Asimov's SF, July 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "I don't want a bunch of strangers running through my brain.” You laid back on your bed, stuck your big toe into a dent on the wall from that time you threw a desk drawer at it.

  Grace Prime sighed. “Grace, privacy is overrated. Especially among those who've already thought your thoughts, or near enough. You think about that. We're no strangers. Think about what that means. Do you want a perfect score on the SAT or not? And those subject tests are killer. You've not exactly had a classical education. You need the help. But it's your decision to make."

  You listened to the TV for a while. The way it sounded from the other room, the walls muffling its noise, made you think of someone being kidnapped. Oh, Grace: you composed an ecstatic letter in your head, like a Penthouse Forum letter except not to Penthouse: Dear Amazing Stories—you'll never believe what happened to me . . .

  Then, slowly, you agreed to everything.

  "Good,” Grace Prime said. “You won't regret it. We get results. We change lives."

  "Now what?"

  "Now I tell you the truth,” she said. “The subspace connection was already opened. It was the only way we could talk.” She coughed, but not in an embarrassed way. “I'm sorry. I do hate to trick a Grace."

  Your head jerked up, just a little. The phone stayed stuck to your cheek. “We're talking on the phone. You called me on the phone."

  "Unfortunately not,” she said. “Sorry."

  The dial tone became louder, turned up and up, until it was all you could hear. And then you realized that it was all you had ever been hearing.

  You never spoke to Grace Prime again. Grace Prime, ancient, weird, brilliant—you wonder how she's been. Moved on to another young Grace, you imagine.

  She may have lied to you, but the subspace corridor worked. On the morning of the SAT, you got to the testing site and tied your hair back as solemnly as a kamizake pilot, sitting monolith-straight in a room full of slouchers.

  The answers came to you unbidden, if not of you then from you. The room was silent but your mind was stuffed migraine-full. You wondered, as you do now, if the feeling of the panoply of Graces in your head, their voices as familiar as your own thoughts, is what it is like to be your father, who gets transmissions from a place he calls The Information Center. Sometimes you imagine how nice a place called The Information Center would be, so straightforward and honest, but then you remember that The Information Center only whispers lies to your father, lies that keep him awake all hours of the night, listening and scheming.

  With the assistance of the other Graces over the subspace corridor, you aced test after test after test—Molecular Biology, English Literature, World History, Chemistry. That is how it happened. That is how you know you will get into any college you want. You know.

  I am still with you, after all these months—I can't pull myself away—and I know this too.

  The price you pay is that you'll never know how smart you really are.

  When you finally get home, you yank open the mailbox door, prepared to gut it of its contents. There's nothing in there. Your face is tingly and your clothes are sticking to you, sweaty and wet as a pupal skin.

  As expected, your brother Luke is sitting on the couch, watching the History Channel. Your mother and father are short, good-looking people, and it's unclear who, if anyone, inherited their looks. Both of you are patchy and unfinished. Luke is twenty-four. He finished college in a prudent and cheap way, by attending community college for two years and moving on afterward to the state university. Yet here he is. It just goes to show that escape must be a drastic endeavor. Otherwise you will loop ever closer back to the source, an orbit decaying into sodden trash.

  "Where's the mail?” you say.

  He rolls his eyes your way. “Kitchen table."

  There's nothing there but catalogs and bills. “Nothing for me?"

  "Nope."

  "Are you sure?"

  He sighs deeply. You know Luke is tired from his nocturnal job, making X-ray copies for hospitals. He also works at a discount department store. But you think this is no excuse for being such a butthead, a terrible brother, a faker, a conspiracy theorist.

  "Uh,” he finally says. “Dad came by earlier. I saw him through the window. He took something out of the mailbox."

  "ARE YOU KIDDING ME? WHY DIDN'T YOU STOP HIM? DID YOU SEE WHAT IT WAS?"

  "He would have made me let him into the house,” your brother says simply. “It was a big envelope. Stop fucking yelling."

