“You don’t,” I say.
In fact, she looks gorgeous, a subtle blush job hiding any remnants of bedbug warfare. Wendy’s made-up face offers comforting wisdom: the past can’t be erased, but it can be hidden until it’s forgotten, buried beneath layers of powder and pigment.
“I’m sorry too,” Wendy says. She means for overreacting, but also for more, it seems, from her refusal to meet my eyes or accept an embrace.
“I’m sorrier,” I say back, and spread my arms to show the breadth of my remorse. “I fucked up. I know I fucked up. But I can fix it now.”
I hold out my hand and show her the bracelet. She doesn’t ask questions, but I sense she understands what it means. Maybe Lucas already explained. Wendy raises her chin so that our eyes align. She puts a fingernail at the nexus of her brows, drags it down across her nose and over her mouth.
“I fucked up,” I say.
“I fucked Lucas,” she says.
The kind of drinking we’re doing doesn’t warrant toasts or salutations or even the comforting clap of a sisterly hand across one’s spine. Only the liquor will get rid of this feeling, and only after Rachel and I finish this bottle and I stumble to bed and go black.
Tom Breem’s press conference plays on TV. He explains why he voted against the UBI. The Suit™, Breem thinks, provides a better solution to the unemployment problem. “An American solution,” he says.
In the end, Breem wasn’t the deciding vote. Six other Democrats switched from yea to nay. All cited The Suit™ as a mitigating factor. Beyond these walls, my colleagues surely celebrate; the result of the vote means our industry’s saved. There will be no looting or riots tonight. Even the radicals seem strangely compliant. We’ve reached another inevitable point on the journey from status quo to status quo.
Soon we’re burping, a chorus of escaped air. Rachel burps the alphabet. She burps the national anthem. We are burping and drinking and all I know is it’s dark: this lightless room, the drone-less sky.
Wendy
It’s a bad day for the beach, overcast with intermittent thunder. I like the cool wind off the water, clouds changing shape as they move across the sky. The Coast Guard used to store artillery here. The old fort is covered in graffiti. Condoms and bottles cover its sandy floor. It’s the kind of place where they find bodies on cop shows. A man fumbles with his girlfriend’s zipper and trips. There, in the dark, lies a decomposing corpse.
Despite the damp, the graffiti looks fresh: uranium greens and popping oranges outlined in silver. None of it is beautiful or artistically rendered, not like the subway trains of my Manhattan childhood. Today’s spray-can artists shoot and run. They leave tags or simple logos, rudimentary marks of existence, poorly rendered self-promotional campaigns. No one takes the time to stencil belabored visions. This is art that captures the ephemeral moment; you can see, in the fluidity of the lines, the speed with which one gets from A to B. One thing I have now is time.
I spread the blanket and we sit, me on the blanket, Olivia suspended on the band of linen stretched between my knees. I’ve begun to dress like the women in the catalogues that arrive on my doorstep unsolicited. My colors are earth tones and muted blues. My fabrics drape loosely and flow. Beneath them, The Suit™ hugs my skin. Its aerating system lets the breeze inside.
I rock my daughter in the hammock of my skirt, attempting to match the ocean’s laps, which swing in a kind of ideal cursive, both slack and exact. Olivia smiles. Spit pools at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes follow the path of a drone on the shoreline. Seagulls scatter.
The Suit™ measures my body’s mechanisms: its waves and punctuations, the regulated movements of water and blood. This information bounces off satellites and towers. It swims invisibly through the air. Once the data leaves my body, then it’s no longer mine, and, in a sense, I find that freeing, like a purge or a cleanse. What, after all, do these numbers mean? They are immaterial representations. I retain the fleshly stuff of life.
The beach’s only other occupants are a couple of young men who wear bathing suits despite the sky’s sunless state, and a female counterpart, fully clothed. I can’t tell if any of them wear Suits™ beneath. Not everyone does, though it’s much more common among the young.
The trio look like they’re having fun. They drink canned margaritas and kick a semi-deflated soccer ball. The men bury each other in sand. When the ball becomes too deflated to kick, they take turns wearing it on their heads. Olivia likes their laughter. I like hers.
The trio reminds me of Michael and Ricky and me. Michael walking on his heels in hot sand to protect the tender balls of his feet. Ricky wearing my sun hat and doing Audrey Hepburn. I wanted to wrap them around each other and fit myself in the alcoves. I wanted to love Ricky because Michael loved him. I was a different person then, laid across those hours, half burnt, half in love.
The drone circles back and hovers just overhead. I’m used to surveillance. I like to imagine Lucas stationed at a monitor, observing his daughter’s growth. He hasn’t reached out. I’m not certain he knows she exists.
The last time I saw Michael in person was after Greg’s keynote at DisruptNY. I watched his physical reaction when I told him: body falling under gravity’s pull, a sharp increase in the speed of his breath. Michael fell to his knees and wrapped his arms around my calves. For a moment, he said nothing. Then he stood. He stepped away and paced, building speed as he circled the room, nearly tripping over Greg’s scattered clothes.
A few
