My Own Devices

by Dessa

  We talked shop for a while: the relative merits of releasing singles as opposed to full-length albums, his upcoming tour, my search for some up-tempo production for a new song. He said he liked my dress. And, to my surprise, it all felt fine.

  I checked the time and said I had to go. I wanted to arrive at Mayo early enough for one last run through my notes.

  We stood and hugged. It lasted one beat longer than a familiar hug would last. At the moment when it should have ended, X lifted his hands from my back, replaced them, and pressed—the way you might press the air out of a bag to smooth it flat.

  Walking toward my car, the old sickness hit. A light nausea, like a kid in the first throes of motion sickness, a dizzy sweat, and the feeling that my blood was somehow too thick, the consistency of expensive balsamic. I knew, from past experience, that I’d pay for that coffee in tears. I was like a walking construction site that now had to reset the sign around her neck: IT’S BEEN 1 DAY SINCE OUR LAST ACCIDENT.

  I sat in my car with my hands on the steering wheel. And I found a tiny, hiding hope that had been sheltering undiscovered in the shadows of my mind. I had been hoping he’d propose. At 10 A.M. on a weekday, with no meaningful discussion, no catalyst at all, I’d hoped he’d take a knee. And that was crazy—I was crazy.

  That’s the last straw, I thought. It’s one thing to be lovesick and another to be . . . whatever this was. Willpower alone hadn’t been enough. I was going to have to consider more serious measures. But first I was going to have to give the speech at Mayo.

  My PowerPoint did in fact slay. A writer in the audience profiled me in Forbes the next week. To my knowledge, my crying backstage was observed by no one. I got on a plane to go back east.

  There are 1,210 miles between Minneapolis and Manhattan. And still, somehow, I’d managed to get within six inches and reset the damn thing.

  How Hockey Breaks Your Heart

  —

  I traveled to Seattle to watch my little brother sell drugs. Maxie had moved there to accept a job offer in the edibles sector of the legal weed market. He’d been in the city for a couple of years, but I was making my first visit to check out his new digs; I wanted to meet his people, learn more about his career, maybe get uncomfortably high on dessert. His employer, Botanica Seattle, is a wholesaler that makes fancy cookies and delicate chocolates and little mints packaged in hinged tins like Altoids. In promotional videos, Maxie sometimes played a fictional character called Journeyman who wears a hot pink silk jacket, talks directly to the camera in a Mad Men voice, and holds up Botanica products to explain the merits of each one before cavalierly throwing it to his right, out of the shot.

  I left Seattle three days later, having learned that I’ll probably develop Alzheimer’s disease. If that ends up being true, I’m not sure if or when I’ll forget having been to his apartment at all.

  * * *

  —

  My brother and I were impossibly close as kids, but we haven’t spent all that much time together as grown-ups. When we are together, it’s almost always at my dad’s house, where we’re inclined to stay faithful to the family scripts we’ve been reading through for twenty years. He is funny and laid-back. I am liberal and high-strung. We love Dad and Dad loves us.

  Adult Maxie would have been difficult to forecast as the consequent of Kid Maxie. The small boy had large, dark eyes, a bowl cut notched in the front by a cowlick, and a quiet Zen unusual in four-year-olds. He tucked neatly under my arm when we sat side by side. To teach him the alphabet, I made a set of tiny books bound with packing tape. When he couldn’t fall asleep, I smoothed his bangs away from his forehead until his face went smooth as he melted out of consciousness. I asked my mother to put plastic on my mattress so that if Maxie wanted to crawl into bed with me in the middle of the night, he wouldn’t have to worry about wetting the bed. When he started school, he clung to me like one of those tiny koala clamp toys that doctors put on their stethoscopes. His teachers and mine made special allowances for me to visit him during the school day. I’m sure other pairs of siblings had a childhood relationship like ours, but I haven’t met them yet.

