by Ben Marcus
“Okay, Royce, if that’s what you want to hear. I make no money for my ideas. But I’m only saying that to comfort you. You seem afraid and I don’t want to scare you. Anyway, it’s sort of true. Weirdly, since you are hardly ever right. ‘Money,’ per se, would be the wrong word—not nearly strong or frightening enough, too bound up in specific meaning—for what they heap on me in return for my services. I used to make money. A filthy amount of it, and I stashed it in a sock the size of your whole house. But then, well, ‘raise’ isn’t the word for what happened. There is no word for the kind of promotion I received. And now I’ve left any category you could even remotely comprehend. I’d have to physically carve a new gutter in your brain for you to understand any of this. With a surgical knife that would blind you to look at. But I still enjoy being your friend. I’m not so advanced that I can’t recognize what good people you are. Here’s to good people, who remind us of our origins.”
Harriet raised a glass, but the toast had few takers.
“That was funny at first, but then it got really long and tedious,” said Royce, who was using Donny as a pillow.
“Whereas I feel that it started out tedious and then grew sickening,” said Ida. “And we still don’t actually know what she gets paid.”
Harriet smirked, rubbing her fingers together to suggest currency.
“Speaking of people,” said Aniel. “There are a few of them I’d like to lick. Not at this table, though. No offense.”
It was getting late, and everyone started to look around at what, and who, there was to be had in the room. Or denied. It was that time of night, but maybe it was always that time of night. There was a collective obligation to try to find moisture, but they were often slow to suit up, sluggish to the starting line. They got tired. They felt slightly sick. Sometimes hooking up took so much work. In the end maybe they preferred to be alone. And yet even that didn’t scratch at the distant craving, not really.
* * *
—
Ida went home with Mort that night. She’d survived his mild trespasses a few times, and the embarrassment she’d initially expected over sex with a young, hairless engineer never really ignited. Maybe that counted for something. Sometimes, at the end of drinking sessions like tonight, each ashamed and regretful to an equal degree, Ida guessed—since they didn’t really stoop to disclosure—they stumbled into each other’s territory, Little Rascals style, providing a certain service. One day, supposedly, a Kind Friend could give them what they needed, and clean up after, and possibly even flush the shame from their systems as well. But for the time being they still had to endure the company of other fleshy need machines, human spouters and little bags of weepery. Mort was younger, and softer all around, but Ida didn’t mind consorting with him because he was erotically polite and nonthreatening and he devoted most of his fornicational energies confirming that everything was all right, as if each new timid push into her, his face ballooning above her like a parade float, might have suddenly changed the ethical terms of their encounter. Which, Ida thought, who knows, maybe it did?
Was it okay, was she okay, did this feel all right, did she mind, was it uncomfortable, did that feel nice? Would she like something else, something different, maybe even a person different from him, which he could possibly try to arrange? Ida pictured Mort on the street, half-naked with his sweet baby legs, soliciting civilians to come up to her apartment and make really, really nice. Mort would do that for her, even if it was secretly for him, to gratify some bottomless need to be solicitous and helpful. The desire to please and please and please. It was all a bit selfish, when you thought about it.
Was it okay, was she okay, did this feel all right? These were the questions a person deserved, Ida thought, but for some reason she only ever heard them naked, and even then not so often. Mort was a good egg, but that was just it. He was no more than that. Smooth and fragile and easy to take for granted.
Tonight Mort was especially soft, for which he blamed his diet and a deficiency in some vitamin buried deep in the alphabet. So there’d be no game of Bible study. He stared down at himself as if he should be able to troubleshoot the issue. “I did a cleanse and I’m fairly certain that I have not had an erection since then. I’ve been feeling weak and depleted. I probably should have done a run-through at home before coming over. I’ve just been too busy.”
“You didn’t connect it to your, uh,” Ida asked, trying to be funny, pointing at the stupid thing on his wrist that barked his inner workings at him all day long.
Mort looked at the watch and didn’t laugh. His wallpaper was of a cartoon bear, rubbing its belly.
So he’d managed to rid himself, through diet, of his male burden? Ida wondered. Could one say “manhood” anymore? It seemed problematic, but Ida wasn’t especially sure. A good deal of the language was mired in lunacy and it sometimes seemed better not to partake. When talking about sensitive matters, or, really, when talking at all, it was safer to just breathe loudly, in different accents, adding a little bit of body English with your face—then the transcript could never come back and fuck you down into the mud. What proof would there ever be? You had only sighed. You just kept sighing and sighing. How could anyone be offended by that? Even biological terminology had taken on a wobble and when you messed up and said something out loud, you dated yourself. You prepped yourself for the dumpster. It was a little bit like using your own tombstone as a sandwich board.
So Mort was soft and she was tired and the night was late, late, late.
