Katie Williams - Tell the Machine Goodnight

“Okay,” she finally says in a small voice. “Okay. I remember now. I mean, I remember enough.”

“Do you want me to tell you the rest?”

“Don’t.”

She turns and looks out through the windshield. I watch her profile for a second, but I hate people staring at me, so I turn and look where she’s looking, which is up. I remember how you can see the spires of the conservatory through the treetops. I search for them there among the green.

We’re quiet for a minute, just looking. Then Saff says, “I thought maybe it was the Apricity that told you to stop eating.”

“What?” I say. “No.”

So many people have asked me why I refused to eat, my parents, my doctors, my therapists, my nurses, Josiah, and that’s just naming the headliners. But Saff doesn’t ask me why. I mean, she does , but she asks it in a way that I can understand.

“Motive?” she says.

I glance over at her, and she’s looking straight back at me.

“Come on: motive?” she repeats.

And I do something all the Apricities in the world could never have predicted. I go ahead and answer her.

“It felt strong. Denying myself something I needed to feel strong. Not giving in when I was hungry felt strong.”

“Okay.” She nods. “Yeah, okay. I get that.”

But somehow I’m still explaining. Because suddenly there’s more. “I think it’s that I wanted to be what’s essential. I wanted to be, like, pure.”

“Shit, Rhett.” She smiles, her eyes big and bright and sad. “Me too.”

And I want to tell her that her smile is what’s essential, that her smile is what’s pure. But I could never say something like that out loud.

So I do what I can. I lick my thumb, reach for her face, and rub the eyebrow pencil away. There are little hairs in an arc, just starting to grow back. Then I do something more. I lean over and kiss her, there above her eye, where her eyebrow used to be.

Means: I am brave.

Motive: I want to kiss her.

Opportunity: She bends her head forward to meet my lips.

Carter heard the stories before he met the man: Thomas Igniss, the new contentment technician manager for Apricity’s Santa Clara office. The position was a top spot, a notch above Carter’s job as manager for the San Francisco office. Santa Clara was where it happened , down there in Silicon, working shoulder-to-rump with the boys in R&D. Carter hadn’t even known the job was opening up, not until after it had already been filled. And Igniss an outside hire! Skrull’s people must have tapped the guy, like the recruit for a secret society. Carter imagined a whiff of cigar smoke, the feel of a stately finger on his own shoulder, a tap, tap that spelled out, Yes. You . Carter’s own shoulder remained unfingered, the air around him disappointingly clear of smoke. It crossed Carter’s mind that he should feel envious of Igniss, but since the promotion had been lost before it’d even been coveted, his envy came out miniaturized, not a punch in the gut, more a pimple on the earlobe.

Shortly after Igniss’s arrival followed the lore. That Thomas Igniss hadn’t come gimlet-eyed from the East Coast, like most managers, but had been forged deep in the Midwest, from the twang, from the heartland. That Thomas’s people (not his “family” or “relatives,” but his people ) worked livestock, going back three generations. That Thomas himself had hay-bucked through college. (Carter had looked this up, this bucking of hay, to see what it entailed and had found pictures of leaning, heaving men, the sun pitching spears of light across their broad shoulders.) That even with his salt-of-the-earth background Thomas Igniss was no bumpkin. That his Adam’s apple rested on a perfect four-in-hand knot of jacquard silk tie. That he spoke fluent Italian; that he spoke fluent Korean (and which language was it? Did the man speak both?); that he’d carpentered the office conference table himself out of sustainable wood; that he’d briefly dated Calla Pax before she was famous; that he was currently dating a burlesque-dancer-cum-bike-messenger named Indigo.

Carter had no such stories. He was the son of an electrical engineer (father) and a kindergarten teacher (mother). He’d grown up an hour away in Gilroy, notable only for its garlic stink. His childhood had been a pastiche of evenings watching popular sitcoms, the couches the actors sat upon in their fake living rooms a nicer version of his family’s own couch. Carter’s mother collected cow figurines, Holsteins and heifers on every table and shelf, and for no reason the woman could articulate. Have you ever even touched a cow? Carter had recently asked her. She’d looked so confused. Why would I touch a cow? she’d said. That was his mother all over, and his father with his tatty books of Sudokus. But that wasn’t Carter. Carter had made it into a top B-school, made it out of a lingering childhood pudge, and, in quick succession, scored Angie and a job at Apricity. From there it had been up and—to Carter’s simultaneous astonishment and vindication—up some more. Carter considered himself a self-made man, not that it’d been easy when he’d been given such shit materials to work with.

CARTER AND THOMAS FINALLY MET at the spring team-builder in Napa. The “TB,” everyone called it. It was supposed to have been just Carter’s office at the Napa TB, but then two days before go-time, Santa Clara’s TB had fallen through (a foible with the required waiting period for hang-glide certification), and it was decided that the two TBs should merge.

“It’s a regular TB outbreak,” Carter said to Pearl, who someday was going to laugh at one of his jokes.

In reply, Pearl coughed. Carter couldn’t tell if she was continuing the TB joke or if she simply had a tickle in her throat. They were standing in a Napa winery tasting room. He tried and failed to catch her eye, but she’d turned her head, so he could only see the back of her neck. She’d cropped her short hair even shorter than before; now the ends curled around her earlobes. He wanted to tell her it’d looked better long, but he’d wait for the right moment so as not to offend her. Pearl swished her wine and spit in the barrel.

The spit barrels were the only things Carter liked about the wineries, which made the flimsiest attempts at refinement—the sommeliers’ blouses a shiny acrylic, the words Tasting Room in big brass letters over the door, the branding absolutely everywhere. At the last one, they’d been selling polo shirts with the winery’s name embroidered over the tit. “Something-or-other & Sons.” Carter didn’t understand why you would wear that on your chest unless you were either the Something-or-other or one of his sons.

He was already regretting the wine tour, which had been whose idea? Not Carter’s. Owen’s? Izzy’s? Not Pearl’s. Pearl had, in fact, tried to get out of the TB, something vague about her teenage son. Carter had told her no dice. After all, wasn’t he leaving Angie alone with their baby daughter, and she barely three months old? The TB was only two nights, he’d told Pearl. Required.

At this point in the afternoon, it was certainly feeling required. The group was at its third winery, and the grapes, both literal and figurative, were withering on the vine. There’d been a campaign in San Francisco that year asking people to drive north and support the wineries, which were struggling because the weather had become too hot to harvest the traditional grapes. Instead of Pinot Noir, the wineries were now bottling something approximate and calling it, with a wink, El Niño Noir. Carter called it Pi- not Noir. (Pearl hadn’t laughed at that one either.) The new wine tasted thin and sweet and awful, like the saliva of someone who’d been sucking on a grape lollipop. Pi- not .