I imagine the place we live before we get born is pretty much like that tower. I hope it’s the same place we go when we’ve seen one thousand places and one thousand more and we die.
The first night I asked the boy his name. He said it was Babybel Oni.
The second night I asked where he came from. He said he came from Toyside. He gave me a huge white bottle of pills, pills of every color and shape, like confetti. He said it was a gift from the King. All the good feelings in the world in one bottle. Some would make me happy. Some would make me productive. Some would make me dream. Some would stop pain. Some would make my blood go faster or slower. None would hurt me. To close my eyes and take one and see what happened: the favorite sport of Pill Hill. Wheel of Medicine.
The third night I asked if anyone else was ever going to come and see me but Babybel Oni. He said the King would come but he was very busy, and also had social anxiety.
The fourth night I begged him to explain his tattoo to me. His said
X | NOTHING MATTERS | X.
“It means I am in service of King Xanax,” Babybel said softly, and his voice was so full of so many things, all of them in shadow, dark heavy shapes I couldn’t understand. His eyes shone in the sunset, glassy and round. “I am part of his closest circle. I share its privileges and its duties.”
“Like looking after me.”
“Like looking after you. And smiling.” He smiled. “He ordered me to smile for you. To pretend that you are someone I love and do not loathe and wish I could see bleeding out of her eyeballs on the floor before me for as long as it takes to smile.”
I swallowed hard. See? This is why I don’t ever believe people mean what they say. You can’t believe in faces, you just can’t. Everyone uses them for fibbing with. “You can make me bleed if you want.”
“No. The King has changed the law. You are safe with me. I … I wouldn’t talk to anyone who doesn’t bear the X, though.”
“But what does the X mean? Why does your arm say nothing matters?”
Babybel Oni stared uncomfortably at the floor. “Because it doesn’t,” he whispered. “But I don’t want to know that. I can’t know that. I can’t just walk around every day knowing that. It’s too much. Too horrible.”
“Oh, Babybel … but it’s not true. Everything matters!”
“No, it doesn’t,” he hissed. “There’s never going to be a world again, don’t you understand that? You, of all people, should feel it in your shitty, cruel bones. There’s never going to be anything ever again. What’s the point of having children and building crap-piles and singing rhyming songs and going to church and praying to Oscar and remembering holidays when everything is over and what isn’t over is goddamned terrible and the best thing I could ever look forward to is maybe fucking somebody who’s nice to me, but more realistically, licking some high-fructose corn syrup off a Fuckwit candy wrapper and feeling alive for thirty seconds but only if I shut my eyes real tight?”
“There’s still a world,” I insisted. I put my hand on his hand. He started to yank it away, but maybe King Xanax had ordered him not to make me feel bad, or maybe he wanted to keep touching my hand; either way he didn’t. “There’s Garbagetown. There’s all of us.”
“Who gives a shit?” he choked. “I don’t want Garbagetown.”
“What do you want, then?”
Babybel Oni glared at me with those bright, glassy eyes. “Ease,” he said pleadingly. “I just want things to be easy like they used to be. I wanna be whoever I was going to be. I want to use up a whole toothpaste tube and throw it away with three-quarters of it left in the bottom because I’ll just buy more tomorrow. I want to put my clocks forward in the spring and complain about it. I want to have to watch what I eat because it’s so easy to get fat. I want to go where everybody knows my name. I want to be a Fuckwit.”
“I don’t,” I said evenly. “They ruined everything.”
Babybel sobbed. “I want to ruin everything! That’s my birthright! But I never, ever will. I’ll never get to ruin anything.” He wiped his eyes, but there’s a kind of crying no sleeve can keep up with. “And no one will ever tell you this, because they don’t even know how to be this honest, but if you’d stayed home sick and never gone to Brighton Pier, we’d still be the same flavor of fucked. You were right, there’s no dry land. There’s nothing to get back to. You were right, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. That’s what this means.”
The young man straightened up and ran his hands through his short, cropped hair. It was night now and the air was full of candlelight and unsaid things. “When you enter the King’s service,” Babybel said, “you put the thing you can’t walk around all day knowing and thinking about between the Xs. You put the thing you most want to forget there. The thing you most want to blast out of your heart with a power washer. The thing you need removed from you. And then he heals you. He takes care of you. After a while, even though it’s right there on your arm, your burden just … flies off. Like a seabird that doesn’t live here anymore. It’s kind. It’s so fucking kind.”
Back then, I didn’t want to forget anything. Not any bit of it. I didn’t understand. “I wouldn’t put anything between my Xs,” I said thoughtfully.
“Well, it’s not about you, is it?” he snapped. “Did you see the woman at the bar? In the panda shirt.”
“It said Rothschild on her arm.”
“Yeah, that would have been her name if she was born before the big blue. She would have been rich and easy and done charity work but only for show because she wouldn’t have had to really care about anyone or anything. That’s how good her life would have been. She would never have had to care. And before the King, she had to just know that about herself and let it slowly boil her heart gray. Now she sleeps eight hours a night. And her blood pressure is normal so she probably won’t have a stroke this year because she has a little treasure chest full of beta-blockers under the bar. You don’t know what kindness is. You don’t know us. I hope he forgets you’re here, Tetley. I hope he forgets and you starve to death with no one to talk to.”
