AS SHE SHUT HER FATHER’S DOOR, HAZEL HAD THE URGE TO TIPTOE around its parameter, searching. Was there a crawl space she could hide under and thereby continue living for a few more hours? But this was probably not possible, her continued living. When she’d placed the thin suggestion in the air a few months ago, “Maybe I should move out?” Byron had given her a terrifying look. It seemed almost helpless: Don’t you know what I’d have to do then? Why would you make me do something so awful? “Unacceptable,” he’d said. For Byron, this meant the worst possibility it could.
Yet she’d done it. Because maybe there was a slight chance he wasn’t going to kill her? Though probably not.
Of course he wouldn’t be doing the killing. Not in a hands-on way. That Hazel could almost find funny: Byron, in his gadgetry-infused suit straight off the cover of Wired, standing behind the sun-faded American flag above her father’s front bushes, doing something so direct and noninterfaced as placing his hands around her neck to strangle her. Then she might get to laugh in his face as he squeezed her life out because it was so not him. Plus, a few moments after her death, he’d be really embarrassed to have indirectly displayed emotion via physical homicide.
What she needed to be watching out for was more along the lines of a microdrone kill. Some buzzing thing that looked like a yellow jacket and stung her between the eyes with a synthetic poison venom. Hard to convey to her father that this was a realistic, genuine concern. That was Byron’s style. Full stop.
And really, she didn’t want to die. Not in a gung-ho way. Sure, the depression of being Byron’s constant audience and test subject had given her an easy coin of nihilism to flip in her hand: heads she died, tails she lived a life of misery. But Hazel hoped now that after so many bad years of internal and external surveillance, of cohabitation with someone she’d grown to hate and fear alike, the absence of sadness might feel something like contentment, or close enough. She did want to live long enough to see what a life of independence might be like, how both her pleasures and problems would feel if she’d never used Byron as an escape route. If she’d been smart enough to say, Your money is tempting but wow are you strange; I am too but let me just add that something does not feel right here. Something feels aggressively odd on a next-level realm I had not previously imagined, in terms of foreboding discomfort.
Hazel turned around on the porch and opened her eyes, which she realized she’d been protectively squeezing shut: it might only be a second before someone or something threw a vial of fast-acting acid into her face.
But what she saw playing out in front of her on the street looked like a small-town musical production. A geriatric opus, but a sizable one. The elderly apparently came out at sunset, and the sunset was beautiful. Its light was antiaging. It tinted their gray hair a luminous auburn and endowed their bald scalps with golden, healthy tans.
Everyone stopped in place, as if on cue, stared at her for a moment, and waved. She felt like she’d landed in an AARP mobile-home version of Oz.
The elderly people gathering there in front of her seemed both intrigued and terrified by her relative youth. Off in the distance, she could see more elderly people coming from streets that were farther away.
She felt like she should make a speech, announce a run for office. Finally one broke the silence and simply yelled at her.
“Who are you?!”
“Yeah!” another added. Hazel couldn’t tell if their tone was due to outrage or being hard of hearing. Technically, since Hazel was under fifty-five years of age, she was not allowed to stay at Shady Place for an extended period of time, though they had no way of knowing that was her plan. Maybe they could smell the residential intent upon her.
When her father had moved into the park after her mother died and Hazel had married Byron, he did so with a cover story: he told people his daughter lived in Washington and was “into strange politics” and their relationship was very strained. When she visited him with the security escort in the digital sedan, if anyone asked, her father claimed she was the daughter of one of his military buddies who’d died young, and she dropped by sometimes to hear stories about their troop. He didn’t want anyone to know Hazel was married to Byron. Boy, would the gold diggers come out in droves then, he always said. It would be like The Godfather. All day long people would be dropping by, asking for favors.
Hazel now looked out upon the masses and cleared her throat. “I’m one of Herbert’s nieces,” she said. If Byron had spy cameras on her and was seeing this, that was good, maybe. Look at all these witnesses with nothing but time on their hands. Lots of bird-watchers among them too, probably: Owners of binoculars. Nosy neighbors. This sea of sagging flesh was a safety net.
“Your uncle never comes to the socials,” one woman complained, also yelling. A leashed teacup dog was biting her edema-puffed ankles, but she didn’t seem to feel it. Which was good because the dog’s owner had dropped the leash and seemed to be taking an upright nap. Hazel could hear him snoring. “Is your uncle blind?”
“I think he is,” Hazel said. “I’m pretty certain.” Why not?
“You know there are these teenagers,” another woman added. “They like to ride their bikes through here and you know what they do? They piss on our lawns. In broad daylight. I can smell it now, can you?” she asked. “Their piss in our grass?”
“I bet it’s a gang thing!” another yelled. They were crafting an informal town hall. It occurred to Hazel just then how ironic her risk of imminent death was. What would their reactions be were she to say, Guess what? Of all of us standing here, I’m actually the most likely to die tonight!
This was a compelling reason not to stand there playing it safe and let the next few hours be whittled away listening to their teen-urine conversation. She should try to pack in whatever she most wanted to do ASAP. Like her father was doing with Diane. Like her mother had done with Bernie, et al. Was sex what Hazel most wanted to fill her last hours on earth with?
She gave it some thought. She wasn’t opposed to a final quick fling, but a beer in a bar sounded greatest. There were just fewer variables. Plus she could go to a really dirty bar. She hadn’t been anywhere filthy since she’d married Byron.
Hazel decided to speak to the group in a parlance they’d understand. “So nice to meet everyone, but I’m on my way to a doctor’s appointment.”
“This late at night?” a man in a ball cap cried out. His hat declared him to be REtired!