of the couch sat Edwidge’s box, cradled in the arms of a dark-skinned woman in hospital scrubs. Edwidge’s box was a perfect cube that constantly gleamed light green. She’d killed herself too. That was how Edwidge referred to it— killing herself. Dying by choice. She said it happily. It had been a relief. Joey had seen photos of Edwidge before she killed herself. She had been a tiny, big-headed girl of 19, bright brown eyes popping out of a skeletal form, dozens of serpentine wires and tubes covering all of her body, coming out of everywhere; her limbs wasted away to twigs. An obscure uncle had left Edwidge with a trust fund for school. When it became clear she would never, ever make it to any real school, Edwidge drained the account and uploaded herself. Her mother’s face was stern, unmoving.
Finally, on one of the folding chairs there was an old lady with hair pinned up in a bird’s nest shape. Her cheeks were perfectly round and apple-red, and there was a sweetness on her breath that Joey could detect from the moment she came in. It was a malty, tannin-rich sweetness. She wore a long, flowery peasant skirt but sat with her legs splayed wide open. In between the old woman’s legs was a pyramid-shaped BrightBox, her husband’s, who thus far had avoided privately conversing with the other Boxes. When it was the old woman’s turn to introduce herself, she patted the box and said his name was Carlton. She nearly forgot to mention her own name until Jeanette prompted her.
“Oh silly me,” she said, patting her warm-looking cheeks. “It’s Andrea, my dear. And I must say, Thea, I’m going to have to ask you for that cookie recipe.”
“Maybe you can do it better justice than my husband,” Thea said, her box pulsing mauve with each syllable. “Then you’ll have the baking duties for the group.”
Andrea grinned, and her plump cheeks nearly swallowed up the rest of her face. Joey couldn’t shift focus from her.
Thea messaged to the other Boxes.
said Thompson.
He cackled in their minds. Milton had begun speaking again but they weren’t listening.
Edwidge said.
Lily said.
Joey said,
Thea asked,
But Carlton didn’t respond. They could feel his consciousness cued into their own; they could feel the cool satisfaction that indicated their messages were being received by him. But he didn’t release any words of his own.
Joey said.
said Lily.
But he didn’t.
The families began discussing their own coping. Jeanette, for her part, wrested the conversation from Milton and described her own pain at the revelation that her twin had died, her convulsive joy at the realization that there was a way to spare Joey from the grave, and her longing to feel that things were ‘normal’. Milton leaned forward, rapt, with his head tilted like a confused and attentive dog. Some of the other family members murmured in identification.
Lily lit up crimson and whispered in Joey’s mind,
Since they had become friends, Lily had never said a word that was sympathetic to the breather’s side of things. Lily’s contempt for Jeanette was redoubled by the fact that Jeanette had chosen to upload her sister without prior consent. Eternal life was not for everyone. It wasn’t even for most.
Joey didn’t know how to respond. she finally said.
said Edwidge. No one had an answer for that either.
When Jeanette finished speaking, she was nearly shivering with sadness, and was digging her nails into Lily’s mother’s hands. Lily’s father threw an arm around his wife and, with a sniffle, began to recount their own struggle.
“We lost our daughter many times,” he said. “The first time, we kept her room exactly as it was. She must have been 13, 14 tops..,”
Lily said.
Joey had nothing to offer. She was too focused on the old woman with the pyramid Box. With the sweet, tea-infused breath. With the knowing eyes and the tawny-headed grandchildren Joey had seen in her dreams.
18.
The families talked until the dip on the table congealed and the cookies disappeared. Their limbs grew stiff. Jeanette began kicking her legs and swaying from side to side complaining that she was at risk for developing a blood clot. Thea’s husband smacked his lips and said he was hungry, so Milton rose and made an elaborate performance of calling for pizza. He broke from the circle and went into the bedroom to give LifeMedia’s credit card number in private; Jeanette felt him squeeze her side playfully as he passed.
“Does anybody want some more tea?” she asked. “Maybe some coffee and Kahlua?”
Thompson’s ex-wife, with the stricken face and the dreary sweater thrust a hand into the air and said, “Lord, yes.”
“Tea would be lovely,” said Andrea.
“We also have a few bottles of a blackberry Lambic,” Joey said.
she added for the benefit of the Boxes. Edwidge giggled audibly and her mother asked what was so funny.
“Nothing,” Edwidge said. “Just felt a tickle.”
Thompson’s ex-wife placed Thompson on the chair and followed Jeanette into the kitchen to help with drinks, flapping her open cardigan like it needed airing out. She filled the tea kettle with water and slid the little door on the front of the coffeemaker open. The grounds tumbled into the garbage.
“Maybe I should just take that Kahlua on the rocks,” the woman said. She stared down at her hands. “I’m jittery and cracked-out as it is.”