  Adult Maxie is nearly six feet tall with a fighter’s build and dry, whip-fast wit. With dark hair, olive skin, and a small silver stud in his rounded nose, Maxie cuts the figure of a perfectly assimilated second-generation Indian. Which is weird because we are not Indian. Mom is Puerto Rican, Dad is white, and I just come off as a brunette with a tan. We pulled up one of those skin-tone charts once: he’s Peanut and I’m Tortilla.

  Unlike Maxie, I’ve aged predictably, becoming exactly the sketch that a forensic artist would create if handed my fifth-grade photo with the note plus twenty-five years. I’m still the color of sand, still tall and long-necked, with a full but asymmetrical mouth, strong cheekbones, and tired-looking eyes.

  The eyes—that’s a trait Maxie and I always had in common. Children with allergies often have dark circles called “allergic shiners.” Even as little kids, Maxie and I looked like we’d been up for days as contenders in some latchkey fight club. In a different era, he and I would have been picked off early by predators. It takes medical intervention and a modern, expanded definition of fitness for nearsighted asthmatics like us to survive childhood, go on dates, and have the chance to send a new round of myopic children out into the sunlight to wheeze the fresh air.

  As grown-ups we’re both socially outgoing, subject to occasional bouts of melancholy, and avid collectors of facts. The way some people accumulate refrigerator magnets or porcelain figurines, we keep little bits of nonfunctional information, the sort that can be trotted out at a dinner party. Did you know the bit of plastic at the end of a shoelace is called an aglet? That the zip in zip code is an acronym for “zone improvement plan”? That the size of a bottle of wine was initially determined by glassblowers’ lung capacity, as each bottle was blown with a single breath? That zebras have a ducking reflex that makes them difficult to lasso, and that even though they look like horses, they can’t really be domesticated because they don’t have the sort of hierarchical social structure that involves following a single male, which means you can’t lead a pack of them anywhere because they just don’t care?

  Maxie is hands-down one of my favorite people. But, gearing up for the Seattle visit, part of me was worried we might discover that we didn’t really have three days of easy conversation between us. I couldn’t remember when we last spent that much time together, without the manic drag race between parents’ and stepparents’ houses on Christmas.

  A few weeks before takeoff, I bought two 23andMe genetic test kits online. I had one sent to Maxie’s address in Seattle and one sent to my apartment in New York. I thought it could be a reliable source of conversation—we could compare genomes over drinks, learn some fresh trivia.

  A lot of people who go in for genetic testing are excited about the ancestry analysis—they’re keen to find out just how much British or Native American blood they might have. I don’t care much about that stuff—the preoccupation with charting one’s family tree on parchment rings with the same gooey, self-absorbed romanticism of past-life regression. Everybody wants to be Braveheart and nobody wants to die in the potato blight.

  I was excited about the traits reports. I wanted to read about the genetic inheritability of widow’s peaks and why cilantro tastes like soap to some poor, unfortunate souls.

  Buying the kits from the 23andMe site meant scrolling through several pages of terms and conditions. I was warned that my genetic information might reveal unexpected information about my ancestry and origins. Different people feel differently about this kind of information; some people are excited about these new connections and others take more time to integrate this information into their sense of self. (I.e., some people are racists.) Genetic information can also reveal that someone you thought you were related to is not your biological relative. (I.e., you’re adopted.) You may learn informat
ion about yourself that you do not anticipate. Once you obtain your genetic information, the knowledge is irrevocable.

  My test arrived in a box just smaller than a microwave meal. It held a vial labeled with a serial number and an instruction card. I was supposed to collect a sample of my saliva in the tube, mix it up with a bit of clear solution in a blister pack, and then mail it back to a third-party lab in Burlington, North Carolina. The preprinted return mailing label said EXEMPT HUMAN SPECIMEN.

  I wondered, while spitting into the tube, if the lab tech would be able to tell that the last meal I’d consumed was low-calorie ice cream and red wine. The collection was slow-going—they really were asking for a decent amount of spit. I felt like one of those vipers being milked for venom on the Discovery Channel. I went into the fridge and opened a jar of capers. Something about that smell has always made my mouth water in a weird, chemical reflex.

