are climbing the willow tree in the back yard. Joey’s shirt is pilled and stringy where bark has snagged it. She’s a good two stories up, and can see their roof, littered with branches and bird poop. She calls to her sister. She bobs up and down on a branch that gives slightly under her weight.
Jeanette is tucked into the crook of a lower branch. Her dark head rests on a balled-up sweatshirt, and she is coloring, or reading, or dragging a pen across a page. Joey pulls strips of bark from the tree and pelts them at her. She pulls hunks of moss, squirming with ants. Her sister takes a long time to notice.
Something occludes the sun for a second. Joey looks up: herons? Great, long-legged birds with vast wingspans and delicate, pencil-thin beaks, unfamiliar critters, casting across the sky, going south. She covers her curly head with a fistful of willow branches, to protect against droppings. The birds’ bellies are silver and pale blue.
“Come up!” she cries to Jeanette. But Jeanette won’t come. “Come see, come see—Jeannnn,”
Jeanette’s sweatshirt is over her head, now. She won’t come. She can’t climb that high, or she won’t. When she skins a knee she picks at the red and white tissue till it goes all purple and yellow, and she moans from the couch that she’s in sepsis, that she is going to die. Something similar keeps her on the ground.
Joey sits with her legs folded and watches the birds disappear. She’ll show them. There will be more birds—she’s sure of it, and sure that they’ll all be envious of the sight. Her father and sister, who watch nature documentaries to fall asleep but are loathe to get dirty outside of the house. She’ll wait. All she has to keep her company is a knife and a lighter filched from their dad’s desk.
She digs her mother’s name into the bark, misspelling it. The small strips of wood that fall into her t-shirted lap would make perfect kindling. Their dad comes into the yard with sandwiches heaped on a plastic plate, and Jeanette flees from the tree trunk.
“Come down, Joey! I’m bored!” Jeanette runs away as she yells it.
Feeling the branch sink under her weight, Joey stands on tiptoes and hurls herself up another level. The willow’s tendrils are a curtain she can throw back to spy on the neighborhood. She’s performing international espionage. She leaps and hangs from a branch the girth of her dad’s arm, and does her best pull-ups. The neighbors quarrel over a barbecue, and Joey takes fastidious notes in the side of the tree. The birds do not come.
“Come down, Jo-ey! I’m going in! Come watch a movie with me before dad takes the TV!”
Majority rules in the house. Joey doesn’t climb down.
“Come up here! I’m hunting for albatross.” Nothing. “Come look at the sunset!”
Truth be told, she doesn’t know how to get down from this height. Just reaching her foot toward a lower branch makes her dizzy.
It gets colder; the neighbors go in and clouds envelop the appearing stars. Joey pulls her arms into the body of her Power Ranger’s nightgown, shivers, and waits. She sees the leaves turn up like bowls to the sky.
It rains. First the branches protect her, then they give way like so many broken umbrellas or burst tarpaulins and dump water on her. Joey’s hair gets frizzy, then damp, and falls into her eyes. Her bare feet are frigid against the bark, which is slowly absorbing moisture. All her appendages feel like cold, dead fish.
Their father runs across the lawn and screams for Joey to come down before she catches cold. Jeanette stands by his side, both of them tiny below. They yell at her for a long time, and Joey begins to cry. There’s a burst of thunder not so far away. Goose pimples press Joey’s arm and leg hair out, and it prickles against her.
Their dad says, “Fine, you wanna catch your death that’s your decision!” and stomps inside. Jeanette stays. She doesn’t call Joey down anymore. She just stands, impotent, with a hand on the tree.
The tree is too slick, too wet to climb down, so Joey resolves to stay the night. The moss is slippery even when it’s dry. She gets an idea to light her kindling. She gathers the slivers of wood and bark up in a ball, jams it into an open knot, and holds her dad’s lighter over it.
The flame catches fast. Soon she has a little fire pit all her own. Joey slices off more bark and moss where it’s still dry and feeds the flame. Her skin warms and the pimples sink back down inside her skin.
But then it’s all out of control. Flame swallows up the knot and jumps over its edge. It catches on some of the leaves, the ones that are still dry and protected underneath the tendrils. The flames crawl down the branch. Joey retreats toward the tree trunk and slips slightly. The fire advances on her.
