Family Business
Photograph by Yoojin Shin
By Adora Svitak
“Tits are in. And stepsisters.”
That was classic Hedden, the CEO. He dropped it in, speaking so flatly you could almost be fooled into thinking it professional. Although, in this line of work, it was: he ran the largest virtual reality sexual entertainment experience in the Bay Area. That was the official name for his category of work. VR sexual entertainment experience. But the protesters outside from local evangelical groups called it by a different name—porn parks. Hedden attracted the most ire because he was one of the first, maybe the first, at least outside of Nevada, and you didn’t get to be an innovator without rubbing someone the wrong way, he said during a Monday standup when the protesters were being particularly vocal. His employees didn’t care too much about the believers. They’d seen enough godmen sail through the park gates behind tinted windows. Besides, it was evident to everyone that the work was mission-driven, at least if you wanted to think so. By helping people experience things they had heretofore only fantasized about, you helped them unlock their erotic potential, understand themselves better, or in the hardest cases—hardest for the workers who got assigned to them, anyway—give them an outlet for release that might keep them from becoming dangers to society.
Hedden’s park was set on the peak of a golden bluff east of the city where once coal miners lived in clapboard houses they took apart, nail by nail and board by board, to bring to new hills after the black veins under the earth ran dry. The regional parks department owned the land, and the abandoned mine, until Hedden made some calls and snatched it up. In a few months he and his team had laid pavement, built a welcome center, and cleared sites to place forty shipping containers, sparsely furnished, where you could play by the hour. Then he sat back and waited. Word spread quickly—first around the money-rich, morals-poor startup boy-kings who lived above chocolate and matcha cafes in 16th St. Mission, a neighborhood named for a stop on a public transit line they didn’t deign to ride. They told the kingmakers in their Sand Hill offices and the weary office drones sipping kombucha on tap and counting down the days to PTO vacations in Japan, and suddenly, who needed Japan? In the park, you could plop two VR contact lenses into your eyes and a wireless headset over your ears and walk into one of those shipping containers, be in bed with a geisha under cherry blossoms fluttering into her hair. Your “play partner.” Contacts off, she wouldn’t look like a geisha at all, just one of Hedden’s employees, maybe an ex-WNBA player with bunions. But you would know only her softness and warmth and the high tinkle of her laughter, filtering into your ear like distant bells.
Hedden himself never cared much about sex work. He just knew how to make money. He was a white man with the right quirks in a town that loved its “culture fits,” and even better, Hedden had a nose for sniffing out impending legislative change. In college, fresh off the heels of marijuana legalization, he made his first small fortune by identifying low-utilization commercial kitchens to rent out for producing edibles. He snapped up property in West Oakland, predicting it would be the next frontier of gentrification, and farmed his profits into other investments and the park. But no matter how many 30 Under 30 lists or star-studded idea conference lineups he graced, no one in his family much appreciated all the work. His wife, Cherie, divorced him shortly after giving birth to their son Denver. She had had one of those late-in-life realizations about her sexual orientation that Hedden, being a good liberal, could hardly resent. They were cordial, if distant. Cherie was not the problem, though; the problem was the old woman. His mother. In fact, she was standing in front of him, interrupting the Monday standup, all to ask why her grandson kept coming back to the park.
“What do you mean, ‘tits and stepsisters?’ ” she said, aghast.
“I mean that’s popular. I am making an attempt to answer your question, which was ‘Why does Denver keep returning to the park?’ Now I obviously can’t comment on specific user data because we only look at it in aggregate or, if there’s a bug, in an anonymized error report—”
“I mean why aren’t you doing anything to stop it!”
The employees standing around the glossy wooden table at the center of the conference room had been studiously avoiding looking at either Hedden or his mother, but a few let out muffled chuckles.
“Oh.” He looked miffed for a second. “You could have sign-posted more for that ‘why,’ to indicate that you were implying a normative judgment—”
The old woman made an impatient noise.
“He’s an adult,” Hedden said mildly.
“He’s falling behind in school because of all the time he spends here.”
“That doesn’t seem pertinent to him having already attained the age of majority.”
“If he were spending all his time in an—an opium den, I don’t think you would just shrug your shoulders and say, ‘He’s an adult.’ ”
“Do you really want to pursue the argument that VR sexual experiences are as chemically addicting as opium?” He looked mildly interested at this, an intrigued expression the old woman could recognize instantly.
