Pearl stared at the asterisk for days, calling up Rhett’s report on her screen time and again to verify that it was indeed there, that bristle of ink. She began to see the asterisk elsewhere, in the drop of coffee on the tabletop, in the glob of mascara on the end of her eyelash, in the spots that flared when she closed her eyes and tilted her face toward the sun. True, she’d seen, at times, a meanness in Rhett, but she’d told herself it grew out of sadness, not cruelty. If he was going to hurt someone, it’d be himself. At his next weigh-in, he’d lost another pound. Pearl looked down at the black specks on the scale, each one signifying a pound. She blinked and they became asterisks, all.
“Mom?” Rhett said. “Can I step off now? Can I step off the scale?”
That’s when Pearl had decided: she would help him.
The item that the machine had redacted from Rhett’s report could have been anything from shoplifting a pair of sneakers to spraying gunfire at a school playground. So Pearl cast a wide net, giving herself a general directive: Do harm. Well, to make Rhett do harm.
The spider under the cup was not Pearl’s first attempt. She hadn’t started with animals. Of course not. She’d started with harm done upon inanimate objects, among them: a ruined blouse (purposely bumping into Rhett so that his protein shake spilled down her front), a crumpled fender (insisting during Rhett’s driving practice that he had still more room to back up), and a broken model of a tule shrew (balancing it behind Rhett’s elbow so that when he shifted, it fell and shattered). After the model of the shrew had broken, the glass bead of its eyeball rolled on the floor, the pupil wheeling, until it finally came to rest, staring up at Pearl.
And?
Nothing. No effect. Rhett had remained sullen, biting, unhappy. He’d lost another pound. Then another. Pearl knew she’d have to call Dr. Singh’s office soon, had gone so far as to hang up on the receptionist. She’d felt a small, mean stirring of pleasure at cutting off the woman’s bewildered Hello?
Pearl gritted her teeth and moved on from objects, reasoning that true harm must be felt by its recipient. She laced the watering can with bleach and watched as, under Rhett’s oblivious ministrations, the plants in the window box whitened and curled up on themselves. She’d waited until Rhett was in a terrible mood before thrusting the phone in his face—“Your father wants to talk to you”—then listened in the hall for the inevitable explosion. She’d sacrificed not only plants and sweaters and her ex-husband’s feelings, but her own body, slipping into Rhett’s clumsy teenage path, darting her toes under his footfalls, placing her face in front of a door just as he was about to open it.
And?
The trouble was that Rhett seemed stricken by the harm he caused her, Pearl’s trod-upon toes and dinged forehead. No, the trouble was that it was her intent, Pearl’s; she was the one doing harm, not Rhett. No, the trouble was that it started working. Rhett was happier.
This was not a matter of interpretation. He was. At his next weigh-in, he was up three whole pounds, his best gain yet. He was hanging out with his friend Josiah again. Just yesterday, she’d spied crumbs on his bedroom rug. She got on all fours to inspect, took one up on her finger, and tasted it. The crumb had come from a cookie. A cookie. A year earlier she had begged Rhett, to the point of tears, to swallow a spoonful of vegetable broth. How could she possibly stop now?
Pearl promised herself that the spider would be it, the largest sacrifice. Or maybe a goldfish. Certainly nothing larger than a fish.
* * *
—
PEARL WISHED SHE COULD TALK to someone about Rhett’s report. Not her parents, who, in a surprise move five years ago, had retired to a sustainable community up in Oregon. They had let age buff away all concerns and would tell her she was overreacting, a verbal pat on the head. Ditto Elliot. She had never been close to her sisters, who were over a decade older and, therefore, more like pleasant aunts than siblings. Her friends had drifted off during Rhett’s illness and were now only available for the odd lunch or overly exuberant birthday wish. Gone were the days of intimacies and confidences. Pearl felt like an asterisk herself, alone on the page.
