Extremis, p.4
To Love Like Venus, page 4
“Which dishes can I carry?” Alita asked. “It smells delicious.”
“Those two there would be fine, dear.” She pointed to two pans with brass stands covered with ceramic lids. It would be a balancing act to take both at the same time. As Alita began to lift them, Claire spoke.
“A good woman knows how to cook. And if not a good one, then a wise one.”
Claire had seemed more the ease-into-it type. Slow-pouring innuendo. It appeared she was also capable of blitzes.
“Both bases are covered, then, in my case,” Alita responded. “I haven’t had much opportunity yet, but it seems Kaveh does like my food, as I’m sure he’s told you.”
“He has.”
Claire’s response to him when he had called her after a scrumptious dinner Alita had prepared, Alita knew, was to accuse her of putting a love potion in his food, on top of seducing him with her body.
“Your son is well fed.” Alita could assure her of that.
Alita hoped this would put that concern to rest, and they could move on to the hundred other worries that troubled her.
She managed to pick up the two dishes and made her way out.
“I’m sure you make a nice spaghetti,” Alita heard Claire smirk as the door closed behind her.
Alita served herself some lamb-and-eggplant stew, a modest scoop of rice, a side of cucumber-yogurt dip. She poured herself water from an orange pitcher that looked stained from years of what could have been cherry Kool-Aid. The pitcher didn’t match the gaudy formality of the platters. Kaveh was stuffing his face, his plate piled high. Claire broke the silence as Alita placed a forkful of rice in her mouth.
“Would you say, Alita, that fidelity is the utmost foundation of a healthy relationship?”
A grain of basmati rice found the perfect time, and an unnatural crevice, to lodge itself inside Alita’s throat. After a coughing fit, Alita composed herself.
After Kaveh handed Alita her glass of water, he continued eating, like his mother had commented on how sunny the day was.
“Trust is important. Yes.” Alita bit into a piece of eggplant, the hours of its preparation apparent in its complex flavors.
“Fidelity,” Claire continued, “is the cornerstone. Otherwise there is no point in pairing.”
“I, too, believe in its virtues, Mrs. Shamez.”
To an extent Claire would never know.
Alita had enjoyed men in her life, but always on an exclusive basis. A perpetual complaint Jean had of her: serial monogamy. She did it not because of modesty but partly out of upbringing, and mostly because she knew too much about the consequences of behavioral risks. Before the thousands of surveys she pored over at work, as a once-ago medical volunteer working with refugees, she’d seen too many untreated syphilis dicks. The disease of sex was too imprinted in her mind. To cure them, she’d retreat into the backroom pharmacy to fetch the expired medicine the doctor instructed her to bring, further fueling her anxiety that no one was really properly treated.
What Claire had unknowingly touched on, though, was Alita’s own Achilles’ heel: what she expected of her partners. They were to be a mirror for her to hold, their attachment fixed on the image before them—Alita, and Alita alone. That was how she valued a man, how she understood love. The idea of looking into a mirror and seeing another woman looking back at her defied the laws of physics. This was Alita’s fatal understanding of fidelity. Claire, though, Alita knew, was only concerned about her turning over exclusive ownership of her body to her son.
The remainder of the meal was uneventful. Alita didn’t make an effort to initiate any further conversation. Claire turned her attention to updating her son on the lives of the neighbors.
Alita gave one last compliment to Claire’s cooking—it was good, as she’d expected it to be—but when she offered to help bring the plates back into the house, Claire was adamant that she stay outside.
“Kaveh will help me, dear. You enjoy sitting outdoors. It must be paradise to someone from the city.”
His mother’s back to him, Kaveh kissed Alita on the cheek, then followed Claire in with a stack of plates, piled knives, and forks. When Alita saw the door close behind them, she knew Claire’s mouth had already started to erupt with criticism. Alita welcomed the solitude.
She got up from her chair and started to walk around the garden. The trees were even prettier up close, providing a generous canopy of shade. Beneath them were typical garden flowers. Nothing edible, but colorful and sunny. They probably helped camouflage what Alita, at first, missed. A toy, then another, drew her eyes to what lay behind the flowers.
