Tell the Machine Goodnight

“Rhett!” Linus shouts, and suddenly, it’s a year ago, and I never left them. “My man!” He’s smiling big, his arms stretched wide in welcome. A couple of the girls, Brynn and Lyda, rush over to fuss at me. (“You look so good, so much better.” “Yeah, there’s, like, color in your cheeks.”) These two would make a project out of me if they could. Astrid gives a half wave, and Ellie calls out, “Hey, skinny,” causing a couple of the others to shoot her looks, which she ignores. Josiah doesn’t say anything until I catch his eye. As usual, his bangs are in dire need of a cutting. “Hey, man,” he says so softly I only know what the words are because I can read them on his lips.

The classroom is seminar style, so instead of desks there’s a conference table and swivel chairs. Brynn and Lyda guide me to the head of the table, where the teacher usually sits.

“Are you back?” Linus asks.

And it occurs to me that I could be. I could say yes and, just like that, be back with my class at Seneca Day just in time for my senior year. The school would let me. The doctors would, too. Mom would be overjoyed. But I look around at them, these too-familiar eleven faces, and I just can’t. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s nothing that any of them did, and it’s nothing that I think they would do. I just know that if I came back I’d stop eating again. And, look, I’m not saying I want to eat. But for the first time, I maybe want to want to.

Josiah is staring down at his lap. All the others are watching me. Saff has her lips parted like she’ll step in for me if I can’t answer.

“No. I’m doing a project for school,” I say. “Cyberschool,” I amend. And if there’s any disappointment that I’m not returning to Seneca Day, it’s whisked away by their excitement over the Apricity I set out on the table.

No one resists taking the Apricity. Everyone is willing to be, as Mom would say, swabbed and swiped. The only hint of hesitation comes from Ellie, who announces, “I don’t need to be told what makes me happy,” though she sucks on her cotton swab along with the rest of them. Ten times, I brush the cotton on a computer chip and fit the chip into the side of the machine, just like I’ve seen Mom do. And Saff and I lie to the class a second time, saying that my screen battery just ran out and that I’ll have to take it home to recharge it before I can get their results from the machine.

“So we’ll see you again?” Josiah says, a little stiffly. I can’t tell if this means that he wants to see me again or that he doesn’t.

Before I can answer, Smitty pops his head into the room, making a surprised face at seeing me there. “Rhett! What a surprise! If I’d known you were coming I would’ve baked you …” He trails off, embarrassed.

“A cake?” I finish the sentence for him. “Sorry, Smitty. Not hungry. Haven’t you heard? Never hungry.” And after an awkward pause, everyone laughs. Even me.

CASE NOTES 3/28/35, LATE AFTERNOON

SUSPECT APRICITY RESULTS

Linus: arrange fresh flowers, visit Italy, sing out loud

Josiah: put a warm blanket on your bed, spend time with your sister,

Astrid: take the night bus, drop math class, get a tattoo

Ellie: run ten miles a day, write poetry, don’t listen to your father

“I DON’T SEE ANYTHING SUSPICIOUS,” Saff says. “Do you?”

I shuffle through the results again, reluctant to tell her that I don’t see anything suspicious either. We’re sitting on the floor in my room, Saff with the tube of cookies again. She’s eating so frenetically I’ve lost count.

“I was hoping someone’s might say, Tell the truth, or Apologize to Saff,” she says through a mouthful of crumbs. “Isn’t that stupid?”

“No. That’s actually the kind of thing that happened when the police used Apricity in interrogations, you know, when that was still legal. It’s like the person’s guilt is what’s keeping them from being happy.”

“Well. I guess whoever did it must not feel guilty then,” Saff murmurs. “They must think I deserved it.”

“Yeah, maybe. But then again, whoever did it is pretty fucked up.”

She sighs. “What’d you get?”

“‘Get’?”

“On the Apricity?”

“I didn’t take it.”

“Yeah, but when you have?”

“I’ve never taken it.”

“What? Never? But your mom,” she says. “It’s, like, her job.”

I keep my eyes on the results. “Uh-huh. So?”

“So you’ve never even been curious?”

“I’m just not interested.”

“You’re not interested in happiness?”

“Yeah.” I look up at her. “Exactly.”

