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  I think my first memory of my mom is her carrying me on her shoulders through the mall. She would constantly be whispering jokes to me, little jokes between the two of us. She especially made fun of plastic. She’d say, “They’re all wearing oil. All their clothes. They don’t have anything on but oil.” I would whisper back to her, “They’re wearing dinosaurs. Dead dinosaurs drippy all over them.” She would whisper, “Trilobites.” I would whisper, “Old plants.” She would whisper, “It’s the height of fashion.” And I would say, “Missus — missus lady — those are some nice old plankton.”

  For an hour and a half today, I couldn’t move my leg. My toes were clenched. My knee was all locked up. I didn’t chat you. I didn’t want to worry you. You don’t talk much now. I went to a technician. By the time I waited, the leg started to work again. My dad was there with me. He’s not doing very well. I can’t feel anything wrong with the leg now. I’m lying here in bed, lifting it up and down. It seems fine. Except it’s kind of cramped from the clenching.

  I’m looking up at my leg. I’m moving my toes, squelching them. That’s a great feeling, squelching, like in mud. Do you know, mud? When it’s in your yard? And you know the day’s going to get hot again when the rain’s over, because that’s what the neighborhood association has decided? So you can just stand there, and wait for the sun?

  And it’s your one time on Earth, I mean, your hundred years, that’s all you have, so there you are, on Earth, a little kid, the one time you’ll be a little kid, and you’re standing, waiting for the artificial sun, and feeling the mud, and at that point, your toes still work perfectly. So you stand there, and you squelch your toes, and you raise your arms up above your head, and you watch the clouds get sucked back into ducts in the sky. And that’s it. That’s an afternoon.

  That’s all.

  I hope you’re okay this morning, too.

  I didn’t listen to all of it immediately. I was lying there in bed. I saw that it was going to be long, and I stopped after a few sentences. There was a smell like the hospital. It was like sickness. At first, I thought it was an attachment, but it wasn’t. It was coming from my nose. I got up and took my shower, and I got dressed and went downstairs and had one of my dad’s Granola Squeezes, and went out to my upcar and started to drive to School™.

  I listened to the rest while the upcar drove me.

  When the upcar settled in the School™ parking lot, I kept staring out the front window. I didn’t want to get out. Kids were running everywhere and pushing each other. Their backpacks were all sparkly in the sun.

  I could still smell the hospital in my nose. It wasn’t anything around me. It was her. I stopped breathing, but the smell was still there. I held my breath.

  I stared out the window at the School™. Everyone went in through the doors. The leaves on the trees turned red to show I was late. My hand was still on the lift shift. I just left it there, in some weird kind of trance, as if I was waiting there for the right moment to pull back, drop anchor, and fall upward into the sky.

  Definitive list of things I want to do:

  Dancing.

  Fly over an active volcano. Spit stuff into magma.

  Could the dancing be in a nightclub with lots of mirrors? And people wear tuxedos, and there’s a big band, and perhaps some mob activity? And you’ll keep staring at a cigarette girl named Belinda, from Oklahoma, and I’ll say, “Damn you, man — damn you — can’t you keep your eyes in your sockets like everyone else?”

  I want to sit with you in a place where I can’t hear engines.

  Is there any moss anywhere?

  I want to go under the sea and watch the last fishes. I want to sit in one of those bubbles in the middle of a school.

  I want to see art. Like, I want to remind myself about the Dutch. I want to remind myself that they wore clothes and armor. That some of them fell in love while they were sitting near maps or tapestries.

  I want to go up into the mountains with you for a weekend. Where people don’t usually go.

  When we’re there, I want to go to a store that sells only beer and jerky.

  I want to rent a hotel room with you. As Mister and Missus Smith.

  I want to say we’re from Fort Wayne. And have the proprietor frown, and know we’re lying, but still nod.

