Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

Her father said, “What monstrous knowledge to bear.”

“We cannot and will not believe her,” they said.

I brought them back to the door. They gave me a phone number to call in case I heard anything. They also told me I could stay in the apartment as long as I wanted. I opened my mouth to say thank you and Bonnie’s father said, “Oh, yes, and since you’ll be taking over rent while Bonnie is away—” and soon named a number so big it should have been written on a piece of paper and slid across a desk. But no. This number was said aloud.

I stood so tall my skull risked detaching from my spine, and smiled like a medalist. “Of course. Thank you.” I was still wearing Bonnie’s coat like it was a strapless minidress on a paper doll, though very much unlike a paper doll I had a back half to me too. Around people like Bonnie’s parents, you were allowed to acknowledge when you weren’t being perfect but you could never, ever be embarrassed. When I had shown them down the hall into our bedrooms, I walked backward stewardess-smooth.

Once they were a safe distance away, I slammed the door shut and slumped into the armchair. The rent on this place, which they already owned, would be impossible. I did not have anywhere else to go, of course. How about if I temporarily shrunk myself into a bean? It would be so nice to be a dried hard tiny thing, fallen down into the spoons and forks and forgotten for maybe one, two years. But as a tiny bean I’d still have a future. I could still return to life or life like ness, once enough time passed and there wasn’t so much bullshit to deal with. Maybe nine, ten years.

The fringe on the bottom of the couch moved. Bonnie poked her head out from underneath, dragging the rest of herself out. I was glad her head came out first and not her hand or foot so I didn’t need to scream.

She hauled herself onto the couch and coughed. “You got resources, kid.”

“So do you,” I said, guiltily remembering the shit-talking from the bar.

“I have to get sensible,” she said. “I should have known it was no good going to my parents like that. What a waste of time.” She laughed. “If such a thing is possible. They wanted to make my entire last day so tiresome. I had to sneak out in the night. Came here and napped under the couch because it felt safer. I was right.”

“Usually I don’t lie like that.”

She shrugged. “Lie all you want. Lie big. I can tell you it does not matter one bit.”

This was the strangest conversation I’d ever had with Bonnie. “They just scared me. Your parents are a piece of work. Pieces of work? No. Them two together make one piece of work.” The strangeness wasn’t all on Bonnie. I was definitely tangoing with her.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “You won’t have to pay the rent.”

“You’ll tell them you’re here?”

“No. I mean it’ll just be last Wednesday again soon.” Then another shrug, one lagging so far behind her words that it split off into its own separate statement. Dust billowed and settled on Bonnie again and she looked like an ancient, badly damaged statue of someone youngish, like her basic composition was at odds with her present circumstances, and despite the smooth jaw and round cheek and slight scanty feathery decorative lines in her forehead and under her eyes you knew she had been around and around and around for eons and would be still and would be still and would be still, beyond all reckoning.

“Very soon,” Bonnie said.

I stood. “I’ve got to get dressed,” I said. I had become very frightened. “I’m super late. Rest up. Okay?”

As I sped down the hall, Bonnie’s thin, sweet voice floated behind. She was singing a line from that song, the line that went, “ Let me see that” —her voice going flannelly and nearly cracking—“ thawwww-awwwwwwww-awwwwwwwng …” And a final desperate and strangled, “ Baaaaby !”

A tossed-off and funny and completely regular thing, a tune in the genre of roommate giving you shit for being such a beast at home—but it did not make me feel better. I was still filled with a very bad form of terror, the kind where you didn’t know what or why. So how would it end? Bonnie’s singing had been the saddest, most yearningest music I had ever heard. You got the joke but the dirge, that was the point. That was what remained.

When Bonnie canceled her birthday drinks the morning of, we didn’t think anything of it. The excuse was plausible. Also, no one really wanted to go out on a Wednesday anyway.

Turned out she was spending her time making a weird, baggy, rambling video of just her sitting in her room, looking super awesome, making predictions of the things to come in the present week. Like that the actor many of us loved would be revealed as a leering terrible date who expected sex as his due and took no for an answer only temporarily before starting up the sex stuff yet again until he took no for an answer only temporarily and so on until the woman gave up. Kind of like when your cat jumped back onto the counter so many times you stopped putting it back on the floor, except with having your boundaries totally ignored during sex. And no cat.

(This had probably happened to many of us—it definitely happened to me—but it was all pretty confusing stuff people didn’t usually care about and to boot Bonnie wasn’t describing it clearly at all, so nobody knew what the hell she was talking about in the video until the next day when the actor’s name did actually appear in the news. But we just figured that she had just found out early somehow. She did know some celebrity-adjacent people.)

Certain sports teams would win certain games, she guessed correctly. That was a little impressive, if you cared. Wildfires. Firings in the White House. Something that the president would say in a few days, which sounded indistinguishable from everything else he had said before so it meant nothing to us and was like a cat jumping onto a counter so many times we stopped trying to stop it or even pay attention to it since we couldn’t stop it. “Is Bonnie being politically humorous?” one of us said.

It was harder to go viral than you’d think. Or, rather, it was pretty easy if you did a kind of bare minimum, and Bonnie had not. Other than some of us texting each other with, “WHAT DID I JUST WATCH,” the video did not catch on with the world at large. I tried to avoid Bonnie (easy, because I had work and she stayed in her room most of the time) because the stinging harsh glow of what was surely flourishing mental illness emanating from the video really freaked me the fuck out. Not that I was proud of that. I wasn’t not proud either! I’d had to survive! Growing up, I had been left largely in the care of my schizophrenic aunt for seven years and I became decent at spotting crazy and crabwalking delicately away from it before it could touch me even as I lived in close proximity to it.

For all that nobody cared about Bonnie’s video, it had apparently reached certain shadowy governmental agencies. One morning the doorbell rang while I was in the shower and Bonnie was in her room, and the agents couldn’t even wait for five seconds before kicking in the door. My towel had somehow vanished from its hook so I grabbed a jacket of Bonnie’s that had been stuffed and forgotten in the space between the door and the wall and wrapped it extremely partially around myself and ran out into the living room, where three men and one woman wearing suits were walking Bonnie out of the apartment.

“I’m going away for a while, and I won’t be in touch. But I promise I’ll be back!” said Bonnie, dragging a suitcase. When did she have time to pack? “Bye!” She sounded cheerful. Then she and the agents left and I was alone with the busted door, a small puddle forming around me.