The weirdest thing about sleeplessness was the friendships she’d kindled with people awake and chattering in exotic timezones. The second weirdest thing about growing old was being with Seth. She’d always been saddened by old couples who never spoke to one another. Those long silences felt desperate. She’d promised herself she’d never end up like that, decades of aging, falling apart in the company of a silent, farting lump of a man, racing to see who reached the grave first.
But as an actual old lady with gray hair and wrinkles, she understood the silences. She didn’t have to talk to Seth about most things, because she had him modeled so well in her mind, she knew what he would say to practically anything she might say to him—and vice versa. They could sit together, not speaking. The silence wasn’t distance, it was closeness. She’d catch him looking and grinning sometimes. She’d grin back. Those grins might be charged with more sexual innuendo than the horniest moment of her entire—admittedly confused—teen years.
The third weirdest thing was Seth himself, who—for all he could sleep like he was in the world championships—didn’t feel old. She’d come on him once, sitting on the bedside, staring at his bare legs, bare lap, the gray, wiry hair, the veins, the sagging, wrinkled skin. She’d realized with a start he was practically in tears, which was not like the Seth she modeled so well in her own mind.
“What is it?”
“This isn’t me. I’m a young man. When I see myself in the mirror, I double-take. This isn’t how I see myself.”
“Is this about your hair? Because I could introduce you to Dr. Wibulpolprasert—”
“It’s not the fucking hair. I don’t give a shit about my hair—it’s this.” He slapped his thigh viciously.
“Easy.” She smoothed his hand.
“You don’t understand, it’s like there’s a different person looking out of the mirror at me—”
“Seth?”
“What?”
She looked at him for a long moment. Saw realization slowly dawn.
“Oh. You understand.”
“I understand.” She lowered him gently to the bed, held him until, goddamn him, he fell asleep.
Now it was 3:15 in the morning. He was asleep again. She caught him mid-freak more than ever. She worried. She knew what it was not to recognize the person in the mirror. She understood the nagging sense of wrongness. Part of her wanted to go upside his head and tell him to grow up, if he wanted to feel dysphoria, he should try being born trans, try a whole world telling him that he was something he wasn’t.
She knew it was pointless. Pain was pain. He was being told by everyone around him, in ways subtle and gross, he wasn’t the young man he felt like. Worst of all, she knew, was his body stubbornly insisting on being an old man’s body.
She’d felt traces of whatever Seth was going through. They’d passed. She’d been through this when she was younger. She could handle it with grace. She could work through it with better thoughts and changes to her hormone regimes. She wasn’t in denial like Seth. Seth had been very boyish looking until, suddenly, he wasn’t.
She padded the hall, ear cocked for other people moving around the house, tugging her robe shut. The hall lights were muted and the skylight revealed a cloudless night tinged with city lights, not so many to drown out the swollen moon, the spray of stars. There were walkaways up there, some old farts from the Thetford days. She chatted them sometimes, though high latency made it more novelty than social occasion.
No one was up. The lights dialed up when she drifted into the kitchen, brighter over the prep-surfaces, dimmer over tables, the house guessing she wanted to prep something before sitting, nudging her. There were pink glows in places where there was work to do—some cooling leftovers needed to go into the fridges, a few out-of-place pans set upside-down to dry on the big prep-surface and forgotten. The house knew who’d forgotten them. If they wanted, they could have live leaderboards of “chore heroes” and “mess miscreants” splashed on surfaces around the place. Some houses put them on bathroom mirrors. You’d confront the stark reality of the division of labor while you were swishing your morning tooth-juice.
Tam and Seth were B&B people. Limpopo people. People who’d been touched by Limpopo refused to turn on leaderboards. The reason to clean up after yourself was you respected your housemates and wanted a place where anyone could walk up to anything and use it, without having to put away someone else’s shit first. When spots were consistently under-maintained, the solution was to figure out why it was hard to get that spot reset, not figure out how to shame people who weren’t doing something that inevitably turned out to be more of a pain in the ass than it had any right to be.
The other houses swore by their “reputation economies.” Limpopo-descended households were the ones where the good designs for living that worked well and failed well came from. They had the nicest house spirits, literally and figuratively. In a Limpopo house, the fact that you were pissed off at your housemates signaled a design opportunity.
She put away the pans and stuck the leftovers in the fridge. Contemplated the imposing wall of sealed tubs of food and ingredients.
“I’m snackish.”
The house knew what that meant. The lazy-Susan shelves spun, presenting her with three options: ginger and honeycomb ice cream with so much ginger it could blow your head off, which she loved more than was decent; jerk goat and lentils; weird freeze-dried almond cakes that were doped with chili and cardamom so fiendishly addictive that they’d made the collective decision to remove their files from the house repo. Eventually temptation always won out and someone mirror-pulled the latest version. The recipe kept getting better.
“Like you even had to ask.” She picked up the almond cookies, squeezing the rim to pop the seal and smelling the mouthwatering almond smell as she crossed through the archway, around the carp pool that bubbled softly in the cooler, wetter air, into the small lounge.
She flumfed on a pile of cushions and picked out a single cake and bit, savoring the crunch, the sweetness and fire that spread through her mouth. She whimpered at the deliciousness. She knew she’d finish the whole batch.
She fired her finger at the far wall. It screened, showed her favorite hangouts, queued messages for her, news items from feeds judged likely to please. A few higher-priority reminders from people she liked and trusted bounced to let her know they were waiting. She crunched a second cake. Goddamn they were good.
“Who’s awake?” She repeated herself because the house misapprehended her through her mouthful of food. The screened wall showed faces, avs and handles, highlights from rooms where stuff was happening, pulsing things closer and further as conversations waxed and waned. She had the contradictory feeling of wanting to talk to someone but not wanting to talk to anyone, a stuck-in-a-rut 3:00 A.M. feeling.
She flumfed again, waved away the screen. There were books, movies, but that 3:00 A.M. wanting-something-but-nothing feeling went for those. She was nostalgic for the excitement of near-death.
“How do you deal with it?”
“You mean me?” Limpopo’s voice hadn’t aged, though there were algorithms for making the voice age as the years went by.