Plastic, p.1
Plastic, page 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by Scott Guild
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Guild, Scott, author.
Title: Plastic / Scott Guild.
Description: First edition. | New York : Pantheon Books, 2024.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023014895 (print) | LCCN 2023014896 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593316764 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593316771 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Dystopian fiction. | Science fiction. | Social problem fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3607.U478 P63 2024 (print) | LCC PS3607.U478 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014895
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014896
Ebook ISBN 9780593316771
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover design and illustration by Tyler Comrie
ep_prh_6.3_146167533_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1: A Doll’s House
Chapter 2: Attack at Tablet Town
Nuclear Family
Chapter 4: Flippin’ Chicken Funeral Home
Chapter 5: The Smartworld
Chapter 6: A Trip to the Moonpark
Chapter 7: The Church of Divine Acceptance
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Nuclear Family
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Nuclear Family
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17: “Send in the Clowns”
Chapter 18: “The Absence”
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
_146167533_
For Rachel Cochran and Marc Pfister
This is the secret: forget the water. Do not see water in the pool below you, only motion. When you hear the blast of the starter gun, when your back foot pushes off the block, when your front foot carries forward your momentum, you are not plunging into a substance any different from yourself, you are not flesh and bone in a foreign element, an element denser than air—you are motion encountering motion, two forms of fluidity. There are no swimmers in the other lanes, no best time that you’re chasing, just your skin and muscle alive in movement, just this sky-blue tunnel where you soar.
But I haven’t felt alive like that in years. When did I last dive into a pool? Or think of myself as a bird? It’s like the waters gathered over me after my sister vanished: turned cold, hard, inflexible, a substance that held me like death. Who could see me under so much ice? Who could recognize my face through all the layers?
1
A DOLL’S HOUSE
The episode opens on a plastic woman driving home from work.
The camera follows her from outside the car, filming her through the window, showing her hard, glossy face inside the dim sedan. She is in her twenties, a pale figurine, with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, nylon hair cut short above her ears. Houses whisper past on the street beside her, the sun setting over their rooftops, their shadows long in the last hour of twilight. Her surface, smooth and specular, reflects the fading light; her fingers, bent at their hinges, grip the upper rim of the wheel. The name tag pinned to her polo shirt reads, Erin: Ask Me Anything!
She rolls to a stop at an empty crosswalk, drums two fingertips idly against the wheel. A single drone is swimming through the smog above her suburb, like a fish seen from the bottom of a frozen lake. Then, as she glides through the intersection, Erin’s voice begins to narrate on the soundtrack. It is a quiet but expressive voice, just louder than the hum of the tires on the pavement.
A year ago, she narrates, I was a very different person. On a night like this, a Friday, I’d be hurrying home from Tablet Town, dying to hang up my uniform and start the weekend. Patrick was in my life back then, a reason to get through the hours on the sales floor. I thought—no, knew—that nothing could ever take him away from me.
The street that scrolls beside her car is dusky and deserted, no vehicles in the driveways, no pedestrians on the sidewalks, no curtains open behind the barred windows. The houses slide past her in a continual sequence, like a succession of blurred photographs, each different in their color scheme but not in their basic construction, shades of pastel siding on the same one-story frame. The backyards are also identical, save for an occasional razor wire fence that glistens above the hedges.
The camera leaves the street, cuts to a close-up of the plastic woman. Shadows drift across her molded face.
Last year, if someone had asked me—that other, naive Erin—I would have told them my life was perfect. And it’s true: I was happy, in my own way. Each night I drove home to Patrick, hid from the world in his arms. I stayed in with him every weekend, barely went out except for groceries. Oh, Patrick. I lost him in the end, of course. Like I’d lost my father, my sister. Like I’ve lost almost everyone else.
Erin slows the car and steers onto the pitted slope of a driveway. At the top sits a small blue house, its aluminum siding faded, its gable roof missing a few shingles. She stops at the garage, takes out her phone and taps a garage-shaped icon. The wobbly door rattles upward.
These days I spend my weekends alone, just trying to stay distracted. I sleep in as late as I can. I binge episodes of Nuclear Family. I clean the entire house, room by room. And on Friday nights, when I miss Patrick the most, I cut myself some slack. I go online and order a Hot Date. I don’t think too much about it. It just helps.
Erin stares at the house in the half-light, her plastic eyes glazed with sunset. The camera holds the shot for a few seconds before the scene fades out.
* * *
• • •
The next scene opens on a slender kitchen, a clean but timeworn room. The floor is a scuffed linoleum, the oven range missing two knobs; columns of blue poppies bulge along the lumps in the wallpaper. A modest yard is visible beyond the window bars: a square of grass enclosed in hedges, a lone pine tree looming at its rear. The pine tree casts a slanted shadow, stretched out on the lawn like a stilt walker.
