Corpus Callosum

“Some things aren’t meant to. That’s all.”

  Jeanette slammed the door behind her and crawled into a lotus position on the floor. She wrapped her arms about herself and stared up at her sister’s BrightBox on the windowsill. Her face and chest had flushed.

  “That woman.”

  Joey turned a deep sienna and softly chirped, “Hey, it’s okay. That brand of e-cig cuts life expectancy by four minutes per use. Tell the cunt to suck it up.”

  8.

  Joey fit comfortably in the children’s seat of most shopping carts. She helped Jeanette compare prices at the grocery store, big box retailers, the drug store, and the home decor store. She recited directions when Jeanette prepared a tofu cilantro scramble at night or blueberry cobbler smoothie in the morning. She played music in Jeanette’s cubicle, and switched tracks if she caught Rita tapping a high-heeled foot or humming in enjoyment.

  Jeanette bought a beta fish and sat it next to Joey’s dock at the office, and bought a lava lamp so she’d have something to watch at night after Jeanette had fallen asleep. She asked Joey her opinion on drapes, perfume, outfits, and web design projects at work. She asked Joey if she looked like she was gaining weight. She asked Joey to calculate the calories and nutrients in what she ate and speculate on the health of her hair.

  Jeanette spoke to Joey as she fell asleep, sometimes mumbling work ideas or vague plans, and crying out for Joey to make a note of it, please mark it down, and email her, or tell her first thing in the morning because she was too sleep-addled to remember. Joey always obliged. Sometimes (when Jeanette’s iron levels were low or she was dehydrated), she would quiz Joey about childhood memories.

  “Remember when mom had dreadlocks?” she asked, rolling up into a ball in bed.

  “Yes,” Joey replied, “we were in what, second grade? And she lived in town that year, with that auto mechanic guy? Will?”

  “Wilhelm,” she said, the W pronounced as a V, a heavy fake German accent.

  “Yeah. What a douche. He never learned to tell us apart.”

  “He did at the end. You hit puberty first. Do you remember what color the dreadlocks were?”

  “Hm. Wait…she dyed them puke green at the tips.”

  “Oh my God, yes!” Jeanette said, and laughed. She rolled onto her belly and clambered down the bed, to the edge, and stared into Joey’s white surface as if she were staring into a sky full of stars.

  “Are you worried there’s part of me missing?” Joey asked.

  Jeanette smiled sleepily and purred, “No. I bought you the biggest hard drive. And it’s so, so obviously you in there. Do you remember what we wanted to be as kids?”

  And Joey said, “Pet shop owners.”

  “Yes. Together. We were gonna buy a storefront and fill it with puppies and lizards, and have a concert space on top where we could sing at night. And all the animals would be safe there, because we’d never sell them to bad families or put them down if they got too old. We’d just keep them and take care of them, and put them in our musical revue.”

  Joey snickered and glowed a very pale blue that was nearly white. “We really didn’t think that shit through, did we? Finding a property like that alone, ha! The zoning would be a nightmare. And how could that be solvent?”

  Jeanette chuckled into her hand and wiped at her mouth. “But that didn’t matter! We didn’t even think about money, or school, or where we’d live, or boyfriends either. When we talked about that plan I kinda assumed it would just be us, you know? Just us and the pet-shop-slash-concert-hall. It was all we needed.”

  Joey remembered pretending to have a pet store/music hall with her sister. She didn’t remember it being a plan. They never discussed plans, not even when they finally became old enough to form actual ones. They’d picked colleges in the same city by accident.

  Joey dimmed and recalled their first drive into the city. Jeanette was riding shotgun in their dad’s old hatchback; the car was stuffed with milk crates of DVDs and clothing. Joey pictured her sister sitting with bare feet propped against the dashboard, staring out the window, muttering that they were lost while Joey navigated. Joey always drove. It was three years in the city before Jeanette had figured out the way to Joey’s dorm. She arrived one night in a soaked terrycloth sweatshirt with her nipples poking out for everyone to see, weeping over some boy but refusing to talk about it, begging to climb into bed with her sister, just for the night. She’d done the same thing as a little girl whenever she had a nightmare.

  “Are you awake?” Jeanette said suddenly. Her head popped out from under the covers.

  “Of course,” Joey replied.

