Tell the Machine Goodnight

by Katie Williams

  American ingenuity! he texts back. Which is what I told him to say whenever he is confused by something people here are doing.

  I smile and toss my screen on the bed. As it lands, it chitters once more, as if in protest.

  Zi again: Golly gosh gee! I hope I have a good flight.

  Zi is fishing. He likes to say that if I teach him how to be American, he’ll teach me how to be human.

  I roll my eyes and send back, I hope you have a good flight, Zi.

  * * *

  —

  MOM HAS, in fact, found a way to wilt the lettuce. I think she might have put it in the oven. I raise my eyebrows at the limp bowl of greens she sets in front of me. Usually Mom won’t carry a joke beyond the telling of it, whereas Dad will carry it to the end of funny and sometimes a mile or two beyond. When I say this out loud, Mom looks annoyed.

  “I haven’t talked to your father in three days,” she says stiffly.

  “I didn’t say he told you to wilt the lettuce. I said it was like something he’d do.”

  She busies herself assembling a taco. “He’s coming for dinner, by the way.”

  “This dinner? Tonight?”

  “Yes. Why not?”

  “Uh, because we’re currently eating it.”

  She shrugs. “I told him seven.”

  “HMS,” I call out, “what time is it?”

  “Seven-oh-three post meridiem,” the HMS reports.

  I give Mom a look, but she doesn’t see it because she’s focused on her taco. She’s practically arranging every individual shred of lettuce and cheese like she’s making one of her models. Mom is the same as my bedroom, familiar but cast in a funny light.

  “Your dad’s less reliable than usual lately. Though,” she adds in a murmur, “he keeps coming around.” She looks at me furtively. When she discovers me watching her, she says, “Sorry. I was thinking out loud.”

  Which is another way of saying that she forgot I was here. Fair enough. I haven’t been here.

  “Your father is always welcome to visit,” she says.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “We’re still friends.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  I take a bite of my taco, and I can see her shoulders relax an inch now that I’m eating, like her shoulders are on the same hinge as my jaw. I don’t think she even knows she’s doing it. And I feel guilty about that, sure, but there’s also a little voice inside of me that roars, Stop caring about me!

  “Did he call you?” she asks. “You know, at school?”

  “Every once in a while.”

  “I didn’t tell him to.” She takes a bite of her perfect taco. It fissures and falls onto her plate. “I mean, I didn’t remind him. If he called, it was because he wanted to.”

  “So I assumed.”

  She’s fussing at her wrecked taco, moving her hands this way and that, trying to figure out the best approach to the salvage. “Did, um, Val ever call?”

  “Did Val call me? No.”

  “I thought she might have.”

  “Uh, why?”

  “To see how your first year of college was going.” She looks at me meaningfully. “She was your stepmother, after all.”

  “I guess.” But I’d never really thought of Val that way. Even when she came up in a story I was telling someone, I wouldn’t refer to her as my stepmother, just Val. I’d miss her, sure. But honestly? When Dad told me she’d left, the news was a quick throb and fade, the emotional equivalent of hitting your thumb with a hammer. I guess I never really expected her to stick around.

  “She was your stepmother,” Mom repeats. “She never even told you goodbye.”

  Mom called every three days while I was at school. As much as you can stand, as little as she can, was how Saff summed it up (before Saff and I stopped talking). Zi was delighted by Mom’s calls. If she called while I was in the bathroom or down the hall, Zi would answer. Once I came back to the room to find my screen angled on Zi’s desk so that he could show Mom his footwork. His feet squeaked on the flecked tile, the ball bobbing between them, a planet in wild orbit. Mom’s face in the screen was a tiny picture of delight. I think she might have even been clapping.

  Most kids at school assume Zi is another rich international student whose parents are making him get an American business degree, but really he’s here on a soccer scholarship. Footie money, as Zi calls it. He’s really good. He was recruited and everything. Zi keeps his hair just long enough to make a stubby ponytail so that it won’t get in his eyes during a game. His legs are like something someone carved out of wood, an archer’s bow or a cello, beautiful in the shape of their function.

