Outside, the music and conversation spilled from the apartment but the sound was baffled buffered diffused except for somebody shouting something a joke an anecdote something endless above it all. There were sirens far off but they didn’t get closer. He had a feeling an inevitability in his stomach a knowledge this was a party where the cops were going to get called. Mixed-race mixed-class city-suburb neighborhood same for the party probably the kind where the police knock politely and say everyone has to leave not the kind where people end up arrested but it could go either way any night always depending on who came and what mood they were in and the response when they opened the door and what the neighbors had said and of course all of this was hypothetical. The air smelled like the flower he didn’t recognize, drippy white and yellow blooms.
“What are you feeling?” He asked because he was curious and she was clearly altered and he still didn’t know which way he was going and this was all a terrible idea but information would be good at this point.
“It’s pretty cool.” The barrier he leaned on at chest height was at her shoulders, so she lifted her forearms onto it and put her chin on her hands. “Actually, describing it would be cool. I’ll try. It’s like even more input. Like, that honeysuckle is overwhelming, heady, sweet, and I’ve never seen somebody pot honeysuckle before, but it looks healthy so I guess it’s working, and I wonder if it could grow big enough to sort of flow over the balcony’s edge and if that’s allowed here—Karina says there are rules against everything in this complex. And I keep counting the cars in the parking lot and I know exactly where everyone is in that bedroom and they’re all watching us and Justin—the guy in the corner—keeps picking between his toes which is disgusting in company but he clearly doesn’t care or doesn’t think anyone is noticing and Alex on the bed is looking at you like you’re a snack and they’re trying to decide if I’m hitting on you or not and I can pick out at least six different voices of people I know in the living room and I can almost kind of follow all their conversations at once but it’s a little confusing and there’s a black cat slinking at the edge of the parking lot and it’s a rush like a rush of information a rush of stimulation it’s like I can follow all of it at once and it would be overwhelming if I didn’t also have this feeling of competence, like I can keep up, this is just me. Why are you staring at me?”
David knew he was staring, the same as he knew the heady sweet scent and now he knew it was called honeysuckle and he heard the conversations even if he didn’t know the people behind the voices, and the cat had already twice pounced at prey in the dark—mice or voles or something else small and fast and elusive, the cat did not succeed either time, but was already hunting again, and this was him, this was always him.
This was a chance to ask without sounding stupid, for once. He chose his words carefully. “How much more, um, information is it than you’re used to?”
She cocked her head. “A lot? I think it would be exhausting for any length of time.”
“But, like, what’s it like normally?”
“Normal.”
She gave him a look like he was asking weird questions, like people always did. As far as they were concerned, a Pilot felt like a Pilot and there was no point in trying to describe that to others, particularly others who also had one.
He tried again. “I’m trying to get a sense of how different it is.”
“Okay, you know how normally you—no, I can’t put it into words. It’s like there’s that and then there’s this and this is so much more than that. Hey, the cat caught something.”
They both watched the triumphant black shadow move against the black trees.
Oh, how he wished she had said something else. He wished she’d put words to normal the way nobody ever did. Even now it rose in him, agitation desperation anger at everyone who said his Pilot was normal managed to make him feel like he was somehow abnormal without being willing to say as much, yes, abnormal for his questions, but they couldn’t fathom that his Pilot might be different that he might be different, no, they assumed he couldn’t handle it, that the thing falling down the thing failing was his cope his competence not the implant in his head surely nothing was wrong with that. Sometimes he wondered if other people had this problem. He’d wondered it so many times but he didn’t know where to find them or how to find them without calling more attention to himself.
His sister said he worked for the devil and he told her he needed to—was that a betrayal? Did she know what it was like in his head? How could he explain why he was working for them anyway, how he was sure it was him that was wrong and not the Pilots in general nobody ever said they felt like this this mounting surmounting mountain of stimuli God if Alyssa had said “noise” he would have dropped to one knee and asked her to marry him just for the sheer relief of hearing someone else say it. As it was, disappointment settled over him like a