  I would like to actually be from Fort Wayne. Or from a small town outside of it. We won’t have the feed, and we’ll go to “movies” on dates. We’ll kiss in the upcar. And then, when I’m in my twenties, I’ll go east to the big city, to find my first job. And have people at parties sitting on the arms of chairs, drinking wine out of plastic cups. People with strange haircuts, things sheared into geometrical shapes.

  And I want to go into “the office” every day, sometimes even on weekends, in some kind of suit, and be someone’s administrative assistant, and complain to you through the feed while I’m at my desk about my bitch of a manager or my pervert boss. You’ll be my boyfriend from home. You’re also from Fort Wayne.

  I want to get older.

  I want to see the years pass.

  Sometime, I want to wear a cardigan and have a golden retriever named … I don’t know. I guess named after someone obscure — usually, isn’t that how it goes for people like me? Their cats are named like Tutankhamen or Mithridates. Their dogs are named for great thinkers, like Jefferson or Socrates or Thomas Paine. I guess I’ll call mine Paine.

  I want famous artists and composers to come and stay at my house. You know, someone named Gerblich who’s writing a piece where you take an ax to the piano.

  My grandkids will come up to see me when I’m in my cardigan. I want them to call me Nana. We’ll sit by the lake, which won’t steam like lakes do and won’t move when the wind isn’t on it, or burn sticks. I’ll tell them about their great-grandparents, and show them old pictures on the family site. I’ll tell them how their great-great-great-grandfather fled Germany just before the Second World War. He was a homosexual, and had to wear a pink triangle on his arm. He got to America and married a pretty Marxist candy striper to get citizenship, and eventually they decided to have kids. My grandkids will ask me what a candy striper is.

  When we make dinner, little Shirley will help me shuck the corn.

  I want to tell her about what her mama used to do when she was just hatched, the silly things Mama did when she was a child.

  I’ll lean on the sink, and I won’t remember the hours spent in waiting rooms, the doctors touching me with metal rods, pushing me back onto gurneys, the technicians having secret conferences with my father. I won’t remember what it is like to stare at my leg and press it with my fingernails until the skin turns white, and then red, and then blue, and still not have any feeling. I won’t remember what’s really going to happen, that nerve-silence spreading over the whole of my body, like a purple cloud, that emptiness, that inactivity. I won’t remember watching you stand by my bed when I can’t move, watching you staring down; I won’t remember you apologizing for not coming sooner; I won’t remember you standing there bored by my bedside as I slur words, standing there waiting to feel like you’ve stayed long enough so that you’re a good person and you’re allowed to leave. I won’t remember any of that, because it won’t happen. I’ll lean on the sink, and my granddaughter will cut paper molecules with her scissors for a project for school.

  I’ll go out and call for the dog, because it’s getting to be evening, and there are coyotes out there in the woods. The night will be falling. By the screen door, I’ll call — “Paine!” And the trees will rustle. “Paine! Paine!” And he’ll come when I call.

  I was staring at a girl’s sweater. I couldn’t like focus on the teacher. The teacher was a hologram that day. There had been some funding cuts. The school band was gone, and so were the alive teachers.

  I didn’t send a message back to Violet. I didn’t even listen to her list all the way through the first time. I skimmed it. I fast-forwarded it. Then, like each hour or so, I’d go back, and I’d listen to
one part of it.

  When I got to the end, that was it.

  I stared at the back of the girl in front of me.

  With a hologram, like when your teacher is one of them, if you aren’t looking right at them, they sometimes seem to be hollow. You see them and suddenly they don’t have a face that pokes out. Their face pokes in, their nose and so on, and there is nothing inside them.

  If you don’t look right at them, they can look just like an empty shell.

  Hey, she chatted. What’s doing? I wish I was with you today. I always wish I was with you. … Oh, did you get my list? Titus? … Titus?

  After School™ that day I went over to Link’s with Marty and Link. We were sitting outside near the pool. Link asked me about Violet, and how she was doing. I said I guessed she was okay. He asked me hadn’t I talked to her. I said I hadn’t, not for a couple of days.

