Hazel thought back to the beginning of their marriage, when the constant monitoring and sensors started to feel increasingly claustrophobic. She tried to believe Byron’s reassurance that it was innocuous—what did she have to hide? what was it hurting?—but increasingly she noticed Byron commenting on her daily activities around The Hub while he was away, the meals a staff member brought her each day changing based on the report of bodily scans she hadn’t been aware she was getting. Back then they’d had what Hazel thought to be a normal amount of occasional sex; Byron wasn’t the sort of person who could let go with abandon or fully stick his tongue in someone’s mouth. But soon not fucking became one of the only barriers Hazel could manage. Sex with you would be redundant! she’d yelled at him once when he finally admitted there were multiple cameras and scanners and more in every room including the bathroom, that no second of her time inside The Hub had gone unrecorded. You’re already inside my body with these fucking sensors! It was for safety and convenience, he’d stressed. It provided necessary data that technology relied upon, technology that would supposedly keep them healthy, happy, and vital. I don’t have a psychology degree, for example, he’d argue, but I can have your words and actions processed and analyzed with almost ninety-seven percent accuracy to reveal to me your current state of mind. How many couples can say that?
Now, Byron snort-laughed. What did Byron ever find funny? She couldn’t think of a single thing except how great it was to win. “I need you to do something for me, Hazel. I need you to go get the mobile device out of the safe in your backyard and call me on a secure line. Can you do that?”
“What happens if I don’t?”
A ringing filled the room—a phone on Byron’s end. His eyes performed a series of spastic blinks; whenever she saw him working, it looked enough like he might be having a seizure to make her feel hopeful, but the flutters and rolls of his lids always turned out to be calculated. “I’m going to need to let you go for the moment, Hazel, but you know how to reach me. I’ll talk to you later today. Probably just after noon. That’s not an arbitrary time, that’s when you’re going to want to place a call to me, and the first order of business in our conversation will be a gentle reminder that I did try to warn you. I did, Hazel. You’re leaving me no choice.”
With that, the regular ceiling came back into view. She glanced toward the back window, hoping the projection box was something he’d had installed that she could break with her hands, or cover by placing the flamingo’s cavernous abdomen over the top of it, but the box had retreated.
She made herself a solemn promise that even if he somehow beamed her father’s house, with her father inside it, out of existence that afternoon and she found herself sitting all alone on the grass of an empty yard with no other object surrounding her but the safe Byron had dropped off, she still would not call him. She would urinate on the safe, maybe. Then she would walk away to try to find solitude and revel in it. Assuming he let her live.
And maybe he would? Perhaps she’d been too pessimistic. There was clearly something more he wanted from her. Hazel tried to hope he might find a way to get it somewhere else. She knew this wasn’t the case though.
Her clothes and hair were still wet. But in the light of the morning they felt different, less soggy and more refreshing, as if she’d simply showered with them on. Hazel removed them and took a moment to relish her nonrecorded nudity, then realized she had to assume Byron was recording video of her if his face had just been plastered across her ceiling.
But she was in the world, having a moment outside Byron’s landscape of influence! She reminded herself that she’d existed before she’d ever known Byron, so a resumption of existence without him was absolutely possible. She’d previously come to believe that it wasn’t.
The shopping carts at her father’s local grocer had wheels that locked up if anyone tried to take them beyond the parking lot, and a part of Hazel had figured that a similar thing would happen to her if she left The Hub’s borders without plans to return.
But it wasn’t like she wanted to go back to her pre-Byron life either. When she’d married, she hadn’t brought any possessions with her because everything she owned was shitty. And when she left Byron, she hadn’t taken anything; it all seemed like his stuff. He’d either invented it or paid for it.
Now she put on a T-shirt that she’d gotten free back in college. It was a thank-you gift for signing up for a credit card that she’d immediately maxed out then never made a payment on; the card’s logo was splashed across the front in different fonts. She paired this top with sweatpants that had DROPOUT written down their left leg in a Sharpie marker. She remembered being intoxicated and writing this upon herself one night back when it was clear she would not be rebounding from academic probation. It sounded better than “flunkout.”
These clothes now seemed an ill fit for her microdermabrased face and asymmetrical haircut and perfect veneer smile. She’d really prided herself on the way she’d begun to ape dignity as Byron’s wife, and he’d sometimes commented, with a surprised tone, on how respectable she looked during the rare occasions when they attended an event as a couple. This getup wasn’t the outfit she wanted to die in, not ideally, but maybe if she renounced and removed all external indications of social merit from her physical person, he’d begin to question whether Hazel was worth all this trouble. She couldn’t simply drop down to a baseline maintenance of her physical attractiveness; she really had to start looking rough, like she meant it. Maybe Mrs. Weathersby, her father’s neighbor down the street, was still hoarding parakeets. If so, Hazel could drop by and ask for a tour of the bird room. She could stay until her clothing was covered with avian dung.
OUT IN THE LIVING ROOM, HER FATHER WAS PUSHING DIANE’S ARRIVAL coffin toward the door by accelerating his scooter and hitting it. He kept backing up then gunning the throttle and hitting it again. She couldn’t tell if it was moving a bit each time or if no progress was being made, but it looked like a cathartic morning activity.
“Hello, Dad!” Hazel called. He gave a small wave indicating that he was too busy to chat.
She walked to the refrigerator and opened its door, then the sensation of being watched filled her with nausea—she turned, ready to confront one of Byron’s electronics, but it was Diane. It creeped Hazel out how she was able to sense the doll. “And hello to you, Diane.” Hazel started to raise the carton of OJ toward her in a gesture of merriment, but froze.
Diane did not appear to be herself. At all.
Overnight, the doll had devolved into some sort of catfish/human hybrid—gone was her foxy, closed smile with the corner lip upturned as if to say, I know the dirty stuff you want to do and I think you’re a sick individual but I must be the biggest sicko of all because I want to try every one of your filthy ideas out! Now, beneath her prim nose, there were no features at all except a puckered, circular, bright maroon opening that reminded Hazel of a baboon’s ass.
“What the hell did you do to her face?” Hazel called out. Diane now looked a lot like the tortured figure in Munch’s painting The Scream, if the tortured figure were a red-haired female sex doll. Her arms were bent upward at the elbow, hands framing her cheeks; her mouth was a wide cavern of terrible surprise.
“That’s her other face,” her father said, appearing at the doorway.
Upon realizing he meant the face I can have intercourse with, Hazel was torn between true curiosity and a desire to change the subject at all costs.
Curiosity won. “Only the face switches? You don’t trade out the whole head?”
“No decapitation necessary.” Her father zipped over, pulled some sort of pop tab on Diane’s scalp, and lifted it off.