She listened to the bird singing, her mouth turned up at the corners in a sad smile. “I guess they did once,” she said. “I don’t really know.” She looked back to him. “I never knew them. They didn’t keep me. They dumped me in an orphanage when I was born. It wasn’t so bad really.”
“You’re an orphan?”
She shook her head. “That’s what people will call you, but I looked it up when I was little. An orphan’s parents are dead. My parents didn’t die. They just didn’t want me.”
“They go in the Bin?”
“I guess so.”
“You never tried to find them?”
“It’s them who should be trying to find me.” She spoke quietly. He knew the tone. It was old, quiet anger, like a block of stone, a cornerstone, something to build on.
He nodded sympathetically. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “That was twenty years ago.”
They stood there for a moment. The bird had moved on. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”
She shook her head.
“What’s somebody like you doing being Senator Bozo’s…uh…dinner companion?”
He thought she might be mad, but the question seemed to amuse her. “What do you mean ‘somebody like me’? You don’t even know me.”
“I can tell you’re smarter than he is. He wouldn’t like that.”
She laughed. “Thanks, I think.”
“And you’re nice, too. You didn’t have to say anything when my parents and I got into it, but you were paying attention, you cared about what was going on, and you don’t even know us.”
“Maybe I’m just nosy.”
“Most people in here don’t pay any attention to anybody but themselves. Why should they? Everybody’s okay. Everybody’s got what they want. You’re different.”
She looked down, as if ashamed. “I haven’t been in here very long. Maybe I’ll change.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, though he couldn’t have said why.
She looked up at him and took his hand. “We should go in,” she said. “Show me the way?”
He offered his arm like he’d seen in old videos. She smiled and wrapped her arms around his and walked close beside him as they moved slowly toward the house. He could smell her perfume, feel each place where her body touched his. He didn’t care whether she was real or not. He liked her. He liked her a lot.
At the back door, she said. “I never answered your question.”
He couldn’t remember asking a question she hadn’t answered. He wondered whether she knew some of the ones he hadn’t asked.
She looked up at him, leaned forward confidentially. “I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m doing here with Senator Bozo,” she said, making a face. “He’s not my type.”
“So what’s your type?” he heard himself asking.
“Sweet nephews,” she said, and kissed his cheek.
NO
ONE
SEEMED
TO
MIND
THEY’D
TAKEN
SO
LONG
.
THE
food was on the table. The four of them sat there with their hands in their laps. Nemo expected Dad to make some remark about keeping people waiting and consideration to others, Winston to have that snooty look he got when he was pissed, Mom to be working on a second hankie because her son didn’t appreciate the marvelous dinner she’d worked all day to prepare from scratch. But they all sat there smiling and happy as you please, like some family from a hundred years ago about to say grace.
Nemo seated Justine beside Winson and took the seat opposite her, next to Lawrence. Mom and Dad sat at either end, Mom closet to the kitchen. Everything was done in mid-twentieth century. It could’ve been Ozzie and Harriet’s house. A big drop-leaf table in the style they used to call Early American, a sideboard with coffee mugs hanging on pegs, saying things like MOM’s
COFFEE
and I
NEVER
MAKE
MISTEAKS
. Some of them had pictures of bunnies or kittens on them. The food was laid out “family style,” as Mom called it. Some family, Nemo thought, their son laid out like a dead man, and they can’t even see it. The whole damn world laid out.
Uncle Winston raised his wineglass. “To the birthday boy!” he said, and they all joined in, looking so damn happy it was weird. Nemo looked across the table at Justine, her eyes crinkled up in laughter, her glass held high, and he did feel happy. Maybe I should try to lighten up like Lawrence said, he thought. What the hell, it’s only for tonight.
Mom had made lasagne, Nemo’s favorite when he was ten. She’d made it every birthday for the last eleven years. The smell of Italian sausage and cheese made his mouth water. He took a swallow of wine, and then another. While he was here, he figured he’d eat and drink too much. When he got back to the real world, he’d be sober and hungry. He and Lawrence planned to cook up a rabbit later, maybe have a few drinks from the still Lawrence had built to fuel the generator he’d rigged up. Maybe they’d watch
Harold & Maude or Harvey
again on the antique
VCR
.
