Her immediate thought was that her mom had just died and was calling her from the beyond. “OH. Shit,” Hazel muttered. It was early for Hazel, around 9 AM, and she was hungover, which her deceased mother would totally be able to detect from Hazel’s voice.
Her mental lexicon of images of possessed phones began to flash through her mind—demonic tongues coming out of the receiver and licking the person’s earlobe with green saliva, retractable needles stabbing through the handset’s speaker holes the moment the unsuspecting recipient placed the receiver against her head. Hazel put on an oven mitt then picked up the phone with the gloved hand. She held it out in front of her at a distance for a moment. Better to let the haunted device make the first move.
“Hello?” Hazel heard a voice say, a male’s voice, which let her sigh with relief. It wasn’t her mom’s fresh ghost. All other deadies felt easier to handle.
“It’s Byron Gogol.”
“You died?” Hazel exclaimed. In the silence that followed, she realized there could be another explanation and tried to backpedal. “I mean my phone was dead. I mean it hasn’t been working,” Hazel said. She hoped this made it sound like the problem had been a service or a technical failure. Jenny had just given her money, but Hazel planned to spend it on liquor and convenience-food items.
In truth she didn’t want to know of her mother’s passing, and her mother had already stipulated that there would be no funeral. Let’s not do good-byes, she’d insisted the last time Hazel was home. Come give me a firm handshake and we’ll agree to see each other later. A gentlemen’s agreement. And Hazel had, though she’d wanted to acknowledge the grappling voice in her mind, half her women’s studies professor and half—who? Octavia Butler? Hazel liked to imagine every thought she had that felt feminist was coming into her brain directly via Octavia Butler’s spirit—Neither of us is a man, Mom. Also you certainly are not gentle.
“But I guess my phone is working now?” She knew that wasn’t a charming thing to ask, so she tried to think of what might charm him. “It’s great to hear your voice,” she said.
“I wanted to hear yours, too, so I took care of your bill. Would you like to go out this evening?”
Some facts about herself, facts she now realized Byron clearly knew, like how she was broke and about to flunk out of college, couldn’t be camouflaged. But her words and expressions didn’t have to match reality. He’d like her more if she seemed to adore him already, so she did. “This can officially be my only-Byron phone,” she said. “I won’t tell anyone else it’s back on. If I answer and it’s anyone but you I’ll just hang up.” Then something less contrived slipped out. “But how did you know my mother is dying?”
Already, though, she was imagining dinner, an upscale affair maybe involving a piano, or pianos. Fancy restaurants probably did not stop at one piano. She had nothing to wear. She did buy clothing on credit cards (and occasionally shoplifted, easing her conscience with the knowledge that the company used sweatshop labor. She told herself that stealing sweatshop-labored garments and wearing them was somewhere on the family tree of protest for human rights.). But most of her clothing was intentionally distressed—holes, skunk-spray patterns of bleach, faux cigarette burns, patches. Christ, her dying mother had said the last time Hazel returned home. Christ, Christ, Christ. Were you recently assaulted? What kind of a look is that! If I saw you walking down the street, I’d stop the van and ask if you needed a ride to the police station. You know what those jeans say to me? “I was gravely wronged. I have a report to make.” And not in a good way!
Her clothes didn’t match the grand degree of agreeability and optimism she wanted Byron to think she possessed.
“I’m sorry if that felt like a violation,” he said. “My team had to investigate you yesterday before we spoke. They’re pretty thorough, in terms of electronic records. In terms of most things.”
Hazel wondered if he worried about her being too sad to party with him, or whatever the evening plans were, due to the maternal situation. How best to convey that she wasn’t fraught with grief without seeming like a monster? “We’ve reached a point of acceptance with her condition,” Hazel said. She borrowed this language from a hospice pamphlet titled “Reaching a Point of Acceptance With Your Condition.” It had sat on their coffee table for weeks, unopened, then was finally thrown away when her intoxicated mother refused a bottle of Ensure by karate-chopping it down with the side of her hand and spilling it everywhere. “What should I wear tonight?”
“I’ll send you something,” Byron said. “Be ready at eight.” Then there was the dial tone. Hazel decided to call the library and inquire about the current balance of her fines, always hefty. She had no plans to pay, but she wanted to call someone since her phone suddenly worked.
What he sent was a gray leisure suit and slip-on shoes, made of the same fabric as his workers’ clothing and his own. It was both sensual and androgynous, hugging her small breasts but also changing the parameters of their shape into something more concave and winnowed, like two tiny abdomens. The shoes were incredibly comfortable, so much so that they gave her the disconcerting feeling of having no feet at all. She walked slowly in them, filled with the suspicion that she wasn’t doing it right.
“Walking feels like not walking, in these!” was the first thing she planned to say to him that evening. “Best shoes ever!” She’d drunk a few personality beers before the car arrived, thinking Byron would be in the car that was picking her up, thinking they were about to go to dinner and her buzz would soon be diluted by food. But the car had only a silent driver who made her sign a form declaring her physical person was harboring neither secretive recording devices nor undisclosed biological specimens. A screen in the car played looped footage of select portions from Byron’s speaking engagements. Hazel pressed every button she could find in an attempt to change the channel, finally opening the partition by accident. “Please don’t touch anything,” the driver said to her without looking back. Then the partition closed.
WHEN THEY ARRIVED AT THE HUB, AN ESCORT TOOK HER THROUGH A ten-minute labyrinthine walk back to a mood-lit room where Byron sat in a hanging black chair that looked like a hollowed-out alien egg. He was absentmindedly typing on something in his lap that appeared to be a sheet of glass while watching something in the corner of the chair that also looked like a sheet of glass. There was a large bowl on the table in front of her that Hazel eagerly walked toward, hoping it was filled with nuts or another snack food, but it was filled with small white rocks alight in a bed of blue flames. She had to pee so badly.