Memento Nora

by Angie Smibert

  I didn’t want that picture in my head, particularly if that man had tattoos.

  “Grandfather owns a chain of tattoo shops,” Winter explained in that same hushed tone she’d used when talking about her creations.

  “I’ll leave you kids alone.” Mr. Yamada headed toward the back garden gate, the one we’d come through, stopping to stretch his calves on the walkway.

  “Sasuke-san,” Winter called after him. “I sort of borrowed some stuff from the Curtain Cling.” She gestured toward the pile of canvas.

  “Like the curtains, huh?” He sighed. “I was never any good at that one, anyway.” He disappeared through the gate.

  We showed Winter our first comic. Micah spread it out on the table for her to read. I couldn’t help rereading it alongside her, and it filled me with an odd sense of pride and rightness. We really had something here.

  Winter said nothing as she read. When she finished, she took an agonizingly long sip of her thick, jet-black espresso.

  “I see your problem,” she finally said.

  Micah nodded.

  “I don’t,” I said. “I still say upload it. Who’s going to care if we send this to a few dozen kids—or the whole world, for that matter? It’s a free country.”

  “Tell that to my parents,” Winter said. She collected our teacups and carefully stacked them on the tray. I wasn’t finished with mine.

  “Look, Winnie-chan,” Micah said. He got up and took the tray.

  “Don’t call me Winnie,” she snapped as she opened the gate into the house.

  I had heard the softness in his voice and something in hers that made me wonder about their relationship. I felt a little jealous. Kind of like a third wheel. The preppie girl among artists. It didn’t help when they came back out laughing.

  “You need two things really,” Winter said. Her irritation had evaporated. “A way to produce. And a way to distribute. I can help with the first one.”

  Her eye twitched slightly, as if it couldn’t take all the energy or caffeine coursing through her spidery body.

  “Okay. Now all computers—mobiles, home, school, work—are part of one big network.”

  “One monitored network,” Micah interjected.

  “Exactly,” Winter agreed. “Ditto the printers, copiers, TVs, cars, refrigerators, etcetera. All of them are dumb devices that pull everything—programs, files, information—from a central server. No memory of their own.

  “You could upload and distribute Memento with your mobile or your bedroom computer, but the government—and the handful of security corporations that run it—will know exactly who you are, and they could block the file. Even if you just jury-rigged a stand-alone printer and handed out the comic books in the bathrooms at school, they could still trace the nanomarkers in the ink.”

  “Central control of the information,” Micah said, tapping his temple.

  “But who’s going to care? We have the right to say what we want,” I argued.

  “My parents thought so,” Winter said. “Grandfather’s lawyer says they’re still alive, but she hasn’t been able to see them for over a year. And neither have we. The first lawyer gave up on the case.”

  She looked at me with that X-ray vision of hers again; but I was a blank, as blank as when Mr. Peters tried to explain tangents. I felt the rays bounce off of me.

  “They’re in Detention,” Micah said. “With a big D. You know the place they hold people for ‘questioning’ and ultimately the Big Pill that makes them forget everything.”

  “There’s no such place.” Dad’s in security, I told myself. He would’ve mentioned such a thing. It would have been on the news. We would have learned about it in school. I looked from Micah to Winter, hoping this was some big joke. No one was laughing. “They can’t just hold people. Or make them take the pill.”

  “Can’t they?” Winter stood up. “Your mother was their first lawyer. Ask her about it.”

  “Winter?” Micah said. He seemed just as surprised as I was.

  “No way,” I said.

  “She lasted the longest. A year.”

  “What did your parents do?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “Nothing. My folks were engineers. Mom designed microchips; Dad created software for his family’s firm.”

  Of course, that Nomura. I felt the outline of the Nomura Pink Ice in the pocket of my new leather jacket.

  I figured it couldn’t hurt to be careful. Still, I thought, the Nomuras must have done something wrong. Maybe I would ask Mom, though I seriously doubted she’d know anything about it.

  “Okay, so how do we print this thing?” I asked after a moment.

  “Oh, I’ll come up with something.” Winter looked around the garden. “People printed underground comics long before computers.”

  “She’s full of crap about my mom, right?” I asked Micah as we walked through the obstacle course on our way back to the library.

  “Beats me,” he said. “Watch this.” He pointed to Mr. Yamada standing at the lip of the giant curved wall.

  “Sasuke—the guy the game show was named after—was this ninja warrior in Japanese comic books and kids’ stories,” Micah explained.

  Mr. Yamada pushed off the lower part of the wall and, with a couple of long, quick strides, propelled himself up the curve, then grabbed the overhanging lip of the wall. He pulled himself up in one fluid motion.

  “He was raised by monkeys,” Micah said as if that explained everything. “The ninja, not Mr. Yamada,” he added when he saw the confused look on my face.

