“India and I had a talk,” Sejal said finally, “and we decided it would be best to see other people for a while.”
Cat stared for a moment, not laughing. Sejal had to smile to let her know that she could, too.
“You were joking,” said Cat.
“Yes.”
“It didn’t sound like you were joking.”
“Perhaps it is my accent.”
This was the second time that day that Sejal had used what she’d considered to be a discreet and charming line about India and her needing some time apart, and in neither instance had it gone well. On the flight from JFK she’d been asked the same question by a University of Pennsylvania undergrad, and had given the same answer.
“What do you mean?” the coed had asked. “Are you in trouble with your government or something?”
“No,” Sejal answered. “I am sorry. I only mean that I had a…personal situation back home. It was a good time to try some studies abroad.”
“What was the problem?”
Sejal had pulled her arms closer to her sides and folded her hands.
“Nothing so terrible. Just a situation.”
“Yeah,” said the girl, “but what was it?”
Sejal lowered her eyes to the seat pocket in front of her.
“C’mon,” the girl prodded, leaning close. “You can tell me.”
Sejal sighed. “I have the Google.”
“Oh. Oh,” said the girl, and she pulled back against her seat.
Sejal had been one of the first clinical cases. India was a bit of a hot spot, Kolkata in particular. So many software companies, so many new jobs making web protocol work better, faster. The old system had been pieced together by all kinds of different people in cubicles and basements all over the world, and it worked about as well as a steam-powered igloo. The last couple years had seen significant upgrades. There were suddenly so many sites and stats and blogs and vlogs that you could search your own name and find out what you had for breakfast that morning. You could download a widget that graphed your last five haircuts. Webcams were everywhere.
Some people couldn’t deal with all the new information. They couldn’t pull themselves away from their computers. But that had always been a problem. That was nothing new. The people who contracted a clinical case of the Google couldn’t pull themselves away from themselves. With everyone online, there was always somebody mentioning you in a blog post, and you were always in the background of someone’s video. The new search engines could show these things to you. They could show you to you. The internet knew what you looked like. The internet had your scent. And if these rumors and blurry visitations weren’t enough (and they weren’t), you could move out of your body and onto the web’s muddy crossroads for good, forever.
It was like a great democratic future where everyone had his own television show—the perfect realization of Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame, one streaming minute at a time. Shows and shows about shows and shows showing people watching shows.
It got so she was on all the time. She had old friends and new friends and real friends and web friends with blogs and video blogs, and she checked them every day. Then it was a few times a day, just in case. Then she started a vlog of her own. Her parents were working long hours and had no idea how much time she was spending on it. They had no idea how much time she spent just watching her old posts, admiring the better things she’d said, obsessing over the little mistakes.
Gradually, it all became more real to Sejal than the real world. Gradually, online Sejal became actual Sejal.
She once saw a banner ad that read, “If a tree falls in the internet and no one’s there to stream it, does it make a sound?” On some level Sejal understood that it was meant to be funny, but she didn’t sleep for three days.
Then one night, her mother came home from work and poked her head through the curtained door of Sejal’s room.
“Hello, princess,” she said.
Seconds passed before Sejal answered. Ten, twelve seconds. She sort of half turned to her mother and said “Hey” before her head jerked back to the screen again.
“What are you looking at?” said Amma, entering the room. “Sejal? What are—”
“Shh,” said Sejal.
Amma looked over her shoulder. It was Sejal’s own video blog, and it was live. Sejal stared back from the screen, and just now her mother’s mouth and chin entered the picture.
“You’re home from work,” Sejal said to the screen with a smile.
“…Yes. Darling, do you think maybe you’ve been spending—”
“Shh-shh.”
“Sejal, I really think—”
“Amma, shh,” she hissed. “Something might happen and I don’t want to miss it.”
“It is not contagious,” Sejal told the girl on the plane.
“I know. Sorry. So you guys…have the internet in India?”