She narrows her eyes. “I’d think sad people would be the ones most interested in happiness.”

“I’m not sad.”

“Yeah,” she says, deadpan. “Me neither.”

We look at each other for a minute, but what is there to say? We’re both sad. So what.

“You know what’s funny?” I push our friends’ results at her. “What’s the first thing you think of when you look at this?”

“That I can’t imagine Linus arranging flowers?”

“Okay, but in general, looking at all of them, what do you think?”

She flips through the pages. “I don’t know. They don’t make much sense.”

“That’s what I mean,” I tell her. “Apricity results sound random. They don’t make sense. ‘Take the night bus.’ ‘Arrange fresh flowers.’ ‘Drop math class.’” I pause, then say, “‘Recite French verbs. Shave your eyebrow. Eat a bar of soap.’ The things you did on zom, it’s like someone made you do a reverse Apricity.”

“Oh.” Saff raises her hands to her mouth, and her bracelets clang. “I think maybe I took one.”

“An Apricity?”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“You mean that night? You remember something?”

“Maybe,” she repeats, her eyes tracking back and forth as she tries to remember. “Maybe in an arcade?”

They have those remakes of the old fortune-teller machines with the papier-mâché Gypsy. You press your finger to a metal panel and the machine prints out a contentment plan. It’s not a real Apricity, though. There’s no DNA involved, no computing. It’s just a game.

“There’s an arcade on Guerrero, isn’t there?”

“Yeah. The Tarnished Penny.”

“Isn’t it just a couple blocks from Ellie’s house? Do you think you went there that night?”

“I told you. I don’t remember that night.” She brings her hands up higher, over her face, and I think of Astrid saying, I like it better in here. From behind her hands, Saff says, “Rhett. What did I do?”

CASE NOTES 3/29/35

Josiah’s Apricity results (in full):

Put a warm blanket on your bed.

Spend time with your sister.

Tell someone.

SO MAYBE I LIED TO SAFF. Because maybe it’s a clue, and maybe it’s nothing. Tell someone. This was Josiah’s last Apricity recommendation. I deleted it from his results before showing her. I rationalize the omission because the Apricity said, Tell someone, not Tell everyone. I rationalize it because I know I’ll do what’s right when it comes to Saff. And I know that sounds like some stupid hero-with-a-moral-code bullshit or whatever, but I also know that it’s true, that I’ll do right by her.

The pattern of the carpet in Josiah’s building gives me that taffy-stretch feeling of familiarity. It’s a deep purple geometric pattern—octagons within octagons within squares. We used to play out here, Josiah and me, building miniature cities out of the shapes, setting up our pewter men. When Josiah answers the door, that’s familiar, too. Though when I’d come here before, he’d open it and already be partway back to his room, knowing I’d follow him there. Today he leans in the doorway, filling the space, and I wonder if he’s going to tell me to go away. After a second, though, he swings the door open, and we go into the living room together, sitting across from each other in the two stiff decorative chairs I’ve never seen anyone in the Halu family actually sit in before.

“They’re out,” he says, nodding toward the rest of the apartment. “Rosie has a game.”

“How’s Rosie?” I ask. She’s his little sister. I like Rosie.

“Yeah, she’s good. Um.” Josiah flips his bangs out of his eyes, but they fall right back to where they were. His eyes, for the second I can really see them, look nervous. “So what did it say?”

“The Apricity, you mean?”

“I’m guessing that’s why you’re here.”

“Or maybe I came because I missed you.”

I don’t plan on saying this. It just comes out of my mouth, and when it does, I realize that I have missed Josiah. Also, that I’m angry at him for staying away. I know this isn’t fair, to not return his texts or calls and to expect him to keep trying. But there it is. The truth. The truth is I thought he’d keep trying.

Josiah leans forward. “Really?” He sounds genuinely curious.

“Nah,” I lie.

He smiles and leans back. “Yeah. Nah. It’s that damn machine.”

“It said you have something to tell someone. I thought maybe”—I shrug, suddenly embarrassed—“you could tell me.”

He bows his head, fingers playing at his lips. This is Josiah thinking.

“The machine thinks you’ll feel better if you tell me,” I say. “Happier.”

“I don’t know if I want to feel happier,” he murmurs.

