victims had been ferreted away. She wanted to be a witness, not a victim or a rescuer.
Writers were like that. They wanted the story of the conflagration without having to sweat. They were better at describing it than living it. Whenever Joey tried to describe a firefight, her words got ahead of her, lost suspense as she tumbled over-eagerly into their conclusion. Often, she let Jeanette tell people her stories instead.
“Jean, tell them about the explosion in Skokie,” she’d say. Or, “There was a forest fire near the conservatory…Jean, go ahead.”
“What are you gonna do when you’re old?” Jeanette asked once. They were at the park, stretching after a run along the lake. Joey’s knees were popping sonorously.
“I’ll keep fighting as long as I can,” Joey said. “Then I’ll ride the desk. Maybe train new recruits.”
Jeanette tensed her glutes and lowered, arms out and straight. “That’s the trajectory, huh.”
“Yup.”
It wasn’t like Jeanette’s writing career was bubbling up, either. Writing for her college newspaper had turned into a post-graduate job selling classified ads. That turned into a job editing and formatting the classifieds for the city’s second most popular free alternative mag, which itself turned into a job writing ad copy for an agency Joey’d never heard of. When asked how she liked the gig, Jeanette simply replied that the people were nice and the roof had a good view.
Joey watched her sister’s ass start to spread. Purplish marks began to cling to the skin under her eyes. The changes were subtle enough that Joey wondered if she’d imagined them. Even still, it made her own future of “riding the desk” all the more portentous.
Joey lived for the tactile. She loved the sense of her body strengthening and bounding into productive use. Nothing topped the severe ache she got at the end of the work day. When she was called into a burning building, weighed down with protective gear and equipment, the heat licking her face and neck, pluming slowly into her throat, she was happy. It felt for once like every cell in her body was being put to use, activated, tingling with energy and purpose.
As she climbed the stairs, batting away the falling embers and chunks of cinder, Joey could hardly distinguish the heat of the flames from the burn of strenuous effort. She threw a leg over the side of the rails, dodged a pile of smoking wood and plaster, and pushed forward up the stairs. There was a middle-aged woman and a toddler on the ninth floor, too weak to rescue themselves.
All Joey’s attention was focused on the movement. Her breath rushed and fogged up her mask as she hurled her body up, two or three stairs at a time, her gloved arms tucked in, pumping. She thought only of her body’s swift, tight motion up the stairs, and of the flames she had to dodge, and of the people above her, waiting for their salvation.
The debris rained down on her in greater and greater amounts, and smoke clouded her vision. Joey could hear the clatter of the other firefighters’ boots, and of their yelling, and of something panicked coming from her walkie talkie. It was all a din in the back of her mind.
She was past the seventh floor and halfway to the next landing. Her pulse was snaking blood into her neck and temples at a rapid but sustainable pace. There was a great sound of something crumbling, and Joey couldn’t see any more, and it grew hotter.
Her lungs flooded with smoke and she stumbled. It was important, in such moments, not to lose control. Joey pushed past the dizzy feeling and moved toward the people who needed her. She liked to picture the people she needed to rescue, especially when her body began to flag.
Her mind called forth a gracefully aged and motherly woman, the likes of which Joey had never known firsthand. She pushed forward. Sweat pooled from every pore and seemed to almost bubble on her skin.
It was the eighth floor that collapsed onto her. It came in several massive planks, smoldering with heat. Joey was immobilized and struck on the head, but not incapacitated. She saw the flames and detritus rain down, an orange hail marred with blackness. The pain pierced every cell, filled her with heat until they burst and ran, fluid pouring out of her and turning hot, becoming part of the fire itself.
The smoke brought sweet release from the scalding, mind-searing pain. It licked at Joey’s nostrils and slunk into her chest, bubbling her insides, fusing her organs into one another. She went to touch her face and found nothing there. She approached her destruction with a dull, almost academic remove. Huh. This is what it feels like to be burned alive.
She tried to hold onto the accumulating facts as long as she could, studying the sounds and putrid smells of her body burning and coming apart. But soon the smoke overtook her, and delivered her into a detached slumber the likes of which she had never known before and would never escape.
30.
