M. T. Anderson (6 page)

It was Saturday night. The main lights were out. It had been a day since any of us had heard from the feed. Our parents were probably already on the moon, and were coming to the hospital the next morning.

For most of the day since we woke up after the attack, we had stared at the walls. We’d been sitting in our beds, and we tapped our feet on the rails. None of us could get the tune of “I’ll Sex You In” out of our heads. Someone kept starting it up, and then the others would swear and tell them to shut up. Then we couldn’t help ourselves, and we’d start to tap it out on our trays with a spork.

Link had finally woken up, and he paced up and down the floor. Loga came by during the afternoon and she talked to all of us, and she kept saying, “Ohhhhh! Ohhhhh!” in this sorry tone of voice, which was nice, except that then she would pause and we could tell she was m-chatting all the news back to our friends on Earth. Occasionally, she’d forget and she’d say out loud to no one, “Omigod! Yes! Right here!” or “Hello . . . ?” or whatever it was she was saying in her head. She would laugh at jokes we couldn’t hear.

Once, she went to the bathroom, casual-like, and came back with her hair parted a different place. Calista and Quendy watched her.

Later, without saying anything, they went and did theirs different like that, too.

Marty was sometimes saying his usual kind of thing, which was like, “Fuck this shit. Fuck this.” He wanted to be out playing basketball or something.

There was nothing to do. Violet stared at her hands in her lap. I looked over at her. I smiled, you know, supportive. She looked at me and then went back to staring at her hands.

Now it was night, and all the big lights were out. We were lying there. There were machines that were taking our pulse and shit. We were all supposed to be sleeping.

I heard Violet walk across the floor and head for the bathroom. A few minutes later, I heard her walking back.

“Hey,” I said.

“Yeah. Hey,” she said. She stopped.

“You can . . . ,” I said. I pulled myself up against the pillows. “Why don’t you sit down for a sec?”

She sat down in the chair by my bed. I could see the curve of her nose against my pulse, which was green and bumpy.

We sat there for a little while. I was thinking,
This is nice. We’re just sitting here. We don’t have to say anything.

I felt real contented. I lay my head back on my pillow.

I looked over at her face. I could see the light from my heartbeat on her tears.

I said. “You’re . . . hey. You’re crying.”

“Yes,” she said.

“You don’t . . .” I didn’t know how to say what I wanted. I tried, “You don’t seem like a crier.”

“No,” she said.

We sat. Now the silence wasn’t very good. Her head was low. I could see the curve of her cheek against my brain waves, which were red and loopy.

She said, “You go try to have fun like a normal person, a normal person with a real life — just for one night you want to live, and suddenly you’re screwed.”

“You’re not screwed.”

“I’m screwed.”

We sat there. I wanted to say something to cheer her up. I had a feeling that cheering her up might be a lot of work. I was thinking of how sometimes, trying to say the right thing to people, it’s like some kind of brain surgery, and you have to tweak exactly the right part of the lobe. Except with talking, it’s more like brain surgery with old, rusted skewers and things, maybe like those things you use to eat lobster, but brown. And you have to get exactly the right place, and you’re touching around in the brain, but the patient, she keeps jumping and saying, “Ow.” Thinking of it like this, I started to not want to say anything. I kept thinking of nice things I could say, like, “I’m glad you went out last night, because that’s how I met you,” or, “And I think you
are
a normal person,” but they all seemed just smarm.

So we just sat there, together, and we didn’t say anything. And it wasn’t bad.

I hoped she could see my smile in the light of my brain.

When my father got there the next morning, he didn’t stay long. He was being very powerful and businesslike. He was dressed up, and he looked like he was ready to give some orders and sort things out. He looked like everyone around us was stupid and he was going to roll up his sleeves and do some real clarity work.

He stood there staring at me for a few seconds, and I was like, “What?
What?
”

He seemed surprised, and then blinked. He said, “Oh. Shit. Yeah, I forgot. No m-chat. Just talking.”

I was like, “Do you have to remind me? What’s doing? How’s Smell Factor?”

“Your brother has a name.”

“How’s Mom?”

“She’s like, whoa, she’s like so stressed out. This is . . . Dude,” he said. “Dude, this is some way bad shit.”

I could completely feel Violet watching us. She was listening. I didn’t want to have her judging us, and thinking we were too boring or stupid or something.

My father asked me to tell him what happened. I told him, leaving out some parts, like trying to break in to the minibar. He just kept shaking his head and going, “Yeah,” “Yeah,” “Yeah,” “Oh, yeah,” “Yeah,” “Shit,” “Yeah.”

Finally, he stood up. I could tell he was pissed. He held up his hands. He said, “They want to subpoena your memories. This is this thing which is . . . Okay, this is bullshit.”

After a minute, he said to someone who wasn’t there, “Okay. Okay.” He turned to me and said, “I’m going down to the police.”

“Dad?” I said. “When am I going home?”

Dad put his hand over his ear. “Okay,” he said. His mouth twitched. He nodded to someone.

