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  We went in to the manager.

  “I reserved a room,” Violet said.

  He said, “Name?” He looked at me.

  I guessed, “Mister and Missus Smith.”

  Violet smiled like we were in a musical and she was about to break out singing.

  The guy nodded. He was like, “Yeah. Sure. Smith. I don’t give a rat’s ass. You’re Smith like I’m Betty Grable.” He held up a scanner. “Hold out your hands. I’ll key you for the room.”

  I was trying to have fun.

  We went out to the room. Violet was like, “What a quaint little place. I didn’t know stucco could brown like this.” She touched the door, and it opened for her hand. She went in. I went out to the upcar and got our bags. I liked being the man getting the bags. I went in. She was poking around the room. She lifted the covers on the bed and looked at the sheets.

  “Check the mattress foundation,” she said. “For bodies. They sew them in.”

  “Okay,” I said. “If you dig the pubic lice out of the soaps.”

  She looked around. “It’s the kind of apocryphal story hotel where people usually only stay when their upcar breaks down during a rainstorm.”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  She said, “Dead rattlers drying on the shower curtain rod. A man with rulers for hands sitting in the room next door. You know, chihuahuas in the mini-fridge.”

  We went out to check out the town. There were lights everywhere, and concrete. You could see down off the mountain, all of the lights from the upper layer of suburbs stretching all around for as far as you could see, in loops and half loops from all of the cul-de-sacs. It was cold out, because we were outside on a mountain, and we wore jackets and night goggles. It was the nice kind of cold when someone else’s skin, it will be grainy when you touch it. I thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, being with her.

  There was some shouting going on by the college campus. We went into a pizza place and ordered a pizza. We asked the people what it was, and they said it was a protest. We asked for what, and they didn’t know. So we ate our pizza there, and got some hot cocoa.

  It was good to have the cocoa. I thought maybe some Kahlúa, too, but I figured the only alcohol they’d have at the hotel would be for cleaning tile. I felt like I needed a drink, because I suddenly realized that I was dreading every second.

  We got back to the room and touched the door. It was a whole night we had to get through.

  She grabbed me when we went through, like it was romantic, and she had the front of my coat in her hands, and she pulled me right up to her and kissed me. She whispered, “I want to experience everything, Titus.”

  I said, “Oh. Okay.”

  I hoped she would like get the signal, which was the null signal.

  She took off her coat and threw it on a chair. She was going, “I’ve done some of it before. I had this boyfriend, he played the guitar. Somehow he tricked me into doing a thing or two before I realized his lyrics didn’t rhyme.” She sat on the bed. She was talking in a way that made me feel like the whole mucusy part of my chest was hardened into a stone and someone threw it off a bridge into a deep, deep hole. “But I’ve never done the main event,” she said. My chest kept on falling, maybe with some ice crystals on it now.

  She said, “Sit down next to me.”

  I sat down next to her.

  She put one arm around me. It was kind of awkward, because we were sitting next to one another. She kissed me on the lips, and I started kissing her back. Her one hand was around my neck, and she put her other hand on my leg. I could still feel the most or I guess biggest part of my chest, the lung and mucus part, falling down into the pit, maybe hitting the edge and getting dirty and rolling now, with a kind of squelching noise, and I was thinking forward to when it would be over.

  She was kneading me with her hand, and I just sat there. My arms weren’t around her anymore, they were back on the bed, holding me up. She was like mushing me up with her hand.

  I said, “Ow.”

  She said, “I really wanted this to happen with you. Right from when we started going out. You’re just so beautiful. You lead this life like I’ve always wanted to — just, everything is normal. We can just be like normal people are, off skiing. We could even rent skis. You know, normal kids, they go off for ski weekends.”

  I said, “Every year I go skiing with my parents. One year we went to Switzerland.”

  “Great,” she said. “You know the border’s closed now, for Americans? Now let’s refocus our attention.”