“I’m sorry,” Ida said, in her flattest voice. It was stone-cold, she knew, but maybe Mort didn’t even catch the shade. His self-punishment techniques were too powerful. She was mostly relieved not to have to get sweaty with this remote coworker who often smelled like her third-grade homeroom teacher, which confused things a good deal, but she felt some vague pressure to take the situation personally. Torn a little bit. You know, he was impotent because of her. She had not inspired a proper baton. It was difficult not to play along and pretend that if only her ass had a steeper switchback, or her breasts didn’t spill to the side, Mort would be seesawing away at her with a diamond cutter. Except they’d consummated before, over the past few months, and her fun happy body, which she loved and loved with all of her blessed heart, oh yes she did, hadn’t changed much in the interval. It hadn’t spoiled or fallen apart or grown discolored or sloughed off a mild, gray powder from its lower parts. Nope, it sure hadn’t. So whatever and whatever and whatever to this young gentleman with his lifeless baby wiener.
She patted Mort on the back. Cleanup would be easier tonight, but what the hell was she supposed to do with this naked person sitting on her bed, on the verge of feeling sorry for himself? Mort was too polite to openly emote about his misfortune—young sensitive men had turned into such exemplars of emotional restraint!—but he parked on the bed as if it was here that his problem would be fixed, and Ida knew that no such thing was in the cards. Must. Get. Sad. Man. Out. Of. House. Now. She’d had her quota of emotions for the week, caring for her mother and father, and right now her store of pity, or really anything else, was empty. She wanted to feed a little, get high, and maybe let the bathtub faucet thunder down on her and finish her off.
* * *
—
Thompson Systems demanded regular physicals of their employees, maybe so you didn’t die at one of their cubicles and cause a lapse in productivity. Ida’s number was up, and in the course of a routine exam, she was prescribed a legacy drug called Rally. Not for moods, she was told, but possibly for the lack of them. This was not a new drug, the doctor stressed. She was to please not think for a moment that she was taking anything new. Sometimes only the older, forgotten drugs could touch that sweet spot, explained her doctor. And we do need our sweet spots touched, Ida had said back, laughing a little too loudly, though the doctor looked at her with boredom and said that the pills were especially hard to swallow. Don
’t assume, he told her, that just because you have taken pills your whole life, that you can take these. It’s not that simple. He paused. She wasn’t sure what to picture. She couldn’t picture anything, just a field with dead people in it, for some reason. It wasn’t that the pills were so large, either, the doctor explained. They were just, trust him, really hard to swallow.
* * *
—
Ida signed in as a fake customer on the Thompson server—one of the hordes of false identities they cultivated in order to spread praise about themselves, along with a certain kind of low-key criticism, in order to build brand authenticity—and did a quick land grab on the drug, but instantly got bored reading about it. It had changed and ruined people’s lives, they loved and hated it. They were indifferent and sad and happy, near death and reborn. Some of them said that if you let the pill sit in your mouth for too long before swallowing it, rather than dissolve it grew larger. It could choke you out, but it also taught you to be a person. Others said it didn’t work and still others complained, at length, about the packaging. It was so soft and it crumbled into your hands and you’d never wash it off. As in ever. People seemed to agree that the drug could take years to kick in, a lifetime. Although some people claimed to be buzzing and cheerful and deeply changed after just one dose. An antidepressant for the afterlife, someone called it. Not a happy pill, no way. Not even really a pill. It works in your sleep. It might not affect you, but could leech over to a friend. Drugs like this, claimed one customer, were only for people who didn’t think they needed them. It wasn’t really a drug. It was more of a bomb, but it had no fuse and would never detonate. You never really swallowed it. You just held it inside you for a while. If you were lucky. We exist to give safe harbor to these pills, someone said. Your body is the bottle. Chemically the drug seemed kind of mild. More like a food than a drug. More like a sample of wind, trapped in a vial. Supposedly they were working on a cream.
Ida filled her prescription and took her bottle of Rally tablets home. With a toothpick she daubed some butter on her pill and it went down fine. But soon it had risen back into her mouth—it felt like a small insect crawling up her throat—and she had to take it out and butter it again. After that it stayed down, and as much as she wanted to claim some change over the next few weeks—to her mind, to her moods, to anything—she noticed nothing different whatsoever.
* * *
—
The next time Ida visited her mother at the nursing home, she asked her about Rally. Her mother had been a physician’s assistant before she retired, and would maybe have heard something, or seen this drug in action. It turned out that her grandfather had taken the same medication, which was called Forlexa back then, for his issue, which could only be described, after a long silence on the part of Ida’s mother, as estrangement.
Not the official diagnosis, Ida guessed, but still, it possessed a certain diagnostic elegance.
“Did it work?” Ida asked.
Her mother again paused, and it seemed she’d forgotten the question. Her clarity could be fleeting. Clearly she was thinking. And thinking and thinking. Her face strained so, and Ida felt bad about putting her mother through this. It wasn’t so important. She didn’t need to know. But another part of her was curious about how her mother’s thoughts sounded now, given the change. Or maybe how they ever sounded.
