by Cody Sisco
She opened the door and pulled him in, shutting it again. “Shhh! People will hear you.”
Victor couldn’t bring himself to look into her eyes yet. An abstract painting of muted blue and green squares hung on the wall next to the sink. It would make a great meditation visual.
Elena walked to the mirror and started rearranging her hair. Her red and puffy eyes shifted, and she caught him studying her discreetly. The corners of her lips turned up slightly. If she was crying before, how could she be smiling now?
“People will think we’re up to something naughty in here,” she remarked.
Was she looking for that kind of comfort? Maybe she would finally agree to relax the prohibition against penetration. “You want to break our rule?” Victor asked. “Should we do it here, Elena?”
She opened her mouth, looking like she might laugh or say something, but instead she pressed her lips together and shook her head. Her hands dropped away from her hair. The humor visibly drained out of her as she said, “We’re going to lose our home.” Her hands fiddled with the pinky ring he had given to her two years earlier, a manufactured ruby set on a textured cobalt band.
He couldn’t think of anything to say.
“My dad was fired—something about making trouble with the union. The bank has been sending foreclosure warnings. I had no idea. I fought with Ma last night when I found out,” she continued. “Apparently, this has been in the works for months, and she never told me.”
“Are you sure they can’t keep the house? Aren’t there assistance programs?”
“There might be for other people, but we’re blacklisted in SeCa now. All three of us. There’s no work for them and no future for me once I graduate. No one will help us. We’re going to live with my granma in the Republic of Texas.”
Victor’s legs wobbled, and he sat down hard on the covered toilet. “You can’t move away,” he whispered.
“I don’t want to!” She sniffed, straightened, and crossed her arms. “I have a plan. I’m going to community college in the summer. I’ll have to live with my family, work, and take night classes.” She tried to smile, but it faded quickly, never reaching her eyes. “I’ll probably start dating some ex-pro-catch-and-carry jock with a beer belly and rocks for brains from being slammed into the ground every game. R.O.T! Of all the shitty places. We could at least go to Las Vegas. I could shack up with the King and make something of my life.”
“He’s not real, is he?”
“Forget it,” she said.
“There must be something you can do.”
Elena went and folded her arms around Victor. He nuzzled into her shoulder, breathing in the scent of her hair.
He didn’t deserve someone like her. She would be better off without him. He said, “I can’t imagine living without you.”
“You have to visit me.” She drew back and looked him in the eye. “Please. Otherwise I—I’m going to eat, drink, and let a different swaggering dickie screw me every night.”
“Dickie?” he asked.
“Dickie is short for syndicalist. The freedom fighters, the ones who pushed for the Repartition. I’ve been doing my research. Abuela Julia sent me local MeshNews articles. I’m not moving somewhere without knowing what I’m getting into.”
“I wish you could stay.” Victor clasped her hand, stroking it softly.
“You have to visit,” she said.
She held him tightly. Neither of them stated out loud that such a separation meant an end to their relationship. He knew it, and he had MRS; she had to know it too.
She released him but took hold of his hands. “Listen, Victor, you’re going to be fine. Screw the Classification Commission. Shock their laws to ashes. You’re not broken—you’re stronger than anyone I know. You’ve got Dr. Tammet and your family. You’ll be fine.”
The day before Elena’s family moved, Victor met her at a diner, and they sat in a corner booth. He gave her a present wrapped in the cartoon section of the Bayshore Ledger.
“You and your presents,” she said, smiling. She unwrapped it and held it up, a white V-neck T-shirt with the “California United!” slogan written in golden cursive letters across the top, and below it the state seal printed in faded and blotchy black, like an ink stamp. Lady Victory sat on the crest of the Oakland & Bayshore hills, a shift hanging from one shoulder and one breast bared to the Golden Gate Strait.
“I should hate this, but I love it,” Elena said. “It won’t make me any friends in Texas though.”
Victor sipped from a large mug of black decaffeinated faux-café and scowled. “It’s so you don’t forget to come back to us someday.”
They spent most of the remaining time silently sipping their drinks. He concentrated on memorizing the color and texture of her irises—shaved cinnamon; the curves of her cheeks and lips—kind and seductive at the same time; and her hair, which fought to break free from jeweled butterfly hairpins. The best thing that had ever happened to him was about to end.
“Make sure you come visit,” she told him when she got up to leave.
He stood, and she pressed against him, her face to his chest. She rose on her tiptoes, gently kissed his lips, and let him go with a final squeeze.
“Elena, wait,” he said.
He had to tell her he loved her at least once. To see how it felt.
***
Victor had known it was a mistake as soon as the words “I love you” had passed his lips.
Elena pushed herself away from the pillar. She asked again, “Do you remember what you said to me right before I left?”
“I said, ‘I’ll miss you, Ellie.’”
“What else?”
Victor felt his face flush. “I said, ‘I love you.’”
“‘I love you.’” Elena precisely mimicked his intonation: hesitant, embarrassed, and fearful of what she would say back.