A door opens on the wall of poppies, revealing the figurine as she steps from her garage. The camera follows Erin as she strides across the kitchen, her gait jerky and mechanical, her upper body unbending. She passes into the dining room and down a brief hallway, the wallpaper darker in patches where a row of picture frames once hung. At the end of the hall is a narrow bedroom, its curtains wan with twilight, a bottle of prescription pills open on the bureau. A stuffed seal smiles at her from the shadows of the headboard, its fluffy flippers reaching out in a gesture of embrace.
Erin sits stiffly on the bed, crosses her legs with a murmur of hinges. She slips her phone from her Tablet Town slacks—a neon T on either knee—and taps in the passcode. Soon she is scrolling through profiles on Hot Date, picture after picture of plastic men, some stubbled and some clean-shaven, some with innocent smiles, others with coy, seductive smirks. Above them glitters the heading: Pick Ur Boytoy!
Before Patrick died, she narrates, I never dreamed I’d pay for a Hot Date. Why would I? We were settled down, the two of us, starting a family. Even after his murder, I only considered it when these Fridays became so painful. It made me nervous at first, the thought of some stranger coming into my house. But in the end I felt so lonely, I took the chance.
She taps the photo of a twenty-year-old Hot Date: a long-haired man with a mellow grin and 4.9 stars, sitting bare-chested in a canoe with a Labrador curled at his feet. Confirm? the app inquires. She confirms. Then she takes off her Tablet Town sneakers—a T on either toe—and leans back against the headboard.
TV on, she says to her flatscreen, mounted above the bureau. Open Nuclear Family.
The show begins to play, resumed at the opening notes of a musical number. On the screen a teenage figurine paces through his bedroom, a circle of spotlight following him across the sitcom set. He sings a tender ballad to a photo he holds in his hand, a picture of his secret love: a giant waffle boy with rubber arms and legs. As a pedal harp plucks on the soundtrack, he closes his eyes and touches his lips to the waffle’s enormous mouth.
Erin lifts her stuffed seal off the headboard. Volume up 3X, she says to the TV.
She pets the plush pinniped, staring at the lovelorn boy on-screen.
* * *
• • •
Two candles burn on the table in the flickering dark of the dining room, immersing the space in a soft, undersea light. A vase of fake tulips gleams on the bureau, under an oil painting of a lighthouse in a storm. A wave explodes off a boulder below the t ower, the soaring spray frozen in a fan of vivid brushstrokes.
The camera pans across the table, where a male figurine sits alone in the shadows. He is a slim but athletic plastic man, his smile relaxed as he scrolls his lambent smartphone. He wears a sapphire pinky ring, jeans so tight they look painted, a tank top whose neck reveals the smooth ridge of his upper pectorals. On the bureau a wireless speaker plays a track of plaintive whale calls, their ululations drenched in reverb, synched to a bassy beat. “Baleen Blues,” reads the song name on the display screen.
The table is set for two. In the kitchen a drawer clatters shut, a faucet dashes a basin.
Just sec! Erin calls through the doorway.
No prob! the young man answers.
He scrolls his phone further, laughs to himself at a post. Then footsteps approach from the kitchen and Erin strides in through the doorway, holding a serving dish before her like a full baptismal bowl. She now wears a blouse and capri pants, heels that show the boneless tops of her feet. Her eyelashes curl out, crisp with mascara; her sunken cheeks glimmer with a fresh coat of polish. She places the dish on the table and lowers herself to a chair, her knees bending at their hinges, her upper body rigid.
Glad food, he says. Okay if start?
Def. Enjoy.
He picks up the carving fork, plunges it into the dish. With a pleased murmur—mmm—he removes the limp comma of a boiled chicken breast.
Forget eat lunch, he adds. Big hungry.
Hope chicken good. Just throw on after work.
Really? It look wow wow.
He scrapes the meat to his plate with a wet slap.
After she serves herself, Erin sets down the dripping fork and shuts her eyes. With the tips of two fingers, she quickly crosses herself to bless her food. The young man pauses in cutting a slice, his head tilted with interest.
You religious? he asks.
She shrugs. Kinda.
Cool. You go church?
Yeah. Now then.
Where go?
CODA, she says. But it not like normal church. No God or weird stuff there.
He gives a startled laugh. You go Church of Divine Acceptance?
You know?
He laughs again, louder. Know? That where I go!
With Pastor Mark?
Never miss Sunday, he says, his voice suddenly serious. Go lot Wednesday, too. It big help me.