Of course at work they had talked and talked about a system of capture, an extraction tool, for thoughts. This was a big R&D area for companies like Thompson. The last frontier of privacy, blah blah blah. How hard could it be to finally reach into people’s faces and claw away at what they were thinking, and to turn that noisy chatter into a cogent transcription? Really stupendously hard, it turned out. But probably not entirely totally impossible. Probably just a matter of time, even if that meant that they’d all be dead and the world would be dead, just a cold and lifeless rock, but it would still happen. Maybe. Ida saw the appeal, and she’d done some grunt work on a mock interface, mostly just color blocking, building a palette, that might have been part of a black cloth project along those lines. She was on such a don’t-need-to-know basis at Thompson that she might as well have been wearing a blindfold. In the end, though, she didn’t want to live in a time when such tech came online and her own thoughts were on offer to the shimmering seals with human genitalia who seemed to encircle her with questions, punching straws into her head to draw out what little she had left. Her so-called thoughts. Her precious precious. She’d have to jump off a building, and she wasn’t in an especially big hurry to do that. Not always, anyway.
“Well, I would say yes, I suppose, it did help,” her mother answered finally.
“You suppose?”
“Grandpa never left us, no matter how much he threatened to. He remained. Sometimes he sat with us, far away, and you could very nearly set him on fire without him noticing. In fact I remember him burning. I do. Burning very prettily right there in his chair.” She pointed at the wall.
“Mother.” Ida touched her hand.
“But his distance from us, emotionally, became less threatening. How do you measure emotional distance? Miles? Days? That’s almost always the question, I think. I never asked Grandma about it. But because my father stayed I would say the medication worked for us. That’s what we all always said, anyway, and I guess that’s what I’m saying now.”
Her mother looked at Ida, bewildered.
“Is that what I’m saying, sweetheart?”
“Yes, Mom,” said Ida. “That is. That’s what you’ve said.”
“Oh good.” She grabbed Ida’s hand. “I made sense, didn’t I?”
“You did. You absolutely did.”
“I want to. I so want to. You know that, right?”
“You always will to me, Mom.”
Her mother looked up at her with such kindness. Her eyes, though, showed something else, and she looked around as if she’d lost something.
“What is it, Mom? Are you okay?”
“Oh yes, oh yes,” she said, but she seemed nervous in front of Ida, or shy.
“I was just thinking, dear, that you are almost as beautiful as my daughter. I would very much like for you to meet her. She visits me here. She’s coming soon.”
She used to correct her mother, but she’d since been advised not to, and sometimes, lately, her mother’s phrasing made a strange sort of sense to her.
Ida smiled and took her mother’s hand. “I would like that, Mom. I really would.”
Together they stared at the door, but the only person to finally come in was the nurse, who said she had to swap out garbage cans because there was sort of a problem with one of them, and that problem, as it was poured out of her mother’s garbage can into a paper bag, was certainly nothing that Ida ever wanted to see again.
* * *
—
After work the next day, across town, Ida brought a spoonful of soup to her father’s lips.
“You think I’m an imbecile,” he said, staring past her hand at the TV.
“I don’t.”
“An idiot, at any rate. Don’t insult me.”
“No, Dad.”
“You look at me with utter disgust.”
Ida stroked her father’s forehead. He still had his hair. He had a broad, smooth forehead and if he could be made to stand upright, and dressed in a suit, he would be so handsome.
“Are you tired, Dad?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
It was a good answer. Ida was tired, too. Did anyone, when asked, ever say they weren’t?
As usual, her father was watching the news, but, as far as she could tell—from the colors on the TV and the old-fashioned clothing the newscasters wore—it was news from a good while ago. Did they show reruns of such things? Maybe this old news was suddenly relevant again?
“What’s this, Dad?”
Ida couldn’t really understand the men on the screen. They spoke a foreign language, like one she might have learned in high school and since forgotten. She looked at her father and marveled that he seemed to be following this. He was utterly engrossed.
It seemed like a standard newscast. Four men at a table, a wireframe globe spinning behind them. Ida tried to settle in and just be there with her father, to relax and enjoy his company and do something with him. She had so much to do, so much to do, so much to do, but it was useless to think about it. She tried not to look too carefully around her father’s room. The bed, the little chair—far too small for anyone who might ever visit him—the window that needed to be cleaned. She focused with all her might on the TV.
“These men are not happy,” her father said. “They can’t say that because they will lose their jobs. Just look at them. They are holding it in. They always do that. They don’t say what they think, so they’re scared. No one is fooling me.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Probably? C’mon.”
She sat with her father and held his hand, which was heavy and dry.
Then her father said, “That one over there, the white man. I tell you what. He’s going to die. The rest of them don’t want to admit it, but he knows. Just look at him. He knows.”
Ida studied the one her father referred to. He had on a white suit, with white hair, but his face was bright red and sweaty. It was likely, given how old this show was, that this man was already dead. Perhaps his children, too, were dead by now. Anyone who loved or knew him. Or quite old by now, anyway, maybe in a room just like this one, sitting with someone somewhere. Hopefully sitting with someone.