Jeanette looked at the woman’s hands. They were pale with thick green veins visible at the surface. It was hard to place the woman’s age; she could have been 47, or maybe just a haggard-looking 34. Jeanette wondered if loss would cut the flesh from her bones the same way, strip the melanin from her skin and ravage her with premature age.
“Social anxiety?” Jeanette guessed.
“Nah. I’ve been to plenty of support groups before.” She leaned against the sink and counted them off. “Al-Anon, Newly Divorced, Survivors of Suicide, and now this, I guess.”
Jeanette dropped a tea bag into a mug with Fozzie Bear etched on the side. “Suicide?”
“Oh, not me,” the woman gestured to the living room. “Thompson.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Pfft. Don’t be.” She swatted at the air.
“I know it’s not the same, but my sister was always doing such dangerous work it kinda felt like she was asking for something terrible to happen.”
Jeanette poured a few fingers’ worth of dark, sticky Kahlua into a glass and pushed it lamely into the woman’s hand. She swirled it around and took a sip.
“Maybe she wasn’t suicidal. Maybe she was just looking for an intense experience. That was Thompson, too, ‘cept with drinking. Not sleeping. Forgetting to eat. Chased his hangovers with Vitamin Waters and disappeared into the lab for twenty, thirty hours. In Al-Anon they called it ‘a high need for sensation seeking’.”
Milton strode past the kitchen, freezing in Jeanette’s line of sight for a moment. She looked at him expectantly, then he floated back into the den. Jeanette wondered how much alcohol abuse she could withstand in a man before divorcing him. It was hard to imagine ever having the gumption.
“Is that why you left him?” she asked Thompson’s wife.
“Eh. Who even knows with these things. There’s no single breaking point.”
Jeanette pursed her lips. Divorce wasn’t even a relief, not for years after it was finalized. It was just a fresh trauma on top of the misery of coexistence. Its lines were cut into the woman’s face. She was a felled log with rings and rings of suffering and age. Jeanette and Joey’s mother had never looked like that. Divorce had left her positively dewy.
“You wanna know how he did it?” the woman said.
Jeanette didn’t. She said, “Sure.”
“He worked in a lab developing cements. They had lots of tools for smashing the columns to bits. Thousands of pounds of sudden pressure. Thompson,” she hiccoughed, “Put his torso in the middle of one. Blammo.”
Jeanette’s stomach lurched and rose into
to her chest. She forced her eyelids shut but visions of a charred Joey were waiting for her on the other side. There was a sour, vomitty taste in the back of her mouth. The woman sucked an ice cube into her mouth and sloshed it around.
The woman went on, “Guess divorce didn’t suit him as well as he thought it was gonna.”
Jeanette didn’t know how to reply. After an inappropriately long pause, she said, “Did death?”
“Hm?”
“Did death suit him better?”
Thompson’s ex-wife sighed. “Nuh-uh. He changed. Really blew a gasket, actually…guess he couldn’t ever deal with loss so hot.”
“What do you mean, changed?”
“He doesn’t want—” she made a limp-wristed gesture in the air, like a flourish, “this. He ponied up half my alimony to get crammed in that stupid electric tube. He wrote me a nauseating little poem about his feelings — and let me tell you, he was an engineer for a reason. His language skills were always cringe-worthy..,”
“But how does he like it?” Jeanette asked. She poured water from the kettle to the Fozzie Bear mug.
“Where’d you put the Kahlua?”
“Here.”
“Thanks sweetheart. You want some?”
Jeanette nodded and mouthed the word, “Sure.”
The woman stared into the bottom of the glasses as she filled them, as if she was reading the next day’s lotto numbers or her tea leaves. Jeanette watched a vein bulge and coil in the woman’s neck. Jeanette took her glass and sipped delicately; her teeth were already on edge from all the sweets.
“So?” she persisted. “How did your husband change? Ex, I mean.”
“Lots more writing now. Poems on poems on poems. He won’t watch his old programs with me. The kids,” she said – and Jeanette thought fuck, there’s children? – “Thompson notices them even less than he did when he was alive. We talk to him, we move him around, we try and include him in whatever we’re doing…”
“But it’s like he’s not there?”
“Yup, yup exactly. And he used to be a happy drunk!” the woman cracked a small smile and tilted her glass self-consciously. “I’ve never had a problem with the stuff. A problem with the alcoholics themselves, that’s what I have.”
“Joey’s out of sorts too,” Jeanette said. “I can’t help but worry they messed up the procedure somehow, and that maybe there’s a chunk of her sitting alone on a computer, who knows where-“
“Ladies!” Milton called from the threshold. He’d shed his LifeMedia button-down, revealing a grey t-shirt with an Apple logo. “Pizza’s almost here.”
“Veggie?” Jeanette guessed, smirking slightly.
“One cheese, one veggie, and one Canadian bacon and pineapple for meat-eating cretins like you,” he said.
Jeanette touched her stomach and was about to claim fullness when the buzzer rang and Milton sailed out of the room.
“What a queer little dude,” Thompson’s ex-wife said.
“He’s not.”
