Katie Williams: The Happiness Machine

WHEN SHE RETURNED HOME, Pearl wondered if she’d find the apartment empty again. But no, there was Rhett, in his room at the computer, doing schoolwork, just as he was supposed to be.

“Hey,” he said without turning around.

Pearl was so focused on the delicate wings of his hunched shoulders that it took her a moment to spot the half-finished trilobite set out on his desk.

“Is it okay I took it?” He’d turned and followed her gaze.

“Of course. But it’s not finished yet. It still needs its details: antennae, legs, a topcoat of shellac.” Then, on impulse, “You could help me finish it.”

“Yeah, maybe.” He’d already turned back around.

“This weekend?”

“Maybe.”

Pearl lingered. She wished she could make her departure now, on this promising note, but they had to get it done before Rhett ate (drank) his dinner.

“Rhett? It’s weigh-in day.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said tonelessly. “Just let me finish my paragraph.”

He met her, minutes later, in the bathroom, where he shrugged off his sweatshirt and put it into her waiting hand.

“Pockets,” she said.

He gave her a look but obliged without comment, turning them inside out. It had been his trick in the past to load his pockets with heavy objects. When Pearl nodded, Rhett stepped on the scale. She was not tall, but he was taller than her now, taller still as he stood on the scale. Taller, but he weighed less than her, and she was not a large woman. Rhett stared straight ahead, leaving Pearl to gaze at the number on her own. She felt it, that number. Higher or lower, she felt it every week, as if it affected her body in reverse, lightening her or weighing her down.

“You’ve lost two pounds.”

He stepped off the scale without comment.

“That’s not good, Rhett.”

“It’s a blip.” “It’s not good.”

“You’ve seen me. I’m drinking my shakes.”

“Where were you yesterday?”

He closed his mouth slowly, defiantly. “Nowhere that has anything to do with that number.”

“Look. I’m your mother—”

“And I’m sorry for that.”

“Sorry? Don’t be sorry. I just want you to—” She stopped. What was she saying? She just wanted him to what? She sounded as if she were reading from some sort of script. “We’ll do an extra weigh-in. On Saturday. If it’s just a blip, it’ll be back to normal then.”

“Okay.”

“If it’s not, we’ll call Dr. Singh and adjust the recipe for your shake. He may want us to come in.”

“I said okay.”

DINNER WAS SILENT, except for the deliberate sound of Rhett slurping his shake. Pearl comforted herself by thinking that this was the exact sort of thing teenage boys did, acted purposely obnoxious to get back at you for scolding them. After dinner, she got out a new modeling kit, this one for a particular species of wasp, and began the armature, twisting the wire filaments with her pliers. As usual, Rhett had disappeared to his room directly after dinner. To study for a test, he’d said. Pearl was lost in her work with the wasp, only emerging when she heard a scrape on the tabletop to find Rhett there, returning the trilobite. He stood, as if waiting, his hand still on the model. She couldn’t read his expression.

“It’s fine if you keep it in your room,” she said. “I mean, I’d like you to.”

“But you need to finish it? You said that.”

On impulse, she reached out and grabbed his wrist. It was so thin! You didn’t really know until you’d touched it. She could have circled it with her thumb and finger easily. There was still a bit of the fur on his skin, the silky translucent hair that his body had grown to keep him warm when he’d been at his skinniest. Lanugo , the doctors had called it. They both stared down at her hand on Rhett’s wrist. She knew he was probably horrified; he hated being touched, especially by her. But she couldn’t make herself release it. She stroked the fur with her finger.

“It’s soft,” she murmured.

He didn’t speak, but he also didn’t pull away.

“I wish I could replicate it on one of my models.” She’d spoken without thinking, a bizarre and horrible thing to say.

But Rhett stayed and let her stroke his wrist for a moment longer. Then, something more, he touched it—improbably—to her cheek before extricating himself.

“Goodnight,” he said, and she thought she heard him add, “Moff.” Then he was gone; again, the sound of his bedroom door. Pearl stared at the unfinished trilobite, imagined it swimming through the dark oceans without the benefit of its antennae to guide it, a compact little shell, deadened and blind. Surely he hadn’t said “Moff.”

Pearl stayed up late again, pretending to work on the wasp, but really making unguided twists in the wire, ending up with an improbable creature, one that had never existed, could never exist; evolution would never allow it. She imagined that the creature existed anyway, imagined it covered with fur, with feathers, with scales, with cilia that reacted to the slightest sensation. When the light to Rhett’s room finally shut off, she went down the hall and got a cotton swab from her bag.

Rhett slept on his back with his lips slightly parted, the effect of the sleeping pill she’d crushed into his shake when fixing his dinner. It was easy to slip the swab into his mouth, to run it against his cheek without causing a murmur or stir. Easier than perhaps it should have been, this act that Rhett and the company, both, would consider a violation. The Apricity 480 sat on the kitchen table, small and knowing. Pearl approached it, the cotton swab in her grip. She unwrapped a new chip, the little slip of plastic that would deliver her son’s DNA to the machine.

You will take a long trip and you will be very happy, though alone.

She loaded the chip, fit it into the port, and tapped the command. The Apricity made a slight whirring as it gathered and tabulated its data. Pearl leaned forward. She unfolded her screen and peered into its blank surface, looking to find her answer there, now, in this last moment before it began to glow.

CASE NOTES 3/25/35

Saff says it’s funny to think of someone hating her enough to do what they did. She says it’s funnier to think that she herself was there while they were doing it, that she already knows the solution to this mystery; she just can’t remember what it is. She says that her body must remember—that the person’s fingers are printed on her skin, their voice in her eardrums, their reflection on the backs of her eyes—and maybe her body could tell her, if only she could get her brain to shut up and let it. She lifts her bracelets to her elbow and lets them drop back down to her wrist, where they fall against each other, chiming. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you, Rhett?” she says, adding, “Tell me the truth.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” I say. “But then most people wouldn’t consider my sense of what’s crazy to be particularly reliable.”

Saff crinkles her nose. Does she think we’re flirting? If she does, I let her go on thinking it because it’s less trouble that way.

And I don’t tell Saff the truth: that my body knows more than my brain does, too, that that’s why I starve it. Instead, I tell her a lie. I tell her that I can help her.