  The last time your father got into the house, he went around cleaning everything up, which meant collecting a bunch of papers and magazines from your and your mother's rooms and ripping those up. Then he walked around the living room and took all the Christmas and birthday and congratulations cards that your mother had received over the years and put on the walls and he ripped those up too. You came home to three big grocery bags full of ripped-up paper clustered neatly by the front door, and your brother in his room with the door closed.

  Your mother's not much of a yeller, but that night she really went off on your brother, which at first appeared ineffectual because Luke already has the mien of one who has just been yelled at, regardless. But after that, he never let your father into the house again.

  Standing there in the living room, shoes still on (and your mother would kill you if she knew!), you consider your options. You're not going to call your mother. It will only stress her out, and then she will stress you out, and then you will feel sorry that you ever said anything. After their divorce, you discovered that your father had given your mother some kind of head injury, years and years ago. It's hard to picture now. He is like King Mr. Head Injury himself now, a man who got knocked straight out of a world in which he is a millionaire and people are conspiring against him in buzzing clusters, into this world, where he's a bum and no one believes a thing he says. He's not capable of hurting anyone now, but you must remember: once he was.

  You worry so much that this head injury might bite your mother in the ass in thirty or so years. For now, her memory just sucks, kind of. She forgets when she's promised to take you shopping, because shopping makes her tired and always, always you demand far too much. Once upon a time she had three jobs (a main job at the shipping company, an occasional job at the nearby fried-fish fast food place, and the jewelry counter at JC Penney's on the weekends). Now she only needs one job, but the tiredness persists, deepened into something chronic.

  It's also a language barrier thing—this occasionally drifty quality to her; after all, if your life began happening in the Korean language, you wouldn't be able to remember or express anything for shit.

  You'll only call your mother when you tell her the good news about college. She'll be thrilled. She is the saddest and least trashy out of any of you. This is why life is hardest for her—you allow yourself to behave badly while she abstains.

  "I need a ride downtown,” you say to your brother.

  "I'm busy,” he says.

  "It's the History Channel! They show everything five billion times!"

  * * * *

  "Ancient astronauts,” says Luke. “In the Chariots of the Gods. Chariots of the Gods.” He grins stiffly and holds his head back in a way that makes him look seedy and double-chinned, unpleasantly taxidermied.

  "Come on, Luke."

  He's gotten into a state. He does this all the time and it is so awful. He'll repeat phrases from his conspiracy theory books over and over again, perform weird tics and squeaks (this is where the spitting on the floor thing comes in). You know he doesn't have Tourette's, you know, but he likes to act like he does. You will understand later that damage manifests itself in so many different ways. Later, you might have sympathy for Luke, with his fake Tourette's. Today, however, all you can think is that he is disgusting.

  "Ancient astronauts."

  "Shut the fuck up,” you say, grabbing your backpack and moving out the door.

  "Don't tell me to shut up,” Luke says, suddenly angry.

  You
hate your brother! Yes you do, right now! You become even more furious when, turning back to Luke, you spy a glob of spit on the floor by the couch. He could stop himself from spitting in the house, but he just doesn't. The sight of it grosses you out but even more so it makes you feel existentially depressed and low and lonesome, all for your brother.

  For there are times when you are near-friends, when you sit and watch The Simpsons reruns together and he forgets to spit on the floor and act crazy, or times when you ask him polite questions about his conspiracy theories and try to listen quietly, or times when he delivers unto you tiny kindnesses such as a new pair of ugly black socks from the department store where he works, but that's just not enough, it's not. The one time it's vital for you to get downtown very quickly and it takes about an hour to get there on the bus and the bus smells like poisonous butt-mushrooms when it rains (which it did last night), Luke completely shuts you down?

  FUCK this STUPID family. You sail out the door; your brother gets up to lock it behind you; you kick the door; he opens it and yells at you again; you run away as the screen door squeaks shut and the door-door slams; and then, you assume, your brother lapses back into his History Channel stupor, because there's really nothing else to do.