“He’s your son, not a thought experiment,” she snapped. “I should beat you merrily ‘round the head.” This was a favorite phrase of hers that Hedden had heard since he was a young boy. At first he took it literally and ran screaming from the room, until his mother had soothed him with the reassurance that it didn’t really mean anything. But if you don’t mean it, then why say anything at all? He’d meant to follow up, but it seemed like he would never get the answer to that question from anyone in the world.
“Mr. Hedden, sir?” asked one of the workers, fumbling with the drawstring of his hoodie. “Were you still planning to finish today’s standup?”
“Oh. Yes. I mean no, you can all to return to work. It appears that I have to attend to my prodigal, though adult—” he looked meaningfully at the old woman, “son.”
*
Denver was in Block 8, the orange-walled shipping container where Calla worked. She wasn’t on the clock. They ate grocery store onigiri, peeling back crinkling plastic wrap to swaddle the plump triangles of rice in seaweed.
“How much was this?” she asked.
“Four-oh-four, oh-five? Don’t worry about it.”
“I’ll pay you. I don’t like owing money.”
“Or is it just that you don’t like owing money to men?”
Calla looked at him directly. She had intense, dark eyes. He dropped his eyes to his lap. A minute later, his phone buzzed with a notification. He looked at it, half expecting it to be Calla’s onigiri money.
“Oh, shit.”
“What?” she asked, pinching a single, stray grain of rice off the back of her hand and drawing it to her mouth.
“My grandma came here to look for me.”
“Your grandma?” Calla burst into a barking laugh. “That’s cute. Real family business you guys got here.”
“Nah. It’s not like that.”
“So you’re telling me your grandma doesn’t work front-of-shop while you toddle around to help clean, and nobody calls the cops on you because you’re a cute little Asian girl?”
“Yeah, that sounds like your childhood.”
“They actually did call the cops.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” Calla said. “For elder abuse, though. The child labor was chill.” She leisurely picked a piece of pickled plum out from between her two front teeth, reveling in the grossness like an old man spitting on the sidewalk. “You going to find your grandma or what?”
“She’s gonna chew me out.”
“She religious?”
“Not like the people outside.” He kicked at a piece of shrink wrap from the onigiri that had dropped from his lap to the ground. Calla pursed her lips. “Sorry.” He picked the plastic up and threw it at the trashcan across the room. “I mean, I don’t even think she’s religious at all. She’s just old.”
“This guy I had yesterday was 78.”
“So?”
“You’re not just automatically hung up about sex because of age. Dude, it’s these 22-year-old kids with a fuck ton of money and no EQ who are the worst. Their fantasies are the most boring.”
“I know age doesn’t mean you have to be repressed and shit but, like, while 78-year-old dudes have always had license to be gross—”
“Sexually liberated,” Calla corrected.
Denver snorted. “You’ve really drunk the Kool-Aid.”
“You know where that saying comes from?”
“Drink the Kool-Aid? No. Kool-Aid’s gross. I’ve never had it.”
“It was a mass suicide.”
“Oh. Damn.”
“Yeah. Like little kids drank it because they were told to, and they didn’t know it had poison in it.” Her face was very still. “It’s actually kind of fucked that you would use the idiom that casually.”
“Oh, shit,” he said, cotton-mouthed. Could she see that all the blood had drained from his face? And that he was actively willing himself to disappear? “I’m so sorry, I really didn’t know about it at all—”
She burst into laughter.
“What?” he asked, befuddled.
“You idiot. You thought I was offended?”
“Well I didn’t—”
“Denver. I had to keep from snorting the other day when a man literally called me his ‘little Oriental.’ This other guy was into calling me a cripple—”
“What the—fuck him.”
“I did.”
“Jesus. You know what I mean.”
“You don’t need to get all righteously indignant on my behalf,” she said. “He obviously couldn’t see the prosthetic. He was objectifying his fantasy girl, not me.”
“Yeah, but—” He found that he didn’t have the words. “How did it make you feel?”
“Rich.” She folded the shrink wrap from her onigiri, her fingernail dragging across the plastic to make severe lines until it made a compliant tiny packet in her palm. “Anyway, I pay someone else to listen to me talk about my feelings. Actually, your dad pays. Love those healthcare benefits.”
“Friends talk about their feelings.”