Besides, Pearl wanted to talk with someone who knew about Apricity and the asterisks. But even at work, discussion of the asterisks was frowned upon. The public didn’t know about them, and the Apricity Corporation didn’t want them to know. It did not suit the slogan. Happiness is Apricity. Stepping into work the next morning, Pearl saw the empty office across from her workpod and realized that there was, in fact, one person who might talk to her. She located her former boss, Carter, lurking in the break room.
Recently Carter had been “repositioned,” as the company liked to call it, from contentment technician manager to a plain old humble technician, like Pearl herself. He’d taken the demotion like a sulking teen, too prideful to show hurt, but too pissed off to hide it. Pearl had yet to see him sit in his newly designated workpod; he’d only skate by it to drop off or collect an item, as if he were assigning work to an invisible employee. He never so much as glanced at his old office, which remained empty and unlit, the position yet to be refilled.
Even now, he leaned against the break-room counter with his screen balanced on his forearm like he was only passing through. And Pearl felt what she often felt in his presence, a divergence of emotion—annoyance and amusement, disgust and pity—all twisted up into one ratty braid.
She busied herself with the coffeemaker. “Want a cup?”
“Oh!” he said, as if only now realizing Pearl was there, though he could hardly have missed her in the small room. “You’re asking if I want a cup of coffee?”
He was suspicious of her offer, and no wonder. When he was her manager, he would call her into his office and there’d be two cups sitting out on his desk. He’d gesture at them and say something like: I know we should have you fetching the coffee, but that’s just the kind of guy I am! Pearl never took so much as a sip, a matter of principle.
“Dark roast, right?” She held up a capsule.
“Blacker than pitch.” He watched her carefully. This was the thing you had to remember about Carter: as foolishly as he behaved, he was not, in fact, a fool.
She nodded at his screen. “Doing the P&Ps?”
His eyes narrowed. Now he thought she was rubbing it in. P&P stood for “Parole and Probation,” Apricity’s long-standing government contract and the technicians’ least-favorite job. Usually they passed it around among themselves week to week. However, along with his demotion, Carter had been assigned to six months straight of P&P.
Pearl handed him the coffee with what she hoped was a sympathetic smile. “You should see what they’ve got me doing over at Cal. Psychology majors.” She made a face. “And the professors. I bet they have more stars than your criminals do.”
She held her breath, waited. Would he scold her for mentioning the asterisks? He wouldn’t miss the opportunity to chastise her. But no:
“Bet they have more stars than the sky does,” Carter replied gamely. He took a drink, then lifted the cup in a toast. “This is good. I can see why you never liked mine.” And Pearl felt guilty and irritated, both at once. It was capsule coffee, for god’s sake; it was all the same.
“How does the Apricity even do it?” She turned back to the coffeemaker, trying to make it seem like a nothing question.
“Do what?”
She lowered her voice, glanced at the door. “Know what recommendations to make into stars?”
“How does the Apricity know anything?” he said, not bothering to lower his. “How does it know what will make us happy?”
“But that comes from us. From DNA. The stars are . . . a judgment. A moral judgment.”
He shrugged. “It’s just programming.”
“Angels in the programming,” she said, repeating the phrase. She went over and closed the door, though he didn’t seem concerned that they might be overheard.
/> “Angels?” Carter stuck out his tongue and blew a raspberry. “Don’t be silly. Not angels. People. It’s like this: The company gives the coders a list of phrases, and they write a little line of code for each thing on the list. When the machine gets one of those phrases, the code tells it to replace the words with a star.”
“And the phrases are—”
“Bad things.”
Pearl took her cup and perched on the edge of the table. “But that’s someone’s job? To sit in a room and think of all the horrible things people might do?”
“Sure. ‘Kick a dog.’ ‘Steal a car.’ ‘Strangle your wife.’ Simple.”
Pearl winced.
“I’ve never had a star myself,” he added, then peered at her. “Have you?”
She shook her head.
“You sure?” He raised his hands. “No judgments!”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Because you never can tell who’ll get one. Ever notice that? Once I had this little old lady, wispy hair, flowers on her dress. Movie grandma. All stars. Her entire list!”
