Patchwork dolls, p.15
Patchwork Dolls, page 15
Leaving the airport that day, she noticed how clear the sky was compared to home. A small car followed her all the way to her motel, but after that nobody attempted to contact her. For a while she sat in that motel room alone, paranoid, ordering takeout and paying delivery people in soft, weathered bills left outside the door. A few weeks later, she moved into an apartment complex in an area she had chosen one day on a map, not far from New York. She called no one; wrote to no one about the news. She realized she hadn’t spoken more than a few words aloud since she landed.
Back home, people spoke far too much, but their voices were empty—their how are yous and nice weather today and good luck on your exams rattled around hollow, the emotion that once stood behind them long gone. In some ways, the patterns of the party mimicked these interactions. A few times she mentioned her home planet, and people murmured a few words of sympathy, but then Molly needed another drink, and Gabe suddenly remembered a funny joke he had heard at work, which made Penny take out her phone, and Jill absolutely needed to show people photographs from her latest ski trip.
Swapping one form of isolation for another, she convinced herself she had made the right choice, but it made the party no less strange, no less surreal as she watched from a distance the slow-moving crowds crawl through bowls of snacks, drinking and playing cards. She remembered at school, years ago, an economics teacher telling her about these people. “Earth is our neighbor planet, so we share many of the same characteristics, but they are especially known for their love of entertainment,” he had said. Bread and circuses. Games and beer. As if there was nothing else in the universe they could be doing.
* * *
T HAD FOUND HER apartment through Jill’s family friend, a woman named Barbara who had gotten her real estate license after her third divorce. She encouraged T to do the same.
“I set my own working hours, I get to meet great people, and honestly, it’s so much fun,” she had said as she walked T over to the complex. “I don’t actually manage apartments. I mainly do family houses, but Jill said you needed help, so I found this great spot for you.” Barbara winked, her eye shriveled and caked in blue powder.
“Now, remind me how I pronounce your name again?”
T said her name. Barbara tried to repeat the sloping vowels, but she fell flat on the tones and twisted off the end with a sour twang. T shook her head, smiling, repeated her name, but still Barbara laughed and said it wrong, flapped her hands and said, “I’ll just call you T, honey, that okay?”
The apartment faced a river, which frothed and soaped against the edges of the rough banks. T heard animals there in the early violet mornings, frightening sounds she had never heard before: branches cleaving themselves from trees, skinny-necked ivory birds skimming the air, things ripping and dying in the woods. The place was bucolic, tamped down with a sort of stunned, blinded friendliness that was distinctly of this world. Older couples and single women inhabited the other apartments. Directly across from T lived a woman named Marta whose apartment faced the road. When T first moved in, Marta had crept out into the hallway and made a strange comment about how young T seemed, what a nice view she had. “I would have liked that apartment myself, but there’s a long waiting list apparently,” she said.
T saw Marta next when she took out the trash. Marta was standing in the hallway, anxiously wiping away the rain from her coat, creating a damp painting of moisture on the carpeted floors. She explained that she had been locked out, how her daughter lived nearby and would arrive with an extra set of keys within the hour. She kept talking, emphasizing how cold she was. Then T realized she wanted to be invited in.
“Oh, thank you, you’re an angel,” Marta said, taking off her coat but not her shoes. “Oh, it’s so strange. My apartment is just like this, except …” She ran a hand over the wallpaper. “In reverse.”
T wanted to be a good host, but she was tired. Earlier that day she had been interviewed at the bank for her new account. It had been almost a month, and she still hadn’t received approval. She felt vulnerable, invisible, without something that connected her to these institutional structures. If she had an account, she thought, she could find a job. If she could find a job, she could earn money to buy food, save up. If she saved up, she could leave this place and move to a better apartment. If she could move to a better apartment, she might be happier. If she was happier, everything would be fine.
“Do you have children? Of course not, you’re so young. I had Mary when I was nineteen. Can you believe it? I was a baby. Kids these days are waiting until their thirties, and I think that’s the way I should have done it. Nineteen and I don’t understand my daughter now, not at all. She says she never wants kids herself, so there goes my chance to be a grandmother. Do you have any water, by the way? Oh, I’m so sorry to barge in on you like this, it’s just that I saw something on the news and then decided to take a walk.”
T poured a glass of water and brought it to her tiny round table, where Marta had already sat down and made herself comfortable. T thought, She has very long arms.
“Did you see the news? A woman killed herself and her daughter, and she did it somewhere in the neighborhood … I figured out the address and I walked over there. I just had to take a look, the woman was a single mother … her daughter was only nine years old … so I took a few pictures of the house, only to post on my Facebook … you know, something like this has never happened before, not in this neighborhood …”
Marta finished her story but showed no indication of leaving. Tapping on her smartphone, she showed T her Facebook account, scrolling through to the newest post, for which she had written a three-paragraph text explaining the circumstances, the history of the house, and how the story would inevitably impact real estate value in the area. My daughter lives very close by, she wrote, and I have been settled in the area for over fifty years now. Something like this has never happened before. I hate to think of how this tragic incident will affect the community I know and love. Under her post, there were already twenty or so comments, likes, and sad-face emojis. Heartbreaking, such tragic news, one of the comments read. It looks like a beautiful house. My grandmother lived in Fairlake for twenty years. Another said, Thanks for this. The state of news media and journalism has been in the shitter lately. Keep up the civilian reporting. We must take care of each other.
