PART 1
INNER LOOP
"… comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love."
—Song of Solomon
"What's the matter, Thalia?"
I wake up with a jerk. Squinting into the light, I see Mom zip past where I'm sprawled across the couch clutching a pillow to my belly, moaning. I try to clear my head and get my bearings. I'm not under a tree. There is no dirt. I poke myself in the stomach to make sure there's no hole. When I sit up, my head feels too heavy, so I flop back on the living room couch. My arms feel like spindly strings attached to my shoulders. My legs are wobbly. My belly is concave.
"Why were you in the dark?" Mom asks over the yapping of her personal cyber assistant Gretchen, who runs through today's junk mail on the main screen.
"Today only…" Gretchen announces.
"No," says Mom. Bonk, Gretchen deletes the message.
"Save big…" Gretchen says.
"No," says Mom. Bonk, goes Gretchen.
"Cyber sale!" Gretchen announces.
"Send to Thalia," Mom commands. Ping!
I roll away from the noise but can't get comfortable on the stiff couch because the backs of my legs stick to the wipeable surface. I pull the heavy pillow that smells strongly of synthetic citrus cleanser over my head to block out the fracas. I wish I could dive back into my dream and find that thing I was searching for. I inhale deeply, but the biting lemony-lime scent is not the smell I want. The smell I'm after is less pungent. More subtle. Not yellow or green but warm and earthy brown.
Mom's heels clack against the tile, then she slips a cool dry hand under the pillow and presses against my forehead.
"What are you doing?" I swat her away with the pillow.
"Checking for a fever."
"You're a doctor for god's sake," I grouse at her. "Why are you touching me?"
Mom crosses her arms and sticks a hip out to the side. She's all points and angles. "If you had your Gizmo with you, I could read your vitals from over there." She points across the room. "But since you don't, I have to do it the old-fashioned way." She holds up her hand and waves her fingers at me.
"Gross," I mutter.
Mom snorts. "That's how doctors used to do it. They even used their hands for surgery." She makes a sick face at the thought of digging inside someone's body. "Why are you on the couch in the middle of the day anyway?"
"I just feel…" I try to describe it. "Weird," I say because there is no one word I can think of.
"Weird is a relative term," says Mom. "Be specific."
"Hollow," I say. I could tell her more. Details like how it starts in my belly. Between my ribs and hips. Above my navel but beneath that springy muscle, the diaphragm, that makes your lungs expand and contract. How it's a strange yawning feeling, like my insides grew a mouth and that mouth is opening. I push a finger into the spot, but all I can say is, "Empty."
"Are you achy?" She cocks her head, and her hair shifts like a black cultured Silkese curtain across her narrow shoulders.
I shake my head no, which makes me dizzy for a moment as if my noggin is a balloon tethered above my shoulders.
Mom switches into full-on MD mode, picking up my arm with two fingers at my wrist, checking my pulse.
"Next you'll cut off my leg with a rusty saw and no anesthesia," I mutter, uncomfortable in her grip.
"Your historical medical references are hilarious," she deadpans. "You should work as a reenactor at the Relics. Did you have your Synthamil today?"
"Of course," I grumble.
"And water? Sixteen ounces of each this morning?"
"God, Mom, yes."
"Have you urinated?"
"Would you like a specimen?"
"Don't get smart." She drops my arm, which flops to the couch. I feel like I'm made of Just-Like-Skin. "Your Synthamil has been precisely calibrated, and if you don't…"
"Jeez, Mom." I sit up and hold my head in my hands. "I know. I drank it all and I had water on schedule and I peed. Okay?"
"Well, you're certainly grouchy," she mutters.
I glare at her through my fingers as she clacks away and returns gently shaking a bottle of blue Synthamil with my name embossed in gold across the label. "Maybe we need to recalibrate. Your metabolism might have shifted." She twists off the cap and hands me the liquid. "Maybe you're having one last growth spurt."
I roll my eyes at her before I take a swig. "I'm seventeen, not twelve."
She shrugs. "It's been known to happen. Sometimes people in their twenties grow a few more inches. Especially when they enter the Procreation Pool and their hormones surge." She's off again, clicking through the hall to her home office.
I chug the Synthamil then wipe the back of my hand across my mouth so I don't have a blue moustache.
Mom returns a few minutes later with a patch and an antiseptic swab. "I'll monitor you for twenty-four hours and see how everything is looking. Lift up your shirt."
"I don't want that on me."