Sejal laughed. “We have the internet. Both my parents are computer programmers. Our connection speed was supernatural,” she said, aware that her voice had become draped with a flowery longing.
Her American foster family had assured her parents in writing that they had only dial-up.
The baggage carousel was filled with luggage now, and it was beginning to thin out as passengers took up their lives again and wheeled them out the sliding doors. Sejal saw her bright pink bag, as radiant as a wound, and when it came within reach she didn’t move to claim it.
“What does yours look like?” asked Cat.
Sejal followed it with her eyes.
“I do not see it yet.”
“I can’t believe they lost your bag,” said Cat from the driver’s seat of her black Jetta. “Those meathead asswipes.”
Sejal smiled faintly in the passenger seat, shifting her feet to avoid the seasick tide of bottles and empty drink cups on the car floor. Sorry about my car, Cat had said when they’d found it in the airport parking garage, but it had turned out she was apologizing not for the mess but for the simple fact that it was a Jetta.
“We should have waited at that counter longer. Or gone to find somebody,” Cat added.
“We can maybe call tomorrow?” said Sejal. “I’m anxious to see my new home. And my new bed.”
“Oh, right. You’re probably tired.”
“Very tired.”
“Only I think my mom has a special dinner planned,” said Cat, wincing.
“Oh!” said Sejal, brightening even as her heart sank. “Of course, that is wonderful, no? My first American home-cooked meal.”
“Actually,” said Cat, “I think we’re going out for Indian.”
The Brown house was larger than Sejal expected. She glanced around it cautiously while Cat and Mr. Brown shouted at each other.
“What were you thinking?” Mr. Brown shouted. “Were you thinking at all? What is Sejal going to wear?”
“It isn’t my fault they sent her bag to the wrong city!” Cat answered. “Why don’t you call up those asswipe…”
“Catherine!” Mrs. Brown gasped.
“…airport…bag…people and yell at them?” finished Cat.
“I will call them, but you should have stayed and talked to someone! If you don’t get them looking for a lost bag right away, they’ll never find it!”
“I didn’t know!” Cat moaned. “Call them then, and stop yelling at me!” She tore out of the room and up the stairs. Mr. Brown stomped into the kitchen. There came from above a whuffing noise, the sound of a door that was too light to slam.
Mrs. Brown was wearing two different kinds of orange. Her small, quiet smile seemed at odds with her outfit, which announced CAUTION: ROADWORK AHEAD. “How was your flight?” she asked.
“It was my fault about the luggage,” said Sejal. “I told Cat I wanted to go.”
“You couldn’t know,” said Mrs. Brown, patting at her curly hair. “But in America we get our bags. They’re not supposed to get lost.”
When she’d first arrived, Sejal had deliberated ov
er whether to bend down and touch the Brown parents’ feet. She considered how it might look in a nation of firm handshakes and high fives, and let the moment pass. Now Sejal could only smile reflexively and glance around the room again. She was finding it difficult to look directly at Mrs. Brown, a condition for which she blamed her father. The woman looked, at the moment, not so much like a gum ball as a goldfish. One of those very round goldfish with the cauliflower heads.
Mr. Brown emerged suddenly with a cordless phone. “I don’t know how to spell your name,” he told Sejal. “Could you speak to this person a moment?”
Sejal got on the phone. “Namaste.”
“Yes, Ms. Namastay,” said a dull voice. “Can you spell that?”
“No, I was merely saying hello. My name is Ganguly.”
“Please spell it, Ms. Namastay.”
Sejal thickened her accent to molasses as she tried to spell as swiftly and unhelpfully as possible. She hoped each odd stress and pause would string out an uncrackable code between her and the bag she did not want. Then, pleased with herself, she said her good-byes and returned the phone to Mr. Brown.
“Are you feeling hungry?” asked Mrs. Brown. “We should leave soon to beat the dinner rush.”