  “My mom thinks you’re a nice boy,” I told Zi one time.

  “And I think she’s a nice mom.” We were in our twin dorm beds with the lights out. A moment later, “Did she really say that?”

  “Would I lie?”

  “Of course. So does she really like me?”

  “Sure. Why do you care?”

  “Why do I care if your mom likes me?” Zi repeated my question as if the question were, itself, the answer.

  Mom finally manages to collect the pieces of her taco and take a bite.

  “Did Zi get packed up okay?” she says, mind-reading.

  “He’s at the airport. In line for coffee.”

  He’s not, though. Not anymore. By now Zi is on his flight, sailing somewhere above us, fidgeting in his seat and annoying the passenger next to him. But I picture him still in line at the coffee kiosk, yawning and shuffling an invisible ball between his feet, taking his screen out to tell me all about it.

  * * *

  —

  MOM WAS RIGHT not to wait on Dad, who misses dinner altogether. In fact, I’m in my room, toothbrushed and pajamaed, when he finally shows. The HMS doesn’t announce him; there’s just suddenly Dad’s voice down the hall booming, “Aaannnd, he’s back!” I don’t know who the he is supposed to be: me or himself.

  By the time I hoist myself up on my elbows and force my eyes open, Dad is already leaning in my doorway, head and shoulders in the room, the rest of him back in the hallway. Val calls Dad “the friendly lamppost.” Well, called him.

  “Lights out, huh?” he says.

  I blink up at him. “Tired. Lots of packing today.”

  “Pack up all my care and woe,” he sings softly.

  To tell the truth, I’ve been avoiding Dad lately. I purposely miss his calls and return them with clips or memes. I keep it light and glancing, a Hey, old man! and a Ha, ha, ha, just like he does. Look, I’m sorry Val left him. But it’s hard to feel totally and completely sorry after he left Mom and me.

  “You really are beat, huh?” Dad tilts his head, assessing me.

  I’m pretty sure he knows I’ve been avoiding him, but he won’t push it, won’t fret or hint like Mom would. He’ll just tilt his head and set his mouth in a line that’s neither smile nor frown and wait me out. And it’s hard to know if he’s giving me space or if he just doesn’t care that much.

  “So much packing,” I say. “My dreams are going to be delivered in moving boxes.”

  He chuckles.

  “I’ll let you get to them then.”

  My screen stops him, a flash of light in the dark room like someone has snapped a picture of us. It’s another image from Saff. Light glancing off the surface of an accumulation of water—a pool? A fountain? A puddle? Something about the water and light makes the picture look subterranean. Is she underground?

  “It’s from Saff,” I say, without thinking.

  And then, also without thinking, I project the picture to show Dad.

  He steps toward it, the image reflected in his glasses. “Huh,” he says. “Interesting framing.”

  See? This is what you get with Dad. You tell him your ex-girlfriend sent you a mysterious, possi
bly subterranean photo, and he says, Interesting framing.

  “Maybe she took a photography class or something,” I mutter.

  “Tell her she has an eye.”

  “I can’t tell her anything. We don’t talk anymore.”

  Dad tilts his head another few degrees and says not a thing. But to be completely fair, what is he supposed to say to that?

  You killed the conversation, Zi likes to say to me. You strangled it. You shot it with a gun. You ax-murdered it.

  Dad retreats to the doorway. “Glad you’re home,” he says. And I don’t point out that it’s not his home anymore. That it’s not even really mine.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE MORNING, I climb the mountain. The grass is uncut, whispering at my calves, and every few strides a flock of tiny yellow birds rises from it in a puff. The higher I go, the steeper the climb, until I have to grasp the honeycombed bark of the pine trees to pull myself along. After a while, the grass grows sparse and turns to drifts of crystalline sand that shift under my feet, then the sand becomes a deep powdery snow that sucks at my steps and dampens all sound. At the summit, there’s no grass or snow or sand. The peak is bare rock, smooth and shiny gray, as if someone put the top of the mountain through a rock tumbler. At one edge of the peak sits a vinyl chair, the kind you might find in a small-town diner. I sink into it, winded from the climb.