He hit me on the knee and left.

I was staring at the wall and the stupid boat picture.

I heard Quendy say to Violet, “When are your parents coming?”

She said in a flat voice, “They’re busy.”

“Busy?”

“Yeah. With jobs. I guess they can’t come at all.”

The next morning, we hadn’t heard anything. We decided we needed to be cheered up big-time.

So Marty invented this game where we blew hypodermic needletips through tubing at a skinless anatomy man on the wall. We spat the needles and tried to pin his nads.

It was the beginning of a great day, one of the greatest days of my life. We all played the dart game, and we laughed and sang “I’ll Sex You In.” Everyone was smiling, and it was skip.

The surprise was, Violet was the best at the dart game. She always won. I sucked.

She tried to teach me. It was a complete turn-on. She took my hand and put the tube in my mouth.

She whispered, “Aspirate. With the tongue.”

People were really impressed. Link and Marty were completely hitting on Violet for it, but she didn’t pay them any attention, and sometimes she would stand there with one hand on my shoulder. I could feel that she was putting pressure on it, and that she didn’t need to stand with all her weight because I was there.

Then Loga came in to the hospital for a while, and we were all talking to her about stuff when she stopped for a second because the girls’ favorite feedcast,
Oh? Wow! Thing!,
was on. They were all like, “Tell us what’s happening, tell us what’s happening,” so we all gathered around her in our little gowns, and she sat there cross-legged on the bed and told us, “Okay, so like now Greg’s walking in, and he’s . . . omigod, he’s completely malfunctioning — he’s completely in mal, and Steph is crying on the sofa. Okay, so she goes . . .” And she told us the story of what was happening as it happened, and we all sat there, smiling. I never heard Loga tell a story this good before, and she even used her hands and stuff, and her eyes were vacant like she was seeing some other world, which I guess she was. “Jackie is sitting on the front of the boat? And he holds his hand up, and he’s going . . . he’s going . . . omigod, he goes, ‘Organelle, I always loved you from when we first went sailing.’”

Quendy was like, “Oh, god! This is so romantic!”

“Oh, meg. Big meg. You can feel the breeze on your skin. It’s warm, like those nights, you know, when we’re like — we’re like, ‘We’re always going to be young.’ The breeze is like that. I wish you could feel it.” We all shivered. She said, “You can smell the salt. The moon’s out. It’s high above everything, and soft.”

Quendy actually cried one tear.

Violet and I looked at each other. We didn’t look away.

We still were like that, looking into each other’s eyes and all, when the doctor came in and was like,
What the hell had happened in the examination room, what’s with all the needles?
and he was upgrading to homicidal and going all,
Da da da professional care unit, da da da dangerous and costly da da infection da da da,
etc. Luckily, Link’s mom heard him yelling at us, and she’s a complete dragon, so she gave him a piece of her mind. She told him that we were all suffering from a very stressful experience and we weren’t used to these kinds of stresses and he had to understand that we had to have our fun, too. I still felt kind of bad about it, because we made a big mess, and Violet was completely meg blushing, but at least we didn’t get like shoved into orbit on cybergurneys or something.

I liked being just a few beds away from her. We could wave. We all talked about old music, like from when we were little, and all the stupid bands they had back then, and the stupid fashions we liked in middle school, like the year when the big fashion from L.A. and shit was that everyone wanted to dress like they were in an elderly convalescent home, there was this weird nostalgic chic for that, so we all remembered having stretch pants and velour tops, and Calista had even bought one of those stupid accessory walkers at Weatherbee & Crotch. There were those stupid ads for having your pants pulled up like around your chest. Violet said she still had a cane at home.

When we were eating dinner, sitting on her bed side by side, she said to me, “This is fun.”

“It weirdly is,” I said.

“Maybe these are our salad days.”

“Huh?”

“You know. Happy.”

“What’s happy about a salad?”

She shrugged. “Ranch,” she said.

Violet was off someplace talking to the doctor. I say “someplace” because we were using the examination room to blow needles at the anatomical guy’s basket.

Link and Calista were standing real close by the vibrating bath, and I realized that they had probably decided to hook up. It looked like Calista was getting over Link being so stupid, which was brag, because he’s a nice guy. Quendy sat there on the table, glaring at them.

Violet came back from the doctor. She was all intense looking. I asked what was wrong. She said she’d found a place she wanted to show me. I said sure, and I went with her. We went out into the hall. The shouting from the examination room was more distant. We walked for a ways through some tubes and so on. People floated by automatically on gurneys.

She walked in front of me. Her slippers went
fitik, fitik, sliss, fitik
on the floors. They were soft sounds, like the sounds mouths make when they open and close. I watched her from behind. When we stopped to wait for an uptube, she lifted her ankle so her heel came out of the slipper, and with her toes she slid it back and forth on the tiles without thinking about it. She massaged the floor. When the uptube was free, she settled her foot back in, and walked,
fitik, fitik, sliss, fitik,
right on in.