  I sent off my spit for analysis and texted Maxie, who’d already mailed in his sample. We agreed not to look at our results until I got to Seattle.

  The afternoon I arrived, he was scheduled to hand out product samples at a local retailer, the Queen Anne Cannabis Company. (That name, I thought, sounded less like a pot shop than a British warship.) He was apologetic about not being able to pick me up from the airport. I told him not to sweat it; I’d take the light-rail and meet him there.

  The sales floor of the Queen Anne Cannabis Company was the size of a junior one-bedroom apartment. An unlikable cover of a very likable Chris Isaak song played on the sound system. There were studio portraits of weed nuggets on the wall, an image of a pensive Bob Marley, and a chalkboard advertising the weekly specials. On Triple Threat Thursdays, the third joint was 50 percent off.

  Maxie stood behind a folding table set with individually packaged treats: snickerdoodles, chocolates, pastel candies. He was talking to two bald white guys and a blonde woman carrying a Michael Kors handbag the same color as her skin—Sugar Cookie on a skin-tone chart. All three wore dark blue jeans and an article of polar fleece. One of the guys was struggling to open the sample he’d taken; Maxie reached out with a pair of scissors. “They make us make these things bulletproof, so children can’t open them.” He snipped the package. “But of course, we’re all just old children.”

  The samples were un-infused; they didn’t have any drugs in them, were just on offer to showcase the flavors. The way Maxie described it, one of his primary tasks was to persuade budtenders—the unfortunate term for dispensary sales staff—to pitch Botanica products to their customers. He was on site to strengthen the relationship with the store as well as hand out snacks to grown-ups.

  During a lull in foot traffic, I dropped my duffel bag in a corner and swooped in for a hug. New customers walked in behind me, and before ducking out of their way, I asked, “Can I take one of these?” Maxie spread his arm wide across the table, in a kingly gesture of largess. I palmed a few samples and stood aside.

  He hailed the new arrivals, “Where you guys coming from?”

  “Kentucky.”

  “Never head of it.”

  They froze for a beat, then laughed in unison.

  Good hawking involves a balance of charisma and credibility: part snake charmer, part professor. Years ago, I’d had a job handing out gelato at high-end grocery stores. I chewed my virgin Weed Tart, watching Maxie’s technique.

  A pair of female retirees, one with a yin-yang patch on her windbreaker, approached Maxie’s table. He explained the chocolates were branded by color to indicate the sort of experience purchasers could expect. Sativa cannabis made for a happy and energized high; indica was calm and relaxed; the hybrid blend was balanced and focused. “The mnemonic device is ‘indica: in the couch.’ Sativa is more cerebral.” Botanica also offered chocolates with CBD, or cannabidiol, for a “neck-down” effect. Those were popular with customers with arthritis pain, inflammation, and anxiety.

  One of the bald guys stepped in for another Weed Tart. He extended it toward Maxie. “Tart Caliphate, will you clip this one?” Instead of reaching for his scissors, Maxie took the package in hand and said, “Here, I’m gonna teach a man to fish,” then demonstrated how the plastic would yield if pulled apart at the cellophane seam.

  I used to smoke a bunch of weed as a teenager, but now it turns me into a paranoid starving person who requests constant reassurance that she is not talking too much. I approached the sales counter and asked the man behind it for a tin of Mr. Moxey’s Mints—one of Botanica’s CBD products that wasn’t supposed to get me too high, just chill me out.

  Between customers I asked Maxie about the company. He explained Botanica was only licensed for recreational products, not the medical stuff. That meant his company couldn’t sell any infused products without THC in them—even if people just wanted the anti-inflammatory benefits of other marijuana compounds. Like a diner that wasn’t allowed to sell orange juice, only very weak mimosas. All retail stores, he said, dealt exclusively in cash to avoid running afoul of federal laws, which still prohibit marijuana sales. He was pretty sure that, technically, he was a felon from nine to five.

