Love Minus Eighty (4 page)

Rob pulled a New Peregrines sweatshirt over his head, relishing the darkness that enveloped him, feeling disappointed
when his head popped through the neck hole and his room returned, with its sagging ceiling, its pocked walls.

He stared at the doorknob. The knob had a dent in it he’d probably put there when he was a kid. In this old house his parents had owned for the past thirty-five years, this hundred-and-sixty-year-old house meant to last fifty, you still had to grasp a knob and twist it to open a door. Right now it seemed far too definitive an act.

He saw the flicker of a shadow beneath the door, but no muffled footsteps. His mom. Or, more accurately, a holographic image of his mom that roamed the house to keep his father company, ten years after his mother’s death. Rob kept expecting his father to move on, to find Mom gone one day. It hadn’t happened yet.

He decided to go back to bed. Maybe tomorrow.

Dad, looking gaunt and raccoon-eyed, brought dinner. If Rob could have eaten anything—a roll, a forkful of baked beans—he would have, just to bring a shade of relief to Dad’s eyes. The last thing Rob wanted was for his dad to suffer along with him. Dad had enough to deal with; he didn’t need a second ghost roaming his house. But Rob couldn’t eat, and didn’t know how else to release Dad from sharing his misery. Maybe he should try harder to get out of the house during the day, to give Dad some relief from his presence, from the constant reminder that a woman was dead because of his son.

Maybe it would have been better for everyone if Rob had been over the legal limit, and sent to prison. He winced, recalling the DA’s ferocity at the inquest, her outrage that he was going to get away with it. Should he have been allowed to walk, simply because he hadn’t been
quite
intoxicated? He hadn’t felt drunk at the time, but surely the drinks had
affected him. He was still surprised he’d passed. Three vodka martinis seemed like a hell of a lot of alcohol, even if spread over a few hours.

Seeing that Rob wasn’t going to eat, his dad sat on the edge of the bed. “So how are you feeling?”

“I’ll be okay. I just need a few weeks.”

Dad considered this and nodded, somewhat skeptically. “I’ve got to say, you don’t seem to be getting better.”

Rob muttered something that was incoherent, even to him, then a long silence stretched, and Rob couldn’t seem to find the energy to break it.

“Why don’t you go out, get some fresh air?” his dad said.

Rob opened his mouth to say he wasn’t up to it, but his father cut him off.

“Even if you don’t feel like it, you should go.” He used that calm yet piercing tone that insisted Rob hear him. “You may have to go through the motions for a while, you know?”

Here was something he could do to ease his father’s suffering: Go Through the Motions. He grabbed his jacket from the closet.

He went out the back door to avoid neighbors who might want to chat, his chin tucked against a chilly breeze. He crossed their small dirt-and-weeds backyard, vaulted a low concrete wall into the gray-water recycling canal that ran behind the houses, and headed toward the abandoned mall. He could lean up against the wall for a few hours, read the graffiti.

Each step was an effort. All he wanted was to be back in bed, memorizing salutations in foreign languages.

The Backmans’ dog barked as he passed behind their house. He eyed the cluster of ancient, cracked solar panels set along the edge of the canal behind the Royers’ house.

The sun felt unnaturally bright, and when he glanced up, it
stung his eyes. Better if he were in Low Town with its muted daylight, the buildings hugging the sidewalks. There was too much open space in the burbs.

“Rob?”

Rob flinched at the sound of Lorelei’s voice. He spun, foolishly expecting her to be standing there in the flesh. Instead her screen was there, large enough that her face was actual size. Several hundred smaller screens flitted behind her.

“You’ve got to be kidding. Get the fuck away from me.” He turned his back. It burned his skin to have all those eyes looking at him, judging him, in all likelihood firing comments back and forth about how utterly consumed with guilt he looked.

“Rob, I just came to say I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ve been trying to contact you. Haven’t you seen my messages?”

Yeah, he’d been eagerly reading all of his friends’ and exes’ messages.
Sorry you killed someone. Feel better soon.
He turned to face her. “Thank you. I appreciate your concern, I really do. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to be alone.” He looked toward the mall. It was semipublic space, there would be nowhere to go where Lorelei couldn’t follow. Better to go home. He ducked around Lorelei, stormed right through the solid-looking wall of frames, rudely shattering their illusion of solidity for a moment. If he’d been wearing a system, the fine for defiling their personhood would have ticked off immediately. As it was, he wasn’t sure if he could be identified and fined or not. He really didn’t care.