  Mr. Yamada stood on the giant concrete wave shaking out his arms, looking out over the world, the city, as if he were taking in one last look before the wave crashed down and wiped it all away. Only then did he notice us. Micah bowed, and I did the same. Mr. Yamada nodded to us ever so slightly before he turned and leaped over the chasm to the next obstacle, disappearing from view.

  And I’d thought sasuke-san was Japanese for “grand-father.”

  11

  Not My Usual

  Glossy Self

  Therapeutic Statement 42-03282028-11

  Subject: JAMES, NORA EMILY, 15

  Facility: HAMILTON DETENTION CENTER TFC-42

  Mom and I finally fit in our post-closing shopping trip on Saturday. I’d been putting it off, using this “art history” project with Micah as an excuse. But really, the idea of shopping, especially downtown, was just too dreary for me.

  So Mom had the car service take us to the Valley Ridge Mall. It’s not the glossiest place, but it’s okay. They don’t require an identity chip to shop. Mom would probably rather see me get a tattoo than an ID chip, although we’ll both need one to live in Los Palamos.

  “These shoes would look cute on you,” Mom said, pointing out a pair of these aqua blue Mary Jane sneakers with gel soles in the window of Shoe City.

  I shrugged. They were cute, but I already had something similar in my closet. In pink.

  “Or maybe you need something a little older.” Mom pointed to a pair of red leather flats on the display table.

  I wanted them less than the sneakers.

  “Honey, are you okay?” Mom asked. “You don’t seem your usual glossy self.”

  I looked at my mother—past her cute, short, cropped brown hair; her flawless makeup; her impeccable Georgia Tatum clothes—and saw this tiredness, this sadness in her hazel eyes that made me want to cry. It made me want to tell her everything, but I wasn’t sure where to begin.

  So I said I was fine.

  She said we needed cookies. Big ones.

  I used some of my TFC points to get us two huge chocolate chips and two small mochaccinos. Mom wanted to use hers, but I had five hundred points to burn and not a clue what I wanted to use them for. We sat in the food court of that cheesy mall and stared at our food for a couple of minutes.

  “It’s the move, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. I actually hadn’t thought much about moving to Los Palamos, b
ut it was like three weeks away now. Mom had already started packing our winter clothes and the stuff in the basement.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said, taking a tentative sip of her coffee. “Though it’s certainly not my top choice of places to live.” She took a big bite of her cookie.

  “Why not?” I asked. But I really wanted to ask her something else.

  “Locking people out—or in—isn’t my idea of community,” she said. “Back when our house was built, people sat out on their stoops and talked to one another. They knew one another. They didn’t hide behind elaborate security systems and blast-proof windows. There was no curfew at night. You could walk or ride your bike or skateboard everywhere.”

  That was her rant about our neighborhood. Usually I tuned it out. Dad was always saying she lived in the past.

  But this time I was listening.

  She swished the whipped cream around in her coffee as she pondered something. “Moving to a compound just seems like giving in,” she said after a few moments. “And I’ve done too much of that already.”

  I wasn’t sure to what exactly she was giving in. Dad? Work? Life? Whatever it was, it looked like it was wearing her down.

  “What did Dad mean about not getting a house there sooner?” I asked. He’d made it seem as if it was her fault they wouldn’t let us in until now.

  She sighed. “I don’t know if you remember, but I used to practice a different kind of law. I had my own small firm—and I defended those people your father considers ‘security risks.’”

  I’d heard Dad talking about those quote-unquote people many times. That was his rant. He said real Americans worked hard and bought stuff for their families so that other real Americans could do the same thing. One gear turning the other, making the economic engine work, he liked to say. Anything else, anything that interfered with that, was un-American. Bad for business. Bad for the country. Good for the Coalition terrorists.

  I usually ignored his rants, too.

  “Ethan complained that it was hurting his business,” Mom said. “And the law kept changing to make it nearly impossible for me to do my job. So I went into real estate.”

  I remembered when she’d switched. It was right after that trip to the beach. I was about six or seven, and Mom had gotten me out of bed one night. She’d packed our bags and said we were going on vacation. “Dad has to work,” she’d said, “and we’re leaving now so we can be there to see the sun rise over the ocean.”

  We’d stayed at a little cabin a block from the beach. The sheets smelled funky, and it had been cold out, too cold to swim. We’d walked barefoot on the rocky beach, eaten popcorn shrimp and saltwater taffy, and watched the stars at night. The beach town didn’t have a curfew like Hamilton and the other big cities did. I’d loved that freedom. The world seemed so much bigger.

  Then one evening just before sunset, as Mom and I hunted for sea beans along the shore, I saw a familiar figure walking toward us.

  “Nora,” Dad called. He was wearing jeans and flip-flops and a golf shirt under his Windbreaker.

  I ran to him, but Mom didn’t budge from her spot on the sand.

  “I’ve missed you, Princess,” he said as he wrapped me up in his jacket. It was warm and smelled like him. He gently steered me toward his car waiting by the road. “Ready to go home?” I turned back toward Mom, who was still standing there staring at us. “Mommy can bring your things when she comes. She has a new job starting soon,” he said loud enough for her to hear.