  But Jeanette wasn’t; not really. She rolled onto her back, and in a groaning voice heavy with sleep she murmured, “I’m so glad you’re here. I have these dreams about what they did to your body…your actual one. Burnt all up, but then they have to burn it again to cremate it, isn’t that weird?”

  Joey didn’t reply, for fear of waking her. She pictured the slow ebb of Jeanette’s brain waves as she drifted off to sleep, alpha and beta beginning their dance.

  “You built all the campfires…,” Jeanette said. “Marshmallows, mountain pies, no thank you..,” and then she was snoring.

  While Joey charged, she let her mind wander and explore its own deepest recesses until, at some point, her consciousness shut itself off. Sleep was for the benefit of the brain, not the body; a BrightBox needed rest just as much as a living human did.

  The role of sleep, Joey knew, was still a matter of some scientific debate. Some believed it consolidated and defragmented memories, while others believed it replenished neurotransmitters and relaxed the hard-working frontal lobes. At any rate, sleep preserved sanity and restored clarity to the mind. It crept up and draped over Joey just the same as it always had. Jeanette’s sleep had always been fitful and twitchy, since their bunk bed and sleeping bag days, but Joey had always dozed like an ancient ruin.

  The dreams were the only thing that had changed. Joey’s dreams used to be placid and familiar glimpses. Memories defragmenting. Movies and video games spliced together. Now every night she was engrossed in a deep unfolding story with no cuts.

  In these new dreams, she was old. In them, she had a body, but it groaned in all its joints and was too heavy for her to move. She was an old man on a porch in the thick heat of July, leaning on haunches and battling a torturous all-body ache. There was a glass of iced tea in an old woman’s frail hands and Joey was straining to reach for it. Joey was startled to see her hands were white, and wide, manly with grit under the nails. The sky was hazy and the cicadas roared.

  Joey reached for the sweet woman in the vision, but a shock went through her jaw and rippled into her heart. The ground flew into Joey’s face and struck her on the chest, and she felt her hands twitch and wander over the dirt. The sweet woman screamed and dropped the iced tea; chunks of ice rained over Joey’s bent, pulsing body, and glass shards erupted over the porch and tumbled down the stairs. The woman’s hands gripped Joey through papery-thin, loose skin… and then suddenly Joey was a small boy in short dungarees riding a tire swing, her core flexed, her youthful digits clutching the rope so hard a burn was forming. Still male—she could feel a small penis on her, soft and smooth and pushed to the right side of her underwear.

  The dreams woke her two or three times each night. For a sweet, agonizing second after each one, Joey could still feel the sting of the rope in her fingers, she could still feel her legs digging into the tire’s rubber sides, and the warm summer wind on her soft face.

  9.

  At work Jeanette had the freedom to come and go mostly as she pleased, but she kept a conventional schedule for the social benefits and the comforting regularity. She liked to be among a steady line of sharply dressed commuters with fresh bags and packed lunches, carrying books and magazines, reading the news from translucent glasses. Standing in the center of the train, packed tightly with all the other workaday travelers, choking on their colognes, Jeanette felt connected.
There would always be someone to catch her if she fell. She couldn’t even fall, actually, in so cramped a space.

  Joey watched the rain pool on the windowsill at home and at Jeanette’s work. She studied the gradients of color in the scales on Jeanette’s new beta fish. Louis rocked furiously in his squeaking chair; He would occasionally pepper Joey with crossword puzzle questions, or ask her the HTML code for a particular color swatch.

  Rita abused her keyboard with forceful typing and spilt liquids, which made Joey feel light-headed and displeased, for reasons she couldn’t describe. Sometimes the outside world became too much to bear, so she turned off her cameras. When she did this, her visual field was greeted with images of withered old-man hands or dimly-lit, archaic sexual trysts she had never taken part in. Computer labs. The driver’s-seat view from cars they didn’t make anymore.

  But this vision-world was better than the actual world, filled as it was with confused, disapproving people who glared at Joey in the grocery store and blinked uncomprehendingly at her on the train but never said anything. And Jeanette. Jeanette with her questions. She was only slightly better than Louis, who had quickly learned to treat Joey like a rolodex. Jeanette’s questions were less factual and more normative.

