Pills and Starships (20 page)

“Is everything all right under here?” she asked in a slightly threatening way.

“Oh yes, sorry—my sister told this old joke,” said Sam, and he was kind of waving his hand around, maybe to distract from his small pupils.

“Old joke,” I agreed. “Sorry.”

“This is a place of tranquilling,” she said. “Now, children, please choose a calmer way of being.”

“Sure, sure,” said Sam. “Yes. Yes, we will.”

“We’re over it,” I said, and we were, we were scared straight, basically. Or as straight as we could be.

But when the woman turned and left—frightening us a bit with a quizzical expression that suggested she was making a note of our behavior and would be keeping a close eye on us—we glanced over at our parents to see if they had noticed how busted we were. And they were
still
making out.

I swear, we almost started laughing again. But we managed to keep our cool, and just walked toward them. As we approached, my mom got distracted by something and stopped the kissing deal, fortunately. She pointed up at the sky.

“Look, honey, look! The trumpeter swans have returned!”

My father shaded his eyes and looked where she was pointing, and then so did we.

I saw nothing up there except the bright, bright sun.

For sheer awkwardness and dread, there’s not much that compares with the part of Happiness Day leading up to the Glorious/Easeful/Bountiful Passing.

Because our pharms didn’t have the passivity of the corp stuff built into them, we weren’t all sleepy high like the other survivors must have been—at least the ones I saw wandering and grinning among the fat fish. So we were on a pharmahigh, but we were also restless and there was a pretty major element of anxiety behind the exhilaration.

We had a plan, though. And I think that was what kept us from going more crazy.

After lunch was the most painful time, because that’s when we had to all sit around together on the balcony and do the Letter Reading.

The Letter Reading is what it sounds like, the part of Final Week when you have to exchange letters. We’d written the letters, as the corp instructed, before we left home, and now we had to pass them out and read them all together. There were letters from Sam and me to each of our parents, and letters from them to each of us.

The letters had a public section and a private one. The public sections were meant to be read aloud, and the private sections were for reading to ourselves—and keeping secret, if we wanted.

They’re also supposed to be keepsakes. So after we wrote them, we sent them to Jean and she had them printed on fancy papyrus and they had graphics on them too, pictures of us and stuff. We were told to stay positive in the letters, since they were for Happiness Day and not for venting.

Our own letters to Mom and Dad get willed to us, for us to look at later if we want to pull them out and reminisce. That’s the idea, anyway. Some people frame the letters and put them up on their walls. I’ve seen them at survivors’ condos.

So we sat out on the balcony, with its view of the cliffwalk and the ocean, and with drinks on small tables at our elbows and flowers the suite cleaners had set up there. My parents read the letters to them first, as the plan recommended. My dad picked mine to start with, unrolling it so the white tassels hung and swayed in the wind.

“
Dear Dad,
” he began, and cleared his throat.
“I try to imagine what it must be like to be you and see the world change as much as you’ve seen it. I try to imagine being anyone who lived most of their life before the tipping point. I can’t. But because of you I keep trying. All my life you’ve taught me to be interested in what came before, and so I try to browse about history. I try to imagine not being me, being an olden person, Before. And because of you I know that it still matters, even now, what’s beautiful. And what isn’t. That beauty will always matter. And I love knowing that. You’ve taught me the world matters, the world and everything that has ever lived in it. Because there’s always been beauty. And always will.”

He looked up from the papyrus then, which trembled a little in his hands.

“Lovely, Nattie,” he said.

“Lovely,” said my mother.

“Dig it,” nodded Sam.

“
Part of me is sorry for Mom and you,
” he went on.
“Because life is so hard with everything you know and remember. But part of me is jealous too. Because of that same thing. Because I can never know or see what you have seen . . .”

I won’t write down my whole letter. Anyone reading this, including you, spacefriend, is probably sick of hearing about my feelings. Point is, my dad got through it without choking up or anything, and then it was my mother’s turn to read, and she picked Sam’s letter. It didn’t start with
Dear Mom
, like I had. Instead, the letter was a list.

“
The park where the old oaks used to grow,
” she began. “
The red swingset after it rained . . .
”

And it went on like that.

The way you used to laugh when I was little and Dad threw me up in the air.

The knot of your hair when you twisted it behind your head to wash dishes.

Your wedding ring too big for your thin finger.

How you danced when Dad put on the olden music.

How you read me bedtime stories, sitting on my bed, and got lost in them and forgot it was my bedtime.

When you crept up behind me and hugged me unexpectedly.

The cross of your legs when you sat on the brown couch and put your feet up.

The tears on your cheeks when you heard about the last penguin.

My mother got to that part and her happy smile wavered. She let the letter fall forward and we could see that it went on and on, a list just on and on down the page.

“Brave girl, Sara,” said my father softly. “Brave girl. Keep reading, honey. Go on.”

Your always thinking of us before yourself.

Your worry.