Of course T knew about the murder-suicide. The woman and child had been from her planet.
She kept the news on constantly throughout the day as a reminder of how quickly things could change. At first, the reports had been neutral, even kind toward foreigners. Earth welcomes asylum seekers. Refugee visas to include up to 1.7 billion people. But then people like T actually started showing up. Some of them were dead within weeks, unable to manage the transition. There were so many of them, and not enough space, not enough jobs. The narrative changed from a language of community to one of singularity, of hostility. Earth rejects visa expansion for extraterrestrial youths. Deadline for exodus looms. Another extraterrestrial body found in the river. Riot breaks out at factory as extraterrestrial workers protest discrimination. Late at night, drinking wine and taking pills, T found online videos of pseudointellectuals espousing conspiracies on space propaganda, mutated genes, and phrenological analyses alongside lectures by flat earth theorists and montages exposing politicians as reptiloids. Here she realized that mistrust was embedded deep into the human psyche.
After that evening’s intrusion, T avoided Marta in the hallways, watching through a peephole to see if her scrunched figure was nearby. She allowed the distance between them to grow long, full of unfamiliarity and polite, forced gestures when they saw each other on the street, in the same aisle of the supermarket. Occasionally, she would receive a Facebook friend suggestion for Marta via an algorithm: People you may know. Every time, she pressed Remove. She wondered if this was what it was like to be neighborly.
* * *
AT THE PARTY, SOMEONE asked about how her former home had managed a contaminated water crisis, and she explained that the government had implemented a system that citizens dutifully followed, and not many people had gotten sick in the end.
“That’s one of the main benefits of an authoritarian regime, right? Not like out here in the Wild West.”
“Yes, that’s true,” she responded, smiling weakly. She did not tell the woman that there had been many people who had stayed within the lines, who had read all their contracts before signing anything, and still had found themselves in compromising positions. She did not say how on their phones there had been tracking devices, tiny drones blinking overhead. She did not tell the woman how if someone even thought about breaking the rules, there would be a neighbor calling a hotline, turning them in. She did not mention how her parents had suffered in their final years from chronic anxiety and depression before succumbing to a cancer that everyone in their generation seemed to be sick with.
She excused herself to the bathroom but had trouble finding it. Jill, walking past, saw her, pulled her to one side—“Hey, you can use my parent’s bathroom upstairs”—and soon T was in an almost-silent part of the house, the sounds of people drinking and partying like a distant laugh track. Jill and Hannah’s parents, T noted as she peed and looked at the monogrammed face towels, were Bill and Eleanor.
The bathroom was at once opulent and chaotic. Sturdy spined books rested on a ledge, fringed by dainty embroidered curtains. She saw The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up next to a group of reading glasses, tangled together with their bead lanyards. A tiny glass sculpture of a Boston terrier stood in a carved-out space behind the toilet. The sink was a gigantic ceramic marvel with hot and cold taps, and when T washed her hands she splashed the water around a little to demonstrate just how much space she had. Another whole person could stand beside her, and they would still not be touching. She recalled the sensation of her body being pressed in a crowd, pressed onto an unyielding floor, and she shook that feeling away as she reentered the party.
She ate some hot dogs and drank a cup of warm, flat beer to appear ceremonial. She could try to pretend, she could adapt; she could be that friendly neighbor. But she was still unsure of the social rules. She spoke too early or too late in conversations, and as the night went on she became less alert, less perky. She had studied enough human body language to know that people didn’t enjoy talking with her, that they felt weighed down by her presence. She looked around for anyone else who might be like her. But the problem was that everyone here looked the same as they did back home.
All along, these people on Earth had assumed there had been other places to go, other planets to start anew on. Her arrival had shattered that illusion. Everywhere was just the same, from the soil down to the languages. The verisimilitude made them uneasy. Her body was a reminder: No matter how far you travelled, there were always things you couldn’t escape.
* * *
ONCE, HER FAMILY HAD visited Earth, back before everything had changed. Her father, a scientist, had been invited to a conference.
“When is it?” T’s mother had asked. “The twins can’t take any time off school. Exams are coming up.”
Fortunately, the conference was scheduled for December. They bought overpriced new winter clothes, which T’s mother was anxious over—Surely it would be cheaper there and Will they even let us go outside?—and looked up photographs of snow. Nobody told them that it never snowed in Las Vegas.
Before they left, T’s father had told them that their trip had to be kept a secret since not many people knew that the borders had opened to interplanetary travel recently.