  Even though I’m not expecting them, I don’t flinch when a pair of hands comes down to rest on my shoulders. I can’t feel the hands, only see them, flickers in the corners of my vision. I can imagine the weight of them, though, the fingers dancing along the crest of my scapula. I turn and Zi’s avatar smiles steadily at me.

  Zi and I spent a lot of time on our avatars. We even let each other make final adjustments, working off the theory that other people see you more accurately than you see yourself. The result is that Zi’s avatar is essentially his doppelganger, if you ignore the fox ears and gold eyes he insisted I add. But mine? Zi made me about twenty-three degrees handsomer than I am, even if he swears he didn’t.

  I stand and turn so we’re facing each other. Zi reaches up and flicks my cheek. Again, I can’t feel it.

  “I chased you all the way up here,” he says. “Didn’t you hear me calling your name?”

  “Nope. Sorry. Must have had a big head start.” And I must have, because Zi can outpace me any day of the week.

  And it is any day of the week, or rather every day of the week, that we climb the mountain. We’ve been doing it every morning since October. It all started because Zi’s coach assigned him the mountain to improve his stamina on the soccer field, but Zi was embarrassed to VR alone, masked and marching in place in the center of our dorm room. So he made himself into a total pest, worse than usual, begging, guilting, and bribing until finally I agreed to climb the mountain with him. Typical Zi. I warned him I wouldn’t be able to make it to the top, and I was right. The first few times, I barely made it to the trees, gasping. By the second week, I’d made it to the sand. The morning I finally got to the snow, we whooped and kicked it up over each other in swirls and flurries, temperatureless and unmelting.

  That’s the day I realized something important about the mountain, something I didn’t tell Zi: To get to the top, I needed energy. I had to eat.

  Everyone—Mom, Saff, Josiah, everyone—worried I’d have a relapse when I went to college. Hey, even me. I was worried, too. It’s what all the literature said could happen. Be vigilant. Avoid triggers. No gateway behaviors. Hell, it’s probably why Saff didn’t break up with me immediately after graduation. For the first few weeks, I was okay. The dorm food was bland, doughy, and inoffensive. But then, slowly, I started making rules again. Only vegetables. Twenty chews before I could swallow. A sip of water between each bite. And I knew that this was how it had started before, little rules that led to bigger ones. No food before dinner. Five hundred calories a day. Five hundred calories every other day.

  But then Zi talked me into climbing the mountain.

  “You really didn’t hear me?”

  I am on the mountaintop. Zi is still going on about chasing me up here.

  “I was like, ‘Rhett! Rhett! Don’t you give a damn?’”

  One of the nice things about Zi’s being from China is that, unlike nearly every other person I’ve ever met ever, he didn’t know about Rhett Butler and Gone with the Wind. Until a couple weeks ago, that is, when a girl on our hall told him about it.

  “Just so you know,” I say, “I’m rolling my eyes right now.”

  “And I’m grinning big at you,” he says back. His lips don’t twitch out of his fox’s smirk. His golden eyes twinkle as programmed, every couple of seconds. Zi touches my shoulder again. I can almost feel it. “Have you seen your friends yet?”

  “Nope. Last night was dinner with the folks. Well: folk. My dad missed it. Actually, they’re being kind of weird.” As I say it, I realize it’s true.

  “Are you seeing your friends today?”

  “Hey, Zi? We listen with our ears, big and round.”

  This is something Zi says when he feels I’m not paying attention. It’s from one of the kids’ shows he watches while I’m at my morning classes. What Zi doesn’t realize is I’m always paying attention to him.

  “And, no, I’m not seeing Saff today. I told you, she’s in Illinois.” I don’t mention the pictures she sent.

  “How far away is Illinois again?”

  “Dear god. How did you get into college? You must be very good at soccer.”

  “Come on. I know it’s in the middle somewhere.” His hand slides from my shoulder and taps me on the chest. “I just meant: it’s a lot closer to where you are than Beijing.”