“I can’t help feeling partly responsible for what happened.”

Rob glanced back. Lorelei and her entourage were following three paces behind him.

“I’m sorry. I can’t help what you feel.”

“Will you please stop and talk to me for a minute?”

Head down, Rob kept walking. “Didn’t we break up? I seem to recall we did.”

“That doesn’t matter. None of this petty shit matters, after what happened.”

“Amen to that.” Another hundred yards, and he’d hit the block he’d set up around the house eight days ago. Thank goodness for private property.

“I’m sorry about what I did. I stopped airmailing your stuff as soon as I heard. I have it at home. Some of it.”

“Toss it out. I don’t want it.”

“Rob, please.”

If she’d been there in person, she could have grabbed his shoulder and yanked him around to face her. But as things were, there was nothing she could do to stop him from climbing out of the canal and into his yard.

Actually, if she had come in person—alone—he might have talked to her. Maybe she could have convinced him that throwing his stuff out the window had been some sort of temporary insanity. Rob still couldn’t believe she’d done it. Lorelei was not your typical person, but he’d never sensed cruelty in her before that night.

Relief flooded him as he closed the back door.

Rob’s father was in the kitchen, watching Lorelei out the window, his old handheld on the table. “I see you didn’t get far.”

Rob’s mom was at the table, studiously chewing some invisible meal.

“Made it to the Royers’ before she chased me back.” Rob eyed the three ancient barber chairs that stood in a row in the front room, in “the Business Room,” as Dad called it. They were empty at the moment, but a customer might push open the door and saddle up at any time of day, seven days a week,
and Dad would power up the scissors. It was so simple, so beautifully simple. Dad carried on a pleasant conversation with his customer, and cut hair. He avoided politics and mean gossip, hiding behind a wall of polite “Uh-huh’s” if a customer brought up either, and went about his days in blissful simplicity. Before the accident, Rob had zero interest in carrying on the family business, but if there’d been anywhere near enough business, Rob would happily begin learning the trade today. Snip-snip, talk about last night’s boloball game.

Dad was watching him stare longingly into the Business Room, probably with no clue why. He clapped Rob’s shoulder. “Come on, you could use a trim.”

Before Rob could protest, Dad led him to the first chair—the one closest to his supplies, and to his Wall of Fame, plastered with hundreds of before-and-after photos of his regulars over the past thirty years.

The familiar high-pitched
wheem
of the scissors, Dad’s fingers brushing his head, made Rob’s throat clench with emotion. Two years ago Rob had quietly begun getting his hair cut at a swanky shop in High Town, where you could see what your haircut would look like beforehand, rather than hope Dad got it even and didn’t shear off too much. Dad had never said a word about it, but now Rob could see what a betrayal it had been. He’d basically told his own father he was no good at what he did. What a thoughtless bastard he was.

No more, though. No more selfishness.

Not that he could afford haircuts in swanky salons in any case, now that he and Lorelei had broken up. The mirror allowed him to see through the doorway behind him, out the kitchen window into the backyard. Lorelei was gone. Did he feel better or worse about being supported by Lorelei and her trust fund for the past eight months? About the same. He’d
felt slimy about it before, he felt shitty about it now. He’d told himself he had no choice, that Lorelei wasn’t about to live in Low Town, and Rob couldn’t afford to live in High Town without her help. Who was he kidding? He hadn’t been able to afford to live in Low Town on what he made as a musician.

His dad set an old handheld in Rob’s lap, amid the clumps of hair collecting on the barber sheath Dad had whipped around him like a bullfighter wielding a red cloak. Rob liberated one hand from the sheath and picked up the handheld.

“What’s this?”

“I’ve gone back and forth on whether to show you.”

“Show me what?” Rob was uneasy about something in his dad’s tone. “What is it?” He sensed it was something that would force him to think about things he didn’t want to think about.

“Just look at it.”

