from here?”
“Yes, I have cameras on every side. If you can see me, I can see you.”
“Alright, sheesh.”
Jeanette tilted her head to the side, letting brown curls fall into her face. Her hair was heavy with oil and dirt, but the smell was comforting in its familiarity. There was only the slightest difference between her and Joey’s smells, but it was distinct enough that each always knew when the other had borrowed clothes. Jeanette never minded it, but Joey hated sharing.
Still, it hadn’t been a major point of contention since the last time they’d lived together, back in high school. Jeanette grinned to herself; She was excited for them to be roommates again, especially now that they were grown and more mature about such things.
Jeanette rolled on her back and consulted the ceiling. It was almost low enough for her to reach up and touch with her feet.
“I hope that someday soon, everybody has the ability to upload themselves and their loved ones, and can live on, and on, and on…” She paddled her feet in the air, kicking her shoes off. “Don’t you?”
Joey said, “I hope everyone has the choice.”
4.
Jeanette lived in a one-bedroom flat in an old brownstone a few minutes north of the city. She kept it stiflingly warm by cranking the radiators, blasting the oven, and running all the faucets with scalding water. The rooms were crammed with thrift store rugs and used hotel furniture she’d bought on the cheap at liquidation sales.
She decorated the walls with the detritus of her childhood, teenage, and college years: a My Little Pony poster taped here, a column of movie tickets taped there; an amputee Troll doll on the mantle, a Holly Golightly poster by the door, with the eyes blackened out and the mouth of a snarling zombie pasted over Audrey Hepburn’s smirking lips.
Bras and Spanx hung from doorknobs and off the sides of chairs. Discount paperbacks by McEwan, Didion, Bronte, and Erdrich sat in impromptu stacks, with stagnant cups of cocoa or tea on top. Music was always escaping from tinny speakers and blending with the hiss of the heater, the clunky hum of the refrigerator, and the banging and squeaking of the front gate outside.
Jeanette cleared a space for Joey at her desk in the bedroom. It had the best natural light. She pushed the desk to the window and swept the papers and dried-out pens away. She threw her broken printer out and dusted the shelves. Joey’s charging station was placed on top of the desk, facing the window, with the cord threaded down the side, so Joey would have a nice view of the trees and the street below while she powered up.
A coffee table in the den was also liberated from old magazines, dirty saucers, wickless candles, ash, and Pez dust. The kitchen counter was cleared off. Jeanette bought an air gun and cleared dust from her keyboard, her speakers, her television, the key holes, the Venetian blinds, and the dark passages between the floor’s wooden boards. She lit several varieties of incense and quizzed Joey on the flavors.
“Pear,” Joey would say. Or, “Patchouli. Apple crisp.”
“Which do you like best?”
“I don’t care. It’s your house.”
“No no,” Jeanette would say, dipping the incense stick in water. “No no, this is our home. I want you to have everything you want. You live here.”
Jeanette emptied a closet in the hall, to pack in Joey’s old stuff. Joey had lived in a studio in the suburbs. She didn’t have many possessions worth keeping— some photo albums, a tie-dyed beanbag chair, a two-foot-tall glass bong, old Gil Scot Heron and Staples Singers records, books by Salinger, Joyce, Pynchon, McCarthy, and Bellow, a few salvageable outfits— but her sister took a conservative approach.
“Maybe someday you’ll want this,” Jeanette said, as she shoved each object into the bare closet.
“What will I need a Shake Weight for?” Joey asked. “I don’t have arms.”
“Maybe someday you will.”
Jeanette merged their clothing. She scanned Joey’s old photographs and copied home movies saved on Joey’s laptop. She drove to the suburbs, to one of the state’s few remaining DVD rental stores, and brought back copies of the films they had enjoyed as little girls. Films like The Last Unicorn, Oliver & Company, and The Black Cauldron. She filled the apartment with the smell of burnt popcorn and held the bowl close to her sister’s Brightbox.
“You liked these movies,” Joey said when she saw the selection. “ I didn’t like these movies.”
“Sure you did! We loved these movies. What, you think you’re too cool?” she threw a kernel at the box; It bounced off Joey and rolled under the couch.
“I liked The Secret of NIMH. All Dogs Go To Heaven. The original Land Before Time, those kinds of movies.”
“Psh, all those movies are about death. It’s too depressing right now.”
