Why Visit America

by Matthew Baker

  “You’re just so different.”

  “Different how?”

  Mia goes silent for a moment.

  “You never did dishes before.”

  “Well, it wasn’t my job back then, right?” Wash says.

  “I mean at home,” Mia explodes, shoving him in frustration, startling him.

  “But after the meatloaf, you told me that’s how things worked, was you doing the cooking and me doing the dishes,” Wash says.

  “I was kidding, I didn’t think you’d actually do them, but then you got up from the table after we finished eating and you just started washing dishes, you’d never washed a dish in that house before in your life, you never used to play games with the kids, you never used to bring the kids along hunting, I always had to nag you to fix things around the house and even after you were done fixing things then you’d get on me for nagging you, I could barely get you to give the kids a ride somewhere without you throwing a fit, all you wanted to do was work and hunt and be alone in the woods, or rant at me about political stuff that there was nothing I could do anything about, we don’t even fight anymore, I tried to pretend that you’re the same but you’re not, you’re the same body, you move the same, you smell the same, you talk the same, you taste the same, but the rest of you is gone, you don’t remember the tomato juice when I was pregnant with Jaden, you don’t remember the fire alarm after I gave birth to Sophie, everything that used to have a secret meaning between us now is just a thing, to you a hay bale is just a hay bale, a batting helmet is just a batting helmet, a mosquito bite is just a mosquito bite, and that’s not what they are to me,” Mia cries, hitting his chest with her fists, “we lost our past, we lost our history,” hitting his chest with her fists, “and you deserved it,” a fist, “I didn’t,” a fist, “not me.”

  Wash sits there in terror, letting her beat on him, until finally she clutches his tee in her hands and sinks her head into his chest in exhaustion. His skin tingles with pain where the blows landed. His heart pounds from the shock of being struck. Wash glances at the blotchy sunspots on his hands, the faint scars on his fingers, the bone spurs on his heels, the brittle calluses on his soles, relics of years he can’t remember living. He’s never felt so much like a stranger in this body.

  He’s almost too shaken to speak.

  “Which one do you want?” Wash says.

  “Which what?”

  “Which me?”

  Mia heaves a sigh, then lifts her head, turns her face away, and rises off of him. She shuffles toward the bathroom. “I never would’ve gotten a gun again if you were the way you used to be.”

  Midnight. He lies next to his wife in the dark. The sheets are thinner than at home. The pillows are harder than at home. He can’t remember ever having spent a night away from home before. He’s gotten so used to falling asleep with her nuzzled against him that trying to fall asleep with her facing away from him is intensely lonely. His feet are cold. An owl hoots down by the reservoir.

  Does he love his wife?

  Did he ever love his wife before?

  * * *

  Lindsay is sitting on the chair in the living room. She’s wearing the same outfit as every month. She tucks her hair behind her ears, then bends to grab a toy from the floor, a plastic bone that squeaks when squeezed.

  “This is the last time we’ll have to meet,” Lindsay says.

  “We’re done?”

  Lindsay looks up with a smile.

  “Next month will mark a full year since your wipe. By the standards of our justice department, you’ve been officially reintroduced to your life. Congratulations.”

  Lindsay tosses the toy down the hallway.

  Biscuit takes off running.

  Wash thinks.

  “There’s something I don’t understand.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What happens if you commit another crime after you’ve had a wipe like mine? What else could they even do to me if they’ve already taken everything?”

  “They took the memories you had back then. You have new memories they could take.”

  Wash frowns.

  “If you’re being sentenced to a partial wipe, a shorter sentence is better than a longer sentence, of course. But for a life sentence, the numbers are meaningless. Is it worse when a sixty-year-old dies than when a six-year-old dies? Of course not. The length of a life has nothing to do with the weight of the loss.”

  Wash settles back into the couch, folding his arms across his chest, tucking his hands into his pits.

  “That’s important for you to understand,” Lindsay says.

  Wash glances over.

  “You have another life you could lose now,” Lindsay says.

  Biscuit drops the bone back onto the floor.

  Lindsay reaches down.

  “How do you feel, Washington?”

  “I feel really good,” Wash says.

