Liver had a lot of smells that seemed automotive in nature, so being on her back beneath him, Hazel thought about the flat rolling carts mechanics lie down on to slide beneath cars, and the sex became a little fun the way it might be fun to roll out from below a vehicle and then roll back under again, and again. The texture of his scars was fun to touch as well, like different land features on a raised-relief globe. His body was a new world, and it was possible for Hazel to be alone there: no satellites orbited its atmosphere, no fiber-optic cables ran beneath its soil. It didn’t leave her mind that soon Byron would be seeing them together through his crystal ball of data, but for the next few hours what she’d done was truly her secret, and she relished it.
AFTERWARD, WITH HER BODY DRAPED ACROSS LIVER, HAZEL REMEMBERED one college summer when she and her friend Becca had gone to an outdoor music festival. They’d stayed up all night taking Ecstasy then slept the morning away in her parents’ station wagon, parked in front of a supermarket. It was a Saturday so the shopping plaza was busy, and occasionally they’d wake for a moment to see young kids peering in at them through the windows, sometimes knocking on them or distorting their lips on the glass like catfish—she and Becca were too out of it to even care. They were just a sedated exhibit at the human zoo: Collegiate Recreational Drug Users, and they’d let the gawkers come and go with no concern. One adult male did knock and yell to ask if they were okay, Y’all aren’t dead, right? I saw you in here at the beginning of my shift eight hours ago. Wiggle a toe for me so I don’t have nightmares about your corpses baking in this hot car all day? but when the two of them opened their eyes his smile made it clear that he was hitting on them so her friend Becca put her foot up on the window and right over his face. She had impressively big feet, and because the festival was outdoors and they’d been walking around barefoot, her toes were feral looking and caked with mud, and when she lifted her foot back off the window the man had gone.
They were hot and sticky and nothing seemed real. They’d gotten terribly lost driving home from the festival and had stumbled on a sad alligator zoo where a shirtless man wrestled an alligator in a cage every hour on the hour, and they decided to stay and watch because their hangover was making surreal things seem normal and normal things, like traffic and driving on the highway, feel incomprehensible and scary.
The wrestler and the reptile had a type of intimacy. When he got to where he was lying on top of it, his belly against its back and his hands wrapped around its jaw, it was clear he was actually whispering to it. In that moment part of Hazel had wished, in a way, to be that poor alligator, in a different context, despite not finding the man attractive. She wanted to be held and whispered to with the weight of another person pressed down across the length of her body.
Sex with Liver was like this. There was a sense of getting to be closer to a wild creature than most people ever get to be, of the danger being reduced for a moment because the creature was restrained. Not by physical force but by booze and sex. Though because of all the scars, Liver’s skin did feel a little reptilian, a little like something a designer purse might be made from. His left nipple was basically missing. There was an indentation that Hazel’s fingers naturally went toward and swept inside, and the absence there lowered them just a few centimeters closer to his beating heart.
“Is there any part of your story you could tell me that’s legal?” Hazel whispered. “Things that couldn’t be held against you in a court of law? Your childhood, maybe.”
“I began courting delinquency from an early age,” Liver said.
“Are your parents still alive?”
“I don’t know,” he said. Of course a Gogol ID search could solve the mystery right away.
“You don’t care to know,” Hazel clarified.
“Sure don’t.”
Hazel squeezed him a little tighter, not out of pity but out of gratitude. Here was someone who didn’t want Byron’s data.
11
THE NEXT MORNING HAZEL WOKE WITH AN IDEA. SHE HAD NO CLUE what time it was and neither did Liver—hopefully it wasn’t too late. She needed to get home before the next download at noon.
“Would you be able to come to my house and lift something?”
“Is it a body?” Liver asked. He was eyeing a shovel in the shed’s corner and clearly wanted to bring the right tools for the job.
Hazel realized that Byron’s intervention meant she’d always have to care, at least once a day, about a schedule. Did she have hours until she’d have to withstand the download seizure, or only minutes or even seconds? “If I start shaking and then puke or pass out or both, just wait it out,” she told Liver.
“Well yeah,” he said.
There wasn’t a functioning clock in his pickup, but they passed a pharmacy marquee that advertised both the 11:32 AM time as well as a low-price special on some cannibalistic-sounding vitamins called HAIR, SKIN & NAILS GUMMIES. With luck they’d make it back to her father’s house just in time.
“It’s complicated,” Hazel explained as they pulled into the driveway, “but something’s about to happen to my body that I’m going to try to prevent. I need to grab a device from the backyard. You may or may not see my father on a scooter, with or without something that looks like a female mannequin. Pay him no mind. What I need you to do is get the huge wooden box in the living room that’s shaped like a coffin and carry it back to the porch.”
He lifted a flask from between the truck’s seat cushions and shook it to make sure it was full. “Okay,” he said. “I’ve got all the necessary equipment.”
In the house, Dad and Diane were playing a card game in the kitchen’s breakfast nook. “Hi, Dad; I’ll be busy for the next few minutes,” she yelled to him. “A friend is coming in to bring Diane’s box out to the porch. Don’t judge him based on appearance. He poses no danger.”
She then ran outside and grabbed the Sleep Helmet Byron had included in the safe. She doubted he’d have included it if wearing it during the downloads could prevent them, but it was worth a shot. After all, why twelve noon instead of twelve midnight? Maybe sleep wasn’t as conducive to ripping out her memories. She wanted to attempt every roadblock she could muster.
“Rummy,” Hazel heard her father saying to Diane. “You win again!”
She didn’t want to be alone when the download came, but she also didn’t want Liver to see it. When he brought the box out, she said, “I need to put on this helmet and climb into the box for a few minutes. I’m not sure exactly what’s going to happen. You might want to wait in another room.”
Liver took a long drag from his cigarette. “You’re gonna shut the lid?” She was clearly not the first woman he’d assisted into a wooden box.
“Yes. Could you give me a hand with that?”