The pinned post began They tried to shut us down but we’re back. Below that, one story after another, all of which she read in David’s voice.
I tried to tell them it wasn’t working like it was supposed to . . .
It’s hard to find the language to explain the way the Pilot makes my head feel. I got it checked but they said it was working fine.
The FDA said the company hadn’t reported any complaints.
They told me it might take a while to get used to it, and I should do the exercises and wait out the static. I waited. It’s still here.
That last one sounded exactly like David, if you substituted “noise” for “static.”
She read on. She waited for somebody to mention FreerMind, for her children’s worlds to intersect, but the more she read, the more she realized these people weren’t looking for political action or support groups; they were struggling to survive their own heads. Like David.
What she wanted, suddenly and more than anything, was a friend who wasn’t her wife. When was the last time she’d had one? Angie at her old school, years ago; she’d been too embarrassed about the way she’d left to keep in touch. She was friendly with the other non-Piloted teachers here, but they all treated each other like they’d been thrown together by circumstance, not choice; alliances more than friendships, all afraid to seem cohesive lest the whole group get yoked together. She wanted a friend to sit in a coffee shop with, not that she ever did that, or go to a bar with, not that she ever did that anymore, either. Someone to chat about her family with who was outside of her family.
That had never been a thing she needed before. She’d had three modes forever, family, school, and solitary, with no time for anyone else. Where did you find new friends, especially if you narrowed it down to people without Pilots? Online communities weren’t her thing, and she didn’t want to invade Sophie’s space. She wanted to talk with someone who would understand when she said she looked at those lights on the heads of people she loved and she felt like she’d been balancing on top of a fence for too long, and any moment she would fall to one side at the expense of whoever was on the other.
When she looked up, the sun had dropped behind the trees and the joggers had gone. Some fraction of her family was probably waiting for her to come home and make dinner.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
DAVID
When he’d left the military, David waited until he had a plan to tell his family; that seemed the right way to go for this as well. Go in with an announcement, not a question. If he arrived at family dinner and said he’d been let go, they’d have asked a million questions about why and how, alongside the how dare they? editorials. Then they’d suggest places for him to apply, and offer to look at his résumé, and before you knew it, the whole thing would have been a family project.
He didn’t want a collaborative process. He wasn’t sure what he was qualified for, or what he wanted to do, for that matter. He didn’t have a college degree, but he had plenty of life skills. He’d learned a lot from the military and the job with BNL.
He left the house every day in his BNL polo to stave off questions. He spent the mornings applying for jobs, and in the afternoons he went to the park and took one of the pills Alyssa had given him. They’d been introduced as Fortress of Solitude, but he had started thinking of them simply as Quiet.
The park was his own dare, a chaotic environment of joggers and ducks and ships and strollers and dogs and children and waves and sky that evened itself out as the pill kicked in, smoothing the sounds, the colors, the movement in his peripheral vision. He was exposed there on his bench, a target in the open. Sitting there, in the Quiet, he proved to himself over and over that not everyone was out to get him.
He’d told Alyssa he wanted the pills for a party game like hers, and she had given him a dozen in a breath-mint tin; he ran out in a week. He didn’t want her to know how many he was taking, in case she told Karina who then told Milo, but one day at the park he noticed someone else sitting the way he did, and he struck up a conversation, and that guy gave him a name and number, and before he knew it, he had a guy who was happy to sell him as many as he needed, no questions asked.
Alyssa hadn’t told him to space the pills out. She hadn’t said anything about them at all, and he went out of his way not to seek any information. He didn’t want anything to disrupt the Quiet. He wouldn’t have minded taking a second one as the first wore off, to sit in the Quiet forever. His self-restraint in taking only one every afternoon was his way of showing himself it wasn’t a problem.
Okay, sometimes he took a second in the evening, but that was a reward for the progress he was making on being out in public without panicking, just as the first was a reward for a morning spent sending out his résumé, going on interviews, concocting new and creative ways to explain parting ways with BNL. If he took one in the morning occasionally, that was to relax before interviews, to concentrate on what mattered and filter out the noise so he didn’t spend the whole time tracking every hand movement, every rattling air vent, every flickering fluorescent, every intern in every busy hallway.
He’d been on twenty-seven first interviews and one second interview without a single offer. The first