“What did you do?”
“I told her the machine had malfunctioned.” Carter paused, took a sip, and then said, “He always seemed like such a nice and polite young man.”
Pearl tensed. “Who did?”
“No one. Like on the news. What the next-door neighbors say: ‘He always seemed like such a nice and polite young man.’” Carter shook his head ruefully. “And then they find the bodies in the basement.”
* * *
—
PEARL STOPPED BY THE PET STORE on the way home from work. She was planning on picking up a goldfish, but that was before she’d set foot in the reptile room with its damp ionized air and eerie violet light. An hour later, she came out with an eighteen-inch monitor lizard and all the associated equipment. Terrarium, heat rock, heat lamp, branch shelter, shallow bath, mulch to spread on the bottom of the tank—there was so much stuff that the sales-guy had to help her carry it to the car. The salesguy had a remarkably long beard clasped every few inches with a different rubber band, like the tail of a circus pony. His beard had dipped in surprise when Pearl had chosen the monitor lizard. And in fact, Pearl was surprised with herself, but she liked the lizard with its river-pebble skin and fluted ridges above its eyes. It reminded her of one of the models she made, extinct creatures motivated by ancient and vicious instincts, the closest thing they had to wisdom.
“They can count, you know,” the salesguy told her, nodding at the lizard.
“Maybe I’ll teach it arithmetic.”
“You could. And it’s a her, actually.”
“Okay. Her.”
“At least we think so.”
“The mice she eats, they’re alive, right?”
“Could do. Some people say it’s more natural. But you don’t have to worry about that. You can buy frozen. For her size, you’ll do pinkies.”
“Pinkies?” Pearl lifted her hand and indicated her smallest finger.
“‘Pinkies’ is baby mice. They’re, um, pink.”
“I see. Because they don’t have their fur yet.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “I know. It’s a toughie.”
“I’ll take a box of them. Live ones.”
* * *
—
PEARL LEFT THE LIZARD in the car.
“Just a minute, girl,” she said, feeling slightly ridiculous speaking to it.
She’d texted Rhett from the pet store saying she was coming home with a surprise. No reply, but the HMS said he was there. In the mailbox, another surprise, Pearl found brochures for three different nearby universities. She’d mentioned applying to college to Rhett months ago but had not gone so far as to request literature, not after the sulfurous look he’d given her. Could Rhett have ordered the brochures himself? That was too much to hope for. The schools must have automatically sent them to households that had kids at the right age. Pearl tucked the mail under her arm, the paper slick and glossy, the faces of smiling teenagers pressed flat against the skin of her arm.
Rhett stood in the foyer, his breath quick, as if upon hearing her key, he’d run from the other side of the apartment and planted himself in front of the door.
“Oh! Hello!” she said.
His cheeks were flushed, too. A strange thought came into Pearl’s head: If my son were a vampire, I would find blood for him to drink.
“Why are you smiling like that?” he asked her.
“Am I smiling?”
“Your mouth is.”
She touched the corner of her lips.
Pearl set the mail on the table, the brochures on top. Rhett took a step toward them, then stopped himself.
“Did you . . . request those?” she said lightly, oh so lightly.
He frowned. “Don’t make a big deal.”
“Santa Cruz has a beautiful campus. If you wanted, we could visit.”
“Mom.”
“All right. Okay.”
Rhett glanced back toward his bedroom door, a frequent tic of his, as if he were a wild creature caught out in the open looking for the route of escape.
“Before you go,” she put in quickly, “I need your help carrying something up from the car.”
“Your surprise?”
“Your surprise actually.”
“What is it?” He followed her back out into the corridor.
“Remember when you said you wanted a puppy?”
“I was seven. That’s before I knew that dogs eat their own yack.”
“Well. It’s not a puppy.”
* * *
—
“I JUST DROP IT IN?” Rhett said.
“The same as last time,” she told him.