Then there’s a curtain of hot dense orangeness, and smoke, and Joey’s face is so warm it feels like it could burst open like a popcorn kernel. Smoke swells around the tree in a cyclone and floods Joey’s lungs. She doesn’t know yet what harm fire can really do to a human body; she won’t learn that till a burning roof falls on her as a thirty-year-old EMT and kills her. But she can’t breathe, and the heat is in the air, it makes all her skin ripple. She can’t tell where the flames end and her body begins. It stings like when it’s negative-degrees in winter.
All at once, Joey pulls the rain-soaked Power Rangers nightgown off and slaps at the flames. The fire hisses under the wet cloth, spitting out smoke. There’s a gasp, and more smoldering air for a few moments, but then the flames are gone. The tree and Joey’s shirt are black. Rain has killed the flames on the other branches.
“Are you okay?” Jeanette’s voice floats up from the dark expanse below the tree.
“Yeah,” Joey says. Then, “I think that was close.”
Looking back, it probably wasn’t. It all happened in the span of a minute, perhaps, but in Joey’s memory it has unfurled and grown rich with detail, caught under a microscope, saved on a slide.
“I won’t tell Dad,” Jeanette says. It’s a promise she will honor even as an adult.
Joey sleeps in the tree with the damp, sooty nightgown pulled across her bare lap. She waits the whole night until the dawn breaks and the tree begins to finally dry and become climbable again. It’s twelve hours all told that she spends up there, at least.
When she finally has the courage to venture down, bare-legged in the morning light, she finds Jeanette curled up in the fetal position, sleeping on a quilt at the roots of the willow tree. In that moment, Joey resolves to forgive her for all past and future grievances. It’s a promise she keeps for the rest of her life. Her sister wasn’t capable of climbing to reach her, but she was all too willing to lie in wait. And that’s something.
7.
The father left and the sisters’ lives fell into a normal rhythm. Jeanette went back to work, having already expended six of her annual vacation days on Joey’s hospital stay and their dad’s visit. She bought a second LifeMedia charging dock and put it on the windowsill of the office she shared with two coworkers.
Joey’s Box was placed between an aloe vera plant and a novelty wooden horse that collapsed into a heap when it was pressed at the base. She listened to her sister hum along to Portishead at her desk, and watched her proofread web advertisements.
“Do you think this would be better if I wrote it in active voice?” Jeanette asked. She swiveled the monitor around. It was a mock-up of an ad for barbecue-flavored rice crisps.
Meat Thins: The flavor and the protein of meat is in it. The cruelty isn’t.
“Isn’t that always the rule?” said Joey.
“I guess. But I thought maybe, after you master the rules, that’s when you have license to flout them.” She tilted her head at the screen and pondered.
Jeanette’s officemate Louis entered with a Cup Noodle suspended between his teeth and an overstuffed binder in his arms. He mumbled a greeting through the styrofoam.
“Do you have the rights to that stock image?” Joey said suddenly, with a flicker of blue light. Louis jumped and gasped slightly, barely recovering in time to save the carpet from a Cup Noodle stain.
“Holy ba-jeez, look at you,” he
said, dropping his things on his desk.
He lifted Joey up like a puppy and turned to Jeanette. “I heard what happened but I didn’t know you were bringing the thing in.”
He examined the bottom of the BrightBox and rubbed his small fingers along the sides, as if inspecting for dust.
“Well, anyway,” he sighed, “What a pretty design.”
Jeanette stood up and pulled the box away.
“Of course I brought her. Was I supposed to do— leave her sitting in my apartment all alone?”
“A pleasure to meet you, Louis,” Joey said with a flash, “I’ve heard so much about you over the years. What a shame we never had the chance to meet when I had hands; I wish I could shake yours.”
He did a jaunty little nod in the box’s direction. “An absolute pleasure.” He picked up his Cup Noodle, stirred it furiously, and said, “Well. Anyway.”
Jeanette sat Joey down and returned to her desk. “Do you like this ad, Louis?”
He leaned across her shoulder and slurped. “It looks very Web 1.0. Add a drop shadow.”
Jeanette pivoted in her swivel chair to face the windowsill. “Joey, as a non-professional in the field, what is your natural, intuitive response to this advertisement?”