She tugs at the back of my shirt anyway. "It's only for a day. It'll give me more info than just your Gizmo, which you never have with you anyway." She manages to expose my lower back. The swab is so cold it makes me jump. "Hold still. You won't even know it's there." She peels the ultrathin two-inch patch off its backing and presses it firmly against my skin, rubbing around all of the edges to make sure it's good and stuck. Then she takes her Gizmo out of her pocket and establishes a link with the patch.
"Doesn't have a locator, does it?" I scratch at it.
She swats my hand away. "Don't pick. You could break a circuit." She checks the connection then slips her Gizmo into her pocket. "And it's not an affront to your personal liberty. It only collects internal data."
"As if that's not personal?"
Mom's eyes narrow and she frowns, which makes her look just like her mother.
"That's your Nguyen face," I tell her. She gives me the eyebrow. "For real, you look just like Grandma Grace when you're mad at me."
For my biology class, we've been mapping the genomes of our four grandparents, our parents, and ourselves in order to figure out where our traits come from. I'm convinced there must be a humorless gene that comes straight from my mother's Vietnamese side because Grandma Grace is the most serious woman I've ever met, which is probably why she's such a good hematologist. There's nothing funny about blood.
Mom pushes off the couch. "I'd be happy to find a specialist to go over your data and make a recommendation."
It's an idle threat and we both know it. Specialists are the last resort, only called in when all the existing science has failed and the only thing left to try is some experimental treatment a doctor is hoping to patent as the latest breakthrough therapy. "As long as it's Papa Peter," I say.
This actually makes Mom laugh. She looks like her father when she's happy, with his broad smile and bright eyes. My whole life, I've heard stories about what a gentle and sweet pediatrician he was and how he sacrificed part of his family's rations for food and medicine to save starving children during the wars. That was a huge point of contention between my hard-nosed grandmother and my bleeding-heart grandfather that almost destroyed their family. My mother says it's an example of an old-fashioned cultural divide—Asian versus African American. Since Papa's black, she claims he had a family history of looking out for the most vulnerable. But that never made much sense to me. I think Grandma and Papa are just different sorts of people no matter what their cultural backgrounds may have been.
"Papa Peter's hugs and stickers won't recalibrate your Synthamil formula if something's off," Mom says as she finishes tidying up the mail, because she can't stand anything unnecessary junking up our waves. "By the way, Gretchen sent you some VirtuShops," she tells me. "You need new pants."
"I have plenty of jeans and skirts." I get off the couch and tug my miniskirt down around my thighs.
She gives me the eyebrow again. "Thalia, we discussed this. You can't keep wearing old stuff like that." She points to my corduroy mini. "What's it made of, anyway?"
"A vintage natural fiber called cotton, thank you very much."
She looks to the ceiling as if the solar lights will recharge her patience with me. "I know what cotton is, Thalia. You have an Interpersonal Classroom Meeting this week. You can't wear Grandma Apple's old clothes to an ICM. What will your instructors think?"
"Who cares what they think? Anyway, it's not a real class. More like four hours of product placement combined with a thinly veiled focus group, if you ask me. Not that anyone ever does."
Mom shakes her head and sighs. "A, that's not true. And B, your father and I care what your teachers think."
"Teachers?" I snort.
"Thalia—" she starts, but I cut her off.
"Dad doesn't mind," I tell her, and she doesn't say anything because she knows it's true. "I'd rather go real-time shopping anyway."
"Should be called waste-of-time shopping," Mom says and chuckles at her own dumb joke. "If you don't like what I put in your box, then design your own."
"But I don't know what I want until I see it and touch it."
She stops what she's doing to look at me. "Seriously, what century are you from?" This is her favorite question. One she's asked me since I was little and preferred to look at real books than have tablet time. "But if that's how you want to do it, fine. Just do it. Get something decent and make a good personal impression."
"I like the feel of cotton," I tell her as I sit down to browse my message center on the main screen.
"Chemically, Cottynelle is virtually the same," she says.
"Virtually," I reiterate. "But not really."
"Don't start."
"Your clothes are grown from bacteria and yeast in a lab."
"Enough." She gives me a warning glance. "Why don't you let Astrid cull the news for you?" she asks, motioning to how I'm manually going through headlines.
"That would necessitate finding my Gizmo."
"You don't know where it is?" She looks at me as if I'm missing an appendage.
"Around here somewhere."
"You're as bad as Grandma Apple."
"How bad am I?" Grandma Apple bops up from the basement, her gray curls bouncing. She carries a ball of string and two pointy sticks.
