ones pushed out to some of the isolated corners while the denizens of Bishop’s truck, among the first responders, got their pick of the waste.
