Was she a freak?
Was wanting to love someone the same as wanting to have sex? Was being lonely the same thing as wanting to share bodies?
Every human and animal on Earth was alive today only because of a two-billion-year unbroken chain of sex, sex, sex. No wonder the world ran on it, look at advertising, look at clickbait, look at jokes. People are robots run by their genes, scraps of code that exist only to keep existing, instructing everyone to care about nothing but seed-spraying, seed-growing, copy-making, or failing that, sublimations like flirting, tonguing, tussling, writhing. One line of code for all life on Earth: if fuckable, then fuck.
Okay, she was a freak, she didn’t want to be reduced to a stand-in for a transport vehicle of soulless monomaniacal fragments of DNA, she was a person, she had thoughts and feelings and a personality, and maybe no one was interested in her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t interesting. Right? Facts are only facts if someone knows them. If no one knew her, did she exist? Being alone used to be enough, but Alex changed that. She wanted to communicate with a special person, she wanted to teach and learn.
On Monday at Qualternion she forced herself to go to Alex. They had said they’d been misreading, so it was no doubt her fault. Forgive her, she had no experience with dates, she must have suggested something in her body language, her eyes. If she could just explain her point of view to Alex, the way the world looked to her, it all made sense in its own way, in her way. Then the two of them could still be friends, maybe better than before, maybe someday Alex would look at things the way she did, and the two of them could hold hands and walk in the park and program together and sleep next to each other and know each other fully and love each other.
Alex cut her off. “No need to apologize, Morticia. It’s okay. I wanted a fling, you didn’t.” They gave what might have been a rueful little laugh. “I can be too much for some people.” She stood there for a second or two, the eloquent thesis she’d rehearsed in her head for two days spinning tractionless. “It really is okay,” they repeated. “Let’s just get back to work.” And they turned away.
She spent the next twenty-four hours refining and rehearsing a slightly different thesis. When she came to work on Tuesday morning she headed for Alex’s workspace, but Alex wasn’t there. They were perched on the edge of Seo-yeon’s desk, deep in conversation. She stood to one side, waiting her turn, until it gradually became clear that Alex was flirting with Seo-yeon. Jokes and inferences pattered back and forth between them. Their eyes sparkled. It was like watching two Ping-Pong players enjoying a nimble game. Neither of them noticed her, probably, when she walked away.
Yes, she was a freak.
She becomes aware again of the world outside the bus window. The huge concrete plain of O’Hare is rotating slowly around the spindle of its control tower as they pass. She can see planes in the air, descending in orderly lines. People hurrying home to partners, beds waiting.
She texts her mother, who’s been pestering her: Don’t worry about me I’m just dandy.
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
“Any news?”
“I got a text from her a minute ago.”
“What did it say?”
“It made me more worried.”
“Noted. What did it say?”
“Hold on a sec. I know you’ll want it word for word.”
“Yes, why not?”
“Need to make sure I’m giving it to you precisely correctly.”
“Our discussion will be more apropos. You must see that.”
“Must I? Apparently, I must. Here it is—‘Don’t worry about me I’m just dandy.’”
“. . . ”
“Yes, Professor?”
“That doesn’t sound like her.”
“Good. Even you see it.”
“That’s not fair.”
“You’re clueless, you’ve said it yourself.”
“Not so much about her. Anyway, I like to think. You’ve spent nearly all the time with her. I wish you had let me—I’ve said all that before.”
“Yes, you have.”
“She didn’t say where she was?”
“I just read you the complete text.”
“Did you—”
“To enable apropos discussion.”
“Did you text her back?”
“I wanted to check with you first.”
“. . . ”
“To see if you’d heard anything from her.”
“I would have told you.”
“Would you have?”
“Of course. I knew you were worried.”
“Whereas you’re not.”
“Not really.”
“Not even now.”
“No, not really.”
“You just said it doesn’t sound like her.”
“It sounds sarcastic, and she’s not usually sarcastic, that’s all. How many times did you text her?”
“You haven’t tried to get in touch with her at all, have you? That’s why she texted me instead of you.”
“I’ve been working—”
“Christ!”
“—and I figured if she wanted to communicate with me, she would.”
“So you’ve never entertained the idea that someone might need reassurance, might need someone else to take the first step. A child needing that from her parent.”
“That’s the subject you’ve made it clear you don’t want to talk about.”
“What’s that?”
“Whose child she is.”
“For Christ’s sake, Mark, she thinks exactly like you.”
“You know I’m not talking about that—”
“Like you squared.”
“You’re wasting time. And by the way, her mind is quite different from mine. She has a temperamental need to be an autodidact. That could help or hurt her, foster originality or make her a crank. I think—”
“Who’s wasting time now?”
“I’m just trying to be accurate.”
“Unlike sloppy me.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m—I’m— Look, could we just talk about this calmly?”
“So you’re telling me to calm down.”
“Yes.”
“. . . ”
“Hello?”
“. . . ”
“Hello?”
1993–1994
Looking back, trying to calm down, she reminds herself that she’s always had a thing for tall, older men. Maybe because her father is short, and she had an allergic reaction to that asshole when she was thirteen. Or maybe because her father seemed tall to her when he mysteriously vanished when she was four years old, and she spent her formative years fantasizing about his whereabouts and activities in