“Are we friends, though?” She fixed one of those faces that gave you no clues as to tone or feeling on him, and he knew it was time to go.
“I hope so,” he said, getting up to walk out the door, “because otherwise you’ve just wasted a lot of earning potential,” and he dared to turn to look at her as he stepped out, catching the briefest of smiles playing across her lips.
*
The old woman saw Denver at the gift shop. He was sitting alone on a bench, twiddling a cheap souvenir eraser between his thumbs. It was supposed to approximate a white woman’s breast, but the colors were all wrong, too loud, the old woman thought: the sharp vinyl nub of the areola was Pop Art pink.
The boy looked a lot like her late husband, had the same messy shock of brown hair that turned light in the summertime and height he didn’t quite know what to do with, folding himself awkwardly into spaces with a perennial expression of apology. He had been such a sweet boy. In Cherie’s absence—she had been an inconsistent mother—the old woman had been his shoulder to lean on in the back of the car on the ride home from kindergarten, the lap where he would sit with his phonics flashcards, the sunspot-dappled cheeks he would festoon with kisses.
Really, she shouldn’t have had to enter the picture. He had a father, after all. But everyone knew that Hedden paid for his genius in equal parts with deficiencies in other areas. That everyone called him by his last name was maybe proof enough of how much distance he put between himself and others. But at least he had given Denver the best schools, the most incisive interlocutors, and the lived example of what it meant to be really good at something that many other fathers, with their paltry backyard games of catch, could only dream of. Still, there must have been something missing; what person with a complete life would feel pulled to a place like this?
Denver looked up and saw his grandmother, this short woman in a blue wool coat belted at the waist. With her arrival the eraser in his hands seemed newly tawdry. He threw it back into the plastic bin it came from: a shallow grave of putty breasts and vulvas and cocks. The old woman looked ill at ease. She was standing next to a glossy female mannequin that was displaying a neon green strap-on dildo. The mannequin was about his grandmother’s height.
“Denver,” she said. “Your father’s been worried about you.”
They both knew it was a lie as soon as she said it.
“Dad’s never been worried about anyone in his life.”
“That’s not true.”
He shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. “Look, Gran—”
“Don’t try to make something up!” she said shrilly, surprising herself. Denver looked shocked too. She had always seemed preternaturally calm, especially considering how aggravating his father could sometimes be.
“I’m sorry,” he said, though he was unsure what, exactly, he was apologizing for. Disturbing the peace? The peace that had existed uneasily between the old woman and him ever since he had begun closing his door, blasting music, failing to tell her what had happened at school—he knew with a certainty he didn’t like to acknowledge that this had been an easy peace for him to keep, far easier than for her. God, how he hated her face when he’d come home from school in senior year and she would bite back the “How was your day, Den?” he could see bubbling up between her cheeks.
She looked at him, hard. “What do you want to make out of your life?” she asked finally.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’ll be fine.”
“This isn’t a good place, you know.”
“It’s Dad’s business.”
“That doesn’t mean much.”
“Gran. Are you saying you agree with all the people out there—” he gestured dismissively toward a brick wall which had no windows.
“I don’t have to be a puritan to think that maybe consorting with escorts and whiling away hours and money behind some virtual reality implies a lack of hope in real life.”
He found it quaint and charming that she had said “escort,” not “prostitute” or “hooker” or “whore.”
“Why are you smiling like that?” she asked.
He quickly wiped the expression from his face. “Nothing.”
“I just want to know,” she pleaded. “What keeps drawing you here?”
He considered how he might begin to answer that question, but then apparently his silence had gone on too long because the old woman murmured, “You’re really a nice young man, Denver, if only you’d think of yourself that way.” He nodded mutely and patted her on the shoulders. He was tall enough to do this. He had been this tall now for years. His hand lingered on her shoulder with an expression of—what was that, pity?
She steeled herself, rejecting the impulse to seize his hand in hers and trace lines on his palm. An illogical exercise, Hedden would say. Instead, she nodded stiffly and pulled away.