“Why wouldn’t you want to be happy? If you could?” It is, I realize, a different version of the same question Saff asked me.

He raises his head. “I don’t know if I deserve it. You know?”

And I do know. Oh man, do I know.

“It’s about Saff, isn’t it?” I say. “It’s about that night.”

Josiah looks at me for a second, then he just gets up and leaves the room. I wonder if I’m supposed to follow him or maybe leave the apartment altogether. He comes right back, though, and drops something in my lap, a slip of paper. At first, I think maybe it’s a dose of zom, but it’s too big for that, and opaque. It’s just regular paper.

HAPPINESS AWAITS!

IF YOU DO THESE THREE THINGS:

1 LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

2 TAKE CARE OF YOUR PRETTY FACE

3 USE FRANGESSE™ LEMON BEAUTY BAR

Except that’s not exactly it. Each of the recommendations has been doctored in silver pen.

HAPPINESS AWAITS!

IF YOU DO THESE THREE THINGS:

1 RECITE LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE NAKED

2 TAKE CARE OF YOUR PRETTY FACE SHAVE OFF YOUR LEFT EYEBROW

3 USE EAT A FRANGESSE™ LEMON BEAUTY BAR

The handwriting isn’t familiar, but then it doesn’t need to be. I already know whose handwriting it is. Josiah is watching me through the brush of his overgrown bangs, waiting for me to finish reading and figure it all out. And I do. Saff ’s mystery. I solve it.

“She did it to herself,” I say.

Josiah nods.

“She dosed herself and asked you to tell her what to do when she was under,” I continue. “She made you promise.”

I don’t have to ask why Saff would choose Josiah to help carry out her punishment. If she could get him to make a promise, Josiah would keep it. He’s a good guy. That’s why he was my friend. Josiah is a hero with a moral code, no bullshit. Except he doesn’t look so heroic just now. He looks pale and pretty much terrible.

“I didn’t know she was going to dose herself like that,” he says. “She waited until I promised and then stuck the zom on her collarbone. That close to the neck, you go out.”

“She doesn’t remember any of that night.”

“On her collarbone,” he repeats. “I’m surprised she remembers any of that week. I almost didn’t go through with it, Rhett. I really almost didn’t. But we were playing this stupid game—”

“I know. She was the scapegoat.”

He stares at his hands like he’s just discovered them lying there in his lap. “I didn’t do it because she was the scapegoat. Kind of the opposite. I did it because she asked me to. And I thought the scapegoat deserved a moment of … of respect. She explained it to me. Why she wanted to do it.”

“Because of how she treated Astrid?”

“She said she needed to know how it felt. How she’d made Astrid feel. She said she was afraid of becoming someone who couldn’t feel things.”

“So you did it,” I say.

“Yeah. I did it. But I took the soap away from her when she got sick. It was enough. I got Ellie. We cleaned her up, got her dressed and home.”

I ask one more question, though I already know the answer to this one, too. “Why didn’t you tell her? After, I mean. Why didn’t you and Ellie tell Saff that it was her all along?”

“She made me promise that, too: not to tell her. She said it’d ruin it. That it’d make it feel, like, noble or something. And that the whole point was to feel like Astrid did. Like a victim.” He shakes his head. “I didn’t know she was going to get you to—you’re trying to find out what happened that night, right?”

“She asked me to help her,” I say, but the sentence doesn’t have the same power as it did before, when I would think it to myself.

“I kind of figured that out when you showed up together at school.” Josiah shakes his head. “I should’ve known she’d go to you.”

“Wait. Why?”

“Well, because of the Apricity. Because deep down she must remember taking it.” He gestures at the paper in my hand. “And she knows your mom works for the real thing.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“And because she always talks about you.”

“She does?” It’s a stupid question, but that’s what I ask: She does?

“Yeah. Out of the blue, she’ll say, I wish Rhett was here, or I wonder how Rhett is doing. She’s the only one of us who actually says …” He shakes his head again. “But we’re all thinking it, man. I hope you know that.”

“Yeah, I know,” I say, and suddenly it’s true: I do know it.

A little while later, when Josiah walks me out, he says, “So I’ll see you again?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Soon?” he says.

“Yeah,” I agree. “Soon.”