  * * *

  Mia calls him into the bathroom. She’s sitting on the lid of the toilet in drawstring sweatpants and a baggy undershirt. The pregnancy test is lying on the side of the tub.

  “We’re both going to remember this one,” Mia says, smiling up at him.

  His kids barge into the bathroom a moment later, already fighting about what to name the baby.

  Wash goes shopping for a crib with his family, pushing a cart down the bright aisles of a department store as swing music plays over the speakers. Wash reclines on a checkered blanket at the park as fireworks burst in the sky above his family, shimmering and fading. Wash hunches over the wastebasket in the bedroom, clipping the nails on his fingers as his wife pops the battery from a watch on the dresser. Wash leans over the sink in the bathroom, tweezing a hair from his nose as his wife gathers dirty towels from the hook on the door. Wash shoots holes into a target shaped like the silhouette of a person as his kids watch from the stump of an oak tree, sipping cans of soda. And wherever he’s at, and whatever he’s doing, there’s something that’s stuck in his mind like a jingle, nagging him.

  He sits on the porch with the dog. Rain drips from the awning. Silks are showing on the husks of corn across the road. Summer is already almost gone. Behind him, through the screens in the windows, sounds of his family talking drift out of the house.

  Sometimes he does want to be alone. Sometimes he feels so lazy that he wants to refuse to help with chores. Sometimes he gets so tense that he has an urge to punch a wall.

  But maybe all of that is trivial compared to how he used to be.

  Is he a different person now?

  Has he been becoming somebody new?

  Or does he have some soul, an inborn nature, a congenital personality, that’s bound to express itself eventually?

  The academic year hasn’t started yet, but the athletic seasons have begun. He’s on the way to pick up the kids from practice when he passes the library. His eyes flick from the road to the rearview, watching the library fade into the distance as the truck rushes on toward the school.

  Knowing who he was might not even be an option. What he did might never even have made the news. And he’s already running late anyway. But still his hands clench tight around the wheel.

  Swearing, he hangs a u-ey, swinging the truck back around.

  He parks at the library.

  “I need to use a computer,” Wash says.

  The librarian asks him for identification, registers him for an account, and then brings him over to a computer. All that time he’s thinking, what are you doing, what are you doing, what are you doing, imagining his kids waiting for him by the fence at the school. The librarian heads back to the reference desk.

  His hands are trembling as he reaches for the keyboard.

  He logs onto the computer, pulls up a browser, and searches his name.

  The screen blinks as the results appear.

  Nothing. A pop star with his name. A goalie. A beach resort with his name. A monument. He’s not there.

  He skims through again to be sure, and then lau
ghs out loud in relief.

  The temptation was a mirage all along.

  Wash swivels on the chair to stand, then thinks of something, and hesitates.

  He turns back around.

  Puts his fingers on the keyboard.

  Tries his name plus his town.

  The screen blinks as the results change.

  His heart leaps.

  He’s there.

  The list of articles seems to scroll on forever.

  The headlines alone are enough to send a beat of rage pulsing through him.

  Wash runs his hands over his mouth, glancing at the daylight streaming into the library through the door beyond the computer, trying to decide whether to leave now or to keep reading, flashing through all of the memories he has from the past year that he could lose. Jaden grinning in amazement after choking on the lozenge in the driveway. Sophie cracking up laughing after the crow fell out of the tree. Mia treading water at the reservoir in a white one-piece, glancing at him with a casual expression before suddenly lunging over to dunk him. Jaden lying on the linoleum in the kitchen in cutoff shorts, gripping him by the ankle, begging to be taken to the go-kart track. Jaden whirling around the yard with a lit sparkler. Mia swinging by the diner on a day off from the hospital, hair piled into a bun, trench coat damp with rain, splitting a slice of cherry pie with him while he’s on break. Sophie standing under the light in the kitchen in pajamas, holding him by the arm, upset by a dream about a ghost. Sophie singing into a lit sparkler like a microphone. Mia arranging gourds on the porch. Mia brushing icicles from the awning. Mia sweating into a damp washcloth, deliriously rambling about how much she loves him, as he crouches by the bed with the wastebasket, waiting there in case she pukes again. The dog watching a butterfly flutter down the hallway, then turning to look at him, as if waiting for an explanation. His kids dancing around the dead buck, boots tromping through snowy ferns, gloved hands raised in celebration, lit by the dazzling sunbeams spiking through the branches of the trees, and afterward driving back to the house with the deer in the bed of the truck, the mighty antlers rising into the air out the window behind the cab, the kids chattering to each other on the seat next to him, hats both off, hair all disheveled, and later eating bowls of cornflakes in the kitchen in thermal underwear together as the kids recount the story of the hunt with wild gestures, while his wife sits across the table in a plaid nightgown, smiling over a mug of black tea. The secret experiences that nobody else shared. The joy of discovering the chocolate stash hidden in the aluminum tin in the basement. The habit he’s made of visiting the glittering display of chandeliers and pendants and lamps and sconces whenever he goes to the hardware store, marveling at the rich glow of the mingled lights, filtered through the tinted glass and the colored shades. The sense of destiny when a bottle of cola suddenly plunked into the dispenser of a vending machine at the shopping mall as he was walking out of the bathroom. The fear and the awe and the wonder of seeing a monstrous tornado churn in the sky above the town, the funnel spiraling down from the clouds, the tip just about to touch the ground.