  I take a step back. In my room, I come up against the edge of my bed. On the mountain, I’m at the precipice, but you can’t fall or jump off or anything. Zi’s hand is pointing at the center of my chest.

  “I should get going,” I say.

  “Huh, gee, wow!” Zi replies, fake bright. “It was pretty cool of me to come meet you here on the mountain!”

  I smile behind my mask. “Huh. Gee. Wow. It was pretty cool of you to come meet me here on the mountain, Zi.”

  “Okay. You can go now. Have a nice morning, Rhett.”

  “Yeah, you too,” I say, and it’s not until I take my mask off, the mountain disappearing and Zi with it, that I realize it’s not morning where he is. I ask the HMS the time in Beijing and learn it’s actually the middle of the night.

  * * *

  —

  I FIND MOM in the living room with a bowl of cereal. Another oddity. She used to say eating on the couch was slovenly. She’d let me do it (she’d let me eat in the shower), but I’ve never seen her do it before. She’s got the bowl balanced in her lap, one hand resting on the Apricity next to her.

  “You’re working from home today?” I nod at her hand on the machine.

  “No, no.” She slides the hand back into her lap. “Just running late. Did you sleep okay?”

  “Like it was my childhood bed.”

  She smiles briefly, a flash of lip and teeth that looks almost startled on her pale face.

  “Did you sleep okay?” I say. I know better than to tell her she looks tired.

  She looks tired.

  “Of course. How else would I sleep?”

  “Wracked with nightmares? Waking in a sweat?”

  “Stop! I slept.” She cocks her head. “Did your father wake you? I told him to tiptoe, but you know how he likes to thump around on his heels.”

  “My alarm woke me. Did Dad stay late or something?”

  “No, no.” She looks down at her hand on the machine. “He left just after he said goodnight to you.” She brings the hand to her chest. “Shortly after.”

  “Are you mad at him?”

  “Of course not.” As she s
ays this, she shifts her knee, causing her bowl of cereal to tip and nearly spill. She catches it.

  I squint. “You seem like you’re mad at him.”

  She pauses, then says, “Your father doesn’t have the power to make me mad anymore. People talk about marriages ‘making it’; well, that’s when your divorce has ‘made it,’ when you can get past the pissed off.”

  “‘Past the pissed off,’” I repeat.

  She smiles. “Taco Tuesdays.”

  “The alliteration makes it taste better.”

  After she leaves for work, I check the HMS box in the hallway. When I scroll through the log, I see that Dad left the apartment this morning, just an hour before I woke up.

  * * *

  —

  I SPEND THE MORNING inspecting the apartment I’ve lived in most of my life, walking to the center of a room and spinning in a slow circle, guessing the contents of cabinets and drawers before sliding them open to see if I’m right.

  Mom has made a few new models since the last time I was home. I set them out on the coffee table: some kind of bird, some kind of weasel, some kind of anemone. The last I recognize; it’s a deathwatch beetle. Same as my ringtone.

  I haven’t told her yet that I’ve decided to major in environmental science. I haven’t told her about Zi and me. Zi says I’m being chicken (he regularly sends me emojis of a chicken—just a chicken), but it’s not that I’m scared, at least not of her reaction. I wasn’t kidding when I told Zi how much she likes him. It’s hard to explain. It’s that there’s the me who’s there at college with Zi, and the me who was here in this apartment, who’s here again.

  I take a picture of the deathwatch beetle and send it to Saff. The reply is almost immediate.

  The picture Saff sends is of a whitewashed brick wall marked with a graffiti scribble that was maybe supposed to be a heart, but the canister slipped partway through.

  This time I recognize it.

  That graffiti, that not-a-heart, is on the side of the corner store at the end of the block, the one where Mom and I go to buy what Mom calls “our little forgottens,” by which she means necessities suddenly depleted, lightbulbs, batteries, soap. It’s also the same store where Saff and I would go to buy her snacks, and sometimes on the way out of the store, Saff would pause and trace the not-a-heart with her finger.