*
The old woman had not always been a shoulder to nap on, a lap, a cheek, a reader of the grandson’s palms. As she trudged back down to her car, a sporty little Fiat, she remembered walking through parking lots as a younger woman, a girl, really. Fourteen and leggy in her first bikini, getting burgers with girlfriends after sunbathing at Capitola Beach. Bare feet slapping on sun-sizzling blacktop. Nobody wore sunscreen. They walked to the soundtrack of wolf-whistles out the window of someone’s pickup. She had turned to her girlfriends with a desperately confused expression and one had sagely advised, “Just walk faster and ignore it,” while another commented archly, “I kinda like it,” and whistled back. As for her, she had just wanted to become invisible—thought the God she half-heartedly believed in could swallow her then and there. This morning she had strapped herself into a garment, architectural in its insistence to cantilever her breasts and buttress them at the sides with wire—all for what?
“Hey! Hey lady!”
She startled at the voice and realized it came from an Asian girl behind her. It was a deceptively deep voice, she thought, and wondered if the girl smoked. She stopped and waited for the girl to sidle closer. She was fearsomely pretty, made of sharp edges: her cheekbones, her chin, the chop of her black hair. Rough, too. Sparse wiry curls peeked out from the wide armholes of her muscle tank. They stood silently apprehending each other, until finally the girl spoke again: “Are you going into town?”
“Oh, yes,” the old woman said. She was a little taken aback by the girl’s directness, no cushioning with a “Sorry” or “Could you possibly?” but she acquiesced. “Do you need a ride?”
“Would you mind?”
“No. Are you just trying to get food, or go somewhere, or…”
“Just a coffee. Drop me anywhere that’s easy.”
The old woman opened the passenger side door. The girl looked at her with an expression of surprise before she slid in.
“Do you work here?” the old woman asked as they pulled out of the parking lot.
“Yeah.”
“Do you like it?”
The girl shrugged. “Job’s a job. Were you here to interview for a position?”
“Me? Oh, no, nothing like that. Just—looking is all.”
“It’s fine,” the girl said, and the old woman realized with some horror that the girl was assuming she had lied about the nature of her visit to save face.
They whipped around the curve of the road. The girl looked at the old woman with an expression, hard to read—surprise at the speed, maybe.
“You drive fast,” she said matter-of-factly.
“It’s one of my vices,” the old woman laughed. “I shouldn’t.”
“It’s good. It’s efficient.”
“And unsafe, they say. My son always—” The old woman realized that she didn’t want to talk about Hedden. “Well. He doesn’t like it.” She twiddled aimlessly with the A/C dials. “Do you want to listen to music?”
“I’m agnostic about it,” the girl shrugged. “Whatever you want.”
Unsure of what to do with that answer, the old woman decided to roll down her window instead. White noise from the road roared into her ear as wind tickled her freckled temples. They passed a massive billboard that rose up out of the brown grass like an alien spaceship. It featured a woman’s derriere in a cheeky bikini bottom. Her oiled skin gleamed, even more because of the sun hitting the picture. “HEDDEN’S,” it read in gold lettering across the butt.
“Does that bother you at all? The sign?” the old woman asked.
“No,” the girl said, and then, relenting, “Yes, but only because it’s outdated. Ass was in six months ago, but tastes have changed. Now it’s all—”
“Tits and stepsisters,” the old woman said, without thinking.
“Yeah, actually. How’d you know?”
“Oh, beginner’s luck,” she said weakly.
“Yeah. The billboard should be her rack.”
The old woman cringed. Rack. Like something to store your shoes. The girl uttered it so neatly. Her voice made a quick cut across what was soft and turned it into metal: an anesthetizing crudity. “So your issue isn’t with the message the image sends.”
“Well it is. The message is ass, and that’s suboptimal,” the girl said.
You remind me of my son, the old woman almost started to say, but she swallowed it back. “Do you think it’s always good to give people what they want?”
The girl looked at her evenly. “What’s the alternative? Are we just supposed to let people miserably want things?”
“Ye-es? Or—maybe we’re not supposed to want some things?”
“How would you regulate people’s minds?”
The girl was sharp as her words. “I don’t know,” she admitted finally. There—she would be the bigger woman, admit a temporary defeat.
“Can you regulate yours?”
Her knuckles turned porcelain on the steering wheel. “My—intimate thoughts?” She was tempted to resort to “inappropriate question, young lady” but she couldn’t tell how old the girl was—somewhere on an interval between twenty-five and forty, though, given her attire, probably on the younger side.
The girl nodded. “Your fantasies, if you will.”
“Well—I—”
“You can’t,” the girl said. “You just prefer not to think about them, right?”