“The lasagne’s great, Mom,” he said, and she beamed at him. At his fourteenth birthday party, when the law had just changed, and Mom and Dad were ecstatic, figuring he was coming into the Bin, he’d refused to eat a bite, pointing out the absurdity of virtual people eating virtual food. Mom had sniffled throughout dinner while Nemo and his dad yelled at each other. He’d tried to hurt them, make Mom cry and Dad clench his jaws till the veins stood out on his neck. But venting his rage hadn’t made him feel any better. It hadn’t changed anything. He used to think anger was something you could use up, purge from your system, but now he knew it just fed on itself and made you feel worse. Just let it go, he’d decided. They had their world. He had his. They saw each other twice a year. Surely, he could be cool twice a year.
Justine was talking to his parents. They asked her about Dallas. She talked to them easily, smiling, but she didn’t give out much. Nemo was the only one who knew she didn’t have a family to talk about. Mom and Dad, by the route of their sterotypical ideas about Texas, turned the conversation to stories about Nemo playing cowboy when he was little, a pair of sixguns strapped round his waist, ridiculously cute. Nemo couldn’t believe it. Usually the subject of his childhood—when they all lived together as a family—was strictly off limits.
Justine smiled slightly, her eyes bright as she listened to the stories Nemo already knew. She seemed interested in hearing about him. The wall behind her was covered with photographs, half of them Little Nemo in the real world: A guitar as big as he was hung around his neck. Riding a bicycle—slightly out of focus. Standing on a huge rock waving at the camera, Dad beside him looking down. Turn around, he wanted to say. I’m right behind you. Virtual Nemo was there, too—a scattering of posed pictures in this house, usually on his birthday, a forced smile on his face, his never-aging parents smiling desperately at the camera as Lawrence took their photograph.
Directly above Justine’s head was his parents’ wedding portrait, the shoulders of Dad’s tuxedo so heavily padded in the style of the time that he looked like an inverted pyramid. This was flanked by travel pictures: A sunset somewhere where there were saguaro cactus. Mom in front of the Taj Majal. A polar bear on an ice floe. And a new one, Mom and Dad at the rail of a cruise ship. The life preserver beside them read
FANTASIA
. They always looked the same, but they had changed. The Bin had changed them. They didn’t have a care in the world.
Justine laughed out loud at the punch line of one of the cute-little-Nemo stories and looked at Nemo, her eyes crinkled up. He liked her laugh. It was low and sexy and full of life. Too bad she wasn’t real. Too bad he couldn’t take her home, ride on the graffiti-scrawled Metro, talk all night, drink some of Lawrence’s brew and make love on the sleeping porch under the stars. The real stars. Blazing now that all the factories were shut down, and the cities were as dark as tombs at night. He tried to smile back, but couldn’t manage it.
He looked down at his plate, the food still steaming. He didn’t feel hungry anymore, but he ate anyway. Fresh romano, ricotta, and mozarella. Sausage with red pepper and fennel. Just get through this meal, he told himself, and then I can go home. He drank off his wine and poured another glass. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Lawrence watching him, knowing exactly how he felt. She’d said,
You’re lucky to have such a good friend
.
He was indeed.
NEMO
GOT
THROUGH
THE
MEAL
ON
AUTOMATIC
PILOT
. HE’D say a few words if somebody said something to him, tried to look interested in what everybody else was saying, but he was really just floating there, the way he’d heard you did when you died: You float up above everything and watch yourself dying, with everybody gathered around your body trying to bring you back. Then you turn to this white light, and that’s it, and you’re gone for good. Nemo wondered if he turned around, if he just quit watching his family, whether there’d be that great white light at his back. But in those stories, people come to meet you, people who died before you, people who loved you and looked after you. Who’d meet me? he thought. He didn’t know anybody who’d died. Except his grandmother, who seemed more like words on a page than a real person.
