Fall sunshine arcs through the ivy over the port window set beneath the gable, falling in a clump of shadows across my feet as I watch the girl on my patio. Her two friends, one with flaxen hair and the other darker, are seated at a table, eating from a glass bowl of ripe strawberries, which are not in season. The girl I watch – my son – her every movement is beautifully and strangely transmuted from the youthful swagger I remember of his lacrosse days, before he developed his grey curls, his crows eyes and voluble cynicism. And will she, now just nineteen again, transform into a jaded old matron?
My body feels weak and I have been impotent, sans the intercession of technology or drugs, for many years. Still, her friends intrigue me, Aleesha and something else that begins with an A. I will have to angle for that name when I talk to them again. I lean on my walker and call for Anya, or rather I press the button on the degrading little eldercare bracelet hidden beneath my cufflink. Moments later, she is at the door.
“Now, would you take me downstairs.”
She does not comment on the duration of my stay in this seldom-used guest bedroom or make noise as to the purpose of my visit. We are clear with each other about my expectations for her services and their limitations, and I believe she does not care to extend them into the domain of “emotional labor”, a wretched phrase that hatched in my early adolescence. She does not say a word, but gently braces my midriff, pulls up, and then puts one of her hands beneath my legs to carry me down the stairs like a bride, while the auxiliary strength exoskeleton she wears beneath her gown whines and the oak stairs creak beneath our doubled weight. Down two more flights, she takes me to the entrance hallway and sets me before the ground floor’s walker.
“Would you like your legs, sir?” By which she means, would I like her to strip me down and fit my hips and weak, old legs into the spindly but quite expensive contraption that allows me to walk or even run as well as a man of fifty.
“No, Anya.”
I hobble with the walker through the dining room, and then out to the sun room, where I fumble with the louvered glass door until my son notices my struggle and moves to open it.
“You really should make these automatic, Dad. It’s safer for you. More convenient.”
I bat away the comment with a clubhanded gesture. “Gaudy shit,” I say. Is this still the appropriate tone to take with him in his state? We had a language once, a way of talking to each other that snarled loving obscenities, but I would never talk to Delilah, my daughter, in this way, and though his personality is the same it feels wrong to be so vulgar with him now, speaking as I am to the animate deathmask of the teenage Filipina who had given her life for his inhabitance.
My son smiles and walks beside me to the table, places a golden arm on my spine-jutting back.
His companions eye me in my hobbled, exotic state, and I make a show of slowly falling back into my extra-cushioned seat, groaning as I do.
Aleesha is Brahmin caste and speaks, of course, in crisp British English. She had just been telling everyone about the dodo bird she’d eaten in Guadaloupe.
“It didn’t taste like chicken. Almost like frog legs, or at least like pheasant, isn’t that strange? But of course the Wahabbis, they’ve declared it Abomination to eat the stuff.” The girls scoff at the narrow-mindedness of the monks. My own feelings as to the gormandizing of resurrected species both sanitary and ethical are considerably more complex, but I let it pass by, jokingly asking whether it tasted anything like wooly mammoth, a worldwide lesser-fortunate staple. Everyone laughs politely.
There’s a brief lull. I look at Aleesha in her satin summer dress covering small ripe breasts and her doe eyes look back at me, intrigued by my wrinkles. I know well enough to look past her, across the table, to the rolling twice-monthly manicured lawns and landscaped walking-gardens, to the circularly curving Atlantic coastline a mile distant, and beyond it to the grey mass of the mainland.
“where are we today?”
“Mass-a-choo-sets,”
The as-of-yet unidentified 3rdwomen says this slowly and ironically, as though it were the name of some doomed tribe of African natives and not my home state. She has a somewhat tight smile.
“Nothing good there of course, but nothing bad enough either. By tonight, captain tells us, we’ll be in Manhattan. Some of the boys are planning a little excursion. We’ll have to join them. It’s been years since I’ve been. Isn’t it just awful?” She laughs again and eats another pear-sized strawberry with pornographically enlarged achenes.
“Well Dad isn’t feeling too well, right Dad? He might want to sit this one out?”
Finally I look at Aleesha again and she looks at me and I say, “No, actually, an excursion is just what I need.”