  “Do you like this text in peach, or in salmon? Is crimson too obviously menstrual?”;

  “Will I be too cold in just this sweater, do you think?”;

  “Is this phrase cheesy?”;

  “Are puns funny, like in a retro-ironic way, or in a sincere way?”;

  “What should I make for dinner? Well, I know, but what would you like to smell?”;

  “Should I ping Mom’s sister and tell her you’re dead?”;

  “What’s wrong? Should I call that Milton guy? I’m gonna call Milton.”

  The last question came out sounding higher and more frantic every time Jeanette uttered it. She said it every morning when Joey was groggy and tormented by the odd visions. She said it when Joey was too slow with a response, or voiced an opinion that, to Jeanette, seemed atypical for her.

  Every night Joey was dusted off with a can of compressed air and explored by her sister’s dainty fingers. The questions were just as prodding.

  “What do you think those visions mean? I should call LifeMedia,” Jeanette said. She retrieved Milton’s card from her winter jacket’s pocket and slipped it into her work bag.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Joey kept saying. “I just need to turn off my wi-fi before bed.”

  Her sister tossed and turned more than ever, muttering and drooling in her sleep and sometimes even heaving with cries. Friday night at 4 am, she sat up, ramrod.

  “Joey, are you up? Joey.”

  Joey’s blue light sliced through the hazy darkness. “The body development program has manifold ethical concerns associated with it, and thus product testing should be as extensive as for any other medical equipment, or perhaps on the level of a novel drug treatment…Animal models should first be determined…this project should be extensively workshopped, as customers are likely to find the body models disturbing at first…”

  Jeanette was silent. Joey could see her chest heaving up and down rapidly under the sheets.

  “Jeanette, what’s wrong?”

  “Joey, what was that? What were you going on about?”

  “What— I don’t know. Was I saying something?”

  “You just said a bunch of weird LifeMedia FAQ-type stuff. Like, technical stuff.”

  Joey pushed out a tiny little yawn through her speakers and said, “Oh, huh. I don’t remember saying anything.”

  “You never used to talk in your sleep. Or remember your dreams. Does this freak you out?”

  “No. I know you’re freaked out, though.”

  Jeanette mussed her hair and scratched her scalp. “I want to call them.”

  “I’m operating just fine.”

  “Maybe. But maybe you aren’t the best gauge of that.”

  Joey considered this for a moment. A yellow ellipsis scrolled along her sides. All at once the dots stopped and shifted into a muddy red.

  “You can’t just wake me up in the middle of a REM cycle and expect me to be lucid. I’m not a computer-“

  “I know that.”

  “You can’t just flip open the lock screen and expect me to be at full capacity. I’m not your fucking phone. People have good moments and bad moments, actual people. I’m sure you can relate to that, Jean. I’m not always at peak functioning, just like any other person.”

  Jeanette leapt from the bed and approached the desk where Joey’s dock sat. She was naked, a sight Joey had avoided processing as much as possible.

  “You’re right! That’s exactly what I’m worried about, and why I woke you up!”

  “Huh?”

  Jeanette said, “You haven’t cried. This whole time! Dead, reanimated, seeing Dad, all of it— I’ve been a wreck! But you haven’t cried once. So I’m wondering: can you? Do you not feel strongly enough to cry? Huh?”

  She folded her arms.

  “This is what you woke me up for?”

  “I have to know.”

  “You’re being crazy-irrational, can you not tell?” Joey said. “This couldn’t wait?”

  “Umm, I’m worried about you and I need to talk to you. That’s what sisters are supposed to do.”

  “You couldn’t hold off on the hysterics a couple hours, maybe see if they seemed a less dire once you were rested?”

  “I did wait! I’ve been waiting to ask you this all week!”

  A flash of red light passed over Jeanette’s face.

  “I’m not you!” Joey yelled.

  Jeanette stepped back and whimpered almost inaudibly. She clutched her bare breasts anxiously; oblivious to the fact that she was doing it, her eyes scrolling across the floor.

  “My reactions are not your reactions,” Joey continued. “Of course I’m sad. Of course. But I never sobbed like you. I’m fine. Just leave it be. ”

  Jeanette wanted to say that there had been a time, long ago, when Joey was a sobber. There was a time when they clutched one another and unleashed twin torrents of tears. She couldn’t pinpoint when or why it had stopped— maybe when they’d gotten separate bedrooms. Maybe when Joey began locking her door so Jeanette couldn’t climb into bed with her. Maybe when puberty struck her first, like a bolt from the sky.

