Yesterday (23 page)

I didn’t think that everything about their way necessarily
was better (I liked gushi as much as most people) but I knew that the government W + Cs were wrong. My brother wasn’t very political either and avoided most of the more activist types from school. Then, at seventeen, he surprised me and began to change, developing an interest in Kinnari Lowe. Although she brought out the best in Latham, influencing him to curtail his criminal dealings, my parents disapproved. It wasn’t wildly unusual for young people to develop temporary romantic attachments to each other but Latham spoke about Kinnari as if their relationship would become something permanent, a love match.

Because she was often at our house in those days I became friendly with Kinnari, who I already knew a little from school. Since her mothers were members of the grounded movement they saw nothing wrong with Latham and Kinnari’s relationship and invited our entire family along to Kinnari’s sixteenth birthday party at the end of July. My father offered a work-related excuse for his absence but my mom, Latham and I agreed to attend, despite my parents’ continuing unhappiness at Latham and Kinnari’s pairing. I was looking forward to the party because I knew Garren would be there. He was scheduled to leave for law school at the end of summer and if I didn’t speak to him soon I’d probably lose my chance entirely.

Like most of the young people in Billings, there was nothing Kinnari really needed, but Latham had told me she was a fan of old-style movies and named several she was hoping to collect in a format from the early twenty-first century
known as Blu-ray Disc. They’d stopped making spectator movies altogether in 2037—by then the rising popularity of interactive gushi had made spectator movies an unlucrative business—but Garren and Kinnari were fans of many old things and their mothers had bought them each Blu-ray players for Christmas. With this in mind, I instructed my trans to drive me over to the shopping zone on the far side of town to visit an area populated with antique stores. Clean and swift, the single-person solar-powered vehicle was the most common method of local transportation, for those who could afford it.

As I neared the antique media shop I noticed that the area was somewhat dilapidated, as most people have no interest in old things and the ones who do are drawn to them despite the unattractive surroundings. Only a block from my destination I happened to spot my mother traipsing out of a dingy café with a stranger. He was holding her hand and as I whizzed by them he pulled her close and kissed her full on the lips.

I was shivering as I commanded my trans to park on the next block. I couldn’t believe my mother would allow
anyone
to kiss her on the lips. I was a product of my upbringing and was disgusted to imagine that my mother might be engaging in grounded sex. It was one thing for my brother to do it; he was young and free. My mother had children and had dedicated her life to being with my father.

I selected three Blu-ray movies for Kinnari from the antique store and returned home visibly upset. Latham
wanted to know what was wrong with me. I told him about the kiss and he smiled to himself a little and said, “Good for her if it’s true. She should’ve left Dad years ago.”

“I should’ve known you’d say that.” I shook my head at him. “It’s not like she’s a prisoner here. You wouldn’t say the same if Dad was tonguing some woman in the street, would you?”

Latham wrinkled his forehead. “Look, what they do with their own lives isn’t our business, right? You should just let it go.”

If it weren’t for the bonfire of anger for my mother that I’d built up inside me over the years, maybe I would’ve been able to do that, but I was fuming with her when the three of us left for the party and snapped at everything she said in the multiperson trans my family rarely used anymore. Kinnari’s mothers were kind and gracious to us when we arrived but I continued to tear strips off my mother, who had no idea why I was furious with her. It was a rare lovely day—not too hot and without a cloud in the sky—and the party was held in the Lowes’ backyard garden. A large group of us were seated on the patio drinking mango juice and snacking on finger foods when my mother decided to fight back with a dispassionately delivered comment. “If you think you’re embarrassing me with this behavior, Freya, you should think again. The only one you’re embarrassing with this selfish display is yourself. Why don’t you think of someone else for a change? This is Kinnari’s birthday party. Can we focus on that for a few minutes?” She slanted her gaze away from me and
sought out a connection with one of Kinnari’s mothers. “And a lovely party it is, I might add. Your garden is beautiful and you’ve done a wonderful job with Kinnari.”

