Some nights, at first to be less conspicuous to the patrol, I would lean back, spreading in the backseat of the car, and Marco would stretch on top of me. We would press against each other. Nothing forbidden, clothes on, we wanted to wait until our wedding as far away as that seemed. I would feel the weight of his body against mine like I was holding up the universe; the world and Marco, all meant for me. He would say my name, Emmy not Amelia, and I would wonder what other secrets remained for us to share. What parts of the external world--animate or not small enough to be actuated—-remained for us to be rediscovered? Marco used to talk about rediscovering lost treasures, things that had been grown over and forgotten.
He would kiss me in the backseat like his life depended on it. One rare cold summer night, we understood how we might depend on each other for heat. He kept me warmer than radiant or hot chocolate made from actuated powder and water from the red faucet. I could feel the steam rising from my lips.
Marco’s love, and you will see that it was love, never felt forceful like in the cautionary tales we learned in pre-courtship classes. He never bullied or threatened. Never tried to seduce me out of reason. He simply asked without words, and I answered without fear or reservation. The only harm in giving to him was every night I melted, but by morning, I woke feeling more whole than when I snuck out the night before.
Not brave enough to risk the patrol in daylight, we never lasted until dawn, but some nights the sun cracked through my bedroom just as I slipped into my bed, the scent of Marco transferring to my pillow. His words would reenter my mind as I drifted into a few hours of sleep. The next time we met, unlike in the seduction tales, Marco’s promises came true as if he knew secrets forgotten by the actuator.
When Marco retold the fairytale about the boy who brings flowers to his love, the next night he was waiting for me with roses. If he told me of an age where ice could survive home delivery, prior to the heat emitted by actuators, then the next night he would bring me ice that tasted like cream from powdered milk he’d mixed with water then froze after combining it with crushed strawberries he grew on his rooftop. Before meeting me, he packed the ice cream in an old device used to keep food cold over distances. He filled the cooler with smaller cubes of ice that--no different than those we make from faucet water and our compact freezers--slowly melted into cold water while the center of the cooler preserved the ice cream. When we finished eating, we tasted the cold strawberry sensation on our lips and fingers.
As if ice cream weren’t enough, we’d try to slip half-melted ice cubes from the cooler down each other’s backs as an excuse to generate our own radiant, to play wrestle and hug. By the time I made it home that evening, my shirt was dry but I felt cold, no matter how strong the radiant, without Marco. Extra blankets and pillows made poor surrogates.
Tonight, like the night before, Marco wasn’t close to the automobile when I arrived at our meet. The wind blew through the tall grass. I was alone. The patrol was nowhere to be found, and the footsteps of transits had gone quiet. The tall grass swayed--the way Marco and I sometimes danced when we didn’t fear the patrol—-and reminded me how empty my arms would feel if Marco never reentered them.
And then I remembered what he said to do if I couldn’t find him. Marco said to look up.
When I scanned above the tall grass, I noticed something coming from deep in the lot where I always feared to wade without him. Where he would sometimes lead me if we were together. Out there, deeper into the night, I noticed Marco’s forearms raised above the grass with a sign held in his hands. His sign. The @ stood painted on cardboard above the tall grass. Patient as usual, Marco held the sign and waited.
For the first time, I waded into the tall grass without Marco holding my hand. The night quiet, the grass harmless, I kept walking toward the sign above me. Once far enough into the grass I could no longer see the @, something deep inside guided me. Knowing Marco was waiting out there convinced me I’d never go lost. I followed my intuition.
Where the grass grew tallest and where roots of young trees broke up the concrete, the ground felt soft at my feet. The ground itself led me closer to Marco.
Though he heard me walking towards him, he never called my name. Still I heard his voice saying “Emmy” over and over in my mind until our lips were kissing.
For what felt like an eternity, we kissed in the tall grass. And I’m not talking about the mathematical definition of eternity, but something much longer without beginning or end and without any interest in defining either. We kissed from the center of a feeling that had for months defined us. We didn’t need words to explain the feeling or reason to guide us. We didn’t need a digital record of our experience or a picture of us from above the tall grass to know where my lips ended and his began. I didn’t need a map app to travel his forearms, and he didn’t need a music app to play the treble clef of my spine.
We kissed and knew it was good.
After we finished kissing--why must there always be an after—-he invited me home where his @ might become mine. Behind his parents home, we could climb a fire escape, forgotten from a time when there were fires, to the brownstone’s third floor, a floor forgotten until Marco rediscovered treasures stored by an old man who once owned the brownstone, a collector of things that existed before the digital age.