  You, as well as I, have had those times where you don't feel like trying anymore. You've thrown your SAT study books across the room. Big, flimsy blocks—they don't make much noise when they hit. You've laughed at your own words in the application essay: wah wah, please take me. I'm ethnic enough for you. But not ethnic in all the wrong ways. I'm poor enough for you. But not so poor I can't pay (let them find the truth out later).

  You've made your blood go hot and speedy at the thought of what these colleges have done to you without their knowing it, making you bow and scrape, making you rewrite and redo your life, until you want to cursive your anger across the skies, or better yet, hack those .edus to scrawl in crude MS Paint on the home page banners I WOULDN'T GO TO YOUR FUCKING SCHOOL IF YOU PAID ME A MILLION DOLLARS TIMES A BILLION DOLLARS SO YOU CAN EAT MY ASS KTHXBYE. ALL BEST, GRACE CHO.

  And yet, and yet. Every time, you picked up the books and brushed them off. You read each sentence in your essay aloud, searching for the perfect words, tamping down the parts of your brain that cringed at your asshattery, your mendaciousness.

  Because:

  Remember your brother. Remember your father, remember your mother.

  Remember the Asian imposters at Stanford. Two recent news stories made you laugh, they scared you so much: an eighteen-year-old girl named Azia Kim (Azia? Seriously?) posed as a Stanford University freshman for almost a whole year. She lived in the dorms! She joined the ROTC! Just a week after, a woman named Elizabeth Okazaki was discovered to be posing as a visiting scholar in the physics department at—yes!—Stanford again, hanging out at Varian Physics Laboratory and accomplishing the heroic feat of being even weirder and creepier than a pack of physics grad students. Azia and Elizabeth were both kicked off campus.

  To a certain extent, you had to admire them. They were too dumb or unlucky or crazy or poor to realize this one stupid dream of theirs, but that didn't stop them.

  To a much greater extent, you had to separate yourself from any identification with them, because you were getting into college in a legit way (or, rather, your cheating would be so technologically advanced and devious that no one would ever find out), and they had ruined Stanford for you—you imagined campus police looking out for girls just like you, chasing you across the moist green lawns and under the Spanish tiles and demanding ID, except you were already late to class, and everyone was staring, and, and . . .

  You didn't apply to Stanford.

  * * * *

  Your father's shelter is on the outskirts of downtown, in an emptied neighborhood scattered with unsuccessful coffee shops, corner stores, dead brick businesses, and bus stops. The shelter is unobtrusive and looks like a tax office from the outside, except for a faded sign that reads FRANCIS-HOLT HOUSE. The buzzer is broken, so you wait outside the door, peering in through the glass until a resident spots you and lets you in. You've never seen him before—a middle-aged black man wearing a maroon T-shirt with a stretched-out neck.

  After opening the door, he smiles kindly and says, “Would you like some money?” He opens his hands and all these dollar bills fall on the ground. You help him pick them up, and then go down the hallway to the elevator. When you pass the main office, you wave at the girl inside and tell her you're there to see your father. Of course you don't tell her why you're here and what you might do, so she smiles and says that he's up in his room.

  Everyone in this house has got something weird with their heads. Which should go without saying, but every time you come here it's as if you've stepped onto a stage, into a company of committed improv actors who incorporate you into skits with Oulipo-type parameters of which no one has informed you; you're just playing but they are wholly serious.

  You take the elevator up to the fourth floor. The hallway is stuffy. It smells of madness, which is something like the smell of people who don't have the right soap and products to get fully clean in the shower, and who wear clothes that come in huge batches from churches. You knock on your father's door. He answers right away.

  You say hello, leaning to give him a careful hug.

  He smiles. You haven't seen him in a few months, so every time you visit you fear that he'll look like just another bum, just another crazy on the street. Always, he looks okay. His hair is neatly parted, and he is clad in clean-as-is-possible slacks and button-down shirts. The thing about yellow trash that you remember is that yellow trash can be visually deceptive.

  "Grace,” he says. “[] [you] [] [messy] [] [very tired-looking]."

