Pills and Starships (7 page)

It wasn’t a coastal town in the strict sense—it wasn’t right on the beach—but it was on a river delta, maybe twenty miles from where the true coast used to be. And so, when the first storm surges came that seawalls couldn’t stop, the town got a wave of coastal refugees. Wave after wave came after that, though most of the people didn’t stay. Back then they were migrating to places like Ogallala, with fertile land or thick forests. If you look at an old map-animation morph you can see the masses moving away from the coasts, inward and upward from New York and Florida, from Southern California and the ruined cities of the desert—Las Vegas and Phoenix, say. The animations look like storms or vast, sky-darkening flocks of birds.

If there were any such flocks.

But we’re the only birds that darken those skies now.

Sometimes, at home, I take a mood softener, sit at my screen, and gaze at the map morphs dreamily. You can customize them to show whatever details you want—the continent shrinking as the oceans rise, plus the massive migrations, say. And you can filter the migrations by category, a game I like to play when I have nothing else to do. Where did Latinos go? you can ask the morph, and choose a color for the migrating Latinos. Where did the women go? and you can make the women pink. Where did the whites end up, the blacks, the Jewish, or the Catholics?

Then you can sit back and watch the swirling trails of color.

They can’t keep such good records anymore, because of the chaos. So what you’re looking at is pretty much historical stuff. But still, it gives you a sense.

I also like to watch the building of the seawalls. You see the swamping of Cape Cod, which happened too fast for walls, and the swallowing up of the Florida Keys: ditto. Islands all over the oceans get smaller and smaller, contracting to the size of pinheads and then vanishing—the famous canaries in the coal mine, the super-early casualties like Micronesia and Tuvalu. Or you can zoom way out and watch the planet rotate, see the surges of ocean that followed the melting of the ice on Greenland and Antarctica.

There’s something lovely about it, lovely like Eno or Mozart, yet—especially if I haven’t had my pharms—it can be pretty sad. I didn’t know those places, but once, after I watched a morph, I browsed some pics of them the way they used to be and I got way teary.

Anyway, my father’s hometown had been leveled by all the waves of refugee camps. Nothing was left of the playgrounds he swung and climbed in when he was little or the leafy cemetery where his parents were buried. All that was gone—even the precious trees, cut down uselessly for fuelwood it was a major crime to burn anyway. The grassy meadows had been trampled down into dirt and the whole town had turned to tent cities.

His baby brother, my uncle Den, died awhile back in a DIY. He didn’t have his own kids and hated the service corps.

Sam and I were sad when Den went, we barely knew him but we both had this one memory of a visit: Den took us out of our complex for a walk through the code zone—a safe zone made mostly of sidewalks, between the complexes, where everyone’s updated on vaccines—and showed us pictures on his handface as we strolled. Where there were just regular parts of other complexes butting up against ours—mostly parts of condo buildings or sometimes a small veg-garden—he called up an olden-time city map on his handface. It was a sat map showing real photographs, from both the air and ground, of the olden-time city.

“Here there was a museum,” he would say. “See? It looked like this. Yes: stone elephants! And they had a whole huge room with scenes from an Egyptian tomb—I once came here on a school trip and saw a real mummy. Even a mummified cat. It was creepy but I loved it. And over here, right where the outdoor waste room is, there used to be beautiful trees and in the middle of them was a library.” He went on and on like that, showing us where things used to be before the tipping point, when people didn’t need codes—before the new bugs and the new regime when people mingled freely.

But Den was too sad, and when I was about ten and Sam was eight he wrote some fond messages on face to all of us and went for a DIY.

So other than us, my dad has no family left.

After the trip he and my mother seemed hollowed out.

I browsed that the final dinosaurs, before they went extinct around sixty-five million years ago, were duck-billed creatures that walked around eating plants. Hadrosaurs. They had these big bony crests on their heads. They lived in North America, not too far from here.

Those dudes were some weird animals. You kind of look at pictures of animals like that, with giant head crests, and you think:
Fail
. They look so outlandish, those critters. Impossible. It’s really not too surprising that they’re gone.

Still, it’d be way more awesome if they weren’t.

Actually, that was the last
nonavian
dinosaur. The real last dinosaurs are the birds.

And maybe us.

D
AY
T
WO

O
RIENTATION
& R
ELAXATION

Theme of the Day: Loving

I don’t recommend family therapy.

At least, not if you’re in a Final Week. It might be okay if your family was in a regular frame of mind and all you had to argue about was something like who was on the face too much playing what my dad calls “frivolous games” like
Serial Murder 6
. Or if you had words about who was shirking their turn to empty the human-waste compost.

But what happened with us wasn’t pretty.

We went into the hearing room feeling low—not Mom and Dad whose pharma is already giving them a lift, but Sam and I. The hearing room is where you do the
listening
. Our service corp is really into its jargon—all the corps pretty much are, they call the trademarked words their “language technology” because they’re into owning every detail of the styles that they’ve branded—so rather than
therapy
they like to use these words that end with
-ing
. They say that makes the process more about
being and
nowness
.

Right before we left, Jean said to me and Sam: “Life is a gift that’s wonderful and yet oh so fleeting. Does a butterfly complain about having to pass into nothing?”

“A butterfly doesn’t say squat,” interrupted Sam. “A butterfly’s a retard.”

Jean patted his shoulder. “A butterfly spends all its time
living
—flitting between the fragrant and colorful flowers. Experience your parents’ time with you not as an automatic entitlement that everyone has, oh
my
no. That’s really obsolete thinking. Think of it as an act of bountiful giving, leading to a bountiful letting go.”