She thought of Arlo. Her first day in a watercolors class she took for fun during graduate school. When her stomach rumbled loudly, Arlo, sitting next to her, grinned and passed her a note: “Forgot to eat dinner?” in a fourth-grade scrawl on a scrap of receipt paper. He had the right kind of wrinkles on his face, hollows at the cheeks and dimples at the lips, and a sea of curls to his shoulders. He could have played a pirate in a play, had the swagger and the stance, the ability to occupy spaces comfortably, sprawled out on a painter’s stool like it was a settee. Everyone she knew woke and slept between the bars of their cages, the boxes on their calendars, taking their time neatly demarcated. Arlo could drink piña coladas on Sunday mornings with you because he didn’t need the assurance of productivity later. He pranced and tumbled between places and people and stories and songs. Jubilation, the bookends of his days.
Arlo, her husband’s fraternal twin.
She banished the memory by thinking of groceries. Food made lists that felt like poetry. Basmati rice, tapioca pudding. Provolone cheese, turkey bacon. Her head swimming with tasty pictures, she looked at the girl. “Isn’t that choice, not thinking of things, a—well, it’s a muscle. It’s good to exercise.”
“I don’t think having a thought is always a choice.”
“Say more?”
“I mean.” The girl tapped her fingers on the dash, but so lightly it hardly made a sound. “I’ve had thoughts I didn’t want to have. I don’t think that makes me a terrible person.” She glanced over her shoulder as they passed the car trundling in front of them. “More importantly, I don’t believe a fantasy has a harm. Unless it’s enacted on non-consenting agents, obviously.” She said this legalese with a comfort that made the old woman wonder how many times she had said it. Non-consenting agents. It was a convenient word. Stripped of all the raw emotional power of being a victim—she had been fourteen, leggy in a bikini, non-consenting agent to every little indignity, whistle, stray hand, following down a dark street.
“I’m sorry, it’s just hard for me to understand how you can be an—er—consenting agent,” the old woman said.
The girl laughed. “I’m fine. Look, have you been married?”
The old woman nodded.
“To a man?”
“Yes.” A good man, a sensible man.
“Then let me put it this way: we’ve both let men use us. We’ve done all the labor that goes with it—the explaining, the listening, the manufacturing of desire, and all the more graphic shit, pardon my French.”
The old woman reflected on the nights she had dragged Arthur to someone’s party, the job she got him at the school, the lacy nothings she’d worn, the days she woke up crying over things she could not name. But he had been kind. “My husband was a good man.”
“So are most of my clients,” the girl said. “The difference between us is that you did everything for free.” She said the words simply and without malice but they still felt stabbing.
“People do these things for love, you know.”
“Oh, I know,” the girl said. “But work’s still work.”
They were pulling into town now, and the girl said she would get off at the stoplight, so the old woman braked and let her out. As she watched the girl walk away it occurred to her that they did not know each other’s names.
*
Calla ordered a chai latte and strode outside to catch the public bus back to Hedden’s. She had Denver again tonight, which she liked because he tipped well and never wanted sex. He was a sweet kid—eighteen and utterly confused, with the bad luck (or good, depending on your persuasion) of having Hedden for a father. Denver and Calla ate together, talked about books and random facts and history and politics. Sometimes he expressed wonderment at the depth of her knowledge on certain subjects; she had not told him that before all this she had been studying for a doctorate in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford. School had been a pressure cooker. The oncoming Caltrain, by those years already a conveyance only for day laborers and itinerant men and women who hung off the sides of the broken-down cars, seemed then like a divine hand come to lift the lid. Until she realized she actually, desperately, wanted to live. She had kept most of her leg.
The work at Hedden’s appealed to her at first because it was easy and then because it was so revealing about people. She had spent all this time reading books in three different languages to try to answer the question of what humans were, what made them laugh and cry and cheat and kill, and here in 70-degree shipping containers with tasteful décor she could read a new story every night. The AI-generated scenarios she played out with her clients were based on over a decade’s worth of data scraping. Every shame-faced social media search for someone’s name at 2 in the morning, every text message, every photo, every book they checked out, video they watched, GPS location and who had been nearby, recorded sound with smart home devices. It took people time to face down their fantasies. Sometimes, they started by protesting loudly—as if to save face in front of her, whose identity they didn’t even know—and said they really weren’t that sort of person, they would never do that with their student/coach/bartender/underage girl in Bangkok/the First Lady—but then, they always, always did.