Milton was splayed across the couch, eating cereal out of Joey’s Oscar the Grouch mug. She didn’t know how he’d gotten there, or when. If there hadn’t been a loud stomping coming from the bedroom, Joey would’ve had no clue where Jeanette was, either.
“Oh, good morning,” Milton said, noticing that Joey had lit up. “Doing well?”
“Are you talking to me?”
He swallowed. “Yup.” He was immensely relaxed, his body draped over the cushions like an afghan that had been tossed.
“I’m fine.”
“You were somewhat incommunicado for the past couple of hours,” he said.
“Oh, yeah? I didn’t know you spoke Spanish.”
He shook his head, puzzled. “Not really?”
Jeanette stomped into the room. She was wearing massive heels with raised platforms. Joey couldn’t place their provenance, but a cursory image search revealed they were quite old.
“Heyy, there you are!” Jeanette cooed. “Are you feeling okay Joey?”
“I. Sure.”
Jeanette ran a hand through her hair, slipping off a ponytail. “Have any dreams?”
“Uh…no?”
Her sister smiled with a closed mouth. “Good. Okay. You feel alright?”
Joey’s turned herself orange. “Why is everyone so doting all of the sudden?”
Milton sat up slightly and said, “Are you sure, no dreams? No weird downloads?”
To placate them, Joey scanned her drives for new material and found none. Carlton’s memories hadn’t visited her in the night, either. But then, she couldn’t even remember choosing to sleep.
“Nope. Right as rain, I guess.”
A real grin pushed from Jeanette’s mouth. She improved her posture, throwing her shoulders back and pulling her torso to the ceiling. With the help of the heels, she suddenly seemed immense, towering over the BrightBox.
“What?” Joey said.
“Steven,” Jeanette said, rolling her shoulders forward and touching Milton on the back, “installed a little software patch last night.”
Milton pulled the spoon from his mouth and said, “Looks like it helped.”
“What. When did you do that?”
“When you were charging,” Jeanette said.
Joey dimmed. “I thought you said LifeMedia doesn’t have access to my drives without my permission.”
“Normally we don’t,” Milton said with a flick of his wrist, “but since you’ve been logging into our network involuntarily, it wasn’t that hard to send you a zipped file.”
“And so you just— you fucking— how did you download it, though?”
Joey noticed that Jeanette and Milton had both tensed and pulled back. She might have been yelling, but she wasn’t sure.
“Joey,” Jeanette said quietly, “you agreed to do it.”
“No I didn’t!”
“Last night. Milton asked you to sign on and download the patch. So you did.”
“—And you feel better, right?” Milton asked.
“How the fuck would I know?” Joey rasped. “I’ve been comatose this whole time!”
Jeanette leaned on the back wall of the den. Her lips squirmed and twisted at the word comatose. Joey pulsed with bright crimson light; she
could see it flashing across half of Milton’s features. They were silent awhile, as if they thought emoting regret was sufficient apology.
“You agreed to it,” Jeanette said. “You said you’d try.”
“It’s a lot less invasive than backing you up to an external drive,” Milton added, “so it was worth a shot.”
“You fucking fleshy bigots,” Joey said, “Just because I’m dead doesn’t mean you can poke at me and shove stuff in me, and defile me like that—”
“You’re not dead,” Jeanette whispered.
“Whatever. I’m just a god damn object, right? If you don’t like how I work you can just try and fix me? Huh? What does it matter what I think about it? I’m just a fucking Furby to you people!”
Milton rose. He was wearing one of Jeanette’s t-shirts. “We let you have your say, Josephine.”
“You let me? You don’t get to ‘let’ me, asshole. I get to choose. Me. And it’s not fucking charity to for me to have autonomy over my own fucking brain!”
Joey’s BrightBox flashed again, the other lights in the room shutting off. Her speakers crackled as the yells came out. Then the red light blinked off, and they were left in near darkness, only a few glimpses of sunlight casting in from the window in slivers. Jeanette slammed a fist into the wall behind her and Milton startled.
“You did say yes, Jose. You said you wanted it. How can you not..,” her words were heavy with tears. She turned to Milton. “I guess it didn’t work.”
“I guess not,” he said, his hand still clamped to the Oscar mug and growing pale. He was already so pale, next to her. And Joey,