Earthen statues the size of small children lined the army-green picket fence separating the yards of neighbor from neighbor. They had cherub cheeks and were elaborately dressed, with crocheted caps in colors that matched the flowers in front of them, further obscuring their presence. Some were draped in capes; others, bibs.
Alita knelt down to get a closer look.
The statues were surrounded by various kinds of trinkets. She picked up the one that first caught her eye, set apart a little farther from the rest: a figurine of some kind of superhero, not exactly human. He had purple skin, a square jaw with gray, striated depressions, eyes as black as space, and exaggerated sinister eyebrows (or golden extensions of a helmet; Alita couldn’t be sure.) He displayed his many teeth in a tight clench and wielded a closed fist that was covered in a gold glove, each knuckle orbed with different-colored circles that gave the impression of gems. She set him back down in the dirt.
Alita scanned the rest of the garden, counting an impressive twenty-four stone dolls. (Calling them statues didn’t make sense anymore—obviously they were tended to.) She expected to find a water fountain to accompany them, maybe in the middle of their row, but so far, she hadn’t spotted one.
“Alita!” she heard Kaveh call from the door. “Come. My mom made tea.”
One more course to get through. Alita dusted off her knees and stood up.
She declined honey when Claire offered it to her, opting instead for sugar like Claire and Kaveh did, even though Alita knew she shouldn’t. She placed a cube in her mouth, took a sip of the tea. It was a million degrees and burned her tongue. The sugar began to melt in her mouth between her clenched teeth. It gave her an unfamiliar rush, as would the caffeine of the black tea leaves that had brewed in the samovar for the past six hours.
Alita, your sugar levels have exceeded the recommended range. Her device was quick to register her transgression. Stand by for monitoring. Alita ignored it. She’d inject with more insulin, if needed. If that’s how they drank their tea, fine. Alita didn’t want to add another reason for Claire to alienate her.
Kaveh kissed his mother goodbye. Alita gave a second, distant wave from the car as it pulled out of the driveway and his mother watched them leave. Claire did not wave back. Her arms hung to her sides. Only the fingers of her right hand moved. Alita noticed their soft undulations, as if Claire were trying to remove dust from her fingertips, or warm them up.
Alita thought about the stone dolls. The toys. They reminded her of walking along the sidewalks of Manhattan Avenue, occasionally spotting a first-floor window cluttered with odd, mismatched collections of figurines, stuffed animals, and dolls. Sometimes she’d spot them in the front yards of the few remaining housing projects that existed in the city. They always looked forgotten, with their coating of dust. Except the stone dolls in Claire’s yard were immaculately kept, not neglected. Their clothes seemed brand new, even though they were outdoors.
Kaveh squeezed Alita’s hand after he backed out of the driveway and turned the car straight. As they climbed the small hill leading back to the main road and turned the corner, Alita looked in the direction of the house. She noticed how close it sat to the riverbed.
7
Wars and military occupations come in different forms; we are good at inventing them. Drones, bombs, boots-on-the-ground invasions, digital viruses, biological agents, slow and subtle acts of genocide (law and enforcement), propaganda that warps how we see reality, long-range missiles from insane dictators (and the equally insane responses from their adversaries) . . . like the missile that killed my husband.
He was serving on a base in Japan when it flew in. Our own monster—the monster—retaliated by digging into his own toy war chest, sending too many sons and daughters to join my husband’s grave. All while the monster’s pockets grew fat from the investments he had hidden in military companies. His double chins quivered orgiastically in his TV appearances about what a real man he was for doing it, what an awesome country America is. His fantasy America. My husband was a real man. Not him. His America was not America, but all her nightmares brought to light.
