The Candy House(50)
Getting high, which is hard to accomplish through the methadone (it takes a lot, Roxy has to be careful), gives her a sensation of power and transcendent rightness beyond anything she could have imagined when she uttered those words: make my mark. Making her mark ended up not involving any of the things she’d banked on—her dancing, her beauty, her sexual confidence—in fact, all of those succumbed to it. Heroin is her great love, her life’s work, and she has given up everything for it, through renunciation or sheer neglect. No one can say she hasn’t been steady—or, rather, everyone says that, but only because they fail to grasp that her scarred arms and swollen fingers, her gray teeth and thin hair and stooped, halting gait, are testaments to her fierce devotion. She’s outlasted even Jocelyn, whom she used to nod off with at her father’s house. Jocelyn got a social work degree in her forties and settled down with a famous guitarist who’d been in love with her since high school. Not Roxy. She will depart this world empty-handed: a sacrifice that only Kiki, in the religious fervor of her girlhood, might have understood.
* * *
The Cube chimes sooner than Roxy expects. She sits up, refreshed and wanting to pee, as if she fell asleep. Maybe she was asleep, for crossing the room feels different, strange. Good. Beside her futon, the Consciousness Cube is warm as a newly laid egg, Artie asleep on top of it. Roxy slides the kitten onto her bed and lifts up the Cube. It feels heavier: the weight of her past. As she plucks the sensors from her scalp, she feels a corresponding lightness, as if she’s been relieved of some internal pressure. She saw a video once about a woman who fell headfirst from a third-story window. Doctors opened up her skull and removed her brain, placing it in a basin of brainy fluid so that it could swell freely without getting squashed against the inside of her skull. That’s how Roxy feels: as if her brain has been released from a cell it outgrew.
She texts the greenhouse that she isn’t feeling well and can’t come in, Effortless Prevarication being another Former Junkie skill. The greenhouse job is a Bright Day program, which means they’ll test her urine tomorrow. Fine—she’s clean! But she wants to give herself to this aftermath, to understand what has changed. Artie hops back onto the Cube when she sets it down. The Cube is her, in a way. It contains the entire contents of her mind: all the things she can and can’t remember, every thought and feeling she has had. At last, she is the owner of her unconscious. She knows where everything can be found.
Everything, that is, until the chime. The twenty minutes since won’t be saved to the Cube until she reapplies the sensors and updates her externalization. For now, they exist only in her mind. And although Roxy has longed for a Consciousness Cube as a means of traveling backward, it is this diaphanous new present, with its fresh-born minutes, that captivates her. She touches her face, feeling the warmth of her skin against her fingertips. She goes to her window and opens it. Blue sky. Brisk San Francisco wind. A sense of the ocean, although it’s nowhere in sight. The satisfaction of one good long breath. She inhales again, even more deeply, and thinks, I am lucky.
The movie she’s longed to see of her young self in London is the one she just watched in that flurry of memories dislodged by the upload. What more does she need? How could revisiting that time in its unfiltered state improve upon the story her memory has made? What if, like those vile moments inside her father’s mind, the truth disappoints?
Roxy understands now why Chris Salazar opposes even the most private, limited use of Own Your Unconscious. The logic of this process pushes out. She feels it as a natural force, a current drawing her consciousness beyond the limits of her self into a wider sphere. To converge, to be subsumed—how she longs for this! The prospect shimmers before her: a fulfillment of everything she has wanted in her life. Make my mark.
Energized by a need to act before she becomes afraid, Roxy aligns the Cube with her Wi-Fi and sits cross-legged in front of it. She provides the required DNA swipe from inside her cheek and the Cube begins to hum, Artie purring rapturously at the rush of new heat. She feels a whirring deep within her body, the gush of her consciousness pouring onto the Internet: a torrent of memories and moments, many painful—some actually memories of pain—all emptying into a cosmos that writhes and twists like an expanding galaxy. Her father is there, somewhere. Roxy feels their memories conjoin at last, like their two arms swinging on that long bright night. The whole of her past whirls through a portal and vanishes onto a separate sheet of graph paper.
And on this one, a secret new life known only to herself, Roxy will go to D&D and say, to Chris and Molly, “I’m ready to make my character. Will you help?”
i, the Protagonist
Chris Salazar couldn’t remember what sort of work he’d envisioned when he first fell under the sway of Sid Stockton, the weirdly charismatic CEO of SweetSpot Networks, during a pandemic Zoom interview, and wound up ditching his editing job for Sid’s entertainment start-up, but it definitely hadn’t involved filling entire walls with algebra. Yet here he was, two years later, with an aching arm and a racing heart, having run through several dry-erase pens defending his suite of “algebraizations”—a word he would have had trouble defining two years ago but now used upward of eighty times a day (he’d counted).
Why, the professional counters wanted to know (Jarred especially; Stanford ’19, like Chris, but a calc major), had Chris algebraized A Drink in the Face—