Several hours later, Anya is helping me onto the helicopter, and I’m seating myself beside Aleesha in a loveseat facing a bulletproof bay window. There is whirring and liftoff. I watch the fleet of two-dozen perfectly circular green disk islands recede as we are enveloped by a dark miasmatic haze. Yellow and amber lights pulse dully in the fog, seeming to fill the air like fireflies beneath and above us. As we draw nearer, monolithic pollution-grey structures show more clearly, as do the tiered bridge-streets between them. In some areas the zoning allows for the buildup of full streets and plazas between the monoliths, although they denied those lower down sunlight even back when the sun still showed. We all watch the grey little people in their protective outerwear and gas masks, some of which ostend to fashionability, (cat faces and whatnot) but most of which are purely functional as they plod the miserable streets.
We fly in closer. From this distance individual figures are more distinct, and I can see them cringing at our incursion. My daughter, Unidentified A, Aleesha and I all use the the helicopter’s camera optics to zoom in on various figures, poking at the glass windows to enlarge the image.
We weave around in this hazy, close-distanced world of yellow light and smog and little people for some time, until, following the lead helicopter, we descend.
“Oh look,” Aleesha says, excited as a little girl. She taps on the glass, and I see several stories of one building are on fire.
“Would you look at that….” she says, and places my hand on her inner thigh. Some men are attempting to pry the door to the building open, but then several more – security - begin beating them with sticks. One man takes a blow to the head, falls over and does not move again as blood trickles from his ear, and a mob forms. It would have overwhelmed the guards had not reinforcements arrived and formed a perimeter around the door. After beating countless of the poor louts unconscious or dead, the armored figures stood backlit by flames as they began chanting some kind of crowd control incantation we could not rightly discern amidst the chaos. Slowly, I allow my hand to creep upward.
“Isn’t it terrible?” I hear Other A aspirate. Her window is magnified to show a bruised underclass transwoman fleeing the scene, one who could not afford full cerebral and limbic transferral and thus invited the disdain of Other A, who herself had a custom body imported from Denmark, who at only seventy became infatuated with femininity as lived experience. For my son, the body of a woman is just an excursion, to be inhabited and enjoyed for some time, but ultimately abandoned. For Other A, it is a foreign territory to be dominated. One is a heterosexual man who decided to become a woman for awhile, the other is a heterosexual man in a woman’s body, and neither can seriously countenance the idea of anyone who would do as they did out of some sense of spiritual necessity.
Aleesha pulls at my cufflink to get my attention.
“Look!” she says ironically, “just like you.”
The fire is rising steadily through the building, pushing trapped tenants to the windows. As we circle the building, I can see that the defense force surrounds the building and the crowd is mostly gone. I do not know what petty squabble could have inspired such a mess, or why the locals try to stop it, when it is so clearly a hopeless. If, for whatever reason, they have to burn, then it is their fate to burn. I see flaming bodies fall from heat-exploded windows. She magnifies the screen to show an old man in filthy pajamas gesticulating wildly from a balcony as he screams and reveals his lack of teeth.
“just like you,” She says again, huskier, and moves my hand up to where I feel her warmth and her mucus.
Back home we say our goodbyes, and Aleesha and I exchange contact information. I promise to visit her island this night or the next. Other A compliments me on my beautiful home, gives me a hug, says goodbye. I call for Anya and she steps out the front door with my walker.
“Just a moment Anya,” my son says with a feminine dismissal. Anya goes back inside.
“Yes, Harold?”
“Dad, I told you I want to be called Angel now.”
“But—you are still Harold, yes?”
“Yes but it ruins the experience. I didn’t spend millions finding a body without C/331 polyps or some other engineered birth defect your friends put in their water just so you can ruin it for me.”
I was taken aback. My friends?
“You know perfectly well, Angel, those were my coworkers and not my friends. Their whole Berkeley set. They spit on me, on the Ivies! But I never gave them a word of it. I was courteous, yes, but—”
“And when are you going to get a new body?”
And so he takes it back to this again, his favorite scab to scratch at.
“That’s not something you have any right to ask me about. I didn’t ask you, you didn’t ask me, it’s a private matter and it’s unbecoming of you to speak to your father like this.”
“But Dad, you’re so old. If you have a heart attack or something you could die and you wouldn’t have first pick. They might even have to use Anya! D’ya know how many neurons you lose when your brain shuts down? Do you know how many stem cells it’ll cost to get them all back up and running? It’s ridiculous!”
As my son speaks he works his way into a feminine hysteria. I feel I am arguing with a sixteen year old Delilah.
“I have my body chosen, Angel, if you must know.”
“You’re just like Delilah, you know that? She comes back as a child to please that—well you know. And you keep yours. For what? For pleasure. It’s disgusting.”
“I will hear no more of this, Angel,”
And with that I call Anya and tell her to put the walker in the car. I will be visiting Aleesha earlier than expected.