  I asked, “Have you ever been telemarking?”

  She kissed me on the mouth to shut me up. She was holding my hair too, which helped? Then she whispered, “I love you, Titus. This is going to be the most amazing night. This is going to drill eyes in the back of our heads.”

  She was still working away with her hand, and nothing was really happening, and I tried to move away, and she had her arm around me and was starting to look worried. I felt bad, because it wasn’t her fault she was going to die, so I tried to smile, but I couldn’t.

  She said, “What’s going on? What am I doing wrong?”

  I said, “Nothing.”

  She said, “What’s happening?”

  I said, “Nothing.”

  She said, “I can tell.” She tried again, and even worse, tried to be dirty, like going, “Come on baby, I want to feel you,” and all that kind of thing.

  Finally, she said, “What’s going on?”

  I stood up.

  She was like, “What’s the matter?”

  I said, “Let’s not.”

  “What? What’s the matter with you?”

  I said, “I keep picturing you dead already. It feels …” I didn’t want to finish the sentence. She was waiting, though, so for some stupid reason, I did finish it, maybe because I was angry, and I said, “It feels like being felt up by a zombie, okay? That’s what it feels like.”

  Her face turned completely white.

  I felt like shit.

  “All right,” she said. “I guess this was a bad idea.”

  She looked very little, down on the bed.

  I felt really bad. I said, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  She said, “What did I do wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  She picked up the edge of the coverlet with her fingers and rubbed it. She dropped it. She was looking what people call “askance.” She said, “In tests, they find huge numbers of DNA strands on hotel coverlets.”

  I stood and waited.

  She said, “I went to the moon during spring break to see how people live. When you came along, I thought, ‘Now I’ll have a boyfriend, like people have boyfriends.’ Other people just have fun. They just have fun, and it comes naturally to them. I couldn’t believe it when the first night … that guy …” She whacked the back of her own head. “Like a punishment. The first night. That guy. The hacker. It was like I was being punished for even trying. That … he …” Now the color was coming back into her face. She said, “Then we were in the hospital. They took me away from the rest of you and told me, ‘Your feed is damaged. There’s a danger it may be life-threatening.’ And I came down, and took you away, and kissed you. And the whole time, I was thinking, Now I’m living. I have someone with me. I’m not alone. I’m living.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Violet, I’m real — I’m real sorry.”

  “You mean ‘sorry.’” She looked up at me, with her eyebrows weird, and what that kind of “sorry” meant to both of us was that it was over, that I had just broken up with her.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry in that way.”

  She thought about it. She said, “I wanted someone to know me. I thought it would be like when you’re finally tied to the dock.” She thought about it more. She said, “I was brought into the world in a room with no one there but seven machines. We all are. My parents watched through the glass when I was taken out of the amniotic fluid. I came into the world alone.
” She picked up her shoe and scratched the crust out of the tread. She said, “I didn’t want to go out of it alone.”

  I was like, “That’s — see? That’s the thing. I can’t field this. Okay? You’re laying this whole guilt banquet. I can’t field any of this.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I seem to be dying.”

  “No — I can’t field this. You were, the whole time, you were just planning this whole eternal thing, and I was supposed to automatically love you always, but I didn’t even know. I was just thinking about going out with you, and we would have some fun for a few months, but to you, I was the normal guy, I was magic Mr. Normal Dumbass, with my dumbass normal friends, and oh! Like the whole, like oh! How delightful, the whole enchanted world of being a stupid shithead who goes dancing and gets laid! You wanted to mingle with the common people. Just latch on to this one dumbass, and make fun of his friends for being stupid, while all the time, having this little wish that you could be like us, without thinking about what we’re like, or what our problems are, or that we might not be like saving the environment or anything, but we have our own problems — now you’re — you know? You know?”

  “No,” she said, really soft and angry. “I don’t have any idea.”

