After driving all night, Jasper and Hazel pulled into the parking lot of a diner in a small southern town off the interstate. “You should get going,” Hazel said. “I’ll eat here and sleep there.” She pointed to the diner, and then to a run-down efficiency motel across the street. “We should’ve dumped my dad’s body and brought that cooler,” she joked. “I could’ve just napped in that for a while. Provided I didn’t accidentally close it so tightly that I suffocated inside.”
There were people who paid a lot of money to get inside something and feel suffocated, Jasper knew—one of his cons had been convinced that a birth reenactment ceremony would be the key to unleashing her full sales potential at the auto, home, and life insurance company where she worked. Coming out of the birth canal as an infant, her clavicle had gotten stuck against her mother’s pelvis for hours. I’ve been stuck ever since, she’d declared to Jasper. I left my true aptitude for success behind in my mother’s vagina, she’d told him, and I’ll be damned if I’m not going to go back and get it. This going back didn’t involve her actual mother—she wanted to go to a retreat in the Mojave Desert where gurus would slather her with a mix of silicone lubricant and strawberry jelly then force her to worm her way through a snug foam cylinder ten feet in length. Yeah, he’d told her, you should go for it! knowing full well she wouldn’t have the money to do it after he left. That one he didn’t feel quite as bad about as all the others. She already wanted to be robbed.
But he did feel bad. About her and everyone else. He’d provided the rabbit woman with some names, and she’d given him a list of current addresses; if he left now, he could make it to some of the houses before the download happened, if it was going to happen. Before Byron began to hunt him down.
“You’re the best thing I’ve ever done,” Jasper said to Hazel, smiling. “Thank you for the opportunity.” The competition wasn’t very fierce, but it was still a nice sentiment to be able to share with another person.
“You’re sure welcome,” Hazel said. “I’ve never had anyone express gratitude for the way my poor decisions placed us both in mortal peril. Really though, thanks for maybe risking your life to maybe save mine.” She placed her hand on his, which felt awkward, then leaned in and gave him an even more awkward-feeling hug. He was glad he’d never be in a position where he had to try to con Hazel. She might be harder than most to pretend to fall in love with.
HAZEL WENT INTO THE DINER’S BATHROOM AND DECIDED TO PRACTICE the speech she’d give Byron if the deactivation didn’t work. “I’m sorry I didn’t fall in love with you,” she said to her reflection in the mirror. “I tried to.” This was the nicest true thing she could think of to say. Hazel suddenly had an urge to go out with kindness, not as a superiority thing but as a guilt thing.
She didn’t know the full extent of the changes Byron wanted to usher into mankind, but they didn’t seem like they were going to foster nurturing human connections. Something far larger than her own life seemed about to end. Had she been responsible, even a fraction of a percent, for any of his heart’s hardening? If so, she wanted to explain.
Yes, unfiltered Byron would creep out a lot of people. But he was truly a genius. “You know how impressive you are, of course,” she continued. “That’s what’s unfair. You could’ve married someone who was actually amazed by you instead of someone who just pretended to be. I’m sure many people out there truly would’ve felt honored to be the inaugural host to all your brain implements. It was a bad match. I knew we were different, but I thought it might turn out all right because my parents were total opposites. They weren’t suited to each other at all and fought all the time. To them, compatability didn’t matter; they’d committed and they were married and that was their life. Plus they didn’t have money. I thought it would be really easy to fall in love with a rich person.
“I know how dumb all this sounds. When I realized I wasn’t going to be able to love you, I should’ve just told you. We hadn’t been married long when I realized. Maybe you realized the same thing. Or maybe you wouldn’t have cared, but I should’ve told you. It just seemed crazy to give you up. Everyone told me I was so lucky that I figured I’d start feeling lucky soon. It’s not your fault I never did.
“Now I feel like when you find me, you won’t kill me,” Hazel continued. “You’ll just keep me holed up somewhere, or do some kind of brainwashing. But brainwashing feels too easy. I know you want me to be aware of my suffering. Can I at least have a virtual reality pod to while away the time? That is one thing I’ll agree with you on. There are many vicarious lives that are preferable to actual ones.”
She stood at the sink with the faucet on as the download time neared, just in case it happened and she threw up.
It ended up not happening, but she still vomited. Hazel felt that it would’ve been inappropriate not to vomit, somehow. The alternative would’ve been just standing there, looking into the mirror and grinning, and she worried that the general universe might interpret a lack of dramatic action as ingratitude. Here, was what Hazel hoped to convey as she bent down next to the faucet, I’m overflowing with emphatic thanks.
When she finished, she felt good about the decision. Hazel was not looking to start her new life off on an anticlimactic foot.
22
HAZEL DECIDED TO STAY IN THE TOWN WHERE JASPER HAD DROPPED her off and get a job at the diner because the manager-owner was very mean and bossy and somewhat resembled her mother. This pretend intimacy felt good to Hazel because it was also distant. Mother semblance she could deal with and even right now liked a little. Were her actual mother to resurrect from the grave, she could not work for her. In a restaurant or anywhere else. Even or especially if her mother’s second life depended on Hazel being an employee.
She said her only requirement was that she didn’t want to work out in the front with people, which she blamed on an anxiety disorder. “Well, it’s hotter in the back and you get paid less,” her boss warned her. “But you come in the back door in the morning, so you can show up to work looking like anything.” Hazel couldn’t decide if this was a commentary on her present appearance or not. “You can just roll out of bed and walk up. The cook staff sure does. They’re always hungover. One morning the dishwasher, Pierre, kept scratching at himself, his private self, and finally went to the bathroom, then we heard him laugh. When he pulled down his underwear, a used condom fell out. He’d gotten so drunk the night before he didn’t even remember having sex. These are your colleagues if you work in the back. Good luck and God bless.”
She asked if she had to fill out paperwork. “I can pay you cash but I’ll pay you a lot less. It’s nothing personal. I’m running a business. If you’re that desperate it would be irresponsible of me, from an economic standpoint, not to take advantage.” Hazel agreed; she was grateful not to have to lie on the forms or make up a formal name.
What should her name be, Hazel wondered, if she were to rename herself appropriately? Maybe “Oh Well”? Or “Should Have Tried”?