The New Voices of Science Fiction Page 17

  One kid had turned around and given Margot the finger. Behind her, a girl leaned forward and whispered something like “maggot.” The children in the classroom whispered in their slithering voices, things about Margot, things about her father, who was so bad at his job, things about Venus. Then someone said, “Who said penis?” and laughter rose and exploded outward like a mushroom cloud. “You know who likes penis?” a boy said, in a high, clear, happy voice, as if he had just gotten a good idea. “Your dad.”

  When I am thirty, I will visit other timestreams. It will almost feel like traveling into my own past, but not quite. Sometimes there will be big differences: shirts, the configurations in which the children stand, the smell of lunch on their breaths. But there will also be the differences I can’t see. I could stay in one event cluster until I died and I still wouldn’t have seen it all. In one timeline, a single hair on a girl’s head might be blown left. In another, blown right. A whole new universe, created just for that hair. The hair was the star of the whole goddamn show but the hair was not egotistical about it at all. It would simply, humbly change directions when the time came. But always: children will come in; children will run out.

  When Margot is nine, her parents are carefully, jazzily, ostentatiously in love. Enraptured by each other and enwrapped in money, their love cushioned against the world and Margot. Native Martians for two generations, Margot’s parents’ families had come from China and Denmark and Nigeria and South Korea. The people do sigh to watch Margot’s parents walk hand in hand—they are lovely alone and sublime together, a gorgeous advertisement for the future, except to see them is to know that the future is the present, it is here, and isn’t that a happy thing?

  This pressure is beneficial to their relationship; they perform a little for the world and Margot, and most of all, for themselves; they grin at each other competitively; their real feelings are burnished until they blaze. She has never seen them in sweatpants, whereas Margot herself often changes into pajamas the moment she gets home, which makes Margot’s mother laugh and pat her face and tell her how extremely Korean she’s being. At the dinner table, her parents feed each other the first bite. Sometimes this is yet another competition, a race to construct the perfect tiny arrangement of food, and sometimes it is a simple moment of closeness that doesn’t make Margot want to barf yet (she’s not old enough) but induces in her narrow chest a weird, jealous, proud feeling. She is certain that, someday soon, she will be able to create a role for herself and join them in their performance.

  When I am thirty, I will be too tall for my parents to make jokes over my head. They’ll have to look me in the eye when they do it. Or the back of my head.

  I will call my mother and she won’t pick up, over and over again. Catching myself in the viddy reflection, I’ll be scared by my face. How perfectly slack and non-sentient it is when nothing prompts it into action. It will remind me of my father’s face, when I watched him alone in the dining room a few weeks before his disappearance. I had woken up in the middle of the night and crept out of my room to get a glass of water. I needed to be quiet, because at night the house stopped being mine. Sometimes it belonged only to my parents. Sometimes the grayscale walls of our aggressively normal house looked alien, as too-smooth as an eggshell, and then the house seemed to belong to no one.

  I peered around the corner into the dining room and saw my father sitting at the table alone. He sat still, staring at his computer. Nothing moved. I was frightened but fascinated to see my father this way, all flat surface. Suddenly he reached up and pinched his upper arm hard, on the inner part where it really hurts. He pinched hard , and then he twisted hard, and the tiny violence of his fingers was so at odds with the nothing expression on his face that I wanted to laugh. I pressed my hands to my mouth and tiptoed quickly back to bed.

  But who could say what the significance of that single memory was, or if it was significant at all? The record will show that he had faked everything, and had been good at it. My father behaved weirdly the night I spied on him; that is true. So maybe that does mean something. But his mind, a very strange place indeed, must have been even stranger when the rest of him was normal: him at dinner, taking a first bite, him at work, making everyone feel special as he told them exactly what to do.

  When Margot is nine, the sun comes out on Venus. All rain stops and the sun comes out for an hour, and for that hour everyone can pretend that Venus turned out okay. Because this gracious, lovely celestial event happens every seven years, some of the kids sorta, kinda remember the last time the sun came out. When they talk about it, they sound like old people reminiscing: they chatter on about how the sun smelled like warming butter and glittered on their skin. Other kids don’t remember anything. And then there’s Margot. Who had been four instead of two the last time she saw the sun, which makes a difference—it’s like having a brain made of clay instead of dough. She knows how the sun is a discrete object in the sky and, also, that it is everywhere, like air. And she knows that, like air, you can breathe the sun in and even taste it a little, but it doesn’t taste like butter or sprinkle sparkles onto your face, that’s just stupid. She has tried to tell this to the other kids, but only makes that mistake once. Margot stares out the window, brimming. Her parents had been letting her paint gold x’s on the wall to count down the days. They laughed about it. Just paint. Margot is looking forward to being warm. She is looking forward to opening her mouth and letting the sun fill her stomach (which is one idea she doesn’t find stupid, no. She believes it will happen).

  The teacher leaves the room for a moment. No one has been able to concentrate on lessons today, after all. Someone prods Margot in the back and she turns, still smiling. A ring of kids closing in on her, shivering in the tank tops and shorts and sandals that they put on that morning in preparation. They look like skinny old stray cats. It occurs to Margot that there is nothing she can say. She’s amazed by their cruelty, but not surprised. Hasn’t she done so much to earn it?

