But her breasts are not tissue. They are what provided Molly with sustenance for the first year of her baby’s life. They are part of what signaled her transition from girl to young woman—changes she hated at first and didn’t want, then wanted just a little bit more of, then eventually came to feel were just right. In Quinn’s opinion, her breasts are one of her more attractive features, and certainly a long-time obsession of her ex-husband’s. They are not just something she has; they are part of who she is.
Quinn does not think she can go through this alone. If she has to, she will call her mother or her brother, but not yet. Once again, her eyes dip to the message queue icon, which now looks as if it has fallen asleep and is dreaming of kittens and birthday cake. Last night, about halfway through her third glass of wine, Quinn sent the long, vulnerable email that she’d written to her ex-husband after scheduling the appointment and that had sat in her outbox awaiting sufficient courage—liquid or otherwise. And now she is waiting to find out whether James is open to not just being with her during the procedure, but, when all of this is behind them, maybe even trying again.
The day after her diagnosis, Quinn called her doctor’s office and left a message for the breast surgeon asking if there was any reason why she would not be able to have children after the procedure. In her experience, doctors seldom do anything they cannot bill an insurance company for, but the surgeon called her right back and spent fifteen minutes reassuring her that not only would she still be able to get pregnant, but unless further treatment was required, she would even be able to breastfeed. At that moment, as Quinn covered her mouth and wept into the phone and her doctor waited patiently for over a minute for her to be able to speak again, she realized that—even though having a child was like removing a critical organ from inside your body and letting it out into the world on its own where anything might happen to it, and if anything ever did, you would never be able to recover—Quinn was not yet ready to give up on being a mother.
29
GHOSTS
HENRIETTA SITS ACROSS from a hologram of her long-dead father. She prefers him as a room-scale projection rather than the crisp, light-field refraction you get from metaspecs. Sometimes images focused directly against your retina can feel a little too real. But when you give them some space, the spontaneous quantum behavior of photons lends them a warm, otherworldly radiance.
The effect works best when it is dark, so all the lights in Henrietta’s apartment are out. That means the scene is lit solely by the incandescence of her father’s angelic presence. Henrietta is sitting on the floor, her back against the couch, her crisscrossed legs tucked under a coffee table bestrewn by a generous spread of Korean takeout. The only space not occupied by redolent, miniature plates is her father’s virtual tray. When she was setting the whole thing up, Henrietta nudged the projection until his meal was right where it needed to be to make the illusion feel uncannily real.
It has to be Korean whenever the two of them have dinner together. The neural network that is resurrecting her father was trained on hundreds of hours of video footage, and Korean cuisine was all he was ever recorded eating. Of course, Henrietta is free to wrap her own mouth around a bean and cheese burrito or feed on greasy slices of sausage and olive pizza, but then the smell in the apartment would be all wrong. Olfactory memory is a critical ingredient in the transcendental experience.
She has him dialed down slightly in age—about a decade closer to her happiest and most salient memories. And she has him dressed casually: an open cable-knit cardigan over a patterned oxford. That’s what she remembers him wearing on evenings and weekends when they worked on projects together or went on long walks, talking about anything and everything. Henrietta’s first word was appa, Korean for “daddy,” and that was what she called her father up until their very last conversation.
As far back as she can remember, he called her olppaemi, Korean for “owl.” Sometimes saekki olppaemi, or “owlet.” The story of Henrietta’s nickname starts with the fact that she spent most of the first eight years of her life in the constant presence of ghosts.
She probably started seeing them the day she was born, but it wasn’t until she was four that she developed the language to express what she was experiencing. They weren’t just people, she told her parents. They were animals and objects, too. Sometimes words and numbers. Symbols. Usually several different things mixed together into one unique and mysterious entity. They were always right there—everywhere she looked—and she could not understand why nobody else ever saw them.
When she was five, her parents decided that Henrietta’s ghosts were more than just an overactive imagination. The neurologist they took her to couldn’t identify a cause and suggested a psychiatric evaluation. A month later, two different psychiatrists had diagnosed her with schizophrenia and were collaborating on an aggressive protocol of antipsychotic medication. Over the course of two years, they experimented with various combinations and adjusted her dosage. The drugs dramatically affected her moods and stunted her growth, but Henrietta never once stopped seeing her ghosts.
And then one day, Henrietta’s father threw away all her medication and told his daughter that he believed that her ghosts were real. Her mother had forbidden her from speaking of them, so Henrietta had grown ashamed, but her father was eventually able to get her to talk to him again about what she saw. He sat her down at a table facing a blank,