There were only a few like Denver, who came just to talk. At first she had thought the AI had to be malfunctioning, when she was 3/4ths of the way through time and they were still just talking, the script in the corner of her eye changing based on what he said. She thought that maybe it meant he was asexual, but he said that he wasn’t, that it was just—keep this on the down-low, Calla, because I shouldn’t be telling you this—Hedden’s mysterious proprietary algorithm optimized for a very specific feeling of release through intimacy but not necessarily orgasm. So it was an intimacy park, not a porn park? she’d asked, and he had shrugged. Denver had struggled to explain it, finally settling on the idea that the algorithm sought to answer the question of what you would do with someone if you were free of shame.
The bus was almost there. She glanced at the grizzled man slumped, open-eyed, against a shopping cart filled with plastic bags. He wore a shearling jacket that had been made for a much smaller man, or perhaps a woman. He looked at her coffee with an interested expression and she held it out questioningly. He nodded. In the handoff her pinky skimmed the top of his index finger. The skin there felt cracked and dry, like drought-drained bark. She didn’t mind this, or that they had touched—transiently, like sliding tectonic plates.
*
Denver’s phone blinked with a notification. The old woman, saying she didn’t want to leave him alone there, that she would come back to pick him up.
“I’m fine,” he wrote back. “Dad’s here.”
She responded, “Have you talked to him?”
When he didn’t respond, she sent, “I just want to make sure you’re away from bad influences.”
His phone started ringing.
“Gran,” he said, before she had a chance to speak. “You don’t understand. It’s really not a bad influence. I’m not doing, like, weird stuff, OK?”
“Then what are you doing?”
He was silent.
“This just isn’t like you.”
“Isn’t like me? I’m sorry that I just wanted to do something to understand myself better—” He felt like he had already said too much.
“Good men—” she began.
“Oh, good men get their sex and emotional labor for free,” he said sardonically.
“That girl,” she said suddenly. “The Asian one.”
“What?”
“I gave a ride to this girl into town, and she said that exact thing.”
“You met Calla?”
“Oh good, she has a name.”
“What do you mean? Of course she has a name.”
“I thought your father said that that was the whole point. Anonymity. ‘Play Partners can be anyone you want them to be.’ ”
“You read his pitch deck from forever ago? Why?”
“He’s my son,” she said, as if it were an answer. “I don’t think you understand,” they both said at the same time.
“What don’t I understand?” she asked, her tone tired.
“Just—all of it. Why people come here. How could you?”
“I can understand.”
“You really can’t. Until you’ve done it.”
“I don’t feel comfortable having this conversation with you,” she said finally.
Denver said nothing.
“Well, I’ll go,” she said, and they hung up.
*
The old woman drove back to the park anyway, knowing full well that there was nothing for her there. In the parking lot she parked far away and watched as Calla got off the bus and Denver, looking gangly and eager to please, walked to her with arms uncertainly outstretched for a hug. She held her breath, almost expecting Calla to refuse, but she pulled him close instead. She felt that there was something voyeuristic about watching and looked away toward a flock of birds that had landed on the glossy branches of a refrigerator tree—so called by the early Chinese immigrants to California who had taken refuge in its shade. When she looked back, her grandson and the girl were gone.
She got out of the car and found herself walking up the stairs on the hill, the back way, which Hedden had shown her when the place first opened and there was no one there. She had been dubious and solemn-faced then, as she was now. The steps were jagged and uneven, made of large slabs of stone that had been shoved into the soft curve of the hill. Sharp grasses grew high in the gaps and stung her ankles as she walked.
At the top of the hill, breathing heavily, she paused and looked at the view. She could see for miles around, the suburban neighborhoods’ empty cul-de-sacs and single-family homes that looked like little dollhouses, more rolling hills of green and yellow and swishing grass painted orange by the sunset. There was the highway that she had driven on, and there, as the sky dimmed, were headlights turning on, racing down the line like fireflies. She sat down on the topmost step and looked and looked.
The old woman stirred when she heard the loud crunching of gravel under footsteps. It was the janitorial staff who used the back steps, she remembered Hedden had told her. Her eyes darted around, looking for a place to hide, and she slipped into an enclosure with a gate hanging slightly ajar. She didn’t know why she wanted to avoid the janitors, exactly, but still she felt relief when she saw them through the slats of the enclosure’s tall fence, passing by with buckets and mops in hand as obliviously as if there were no one there at all.