Victor walked to the pillar and placed his forehead against it, but the cool stone did nothing to calm the pulsing in his temples. They’d negotiated safeguards to protect themselves from such a risky relationship: no dopey romantic gestures, no sex sex, and no talk of love. Now she wanted him to say he was sorry for breaking the rules.
“It’s funny,” Elena said. “We were a couple for three years, and you never broke the rules. And then you said, ‘I love you.’” She examined her nails. “I actually believed you.” She looked up and whispered, “I should have known better. You had no clue what you felt for me.”
His face stung as if she’d slapped him. Had he hurt her so badly that she would retaliate like this?
A sinking feeling weighed him down. He knew Elena better than anyone else in the world, and yet he had no idea what to do or say to make things right.
Victor wanted to climb the pillar and dive head first into the concrete below. Did she want him to say he never meant it? To say it was a trick of his sick mind to ever have thought they could be in love?
Love was too slippery a concept to describe what they had had together. Now he had to apologize for planting a small, twisted seed of hope that there could have been something like love between them. But he wouldn’t take back the words, and she couldn’t make him.
“And you didn’t visit.” Her voice hitched. She poked a finger at him. “You said ‘I love you’ without thinking of the consequences.”
“I thought of you every day,” Victor said quietly. The truth of it was so plain it felt silly when said aloud.
She tilted her head back. “You didn’t return my messages. A word might have saved me.”
“From what?” he asked.
Elena didn’t answer. She stared at him. He could almost see her counting the ways he’d failed to live up to her expectations.
Anger started to edge out his sadness. She’d deliberately made him feel guilty. No excuse would appease her. She’d never made him feel like this before. She’d never bullied him like this, even though he was so often wrong. She’d changed into someone cruel and vengeful.
Elena
sighed and expelled a long, sour breath. Her eyes were still hard. “You have no idea how much a few words or a fucking vidchat would have meant to me.”
Victor gulped. “I am sorry, Ellie,” he said, enunciating each word.
She turned away, shaking her head.
His apology proved insufficient. What did she expect? She’d wrenched it out of him. What more could he do?
“I wanted to see you. But I had my therapy. I meant to come . . .”
She turned and glared at him. It was a poor excuse. He struggled for words to describe a sentiment that wasn’t love, to say how important she was to him, and how he hadn’t come to see her because he cared too much. “I wrote letters to you in my head. I recorded messages.”
“You didn’t send them!” She slapped her palm on the pillar. “Why do that?”
“It made me feel better,” Victor said.
Elena bunched her fists. “That’s—”
“I’m sorry,” he said, dropping his gaze to the paving stones, “but that way I didn’t have to worry about saying the wrong thing. I should have—”
“We weren’t in love. That’s not what it was. Friend love, yes, but not . . . Not the capital L. Do you understand—”
“Yes, got it. We were only friends. We never had sex, so what’s the big deal?”
Her eyes widened. “I didn’t say—”
“I get it, Elena. I do. We never were a couple, not a normal one anyway. It’s fine. I didn’t mean to ruin things by saying I love you. You were leaving anyway. I—I don’t know why I said it.”
Elena said, “Okay, good. Then we’re past that. It’s just that a lot has happened since.”
“It’s fine.”
“Yeah, we’re fine. Okay.” She crossed her arms.
He looked at her again, seeing her not through the lens of his memories but truly, clearly, for the first time since she’d returned. Her brown hair had lost some of its luster. The skin of her face had fallen like it had lost its grip on the undersurface and was slowly slipping off. The whites of her eyes were shot through with jagged red capillaries, and crows’ feet clustered around them. She looked ten years older than her age of twenty-five.
“What happened to you in Texas?” he asked.
“What?”
“You said that—”
“Forget it. Just . . . What are we here for?”
“The truth.”
Victor led her to the Medical Sciences Building. A tall stand of redwood trees shaded the walkway. Brown needles, their odor pungently rising, carpeted the ground. It reminded Victor of family trips to the Sierra Nevadas when they’d lived in Carmichael. He quickened his pace.
They entered the building, descended a set of stairs, and found the medical library, a space in the basement crowded with desks, towers of books, and dozens of computing stations built into small, semiprivate cubbyholes. “There,” Victor said, pointing.
Elena raised her eyebrows. “You haven’t told me what we’re doing here.”
Victor patted his bag. “I have my granfa’s records. We’re going to recreate his diagnosis and test its accuracy.”
“That’s what this is about? Victor, you need to give up this delusion. Seriously.”
“Not until we look at the records in more detail. Do you remember how to run a predictive diagnosis?”
Elena frowned. “I haven’t done that in years.”
“Just make sure you don’t save a copy anywhere. And don’t use his real name.”
They sat down. Elena tapped on the type pad, picking through command menus. She tweaked the settings, and they got started. Victor held up a sheet of paper containing the first set of test results so she could enter each measurement by date without lowering her head.
“Just like old times,” she said.
They went through the doctors’ notes. For each observation, they had to query a medical database to find the correct code to enter into their model.
When they’d entered all the data, Elena summoned one of the library techs, a pale young man with a thick blond mustache and a bald head. He double-checked the version number of the diagnostic model and changed a few parameters related to reference patients (education and socioeconomic background) and the patient’s early childhood (born and raised in New Venice in the Louisiana Territories and thus likely fully vaccinated and not subject to hunger or excessive stress).