"Never mind," says Mom and goes back to her conversation with Gretchen.
"Gizmo," I mouth to Grandma, who twirls her finger in the air as if to say whoop-de-do.
I snicker, which makes my mom's back straighten, although she pretends to ignore us as she pockets her Gizmo then announces, "I'm off to the lab again."
"But it's Friday," says Grandma.
Mom glances up. "So?"
"Family time," Grandma says hopefully, but I see her shoulders slumping in anticipation of defeat.
"Did you schedule it?" Mom asks.
"But Lily, it's every Friday," says Grandma.
"Well if you don't schedule it…" Mom trails off. "It's not hard, Rebecca." Mom has a habit of speaking to Grandma as if she's talking to a small child who doesn't understand the great big scary Interweb. "Thalia or Max could teach you in two minutes. You just tell your PCA, what's her name?"
"Annie," Grandma says dryly.
"Just tell Annie one time to coordinate all our calendars with a repeating event. Then we'll be synched up, and when Gretchen checks my daily calendar to generate my to-do list…"
"I know how to do it," Grandma clarifies. "Just seems unnecessary."
I blink off the main screen. "We can do family night without Mom," I tell Grandma, hoping to avoid another awkward conversation about family life between the two of them.
Grandma smiles at me, but I see the tiredness around her eyes. "Of course, lovey." She holds up the ball of string. "I'm going to teach you how to knit."
I catch the tail end of my mom's eye roll as she swings her black Silkese jacket around her shoulders. Before she leaves, she says, "Schedule family night. We'll do it next week."
"Sure thing," I call after her, knowing full well that will never happen. "You, me, and Dad?" I ask Grandma after the door wheeshes closed.
"I doubt it," she says, pointing to the flashing video-message indicator on the main screen with my dad's network photo.
I accept and Dad pops up on the screen. He's in his office, slouching at his desk, surrounded by gently buzzing blue walls. "Hey, you guys, sorry I can't make family night. I've got to work late." Then he sits up tall and smiles. "But wait until you see what we're working on! It's almost done and you'll be the first to have it. Promise." I close Dad's message and ask Grandma what she thinks the surprise will be.
"A robotic head for when you're tired of thinking for yourself."
"The latest craze," I tell her. "You should have been a designer."
"Missed my calling, huh?"
"Oh well, not everyone can change the world one nanoprocessor at a time."
We both giggle at our stupid jokes, mostly because no one else would appreciate them.
"Let's go knit," I say. "With these." I hold up my hands and wave my fingers like my mom did earlier.
"Subversive," Grandma says with a chuckle.
* * *
Since it's just the two of us, Grandma Apple and I cozy up in her living room, which is in the basement of our house. I love her place with all the fluffy throw pillows, warm quilts, and soft worn rugs, the old-fashioned wooden furniture, and best of all—the books. Mom can't stand to come down here. She says all the microbes in the natural fibers make her sneeze. Not that that should surprise anyone. Sometimes I think my mom would rather live in her lab where every surface is smooth, cold, hard, and antibacterial.
I curl up next to my grandma on the sofa with my feet tucked beneath a hand-crocheted blanket her mother made a hundred years ago on their family farm.
"Used to be you could get yarn made out of natural fibers like cotton or wool," she tells me as she loops the slate-gray string, the same color and texture as her hair, around a knitting needle.
"What's wool again?" I ask, trying to mimic her motions with my own ball of red yarn and silver needles.
"The hair from sheep. But there were lots of other animals that people used for yarn, too. Goats, alpacas, rabbits. Each one had its own texture, and some of it was so soft and warm, you wouldn't believe it now. Real yarn was nothing like these synth fibers." She frowns down at the rows she's knitting.
"Which did you raise?" I ask.
"Goats," she tells me for the millionth time, but I can never remember the difference between a goat and a sheep. "Not the woolly one that said baa. The ornery one that would eat anything." She laughs at some memory I'll never understand. "But ours ate mostly sweet hay and clover, so their milk was delicious. And the cheese! There was nothing better than fresh goat cheese. Except for warm bread to put it on." She sighs. "Ahh, the smell of fresh-baked bread. I keep telling your father he should make an app for that! Then I'd have a reason to use my Gizmo."
I chuckle, then we're quiet for a few moments while she corrects my yarn. Once I get the hang of the knit stitch, I say, "Tell me about dinner again."
Grandma draws in a deep breath. "Well," she says, thinking back. "That was the real family time, you know. Not for everyone, I guess, but in our family, since we were farmers, we wanted to sit down together and enjoy the food we'd raised."