The enclosure, she realized, was a backyard to one of the shipping containers. There were four rectangular cedar garden beds filled with flowers, and a neat wide path between them. Where she stood, a flowering dogwood tree shaded her so perfectly that the young man and woman who emerged from the shipping container did not see her, not even when she gasped sharply as she realized who they were. She stood, frozen, by the tree’s slender trunk.
“I know,” Denver was saying. “But I guess—I dunno. How to stay close to her but also make room for myself, or something. I know that’s sappy.”
“That’s okay. It’s not sappy to want to be independent.” He sat down on a wooden chair and Calla put her arm around him and kissed the top of his head.
The old woman squeezed her eyes shut, but then she heard them walking again, their footsteps drifting closer, and the runaway beat of her heart forced her eyes open again. The two of them were standing over a bed of geraniums, their backs to her, and the old woman knew that she should just run, now, before it all blew up in her face.
“Thanks,” Denver said. “I know things will be okay. But it drives me crazy that she, like—I dunno. Probably thinks I’m doing some weird sex thing right now.”
Calla laughed softly.
“There wasn’t a good way to explain.” He gestured around at nothing in particular. “Mom, why is it so hard to talk to family?”
Mom?
It was then that the old woman noticed the glint of white plastic in their ears.
She tiptoed slowly to the open gate, her back to the fence. When she slipped out, hardly daring to breathe, she returned to her stoop at the top of the steps, only a few paces from the fence but far enough away that she could not hear their voices.
When the old woman heard the rumble of wheels on gravel she did not move until Hedden shined a flashlight in her face, looking harried. “Ma?” She turned to see him. He was pushing a wheelbarrow filled with broken hardware—dusty monitors, frayed wires. He looked at her quizzically. “You can’t be here.”
“I know, I know,” she said in a hurry. “It’s just that I was walking and—well—”
Hedden glanced over at the enclosure, taking in the open door and the distant voices of Calla and Denver. He looked back at her face with an expression of disbelief. “You were spying? On my son?”
She gaped at him. She had never heard him say those words, “my son,” in that tone, so full of life squalling at the hospital and ready to be taken home. My son, she thought with wonderment—that here, now, he was still capable of astounding her.
“It was an accident.”
“How long did you spend in there?”
“It was an accident!” she repeated.
“You shouldn’t have gone in there in the first place. I don’t know what you were thinking. Were you thinking?”
“He wasn’t doing—you know,” she said finally.
“I know. He’s talking to his mother.”
“He told you?”
“A little earlier today. Maybe sometimes it’s easier to tell people things when you know they won’t have an oversized emotional reaction.”
She shrunk under his withering gaze. “Is that an accusation of me?”
“No,” he said mildly. “It’s merely an observation.”
“Is that the real reason you built this, then?” she asked icily. “So that you can have mothers and wives with none of the inconvenient emotions?”
“It’s not just men. You could use it, too.”
“What, to talk to a fake version of my mother? Some of us know how to pay for therapy.”
“It’s not therapy. The algorithm just gives you what you want.”
“Have you ever thought that maybe you shouldn’t get everything you want?” She gesticulated and her purse jangled furiously on her wrist. It had drifted from her shoulder, leaving angry red skid-marks on her skin.
“Have you ever considered,” he said evenly, “that you grew up in a time when social pressures and economic scarcity meant you couldn’t—”
“I’m not one of your, your—” She struggled for the words. “Thought experiments. Something to pick apart on some forum online with other men who pretend to know things—”
“I’m only saying that I think your reliance on an unprovable moral dictum might have just been an imperfect way to cope with the reality of your times instead of acknowledging its fundamental tragedy.”
She wanted to scream. This horrible little man who was her son. That fundamental tragedy was what made you, what clothed you and fed you and schooled you, she wanted to say. Instead, she took three deep breaths. “If there’s so much you say I don’t understand,” she said in a low and dangerous voice, “then I’ll try it right now. This park—the experience that everyone is coming here for.”
Hedden looked squeamish. “Do you really want to do that?”
She nodded.
