All Our Wrong Todays(17)
“Did you hear about the zero-gravity weight-loss clinic?” I said. “Okay, so, they put a medical facility on an orbital station to run experimental procedures on people who can’t seem to burn fat in regular gravity. But something goes horribly wrong and the clients sprout fat-filled growths as big as cantaloupes under their armpits and behind their knees that have to be drained and cosmetically reconstructed.”
“I think I saw that, yeah,” said Xiao.
“I must have missed it,” said Asher. “But it sounds, you know, hilarious.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Deisha said. “It sounds upsetting for the people it happened to.”
“Come on,” I said, “you used to find this stuff funny.”
“When I was a kid,” she said. “Before I actually tried to do anything and found out how hard it is. If the project I’m working on fails, will you laugh at me too?”
“Let’s go back to the hover car,” said Xiao. “We don’t need to talk about this.”
“Sure, let’s never talk about it,” said Deisha. “Let’s just keep getting together without him and discussing how worried we are about what he’s doing with his life.”
“Deisha, his mother just died,” said Asher.
“That’s right. So let’s talk about that. Instead of acting like we’re still those kids who sat around making fun of all the losers who actually care about things. Because guess what? They were right and we were wrong. Caring about things feels good. And you know what feels even better? Contributing in some small way to the world. That’s all I’m saying, Tom. Do something. Be something. Make something.”
“How?” I said. “I’m not anything. And it’s only going to get worse. My father tests his prototype in July. And when it works, because of course it’ll work, he’ll be even more of a genius and I’ll be even more of a . . . nothing.”
Nobody knew what to say to that. The problem with knowing people too well is that their words stop meaning anything and their silences start meaning everything.
26
The four of us shuffled back to the hover car, past the decrepit buildings engulfed in flora, Xiao and Asher pulling ahead to talk discreetly about the wedding—Xiao was set to be the best man. I could tell Deisha was anxious to say more, but I didn’t feel like hearing it because I was busy thinking about how the three of them had been hanging out without me so they could discuss what a colossal screw-up I’d become.
What remained of the sidewalk was steadily disintegrating, every crack stuffed with knee-high weeds, so I kept my eyes on the ground to avoid tripping. That’s the only reason I saw the glint of metal half-buried underfoot. It was an antique pocket watch. The gold-plated case was scuffed and mottled but because the cover was clasped shut the glass face inside wasn’t too badly scratched. The main clock had arrow-pointed hands for hours and minutes and a smaller, inset clock below it with a thin, delicate hand for counting seconds. On the porcelain dial it read—HAMILTON WATCH CO., 1909.
When you invent the train, you also invent the derailment. In the early twentieth century, railroad accidents were commonplace because trains running on the same tracks weren’t accurately synchronized. Keeping time was actually a matter of life or death. A watch like this was made to protect people. Every piece of technology in my world shared a global chronometer, coordinated to the microsecond, a planet of people all living in unison. But this pocket watch was from an era of temporal isolation, a planet of people each inside their own definition of time.
That’s how I felt too. Deisha, Xiao, and Asher lived in literally different time zones but they found a way to keep time between them, while I was falling away.
“Tom,” Deisha said, “you have to see this.”
Upset, I was ready to say something shitty to her in reply, but she was standing outside a two-floor redbrick building, the wood trim streaked with flakes of cream-colored paint, peering into a window. The glass was cracked and filthy and when I looked through I saw it was once a library. Hundreds of decomposed books littered the floor, and out of the rotting mulch of paper grew a dozen spindly pine trees, reaching for the sunlight that beamed down from the half-collapsed roof. Deisha goggled her eyes at me in a playful way I hadn’t seen in probably a decade. She’d hardened over the years and I had no idea if it was a natural progression or provoked by human error. We weren’t as close as we used to be. The frantic intimacy of teenage friendship was long gone.
“I shouldn’t have said all that stuff,” Deisha said. “But I don’t know when I’ll get another chance. We never see each other anymore.”
“You live in a secret base in Antarctica,” I said.
“We have a teleporter,” she said. “We could talk. Really talk.”
My friends and I used to debate our adolescent relationship dramas, but other than occasional dirty jokes, we didn’t talk about sex. And we never discussed Deisha that way. There was a mutual understanding, unspoken but of quarriable density, that we wouldn’t cross that line with her. But standing next to her, our shoulders touching, looking through a grimy window at trees rising from a pile of moldering pages, I started to think about just how uncrossable that line really was. What is a line, after all, if not for crossing?