“I mean, I don’t know. Seems like it violates the rules of good photo composition though. And that stock image with the laughing woman…it’s already been in a lot of laptop and yogurt ads.”
“Are you Googling in there?” Louis asked. He crept forward and tapped Joey’s surface with a single outstretched digit.
“Yeah. And then some.”
“You’re fucking Data.” He shot Jeanette a broad, almost conspiratorial smile. “Your sister is Data! She’s, no—She’s like this one android in this game I used to play as a kid, Xenosaga? Kos-Mos. She had a soul but she was fully synthetic-“
“Whatever, sorry,” Joey snapped, turning dim yellow. “I don’t like the ad. It makes me bored.”
Jeanette beamed and swatted Louis’ hand away from the box.
“Thank you! See, this is going to be great. Having a layperson’s perspective in the office to spitball off. Awesome.”
Their second officemate, Rita, came in late and refused to marvel over the BrightBox. She collapsed in a huff at her desk with the hood to her winter jacket pulled up, sighed loudly, and began clicking noisily at her computer and chewing her lip. Everyone in the room, including Joey, threw her a timid greeting, but she didn’t respond, and for hours she worked at her desk without removing her head from under the parka’s heavy, furry mass. Her fury kept everyone else quiet, it seemed to Joey. At one point, Joey caught her turning away from the monitor, staring at the BrightBox dead-on, her lip twisting.
At lunch, several employees wandered in to meet Joey and ask questions. They came in a huddle, holding their mugs and Tupperware containers of bland-smelling vegetables and cold sandwiches, their eyes wide with friendly expectation. They brought with them a gigantic sympathy card with both sisters’ names on it.
Jeanette scooted her chair in front of the windowsill to buffer Joey against the growing gaggle. She answered many of their technical and medical queries, smiling with only her cheeks and occasionally rubbing her sister on the BrightBox’s silicone sides. Rita worked as the kept talking, turned as far away from the spectacle as her cubicle would allow, headphones on.
The coworkers wanted to know how Joey had died (misadventure; house fire). They wanted to know if this BrightBox thing was expensive (yes, just like a good college education or an infantile gastric bypass). They asked if it was waterproof (yes). They wanted to know if “it” hurt (Joey said it did). They wondered if Joey was legally alive (she wasn’t). They wanted to know what was going to happen to Joey’s money and personal effects (Joey didn’t care). They wanted to know what would happen to Joey herself (“She’s living with me,” Jeanette said firmly). They wanted to know if there were other people like her.
“I- I don’t know,” Jeanette said. She chewed on a pen and considered it. “I mean, it’s pretty new… I had never heard of it before, until the hospital!” Joey cut in at that point.
“There are just under three thousand BrightBox uploadees in the world,” she said.
She sounded like a tour guide, Jeanette noticed, when she dispensed information that didn’t belong to her.
“And people just buy this thing, like, after somebody in their family’s died?” asked Marta, the intern with the face tattoo.
“Not all of them. Over one-third of those users were uploaded as pre-needs.”
“Pre-need?” Rita said. She pushed down her headphones and wriggled out of her jacket, which revealed a massive tuft of yellow-and-black hair that towered above her in a row of shellacked spikes.
“Pre-need, I don’t know,” Jeanette said vaguely.
She shot glances to the crowd, her sister, and back again; the interview was slipping out from under her. There was a slight hush in the room, though many of the employees were still audibly chewing soft food and sipping their Diet Cokes. Behind Jeanette, the box was pulsing minty green.
“Like in the funeral industry?” Louis guessed. He nudged a woman in a high-waisted skirt whom Jeanette didn’t recognize and said, “You knowww, you know how people buy their own funerals before they, well. Before they need them.”
Joey said, “That’s the idea. People buy an upload for themselves before they die. It’s a lot like funerals. Nearly a thousand BrightBox clients have signed up to be uploaded following their death, and have paid ahead of time for their upload package. But half of BrightBox users are uploaded post-death by their families, in which case it’s obviously the family’s decision and financial obligation. That’s like what happened to me.”
“That doesn’t add up, then,” a man with a full mouth said from the back of the crowd. Jeanette wasn’t sure, but she thought it was Pete from the Social Media Department. He liked to wear Kokopeli t-shirts and stuff his hands into the front pockets of too-tight jeans. ”What about the remaining, uh, sixth?”