  When I am thirty, I will lose my boyfriend. He will have asked me many times, over the course of many weeks: “Is there anything I can do to make you happy?” He’ll even get down on his knees, a move that will strike me not only as melodramatic but also aggressive and mean, yes, mean, because the way he does it, it’s not the action of a supplicant, it’s the action of a bully who wants to force my hand by slumping to the ground so aggressively like this, far before the situation warrants it. I will be harsh in my gloom and he harsh in his cheer. He’ll say again, “Is there anything I can do to make you happy?”

  I will think that the answer is yes—although I don’t know what the thing would be—and he will think that the answer is no.

  When Margot is nine, the sun comes out on Venus, and the teacher runs into the classroom. She looks from child to child and knows that she has gotten there just in time. Though still troubled by her encounter with the strange woman, she puts her arm around Margot and another child and says brightly, “Let’s go! We don’t want to miss a single second.” They go out into the day.

  Afterward, in the post-sun future, life is a little easier. Now all of the kids have seen the sun; it’s not something that Margot owns and they don’t, and so Margot is allowed to develop into less of a loser. After all, you only need a little bit of space to not be a loser, a few hours in the day of not being teased. I’m telling you, you’d be surprised, you’d be shocked at what miracles can happen.

  When I am thirty, most of my old classmates will have added me to every conceivable social network. They won’t remember anything from when we were nine, and I’ll be relieved. I’ll think that’s sweet. I will be asked to look, listen, gubble, like, pfuff, [untranslatable gesture], post, re-post, and blat for their sakes, and sometimes I will.

  After all, I will have the time, plenty of time for everyone after my mother moves out. At that point, we’d lived together for ages. Early on, she would sometimes come into my room at night, desolate and weepy, telling me how she needed to kill her
self and asking for my reassurance that I would be fine without her. I was nine, ten, seventeen, twenty-three, and always I’d say to myself, What is required here? Reassurance given, so she’d at least calm down, or reassurance withheld, so she would decide to not kill herself?

  Other times my mother could cook; she could be funny while we watched televised vote-in talent shows, and able to imitate just about anybody in her good/bad/perfectly not-too-cruel way; she could offer to take me shopping with my money because I had forgotten to cultivate a sense of style because I was working, but only with my money, so that we could stretch the money that was left after my father disappeared, and after I attended school, and got full scholarships that indentured me to a corporation for five years post-graduation.

  At first, it was hard to turn down invitations and skip social events for her. I’d come home angry, slamming doors and dropping my bag like I was thirteen, even when I was seventeen, twenty-three, twenty-seven. Then I’d see her on the couch looking like the dropped bag and I’d go make her a drink. I would have one too. Each of us just one, or two. And then I would proceed forth with my life’s work of putting her in a good mood, and, failing that, dragging her up from wailing despair, silent despair, mumbling despair. “Daughter, you are all I have,” she would say in her deep, beautiful voice, part Nigerian and English and Martian and not at all Venusian. Part of me liked hearing that, both the sentiment and the grand sound of it, like we were in some BBC miniseries, and part of me hated the non-specificity of “daughter,” as if I could be anyone and not me in particular, plus the implication that I, the “daughter,” was the leftover quantity, and not one anyone would keep by choice. Which, she hadn’t. My poor mother.

  Soon no one invited me to things and I was too busy, anyway; soon I was in the groove of our shared routine and remembered nothing else. And in the groove I grew up twisty, quiet and distracted and money-grubbing and unibrowed. No matter: I did good for us. I took care of my mother, I got better and better jobs once I was released from my contract, and, when I was twenty-nine, I bought us a condo on Mars. It was nothing like the wonderful places my mother had lived in when she was younger, but it was reminiscent of them, with its higher than absolutely necessary ceilings and the modern fixtures that hid their functionalities behind unhelpfully smooth surfaces.

  It was moving into this condo, I believe, that spurred my mother to start working out and getting into therapy and, finally, to move out; but who knows, it’s not like I saw her look upward at the ceilings and down at herself, down at the gorgeous young orange people and back up at herself. My mother moved out. Five months after that she wouldn’t even take any of my money. At first she called often and I would be there for her or I would go over there to fall asleep on her couch. Then I was the one calling her, every missed call a slasher film in which the very worst had happened, inflicted by someone else or herself.

  I will call my mother again. She won’t pick up. One more time. Then I will go out to smoke on the balcony. It will be the best thing about living here alone.

  When Margot is almost ten, she and her mom move to a tiny apartment on Mars. Margot loses her favorite sneakers in the move. She throws a quiet tantrum, drums her feet on the floor. Ordinarily, Margot’s mom would enjoy seeing such liveliness in her, would encourage it by laughing and grabbing Margot’s hands and dancing until Margot could no longer resist. But Margot’s mom is in bed, covers over her face, still wearing her shoes and her Martian jackal-collar coat.