When Marco was old enough to marry and move into the third floor himself, his parents planned to clear the spam, an expensive task since no one would want the extraneous physical things, but Marco had grown fond of exploring the collection after he dropped college, learning his parents’ trade by day. Though it wasn’t what his parents wished for him, Marco pursued dressmaking sincerely enough to keep them from forcing him in a different direction. In the evenings, after his parents received their nightly ship, Marco would sneak away to the third floor and rummage through antiques without any vision for using the forgotten things until we started to meet.
But I was afraid to follow him home.
“Have I ever let you down?” he said.
“The opposite.”
“That’s more like it. They’ve forgotten the pleasure of physical things in favor of trace.”
“Your parents?”
“Who else? The space will be private.”
“You think it’s true? About trace?”
“While they sleep, the effect of trace wears off. Parents wake each morning in a mental fog. Haven’t you noticed? They’ll never know we were there.”
Things started to look clearer to me.
“The sun never shines brighter than after a night with you, Marco.”
“No matter how tired I feel the next morning, I sew through dresses like following a maze back to our meets.”
“My parents say I’m crazy. They say electric lights are superior for our eyes, engineered to produce vitamin D, but preferring to remember the night, I turn off the electric lights. My parents say there’s no point in spending an hour a day on the elliptical if I’m not going to use the energy exercise generates. I say there are better uses for energy. When they ask what, I blush, remembering when you make me blush.”
“When do I do that?
“When don’t you?”
“Let’s go,” Marco said, guiding me through the tall grass.
Walking in the opposite direction from where I joined him, we waded through the tall grass. As we went, mourning doves rose up from our feet, their wings flapping rapidly like a nervous heart, testing the air above us. When the floodlights of the patrol crossed a flock’s path, the mourning doves sunk back into the grass and made cooing sounds.
Marco knows the names of all things, not just birds, learned from paper books stored in the collector’s flat. When my fears returned, he promised to show me the books that lined the collector’s walls like paint.
Then Marco dropped his sign into the tall grass.
“We won’t be needing that much longer,” he said.
“But it’s your sign.”
“Only so you could find me.
Soon we’ll be together all the time. Soon we’ll feel what those on trace do not.”
I didn’t understand, but Marco promised to show me the way. He promised all things would become clear once we made it to his parents’ home. My heart almost dropped when we made it to the far edge of the tall grass. Following Marco’s lead I dropped down to my knees from where we listened to the patrol driving along an official transport route separating us from his parents’ home. The patrol, doctors, large product unfit for actuating, and parents on licensed trips used the route on a regular circuit. Marco had been crossing the route twice a night to be with me, but embarrassingly I was afraid to cross.
“I’m afraid every night,” he said.
“How did you know what I was thinking?”
“Every night,” he said again, both times speaking in a whisper. “But it’s the only way.”
He pressed his finger to his lips, signaling me we must whisper, and then to his head that we must outthink the patrol. I understood his non-verbal communication until he pressed two fingers to his heart, which I thought was just for beating. More rapidly on the elliptical or when startled by the patrol or fastest of all with Marco’s beating against mine, but I didn’t know how our hearts could help us dodge the patrol.
"Before the digital age, heart was everything. Heart can’t be programmed or described through reason. The patrol follows a circuit generated by regression programmers. Members of the patrol and programmers are born with heart, but by the time they complete their studies, they’ve suppressed their intuition and replaced it with reason, efficiency, digital technology and love for the actuator and its promise of instantaneously shipped product. All these things are fine and valuable, and in their time, have solved many problems but heart is superior to them all. You, Emmy, have more heart than anyone I’ve ever known.”
“Then how do I use it?”
“You listen.”
The space around us became quiet. The tall grass stopped its hush and whistle, and the mourning doves stopped their cooing. In the place of those sounds, the turning of wheels grew more distinct. As if he knew what I was thinking, Marco nodded. How many nights had he listened to these sounds on his way to me? From our learning stations, most college students listen to our music and movies and video chat through headsets designed to preserve each other’s privacy. Sounds from only a room away might as well originate on different planets. We seldom hear sounds that echo from a distance.
The sound of tires increased in strength as the patrol neared us and slackened as they drove off in the distance. After a few passes I paired the distinct sound of the patrol cars with the lights they shined towards the tall grass and learned the difference between the patrol and other automobiles. The sounds of night became familiar to me before a blanket of silence settled over us.
Marco and I ran across the street in a burst of speed that justified every tiresome hour on the elliptical. The wind raced between us, and though he told me to keep my focus on an alley on the other side of the street, I could hear Marco’s footsteps conversing beside mine. We ran between two residential towers and kept running deeper into the alley until the patrol’s light could never reach us.
