IF, the TV continued, YOU ARE FINDING MEANING IN THIS SETUP AND FEEL YOUR CURRENT PURPOSE IS BEING PRESENT FOR YOUR FATHER AS HE VENTURES INTO SOLITARY EXIT, AS SOME OF YOUR RECENT THOUGHTS SEEM TO INDICATE, THEN CONTINUE. BUT ONCE HE DIES, WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE THEN? WHEN YOUR FATHER IS GONE, COME HOME. YOU CAN ENTER INTO THE NEXT CHAPTER KNOWING YOU SAW HIM OUT OF THE WORLD HONORABLY AND HAVE NO OUTSTANDING PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITIES TO GET IN THE WAY OF YOUR DEVOTION TO THE BIGGEST MEDICAL-TECHNOLOGICAL ACCOMPLISHMENT OF ALL TIME, AND YOU CAN FULLY NETWORK WITH YOUR BELOVED SPOUSE. MAKING HISTORY IS EXCITING! LET’S START TO GET EXCITED. IT’S ALSO A WAY FOR YOUR FATHER’S DEATH TO NOT BE TOO SAD, BECAUSE IT MARKS THE HERALD OF A NEW DAWN FOR NEUROLOGICAL ENHANCEMENT. HIS DEATH WILL BE THE LAST DOMINO, AND ITS FALL WILL BRING AN END TO THE OBSOLETE WORLD OF ISOLATED THOUGHT.
The TV returned to a woman in a pretzeled position, her bunned head moving up and down rhythmically between her thighs. I don’t know about Syrah, as a vintage, her muffled voice said. I think it numbs my tongue.
Do we have it all figured out, or are we lonely? another woman mumbled between dubbed smacking noises.
I’m just trying to make it to Friday without killing myself, a third woman said. This camera angle showed only the woman’s back, but her voice implied her mouth was open very wide; she sounded like someone talking to one of those dentists who asks patients questions while he drills. I’m just licking my way through the week.
Hazel tried out the position they were all in and failed. She looked up at the cracks on the ceiling and imagined it falling down upon her. She’d made bad choices in life. Irreversible wrong choices.
A low wail came from her father’s bedroom. It was not a sound so much as an aural collage of human misery. A fresh one whose glue hadn’t dried.
When Hazel was young, her mother had taken her to an art gallery and Hazel had been surprised to find most of the paintings ugly. Early education had taught her that art was supposed to be beautiful—that was its point! Mom, Hazel asked, what’s it called when you’re looking at something, I mean staring at something, like how we’re doing, but not at something pretty? That’s the whole reason to stare usually, right? Because something’s beautiful. What about when something isn’t nice to look at but you’re still looking at it and thinking and stuff? She’d watched her mother’s thick brow wrinkle up and push out, which always reminded Hazel of the top of a cardboard milk carton being opened. When you’re looking at something that isn’t nice to look at and thinking? her mother said. Well, that’s called reality, Hazel. That is called L-I-F-E.
WHEN HAZEL ENTERED HIS BEDROOM, HER FATHER’S MOUTH OPENED like he was going to speak, or play a single note on a wind instrument. “Whoa,” Hazel said, realizing what she was seeing. She ran to his side and listened for a final word or noise, some hiss or pop or fizz of a soul leaving the body. Instead his silent lips parted and froze. More than life exiting his body, it looked like death was entering into him between his teeth. “Dad?” Hazel asked.
He’d been wearing only a bathrobe the past few weeks, and between the dolls seemed like an elderly gentleman partier who’d just died of a cocaine overdose. It was a far more festive deathbed than she’d imagined him having. For some reason she’d always pictured an ill-lit room full of beeping machines, a hospital bed, her father yelling at an orderly about the lack of flavor in that day’s turkey. Then his face turning bright red mid-rant as he clutched his chest and flatlined. “I guess you went out on top, Pops,” Hazel said. “Sort of.”
She did, then, begin to start hearing vague digestive noises and gurgles from beneath the covers, the staccato bursts of sound a cooling engine makes when turned off after a long drive.
Hazel walked back into the living room and felt very weird. Sadness wasn’t hitting her in those exact terms. It felt more like the acceptance of anticlimax, which was what all major events seemed to be. Nothing ever felt like a big enough deal. Her father had just died and she didn’t feel transformed or epiphanic or even especially glum. She tried to get upset about not feeling that upset.
Now what, though? She looked at the clock; it was just after 4 PM. Best-case scenario, she had twenty hours before Byron knew her father was dead. Twenty hours to think about what to do next. She had to go back to The Hub now. Otherwise no one still living whom she might ever think about, even briefly, would be safe.
Except Hazel didn’t seem to be thinking. Instead she was turning around to take a focused walk down the hallway to the bathroom. It felt very easy, like she’d practiced it a thousand times. Like she’d done suicide drills to make sure that when the time came she would take her life with record speed. First she used tap water from the bathroom sink to swallow a full bottle of her father’s heavy opioids. Then she went to the kitchen and took terrible, profound gulps of the cheap whiskey her father liked to drink. He felt that in social settings, its ethanol reek made other men respect him.
If she died now, maybe there wouldn’t be another download. Maybe Byron would never see her father’s last moments, or hers. She liked the thought of that: perhaps she was stealing a private death for the two of them. She didn’t want to go back to Byron; no matter how glorious the general public might find the “breakthrough” of their synced brains to be, there wouldn’t be any joy or meaning in it for her. And Byron would hound her until she returned to him or died. So that was that.
Hazel climbed into her father’s bed, angling herself between him and Di. She took the dolls’ eye masks off and put one of them on her father and then one onto herself. Cuddling up to her father’s body was awkward, but in a way she was grateful for the opportunity—it wouldn’t have been all that possible when he was alive. At least not alive and conscious.
He had wanted to die alone yet not alone, which Hazel understood—other people bring their own wants and needs and sadness into a situation that is already too full of feeling—but loneliness is hard. And now with the three of them she was getting the same thing: people were there with her but also were not, being in a category of either “dead” or “never alive.” As the painkillers began to kick in, she felt a little noble about it all. It was like her father had decided, as captain of their retirement-trailer ship, that it needed to sink and he and all his creations, including Hazel, should go down with him. She felt like she was following orders, and owning up to her failures—she’d screwed up and it was probably best to just call it. His body was still warm, and the deep echo of Hazel’s slowing breaths that she could hear with one of her ears pressed to his chest was relaxing in the way that hearing his heartbeat might’ve been. There was an acrid sharpness to his smell that insisted everything was expiring: it was okay for her to leave because everything was almost used up, including the oxygen around them.
She hadn’t cuddled with anyone in a very long time. Byron sure didn’t cuddle. Early on, if he held her after sex, it was more an immobilization than an embrace, like a parent putting his arms around a child before a vaccination shot to ensure stillness. It felt like something bad was going to happen and Byron knew about it but she didn’t. Which made perfect sense now.