"That was before the wars."
"Yes, but even during the wars, we did the best we could from what little we were able to grow, even if it was just bitter greens and a few chicken eggs."
"And you had lots of people who came to eat with you, right?"
"At first," she says. "But when things got scarce, like everyone, we hid what we had."
I shake my head. "I don't want to hear that part. Tell me about when dinner was good."
Grandma grins. "Alright." She lays her knitting in her lap and thinks for a moment with her eyes closed. "I'll tell you how to make a roasted chicken."
Grandma takes her time, as if she's back in a kitchen, preparing each ingredient. She tells me about melting butter in the microwave and pouring it over the chicken. Then sprinkling on salt and pepper and fresh herbs that grew right outside her back door in a little pot filled with rich dark dirt. She explains how her mother put the chicken in a pan with onions and carrots and potatoes dug from her garden, and then stuck it all in the oven for hours, only opening the door to brush the juices over the chicken's skin every once in a while. I close my eyes when she talks about food, and I try to imagine how it was. My mind drifts and blurs through vague images, but it all fades into words because I have no idea what she's really talking about. And, to be honest, some of it sounds gross. Like the part about eating something dead.
"The fragrance of that roasting chicken would permeate the whole house, and you knew when it was done the skin would be brown and crispy and the meat would be tender and juicy."
As she says this, a sound, like a yowling animal trapped beneath my rib cage, roils up from deep inside of me. "Oh my god!" I say, sitting up straight.
Grandma blinks at me.
"That keeps happening," I tell her. "It's so embarrassing! It happened the last time I was at a PlugIn with Yaz. Luckily most people had on their Earz so not too many heard. And the ones who did thought it was a weird ringtone."
Grandma laughs.
"It's not funny!" I clutch myself around the middle as if that will stop the noise from coming out again. "This doesn't happen to anyone else I know. Something's wrong with me. I'm a freak."
"I don't know about that," she says calmly. "It sounds like your stomach is growling."
I must look horrified as I picture some rampant parasites in my guts, shrieking for blood.
Grandma lays her hand on my leg. "It's just what used to happen when people were hungry. Our stomachs would growl like that."
"For god's sake, don't tell Mom!" I almost shout. "She would never forgive me."
Grandma snorts. "Even the best inoculations can't fight the power of a good roasted chicken!"
"That makes no sense," I tell her. "I don't even know what a roasted chicken is."
"But someplace deep inside, your brain does," says Grandma. "And my description was so powerful that it woke up the eater in you for a moment. I mean, come on, human beings ate food for hundreds of thousands of years before the inoculations. It's a normal, natural response, Thalia. Nothing to be ashamed of."
"Easy for you to say. It's not happening to you."
"Oh, you'd be appalled by what noises we used to make when we ate. Burps and gurgles and farts!" she laughs. "Your grandfather Hector could belch his full name after a few beers."
"Disgusting," I say.
"Actually, a well-timed, rip-roaring fart could be quite funny, if you ask me."
I shake my head. "Oh, Grandma."
"Anyway, Thal, I wouldn't worry too much about that noise from your tummy," she says with a wink. "I'm sure it will go away." She looks down at the square of material I've knit. "In the olden days, this would have been called a pot holder."
"What'd you do with it?" I ask, trying to figure out any use for something so small.
"You used it to pick up hot pots so you didn't burn your hand."
"I always forget that food was warm." I size up the thing in my palm then laugh at how absurd the world must seem to Grandma. "Now it'd have to be a Gizmo holder."
"What a good idea!" My grandma, ever the resourceful one, takes it from me and folds it in half. "Add a strap and it would be perfect."
From upstairs, I hear pinging on the main screen. "Ugh," I groan. "Probably Mom sending more VirtuShops. She thinks I need new pants."
Grandma frowns. "I love your little skirts and jeans."
"Of course you do—they were yours."
"When I wore them, they were just farm-girl clothes, but you have such a wonderful independent sense of style." The screen pings again. "Could be a message from your dad or a friend," Grandma says. "You know it's okay if you bring your Gizmo down here."
"I like having one place with nothing yapping at me."
Grandma nods, because more than anyone else, she gets me. Mom says that's because I'm an old lady at heart, which I take as a compliment.
"I should probably go check it," I tell her with a sigh.
"That's fine, sweetie," says Grandma. "Thanks for doing family time with me."
"I'll be back," I say, but she just smiles down at the long chain of stitches gathering on her lap.
Copyright © 2014 by H. A. Swain