“When they planned this pair of towers,” Marco said, “some people still owned personal automobiles, and the Private responsible for the project thought the alley could serve as a parking entrance. By the time the building was finished, the actuators were functioning so well that reason and efficiency put an end to most personal travel. The Private didn’t bother incorporating windows on the inner portion of the buildings because light never travels this far.”
“How will we see?”
“We won’t. Use your hands to guide you.”
“What if transits pass us in here?”
“If you hear their footsteps, lean against the building on your right hand and breath quietly. Most transits are harmless, looking for others with whom to barter manmade product, wild grown mushrooms and berries.”
“Aren’t all products manmade?”
“By a human programming or running one side of the technology and a machine responding on the other. These products are made or cut by a human’s hand.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference is why we met. Why your parents chose to have your dress tailored. When a product is touched by human hands, the difference is what makes us take the journey.”
“Are we almost there?”
“On the other side of the alley, the buildings are from a different age, before the efficiency of living in a tower made most other living arrangements seem obsolete. My parents live in one of the grandfathered brownstones that hold the key to our future together.”
“To think our future is in the past.”
“Past is prelude.”
“If only Vidalia could understand.”
“Be careful of her,” he said.
But I told him you could be trusted, Vidalia. Once I tell you what happened when we made it into the collector’s flat, the purity of our reason will convince you.
Oh, Vidalia, I can’t wait to tell you what happened next. My parents are going to sleep, I can hear them fumbling. Give me a minute to wash up so they don’t make me shutdown. Then I’ll tell you what happened next.
Chapter 7
After climbing a junked fire escape, careful not to fall, Marco pulled me onto the roof of his parents’ building. From there, the cluster of grandfathered brownstones looked like a simulated village against blocks of towers. Somewhere past those towers, Marco promised he’d take me one day once travel restrictions were lifted.
On the far side of City’s metro, beyond the towers and water that circle City’s core, farms and factories grow food and assemble product made by machines at the direction of programmers living in City towers. Marco longs to experience firsthand how things are made in their place of origin before being actuated. Few in City share his curiosity.
Once the majority of City drifted into their trace-aided slumber, the lights of all but the nightshift brownstones went dim. Marco shared his cynical take on why tinted windows were intended to keep lights out, shielding us from the truth of the streets and the lives of transits, rather than serving their promise of protecting our privacy. Otherwise why would the windows need tint in both directions, and why had City failed to upgrade windows on the brownstones so that light would not escape from them, compromising the privacy of those grandfathered families living inside? Only City’s arrogant disregard for the potential of individuals had shielded Marco from City’s gaze.
Those of us who never venture outside our towers miss the panoramic beauty that digital technology fails to capture: such as the firmament of stars no different in splendor than the fairy tale where the boy, guided only by constellations, carries a bouquet of roses across the cool desert night to bring to his true love flowers from a land where such things continue to grow.
Marco said the stars tell stories more ancient than the earliest forms of digital technology, that tech’s comparative lack of historical footing reminds us of the inquisitiveness and imagination inherent in our ancestors who studied the sky. Marco pointed out a pattern of stars like the animal that produced milk prior to powder. Another constellation cinched the sky like a girl’s belt.
As Marco tilted me back for a brief kiss, the stars dipped in the sky. Then Marco twirled me around and called me his compass before plugging in a long cord to display a set of handmade lights once used to celebrate a winter holiday, casting the space above us into a miniature version of the starry sky.
As if the holiday lights were not enough, Marco set a large black disc into an old-fashioned music device plugged into an outlet on the roof--old outlets Marco had modernized to receive energy from his parents’ elliptical machine--and we danced to music from a Prokofiev record while the lights swayed in the wind. The dizziness brought on by so much motion and light sent me back into Marco’s arms from where he carried me to his roses, explaining how he
collects rainwater in barrels on the rooftop to prepare for unexpected droughts and the limited supply of water allocated to citizens via pipes. No longer guided solely by the logic and structure of the rationale, Marco allowed the roses to grow untamed over a trellis he’d reconstructed from bits of wood found in the collector’s flat.
When I thought there’d be nothing left for Marco to show me on the rooftop, he pulled out a small music box meant to store jewelry from a time when women could expect more than one necklace for the senior dance and a ring for their wedding. A song called “You Are My Sunshine” tinkled out of the music box while Marco, with the dexterity of a computer mouse, transferred a gold ring from the velvet of the box to my fourth finger.
“But we’re too young,” I said. “I’m not even old enough to be courting. We could be convicted for crimes against reason.”
Actuator Page 3