  Mom had come home at the end of the week.

  I had to ask it now.

  “Mom, were the Nomuras your clients, you know, before you switched?” I looked at her as if I were Winter watching one of her creations through those X-ray eyes, trying to see where it had gone wrong.

  Mom looked at me blankly. “I don’t think so, but my memory of clients from those days is a little hazy.”

  Then I remembered. The day after she’d come home from the beach, Mom had made her first trip to TFC.

  The mall was beginning to close in around me. I needed some air.

  “Can we get out of here?” I asked, not really waiting for her to answer as I threw away my cookie and half-filled cup of caffeinated crap.

  We didn’t buy anything else that day.

  12

  I Hate Pudding

  Therapeutic Statement 42-03282028-13

  Subject: NOMURA, WINTER, 14

  Facility: HAMILTON DETENTION CENTER TFC-42

  I was in this room. It’s the basement of our old house. Mom’s treadmill was there. So was Dad’s stinky futon from college that our old dog liked to sleep on. And my programmable Legos were scattered all over the floor. It smelled damp. Mom was running on the treadmill, a murder mystery cranked up on her earbuds. All I could hear were her sneakers beating out the time against the cranky whir of the treadmill belt. Step. Whir. Step. Whir.

  Then there was banging upstairs. Men yelling. Mom kept running in place. Step. Whir. Step. Whir.

  I ran into the next room, expecting to find the stairs. It was a closet. I backed out of it into the garage. I opened the door to the backyard, and I was in the attic. Then the guest room. The kitchen. I ran through rooms I didn’t know we had. All the time I could hear her steps, steady like an old-fashioned clock.

  Step. Whir. Step. Whir.

  And everything smelled musty. The walls closed in on me, and I ran faster through room after room, calling for Mom and Dad in Japanese. A language I never learned.

  Step. Whir. Step. Whir.

  The sound grew louder, but I was no closer to getting back to her. Or anywhere familiar.

  Then my grandfather ran past me and opened a door. It led into a big, white, empty room. He took me by the hand to the center. Then he bowed and disappeared. It was so quiet there, and there were no other doors or rooms; but I could still hear the sound of my mother running in my head. Running and going nowhere. The sound got louder, and I had no place else to go.

  I always woke up at that point. Well, 99 percent of the time. Sometimes I dreamed I was filling up the white room with junk. But most of the time I’d wake up, fix a triple espresso, and then go out to my garden or workshop and tinker with my toys.

  I know; my shrink told me I’m filling up that big white room in my soul with my creations, always moving, always making sounds to drown out that step-whir in my head. Duh. She wanted me to forget. Or at least to take the chill pills.

  But who am I if I’m not that crazy artist girl?

  No, if I take the chill pills, I’ll feel like my brain is swimming in pudding. I won’t see things clearly. I won’t think at the speed of light. Sure, the meds will quiet the hummingbirds; but then my ideas won’t buzz around in my head as if they had tiny wings, too.

  A hummingbird would be a great tattoo. Grandfather won’t let me get one until I’m eighteen, though. He said he promised Mom long ago.

  Anyway, I decided to work on the tattoo machine I’m modding for Jet, Sasuke-san’s best artist in his downtown shop. She’s into real old-school Japanese tats, like koi fish and big back pieces with lots of color. She always dresses in old, turn-of-last-century-style clothes, but like adapted to today—and with a lot of leather—which might look stupid on some people. It looks hot on her.

  So I was modifying this tattoo machine—the gunlike thing that pushes the ink into the skin—to look as if it stepped out of the pages of Jules Verne. I used pieces of copper, distressed wood, and a few gratuitous gears here and there to make it look Victorian. I threw some analog dials and gauges on the power supply to complete the effect.

  I’ve done some similar mods for Jet’s friends and mine. I’ve added copper pipe and an antique weather dial to Richie’s bass. And I’ve etched a few mobiles to look like scrimshaw—you know, those designs sailors scratched out on whale bones and teeth hundreds of years ago. I’ve also made a few keyboards look like old metal typewriters, the ones with the round keys. Jet’s friends call the style steampunk, which was this litera
ry-pop art style about thirty or forty years ago. It’s all about making today’s technology look like it would if it had been invented hundreds of years ago. I don’t really see the point, but it’s something to do in the wee hours of the morning when I’m too brain-dead to work on my own stuff.

  I like things to be what they’re going to be. Not what they were. Or could have been.

  So, I finished the mod and wanted to test it out. It wasn’t any good if Jet couldn’t use it. I slipped an ink cartridge into the machine and tatted on the fleshy part of my left hand, between the thumb and the index finger. It stung as the needle jabbed into my skin. But it wasn’t bad. Actually, I kind of got into it. The pain focused me. I just did a simple circle. Sort of calligraphy style, like I’d done it with a brush and not quite closed it.