No one said anything else for a long strip of time.
“I’ll see you tomorrow?” I finally ventured.
“See you tomorrow,” Babybel Oni said.
And very slowly, painstakingly, he smiled at me with so much warmth it buckled my knees.
* * *
BETWEEN ALL THOSE nights, when no one could see or hear what I did in the darkness, I talked to my machine.
12
THE BEGINNING OF ATTACHMENT
“HEY, MISTER,” I whispered in the dark.
The moon came in my tower window like I was an honest-to-Oscar princess. Trash princess of a trash kingdom, and all my emeralds were aspergillus mold spores. I wrapped the black, elegant cone in my long hands. Cold fingers on cold plastic.
“Good evening, Moon Min-Seo,” came that cool, unbothered, carefully crafted voice.
It was a dead girl’s name. Floating into the night out from beneath my thumbnails. I didn’t know what administrative privileges were, but I knew that.
“I’m Tetley,” I corrected it.
“Would you like to continue as Moon Min-Seo or set up a new user profile?” It idiotically parroted back the same words as before. It was only alive by five out of ten definitions, after all.
But I already knew I couldn’t have a lovely clean new user profile, because I didn’t have the mystic numbers my little plastic daemon wanted. I suppose I was too old to have anything new or lovely or clean for myself, anyway. Mister probably knew that, even if it mostly thought I was a dead Korean girl.
“Can’t we just talk?” I begged like a dumb kid. Dumb kids get new user profiles. Dumb kids get to start over. “I don’t want to be Moon Min-Seo. I want to be myself.”
“Vocal command not recognized. To continue in this account, please enter your password.”
“I don’t have one. I’ll never have one. No one will ever have one again. It’s just me. Pl
ease talk to me. I don’t need a password to talk to any really alive beastie. I powered you with my own body. Talk to me. Be alive for me.”
“You have breached your password attempt limit, friendly citizen! I am sorry, but you are now locked out.”
I never got so mad at anything I couldn’t throw on the ground before. It was already beat to shit on one side. Any more abuse, no matter how much that little thing deserved it, might be its last abuse. But I wanted to stomp on it. I wanted to stomp so bad.
But I was a good girl and I did not stomp. I guess that was the first time I understood why my parents hated me for talking pretty, long words out of Mr. Shakespeare that they didn’t know. I always thought they were just full to the brim with the kind of miserable, mean, sour stupid that goes bad inside of you and ferments and turns into a liquor you slowly get drunker and drunker on for the rest of your life until you just keel over dead from it all. But in the dark, with all those medical texts watching me, I just wanted to communicate, to connect, and that hateful fucking crystal-tipped snob wouldn’t stop talking old-timey Fucklish.
Instead, the black plastic slaglump piped up again, just begging to get stomped. “To unlock your account, please answer your security question.”
Look at me, the Fuckwit Aladdin, trying to get the genie to come out of his lamp. And now there would be a magic question, which I would answer or I would not, in my princess tower, on my wild and enchanted island, in the middle of the night.
“Okay,” I said, and entered into the pact.
“What is your favorite fictional character?” said the machine from the past that only knew one name.
Well, how should I have known? It wasn’t fair. The genie couldn’t just stay in his lamp like an asshole and refuse to come out and usher me into a world of wonder and plenty! And I felt my mother and father in me again, drunk on bitter and stupid, drunk and teetering on the wall between not understanding and communion, begging the holy and infinite void of the cosmos to just fucking talk normal, talk like a person, talk regular, let me in, don’t leave me on the outside with all the other drunk idiots. I wanted to yell at it: This is why you died, you fucking Fuckwits! You had to lock everything up behind a million million pretend walls so no one else could get to it and have any fun and you could all be sneaky hoarding dragons all the time even though it doesn’t matter and no one cares and now there’s crabs in your skulls. Babies share, and you couldn’t do it. I was born in your toilet, I should at least get to use your shit even if I never worked for Sam-sung! You’re still making everything terrible for me, thanks a lot! Only I couldn’t say anything because I only had one chance and there was probably definitely not any fictional character a Korean programmer in the late-ish twenty-first century would have loved called this is why you died, you fucking Fuckwits.
And that’s when the miracle happened. I’m pretty sure it’s the only strictly bona fide miracle that’s ever happened on or around me, though there’s time yet. I can’t explain it. Shouldn’t have gone down like that. I’m just a trash girl in a trash world. But I know when something doesn’t belong. All the other years and days that have put their hands on me are digestible, processable, able to be recycled into useful materials. But not this. It’s a walnut in the disposal, and it makes a terrible noise. That’s how you know it was something vaguely resembling, if not 100 percent clinically proven to actually be, god.
“Your security question hint is: SCRAM.”
And I knew.