  Wash sits back in the chair, looking from the door to the computer, biting his lip as he wavers, torn between the possibility of having a future and the possibility of having a past. But only for a moment. Because when he thinks about it, he knows who he is. He already knows what he’ll do.

  A Bad Day In Utopia

  She’d had a hard day. Earlier that morning she’d discovered that the game her company was developing, which was already months behind schedule for release, had a glitch somewhere in the code that caused the game to crash if the player character was equipped with diamond armor on the level with the meteors, and nobody could figure out why. It didn’t make any sense. It was a total nightmare. Anna, her boss, was mad at her for leaving dirty dishes in the kitchen again. Lucy, her supervisor, kept ignoring her emails about the status of the new health plan. Indira, the latest intern, had spilled coffee all over the table in the conference room, and the coffee had gotten onto her blouse and her skirt, and though the coffee had been iced and hadn’t burned her, her blouse was white and her skirt was peach, and she hadn’t been able to get the stains to wash out completely, leaving faint blotches on the fabric, and her clothes were still damp from trying. Her landlord, Kayla, had sent her a message that she wouldn’t replace her garbage disposal, despite that her disposal was indisputably broken. Her therapist, Sofia, had sent her a message that she was raising her hourly fee, even though her fee was already outrageous. Danielle, her neighbor, still wasn’t talking to her after last weekend. And all of the women at the company were running around the office, desperately trying to pinpoint the exact cause of the glitch, which made her so anxious that she could physically feel the stress tingling through her body as she typed code, and her breast had a lump that she was trying not to think about until the results came back, and her wrist was still tender from the spill that she had taken on the track at the gym, and she had a pimple on her shoulder that was sore and swollen and seemingly resistant to every known variety of acne cream, and that morning the governor had announced a plan to substantially raise the income tax in California, which meant that she’d have less money to put toward savings every paycheck, and that she wouldn’t be able to afford a baby for another year. Fuck, she thought. Fuck, fuck, fuck. By the end of the day she was just sitting at her computer in a daze. She was supposed to meet some of her friends for dinner. She wasn’t hungry. She felt depressed. She didn’t want to go. She messaged her friends that she had to cancel.

  Mackenzie called her.

  “Why aren’t you coming?” Mackenzie said.

  “I had a shitty day,” she said.

  “Maybe going out would help?” Mackenzie said.

  “I’m just going to go home,” she said.

  Mackenzie made a sympathetic noise.

  “You sound miserable. I’m going to have a care package delivered to your apartment. Expect wine and cupcakes. I love you, I miss you, get some sleep. I’ll see you this weekend,” Mackenzie said.

  After hanging up she tried calling her mother.

  “I had a terrible day,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, baby, I’m just walking into a surgery,” her mother said.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, really, I’ll call you back when we’re done,” her mother said.

  “I’ll just be at home,” she said.