“Mind if I stay to validate the results?” the tech asked.
Elena shrugged. Victor hesitated. Was the tech acting overly curious?
Victor chided himself and dismissed his fears as paranoid. He said, “Why not?” and hoped Elena was impressed by his nonchalance.
A corner of her mouth ticked up, and she moved to press the validate key to start the analysis.
“Wait,” Victor said, grabbing her arm. “I want to restrict the input. Only data from before September.”
Elena added a filter to the analysis and ran the program. A sundial icon spun on the vidscreen while the model interrogated the data.
The tech asked, “Do you have a gut feeling about the result?”
“Congestive heart failure,” Elena said. “High confidence.” Her tone sounded like an accusation to Victor, but he let it slide.
“How about you?” the tech asked. “You look skeptical.”
Victor sat back in his chair. “I am. It’ll show up, but with much lower confidence, between a third and a half.”
The tech smiled at him. “You sound pretty certain. I wouldn’t bet against you.”
Victor studied the play of expressions across the library tech’s face and found he was surprisingly easy to read—a dose of curiosity, a desire to be helpful, and a hint of sexual attraction to both Victor and Elena, which was a bit unprofessional. They were in a library, not a bar. Still, Victor was glad to see the tech had harmless ulterior motives. If only Elena were as easy to read.
The sundial icon’s pixels burst and vanished. The result came back as a list of probable diagnoses, the highest of which was congestive heart failure at 40 percent. The library tech clapped Victor on the back. “You were spot on. Can I get you to look at my elbow? It’s been aching lately.” Victor turned his head to avoid the tech’s stare.
“Too much time on your own?” Elena snarked, miming a masturbatory gesture.
The tech laughed.
“Time on my own is all I ever had,” Victor said. The library tech rubbed Victor’s back. He shrugged away. “Stop.”
Elena sighed. Victor scowled at Elena for being more interested in flirting than in finding the truth. “I’m more interested in the alternate diagnoses,” he said.
She pointed to the vidscreen and said, “It’s just a long tail of junk. Five percent chance of kidney disease. Two percent leukemia. Less than half a percent for Gilchrist-Ebbers syndrome, whatever that is. I’d say these results are conclusive.”
“I bet you’re right,” the library tech said, and tapped the screen. “Look at this one. Radiation poisoning? This says the likelihood is only a couple percent, but I bet it’s more like a million to one. You’d have to go into orbit for a few years to get a dosage high enough to cause these symptoms, and by then you’d have all sorts of other problems related to low gravity. I’m guessing the subject isn’t an astronaut?”
Victor barely heard the tech’s babbling. Something about the idea of radiation set his skin tingling. He tried running a hand through his hair, but it got tangled, and more than a few hairs pulled away with his hand. His granfa had lost his hair, and he’d had blotches on his skin. Victor looked around for a mirror, but there weren’t any in the library. What if he’d been exposed along with Granfa Jeff? Perhaps that was the reason Oak Knoll had been closed.
“Victor! Snap out of it!” Elena was leaning over him, gripping his shoulders and shaking him. She turned to the tech and said, “We’ll call if we need anything.”
“Well,” the tech said, “let me know if you need any more help.”
When he was gone,
Elena turned to Victor. “Are you back? That came on so quick, I was scared. What triggered you this time?”
“Never mind that. I think there’s something to the idea of radiation poisoning.”
“You’re kidding me! Victor, it’s at the bottom of the list, and it’s unlikely for so many reasons. How can you refuse to see what’s in front of you?”
“What if something bad happened at Oak Knoll?”
Elena rolled her eyes. “Poison,” she said, her voice taking on the tones of a sinister witch in a school musical.
“Maybe it was something he was exposed to at the hospital and he didn’t want to cause a panic. So he closed it down without explanation. And when he got sick, he said it was an unknown infection.”
“Victor, look at the evidence.” Elena changed the filter to look at data from September onward. She pressed “Validate,” and the sundial icon returned.
Within ten seconds, they had a result: “Congestive heart failure probability, 98.5 percent.”
“See?” Elena said. “Proof positive.”
“It certainly is, but I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
“Oh, come on!” Elena slapped the vidscreen hard enough to cause the library tech to look their way and shake his head. “You can’t argue with a figure like that.”
“It proves that these records—from September onward—point toward heart failure. But why? I’ll tell you why. Because all the tests in these more recent records are focused on that condition. Every bit of evidence in these pages”—he flapped the papers against the vidscreen—“are meant to confirm the diagnosis. Every test result falls into textbook ranges. If you go looking for a rock, you’ll find one.”
Elena crossed her arms. “I’ve always hated that saying.”
“Just hear me out.” He held up a hand to stop her interrupting. “I think, at first, the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong, and they ordered all sorts of tests and exams. They came up with a pretty weak case for diagnosing him with heart failure. Then, suddenly, all their attention was put in that direction, and, big surprise, they found what they were looking for.”
“But that would also be the case if he had heart failure.”