My mother, the ultimate fake
. She would have been happy if Kinnari never set foot in our house again but it was always about appearances with her. She must have totally lost control of herself to go as far as kissing someone on a public street (even if it was in a part of town most people she knew would never find themselves).

My bottom lip was trembling when I stared at my mother and I’m not sure what horrible thing would’ve burst out of my mouth if Garren Lowe hadn’t, at that very moment, crouched down by my chair and said, “Freya, if you have a second there’s something I want to show you.” He smiled as he waited for me to answer him, his dark hair wild and wavy like it would later be in my dreams.

I’m sure my face was reddening with humiliation but Garren reflected none of my discomfort in his face. “Listen to, actually,” he added. “That seventies record I was talking to you about at school the other day.”

I nodded as if I knew what he was talking about and followed him from the table. “Thanks for the rescue,” I said as soon as we were far enough away not to be overheard.

“You looked like you were about to twist her head off,” he said. “You two really know how to push each other’s buttons, huh?”

“It’s not even that.” I bit the inside of my cheek. “I mean,
I hate her all the time.
All the time
. But today I found a new reason.” A live human band of classical musicians was playing near the back entranceway to the Lowe house and I stopped to listen to them. If my mother ever paid for a live band it would probably just be as a show of status, otherwise she’d consider Ros or holographic musicians just as good.

Garren was listening to the band too and I glanced into his green eyes and said, “I wish I had your mothers for parents. They’re so cool.”

A shrug stretched slowly across Garren’s shoulder blades. “A lot of people think they’re kooks.”

“Only stupid people. And who cares what stupid people think?”

“Exactly.” Garren smiled again and this one felt like it was one hundred percent genuine and just for me.

I didn’t want our time together to end and I smiled back, feeling warm in the face again. “So the seventies record, does it exist?”

“I have a lot of records but I didn’t have a specific one in mind,” he said. There’d been a sixties and seventies music revival going on for years and China (the parts of it that were still functioning) was cashing in on it by ignoring a human cloning ban and assembling their own super-groups and artists from the spliced DNA of former rock stars. Some of the current biggest acts were female singer/songwriter Chena (a Tina Turner/Cher clone), Supreme (another female solo act who was an amalgamation of all the original members
of the Supremes), and the rock band ABBA3+Elton (having failed to secure Benny Andersson’s DNA, Chinese geneticists had substituted a cloned Elton John as the fourth member of the band). So far many of the Chinese acts had proven hugely successful in the short term but quickly crashed and burned, suffering addictions and mental health issues that had largely been eradicated in the U.N.A.

I was already well aware, from what I’d overheard at school and later from Kinnari, that Garren’s interest was mainly in original music rather than genetically engineered copies and I said, “Play some for me then. Keep me away from my mother for a while.”

We went up to Garren’s room, which looked as contemporary as my own except for the contents of the wooden shelves in the corner and what I guessed must be an antique record player. I stood peering down at it, afraid to touch it.

“Don’t worry, you’re not going to break it,” Garren told me, freeing a thin black disc from its outer cardboard sleeve. “The machine’s not as fragile as it looks but the records themselves can get pretty scratchy.” He handed the disc to me and pulled the glass lid of the record player open. “Here, I’ll show you how to use it.”

Soon I was putting on records for myself and we listened to old music by Neil Young, Patti Smith and The Band, musicians I’d barely heard of before. During “Heart of Gold” I almost broke down and told Garren about my mom and the stranger kissing but changed my mind at the last second and murmured something about the song being haunting.
I figured Garren wouldn’t see the incident from my point of view, being big into the grounded movement like he was. Just then Kinnari knocked on her brother’s door. She and Latham slipped into the room, joining us to listen to records, and the opportunity to be alone with Garren had passed in the blink of an eye.

