Rie sort of winces at me, and then the funniest thing happens: She takes my hand.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I’m
“It’s fine. I’ve seen it twenty-seven times. It’s astonishing.”
The voice is back:
“That doesn’t make sense,” Rie whispers.
“The company thinks it’s subliminal,” I say. “Believe me.”
“I hate my brother.”
“Oh.”
The frosted dome cover begins to gently lift from the Virtual Pond. It hovers for a moment before it snaps into a lattice harness on the ceiling, pulling with it, like so many spider webs, the clinking clear-filament netting that encloses the pond and its environment.
Rie whispers, “Whoa.”
Uncovered, the Virtual Pond looks like a cel from a Pixar movie. The blues are so wet and the greens are so crisp. The plantlife is gnarled but it’s accented with, um, “cute” touches, such as tawny freckled trunks and smile- pattern leaves. The water itself is clear as a spring. Silver fish dive and spiral to the surface. You can see the pebbled bottom-ferns, tricks of light, the blipping brown creatures.
At first, you don’t think that the showpiece frogs, the engineered virtuals, are in the pond. You think they’re waiting for the air to warm up, for the sun to blaze a little bit more brilliantly.
I look down the aisle, trying to catch Laurie’s eyes, when it happens. The gasps-all at once, like the whoosh of a roller coaster twisting its first descent. Rie’s got a strong grip, the muscles in my arm are tense where her fingers poke me.
“It’s them,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say.
Them. Three chunky brown rocks covered with moss at the edge of the water. The three sit side by side like little lords, grinning insouciantly. Like boulders that grin-broad, immovable.
Until it moves.
The smallest-it’s the size of a small fat cat-opens its mouth and lets out a low rumble. It lifts its head and takes an astonishing leap and lands with a moist thud, eight yards to its left, scattering a group of small navy- green pygmy frogs, who let out high-pitched shrieks.
The voice purrs:
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Rie says. She lets go of my arm and makes a pucker-face at me.
The voice goes on:
“Oh, come on!” Rie snorts.
The second of the three virtual frogs flies into the air and leaps the entire long length of the pond, like a hurdler showing off. It lands on the opposite shore, bellowing in the direction of a tiny albino toad. Its glistening haunches tremble in the light.
Suddenly, lights mounted in the pond increase in brightness so the water’s utterly translucent. There are hundreds of tadpoles in the water, zipping in circles.
The voice says,
“That’s enough,” Rie says. She looks out at the audience, in tiers behind us and in a high, quivering voice shouts, “Somebody stop the music!”
There’s some laughter, a lot of
I take Rie’s hand. “This is real,” I tell her. “This is really happening.”
Suddenly I feel warmth. I smell algaeic warm wet air. Breath. Venting on my cheek and down my neck. I look over at Rie, and she shakes her head at me. “It’s not me, asshole,” she says.
I turn and meet its eye. The biggest frog. We’re talking twenty pounds. It’s less than a yard from me, its big bull head pushing against the mesh barrier, wheezing and looking right at me. A string of drool hangs from its lower lip.
I let out a little cry, my feet scrabbling along the floor. The frog roars. The mesh is chinking and clanging and groaning with its weight.
“You’re making it happen,” Rie says. “My brother’s making it happen.” But she lets me hold her hand, so I know we’re safe. I look up the tier; Laurie gives me a quick nod.
We’re in a helicopter out of Martin State. There’s an after-party in Talbot County. I am completely smashed, nearly falling asleep, head bouncing against a window. Over the roar of the engine, I can hear Rie behind me, slurring, giggling. “All I could think of was reproduction,” she’s saying. “I kept looking, against my will, at those hips moving like a piston, spewing that filthy clotted cream. Wasn’t it so terrible? Wasn’t it? That was so disgusting. Every time I close my eyes, I just see it-and I think it should be outlawed. Oh, but maybe I want to see it just one more time.”
For a while, no one speaks. I’m kind of staring out at the purple night clouds and the sparkle of the shoreline in the distance.
Rie makes a little purring noise. I can hear her lips. I guess she’s kissing the guy in the seat next to hers.
“My God, honey,” she says all throat, “my brother made that happen.”
GOODWOOD GARDENS BY SUJATA MASSEY
Jeannie always made it a point to say that the house on Goodwood Gardens had never been her choice. Charlie, however, clung to his belief that their first home in
Baltimore had been a marital compromise. It was an argument without an ending-like their family, and like the house itself.
Goodwood Gardens was not actually a park, as the name suggested, but a short residential road in Plat Four, the fourth portion of land developed in the early twentieth century in Roland Park, a magical neighborhood of curving, tree-shaded streets that boasted grand, century-old houses of stone, stucco, and shingle.
The omission of a word such as “street” or “road” or “avenue” in the Gardens’ address was something Jeannie found maddeningly pretentious, but Goodwood Gardens had been established as the city’s millionaire’s row back at the dawning of the twentieth century, and its identity had held. It didn’t seem like a place that anyone, least of all a girl who’d grown up in a ranch house in San Mateo, should have disliked so heartily.
Jeannie and Charlie’s house had been built in the 1920s, making it one of the newer houses on the street. The residence was huge-ten bedrooms, ten baths, and two powder rooms-more than enough room for a family of three. The place reminded one of an embassy, perhaps located in Salzburg or some other romantic Teutonic locale. The exterior was beautifully half-timbered white stucco, and was ornamented with two battlements from which hung, respectively, the flags of the United States and Maryland.
Jeannie had wanted to remove the flags-the previous owners had left in a hurry, not bothering to take them along-but Charlie thought the neighbors would wonder why. So the flags remained, respectfully illuminated through the night by the klieg-like spotlights that nestled around the house: an excellent security feature, but also another way of showing off the structure, making it look more like a State Department residence than the home of