  Every time you see him you are relieved that he looks so good but he gets upset at how awful you look.

  "How are you doing?” you say.

  "Ah,” he says, like ten light bulbs have exploded above his head. “[]. [] [Come in]."

  Your father has mellowed out extremely. There's a night you remember, a long time ago, when he left home. You and your mother and your brother went to retrieve him and had a huge shouting fight in a motel courtyard. People were smiling as they watched. The same people that liked watching your family fight probably liked watching that show COPS. Why else would they smile?

  His place now looks like a motel room, everything petite and self-contained, an answer to the question, How little do you need in order to feel like a respectable human being in today's America? You stand by the round table next to his bed. Your father is on medication that makes his feet dance forward and back in a shuffling samba. You looked it up; it's called tardive dyskinesia, and it is the result of an evil White Elephant party in which one gives up psychosis in order to win a case of pseudo-Parkinson's. All the way home from the library you chanted “tardive dyskinesia, tardive dyskinesia” until it turned into “retarded synesthesia,” which could have been yet another mental ailment lying in wait for your father.

  "Come on, Dad, let's sit down.” You put your hand on his elbow and help him down into the chair. He doesn't need the help, but it makes you feel better and maybe him too. He used to harsh you out every time you saw him, especially back when he still had money and his illness still seemed more like an overabundance of cruelty and suspicion than anything else.

  These days, during the good visits, you two can walk arm-in-arm down the street to get tacos; this is something that never, ever would have happened before. So you have hope, now. Which is a terrible thing, Grace. I feel sorry for you.

  "Dad,” you say, “Luke saw you get some of the mail from our box."

  He nods, and grins so widely you can see the spaces where teeth are missing.

  "Was there anything for me?"

  He opens his black satchel, which he keeps clean and polished, and pulls out a big flat envelope.

  On that envelope are the colors of a school you've dreamed about. Inside that envelope must be a Yes, or at the very leas
t a strong Maybe. Around that envelope are your father's fingers.

  He says, “I am very proud of you,” a sentence that you can understand in English or in Korean. You bask in it, you do, his pride and the fact that you finally understood something completely. Everything's so tenuous. Everything's about to be undone.

  "Thanks, Dad,” you say. You and your father smile at each other, and he reaches over to pat you on the shoulder. “Can I see it?” you say.

  "No,” he says loudly, “[] [] [keep safe] [] Information Center. [] []."

  He slides the envelope back into the satchel and rests his arm over it. “[] [this is] [] [very good school]. [] [] but you careful. [] [] Information Center [] [] [] [your mother] [] [] [] [] Catholic Church [] [] [] [] [] [] lawyer [] [] [] [] [] [money] [] [] [] [] [] [] Luke [] [] [] [millions][] [] [television news anchors] [] [] [] [] sometimes you are not smart [] [] [] [] [I need to make you study] [] [] [] [] I will call school [] []. I'm coming with you. We go together."

  You know that's not true and he can't, he just can't. It's all crazy talk. How's this guy going to get on a plane and follow you anywhere? He couldn't even ride the bus if he didn't get a pass from the shelter.

  But at the same time everything he is saying is so true that your heart and your head want to explode. You feel like crying, but your body is set up to not-cry, it's set up to shunt that impulse into thinking about crying, all the crying you will have to do later, in your room at home. But by then it will be all gone. That's the problem with saving it up.

  "Okay? Okay?” he is saying.

  Heliumed with despair—because despair can make one oddly light, isn't that right? Everything lost, and what remains is so stupid and pointless it's lighter than popcorn—you rise up and stand over your father. He is small and thin in his paper-bag-cinched slacks and you feel huge. You're taller than both of your parents because you were bred on meat and white bread and hateful, indigestible milk. This can happen to guys who are afflicted with Bad Dads. They take it until they're fifteen, sixteen, until they discover that they're big enough to start hitting back. You're a girl, but over the years you've been getting angry and big too. So slowly that you had no idea it was happening.