The associate pursed her lips. “We can do anything you like,” she finally said. Her words had the intonation of a sincere apology.
But the dress-purchasing mission wasn’t entirely fruitless: six months later, Fiffany and the EMT got married. Fiffany wore a smaller version of the dress Hazel had ripped her way out of. Per usual, Byron was on his device for most of the ceremony, but since Fiffany chose to get married in the Gogol headquarters employee chapel, he did attend, and he did pause for one moment to look up and comment to Hazel when Fiffany walked down the aisle, “Well, she looks just beautiful,” he said. “Doesn’t she?” He started at Fiffany for a moment with the same look of delight he’d given Hazel in the interview. Then, so casually Hazel might’ve easily ignored it, he added, “Love the dress.” And she hadn’t wanted her face to grow hot, but it had. And she hadn’t wanted to turn to look at him. She did though; already at this early point in their marriage, curiosity had stopped being a friend to her. Byron was staring at her, waiting for her eyes to meet his, and when they did he gave her a knowing wink.
Of course Fiffany had shown Byron the video. Why wouldn’t she? Hazel was surprised to find this felt far more painful than imagining a full-blown affair: Byron and the attractive Fiffany, chuckling together in his office at Hazel’s expense, somehow caused her a more vulnerable form of pain.
Fiffany had gotten divorced two weeks later. Hazel told herself it was a crazy thought, but she almost wondered if the wedding had been a show. That Fiffany had done it just so Byron could see her wearing that dress and feel like he should’ve married Fiffany instead.
FOUR DRINKS LATER, HAZEL WAS FOLDED OVER ACROSS LIVER’S LAP. “Was that sent here to kill me?” she’d ask, then point to something in the bar. “Was that?” She rubbed her finger along Liver’s knee then glanced at the sheen on her fingertip. Like an otter’s fur, his pants seemed to produce an oil-based protective coating.
This was a digression. She’d been telling him all about the failings of her marriage, Byron’s monstrosity, the ways that he’d refused to respect the most basic of personal boundaries, such as her skull. “I mean a microchip,” she continued, returning to the story. “He wanted to put it up here.” She felt her hand move toward her head; a finger—her own? the verdict was out—went inside her ear. Attempts to sit up were unsuccessful. It felt like Liver’s pants were magnetic and her cheeks were lined with metal shavings. “Is there a bathroom?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he responded. “There is. Big enough to screw in. Small enough to feel romantic. May I escort you?”
Hazel shook her head. “I’ll be right back,” she said. By which she meant she would never return, not to Liver’s lap or to the Spotted Rose. Probably because she’d be dead.
It had been a long time since she’d had alcohol with so many impurities; the inside of her mouth felt lined with grit. But this was good, she reminded herself. She needed to rid herself of Byron’s long-standing odor of sterility, and she was succeeding. When she burped it smelled like the world’s most fermented peach bobbing in a bowl of lighter fluid.
Hazel felt fawnlike on her walk home, newly born; her legs had forgotten everything. She reached the sanctuary of Shady Place’s entrance and decided it was okay to begin to crawl. For a while she dry-heaved into a neighbor’s faux-stone wishing-well planter, which maybe wasn’t too far off from tossing in a penny, so she decided to leave a wish that could be granted. Universe, she thought, please let me convert to a tangible existence now. One without interfaces and constant monitoring and a shower that talks. Also please let me live long enough to taste an adult life of my very own, even if it’s a pathetic one.
She crawled several more feet before passing out at the foot of Mrs. Fennigan’s tranquility fountain. Sleep came to Hazel—she couldn’t help it—the moment her brain heard the running water. Like birdcalls, water was one of Hazel’s preferred meditation sound-machine settings. Well, her former meditation sound machine.
An ambulance came careening into the park with sirens at full blare, sans consideration for someone who might be passed out on a nearby lawn: one of the street’s routine elder deaths. Hazel looked up at the sky; swampy clouds crisscrossed the moon. It was very late. Rocking up onto her knees, she tried standing but found she was still intoxicated. More so, somehow, than she had been when she’d passed out. Her eyes were drawn to the flaccid promise of a garden hose dangling off the side of a trailer a few feet away. “Water!” she announced, then decided she should not speak aloud at present. That had been a misstep.
For a while she just sprayed the hose onto her face, her eyes closed, then she began lapping at the stream—why did her tongue feel so swollen?—still without opening her eyes. By the time she became conscious enough for reason to set in, she realized she didn’t know if her pants were wet from the hose or another source, so she spent an additional few minutes soaking them just in case.
It would alarm her father to see her enter his home in the early dawn hours wearing saturated clothing. It just would. This was extra incentive to make it back to the screened-in-porch room before he woke.
After a few failed attempts, Hazel was able to cross to the other side of the street on all fours, but her errant path led her to head butt a lawn flamingo.
Suddenly the moon was wide and full above her head like a spotlight. The flamingo, with its raised, tucked-under plastic leg, suggested the shape of Byron kneeling down on one knee, and memory flooded her. This was how he’d presented her with the microchip that he wanted to place in her brain: Byron had cleverly, in a faux-romantic overture, put the chip inside a velvet ring box, made his proposal regarding their tandem neurosurgical alterations, then had gotten down on one knee, opened up the box’s lid, and said, Hazel Green, will you meld with me?
He had worn a tux.
Of course this is what his research had told him to do—he was altering a familiar social script in which she was supposed to feel gleeful, flattered, adored; she was supposed to throw her arms around him afterward and say Yes!; she was probably even supposed to cry.