Platformed: A Novel, page 13
He grinned and then stepped out from around the counter. She took an awkward step back in surprise, but nothing about him was threatening, strange as his approach might be. “Let me show you!”
He proceeded right past her and out onto the street. She frowned but followed.
“This, here,” he said, running a hand down the fancy carved facade of the shop. “I love this.”
She tilted her head to one side and nodded, not understanding in the least. “I see.”
“I’m an architect, you know,” he said. “The cakes, the frosting, it’s just the current expression of my creativity. This building, though…”
“You designed this building?” she asked. Trying to keep up.
He shrugged. “Or something like that.”
“Right.” The glee in his eyes was more than she was comfortable with, and her meditations on insanity and the edges of society felt more relevant than ever. “You were an architect before coming here?” she tried again.
He nodded. “And I still am, like I said.”
“Of course,” she said. Feeling like she was talking to a crazy person, or at least someone who didn’t understand metaphors. “So, the cake?”
“Would you like it like this?” he asked, gesturing toward the wall and its ornate carvings.
“Like the wall?” she asked dumbly. “Sure. Love it.”
“It’ll be ready tomorrow!” he said.
She took that as a dismissal and nodded, smiling, retreating into the crowd that had grown as the evening approached. He waved to her like they were great friends.
What a strange interaction, she thought. Had he been crazy when he arrived, or did he become like that since coming here? There was no way to know, really.
Or maybe he really had designed the building and she was being too harsh. Maybe he was entirely sane, just a bit odd. Maybe she was a terrible person.
That was probably it, she concluded with a private smile. Best to acknowledge and come to terms with that now, early in the game.
And then, as if her own grip on reality were slipping, she laughed and had to hold herself back from skipping down the street. Because, even if sanity and appearances scarcely mattered, she did still have a tiny amount of dignity.
36
Three and a half years before the Community
“So, Bea,” Sara’s mom said as she reached for the salad bowl, “tell me what you think of Sara’s new boyfriend.”
Sara felt herself flush, more from horror than embarrassment.
Bea’s eyes cut across the table to meet Sara’s, silently asking a question. Sara just grimaced and shrugged.
“Honestly?” Bea asked, setting down her glass of wine. “I am not convinced.”
“Bea!” Sara protested.
“Convinced?” Sara’s mom asked.
“She means she doesn’t like him, Mom,” Sara jumped in. “She thinks I’m making a mistake, that he’s not good enough for me.”
“Well, are you making a mistake? He can’t possibly be good enough for you.”
Sara rolled her eyes. “No one could be, eh? But seriously, could you two be a little supportive?”
“I’m not supportive either,” Emily piped up.
The four of them were eating dinner at her parents’ house while her dad was getting beers with friends. A girls’ night, Sara’s mom called it, but really her dad would have been welcome, too. Nights like this one had started when Bea came home with Sara one weekend early in college and so thoroughly charmed her parents that they insisted she bring her along all the time. Bea and her mom talked on the phone sometimes.
“Just tell me that you’re not being taken advantage of,” her mother said.
“Zach is actually really great,” Sara said. “I know it’s weird, but you must see the appeal, right? He has his shit together so much more than anyone else I know!”
“Yeah, yeah, he runs a company, we know,” Bea said. “You’re attracted to success, ambition, blah, blah, blah. But Sara—that’s just not sexy.”
Sara glanced at her mom, uncomfortable, but her mom was laughing. “She’s right, honey!”
Emily kicked Sara’s leg under the table. “Sara has always liked nerds.”
“I am a nerd,” Sara said. “We have a lot in common.”
“Except you actually graduated,” Bea said. “Unlike him.”
“Like a degree makes you so special,” Sara said.
“I’m just saying.”
“Do you want me to list everything I like about him?” Sara asked.
Emily laughed. “Could you, please?”
“Well,” Sara said, pretending to deliberate. “He’s tall.”
Bea shook her head vehemently. “We’ve talked about this, Sara. Tall is not a reason to like someone.”
Emily wrinkled her nose. “You know, I think it might be.”
“You’ll grow out of that, honey,” their mom said. That made everyone laugh—Sara’s father was exactly the average height for an American man.
“Seriously, though,” Sara said. “None of you have even met him. You’ll understand when you do.”
And they did, as it turned out. The next time they had a girls’ night, it wasn’t just the girls—Sara’s dad and Zach were both invited, and the seven of them sat around her parents’ big antique dining table eating pizza and drinking the bottle of wine Zach had insisted on bringing.
“It’s not local,” her dad had chided, pretending to be upset. “Don’t you care about the local economy?”
Zach had taken this in stride. “I care about the dock workers who unload crates, too,” he replied. “It’s more of an economic stimulus to buy things that have been shipped a long way because so many people were involved.”
Bea murmured to Sara that she found this doubtful, but she had to admit it was a good recovery.
