* * *
He was adrift for two days and a night before a merchant vessel came across him. With kindness and care they rescued him from the leaking whaleboat and brought him aboard their ship, The Lady Elise. After he was given fresh water to drink and wrapped in warm blankets, the captain, a young, amiable-looking man with freckles, asked him to tell his story. John did, with some careful omissions. The Lady Elise’s captain furrowed his brow. “We picked up another castaway from your ship two nights gone. You must have the devil’s own luck.”
He saw him then, wrapped in an Indian blanket. Staring up at the star-shattered sky was William.
John fell to the deck. “How can this be?”
William hobbled toward him, his movement slow and aided by a cane. He said, “Leg’s seen better days, and I’ve been pummeled all about like a sack of rotten fruit, but I live.” William winced. He dropped the blanket. A red welt the breadth of a thumb was raised around his neck. “Nearly strangled to death and dragged into the sea. But when I was down in the briny cold I heard a voice tell it weren’t yet time, that I were given a second chance. Queerest thing, sounded the near exact twin of that poor lost little cabin boy.”
John rose to his feet and closed the space between them. When William took his hand, John was still clutching the piece of scrimshaw carved with his image.
KEN LIU
Thoughts and Prayers
from Future Tense
Emily Fort:
So you want to know about Hayley.
No, I’m used to it, or at least I should be by now. People only want to hear about my sister.
It was a dreary, rainy Friday in October, the smell of fresh fallen leaves in the air. The black tupelos lining the field hockey pitch had turned bright red, like a trail of bloody footprints left by a giant.
I had a quiz in French II and planned a week’s worth of vegan meals for a family of four in family and consumer science. Around noon, Hayley messaged me from California.
Skipped class. Q and I are driving to the festival right now!!!
I ignored her. She delighted in taunting me with the freedoms of her college life. I was envious, but didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of showing it.
In the afternoon, Mom messaged me.
Have you heard from Hayley?
No. The sisterly code of silence was sacred. Her secret boyfriend was safe with me.
If you do, call me right away.
I put the phone away. Mom was the helicopter type.
As soon as I got home from field hockey, I knew something was wrong. Mom’s car was in the driveway, and she never left work this early.
The TV was on in the basement.
Mom’s face was ashen. In a voice that sounded strangled, she said, “Hayley’s RA called. She went to a music festival. There’s been a shooting.”
The rest of the evening was a blur as the death toll climbed, TV anchors read old forum posts from the gunman in dramatic voices, shaky follow-drone footage of panicked people screaming and scattering circulated on the Web.
I put on my glasses and drifted through the VR re-creation of the site hastily put up by the news crews. Already, the place was teeming with avatars holding a candlelight vigil. Outlines on the ground glowed where victims were found, and luminous arcs with floating numbers reconstructed ballistic trails. So much data, so little information.
We tried calling and messaging. There was no answer. Probably ran out of battery, we told ourselves. She always forgets to charge her phone. The network must be jammed.
The call came at four in the morning. We were all awake.
“Yes, this is . . . Are you sure?” Mom’s voice was unnaturally calm, as though her life, and all our lives, hadn’t just changed forever. “No, we’ll fly out ourselves. Thank you.”
She hung up, looked at us, and delivered the news. Then she collapsed onto the couch and buried her face in her hands.
There was an odd sound. I turned and, for the first time in my life, saw Dad crying.
I missed my last chance to tell her how much I loved her. I should have messaged her back.
* * *
Gregg Fort:
I don’t have any pictures of Hayley to show you. It doesn’t matter. You already have all the pictures of my daughter you need.
Unlike Abigail, I’ve never taken many pictures or videos, much less drone-view holograms or omni immersions. I lack the instinct to be prepared for the unexpected, the discipline to document the big moments, the skill to frame a scene perfectly. But those aren’t the most important reasons.
My father was a hobbyist photographer who took pride in developing his own film and making his own prints. If you were to flip through the dust-covered albums in the attic, you’d see many posed shots of my sisters and me, smiling stiffly into the camera. Pay attention to the ones of my sister Sara. Note how her face is often turned slightly away from the lens so that her right cheek is out of view.
When Sara was five, she climbed onto a chair and toppled a boiling pot. My father was supposed to be watching her, but he’d been distracted, arguing with a colleague on the phone. When all was said and done, Sara had a trail of scars that ran from the right side of her face all the way down her thigh, like a rope of solidified lava.
You won’t find in those albums records of the screaming fights between my parents; the awkward chill that descended around the dining table every time my mother stumbled over the word “beautiful”; the way my father avoided looking Sara in the eye.
In the few photographs of Sara where her entire face can be seen, the scars are invisible, meticulously painted out of existence in the darkroom, stroke by stroke. My father simply did it, and the rest of us went along in our practiced silence.