“Those remaining few hundred users are pre-morbidities,” Joey said. “Or premies for short. They chose to upload before dying. Completely voluntary. But their market share is growing, as are the pre-need packages.”
The crowd quietly consulted their tepid meals. Pete from Social Media eased back on his heels and jammed his fists into his pockets. Rita shook her head at the ground like she was cursing either the devil or the first-floor day care center below her feet.
“How do you know all that?” Jeanette whispered to Joey.
Joey’s cool blue light dimmed, taking her voice down with it. “There’s a user message board.”
Jeanette turned back and read her coworkers’ downcast faces. None of them were meeting her gaze. Coming in, they had seemed jovial, as if Jeanette had just given birth and they’d all been given the chance to hold the baby. Then, it had started to feel more like she’d bought a new smartglass computer for them to coo at and play with. But now they all were picking at their sad lunches and avoiding eye contact like they were all trapped in an enormous elevator. Or an actual funeral.
Marta forced the gigantic card into Jeanette’s hands. It was bulky and awkward in her lap. The collective mass of her coworkers’ breaths and body heat was stifling. The doorway was completely occluded by checker print, black, navy, slate grey, and khaki.
“Well, anyway,” Louis said to no one.
He pushed through the crowd awkwardly. The other employees followed, departing in intermittent little bursts, some wishing Jeanette and Joey a good day, some chattering too softly to be heard, others wondering aloud where all the condiments had gone. Soon the office was clear except for Joey, Jeanette, Rita, and Jeanette’s manager Reggie, whom Jeanette hadn’t even noticed lurking in the back of the crowd.
He was an old man, at least by Jeanette’s approximation. He’d been in the field in the days before stock images and viral campaigns; he’d enjoyed the grand era of the commercial jin
gle and the hand-drawn pin-up. He sidled up to Jeanette and patted her on the shoulder. It was a quick, curt gesture.
“Glad to see you’re back,” he said. “And nice to see you’ve brought your little friend here with you.”
“Nice to meet you too,” Joey said. Her voice was icy, but the faint static tempered some of its edge.
Reggie stared down at the box and his eyes crinkled. “I’m sorry folks were so skiddish about your…situation.”
Jeanette wondered if awareness of mortality made a person more sympathetic to her and Joey’s position. Reggie had brushed against cancer, or his wife had, or maybe it had been his elderly mother. He wasn’t far from a stroke or heart attack himself, and must’ve known it. Surely there were days when he awoke so short of breath and weak that he already felt his body was an immobile trap. Perhaps he wasn’t far from becoming a BrightBox client; he certainly had the bread for it. Joey did a quick estimate of how long he probably had before he’d die; not that long.
“They’re just intimidated,” Jeanette said. “Or jealous.”
“They’ve got a hell of a branding issue, I think,” he said. “Folks’re killing themselves to get in one of those things? That’s gonna take a pretty clever PR campaign to jazz up.”
“The people who do it that way,” Joey said, “don’t think of it as suicide.”
Jeanette shot her a look as if she’d said something outrageously offensive. Maybe it was just the fact she was expressing disagreement.
Reggie swaggered back to the door. “Good meeting ya,” he said to Joey, and stepped out.
Jeanette looked back to her sister and waited a moment as Reggie’s footsteps grew fainter. She said, “So that went great, mostly! It’ll be great to have your help around here. Let me pull up a smartglass site I’ve been editing, you should look it over..,”
Rita rose from her seat with an e-cigarette tucked behind her ear. It jutted into one of her vast tufts of gold-black hair. She unleashed a deep, wet-sounding sigh and began to zip her parka back up.
“You don’t mind me having Joey here for consulting, do you Rita?” Jeanette said. She tilted her head in challenge.
“Of course not, you can bring in a kitten for all I care,” the woman said. She paused at the door, drummed her bright nails on the wall, and sighed again.
“What.”
“But this uploading business? It’s not moral. I’m not saying I blame you, I’d probably do the same thing if my mom or auntie kicked it, but it is a perversion of nature. Our time is not fungible.”
She pointed a magenta talon at Jeanette. With her free hand, she pulled the smoke from her coif and jammed it into her lips; it was already stained pink on the edges from where it had met her lipstick before.
“Hey,” Jeanette said, but she couldn’t think of a retort.
“Some things don’t last,” she said again.