CASE NOTES 3/30/35

THE SOLUTION

I can now conclude with reasonable certainty that Saffron Jones committed the perfect crime. She built a machine of revenge and set it to run, concocting a series of unsavory tasks, eliciting the help of Josiah Halu to carry them out, giving herself an amnesiac dose of zom. She did this to assuage the guilt she felt over bullying Astrid Lowenstein during the Scapegoat Game. Because of the effects of the drug and the promise of secrecy she exacted from Josiah, Saff doesn’t remember that she was not just victim but also culprit. Cruelest are the punishments we visit upon ourselves.

I MEET UP WITH SAFF, ready to tell her that I’ve done it. I’ve solved her mystery. Even if I don’t know how I’m going to tell her the truth, even if I don’t know how she’ll react when I do. We drive to Golden Gate Park again, to that same road behind the flower conservatory where we met to figure things out right at the beginning. Six days and a thousand years ago. The whole way there, I’m thinking about how I should say it, what the best words would be. I’m thinking that if she cries I’ll go ahead and pat her arm. Or hug her? But before I can say anything, Saff cuts the engine, looks at me level, and says, “You know, don’t you?”

“It was you,” I say, all my careful words gone from my head. “You did it to yourself.”

I see her take the news. I see it change the smallest things about her face. She doesn’t cry, even though her eyes are big like she might. She breathes in shakily through her nose, then out again.

“Okay,” she finally says in a small voice. “Okay. I remember now. I mean, I remember enough.”

“Do you want me to tell you the rest?”

“Don’t.”

She turns and looks out through the windshield. I watch her profile for a second, but I hate people staring at me, so I turn and look where she’s looking, which is up. I remember how you can see the spires of the conservatory through the treetops. I search for them there among the green.

We’re quiet for a minute, just looking. Then Saff says, “I thought maybe it was the Apricity that told you to stop eating.”

“What?” I say. “No.”

So many people have asked me why I refused to eat, my parents, my doctors, my therapists, my nurses, Josiah, and that’s just naming the headliners. But Saff doesn’t ask me why. I mean, she does, but she asks it in a way that I can understand.

“Motive?” she says.

I glance over at her, and she’s looking straight back at me.

“Come on: motive?” she repeats.

And I do something all the Apricities in the world could never have predicted. I go ahead and answer her.

“It felt strong. Denying myself something I needed to feel strong. Not giving in when I was hungry felt strong.”

“Okay.” She nods. “Yeah, okay. I get that.”

But somehow I’m still explaining. Because suddenly there’s more. “I think it’s that I wanted to be what’s essential. I wanted to be, like, pure.”

“Shit, Rhett.” She smiles, her eyes big and bright and sad. “Me too.”

And I want to tell her that her smile is what’s essential, that her smile is what’s pure. But I could never say something like that out loud.

So I do what I can. I lick my thumb, reach for her face, and rub the eyebrow pencil away. There are little hairs in an arc, just starting to grow back. Then I do something more. I lean over and kiss her, there above her eye, where her eyebrow used to be.

Means: I am brave.

Motive: I want to kiss her.

Opportunity: She bends her head forward to meet my lips.

Brotherly Love

Carter heard the stories before he met the man: Thomas Igniss, the new contentment technician manager for Apricity’s Santa Clara office. The position was a top spot, a notch above Carter’s job as manager for the San Francisco office. Santa Clara was where it happened, down there in Silicon, working shoulder-to-rump with the boys in R&D. Carter hadn’t even known the job was opening up, not until after it had already been filled. And Igniss an outside hire! Skrull’s people must have tapped the guy, like the recruit for a secret society. Carter imagined a whiff of cigar smoke, the feel of a stately finger on his own shoulder, a tap, tap that spelled out, Yes. You. Carter’s own shoulder remained unfingered, the air around him disappointingly clear of smoke. It crossed Carter’s mind that he should feel envious of Igniss, but since the promotion had been lost before it’d even been coveted, his envy came out miniaturized, not a punch in the gut, more a pimple on the earlobe.