  “I’m sorry,” Jeanette said. She eased into a sitting position on the foot of her bed. “You’ll let me know if something is wrong, won’t you?”

  “I will,” Joey said, “you have to trust me.”

  At some point that night, Joey’s fury subsided and sleep found her again. It was harder to track her emotions now that she didn’t have a pulse. In the old days, her heart would have drummed in her temples and wrists all night, beating out a rhythm of annoyed rage, bringing Jeanette’s offense back to mind (and keeping her alert) with every pulse.

  But now, anything that bothered her seemed to slip under the veil of consciousness as soon as she stopped purposefully dwelling on it. Jeanette’s flaws couldn’t be helped. Joey watched her fall asleep and followed suit.

  When she awoke at 7:34 am, Joey couldn’t see anything. Panicked, she turned up her microphones and picked up the rush of a shower, the tweet of cardinals outside, and her sister vaguely humming Black Socks from inside the bathroom.

  Joey tasted orange bitters and shitty Lipton tea for a moment, and was filled with a sensation of desperation. She felt like she had children to feed; several blonde, oddly Caucasian heads. She turned her lights on to full brightness, but still there was nothing but a cavern of white around her.

  In her mind’s eye Joey saw a 3-dimensional mockup of a large metal claw with a glowing rubber base. She knew things she had no business knowing. For example: LifeMedia was constructing a body.

  “What the fuck,” Joey said. It came out much louder than intended.

  Jeanette came from the bathroom and pulled the sheet down, and the external world flooded
back in. Joey realized that at some point in the evening her sister must have pulled the Box into bed with her and tucked it in.

  Jeanette took Joey to an indoor market. ‘They’ selected and bought butternut squash, kale, avocados, and grapefruit.

  “Does this one look ripe? How do you tell, again?” Jeanette asked, but wasn’t answered.

  When they walked by the coffee roaster’s stand, Joey pulsed green and yellow and spoke for the first time in hours.

  “Get a tea. Or, let’s just stand by the tea jars.”

  “Okay…”

  Jeanette popped the lid from a jar of loose tea and held it beneath her sister’s BrightBox.

  “Mmm that smells uncanny. I have got the biggest fucking hankering for hot toddies,” Joey said.

  But Jeanette didn’t know what hot toddies were, and the barista was beginning to lean over the table and stare at the woman with the talking box. Jeanette bought a small satchel, shoved it along with Joey into a burlap tote she’d gotten for free with the avocados, and hurried past the remaining stands to the exit. If she stayed long enough, people would amass and ask questions. They might demand to touch Joey, or hold the box, or worse.

  The next day they went with several of Jeanette’s college friends to a show at a crowded bar. Jeanette’s friends had heard all about Joey by then. They didn’t ask much, and Jeanette found she felt insulted rather than relieved. Joey didn’t like the music, and halfway through the show she shut her external sensors off. When Jeanette asked what she’d been doing, then, to keep herself entertained, Joey said she was researching something. Stuff. Things. Whatever. She wouldn’t clarify.

  The next morning, Jeanette dressed and packed for work before Joey awakened. She approached the box in her coat, her lunch already hanging in a plastic off her shoulder.

  “Time to go,” Jeanette called sweetly, like a mother waking a child.

  Joey’s blue light snapped on. “I’d like to stay here today.”

  “Are you sure?” Jeanette shifted her weight from one foot then the other. “What are you going to do all day? Won’t you be bored?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Jeanette walked halfway out of the bedroom, then stopped. She turned back. “Because Joey, the usage guide says you’re supposed to be moved at least a few times-”

  “Please, Jean. I want to be alone.”

  Jeanette left with a severe look on her face, slamming the door with slightly more force than was necessary. Later, there would be questions. Joey was already dreading them. She dove back into her research and turned all her external sensors off.

  10.

  There were others. LifeMedia Solutions had unveiled BrightBox six months before Joey’s death, and had been beta-testing long before that, so a sizable cadre of uploadees was forming. They were all over the country— and in Germany, the UK, Sweden, India, Japan, Korea, the UAE, Israel, and Australia, at varying levels of market saturation. But growing. Everywhere, growing.

  Joey found them on the LifeMedia customer support message board. New BrightBox users