“So, Zach, tell us about yourself,” Sara’s mom said once they were all settled with their food.
He’d looked at Sara, smirked, and said, “I’ve heard the main appeal is that I’m tall.”
Making Sara blush was a sure-fire way to get everyone laughing, so this was a promising start to the evening.
Zach hadn’t expressed any nerves about meeting her family, though Sara would have been intolerably anxious to meet his parents. He figured out the dynamic effortlessly and even had Bea honestly impressed by the end of the night.
“To be clear,” Bea whispered to Sara as they all parted hours later, “I still think you’re being dumb, sleeping with your boss.”
“But?”
“He is tall.”
Girls’ nights continued, but so did family dinners, complete with the men. Zach loved her parents as much as Bea did, which Emily and Sara found both hilarious and kind of wonderful. Their parents were never the neighborhood favorites when the girls were young, but had managed the transition to having adult children more deftly than most. Even if she still kept her relationship with Zach a secret from her coworkers, it felt great to share him with the people who really mattered.
37
Sara found her way back to the pillar and couldn’t bring herself to message Zach. But she was desperate to message Bea.
She struggled to find the words, though she had so much to say. She felt her mind tripping over itself. Bea would never take something she said the wrong way, would always understand the subtext and jokes. Writing to her had always been easy, so why was it suddenly so hard?
Heyyy
With the full three ys, of course.
I SWEAR I saw you the other day here, dressed like one of the, idk, marginal women? Honestly not sure what to call them. But I hope you’re here and you get this! Would love to see you, obv. Miss you a thousand.
Before she could send it, something bright flared in the sky.
She flinched, glanced upward, some instinctive fear coursing through her. Was it falling, or flying?
Her chest tightened and her breath caught and she watched the rocket or weapon or whatever it was racing overhead, impossibly fast but also strangely slow. Great rippling clouds rolled off it, colors that lifelong experience with airplanes had not prepared her to see.
Someone nearby was laughing at her.
She forced her eyes away from the thing in the sky and met the eyes of her mocker, a woman decked out in faintly ridiculous jogging clothes. Paused on her run to watch the rocket overhead, amused at Sara’s surprise.
“You looked terrified!” the woman managed to get out between guffaws. “Didn’t you hear about the spaceport?”
Sara’s face grew hot. She looked away from the woman, ignoring her and the rocket overhead, and skimmed the message once more. It had felt so important a moment before, but now all she could feel was the heat on the back of her neck, the embarrassment. She’d heard of the spaceport, of course, but not that it was operational. And not that it would be visible from here.
Sara returned her attention to the screen, skimming back over her note to Bea. It would never be perfect, but it didn’t need to be. She hit send.
The screen pulsed once, glowing brighter blue and then returning to its usual benign white. Beneath her message, an italicized message in red appeared:
Message cannot be delivered: contacts within the Community are not supported at this time.
Sara blinked and took a startled step back, then peered closer at the message again. Bea had been accepted? Who had Sara seen, then, the other night among the marginal people? And why had she been unable to find Bea anywhere amid the crowded streets?
She told herself not to be surprised by that: there were so many people in the Community, it was not too strange that she hadn’t run into one of them yet. But she had been looking.
Impulsively, she typed Emily’s name next, needing to know.
Whether it went through or not wouldn’t necessarily tell her anything, she thought. Perhaps the messages could go through to someone still in quarantine, though obviously their intended recipient would not read them.
Already bargaining, as if she knew before she even tried what the result would be.
Hi! Hope you’re doing okay! Let me know if you get this!
The message did not bounce back.
38
She didn’t go back for her cake the next morning.
It rained until noon; cozy in her warm, dry room, she didn’t want to venture out into the wet. She could barely bring herself to get out of bed, and it occurred to her that she was behaving as if she were depressed. But she couldn’t be: life was too good, compared to what it had once been. There were so many luxuries and so few worries. Any discomfort had to be overridden by her relief.
One major downside of this life was dependence on leaving the apartment. She supposed she could have acquired snacks and kept them in her room, but the Community was structured around leaving for every meal. She suspected it was by design, a way to get people out of their homes and interacting with each other. It probably did them well, but it didn’t come naturally to her.
It was the kind of morning that would have been absolutely perfect with a book in her lap and a mug of tea in her hands, but she didn’t have either of those things.
There had to be a library around here somewhere. As she understood it, the main purveyor of e-books was as verboten as the other tech giants that competed with the company, but surely physical books were allowed. She just had to find them.
Adjusting to life with the products of a single corporation was more difficult than she had expected. It hadn’t been a consideration when she chose this place. Because why would it be? She was not so dependent on any one company as to truly miss its services, she had thought.