“I’ll go tell Cat,” Sejal answered.
“You see what I have to put up with?” Cat said immediately upon opening her door. Behind her, on walls the color of eggplant, were black posters and clippings from magazines. Many photos of girls looking morose in cemeteries. People in complicated outfits; black and red and white material laced up backs; arms and legs waffled by fishnet. A chunky laptop and a cherub-shaped lamp with a counterproductively black lamp-shade stood on a desk so haphazardly piled with CD cases it appeared to be molting. “Sorry your room isn’t cool like mine. I’ll show you.”
Sejal’s room was through the next door down the hall. It was stupefyingly beige. It had a beige computer in it and an off-white bed.
Neither this computer nor Cat’s antique laptop had stirred more than the slightest pang in Sejal. If she were an alcoholic, these machines would have been weak lemonade shandy. She felt intellectually safe but oddly claustrophobic.
“Your mom wants to leave soon,” said Sejal.
“To ‘beat the rush,’ right?” said Cat in an impersonation of her mother, if her mother had been a dim-witted cartoon bear. “It’s like, there’s a reason they have a dinner rush—that’s when all normal people eat.”
“Do you think we can wait a bit? I promised my mother I would have a puja in my new room.”
Cat wrinkled her nose. “That can’t possibly mean what it sounds like.”
“It’s only a…small ceremony about new beginnings. You bathe and burn incense, and offer flowers and sweets to Ganesha—”
Sejal gave a small cry and tented her hands over her face.
“What?” said Cat. “What’s wrong?”
“Ganesha is in the bag I…lost,” Sejal said.
“Ganesha…Is that the god with the elephant head?”
Sejal thought of her little pink Ganesha figurine in her big pink bag, turning slowly on the dull airport merry-go-round. She nodded.
“The airport lost your elephant god,” said Cat.
Both girls slumped onto the bed.
“Asswipes.”
6
PLASMA TV
TV’S ALAN FRIENDLY strode down the corridor of Belfry Studios, a DVD in his hand. Occasionally he pumped this hand in the air, watching the light glint dazzlingly off the disk’s iridescent grooves. This would look good on tape, Alan thought. He wished someone were taping him. Someone usually was.
He hosted a hit basic cable television show called Vampire Hunters on which, over the course of two and a half seasons, they had not only failed to ever successfully hunt a vampire but also failed to collect adequate proof that such a thing even existed. And yet people watched. Every week, their numbers were as good as the weaker network shows, even in reruns. It was all a lot of stumbling around in the dark, filming everything with those green night-vision cameras, hanging around New Orleans nightclubs when there were no leads to take them elsewhere. So many false alarms with wealthy homosexuals and goth kids, never any legitimate bloodsucking anything, and still the nation watched. It had made Alan feel invincible, like he could put anything on television and make money. Miniature Bigfoot Hunters. Sixteen-Foot-Tall Invisible Robot Hunters.
Then came the Saturday Night Live skit thing. Last Saturday’s host, Cody Southern, had once starred in an 80’s teen vampire picture (Love Bites, 1987, starring Cody Southern and Cody Meyer) that had become the sort of movie that was on TV every Saturday afternoon your whole life. So the SNL writers and cast cooked up a Vampire Hunters parody in which a fake Alan and his team followed the real-life Cody everywhere—to the dry cleaners, to his kid’s piano recital, always impotently waving crosses and garlic in his face and trying to stake him.
It shouldn’t have been important. There was a school of thought (and a school of thought that Alan had been hearing a lot lately, especially from the people who worked for him) that said getting spoofed on SNL was a good thing—it proved that they’d arrived, that the country was talking about them. And the following week they had their best viewer share ever. But the week after that they had their second worst. And that was the same week that Alan lost a sponsor. That was the week an anchor on TV Now! said his name like it had quotes around it. That was the week his coproducers started looking like they’d awoken abruptly from a confusing dream in which they had, for some reason, financed a man with a vampire-hunting show based on little more than the fact that he had an English accent and his own stake.