“They’re not about death. All Dogs Go to Heaven is about cheating death—cheating heaven, really! It’s about choosing a flawed, tenuous life over an eternal, delusional paradise where suffering is ignored.”
“So it’s about existentialism! That’s the same as death!”
“-And NIMH is about biomedical engineering, and the inhumanity of humanity’s attempts to improve itself. Or, like, the costs of artificial self-improvement. It’s the biologically un-altered mouse, after all, who saves the day.”
Jeanette muted the TV. “Are you mad at me for throwing popcorn at you?”
“No. I appreciate your trying to make this normal.”
“Thank you. And those are good movies. I’ll get some of them next time, alright?”
Joey dimmed, to take the glare off the TV. They watched The Last Unicorn, Jeanette chewing popcorn with an open mouth. Near the end of the film she began to cry, and her arms flung forward to pull Joey from the table and into her lap. She hugged the BrightBox through her blanket.
When the movie was over Jeanette stared blankly at the screen and let the credits roll to the end. Her eyes were puffy and streaked with red, and there was a tuft of hair in her mouth. Music tinkled out of the BrightBox. Quiet, playful harp music, followed by a woman’s hoarse voice. Jeanette jumped, startled.
“Horizon, rising, up to meet the purple dawn. Dust demon, screaming, bring an eagle to carry me home. For in my heart I carry such a heavy load. Here I am, on man’s road. Walking man’s road, oh! Walking man’s road…”
“What is that?”
“It’s Joanna Newsom’s cover of the song from the movie,” Joey said, her staticy voice momentarily overdubbing the track. “Can’t you tell?”
Jeanette wrinkled her nose. “Her voice. I don’t like it. It’s unsettling.”
“Here I am, on man’s road…”
“I like it,” Joey said over the track. “This is a rare live cut.”
“…Why don’t we just stream movies off of you?”
“Walking man’s road, oh! Walking man’s road…”
Joey darkened. “I don’t have a monitor, idiot.”
“I’m sure you can search the torrent sites faster than I can on a computer.”
“I’m hungry, and I’m weary, but I cannot lay me down. And the rain falls…dreary, and there’s no comfort that I have found. It’ll be such a long time till I find my abode…here I am, on man’s road…”
“Does it feel to you like you’re singing?” Jeanette asked. “Or…thinking it?”
“Neither. It’s just playing.”
“…it waits in silence for the night to explode. Here I am on man’s road…”
“Could you sing along with it?”
Joey turned the sound down. Her voice chirped over the sounds of the harp. “Walking man’s road, oh! Walking man’s road…”
Jeanette joined in. Joey’s voice had always been the prettier one. There was more ease in it. Now it was under a layer of faint white noise at all times, and corrupted, but it seemed to Jeanette that if she could only peel a layer back, she’d hear the real thing again.
“Walking man’s road-” Jeanette strained to sing, but then the song ended. Joanna Newsom thanked t
he crowd in a childish, self-pleased little voice, and there was a din of applause, and the harp plunked out. She’d never been good at sensing when a chorus was going to stop repeating.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Joey said.
“It’s too bad you couldn’t give a voice sample to LifeMedia before you died,” Jeanette said. She stood and picked up the bowl of popcorn. “Of course, you weren’t planning on dying, I guess.”
Now more than ever Jeanette was aware of the mechanical artifice in her sister’s new voice. It was just a little too even and flat, a little too subdued.
“I wasn’t planning on getting crammed inside an alarm clock, either,” Joey said when Jeanette crossed into the kitchen.
Jeanette flung the bowl back at the den. It knocked a glass of vodka seltzer on its side. Bubbles sprayed across the BrightBox. Joey’s light flashed yellow, then red, and then shut off. Popcorn went sailing everywhere. Jeanette was picking it out of the rugs and couch cushions for two weeks afterward.
5.
Their father lived in St. Louis in a ranch-style house under a clutch of willow trees that were constantly shedding limbs onto his roof. When he first heard Joey had died, he demanded a funeral. Jeanette kept having to call the funeral home and cancel his plans behind his back, but this only redoubled his efforts.
“Come and visit,” she begged. “Come and see her. You’ll understand.”
He didn’t believe it. He didn’t comprehend it. He pictured it like life support, or like Joey’s brain was floating in a jar. If she couldn’t call him, he complained, she wasn’t alive in