Rhett held the pinkie mouse above the terrarium. It squirmed sightlessly in his grip, a vivid pink nubbin. It looked more like a crawfish or a grub than a mouse, Pearl thought, something dug up from the mud. The monitor lizard, sensing a meal, swiveled her neck out from under the branch shelter and then stilled, the movement and the stilling both so sudden, it seemed as if she had flickered from one posture to the next.
Rhett wrinkled his nose. “I don’t think I can do it.”
“You did it before.”
“I don’t think I can do it now.”
“You don’t have to do anything. Just open your fingers.”
“Yeah, right. I don’t do anything. Just open my fingers and then a monster comes and eats it.”
In the silence between their words was a soft fleshy sound, skin rubbing against skin—the other pinkies in the straw-lined box. Do it, Pearl thought. Go on and do it. But Rhett turned his palm upward, cupping the mouse safely in his hand.
“Hey. Look.” He presented his hand to her. “It’s like that story.”
“Story?”
“‘The Mouse and the Mollusk.’”
Pearl shook her head.
“You don’t know it? I thought it was an old myth or something. Una told it to me.”
Pearl flinched inwardly at that name. Una the hugger. She pictured her son gathered in the woman’s embrace, his limbs a bundle of sticks, kindling for the fire. The bills the insurance sent had coded the treatment, guttingly, as “hospice.” Pearl didn’t like to think of this time, and until now, Rhett had never spoken of it.
“Una told you stories?” she breathed.
“Sometimes,” Rhett said, his eyes on the mouse. “Sometimes I dreamed them. Can’t always remember which.”
No surprise. Rhett had been emaciated, wracked with fevers and chills. Pearl couldn’t help but reach out now to touch him, a teenage boy, solid and whole. He didn’t flinch or pull away, just lifted the mouse in his palm to eye level, staring at it.
“So it goes like this: There was this kid,” he said, and it took Pearl a momen
t to realize that he was now telling her Una’s story, “who was training to be an oracle . . . like to give people their fortunes? And part of the training was to stand in the temple, totally still, and hold a mollusk in one hand and a mouse in the other. And then people would come to ask the kid questions. But the people had a choice. They could turn to his right hand and ask the mollusk for a truth they did want to know. Or they could turn to his left and ask the mouse.”
He paused, waiting until she asked, “And what did the mouse tell them?”
“A truth they didn’t want to know.” He glanced at her. “You really never heard that story?”
“No.”
“Guess Una made it up.”
With that, Rhett turned his hand over, and the pinkie dropped to the mulched floor of the terrarium, where it lay squirming. It was only there an instant before the monitor’s head snapped forward. Pearl and Rhett both leaned in. You couldn’t help it. It was like witnessing a magic trick: the little mouse there and then gone. The monitor receded under her branches.
“Nice pet you got there.” Rhett got up, wiping his palm on the leg of his pants. “It didn’t even chew.”
He’d been poking at Pearl the entire week, as was his habit. He’d named the lizard Lady Báthory after a sixteenth-century Hungarian countess who’d slaughtered servant girls and bathed in their blood. He’d also named the feeder mice, watching Pearl slyly as he’d done so, each one after a different shade of pink: Rose, Carnation, Flamingo, and so on. Still, every evening when she’d called him to the living room, he’d chosen a mouse from the box and, with her urging, dropped it down to the lizard. The mice that remained filled in the empty spaces left by their sacrificed brethren, wriggling together in the center of the box for heat or, perhaps, comfort.
At Rhett’s next weigh-in, he was up 1.4 pounds. He’d started listening to music while doing his homework. He’d been out with friends twice in the past week. The other night at dinner, he’d reached over to Pearl’s plate and plucked up a cube of potato. Pearl had kept her eyes fixed on the tabletop, but she could hear it, the near-silent sound as he chewed and swallowed. She imagined the starches and the sugars of that little cube softening, dissolving, feeding him.
Tell the Machine Goodnight Page 8