  For them it had been a long rocket trip, and before that, a long and extremely bad month. A month ago, a young woman in a boxy neoprene business suit had visited their house. On their doorstep she squeezed rain out of her hair and asked if she could have a moment of Margot’s mother’s time. She said her name was Hilda. She was immaculately composed, her makeup like a bulletproof vest.

  Hilda had told them that their father had put the whole Venus Project in jeopardy. But this meant nothing to Margot’s mom; she couldn’t care less about the Venus Project. Her husband had disappeared, and that’s what mattered to her. Margot’s dad had disappeared, and her mom absolutely did not give a shit about the Venus Project.

  It wouldn’t be that hard to kill yourself on Venus. Margot has thought about it. You just walk out of your door and keep walking, don’t change a thing. Sure, you could do that on any planet, but on Venus death would be fast, and it would be predictable: drowning or sea monster.

  Her mom questioned all their friends, searched his files, demanded that the authorities scour the oceans, and then paid contractors to continue searching—until she ran out of money. Because that was the thing, there wasn’t much money left. When it came to money, Margot’s dad had lied in every way possible, about the getting of it and most certainly about the spending of it.

  Margot and her mother left Venus after that.

  When I am thirty, my mother will viddy me, looking great. She’ll have just gotten the hand rejuvenation surgery that she’d been saving up for. “Check it out,” she’ll say, waving springy teenage hands that look like they could repel water. She’ll tell me that things have been great since she moved out. She likes her job at the archive. She likes that her younger coworkers will tell her all the work gossip because they think she’s old and harmless but still fun enough to confide in. Sometimes she’s the subject of the work gossip, like the time she went out on four dates with a researcher who had frequented the archive more and more since she started working there, haunting the checkout desk with increasingly unnecessary requests. My mother will have even gotten back into painting, where she was on a hotter track decades ago, when she was younger than I will be now. She’d studied at Martian Yale and won a big prize and everything.

  I’ll remind her that I haven’t heard from her in a long time.

  My mother, who usually apologizes so sweetly, whose apologies are heartfelt and devastating but ultimately goldfish apologies, that kind that are forgotten six seconds later, this time will not even say sorry. “There’s been so much going on,” she’ll say. “The most wonderful thing has happened. Your father is alive.” She’ll tell me that she rehired a private investigator on Venus, who has found a man who looks like my father working on a research submersible. There is a photo. Seeing it, I won’t be able to tell whether it’s him, one way or another. I will have so many things to say that they will get stuck—too many people trying to crowd through a narrow door. My mom will just look at my face, which she can tell I’ve changed, I can tell.

  “I’m going to Venus to find him,” she’ll say. “I’ve given notice at the archive.”

  “You can’t,” I say. “You just moved out.” My new face will not move around as much as my old face, for which I will be grateful.

  “Please, darling. I’m going. We’re not going to be able to talk again for a while, so let’s make this nice.”

  In my opinion, all my mother has to do is get better and stronger and never call me and, even if she acts like a high school best friend who thinks you’re a dork but puts up with you because they love being worshipped and always hangs up first, that is still all I want and all that is required of her, and the words crowd together and all that will come out is another strangled,

  “You can’t.”

  My mother will shake her head. She will laugh, looking everywhere but at the screen, at me. “You think that I like everything, that I’m having such a fabulous time and this is the best that can be expected,” she’ll say. Then she’ll look at me. “All of it’s nothing.”

  When Margot is nine, the sun comes out on Venus and a woman bursts into the classroom and starts punching the kids. She is not very good at it and the children quickly overpower her. To Margot, this is the height of unfairness: that an adult would bend from her looming height to attack children, so Margot shouts and fights back, too. The others look at her with a new respect. The woman coughs, dabs her bloody nose with the back of her hand, and disappears. By the end of that day the children will have witnessed two m
iraculous events, and they will never forget either one. Over beers, they will meet at least once a year when they’re in their twenties, once every two years in their early thirties, and so on, the connection degrading but never really disappearing.

  When I am thirty, I will give up trying to be pretty. I will give up on trying to have fun. I will decide, instead, that what I need to do is erase myself and then proceed on a new, normal path. Late one night—so late that no one is hanging around, playing Jenga, drinking from beakers, what fun—I will open the door to the lab. Time machines are so beautiful in the moonlight. They look like what they are, like pearls, like eggs you can crawl into and sleep inside until it’s time to be born.

  I will initiate a program that I cooked up myself. It will take many attempts, but I have so much time after giving up on having a smiling boyfriend, even skin, rosy lips, a mother who calls, friendly eye contact with just about anyone. Those things, I will come to realize, are cosmetic. What I need to fix is far, far back, before I got twisted and grew wrong, my little gnarled life, the lives of everyone around me warped around it.

  Eventually I will do it: I will find my own timeline. After three days without sleep and only one change of underwear and a tender pink groove worn into my left middle finger by my pen, I will type a new code into the time machine. I will fold myself inside, close my eyes gratefully, and when the eggs shudders me into a new universe, I will already know something is different. Something is right.