As much as I dislike photographs and other memory substitutes, it’s impossible to avoid them. Coworkers and relatives show them to you, and you have no choice but to look and nod. I see the efforts manufacturers of memory-capturing devices put into making their results better than life. Colors are more vivid; details emerge from shadows; filters evoke whatever mood you desire. Without you having to do anything, the phone brackets the shot so that you can pretend to time-travel, to pick the perfect instant when everyone is smiling. Skin is smoothed out; pores and small imperfections are erased. What used to take my father a day’s work is now done in the blink of an eye, and far better.
Do the people who take these photos believe them to be reality? Or have the digital paintings taken the place of reality in their memory? When they try to remember the captured moment, do they recall what they saw, or what the camera crafted for them?
* * *
Abigail Fort:
On the flight to California, while Gregg napped and Emily stared out the window, I put on my glasses and immersed myself in images of Hayley. I never expected to do this until I was aged and decrepit, unable to make new memories. Rage would come later. Grief left no room for other emotions.
I was always the one in charge of the camera, the phone, the follow-drone. I made the annual albums, the vacation-highlight videos, the animated Christmas cards summarizing the family’s yearly accomplishments.
Gregg and the girls indulged me, sometimes reluctantly. I always believed that someday they would come to see my point of view.
“Pictures are important,” I’d tell them. “Our brains are so flawed, leaky sieves of time. Without pictures, so many things we want to remember would be forgotten.”
I sobbed the whole way across the country as I relived the life of my firstborn.
* * *
Gregg Fort:
Abigail wasn’t wrong, not exactly.
Many have been the times when I wished I had images to help me remember. I can’t picture the exact shape of Hayley’s face at six months, or recall her Halloween costume when she was five. I can’t even remember the exact shade of blue of the dress she wore for high school graduation.
Given what happened later, of course, her pictures are beyond my rea
ch.
I comfort myself with this thought: How can a picture or video capture the intimacy, the irreproducible subjective perspective and mood through my eyes, the emotional tenor of each moment when I felt the impossible beauty of the soul of my child? I don’t want digital representations, ersatz reflections of the gaze of electronic eyes filtered through layers of artificial intelligence, to mar what I remember of our daughter.
When I think of Hayley, what comes to mind is a series of disjointed memories.
The baby wrapping her translucent fingers around my thumb for the first time; the infant scooting around on her bottom on the hardwood floor, plowing through alphabet blocks like an icebreaker through floes; the four-year-old handing me a box of tissues as I shivered in bed with a cold and laying a small, cool hand against my feverish cheek.
The eight-year-old pulling the rope that released the pumped-up soda bottle launcher. As frothy water drenched the two of us in the wake of the rising rocket, she yelled, laughing, “I’m going to be the first ballerina to dance on Mars!”
The nine-year-old telling me that she no longer wanted me to read to her before going to sleep. As my heart throbbed with the inevitable pain of a child pulling away, she softened the blow with “Maybe someday I’ll read to you.”
The ten-year-old defiantly standing her ground in the kitchen, supported by her little sister, staring down me and Abigail both. “I won’t hand back your phones until you both sign this pledge to never use them during dinner.”
The fifteen-year-old slamming on the brakes, creating the loudest tire screech I’d ever heard; me in the passenger seat, knuckles so white they hurt. “You look like me on that rollercoaster, Dad.” The tone carefully modulated, breezy. She had held out an arm in front of me, as though she could keep me safe, the same way I had done to her hundreds of times before.
And on and on, distillations of the 6,874 days we had together, like broken, luminous shells left on a beach after the tide of quotidian life has receded.
In California, Abigail asked to see her body; I didn’t.
I suppose one could argue that there’s no difference between my father trying to erase the scars of his error in the darkroom and my refusal to look upon the body of the child I failed to protect. A thousand “I could have’s” swirled in my mind: I could have insisted that she go to a college near home; I could have signed her up for a course on mass-shooting-survival skills; I could have demanded that she wear her body armor at all times. An entire generation had grown up with active-shooter drills, so why didn’t I do more? I don’t think I ever understood my father, empathized with his flawed and cowardly and guilt-ridden heart, until Hayley’s death.
But in the end, I didn’t want to see because I wanted to protect the only thing I had left of her: those memories.
If I were to see her body, the jagged crater of the exit wound, the frozen lava trails of coagulated blood, the muddy cinders and ashes of shredded clothing, I knew the image would overwhelm all that had come before, would incinerate the memories of my daughter, my baby, in one violent eruption, leaving only hatred and despair in its wake. No, that lifeless body was not Hayley, was not the child I wanted to remember. I would no more allow that one moment to filter her whole existence than I would allow transistors and bits to dictate my memory.
So Abigail went, lifted the sheet, and gazed upon the wreckage of Hayley, of our life. She took pictures, too. “This I also want to remember,” she mumbled. “You don’t turn away from your child in her moment of agony, in the aftermath of your failure.”
* * *
Abigail Fort:
They came to me while we were still in California.