Our service corps can’t get enough of “bountiful.”

So there we are, in the hearing room in our nubbly beige hotel robes, all sitting on these tatami mats around a burbling water feature full of rounded rocks, with wave lightforms rippling on the fabric draperies and some kind of quiet hippie flute music tinkling from invisible speakers.

Tall bamboo plants in water, liberally placed.

In comes the therapist, a/k/a the Vessel for Receiving.

I swear, that’s what they call them.
Vessels for Receiving
.

Sounds like a toilet, huh.

So then our personal VR, a whiter-than-white lady with flowing blond hair and a long, light-blue robe that gives her a kind of princess aspect, sits herself down in our circle, smiles serenely, and purrs, “Welcome, all. Let us hold hands.
Be
in the
gathering
.”

The water burbled, the flute warbled.

But Sam has a knee-jerk reaction to corp jargon. “I’m not even doing this for five minutes if you’re going to use those full-of-shit, empty expressions,” he said. “We’re not sheep and we’re not brainwashed. At least, not
all
of us are.”

“An angriness,” said the VR, and smiled again in a saintly way as though the “angriness” was a special treat. “Sam is your name, I know. Sam, please allow me to be your vessel for feeling-receiving. My name is LaTessa. You may offer your angriness to me. That’s what I’m here for, Sam. I will receive the anger you’re so abundantly giving.”

She had him for a minute with that one. His jaw unhinged and his mouth hung open, à la moron.

“Please, honey,” added my mother, who had a decent tranquility vibe going due to her Day One pharma regime. “An open mind, okay? Remember what we discussed. Anger is fine, anger is absolutely what happens. But also—try openness. Try being open, if you can.”

“Open yourself to possibility,” said LaTessa.

That snapped him out of his gape-mouth deal. “There’s open, and there’s gullible.”

“All the expressing is welcome,” said LaTessa, lilting and silvery. “The angriness is so
natural
, Sam. And we are not here for a judging; we are here for a
listening
and a
loving
. Offer the angriness to me and I will be happy to hold it for you. Nestling the angriness
next
to me, Sam, I will take
care
of it.”

So this went on for a while, with Sam saying the whole thing was crap and LaTessa saying nothing except that she
welcomed
his
angriness
and she was there for
receiving
.

Personally, I was wondering when she would get tired of all the gerunds they were making her use and call someone in to give Sam a quick shot of trankpharms and keep the session moving.

But she never did.

I won’t say that she wore Sam down—that would be a definite exaggeration. Still, after a few minutes of acting out he settled into a kind of slump and stopped looking at her when she talked. He wasn’t going to walk out, because he didn’t want to hurt the ’rents’ feelings that badly. He wasn’t willing to go that far, I figure. So all he could really do was sulk.

There was mandatory hand-holding after that and my mom and dad said how painful it was to leave us. They said it was the hardest thing they ever had to do and they didn’t mind dying at all, they only minded having to leave the two of us. They said why couldn’t it be a better world, why did the world and our ultimate history break their hearts like this? My dad said he was angry with the dead people a long time ago who didn’t stop the warming before the feedback loops started. He talked louder and louder and said they were energy hogs and food hogs and overall hogs for a super-easy life. He kept saying “hogs.” Just hogs hogs hogs.

LaTessa said calmly that she received his anger,
and
the world was
yet only the world
, it was a
sunset-time glorious nowness of being
.

Very insightful, thanks for that, I thought.

She never said “but,” she always said “and.” I don’t think there are any
buts
in language technology.

At that point I was suspecting maybe she was actually a member of the Hot Earth Society, who welcomed the chaos as an end to sin. But I didn’t ask, because the session wasn’t about her and who cared what she thought anyway.

My parents had made peace with leaving the friends and acquaintances they still had, they told LaTessa.

“Some of our friends are already thinking along contract lines themselves,” my mother added.

My father nodded and said they had an understanding, their generation. They felt for each other, but they also knew what time it was. (Whatever that fossil expression meant. My dad’s the worst when it comes to using fossilized expressions.) So they didn’t worry so much about their adult friends.

Then my mom looked over at Sam and me and averted her eyes. “But my—I mean—it’s a cliché, I know, but it’s so
real
to me: it seems like yesterday they were babies. I held them and wanted to protect them forever.”

Then she started crying; she was sobbing even though the pharma was making her smile while tears ran from her eyes. But I have to say, that smile made it worse, not better. My father’s eyes were wet and he got choked up, but in his case the tears didn’t actually come out.

I started blinking rapidly.

I was wishing my own pharms were more powerful, at that point. I mean I know maybe it’s weak—Sam thinks it’s weak to use pharma every day, lately he’s been suggesting pharma should be for special occasions. I don’t know where he gets this stuff—a rebel listserve or somewhere like that. Sometimes, even though it’s weird, I can almost see his point of view, but other times I feel like,
Come on, small angry-dude brother, live a little. Everyone can’t be wrong. Can they?

Plus there have been times I was on pharma when I saw things I’d never have a chance of seeing flat. Pharma can turn the ugly into the beautiful.

Of course, it can also work the other way around.

Sometimes a visionpharm helps me work on my collection. I don’t need it, but I can definitely use it to good effect. Once or twice I’ve found things whose loveliness I wouldn’t have seen without the pills I was on. But, see, that loveliness is real, because later, after the pills wear off, I can still see it in the collected thing.