When Rob saw Winter West’s name at the top, it felt as if all of the light drained out of his head. He was sure he was going to black out, but he didn’t.

It was a profile from Cryomed’s dating center. The bridesicle place.

“Oh. Jesus Christ.” There was a clip of Winter standing in front of the Grand Canyon. She was laughing. Not smiling but flat-out laughing, her nostrils flared like a winded colt. Her hair was striking—long, curly, deep auburn—she looked to be one of those easygoing, energetic people others love to be around. A lot of people probably missed her.

“She’s in the minus eighty. She didn’t have freezing insurance, but she was good-looking enough that Cryomed picked her up for the bridesicle program.” Dad leaned over to look at the screen with him.

Even on this old handheld, Rob could have expanded her
profile so that she was standing right next to him, as big and bright as life itself. But it hurt just to look at her static clip on the tiny screen, like a flame on his retinas. She’d been thirty, single, a teacher. An English teacher. She’d been an avid runner, loved random-selection reality feeds and vertical gardening.

“She just made the cut.” Dad pointed to her global attractiveness rating, which was eight point six, before returning to the haircut. “They only take uninsured who are eight and a half or over.” Her face was all original, so the rating was unadjusted. A nose job or butt implants would have put her in the ground.

After her physical stats was a list of the damage, beginning with the major organs that would need to be replaced. Rob squeezed his eyes shut, turned his head. “You’re showing me this to say that at least she’s got a chance, is that it? At least she’s not in the ground?”

Dad stopped cutting, stared out the window, tugging at his lower lip. “I guess that’s part of it.” He looked at Rob; it had always amazed Rob how open and frank his gaze could be. Maybe it was because he wasn’t educated enough to learn about guile. More likely it was because he never carried on other conversations while talking to Rob, never divided his attention. It was hard to meet his father’s gaze now. “What I was really thinking was, you could go there and apologize.”

“
What?
” The thought filled him with electric terror. “No, no, no.” It would never have occurred to him, not in a million years. He couldn’t imagine anything more awful than standing over her while she lay in that drawer, and admitting he was the one who put her there. And to what end? To seek absolution? He had no business asking her to release him from his guilt. He deserved to feel awful for the rest of his life; his last breath on earth should be an uneasy one.

“You’re saying I should go to the dating center, revive her, tell her I was the one who killed her and I’m very sorry, then pull the plug on her again?”

His father’s tone grew soft. “She probably has some things she wants to say to you, and you should give her the chance to say them, even if you don’t want to hear them. Maybe you’ll find some peace that way.” Rob felt his dad’s hand on the back of his neck. “Even if it doesn’t, I think it’s still the right thing to do.”

Rob had no answer. “I know you’re right.” But even if it was the right thing to do, it still wasn’t possible. There had just been something on the macrofeeds about protests outside bridesicle centers. Visiting bridesicle places was crazy expensive, to discourage people who couldn’t actually afford to repair any of the women from visiting, so it had an exclusive feel, no relatives sitting around sobbing. It cost something like six times as much to visit a bridesicle as it did a relative frozen in the main facility. Not that most people could even afford to visit their relatives.

Rob called up the local bridesicle site, which was in Yonkers, and located a fee list. Yeah, crazy expensive.

“I can’t afford it, though. Even if I drained all of my savings, I wouldn’t have anywhere near enough.”

His father patted his shoulder. “I’ll loan you the rest. Whatever you need.”

“Dad, no, five minutes is like nine thousand. I have less than two, and I know you don’t have seven.”

His dad shushed him like he was six again. “We’ll get it.”

Mira dreamed she was running on a trail in the woods. The trail sloped upward, growing steeper and steeper until she was running up big steps. Then the steps entered a flimsy plywood tower and wound up, up. It was dark, and she could barely see, but it felt so good to run; it had been such a long time that she didn’t care how steep it was. She climbed higher, considered turning back, but she wanted to make it to the top after having gone so far. Finally she reached the top, and there was a window where she could see a vast river, and a lovely college campus set along it. She hurried over to the window for a better view, and as she did, the tower leaned under her shifting weight, and began to fall forward. The tower built speed, hurtled toward the buildings.
This is it
, she thought, her stomach flip-flopping.
This is the moment of my death.