I was numb. Questions that had been asked by thousands of mothers swarmed my mind. Why was he allowed to amass such an arsenal? Why did no one stop him despite all the warning signs? What could I have—should I have—done differently to save my child?
“You can do something,” they said. “Let’s work together to honor the memory of Hayley and bring about change.”
Many have called me naive or worse. What did I think was going to happen? After decades of watching the exact same script being followed to end in thoughts and prayers, what made me think this time would be different? It was the very definition of madness.
Cynicism might make some invulnerable and superior. But not everyone is built that way. In the thralls of grief, you cling to any ray of hope.
“Politics is broken,” they said. “It should be enough, after the deaths of little children, after the deaths of newlyweds, after the deaths of mothers shielding newborns, to finally do something. But it never is. Logic and persuasion have lost their power, so we have to arouse the passions. Instead of letting the media direct the public’s morbid curiosity to the killer, let’s focus on Hayley’s story.”
It’s been done before, I muttered. To center the victim is hardly a novel political move. You want to make sure that she isn’t merely a number, a statistic, one more abstract name among lists of the dead. You think when people are confronted by the flesh-and-blood consequences of their vacillation and disengagement, things change. But that hasn’t worked, doesn’t work.
“Not like this,” they insisted, “not with our algorithm.”
They tried to explain the process to me, though the details of machine learning and convolution networks and biofeedback models escaped me. Their algorithm had originated in the entertainment industry, where it was used to evaluate films and predict their box-office success, and eventually, to craft them. Proprietary variations are used in applications from product design to drafting political speeches, every field in which emotional engagement is critical. Emotions are ultimately biological phenomena, not mystical emanations, and it’s possible to discern trends and patterns, to home in on the stimuli that maximize impact. The algorithm would craft a visual narrative of Hayley’s life, shape it into a battering ram to shatter the hardened shell of cynicism, spur the viewer to action, shame them for their complacency and defeatism.
The idea seemed absurd, I said. How could electronics know my daughter better than I did? How could machines move hearts when real people could not?
“When you take a photograph,” they asked me, “don’t you trust the camera AI to give you the best picture? When you scrub through drone footage, you rely on the AI to identify the most interesting clips, to enhance them with the perfect mood filters. This is a million times more powerful.”
I gave them my archive of family memories: photos, videos, scans, drone footage, sound recordings, immersiongrams. I entrusted them with my child.
I’m no film critic, and I don’t have the terms for the techniques they used. Narrated only with words spoken by our family, intended for each other and not an audience of strangers, the result was unlike any movie or VR immersion I had ever seen. There was no plot save the course of a single life; there was no agenda save the celebration of the curiosity, the compassion, the drive of a child to embrace the universe, to become. It was a beautiful life, a life that loved and deserved to be loved, until the moment it was abruptly and violently cut down.
This is the way Hayley deserves to be remembered, I thought, tears streaming down my face. This is how I see her, and it is how she should be seen.
I gave them my blessing.
* * *
Sara Fort:
Growing up, Gregg and I weren’t close. It was important to my parents that our family project the image of success, of decorum, regardless of the reality. In response, Gregg distrusted all forms of representation, while I became obsessed with them.
Other than holiday greetings, we rarely conversed as adults, and certainly didn’t confide in each other. I knew my nieces only through Abigail’s social media posts.
I suppose this is my way of excusing myself for not intervening earlier.
When Hayley died in California, I sent Gregg the contact info for a few therapists who specialized in working with families of mass shooting victims, but I purposefully
stayed away myself, believing that my intrusion in their moment of grief would be inappropriate given my role as distant aunt and aloof sister. So I wasn’t there when Abigail agreed to devote Hayley’s memory to the cause of gun control.
Though my company bio describes my specialty as the study of online discourse, the vast bulk of my research material is visual. I design armor against trolls.
* * *
Emily Fort:
I watched that video of Hayley many times.
It was impossible to avoid. There was an immersive version, in which you could step into Hayley’s room and read her neat handwriting, examine the posters on her wall. There was a low-fidelity version designed for frugal data plans, and the compression artifacts and motion blur made her life seem old-fashioned, dreamy. Everyone shared the video as a way to reaffirm that they were a good person, that they stood with the victims. Click, bump, add a lit-candle emoji, re-rumble.
It was powerful. I cried, also many times. Comments expressing grief and solidarity scrolled past my glasses like a never-ending wake. Families of victims in other shootings, their hopes rekindled, spoke out in support.
But the Hayley in that video felt like a stranger. All the elements in the video were true, but they also felt like lies.
Teachers and parents loved the Hayley they knew, but there was a mousy girl in school who cowered when my sister entered the room. One time, Hayley drove home drunk; another time, she stole from me and lied until I found the money in her purse. She knew how to manipulate people and wasn’t shy about doing it. She was fiercely loyal, courageous, kind, but she could also be reckless, cruel, petty. I loved Hayley because she was human, but the girl in that video was both more and less than.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 Page 36
