Hazel found it depressing, or maybe just disappointing, on a personal level, how even though her father was fatally ill, on the whole she was still incapable of appreciating him. She tried watching TV on the bed with the three of them—she placed eye masks on the dolls so it looked like they were resting, peaceful and waxen. It was like instead of dying, her father was turning into a doll too.
But the smell. Death did have an odor. She kept the bedroom window open although she hated the vulnerable feeling that caused. It was illogical; a pane of glass wasn’t going to make any difference to Byron. Plus he was already camped out inside her mind. But it felt so much easier for him to get to her when there was just a screen between the inside of the house and the open air. She looked out of it at least twelve times a day, fearful that he’d somehow transported her father’s entire house into a warehouse chamber of The Hub without her noticing. It was a slight comfort when she looked into the yard and saw palm trees instead of the wall of a cement bunker.
Hazel decided to go watch TV by herself in the living room instead. She found a sitcom about a horny single mother who ran a secret yoga studio in her living room after her children went to bed each night; the only moves and positions she taught were ones adapted to allow for autocunnilingus, and for two hours other single mothers would come over and guzzle red wine then lie on mats and lick their own crotches to orgasm. The show’s sound track featured bursts of soft jazz and the punctuated orchestral swelling of frenzied violins. Hey, one woman on the show said. They were panting and heaped together on the mats post-session; their thin legs had intertwined to form a nest of Lycra and spandex twigs. It’s great we can touch ourselves like that. Independence and all. But why don’t we ever touch each other? I mean, we’re all just here to get off, right? Does it have to be a solitary thing? The rest of the women giggled in unison. But then it’s not yoga. Then it’s an orgy! Now everyone laughed. Orgies on a school night would be a little strange, said a third.
When their sex had begun to wane, Byron installed something for Hazel in the shower, and in the bed. You seem increasingly uncomfortable with that aspect of our companionship, he’d told her. So be it. I’ve long had efficient and solitary ways to bring myself to orgasm. I’d like to make these available to you as well. Physiologically, daily orgasm is healthful. I have to insist on your continued monogamy for social reasons. We could certainly do scans of potential partners and take precautions against disease and pregnancy, but it’s the secrecy we can’t guarantee, and an affair going public would irrevocably maim our image in the media. We’re a deeply happy and deeply private couple. That’s who we are. To summarize, I’m encouraging you to touch yourself often and develop an effective self-satiation routine. This will minimize any temptation you might feel in terms of breaching our union. I’ll discontinue all physically romantic advances toward you until you ask me to resume. Well, Hazel had thought at the time. That’s that.
She’d tried out the machines, and they were effective. But too effective? They worked in seconds and made climax feel like a reflex. Afterward she had the feeling of having watched something on fast-forward, the need to go back and see it again on normal speed so she could understand what had just happened. Plus she knew that Byron probably watched surveillance video of her using them. So when you’re pleasuring yourself, he’d asked her one night, what do you think about? Hazel had swallowed, laughed. There’s not really time to think, with those things, she’d joked, but if she’d answered honestly it would’ve been something along the lines of how she thought about having sex with everyone she met or saw while Byron was made to watch, in person. It was the in-person part that was critical. It didn’t count if he was watching it on a screen. He’d have to stop working entirely and just be there, and have to see both Hazel and whomever she was fucking actually see him being there. He couldn’t hide.
But she’d stopped using them because it angered him. Anything healthful she failed to do made him mad, as did her abstinence from cell phones and tech devices.
Hazel blinked. The living room TV screen had just turned a weird sky blue color. One second she’d been watching a woman in capri leggings theatrically lift a glass of wine between her toes, pretzel her body to bring it to her mouth while she held a uttana padasana pose, and drink through a crazy straw. Now, nothing.
Hazel got up to bang the TV on its side, which she remembered her father doing when she was younger. That was something she felt nostalgic about—the good old days when people beat the shit out of technology if it didn’t perform. She knew from her father’s rants that he agreed with her on this. These silly phones! People treat them like they’re porcelain eggs holding the fetus of the baby Jesus. Now the concern was on protecting and encasing devices, not giving them repeated blows.
Some of her father’s roundhouse fights with their old TV had been epic. He had treated the thing like it was an insane cow that had charged into their living room.
HAZEL, the TV screen suddenly read.
“Oh,” Hazel remarked. “Oh shit.”
HAZEL, YOU NEED TO PUT ON THE HELMET. THIS IS URGENT. LET US DO A CHECK OF YOUR FATHER’S CONDITION. HE NEEDS TO BE HOSPITALIZED. IT IS NOT HUMANE TO LET HIM SUFFER THIS WAY.
“TV,” Hazel remarked. “Tell Byron that my father is dying of cancer. Humane is not, you know, possible. I get that there might be more we can do to mitigate his physical discomfort. But in the global sense, which I think is what my father has chosen to tether himself to, in terms of his death, in that his body is painfully breaking down against his will and is going to continue to do so until he is gone and then he will be gone forever and that is all, humane does not apply. Also maybe tell Byron that ‘humane’ is a funny word for him to use! For example, murdering an eccentric renegade who mainly lived off the land and wasn’t doing anything criminal in any of the moments I knew him just because I slept with him? That is not humane. Bring up how his company masterminds futuristic weapons and betrays all individual rights to privacy—both those created by law and those imposed by the insight of biological evolution, like the sanctity of one’s own fucking brain!”