He sighed and pulled his black backpack off his shoulders. She bit back her usual comment about how it was a bit ridiculous for a man of his age and seniority to carry a backpack like a schoolboy. He pulled out a tablet, entered some numbers into an application, and held it out for her fingerprint. “It’ll access your data and build a profile accordingly,” he said. “You can go wait in Block 17.” He turned on his heel and left without another word. The wheelbarrow sat forlornly by the wooden fence around Calla’s garden, one surge protector with a bent prong dragging in the dirt. She looked up hoping that maybe Hedden would look over his shoulder, make sure she was alright, but he walked straight ahead until he reached the glass doors of his office building.
This loneliness. It was the kind that only her late husband, and then her son, could provoke—the sense of being utterly unstimulating, easy to leave without lingering. She missed goodbyes from Arlo. Arlo had been her husband’s foil—a party boy, unserious, prone to speaking out of turn—but also warm, sincere, free with his affection. It had never been, to him, a finite resource. Once after they’d known each other for years he brushed a stray hair from her face and said, joyfully and free of guile, “You have a beautiful smile,” and she had the thought that Helen of Troy would have left Menelaus for less. Sometimes she dreamed of him. These were the things you couldn’t say. How she had yearned to tell Arlo about the contents of her days. She had never told her husband that sometimes she looked at them side-by-side and thought about how they were different and yet the same. Same long lashes, expressive eyebrows, explosive laughter for a shared set of inexplicable things. With both she had bitten back every “Can’t you act more like—” that rose to her tongue. Their opposite flaws sent her swaying, dizzy between resentment and desire. She envied their mother for not having to pick one to love best, knowing them first as two bundles of cells vying for space until they came spilling out into blue blankets and grew into men.
In Block 17 they asked her to recline in a black leather chair. They gave her a pill for nausea—in case the scenario involved motion, they said. She swallowed it with a glass of fizzy water that tasted like cantaloupe. She signed a waiver. They asked if she wanted a pill for anxiety and she politely declined. Someone she could not see complained about the online portal where they logged their hours having an outage and someone else shushed them. They shone a light in her eye and someone’s hand in a nitrile glove dropped in the lens. Then it was pitch black. She shook hands with someone in the dark.
They said, “We’ve almost got the program all loaded up, you ready?” and she said “Yes,” sat up, blinked, and opened her eyes.
It was the end of watercolors class, light from that stuffy little room and people spilling out into the liquid night. She had painted a blurry pond busy with lily pads. Arlo looked at it and gave her a thumbs-up. At home, Arthur would be taking salmon and green beans out of the oven, and when he came out onto the porch to greet the two of them, he would be wearing a button-up shirt and shiny Oxford shoes, looking formal and innocent, like a Mormon missionary.
Arlo opened the classroom door for her grandly, bowing down with a joking expression playing at his lips, and outside she waited by him while he unlocked his bike. It was shabby and weighed down by colorful woven panniers. The air should have felt cold against her bare legs and cotton dress, but this wasn’t real, she reminded herself, even as she exhaled and wisps of fog escaped her lips. He gestured up at the handlebars and she hoisted herself up, fingers wrapped around for dear life, her pinkies touching the sides of his index fingers. When he started pedaling, taking quick turns around potholes, she yelped and he laughed, and then she laughed, too, knowing she could not fall.
They were whirring through the dark. The skirt of her dress billowed into a pink sail as they careened around that lovely street where above the tree branches leaned close enough for their leaves to kiss. Blocks of wedding arches. Arlo hand-braked, the wheels squeaked, and he steadied the bike with the thick sole of his brown leather boot on the ground. She hopped off. He rested the bike against the steel stem of a stop sign.
“Tell Arthur I’m done fixing his bike,” he said, and she nodded and stood there with the expectant air swilling between them. In the past, the real past, she would bite her lip and wait for him to hug her, or sometimes he would just wave genially and bike onward. She reminded herself that this was her scenario. She was the customer; she could do whatever she wanted with Arlo-who-wasn’t-Arlo, and it would be alright. She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him. He held her with his brown-sweatered arms that smelled like cloves and dusty wool. “Good night, Marie,” he said, and pressed his stubbly chin close to her cheek.
“Oh—oh,” she said, marveling at the sound of her name.
Adora Svitak is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer. Her stories, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in publications including Apogee Journal, 8Poems, BUST, the Huffington Post, and numerous others. Her book Speak Up! Speeches by young people to empower and inspire is forthcoming from Quarto in February 2020. You can learn more about her writings at www.adorasvitak.com.