  Maxie’s sampling shift at Queen Anne Cannabis Company ended at 6 P.M. He packed his materials into a plastic tote and led us to a two-seat Smart car. The vehicle was too small to seem real, like a comma with wheels, but it was a company car and that made it wondrous. Maxie said that he got to buy it from the Mercedes-Benz dealership and that he drank free coffee on the showroom floor feeling like a day-tripper to another tax bracket. There was no space for his tote to fit anywhere but on my lap. He looked apologetically at the big bin sitting on my legs, the lid almost to my chin. “It’s only six blocks to my apartment.” I didn’t mind at all. It was like riding in a thought bubble.

  Maxie’s apartment was a basement unit in what had been a fancy hotel. The entryway was impressive: iron gates, Roman columns, and a fountain with a lady statue holding a bowl of water over her head. The actual apartment was spare. Maxie had a two-top table and a couple of chairs; there was a rug in the little living room, but no furniture. He was waiting to find just the right couch.

  “I didn’t have time to go to Target for an air mattress yet,” he said.

  No sweat, I told him. I’m always up for a field trip.

  He poured us each a glass of red wine. The bottle was open already, but there was no cork—just a sheet of tinfoil crushed over the top. There was also a sheet of foil crushed over the smoke detector on the ceiling, to stop the false positives when he sautéed. I told him I liked the design motif. He pulled out a sheet of foil and crushed over a corner of the countertop with an extravagant flourish.

  Before we sat with our glasses, I asked Maxie to cut my bangs. They’d grown long enough to cover my eyebrows, which meant they were irritatingly creeping into my field of vision—and also impeding my ability to emote fear or surprise. He rummaged around for a pair of red-handled kitchen scissors and I leaned forward to prevent the tiny, pokey bits from falling into my sweater. In five or six snips, he was done. He held the dustpan while I broomed. He loved sweeping, he said, because it’s like approaching infinity but never getting there. I knew what he meant: there’s always a thin line of dust when you inch the dustpan back—that’s why I hated it. Maxie’s always been more comfortable with big, cosmic concepts than I am. Mortality, moral relativism, that sort of stuff. He’s told me several times that if there were an open call, he’d volunteer for a mission to Mars. Even if it were a one-way ticket, he’d want to be part of the history, one of the pioneers willing to watch the blue Earth recede in order to see the red Martian world approaching. I don’t fully believe he’d do it, but I still hate when he talks about it. I start to miss my brother the astronaut.

  Wine in hand, I told Maxie I’d come with a fresh cache of facts to share. In the course of doing some research for an upcoming monologue performance, I’d run across some pretty fascinating experiments on human sexuality and atta
chment. I told him how in one of the studies I’d read I discovered that lap dancers make more in tips when they’re ovulating. Another study suggested that a chemical in female human tears blunted male sexual response. And, in one of my favorites, researchers identified particular dance moves that seemed to serve as indicators of reproductive fitness. It turned out that males whose right knees were especially active earned higher scores from female observers asked to rate their dancing. Which sounds like total nonsense until—I stood up and adopted the classic posture of A Dude at a Rock Show: hands in pockets, shoulders slightly rounded, and right knee flexing in time. Dead-on, right? Taking my seat again, I told Maxie that after doing all this research for the monologue gig, it was harder to eke out enough room for free will to do any real work at all. There were countless variables that influenced mate selection without ever making themselves known to our conscious minds. You may think you’re responding to the fact that someone shares your interest in nonrepresentational East Asian art, but really you’re just into his knee.

  Free will was already a pretty tough sell for me and Maxie, both science-minded atheists. If you could account for every variable in a person’s life—experiential and genetic—his or her behavior might be perfectly, predictably determined. But there are just too many factors to do the math right. (Was she breastfed? Was he cuddled? Read to? Given gender-normative plush playthings? Served fluorinated tap water? Bullied? Made to shower with the others after gym class? Undiagnosed as color blind? Rattled by a fender bender on the morning of the SATs? Recently divorced?) Free will is just the ghost we strap into the machine when the manual gets confusing.