  She had tried chatting me a few times since she sent me the list, but I had on my busy signal.

  We sat there for a while, and Link and Marty went swimming, and we played water volleyball, which was hard with three people. So we stood there for a minute, until I said, “Does anyone else want to go in mal?”

  They looked at me. They were like, Unit. Marty said sure, and Link said he had a tip for this great new site.

  They went, “You sure?”

  I was like, “What I say?”

  They nodded.

  We got out of the pool and dried off with towels. We went inside. We found the site. It had these meg-ass warnings all over it, it was Swedish. We all clicked on it and we could feel it tap our credit, and then suddenly it hit me all at once. It was colored bricks, first, and I fell down because they were coming too quick. Then I could start to see the bottom of the sofa. Link was crawling, and his face was taken up by it. It kept coming in wave after wave. The floor was steep. I held on to the lamp but it dumped me.

  The static was covering everything and so when we went somewhere, I couldn’t even see where we were going. I just watched the others. From the static, I could see their mouths talking. Violet asked me what was going on with me. I tried sitting up and answering but she wasn’t in the room. That was funny and I laughed.

  Marty thought I was laughing at something else, so he got started, too, and pretty soon we were all laughing, and so everybody at the ice-cream store was looking at us. We’d just bought a tub and I was like, If I eat this I’m going to puke, and Marty went, Unit, how the fuck did we get to an ice-cream store anyway? and I was like, Whoa, unit, shit, I hope you didn’t drive. Some parents were moving their kids away from us, and Link went to them, “Boo! Okay? BOO!” He spread his hands. There was light coming from his fingers. I pointed and said, “Light.” Marty said, “Bright.” Link said, “Sight.” Marty said, “Night.” I said, “Kite.” Link said, “Have you ever thought about how a kite is held up by nothing?” Marty said it wasn’t nothing, fuckhead, it was air. Like, air. Like, as in fuckin’ air. Air.

  We went out into the main part of the mall and went into a music store but it was really really really loud, so we went out? And we went down to a clothes store, and sat in the dressing room for a while. It was quiet there, except the banging on the door and asking us to leave. I showed Marty and Link the message from Violet with the list, the things she wanted to do before she died, and they read it, and Marty said, Fuck, unit, fuck, and Link said, Whoa, that’s intense, she’s one weird bitch. I said she wasn’t a bitch and he said that that’s not what he meant, that’s just what he said. Marty asked me why I wasn’t talking to her, and I said I was talking to her, I just hadn’t. He said that message was so fuckin’ sad it made him want to like fuckin’, you know, bawl his eyes out, and I said, Do you think she’s being mean to me? In telling me about that part with me standing by her bed? They said, Mean how? And there kept on being this stupid banging on the door, which woke me up several times in one minute. I was curled up in this ball, like doing a cannonball, but on carpeting, with my arms wrapped around my leg. There were some pants hanging on one of the hooks. We checked a few times, but we all had our pants on, so they must have belonged to the lady who left just before we came in. We thought it was funny that she hadn’t come back for them, and we laughed about that. It was good to be with friends. Violet asked me again what was going on, and I told her to shut the fuck up, but luckily, I told her that out loud, and she wasn’t there, but chatting.

  We got up and opened the door, and there was this kid dressed in perfect clothes, like, with doughnut rings on his arms, and he asked us would we please leave as we appeared to be under the influence.

  We went out and sat near the fountain, watching the water, which was interesting, because your vision slowed it down so much that you could see each individual droplet, which was fascinating, each one of them, falling down, and making a ring in the water, and that ring spreading with all of its tentacles reaching up and then dropping back, and then the water rocking. Violet asked me what I was doing, was I out of School™ yet.

  Unit, I said. I’m way out of School™.

  She was like, How are you? I haven’t heard from you for days.

  Violet, I was like, Violet. Violet. Violet.

  Hey. What’s up?

  Violet. Violet. Violet.

  Are you in mal?

  I’m coming over.