  “We’ve only been going out a couple of months. And I’m supposed to act like we’re married. A couple of months. It’s not some big eternal thing. We should’ve broke up weeks ago. I would’ve, if you hadn’t been …”

  “If I hadn’t been what?”

  “I didn’t sign up to go out with you forever when you’re dead. It’s been a couple of months. Okay? A couple of months.”

  There was a silence.

  “That’s it?” she said.

  “Well, it was spring break. That would make it April, May …”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean, that’s it?”

  “Oh, now you’re going to take it all wrong.”

  “Let’s go home.”

  “What?”

  “Take me out to your brand-spanking-new upcar and take me home.”

  “What’s wrong with my upcar?”

  “You tell me. You look worried.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “The male goat pisses in his own face to attract the female. And she likes it.”

  “Oh, fuck you. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Do you know what’s going on in Central America?”

  “Oh, here we —”

  “Do you know why the Global Alliance is pointing all the weaponry at their disposal at us? No. Hardly anyone does. Do you know why our skin is falling off? Have you heard that some suburbs have been lost, just, no one knows where they are anymore? No one can find them? No one knows what’s happened? Do you know the earth is dead? Almost nothing lives here anymore, except where we plant it? No. No, no, no. We don’t know any of that. We have tea parties with our teddies. We go sledding. We enjoy being young. We take what’s coming to us. That’s our way.”

  I picked up my duffel bag. “You can finish the like, the sermon in the upcar,” I said. “You’ll have a couple of hours before we get to your house.” I opened the door. “Maybe you can also sing me some death songs.”

  She grabbed her bag. She explained carefully, “I discover that I hate you.”

  I said, “Do you want to pay for the room, honey, or should I?”

  She realized it had to be paid still, and she said, “Oh, shit.”

  “Don’t worry, darling. I have like all the money in the world.”

  I paid. I was walking out the door. I felt my credit blotted five hundred and twenty dollars. I went out to the upcar. I opened the door for her. She got in. We put the duffel bags between us.

  We flew back. It was night. I had never been someplace with that much of angry in the air, like it was crammed. Like the whole air was buzzing. Like all of the lights on the dashboard were teasing us. We were hurtling forward, and it was like we were fueled by how much we hated each other.

  She was crying. It made her ugly. She crossed her arms on her lap. I thought how ugly she was. Her one hand was limp, like a flipper.

  I realized it wasn’t working anymore.

  I closed my eyes. There was nothing but air in between us. I could say I was sorry. I was almost saying it. We were flying, and I was close to saying it, if only she wouldn’t say something sarcastic, something snotty, something about how she had watched us all and tried to be as dumb and fun as us. She looked really alone, sitting there in the seat, with the harness around her, and her crippled flipper-hand cradled between her legs so I wouldn’t see it.

  I don’t know how I spent two hours, it was so awful and boring. I thought about anything else that I could. You low? said a banner. Not for long — not when you find out the savings you can enjoy at Weatherbee & Crotch’s Annual Blowout Summer Fashions Sale! It was a little embarrassing, but I did order a jersey. I did it really careful, in case she was tracking my feed.

  The night seemed to go on for hours.

  I couldn’t believe it when we got to her droptube and went down to the bottom, to her suburb. We flew down her street. There were streets on the ground. They were lit by lights.

  At her house, I got out and climbed down. Her father was watching through the window. He would see me and know she was lying about where she had been. He came out of the front door. We were hovering in the driveway. I had gone around to her side and opened her door up, and she was trying to stand. She couldn’t get out too good with her arm not working. I held up my hand.

  She didn’t take it. She wobbled there. She was afraid she would fall.

  Her father watched her. He saw what was happening and ran up. He took her hand.

  She reached out with her other hand and took her own wrist back from him. She freed her hand from her dad’s.

  She let herself down to the ground alone, all alone.

  She stood between the two of us, looking from one to the other.

  I turned around and went back to my side of the upcar. I got in. I left. I flew home.

