LYING IN THE RECLINER I found myself walking along an institutional hallway, following green footsteps on the white floor—the footsteps were color-coded to the different wings and there were colored lines along the ceilings, too. I walked with deliberate steps until I came to a room.
An older woman sat in a chair, knitting with blue-gray yarn. The nightstand was crowded with propped-open cards. But instead of lying inert in her coma, Kay hovered above the bed. Her levitation had a Buddhist quality—though her posture was comfortable, not a straight-backed, cross-legged stance as in meditation or yoga. She slumped a bit, relaxed, and remained in the air smiling down at me, with a serene quality that’s rare inside the confines of real life.
I wanted to rise to where she was, but I couldn’t, so at an angle from each other, she high and me low, we gazed out the window. Out there was the crumbling city of words, much as I’d seen it before, though farther in the distance, dust rising from its slow-motion collapse. Kay nodded and stared. Her face had a kind of shining, imperturbable sadness like a bronze statue in a park, somehow civic.
I followed her gaze back to the window again and saw it wasn’t a window after all but a computer screen.
She wouldn’t explain at first, though her face kept on gleaming with a smooth and oddly official grief: yes, her grief seemed ceremonial. It was a stately mourning, like a dignitary presiding over a state funeral.
Expository words scrolled quickly along the windowsill.
IF Our symbols are corrupt. IF Our tools are made of symbols. IF We are made of our tools. ∴ We are made of our symbols. ∴ WE ARE CORRUPT WE ARE CORRUPT WE ARE CORRUPT WE ARE CORRUPT WE
The last sentence ran on repeating forever, scrolling across the bottom of the screen like a stock-market ticker tape.
“Think of social-media websites,” said Kay.
For some reason she insisted on speaking silently, using a comic-book speech bubble.
“Are you kidding?” I asked.
“Think of all those sites, all those apps, the billions of selfies. Now we filter ourselves through them. Sometimes it’s our whole presentation of ourselves to the world. That’s all that enters the social sphere—that imprint of our ego is all that ever meets up with the collective.”
“Seriously?”
I was sorely disappointed that here, under hypnosis, an oracle appeared and spoke to me, and the subject turned out to be social media.
The oracle had actually said the word apps.
“Lena will be all symbols, by the time she’s grown up,” said Kay. “I’m sorry to inform you. It’s a fact. Nothing but symbols, your little girl.”
The lights dimmed in her room, and in the corners dark beings flitted. I couldn’t see them but I knew they were only half-alive, hybrids of flesh and machine, and they moved through the pipes in the walls, among the wires and conduits. Those too, the long tubes and threads that were supposed to be inanimate, moved sluggishly behind the drywall. Between the girders they pulled themselves in. Closer and closer they approached.
“Why do you pretend to know everything?” I asked her. “Are you right about it all? Or are you just sick?”
Kay’s face kept on shining, turned away from me, but the knitting mother looked up from her bedside chair. Now the hands in her lap, holding a panel of blue-gray yarn that might have been a scarf, were made of metal: robot hands, with clicking needles. Her face was contorted with rage.
“This isn’t a dream, Kay. It’s more like a horror movie,” I said.
She was supposed to be trustworthy—she’d watched over my daughter’s sleep, cried to me and told me about her life. But telling a feeling isn’t the same as knowing someone, I thought regretfully. We think it is. A piece of the Freudian inheritance. People tell their emotions, tell their emotional story, and think that equates to knowing each other.
The pipes in the walls turned from ducts or sacks to the old bones of patients, bones that fed out their cold onto me so that the hairs rose on the back of my neck and my forearms. Yet when I tilted my head back the ceiling hadn’t gone brittle at all but was warm and rotten, like pink foam breathing.
Kay turned her head slowly and looked at me, and when she smiled I saw her teeth were gray, not regular teeth but some kind of ugly digital code that shifted and moved in her mouth.
It looked a bit like hieroglyphs, a bit like 1’s and 0’s.
I thought: What have they done to her?
Suddenly her mouth opened wide, wider and wider, far too wide. And something ugly streamed out.
“Your little girl won’t even need her face,” she said.
9
TO THE WHITE CASTLE