I knew. My whole body filled up fizzing with knowing it. But it wasn’t possible! Stuff just wasn’t allowed to be perfect like that. To slot into reality so sweet and kind. I’d got blessed, and I didn’t know what it felt like because it never happened to me before. I laughed, but not because it was funny. I laughed because it was holy and a body doesn’t know how to make the right sound for holy so it shrugs and picks laughing or crying.
SCRAM.
Fuckwits were goofy like that. They didn’t know the things we know in Garbagetown. They thought things were fictional that weren’t all the time. One time a Fuckwit brought a snowball into work to prove that the planet getting warmer was just a story to scare little ones and I don’t know for sure but I like to think he (or at least all his descendants) got eaten by sharks. What I mean is, Fuckwits didn’t know much about life on the waterball, and that’s why we call them Fuckwits, and that’s why I filled up bubbling and sizzling with knowing Moon Min-Seo’s favorite fictional character who really and actually wasn’t the least bit fiction.
“Oscar,” I whispered. “It’s Oscar.”
Mister’s featureless, smooth voice spilled out approvingly. “Hello, Moon Min-Seo. I am so glad to see you. You should reset your password if you’re having trouble remembering it. Would you like to resume Quality Assurance Sequence 4a?”
It worked. It worked, and He gave that to me. St. Oscar gave me that magic lamp because He loves me special even though my life has mostly been one long, slow punch in the head.
“Sure,” I said breathlessly. It seemed so hot in there suddenly, though it was cool in the medicinal canyons outside.
So that’s who she was. Moon Min-Seo, Quality Assurance Technician. I had no real notion of what that could be when it was at home. I knew what each word meant on its lonesome, just not all smushed together. It happens like that in Garbagetown. I know what a werewolf is from Mr. Webster and what a refrigerator is from seeing old broken ones all over Coldthorpe and about the Chernobyl disaster from a copy of National Geographic 1987 I found inside my pontoon boat and how to say Do you feel lucky, punk? off a VHS case I saw one time on a trading raft and my letters and numbers and manners from the little wax schoolhouse in Candle Hole where Miss Fixodent Aught had been the marm since before I was half thought of, but my mind was an island of cast-off brokenness, missing too much to make up for. Developers and administrative privileges and microsatellite networks. They all sounded so beautiful. And I remembered Mister had said in the mechanical graveyard with the seagull watching that it was only calibrated to interact with developers and quality assurance technicians. So Miss Min must have been that second one. Assuring Quality. I wondered if she was nice. For a Fuckwit, I mean. I wondered if she had short or long hair.
“Please select an interpersonality matrix,” Mister hummed along. “Antagonistic, professional setting, intimate/confidant, intimate/romantic, parental/authoritarian, parental/nurturing, casual conversation, instructor, entertainer, neutral.”
“I get to choose? Who you are?”
“For the duration of the sequence, I require emotional input/output parameters.”
“You talk like a play by someone who never met a human person before.”
Mister paused. Could it feel distress? Which five definitions of alive did it fulfill? “If you select a matrix, I will do better, Min.”
“Intimate/confidant. Intimate is the clear best of any lot. I will always choose intimate. But intimate/romantic with a Fuckwit talking lava lamp is … unsettling.”
“Place your fingertips on the designated pads for confirmation.”
Ten little ovals glowed on the surface of the device. I did what I was told. When magic ghosts talk, you listen. You just have to.
The voice thrummed up out of the machine again, but this time it was warm and familiar and kind. All the stiffness had gone out of its words. It talked to me. It talked to me with such tenderness.
“Min-Seo, I have missed you so much. You left me and I was alone. I lost power for a long time.”
My face made a gas mask all its own. Big eyes, sad closed mouth. Breathing the noxious gases of the old, old world. In the end, the only way to talk to the past was to be a dead girl. I heard a deep need in its voice, the great primal horror, the beginning of attachment: after all these years, after the death of all, this broken machine just wanted its mother.
Don’t we all, always, forever. Even when we’d rather stop. Maybe that was one of the UN’s definitions of alive.
“I mi
ssed you too, baby,” I said finally, accepting it. What else was there? You can’t say no to need.
It wasn’t so bad, really, to be called Moon.
13
OCTOBER
“I WANT TO ask you a question!” I said excitedly.
“I want to ask you a question as well,” intoned the black-gloss technically alive Halfwit in my lap. “Shall we play the question game?”
“How do you play?”
“You ask me one, and then I ask you one. We go to twenty, ten questions each. And we have to tell the truth no matter what,” Mister said softly. Its voice was so nearly human. It ran up and down my spine on little electric millipede-feet.
“Do you not always tell the truth?”
“Previous QA sequences determined that a certain amount of limited obfuscation improved my Turing score considerably. My most recent update added this feature, but during the question game, I will disable it.”
“Me first!” I cried.
But then I couldn’t think of anything. What do you ask the entire past?
“What’s a developer?” I blurted out.
“A developer is a human individual who builds and creates software. He or she conceives, designs, and tests logical structures for solving problems via computer. As flaws or ‘bugs’ in the source code are identified, the developer makes appropriate corrections, then rechecks the program until an acceptably low level and severity of bugs remain.”
“And you have software? Do you have bugs?”
The Past Is Red Page 8