  She hung up. She felt awful. She left. In the elevator she realized she had forgotten to shut off her computer. She was too exhausted to go back. She walked through the revolving door in the lobby out onto the street. The sun was out, but rain was falling, a light scatter of drops pattering down from a blue sky. Fluffy clouds were floating above the city. She paused at the curb, full of despair. The street was full of people. A mail carrier at a drop box, a woman in tortoiseshell glasses, sorting through envelopes. An electrician on a hydraulic lift, a woman with tattooed hands, repairing a utility pole. A pair of cops, a couple of women with blond ponytails, ticketing a parked convertible. Women striding down the sidewalk with briefcases and clutches and backpacks and satchels and colorful wheeled suitcases. Women gliding through the intersection in buses and taxis and pickups and sedans and gleaming delivery trucks. Students on a field trip from out of town, a line of girls in matching shirts, following a pregnant chaperone across a crosswalk. Teenagers in dresses and denim jackets doing kickflips and nosegrinds on battered skateboards. Women holding hands at marble tables on the patio of the cafe across the street, sipping at foamy cappuccinos, flirting with each other. Seeing the women holding hands made her think about sex. And suddenly all that she could think about was sex. She wanted to be touched.

  She wasn’t lucky enough to be attracted to women. She had tried a couple times, in school, in college, and had been forced to admit that women just didn’t interest her sexually. She had only ever fantasized about men. Men from classic movies. Men from vintage comics. Men from paintings and statues at the mus
eum. She had other straight friends, Mackenzie especially, who liked to go to android clubs, having sex with robots designed to look like men, with cocks and balls and hairy chests, skin as soft and warm as the flesh of a human. The robots could talk and laugh and flirt, but the technology was still relatively unrefined, and tended to induce that uncanny effect, seeming vaguely creepy to her. She preferred to get off with simpler machines, generally. Vibrators. Dildos. Showerheads. She could satisfy herself like that for weeks at a time.

  But sometimes there were days when machines weren’t enough, days when she felt like cuddling, days when she felt like kissing, days when she felt like being caressed and squeezed and held by another person.

  And so when she got into her car that day, instead of going home she drove to the local menagerie.

  San Francisco’s menagerie was a glass dome on the shore of a sandy cove along the ocean, out past the redwood forest in the hills. She drove with the windows down so that her hair danced around her head as her car flew over the bridge. Electronica was playing over her stereo. Rain was still falling in a scatter. The sky was turning orange and yellow. Fluffy clouds were floating above the hills. She felt a tingle of excitement, of anticipation, as she arrived at the menagerie. Sunlight reflected off of the dome in iridescent shimmers of color. The only other car in the lot was an antique roadster. The primary purpose of the facility obviously was to serve as a safeguard, to prevent the extinction of the human race in the event that civilization collapsed, if artificial fertilization was suddenly rendered impossible by an asteroid impact or a geomagnetic storm. The men created for the menagerie were living sperm banks. Redundant machines that would only be useful in an emergency. Like an oil lantern that nobody would ever need unless the power went out and the batteries went dead in the flashlights. She rarely ever thought about that, though, as the possibility was so unlikely. For her the primary purpose of the facility was to provide women the opportunity to have sex with men. Her straight friends preferred to have sex with robots because having sex with men was so much more expensive, but she didn’t mind paying extra. Technically the money was a donation. All of the proceeds went toward buying the men special treats, like sorbet and pastries. She liked feeling generous. The doors to the lobby slid apart automatically. She paid the receptionist, accepted a glass of chilled cucumber water, selected a couch in the waiting area, and sat sipping the cucumber water in the waiting area as the receptionist paged a guard. Even for a weeknight, the menagerie was strangely quiet. Aside from the receptionist, the lobby was completely empty. Recently a man had attempted to escape from the menagerie in Detroit, had become violent when the guards had tranqed him, and had attempted suicide with a belt upon awaking in his cell. Another man had recently attacked a visitor at the menagerie in Atlanta, had been beaten by the guards in retribution, and never would be allowed to have a visitor in his cell again. She had read about it in the news. Incidents like that didn’t scare her, though, being so rare. The global population of men was strictly regulated, just over a hundred thousand in the world, and all of the men had been raised in captivity from birth, were familiar with the bite and the sting of batons and stunners. In her experience the men at the menagerie knew better than to cause trouble. And in a way, she liked the thrill. Entering the lair of the most violent, ruthless, destructive creature that had ever walked the face of the planet.