And One Day We Will Die, page 10
“What gave you that idea?”
“You mentioned a band once, I thought.”
“Oh. We called ourselves that when I worked with collaborators.” Belle and the others, presumably her enemies now. How could that be?
How could she be here, not answering—not even seeing—whatever they were saying about the break-up? Kay’s manager Genevieve and her assistants had taken control of her social media, email, finances, everything. All so she could focus on this precious project she could not even begin to explain to the boy.
“So, what you’re making, it’s not music?” he said.
“There’s music, but it’s not mine. Legal will license things like for a playlist or a soundtrack. You know these things?”
He smiled. “Of course, yes.”
How sweet and earnest he was, how baby-faced.
She said, “I want some from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea because she mentioned it a lot in her journals. I'm not sure what else, but lots of music from different bands she loved. Really old stuff, from the nineties and even earlier.”
“It’s a movie, then?”
How to explain virtual experiences to someone born and raised in a low-tech enclave? She said, “I’m building a kind of imaginary place that other people can visit. My mother’s life as a place, preserving the time she lived and the emotions she had.”
Preserving. He’ll ask how that can be when she’s already gone.
The boy only squeezed her hand, seeming to react to the hitch in her voice.
“She died in childbirth just like someone in an old novel, only she wasn’t young. The journals cover like thirty-five years, and the last one is all about her hopes for me. All the things she thought we’d do together.”
Kay didn’t need to go on. He understood the emotion if nothing else.
She promised so much in that last one. She promised to be there for me.
She can’t unless I make her real.
The trail looped, and all at once they were looking down at the town she’d been forbidden to visit. Maybe viewing from this distance was also taboo.
Luke pointed out stores, schools, bars, churches. Houses clustered near the center and sprinkled around the green hills. With reverence he explained that somewhere close to five thousand people stayed in this valley without internet, phone service, or meaningful ties to the outside. This was their world.
“Beautiful,” she said because he seemed to expect it, and then, “How do people live here?”
“Peacefully,” he said. “Happily.”
“How do you get what you need?”
“We farm, make our own things.”
She considered his shoes, the family pickup, even the coffee can ashtray. No one here had made them.
It’s a pyramid, like any cult. They bring in people with life's savings, people with inheritance.
People who’d give everything for a chance at utopia, a chance at community, open air. These things came with high cost and moral compromise.
Kay sat in the wide back doorway staring out at the dripping foliage. Everything was rich as deep green India ink, drenched and shining.
Focusing on all the rainy green brought to mind a journal passage. It had rained like this at a house party her mother’s first time trying cocaine—or was it meth, something else? The entry hadn’t made it entirely clear. She’d been handed a straw and told to suck it back slowly, make sure not to sneeze.
The scene built itself before Kay’s eyes.
Her mother was Kay’s younger self, too young to be at a party like this, but no one had ever policed her movements and so she went where she was invited. She was called into a bathroom to try the drug and then came out through a hall into a dimly lit living area. Porn played on an oversized TV, long before most people had big-screens. It was a rich kid’s house, then, but nothing about the interior was described in the journal. Kay improvised a white leather sectional and wondered if that was period. They could fix it in post if not. Beyond the room was a wall of tall windows, beyond them a line of shrubs and brilliant green grass all shiny in the rain. Bright lights shone outdoors.
Her mother had never seen this kind of porn before. She’d seen the satellite channel American Exxtasy, an awkward couple doing oral on a couch or a girl doing self-care in a candlelit bathtub. She’d seen a grittier film on VHS at a friend’s and walked out of the room, stomach turning. This piece now was only body parts like machinery, like well-oiled pistons, in and out forever, inspiring no shock or any other emotion, really.
Her mother watched for a minute, then grabbed her friend Rachel to go outside. In her journal, she’d chastised all those people inside watching the TV, ignoring two beautiful girls moving in the rain just beyond their focus. They danced in spinning circles and left the yard. Ditching things often brought them greater joy than staying. They walked home at midnight through alleys, soundlessly laughing and kicking at puddles. Oh, Kay wished she could hear.
She walked a few paces out from the shack to better visualize it, as though the entire field were a sound stage. Never had she had such a large canvas. The TV here, the sectional, window glass, shrubs, alleys and darkened houses beyond. The trailer park, end of their walk. She saw the entire town before her, an intentional hallucination.
Rain fell on Kay as it fell on her mother and Rachel. (Her image of Rachel was too like Belle, something she’d need to adjust later). She felt she could run to join them. If she didn’t get there in time, she could always reverse their actions, or “rewind” in the terms of their era.
She did that now, placing her mother back in the rich kid’s bathroom. This time Kay stood a foot away, watching the careful girl holding her hair to her nape so it wouldn’t disturb the powdery lines on the proffered mirror.
Kay would rewind and rewind, making each time all the clearer.
This was why she’d asked the boy about school. She’d wanted to know if they had anything here like what she knew—visualization and enhancement and all of that—but clearly they did not.