  It was only months later that I realized that the last thing I ever heard her mouth say, the last words she would speak to me, had already been spoken, and they were, “Oh, shit.”

  So, she messaged me the next day, I’m not messaging you to say I’m sorry, because I’m not, not for everything.

  But I am messaging you to say that I love you, and that you’re completely wrong about me thinking you’re stupid. I always thought you could teach me things. I was always waiting. You’re not like the others. You say things that no one expects you to. You think you’re stupid. You want to be stupid. But you’re someone people could learn from.

  And I want to talk, if you do.

  We both said mean things, dumb things, things we didn’t mean. But there’s always time to change. There’s always time. Until there’s not.

  That was her message.

  I said, “Oh, nothing,” when Link looked at me funny. We went out to kick some ass on the basketball court.

  When school ended for the year, Link and Marty and I went to one of the moons of Jupiter to stay with Marty’s aunt for a few weeks. It was okay. We had a pretty good time. By that point, I was going out with Quendy, and I kind of missed her. We met other girls on Io, but I was chatting back to Quendy the whole time, even though there were some meg delays in feed service between the planets. I told her how much I missed her.

  We had some good parties that summer when we got back to Earth. Marty got a giant Top Quark pool, it was inflatable and huge, and the pool was in Top Quark’s belly? It floated above Marty’s house. It was pretty funny.

  Marty had also gotten a Nike speech tattoo, which was pretty brag. It meant that every sentence, he automatically said “Nike.” He paid a lot for it. It was hilarious, because you could hardly understand what he said anymore. It was just, “This fuckin’ shit Nike, fuckin’, you know, Nike,” etc.

  Everything was not always going well, because for most peo
ple, our hair fell out and we were bald, and we had less and less skin. Then later there was this thing that hit hipsters. People were just stopping in their tracks frozen. At first, people thought it was another virus, and they were looking for groups like the Coalition of Pity, but it turned out that it was something called Nostalgia Feedback. People had been getting nostalgia for fashions that were closer and closer to their own time, until finally people became nostalgic for the moment they were actually living in, and the feedback completely froze them. It happened to Calista and Loga. We were real worried about them for a day or so. We knew they’d be all right, but still, you know. Marty was like, “Holy fuckin’ shit, this is so Nike fucked.”

  The night after I saw them frozen, even though they were okay, I couldn’t sleep at all. I kept thinking of Violet and her broken flipper-hand. I kept thinking of her pinching her leg and not being able to feel it. I thought of her lying without moving, but in my thoughts, her eyes were open.

  That summer was the summer when all of the bees came out of the walls of those suburbs and went crazy, and people couldn’t figure it out at all.

  It turned out that my upcar was not the kind of upcar my friends rode in. I don’t know why. It had enough room, but for some reason people didn’t think of it that way. Sometimes that made me feel kind of tired. It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it.

  I felt like I’d been running toward it for a long time.

  One night at dinner, when my dad came back from a corporate adventure with his management team, he showed us memories from it. He said it was great and really refreshing, and that it was just the kind of thing to promote team interface, and to get everyone to work out their stop/go hierarchies. They went whale hunting. It was just people and old ships and the whales, and the whales’ lamination, which he said was a non-organic covering that made it possible for them to live in the sea.

  So he broadcast it to the family. He was all, “Okay, here you see us in the little whaleboat. We’ve ‘put out’ from the main ship. We’ve spotted a whale, and we’re rowing out to it. This was awesome. Totally awesome. Can you feel the spray? I loved it. I kept getting it in my eyes and blinking. That’s — oh, that’s Dave Percolex, V.P. of Client Relations. He’s in charge of the bucket of rope. See him waving? Hi, Dave. You can see the head of our Phoenix office there holding the harpoon. So we’re rowing out there as fast as possible. It was really rough that day. See, we’re all shouting that we need to be going faster. ‘Row, row, row!’ We have our new intern there pulling at the oars. Hey, Lisa!”