“They probably won’t let us leave the resort grounds,” he had told them. “And no talking to strangers.”
At their hotel, the concierge looked up their booking while their father tried to get a signal on his small handheld radio.
“The connection here is poor,” he remarked but then was distracted by the presentation of two giant, gold cards.
“This is your room key,” the concierge said. “Breakfast is from nine to eleven. We have twenty-four-hour room service also. Please enjoy your stay.”
“Two keys …” T’s mother said. “Could we have an extra one? For my daughters?”
The concierge looked at T, nineteen at the time, then to her twin sisters, ten years old, smartly dressed, sharp-edged like two brains wired to a single computer. He clacked on his keyboard, and then T had it in her hand: freedom, at least within the confines of the resort.
“You’re in charge of your sisters,” her mother said, pulling her close. “Don’t leave the hotel.”
For three days they ran around the faux-marble fountains, the indoor palm trees, the men in suits. They stuck their faces on smoked-glass windows, ogling at the cars and sunlight and people walking around. They ate glazed donuts and played chess.
“The food is weird,” one of T’s sisters said on the fourth day, at one of the resort’s lavish, gold-frosted restaurants, poking at plates of fried potato and meat. “I miss our food.”
“Don’t complain,” T said, and was about to say more, but her eye caught a pale, unshaven man sitting by himself not far from their table. He was looking at them, and there was something uneasy in his directionless posture, the way he sat and ate as if he had nowhere to go. She noticed immediately that he was distinct to other people in the room—he dressed differently, for one, in a long gray coat and a white-streaked baseball cap. Everyone else was wearing colorful, silky indoor clothes, as if they had just arrived from their rooms. T then remembered it was December on Earth: cold.
The man had a strange bruise on his chin, a flowering growth of purple. He was drinking a coffee, or some kind of dark liquid. He sipped at it hurriedly, like a rabbit running over a patch of grass. Then T saw him ask a waitress for the check—it was so elegant, the way he pinched his fingers and made a W with them—and in the same motion, very fluidly and quickly, he wrapped a fork and a knife in his cloth napkin and slipped them into his pocket.
When their server came with the bill, T told him what she had seen.
“Maybe you can catch him before he leaves,” she said.
After they left the restaurant and were back in their rooms, one of T’s sisters asked why she had talked to the waiter.
“The man stole.”
“Just a fork and knife?”
“It’s wrong.”
The other sister chimed in: “I think the man needed a bigger meal. He looked poor. He looked sick.”
All day after that, T felt terrible. She kept thinking about the man’s outfit, and whether he was really poor or sick. How he moved like a block of gray sky, like something you did your best to ignore as you went on with your life. She wondered if they had caught him, if he knew that she had told. She kept waiting for him to turn up, like a bad dream, but they never saw him again. Soon they were leaving.
On the weeklong shuttle trip back home, T heard her mother crying late at night.
“I really thought we would see snow,” T’s mother whispered. “I feel so silly. Even the girls didn’t care that much.”
Her mother softly cried some more, and T heard her father say, “We’ll go back another time, okay? Maybe when the twins are older. Another holiday.”
She thought about this now, alone at the party. When it came to choosing where she would migrate to, she had chosen America simply because she didn’t know any other place. In catalogues, the photographs were spectacular: red, rusty canyons, parks and trees. But she should have known better, should have known that the man with the bruise in the café would tell her all she needed to know about Earth and its distractions.
Now her parents were long gone, and her sisters were living different lives. One of them had become an activist and protested space colonization and poverty tourism; the other was a lawyer. They hadn’t kept in touch all that much, a message here and there. T suspected they didn’t even know she had left. Both of them had stayed.
Who was right, who was wrong? At night, T turned over the choices in her mind like a coin, feeling herself slip and morph into her dark dreams. In the mornings, the grayness of her curtains, her floor, matched how she felt as she poured another cup of coffee, took another lukewarm shower, set up her sticky computer to spend another few hours looking for jobs. It had been so long since she felt the rightness of anything. In America, people liked to call it gut feeling, as if there was something in your bowels that could provide spiritual clarity.
She had read in a research paper about how immigrants gained new microbiomes in the first few months of arrival to the U.S., their bodies adapting quickly to new foods, new fats, and sugars. Scientists also noted a loss in gut diversity; in some cases, people lost the microbiomes they had inherited at birth from their families, making them more vulnerable to disease and infection. But her gut was silent, soft, yielding. It told her nothing, except that she was always hungry.
* * *
HANNAH OFFERED TO DRIVE T home since everyone else was too high or drunk to figure out which car was theirs. When T refused, saying it was an inconvenience, Hannah shrugged and said it wasn’t a problem: She was a night owl anyway, and she had just been reading in her bedroom.
On the way over, T asked Hannah questions about herself, in the way that she felt adults should with younger people. She learned that Hannah was a freshman at a prestigious college that her parents couldn’t exactly afford, but she had received generous funding. She was a history major.