“Meh. Maybe I should’ve gone for the weird little fellas like that. Wouldn’t have ended up in this mess.”
Jeanette considered touching the woman on the arm and telling her she was strong, that she was doing everything she could. That things would be alright. She’d seen plenty of women say and do things like that, their voices bleeding with desperate sincerity, but she didn’t think she could pull it off. Lying seemed crueler than silence.
The woman, already small and birdlike, now appeared greatly diminished. “When Thompson offed himself, to be honest I thought it was a sign things were about to get better. It seemed kind of perfect, you know? With Thompson in the Box, I could have him around, and the kids could have him, but we’d never have to worry about him getting in trouble again. I thought we’d been left with all the good parts and none of the bad.”
“Totally.”
She shrugged. “But it’s just his illness in there, nothing else. He keeps asking me to pull the plug. He asked our eldest to put him in the tub!”
“How old—”
“He’s seven. What would you do?” the woman put her glass in the sink and ran water over the diluted Kahlua and ice. The cubes shrunk and floated over the edge of the glass.
“I wouldn’t turn him off,” Jeanette said. “Steven says it’s just a phase.”
Thompson’s ex-wife stared down, her face disappearing into a curtain of limp hair. “Do we know anyone that’s been true for?”
“They’ve done research.”
“My husband knows research,” the woman said, her shoulders bowed. “He looked it all up. He wrote a bunch of computer scientists and whatnot, and none of them can find any ‘research’ about those damn things.”
“It’s a medical procedure, there’s got to be research.”
“I’m sure they know more than they’re letting on,” the woman said tersely, “but I’m sure it’s not good news. Do any of those Boxes in there look like they’re feeling peachy about the whole thing? Did any of those sad-sack suicidal kids and old geezers really seem alive to you—”
“That’s my sister you’re talking about.”
“And you were saying she’s a zombie too.”
Jeanette stepped back. “No, wait a second. I said she’s depressed.”
“Those hunks of plastic in there aren’t people, let’s just face it,” Thompson’s ex-wife squinted at Jeanette. “No feelings, no desires, they can’t touch you, they can’t hold you—”
“Which is probably why they’re depressed!”
“Maybe it’s just us who’re depressed. Maybe they’re apathetic.”
Jeanette downed her drink. It was cloying. When she was done, the woman seemed less infuriated and more resigned, like she was a balloon that had leaked all its air out.
“Thompson keeps trying to talk to LifeMedia, and to other users, and they keep blocking him.” Her hands dropped to her side. “I’m just saying something’s not right. All this was a mistake, and they know it.”
Jeanette sighed and stared into the living room. The old woman, Andrea, was chatting with Milton and holding her husband under her arm. His box was glowing a rich chocolate brown, like a lamp from the ‘70’s. When Milton saw she was watching them, he turned and called out.
“Is everything alright in there, ladies?”
“Just talking sports!” Thompson’s ex-wife said. She leaned into the living room, her pale hands gripping the door frame. “I think we should have a March Madness pool when the time comes!”
Milton gushed that this was a great idea and made a note on his tablet. They returned to the room, Thompson’s ex-wife complaining that she needed a cigarette.
As Jeanette came over with Andrea’s tea, Milton intercepted her with a pat her on the back. He whispered, “This is great! What a crowd, right?”
“Yeah, they’re hysterical,” Jeanette said.
19.
Lily’s parents and Thompson’s ex-wife went out for a smoke on the fire escape. Lily’s was carried out with them; Her parents had constructed a small backpack for the BrightBox that resembled a baby Bjorn. The remaining guest spread out in the newfound space. Milton and Jeanette were lying on the floor with their legs tangled together. Joey could see Edwidge’s mom was beginning to slump from her perch on the edge of the couch.
Joey said.
Edwidge responded dreamily.
Lily said, messaging from outside.
said Thea.
Thompson said, He hadn’t spoken much the entire night.
said Edwidge.
said Thompson.
Edwidge piped up again,
said Lily.
Joey explained.
Lily said,
Thea said,
whined Edwidge. Her surface flashed pale pink.
an unfamiliar voice said. It was deep and grating.
Joey said.
Joey felt his consciousness slink away and
release itself from them. She watched his wife Andrea speaking quietly to Milton and Jeanette, sliding her wrinkled palm up and down the side of Carlton’s box the same way Jeanette liked to do with Joey’s.
“He doesn’t remember so well,” Andrea said sadly. Jeanette emitted a soft moan of sympathy, and Milton’s hand drifted to her leg.
“Was he having any…difficulties before he passed?” he asked.
“Son, you know he wasn’t. He was still at work, sharp as a tack.”
“But it’s possible,” Edwidge’s mother offered from the couch, “that his stroke might wasn’t the first one. Those things are nasty, trust me, they can eat away a heckuva lot of your brain before you notice.”
Edwidge messaged.
said Lily.
“Steve, is there any way they can try and re-upload him to his box?” Joey