Craze. Prob pass you thousand time.
Prob!
The camera cuts to a wide shot, showing both figurines in profile, smiling across the candles at each other. On the speaker a different whale track plays, two chirpy belugas dueting over the beat. He shakes his head and forks the slice of chicken to his mouth; a brief lump bulges his plastic throat.
You my first CODA client, he says. This shiny. How long you go?
Three year. Almost. I go with relative.
Real shiny. Two year me. CODA like…no explain even. So amaze.
He taps at his phone and hands it to Erin, his stiff forearm swinging on its hinge. She chuckles at a recent picture of him with a middle-aged figurine, both men dressed in teal T-shirts—CODA 5K Fun Run!—a crowd of joggers bustling in the street behind them. The older man, his jowly face sharpened by a goatee, offers a playful, knowing wink to the camera.
You luck, she says. I only see him on stage. When this?
Last year. I volunteer race. Raise money.
She returns his phone. I need volunteer more. Mean to.
Should! Craze fun.
The figurines discuss the church further. Both, they find, have had a similar experience. Religion had once seemed to them a collection of myths and fables, an artifact of the past, irrelevant to contemporary life. Before their time at CODA, neither had guessed that religious teachings could give them practical guidance, or provide a dose of the inner peace that Pastor Mark termed “mega chill” in his many videos and podcasts on the subject. Both figurines had fallen in love with the message of the church: that religion, far from some dead superstition, was an ancient form of “technology” for pursuing a happy life.
He shows her another picture, this one of himself at a nightclub, squinting as he takes a hit on a zing-stick. The slogan Faith=Technology runs in bubbly letters down his tank top.
By way, she says with a laugh, no mind if you zing.
He looks at her slyly. Serious?
Sure. No prob.
Rising in his chair, he slides a petite cylinder from his pocket, its metal spangled with periwinkle stars. Erin watches his movements closely, sipping from her wineglass.
What kind you smoke? she asks him.
Oh, I buy many. But right now, lot Breezy BigThink. I study for National Aptitude Test, take in just few month. My all-time fav prob Airy Awestruck, but Breezy def best think good. Want try?
She lifts a polite palm. No thank. Get anxious.
Ah, he says with a grin. That when I zing more.
He fits the mouthpiece between his lips, inhales with his eyes closed.
So, why start CODA? she asks him after he exhales.
He takes a shorter drag. That kinda sad, if honest. Prob kill mood.
Sad okay.
You sure?
Def.
Well, he begins uncertainly. My family have bad tragic. Uncle get killed.
Oh. So sorry hear.
It ecoterrorist, of course. We no get body back, just head. Janitor find it. Toilet stall.
The camera zooms in slowly on Erin. She gives a sympathetic sigh.
I need to be more careful, she narrates. Talking like this—it could get me thinking about my sister. If this man knew where he is right now, the house where Fiona Reynolds grew up…but I can’t let my mind go there. These Hot Dates are supposed to help me forget.
So awful, she says to her guest.
He rests an elbow on the table, takes a lengthy hit on the zing-stick. And that what they want, he says in a pinched voice as he holds the smoke. Scare shitless. Make think. Your uncle die like that…it haunt you much.
He exhales a dense cloud, like breath on a winter night. He continues:
Maybe bad I say, but I no hate all these terror group before. Before my uncle. I think good cause, think they hero maybe. Who else fight for nature, make us take HeatLeap serious? Who else drive home message—that it suicide keep burning Ground-Up-Bone? But then, such big horror. Hate them much now.
The figurine tells her how, the weekend after the funeral, his family had decided to go to church. How they had somehow known they needed a church, a place to take these feelings, even if they had no faith, no belief in God or salvation, no desire to be religious in a traditional sense of the word. A friend had mentioned CODA to his mother at the funeral, and so, at a loss, the family attended a service there the following Sunday, stepping into the beautiful worship arena at the former SmileMile Mall. That day they had found their permanent spiritual home. Now, with the National Aptitude Test approaching—his second, final chance to pass the exam—he’s so grateful for the focus CODA gives him. If he fails the NAT again, he’ll never be allowed to attend college, will get sent to a government training camp instead, then assigned to some random work post far from his family.
And you? he asks her. You go CODA three year?
Erin reaches for the wine bottle, pours herself another glass. Go same reason you. Big big death. My dad.
They monster. They enjoy kill, I think. They enjoy.
Oh, it not terror group. He just get bad sick.
What with?
BPD, Erin says.
The young man hesitates. Brad Pitt Disease?
She nods.
Damn. I hear it…well…rumor, really. No know much.
She presses a thumb against her glass stem. It rough. Bad way go.
He sick long?