By the time they were sitting around in the den after the cake and the birthday card with a deposit receipt and a bit of doggerel inside, nobody expected Nemo to say much of anything. He was working on another Scotch. He was almost enjoying himself, tuning in and out of their talk about this and that. He listened every time the conversation turned to Justine, but every time she turned it back again, never giving anything away. He knew more about her from their five minutes in the garden than the rest of them did from talking to her all night.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Every once in a while, she’d catch him looking at her and smile, look into his eyes. He wondered what she was doing here, how she’d ended up coming to his birthday party, who she was, and what she cared about, but he couldn’t really talk to her with everybody else around. He had to content himself with watching her, studying the contours of her face. He imagined kissing her, holding her in his arms.
Such thoughts would get him nowhere. Sparks, his mom’s cat, had also taken a fancy to Justine. He curled up in her lap and purred loudly as Justine scratched his head. Like many cats in the Bin, he was a little odd. He was thirty-one years old and hadn’t eaten in five years, somehow knowing he didn’t have to. Every once in a while, he’d snack on the patch of catnip in the garden and go tearing around the house, but mostly he lay in the sun or enlisted some human to pet him, and seemed perfectly content. As Justine listened to Lawrence telling a story about a black lab he’d had in Texas, Sparks stood up and burrowed his head into Justine’s chest. Nemo couldn’t watch anymore.
He shifted in the squishy leather chair he was sprawled in and turned toward his Mom. She was talking about the plight of some friends of hers, asking Uncle Winston if something couldn’t be done for them. She wrung her hands and looked at her big brother as if he were Solomon, and she just knew he could fix anything. Dad also looked at Uncle Winston as if he could fix anything, but he didn’t look so happy about it.
It seemed this couple Mom knew wanted a kid, but it was getting too hard to adopt from outside—meaning the real world was getting low on breeders to meet the demand—and this couple hadn’t made provisions for in vitro before they’d come in.
That was the way it worked ever since kids were allowed in the Bin. Couples going in who didn’t have any kids usually left a few fertilized eggs in the deep freeze in case they ever decided to clutter up their perfect lives with children. Just give the word, and the eggs would be thawed out and brought to term, delivered for uploading and cremation nine months later, no muss, no fuss, no labor pains. Even his mom and dad had stashed away a few ovum for a rainy day, though he knew from many late-night fights that he’d been an accident that had kept them from going into the Bin for years—till they found a way around their consciences. These friends of theirs must’ve gone in a long time back, or they’d been pretty sure they wouldn’t want kids. But that’s the way it was a lot of times—they’d get in here and find out they were bored and thought they needed a kid to play with. Nemo’s heart bled for them.
Uncle Winston was nodding and
hmhm
-ing his concern for his little sister and these people he didn’t even know. This was the routine that got him elected term after term. “Your friends shouldn’t have long to wait,” he said. “Virtual birth will pass this session. I’m sure of it.”
Nemo rolled his eyes, and tried to shut out the drone of Uncle Winston’s campaigning in his sister’s den. Even Justine and Lawrence had dropped their own conversation to listen to the Senator. Nemo had heard it all before. Virtual birth would eliminate having to deal with reality at all. The parents’ genetic uploads would be matched up, and a virtual child was born. A child who never existed in the real world at all, no embryo to mess with, no body to burn. It’d been possible ever since they cranked up the Bin, but it’d been illegal because even all these silicon dwellers weren’t so sure about legalizing a bunch of little tykes who’d never met a hydrocarbon. But this session, everybody said, it’d be legalized. Uncle Winston was leading the good fight for the as-yet-unborn silicon babes.
Everybody quit talking, and Nemo looked around the room. Without realizing it, he must’ve made some sort of grunt of disapproval—it was a bad habit of his when he’d had too much to drink—and everyone was looking at him. He shifted in his chair, and the leather made a noise like a giant wadding up a saddle. He tried to look pleasant, harmless, and attentive. Uncle Winston had this tight-lipped little smile. Dad looked tired. Mom was afraid Nemo was going to spoil another dinner party. Lawrence just watched. He wouldn’t give Nemo any trouble no matter what he said.
You and your folks—that’s none of our damn business
, he often said.
Justine’s eyes looked sad. Nemo couldn’t help looking into them, and he thought he knew what she was feeling. This conversation—talking about some couple who wanted kids, virtual or not—must make her feel awful. She had no parents, would never have any. No laws could change that. Sparks jumped down from her lap and padded off upstairs to sleep on one of the beds. He always avoided unpleasantness.