W
hen Latham found out Hendris (the Jimi Hendrix/Janis Joplin hybrid who critics agreed was the most talented of all the spliced musicians) was playing one final live concert in Chicago before she gave up music, he asked me to go with him and Kinnari. “You know you love Hendris,” he said, and he was right. She wasn’t a product like the others; she was a genuine artist. That’s why she was giving up the music industry. She said no matter what her genetic roots were she was still a real live person with her own dreams and feelings and though she loved music she didn’t want to feel like she owed her success to her DNA. So she was turning away from a multimillion-dollar career and towards her other great passion, painting, which she intended to do under another name.

There’d been heightened terrorist activity in the U.N.A. recently and neither my parents nor the Lowes would’ve allowed Latham and Kinnari to travel all the way out to
Chicago but Latham (who hadn’t given up his old delinquent tricks entirely) promised he’d fix things so that they wouldn’t have to know. He’d scored multiple transit documents through one of his many contacts and planned to tell our parents that he was going to do a twelve-hour volunteer stint at the social welfare camp just outside of Great Falls. All U.N.A. students were required to lodge fifty volunteer hours at a government-approved activity before graduation and my brother even had an administration officer at the camp ready to cover for him and Kinnari (and even me, if I wanted to go with them). Meanwhile they’d catch the Zeph (the nickname for the U.N.A.’s train system) to Chicago, arriving within five hours.

I was surprised that Kinnari was willing to lie to her parents and run off to Chicago behind their backs and said as much to Latham. “Are you kidding?” he said. “It’s this major grounded experience—she’s
dying
to go. She doesn’t like lying to them, but she knows they’d never say yes. Garren said he would’ve come too, except he had plans he couldn’t shake.”

I was glad Garren couldn’t make it. The temptation to go to the concert would’ve been unbearable otherwise and I’d had a crazy screaming match with my mother earlier that day and wasn’t allowed to leave the house, except to go to school, for the next week. The last-minute Hendris concert was in only three days’ time.

Latham looked downcast when I explained why I couldn’t go. “
Shit
. You really should be there. Maybe we can come up
with something. If you suck up to Mom for the next couple days maybe she’ll forget about putting you under house arrest.”

“She might forget if we were talking about
you
but if I sucked up to her it’d only make her suspicious,” I said. Besides, the more alibis we tossed around the more likely they’d blow up in someone’s face and take the entire trip to Chicago down with them.

“Shit,” Latham repeated, shoving his fists into his pocket. “This sucks.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I told him. “Go. Have a good time. Tell me everything when you get back.” Gushi was being blocked from the event, which was billing itself as one hundred percent grounded but the odds were that someone would eventually find a way to share the experience.

Latham nodded but I could tell that if I didn’t do something he was going to keep moping about me not being able to go with them. I had a flash of inspiration and convinced him we should do the next best thing—dive into the gushi experience of the 1969 Woodstock concert, which featured performances by both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. I was no expert on old music but knew of the concert because of my Hendris fandom.

Latham loved the idea and we stared inward, our Bio-nets shutting down input from our real senses as our minds jumped into as realistic an experience of that mud-soaked, drug-fueled hippy festival as you’d ever want to live through. It was epic in parts and exhausting (and even boring) in
others and though it felt like it had gone on for days the experience was all over in about two hours. For days after that Latham and I peppered our conversations with each other with hippy lingo and made references to doing acid and magic mushrooms.

I didn’t foresee anything unusual about the Hendris concert beforehand. The morning Latham left he was hyper like a little boy and I was jealous that I was being left behind. He hugged me goodbye and said, in the stoned-out tone we’d perfected over the past few days, “Don’t let the man keep you down, man.”

“Fuck the establishment,” I said back. Then I raised my fingers in a peace symbol salute.

That was the last time I saw Latham as himself.

Later that night I was curled up in bed, trying to sleep, when my mind flew to him and Kinnari across the country. They were in the middle of a crowded, throbbing mass of people. Kinnari was dancing, my brother’s arms wrapped around her waist, and the music was so loud that they wouldn’t have been able to hear themselves think. Beads of sweat gathered on my upper lip as I felt fear spread through the crowd.