But she didn’t realize how much her life was a blend of just a few companies, typing on the keyboard of one and the phone of another with the software of the third and relying on the final one for everything else, from entertainment to the procurement of objects in the physical world. She used a hundred apps and tools and products, but they belonged to just a few billionaires.
And now, to her surprise, even the company’s own products had faded into the ether. Because the familiar was not what she was here to test. They had real users for that, not these strange, almost captive employees.
She forced herself to stop lamenting how bored she was, how isolated. This place was a choice. She chose this. She should appreciate what she had.
Eventually her boredom and hunger drew her from her bed and into the strange little world. She went out in her pajamas without a jacket, just shrugging into a bra and pulling on shoes. Something she never would have done before, but like so much else, her appearance no longer mattered. She no longer mattered.
There were probably people here who cared about their appearances more than ever, she thought. Lots more time for dating, and everyone so healthy and young.
Maybe that drive to look good was why everyone here seemed so fit. Or maybe they ejected you if you gained too much weight—you were no longer part of their utopian vision. It was a dark thought, such a sad and broken way of looking at the world that it almost made her laugh. The ridiculousness of Silicon Valley, percolating into everything. Wellness culture intoxicating our brains.
The rain was beginning to let up and she walked through it languidly, letting it land on her unhooded head and drip down her bare arms. She was cold, but not uncomfortably so.
She crossed the courtyard and entered the first cafe she reached, ordering a latte and breakfast sandwich, sitting by the window while she ate to watch the raindrops on the glass. People’s voices murmured through the air around her, but she didn’t eavesdrop, something that took actual effort to avoid. So strange that other people’s thoughts intruded so easily.
After eating, she returned to the promenade and walked along it slowly, letting the gentle rocking of the waves and the sound of their insistent washing against the shore blend with the last of the rain to make the whole world water.
She could almost believe that if she closed her eyes, she would find herself beneath the surface, sunlight bending through the deep, sea life flying through the sky above her. She thought back to the kelp forests and the deep blue of the tanks at the aquarium so many years before, how small she had felt, how calm.
Instead, she leaned against the low wall on her elbows, watching the white caps out in the bay and the storm clouds gathering again in the distance. The deck beneath her feet rocked gently on the high tide. The sun had defeated the clouds directly above town, but it would not last. It never lasted, did it?
Birds dipped and dove, splashing into the surface like downed fighter pilots and then emerging again, triumphant. She thought their antics should make her smile, but they didn’t, and she wasn’t sure why.
She became aware of another body standing beside her but did not turn her head. The person was larger than she was, standing close enough that she couldn’t quite see them with her eyes fixed ahead of her. Familiarly close. Could she guess who it was?
The stupid games she played to fill the hours.
The slightest turn of her head gave it all away, ruining her fun. Huh, not who she had expected, but that, too, made sense.
“So what kind of a name is Everest?” she asked.
He made a sound like he was more amused than insulted, which had been exactly what she was going for. “My parents wanted me to aim high.”
She smiled. Tapped a hand against the wall. “And did you?”
A shrug. “I didn’t not.”
“I know the feeling,” she said.
Silence then, for a while. Or not silence: a bird crying overheard, the waves brushing against the sand as they receded, wind in the grass and through the leaves. What hubris to call these things silence.
“Who were you, before?” she asked eventually.
It was a strange question, one she had mulled over for a while. What she wanted to ask—so what do you do?—no longer made sense here. Like for the poor baker architect. How was he supposed to answer such a question?
She could hear the smile in his voice when he replied. “Wouldn’t you rather know who I am here?”
She kept her body angled out toward the water but hazarded a glance in his direction. “I’m getting pretty used to not getting what I want. But I think that’s what the company would want, yes.”
He was looking back at her, too, and smiling now. Such perfect white teeth. “But that’s a boring question, isn’t it?”
“Which is why I didn’t ask it.”
No reply.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me,” she said. Retreating by habit.
“Well, let me ask something,” he said. “You want to know what I used to do, right?”
When she nodded, he went on.
“What does that matter? Why did that ever matter?”
She snorted. Started to reply but then found all of her almost-answers woefully inadequate. “It’s a heuristic,” she finally settled on. “Always imperfect.”
“And shouldn’t we strive for perfection, Sara?”
Something in his tone was grating to her. As if he knew so much more than she did. It reminded her of Zach in the worst way. “Is that what we’re doing here?”
He seemed to shrink slightly. Let his line of questioning go.
She wished she knew what the two of them were doing, exactly.
“What do you think happens here?” he asked after a long pause, in which the freshness of the waves had rushed in to fill her ears, so complete she didn’t know why they bothered talking.
Something about that question felt different from the others. More sincere. Less like he already knew what she should say.
But she also didn’t know what she should say. “Testing things, right?” she offered, lamely.
“That’s the company line,” he replied.
She decided to be fully honest, though perhaps that was stupid. “I think we’re hiding, actually.”