Your swearing once when I was little and you cut your hand in the kitchen, then noticing me and saying “Now, that’s a mommy word, Sam. A mommy and daddy word.”

My dad laughed at that and it lifted my mom’s mood a bit. The list continued, and it ended like this:

You trying to tell me the “facts of life” when I knew them already.

All together in the big bed on a weekend morning, when we wouldn’t let you sleep in and just wanted to play.

The way you bit your fingernails.

The way you were my mother.

She stopped reading and put the letter down on the table, where my father quickly set a cup on it so the wind wouldn’t carry it off.

And then she just sat there, staring straight ahead.

The silence lasted a long time.

Then my father cleared his throat again. “We’ve raised quite a poet, Sara. Well, two of them! Two poets.”

We read my parents’ letters to us after that, some mushy stuff, of course, and then some advice on how they wanted us to live the rest of our lives—along with some other stuff about how they knew they had no right to say, and our lives were our own, and things like that.

But what I remember most was how my mom sat there, through all of this, with a faint smile but not saying anything at all, gazing past us at nothing, or maybe out to sea.

How they set up Happiness Time itself, at least in our contract, was this: they let the contracts pick the place. It has to be on a certain list of approved spots. (You can’t get any more lavender than
this
shit.) There are inside spots and outside spots, which the corp calls—pretty straightforwardly by their standards—Happiness Places. These include the suites, of course, for people who value privacy above all else.

But if you choose an outdoor Place, you have to be okay with not having privacy. Not just anyone can barge in, or anything; the Places are set aside and guarded. But other contracts can be there too, if they want. They don’t have enough outside spots for everyone to be separate. You book the spots in advance, of course; the corps are way organized.

And my parents, totally predictably, picked a Place overlooking the ocean.

The method was preapproved, the only method they use at this particular resort. It was Quiet Pharma, pharma you take and don’t feel and it just creeps in and puts you to sleep, painless and more or less instant—within a few minutes.

Another thing they don’t want is tons of public emoting. So we were on the plan to part company in the suite, that was our last time to see them up close. After that, though, after they left the room, we had to go to an Observing Place—near enough to the Happiness Place that we could see what was going on but not, say, throw ourselves upon them sobbing, making a scene. It was choreographed.

The time got closer and closer, and we were all sitting in the suite’s living room listening to preselected music, and my parents were freshly showered—my dad shaved, my mother with her hair brushed to a shine and twisted up on top of her head in this fancy elegant hairdo. They were wearing their Happiness robes, a lot like the beige ones we wore to the therapy sessions but thinner and with this kind of silver braid around the collar.

They seemed to have recovered from the Letter Reading, where to me they’d seemed pretty real and
present
, in corpspeak—they must have trained and worked hard at it—and now they were off the hook and back in full bliss mode. They just sat and smiled and nodded their heads to the music, and alarmingly often they’d get up and hug me or Sam spontaneously, and just stand there hugging us, and we’d hug them back, feeling half-embarrassed and half-impatient and half–something else I can’t put into words. I guess that’s three halves, but you know what I mean.

And that was even
with
our own happy pills. I can’t imagine what it would have been like without them.

Or then, for instance, my mom or dad would say something blissful, like, “Sara! Look how beautiful Nat is. Isn’t she
beautiful
? She has your bone structure!” (Not true.) Or, “Sam, Sam, Sam . . . what a smart boy you are . . . what a good boy. A good, good, good, good boy.”

He’s smart all right but he’s never been polite or well-behaved so the word
good
didn’t ring true. And there were other words they used like that, words that were generic and positive but didn’t seem to really apply to
us
. Not us specifically. A lot of the comments coming out of their mouths seemed to me to be on the totally irrelevant side. Like we could have been two dogs sitting there on our chairs, or two pigs. And they would have said the exact same things.

It was as if, to them, we’d turned into pictures of their kids. As if we, our actual selves, had almost nothing to do with what they were seeing.

Which was probably true, because they were also back in the loop they’d been in when we rode down to the Japanese garden on the elevator. They would say these nice things to us, and then one of them would look up at the ceiling and go, “Is that a doggy? A doggy face on the ceiling? I miss those little doggies so! Here, doggy! Here, doggy!”

Their dose had plenty of visionpharm in it, that’s for sure.

Or there was what they did with the flowers: at one point, about an hour before they were supposed to leave, my father got up from the couch and picked up a vase of those tropical flowers that had bugged me the whole time we were in the suite—the same ones he’d touched when he was remembering the tulips at the hospital I was born in. He picked up the vase and brought it back to the couch and just sat with it on his lap.

My mother reached over and pulled a flower out and held it up so close I was surprised her eyes didn’t cross. Then she started picking the petals off till they were all over her lap and on the floor at her feet. Smiling all the time like she was doing the flower a favor. Finally all she had left was the stem. She stared at that for a while, called it
excellent
, and then dropped it too.