Shortly after Igniss’s arrival followed the lore. That Thomas Igniss hadn’t come gimlet-eyed from the East Coast, like most managers, but had been forged deep in the Midwest, from the twang, from the heartland. That Thomas’s people (not his “family” or “relatives,” but his people) worked livestock, going back three generations. That Thomas himself had hay-bucked through college. (Carter had looked this up, this bucking of hay, to see what it entailed and had found pictures of leaning, heaving men, the sun pitching spears of light across their broad shoulders.) That even with his salt-of-the-earth background Thomas Igniss was no bumpkin. That his Adam’s apple rested on a perfect four-in-hand knot of jacquard silk tie. That he spoke fluent Italian; that he spoke fluent Korean (and which language was it? Did the man speak both?); that he’d carpentered the office conference table himself out of sustainable wood; that he’d briefly dated Calla Pax before she was famous; that he was currently dating a burlesque-dancer-cum-bike-messenger named Indigo.

Carter had no such stories. He was the son of an electrical engineer (father) and a kindergarten teacher (mother). He’d grown up an hour away in Gilroy, notable only for its garlic stink. His childhood had been a pastiche of evenings watching popular sitcoms, the couches the actors sat upon in their fake living rooms a nicer version of his family’s own couch. Carter’s mother collected cow figurines, Holsteins and heifers on every table and shelf, and for no reason the woman could articulate. Have you ever even touched a cow? Carter had recently asked her. She’d looked so confused. Why would I touch a cow? she’d said. That was his mother all over, and his father with his tatty books of Sudokus. But that wasn’t Carter. Carter had made it into a top B-school, made it out of a lingering childhood pudge, and, in quick succession, scored Angie and a job at Apricity. From there it had been up and—to Carter’s simultaneous astonishment and vindication—up some more. Carter considered himself a self-made man, not that it’d been easy when he’d been given such shit materials to work with.

CARTER AND THOMAS FINALLY MET at the spring team-builder in Napa. The “TB,” everyone called it. It was supposed to have been just Carter’s office at the Napa TB, but then two days before go-time, Santa Clara’s TB had fallen through (a foible with the required waiting period for hang-glide certification), and it was decided that the two TBs should merge.

“It’s a regular TB outbreak,” Carter said to Pearl, who someday was going to laugh at one of his jokes.

In reply, Pearl coughed. Carter couldn’t tell if she was continuing the TB joke or if she simply had a tickle in her throat. They were standing in a Napa winery tasting room. He tried and failed to catch her eye, but she’d turned her head, so he could only see the back of her neck. She’d cropped her short hair even shorter than before; now the ends curled around her earlobes. He wanted to tell her it’d looked better long, but he’d wait for the right moment so as not to offend her. Pearl swished her wine and spit in the barrel.

The spit barrels were the only things Carter liked about the wineries, which made the flimsiest attempts at refinement—the sommeliers’ blouses a shiny acrylic, the words Tasting Room in big brass letters over the door, the branding absolutely everywhere. At the last one, they’d been selling polo shirts with the winery’s name embroidered over the tit. “Something-or-other & Sons.” Carter didn’t understand why you would wear that on your chest unless you were either the Something-or-other or one of his sons.

He was already regretting the wine tour, which had been whose idea? Not Carter’s. Owen’s? Izzy’s? Not Pearl’s. Pearl had, in fact, tried to get out of the TB, something vague about her teenage son. Carter had told her no dice. After all, wasn’t he leaving Angie alone with their baby daughter, and she barely three months old? The TB was only two nights, he’d told Pearl. Required.

At this point in the afternoon, it was certainly feeling required. The group was at its third winery, and the grapes, both literal and figurative, were withering on the vine. There’d been a campaign in San Francisco that year asking people to drive north and support the wineries, which were struggling because the weather had become too hot to harvest the traditional grapes. Instead of Pinot Noir, the wineries were now bottling something approximate and calling it, with a wink, El Niño Noir. Carter called it Pi-not Noir. (Pearl hadn’t laughed at that one either.) The new wine tasted thin and sweet and awful, like the saliva of someone who’d been sucking on a grape lollipop. Pi-not.

By the middle of their fourth, and final, winery of the day, Carter wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or relieved that the Santa Clara office had yet to show up. He posted himself by one of the barrels, watching his employees swish and spit. He kept an eye on Pearl, the only one out of the group sticking to white wines. He wanted her to try a red. He wanted her teeth to stain purple and for her not to know it. Why couldn’t she so much as smile at him?