Alissa Nutting - Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

CargoBabe:

Brady, I’m not an orphan as my profile states.

FluidTransfer69:

R u married?

CargoBabe:

No, Brady. My secret is unrelated to our love.

FluidTransfer69:

R U A MAN??

Clearly, any further delay of information is not possible. Brady needs the truth and only the truth, and as my job motto states, I Shall Deliver.

CargoBabe:

Today I’m at an auction to buy my frozen convict mother.

As I press “Enter,” I imagine this information beaming through light-years of distance to reach Brady. It’s a short but hard wait before I know relief.

FluidTransfer69: Oh. Want 2 get dirty b4 bed?

By the time Mother is put onto the block, the more upright bidding citizens have long left the building. The man to my left smells vaguely of urine and keeps lifting his wig and scratching his scalp with the end of his paddle.

I am the first to call Mother’s bid at its minimum, and am challenged only once by an awkward but well-dressed teenager who has been making the second bid on everything and accumulating an impressive frozen army. As I raise him, anxiety floods me. In my head I’ve already accepted a projected scenario where he bids my mother up to an unaffordable price and I leave defeated, only to be arrested five years later for breaking into his pool house in an attempt, likely drunken, to reclaim her. Then his shiny cell phone goes off and he leaves.

I get my mother for minimal mark-up, about the cost of three days of work. That is, when there’s cargo work to be had, and when misfortune does not follow my delivery mission like a love-drunk puppy.

I decide I cannot just dive in and yell to Mother’s capsule Everything I’ve Been Wanting To Say. The comfort level has to raise, familiarity must be reestablished and achieved. As evening sets in, I boil an insta-broth and sip it in front of her.

Although it wasn’t easy to fit her capsule, 15x6 feet, into the 30x20 interior of my ship, I believe that ultimately it will prove to be a healing experience. I think, sometimes, that my whole life, this wandering around the universe, is really just an attempt to try and outrun her and my past. But now here she is — consuming a large amount of electricity and frozen solid just inches away from wherever I am to roam about the cabin.

The heat from my insta-broth melts the frost away from her digital lock, informing me that she has over 414 years left on her sentence. When (or if) she does finally wake, I will be so dead, and she will most likely have no idea that the majority of my adult life was spent in cohabitation with her physical being. Perhaps I’m fooling myself thinking that this is any kind of personal breakthrough. To say that she is emotionally unavailable is a bit of an understatement. But really, it’s my life I should concern myself with. Our relationship doesn’t have to be a two-way street.

When it’s time to meet Brady online, I throw a blanket over Mother’s capsule like it’s a parrot’s cage. My personal life should remain private. It’s been a long day, and I’m ready to lose myself to the gaping void of lust. At times I worry my relationship with Brady is too heavily dependent on the sexual, but tonight I’m grateful for its numbing opiate. Afterwards, when I’m about to sign off, Brady brings up Mother.

FluidTransfer69: So what did she do, anyway?

I fear disclosing this information may cause him to worry about a genetic bias towards psychosis on my end, but then I remember our previous bonding experience that day.

CargoBabe:

A lot of things. She has a strong thirst for money and blood.

FluidTransfer69:

O? Sounds like a feisty one.

CargoBabe:

She is fierce.

FluidTransfer69:

So have u unthawed her yet?

Naïve as this question is, I can’t help but wonder if this is his way of telling me that he soon wants to meet not only myself but also the family, to take our relationship to the next level.

CargoBabe:

That won’t happen in my lifetime. She has over four more centuries on her sentence.

I pause, pondering how much I should express to him. It’s healthy, I decide, to just say what I feel.

CargoBabe:

It’s kind of a shame that I’ll only get to make amends on my end. There’s so much I wish I could say and have her hear.

FluidTransfer69:

Huh.

And suddenly, I see that it’s OK. That it will all be OK because I’m not in this alone. My feelings for Brady swell and I decide to express them in a humorous pun.

CargoBabe:

Thank you for listening. I feel like our love is now light-years past what it was this a.m.

FluidTransfer69:

Pierre is happy 2 hear that! Babe?

Pierre is Brady’s name for his penis.

CargoBabe:

Yes?

FluidTransfer69:

Is ur mom’s capsule a Digilock? Cause it’s all over the Internet how to open those.

And with that, Brady demonstrates his technical prowess by cutting and pasting a series of step-by-step instructions that could have Mother room-temperature by morning.

I strap into my sleepsak with a heavy dilemma. I, and perhaps I alone, am in a unique position to understand that Mother is, on many levels, a monster of unthinkable proportions.

Yet I’m also her daughter. Her daughter and her only child. If I were frozen, wouldn’t I want her to unthaw me if I were so capable? And what of second chances? What of personal growth and change? What of her realizing that it’s me, her little daughter, but arson, drug trafficking, homicide, sexual battery, and a variety of other mistakes caused her to miss my childhood and adolescence?

I leave the blanket on her capsule all through the night. The next morning, I meet Brady online, but I’m not interested in the hot-n-heavy. I have hard-hitting questions that need answers.

CargoBabe:

Brady, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m thinking of dethawing my mother.

FluidTransfer69:

Isn’t that why you got her?

CargoBabe:

I didn’t think it was.

FluidTransfer69:

Then what’s the point?

Was Brady right? Had I subconsciously been hoping that I would be able to bring her back to life all along?

CargoBabe:

She’s done some very bad things.

FluidTransfer69:

Well, nobody’s perfect.

I’m inclined to agree with him, although I’m not sure that using her command of martial arts to force a wooden spoon handle into my father’s jugular could rightly be labeled an imperfection.

CargoBabe:

I’ve got to go, Brady. You many not hear from me tonight.

FluidTransfer69:

I’ll b thinking of u!

We give each other kissing icons; I impulsively touch the screen when his name disappears.

I remember, kind of, the movie Frankenstein. Or maybe I’m making this up. But I think that when the creature comes to life, there are lots of subhuman moans and groans. Perhaps some running around and crashing into things.

There is no technical support hotline I can call for assistance with illegally opening my mother’s prison capsule, and we’re a few hours away from any medi-port. My greatest fear is that she’ll wake up startled and instinctually lash out at the first organic thing she senses, which will be me.

Simply opening the capsule is easy. When the door lifts up it’s quite theatrical due to the frozen smoke. I wonder if I should be recording this. It seems like something my mother, the new mellowed-out one that will take to bridge and cardigans, might want to watch alone and get a bit misty-eyed to on nights when Brady and I have gone somewhere romantic and timeless: here is where my daughter pulled me from the fog of purgatory. Here is where I achieved room temperature.