I didn’t use the names that follow in my thesis, but the story of war is the same. Venus’s history went a little like this, despite my advisors’ reproach:
Venus was conquered by an allegiance of the nation-states of Gonal and Menopur, an alliance known (in the most approximate pronunciation in their alien tongue) as RTNY, which, when translated, amounted to something close to “Alliance for Infinity Gem Genesis.” The initial invasion, if you don’t count the scouting missions of the suppressive state of Metformin, was a long-distance nine-day missile strike. Gonal took the northern continent, Ishtar Terra; Menopur, the southern continent, Aphrodite Terra. The purpose of their collaboration was to harvest one of the most valuable raw resources in the living universe: Venusian soul gems. When realized in potential, they become infinity gems, the living universe’s only ticket to immortality.
Missiles pierced Venus’s surface twice daily for two Venusian weeks. They didn’t produce impact craters because their damage was beneath the surface, leaving calderas instead. By day one, her once-clear atmosphere had already become hazy from all the bombardment. Partly from the release of the chemicals in their missile tips, partly from the impacts that turned solid rock into dust. The sun was no longer visible from her surface.
Other nations joined in on the RTNY alliance; on day seven came Cetrotide, on day nine Ganirelix, until one final assault by the star-nuclear powers of the galactic alliance of Lupron rained down from a darkened sky. When the mushroom cloud settled, the armies descended in special white suits, masks, and helmets that protected them from her surface, and to protect the delicate soul gems from alien impurities. To ensure she did not spew volcanic lava on them when they landed—she was known to obliterate her crust at whim—they sprayed her with a derivative of ICI 35868 before landing. The planet subdued, the aliens carefully drilled into their bomb sites, extracting twenty-four soul gems that their assault had forced to mature in unnatural acceleration and rise close to the surface, like plants seeking light. Before leaving, they sprayed Venus with an antimicrobial cloud. They weren’t done with her yet.
Why didn’t she autodestruct rather than deal with the Pandora’s box of what would follow? Here is where you judge her, where she judges herself—because Venus, it seems, had a choice. They told her that she could have the soul gems back later. The invading armies were from a civilization that simply craved data and the bounty of mineral byproducts such a harvest would reap. Assuming, of course, these aliens were honest, which is a grand assumption to make if they were anything close to human. Therein lied the cosmic quandary: How could she know that the soul gems would be returned to her properly? Because the aliens took them off the planet, back to their off-site laboratories, to a place she could never know or visit. Twenty-four.
Only twelve, they documented, they were able to activate with the ubiquitous soul gems from Mars (a far easier and more pleasant retrieval procedure—the equivalent of vigorously sweeping the planet’s surface with a broom into a collecting dustpan). Twelve, they said, survived a special procedure conducted during a crucial part of their data analysis, and had become nascent infinity gems. But six of these infinity gems were deemed flawed by the aliens—a crack in their surface, an ominous hue portraying death and destruction. They brought Venus back only these six. From twenty-four.
Before the armies returned with the infinity gems, which they now presented to her as gifts, they subjected the planet to further chemical bombardment to make her surface hospitable to the sudden implantation of the immature infinity gems. That’s when they asked her, as if she could speak, which of them she wanted to keep.
Study the particles in Venus’s atmosphere today, and you’ll find they are waste products of mineral extraction and excavation. Study the Ozza Mons area, Spandarmat Mons. Evidence of the bomb sites are there, too, despite Venus’s cycles of rejuvenation. Because can we ever really hide all our sorrows from the world?
Don’t tell me I have no right to claim ownership to what I created by the powers of God.
Snap!
8
August rolled in, bringing a packed “Latin Skate Night” at the Rox. The ads flashed on the devices of anyone with a history of ever having visited the skate-dance club and anyone whose device history showed a remote interest or identity in anything skating and Latin/Latino/Latina/Latin@/Latinx/Latine. The flyer showcased a red skate boot with wheels sizzling fire, the silhouette of a woman rising as smoke, her arms splayed out in the letter “L,” which a dance partner elongated to the limit by gripping her fingertips, his legs making a perfectly erect, upside-down “V.” Two red dots below the dancers’ feet suggested toe stops, reminding you that they were skating. Audio in the ad assured the subzero temperature of the club’s air-conditioning unit. Good thing, because factoring in the lack of wind, at dusk it was still ninety-five degrees.