  Hey. Yoo-hoo. Hey. Stop.

  I can’t remember if my upcar’s here.

  Don’t fly like this. You’re slammed. Have you heard about this Central American stuff? Two villages on the Gulf of Mexico, fifteen hundred people — they’ve just been found dead, covered in this black stuff.

  “Gentlemen,” I said to the other two. “I got to go.”

  Have you heard about it? This is big. It seems like an industrial disaster. The Global Alliance is blaming the U.S.

  “I am hoping, sirs, that we brought separate vehicles for …” I said. “Things. Vehicles.”

  Don’t fly right now, she said. Don’t fly. You’re meg jazzed.

  No, I’m not.

  You’re spewing a substream of junk characters all over the place. You’re completely unformatted. What are you doing? Why did you do this? Just stay there.

  I’m at the mall. In mal. At the mall. In mal. At the mall.

  Oh. Oh, god. Don’t do anything. Wait for it to wear down.

  I’m coming to see you. I feel. I feel bad.

  You are such a shithead. You don’t know what happened to me this morning. And the news. Titus — this morning … I can’t believe in the middle of all this, you went and got malfunctioned. You are such an asshole and a shithead.

  “On level three,” said Marty, who I discovered was still sitting in front of me. “Of the parking lot. Next to mine. You okay to drive?”

  “I’ll do it autopilot,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  I said, “The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh, through the …” I scratched my hair.

  Marty nodded. Link started singing “Ho, Ho, Elflings, Santa’s on His Way,” which was the completely wrong song.

  I went up to the parking lot. I looked for level three. The in mal was starting to wear off a little. It was mainly just euphoria now. I found my upcar next to Marty’s. Marty’s upcar was kind of touched and wrinkled by a pillar.

  I flew. Once I got up the droptube, I put the upcar in autopilot. I was almost asleep. I dreamed about sweater vests, mainly. Spreadable cheese! But with a difference!

  … after the Prime Minister of the Global Alliance issued a statement that, quote, “the physical and biological integrity of the earth relies at this point upon the dismantling of American-based corporate entities, whatever the cost.” It is thought that the American annexation of the moon as the fifty-first state …

  Into her droptube, and it found its way to her level, which was on the bottom, or maybe just toward the bottom, her suburb was.

  I flew to her street. She was waiting outside her house. She had her hair up in this really nice way. I pulled up in her dr
iveway and left the upcar hovering. I opened the door and stumbled to hang out of it.

  I was like, “Unette.”

  “Don’t go inside. My dad will know.”

  “Big unsteady. Biiiiig unsteady.”

  “You are such a shithead. Okay. Get down from there. Let’s spend some time on the lawn.”

  I climbed down. I had to touch the grass with my heel like all these times to make sure it was still hard. She took my hand.

  “Your list,” I said. “It will just take about five days.”

  “What?”

  “Look at your list. It will just take about five days. I mean, for us to do everything. Well, okay, the list before the part, you know, where you become from Fort Worth.”

  “Fort Wayne. Activity twelve.”

  “Huh?”

  “Activity twelve. Actually being from Fort Wayne.”

  “Activity twelve is out of the question.”

  “I’m glad you came back. I was worried you weren’t going to.”

  “We’re going to do it all, unette. We’re going to find the mountains.”

  “Hey. Hey. Calm down. Have you heard the news? It’s awful.”

  “I think maybe if I sleep again, we can start by going dancing. We better wait for the weekend to go to the mountains. I have School™. You don’t.”

  “No. I just have mourning.”

  “What?”

  “My father sitting around, staring at me. He’s stopped teaching me. He says he’ll tell me whatever I want to know, but that there’s no reason for lessons anymore.”

  I felt like what she was telling me was real important, but the trees were so green, and I could smell the grass near my face. She told me that her father asked her what she wanted to know, and she asked him whether there was a soul, but I just put my face against the ground, and the dirt was cool, and the grass was tickling my nose, and I fell asleep, and heard the news talking through my eyes.