But that was old news. The DVD made it old news.
“Ha-ha!” Alan trumpeted as he entered Props. “I have it! The news affiliate sent it over this morning.”
Mike didn’t look up from his workbench. “I’ve already seen it on YouTube,” he said.
“Not like this. Not like this. The quality is much better. Look.”
Mike flinched as if Alan had slipped a wet finger into his ear, rather than a DVD into his laptop. “That better be clean,” he said. “Nobody but me ever scans for viruses around here.”
The video started itself. It looked down onto a concrete zoo enclosure and a sleeping panda. And a kid or a short man hunched over the panda. Seconds later there was the bang of a door and two more men appeared, and there was a struggle, and then a moment that was difficult to explain.
“There!” shouted Alan, thumping out the punctuation against the workbench, then cradling his bruised hand. “There.”
Amid the tangle of bodies a shape had seemed to collapse in on itself and rise, flittering, into the air. Where there had once been three people, now there were only two zoo guards and what looked, conceivably, to be a bat. Especially if you wanted it to be a bat.
“There,” Alan said again, gesturing at the monitor. “This is a big break. Before now we weren’t even sure a vampire would show up on tape.”
“What do you mean? Why?”
“Because of the whole no-reflection thing. And some people claim they can’t be photographed.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Light either reflects off something or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you wouldn’t be able to see the vampire with the naked eye, either.”
“Well…” said Alan. He wasn’t used to having this sort of conversation about what he did. Most of his staff were fairly uncritical believers, or pretended to be. And until recently his coproducers hadn’t cared either way.
“And this is supposed to be the same person who stole some blood at a comics convention.”
“He fits the description.”
“Comics fan donors,” Mike snorted. “That’s gotta be some watery blood.” He pushed back his chair. “By the way, your Stake-O-Matic is done.”
Alan squealed and leaned over Mike’s shoulder.
“It eats up a lot of compressed air,” said Mike. “You’ll ha
ve to wear some kind of whippit bandolier.”
It was a gun, there was no pussyfooting around that. It was a homemade air pistol with a wide, open barrel.
“It takes a standard three-quarter-inch dowel rod,” said Mike. “Can stake a vampire-shaped thing at ten yards.”
“Do you have any stakes already sharpened? I want to try it.”
“I’m an applied sciences genius. I don’t whittle sticks. You want a stick whittled, find an intern.”
“But it kills vampires?” asked Alan.
Mike sighed. “If vampires, like most people, don’t like getting things stuck in their hearts, then, yeah, okay. But if I really thought you were going to be aiming this thing at any vampires, I wouldn’t have made it in the first place. I’m envisioning a lot of footage of target practice at dummies with the word ‘vampire’ written in Sharpie.”
“That footage says this kid is a vampire.”
“That footage could have been faked. Are you kidding? I could have made that at home on my Mac. But if there are such things as vampires, it’s because they’re people with a disease or a disorder. Light sensitivity plus anemia, or something. Even if this kid is out there hurting people you’re not allowed to just go shooting things into his chest.”
“If he’s…” said Alan, “if he’s a murderer, it’ll be justifiable.”
“Sure. And Vampire Hunters will join the great tradition of television shows predicated on vigilante homicide. On-camera, vigilante homicide. Oh, wait—there aren’t any shows like that? I wonder why that is.”
“Look,” said Alan, “it’s not called Vampire Killers. It’s Vampire Hunters. We should be able to string out the hunt for this kid for at least five episodes. We’ll figure out what to do with him when we find him. But focus groups say they like our gear. Our tools. So we need more swag like the Stake-O-Matic. There are licensing possibilities.”
“Whatever.”
“Four more Stake-O-Matics just like this, plus another four for backups, plus we’re not calling them Stake-O-Matics anymore. They’re now called Redeemers.”