Themed nights were really just marketing gimmicks to attract tourists, the curious, and those with exclusive tastes. Every skate night at the Rox was a melting pot of musical genres: beats from around the block, the continent, the Caribbean, the globe—a reflection of the ethno-fusion that constituted a great part of the world. But the uniting theme of skate night and all of skate dancing remained disco.
Alita had changed her skate laces from pink to red for the occasion. She wore a denim-shorts jumper—Daisy-Dukes length—with a V-neck that would allow her to breathe comfortably after the sweat would start to bead around her breasts and she’d be fanned by the wind of her velocity as she orbited the rink.
She was on a break after a long, solitary skating stretch, sipping a bottle of water at the bar. She eyed, enviously, the melting ice cubes in the drink of the gentleman next to her. Envious only for the concept of a cool drink: The Rox’s bartender had warned her long ago to never-ever order anything not bottled. He explained how staff regularly struggled with the beverage tubes that dispensed drinks. How they constantly got clogged with cockroach carcasses. The sliced limes were cut you-don’t-want-to-know how long ago. Forget the ice entirely.
“Alita, you skate yet?” She felt someone join the seat beside her. She couldn’t place the voice because they didn’t speak much. But when she turned around, she saw it was Dyon.
“Oh, yeah,” she said, rolling her eyes because of course she’d skated. “I’m just on break. Is Flor with you?” Alita always asked about his partner out of respect, an affirmation of borders. It was needless, in theory, at least from Dyon and Flor’s end. The couple was polyamorous, but Alita still wasn’t sure what this meant because the label had so many variations.
When Dyon had shared the details of their relationship to Alita while the two of them paired off in a Carousel spin a year or two back, Alita at first had a brain freeze because the statement was made out of the context of her job. Instinctually, her mind automatically extracted its word roots. Poly=many. Amor=love. Suffix “ous” connotes a condition of being. A man who is full of many loves. Then she recalled the identifiers of sexuality and relationship markers in her behavioral surveys. None of this academic understanding that the label conferred resonated with her, though. Not having the boundaries of ownership over a lover’s body was so foreign to Alita, and it threw her off when trying to navigate the couple’s interactions. This might have been because, despite their description of their relationship, Dyon’s partner watched Alita like a hawk when she was around. Just Alita’s luck that even in a polyamorous situation the woman would find cause to view her as competition, or at the very least with contempt. Alita’s intention was just to skate. But Alita was also no fool when a man showed interest in her, so there was that, too.
“Yeah. She’s here,” he answered her. “Skating with her boyfriend.”
Alita took another sip of water, feeling the ripples of vibrations from the movements of the X457 at the other end of the bar, then the air-valve sigh of its mechanical joints as it crouched down to allow a couple to insert a rose (a gift patrons got after tipping the unit in bitcoins) between its silicone breasts. It was the latest model, a fusion of pixels, doll-making, and robotics meant to please the complete set of human senses in the form of a pole dance. The Rox used them until the flesh dancers arrived in the later hours, though there was always a patron or two who requested they leave it on (leave her on, they said, and they usually each called her by the names it gave them, an algorithm the unit could calculate to reflect their particular likes if their devices were close enough and activated). The face was just an oval metal frame, a screen filling its center. Convincing human facial features were still too tricky for robotics to mimic for such intimate needs. A video of a real-life face glowed in the display, giving the unit a sense of unique personhood. From the chest down to her buttocks, the unit was like flesh, a bouncy mold of soft silicone in a metallic bustier and severe boy shorts. This model appeared female, with a tan skin tone, and followed the industry standard of body proportions taken from data extracted from strip-club patrons about what users liked best. The legs were coated in the same material as the torso, but, like the face, reflected robotics’ current tech limits in their stiffness and inability to replicate the smooth harmony of coordinated human muscle movement. Thigh-high boots sought to cover this up. The models were poor substitutes for the real deal, but for many patrons, mostly men, they did the trick—or filled a growing taste for robots.