He arrived before the last images faded. The girls had reached the trailer park and lingered, hugging before going their separate ways. Kay thought of how difficult their home lives were, thought of Rachel’s unhappy fate.
The boy crossed alleys and walked through houses and fences unawares, and then he was only walking through a field. Kay caught joy and the awe on his face. Maybe he'd thought her a dream.
She rose and moved across the field toward him, feeling propelled, as though she were a train and the track led to him, as though she were a marionette being raised and moved. No difference between her will and that of the universe.
They lay under the mosquito net with all the shack’s doors and windows open as nothing could disturb them. Surging with longing, connection, more longing. Sweet words close to her ear, his soft smoke-and-cinnamon breath. Why didn’t he worry that someone might find them?
Paranoia came: This only feels illicit.
How would courtship go down in this kind of scheme? They’ve got to bring in outsiders, money. Charm you.
He certainly had charmed her. Kept charming her.
As though hearing her inner monologue, he asked, “How different are we, really? People here and people outside.”
“I don't know,” she said after a while. “I only have my own experience to go on and it was never quite . . . typical.”
“I’d love to hear,” he said.
It felt like a song, the crickets making rhythm, as she told of being chosen young for a special school. “I had to have a surgery before I could advance far.”
She cradled the right side of her skull in her hand, but he did not ask, and so she went on, telling of her classmate Belle and their first project, an abstract game.
The player was a simple point, a dot, and the field a labyrinth built out of crosshatching so that there were no cues or landmarks at first, and only after you played for a long while would you learn how to read the crosshatching and find your way out. Like learning. A very simple game, but it earned them sponsorship for further study.
Out of school, their dreamy debut piece surprised everyone. The aesthetics of it were retro-futuristic, quite memorable. Soft shapes and washed-out warm nostalgic colors. As you moved through the space, you might see anthropomorphic vegetables like on a Victorian Christmas card, or you might see robots or spaceships. Aliens, monsters. Not a game but more of an “experience,” like a trip to one of Gulliver or Odysseus’s strange countries.
The whole conceit was about re-becoming children, which she and Belle kind of still were at the time. It was about smallness, helplessness, imagination, hope. They’d forget childhood very soon, but at eighteen or so, they still remembered some of it.
“There was a real joy and sentimentality to it, and it was a joy to work together, too, but—and I don’t know how to put this without sounding arrogant—I was the driver.”
She’d left the bed without realizing and gazed out at the field now populated with the images she’d been describing, the whimsical backgrounds and characters of their first professional project. How small the participants must have felt, moving amongst these giant and powerfully sentimental entities.
“Yeah, little mama. I understand,” said Luke, coming up behind her, touching her hips, resting his chin on her head. “You're saying you're smart and talented, but I already knew.”
She moved away, set her bare feet on the soft grass.
“Anyway, there was a lot of pressure to think of our next project. Belle wanted to be like the celebrities in our field. They're fake, you know? Augmented. Some of them aren’t even—"
“What does ‘augmented’ mean, though?”
“They have surgeries.”
“You had surgery.”
An intense pang of shame moved in her belly.
“I’m sorry, go on,” he said.
“Their minds and bodies are highly augmented. They’re only pandering and so there’s . . . nothing. No communication. Their projects are flattering mirrors. Oh, you’d never understand.”
She was being unfair, anyway. Belle would not have put any of this in such terms.
He’d reached her, was kissing her neck.
She said, “I’m so glad you don’t understand.”
She was deep into visualizing the Lollapalooza experience from her mother’s post-high school journal. She said he could stay long enough to smoke one cigarette and then he’d have to leave. He could come back at night.
“What were you seeing just now?” he asked.
“I’ve been reading about stadium concerts and music festivals she went to.” She pointed. “There are four stages at this one, all spread out, and along here are kiosks and port-a-potties.
The exhilaration and connection of the concerts was what she wanted to recreate, that spiritual feeling vibrating throughout her mother’s young body, the excitement of seeing people alive and ornamented, so unlike the ones she saw day to day. The awe and wonder of it. Like long-sustained orgasm, like opening up a new organ.
Kay suddenly saw a torso bursting into flower. This thing was beginning to form itself.
The journals absolutely fizzed with passion and life. Kay strongly believed the modern world was lacking that sort of vitality. Certainly she had never had it herself. (Only now was she finding it, with her projects. And, she couldn’t deny, with this boy.)
The freedom of living at the turn of the century may have added to her mother’s energy. Being vivacious was likely an inborn trait, but wasn’t there a cyclical relationship between it and the concerts, the cutting school and dancing in the rain, and all? A feedback loop. To give this to people—to set them on such a loop or even imagine the possibility—would be a service. Imagine!
Her project would one day exist in the cloud for people to enter at their leisure, but at first there would be large live sessions with thousands of tourists, if all went to plan. She tried to explain the great communal feelings large concerts elicited, the overflow of joy and enthusiasm.
The boy nodded, saying, “That’s exactly how we feel, living here.”
He had the truck one night and drove her so close to the farmhouse she saw his family moving inside, fish behind glass.
Kay couldn’t stop seeing the festival out in the darkness beyond the road, and now the auditory hallucinations began. Her implants were always meant to allow for these, but they’d rarely worked because she’d never been musically attuned. Maybe something of her mother was rubbing off.
The hum suggested a concert in the distance. Soaring, swelling, falling, making her feel some of that exhilaration and magic her mother had written about.
“I don't know if it's a human voice or a horn,” she said at some point. He said he wished he’d hear it too.
“I wonder if I really ought to be building all of this here,” she said. “Traces of landscape could become enmeshed.”
“What would that hurt?”
She shook her head, for the first time realizing, You don’t know what fans are like. If this makes the impact I hope it will, they’ll find this place.
Maybe that was just as well. The peace of a lucky five thousand for the pleasure of fifty thousand, five hundred thousand. In truth, she hoped to reach even more.
Only four or five weeks had gone by, but it wasn’t so warm at night anymore. When Kay woke up to close the windows and doors, she saw it all. Complete and coherently imagined, the whole landscape of the project lay before her, everything just as highly polished, stylized, abridged and compressed as in a theme park. Trailer park, stadium, school, mall, bar, state fair with its Ferris Wheel, stadiums, and festival grounds—everything from the journals, so artificial in design and yet so real in details. Streets shining wet, streetlamps haloed in light fog, dogs barking, and engines idling.
Off to the right, beside the mobile homes, towered a tree with a figure penduluming on a rope-swing.
“What are you doing?” the boy called from bed.
“I’ll be right back.”
How was this all so vivid? Grass thinned, becoming dark asphalt as Kay approached the tree.
The woman on the swing became clear, as though a spotlight had turned on her. It was, of course, Kay’s mother, middle-aged and pregnant this time. She and her swing were festooned with flowers and plump fruit hanging from graceful vines.
“Be careful here,” she said before fading.
All of it faded. Kay’s body pulsed and the humming music came on. Her tears came too. Those were the first words her mother had ever spoken to her.
The boy was behind her, chin on her head again, arms around her shoulders. “You’ll catch a cold,” he said.
For the first time she wished she could take him home, hook him up with VR gear and show him her mother’s town. He might like the modern world, too, if he gave it a chance.
“Beautiful,” he said, paging through her finished sketchbook as she filled the second.
“Eh, they’re okay. I have to get to a big computer before I can realize everything.”
“Then why would they send you away from computers?
“So I wouldn’t get stalled by the details.” So I could hide from Belle, keep my ego safe. “I want it detailed, though. I want it ripe and opulent. Not going to murder a single darling.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, you know. They tell you to get rid of whatever you think is best because if the artist likes it, it's obviously too pretentious.”
“So dumb,” he said, stroking the back of her neck.
He still made her shiver when they touched, maybe more than before.
“Hey, I need to get in touch with Genevieve,” she said.
He leaned over her table, looking through the new artwork. “People walk around these places, or feel like they are?”
“That’s part of it. They can move from body to body. They don’t even have to have a body. They can drift, go inside things.”
“It's just, why would you want to have such artificial experiences?
“You enjoy having dreams, don't you?”
“But dreams are personal. This would be like having other people’s dreams.”
Oh God, don’t they even read books here—and whose dream does he think he’s living?
She began to feel uncomfortable and moved out into the cool of the room. She dug for clean socks in her backpack, which had not moved from the loveseat all these weeks.
“Ought to hang up your clothes and stay a while,” he said.
“Listen, I need to put a call out to Genevieve in the morning. She said I’d get in touch through the people bringing supplies, which is you, right?”
He tensed. She couldn’t see his eyes. He said. “Sometimes I wish you could stay here. Isn’t that dumb?”
“You'd get sick of my self-absorption.” She stood and held him, stepped back, made eye contact. “Seriously, I never get better with time.”
Before dawn, as he was leaving, Kay woke long enough to remind him about Genevieve. His mother was the only one in the family who could drive out to do it, he said.
He’d had a hard day of work, she guessed, because he arrived late and looking gray around the eyes, not having showered.
"Problem with the irrigation. I've got to get back,” he said. “Just stopped to say goodnight.”
“What about—”
But he kissed her. He was still so soft with her, putting such light pressure into every touch. He held her jaw in that certain way he must have seen in the same old movies she had. Movies were legal here, weren't they? She’d never gotten all of that straight.
"I need to go home soon,” she said.
He kept swaying with her, and she realized she’d never be so close to anyone as they thought she was.
When people think you're more intimate than you are, her mother had written in one of the later journals, it can be dangerous.
"I need to get to a studio soon or I'll be giving away what this place is without even trying, you understand? I need to upload what I’ve visualized and continue building it out in the computer. It comes out of me like a photo, like a scale model. That’s what I can do. I know you can’t imagine, but it’s true.”
