Primo Patterson lived with his mother Corona, in a domed complex in Saddle Meadows, a gated community in upstate Pennsylvania. Primo’s father was the First American Sperm Bank, and didn’t visit.
Primo, sixteen years old, lived in Room Three, a bedroom/study/bathroom complex forty meters from Room One, the main house, where his mother lived. Monday morning he woke up, and like every morning, he looked down to see his pajamas tented out. It was a warm, lazy feeling, just looking at it.
“Good morning, Primo,” said his mother. Her face appeared on a screen filling the wall, so that her eyes were the size of faces and her head the size of an Egyptian idol. Immediately he leaned forward, elbows on knees.
“Hi, Mother,” he squeaked.
“You’d better get dressed. You don’t want to be late for school. See you for lunch at twelve.”
Primo’s mother was a handome, matronly woman, heading towards fifty. From anywhere in Room One, she could access him by screen. Once, when Primo’s morning erections had started, he had asked his mother if he could have an off-command for the screen. She frostily requested why he needed to cut off a simple connection from his own mother. And that was that.
Primo showered, thankful there was no screen in the bathroom, and got dressed. He ate pre-packaged self-heating oatmeal – the battery revved up as soon as you broke the seal on the bowl – and vitamins.
It was school then, with Amicus, his virtual friend who lived everywhere in the dome. He worked through a number of online workshops on mathematics, social studies, and finance. His mother had been grooming him for a position in her online currency trading business.
By 11:30, his appetite, which lately had become a capricious beast, coming and going, started to gnaw. “Amicus, let’s stop early.”
Amicus answered with a cued song from Teen Success:
If at first you don’t succeed,
Don’t wallow in your mess!
Determination is the way
To TEEN SUC-CESS!
Primo sang along with the jingle unconsciously, but lately, the songs of Teen Success had lost some of their charm for him.
Despite his music appreciation classes – he dozed on Tuesdays and Fridays to the better-known selections from Mozart and Haydn – music didn’t get much of a rise out of him, except during a few of Teen Success’s slightly disapproving stories on ‘new trends,’ where an intrepid reporter dared some forbidding club in New York or Chicago. Primo liked the thudding beat and pulsing synthesizers from the dance floor. He liked to listen to them late at night in bed, repeatedly, while nursing his erection, until his mother’s face filled the screen and reminded him to go to bed.
Primo suddenly felt fear, anger, and some other emotion he couldn’t describe. He shook it off and went back to schoolwork.
At lunchtime, Primo walked across the lawn to Room One, looking up at the environmental dome on the way. It showed blue skies, with some clouds, and luminosity with no particular source. At night, it was simply dark. Primo knew the sun and moon from school.
Primo sat down at the table and took a bite of mushrooms. They were swimming in lemon sauce, too watery. He tapped his spoon and pushed them away.
Ms. Patterson, wearing a pink suit, looked at him from across the table. “Primo,” she said. “What are you doing?”
“I’m not very hungry.”
“Primo.”
If necessary, she could say his name for hours. He chewed another mushroom.
The section of Amicus’s personality reserved for his mother said, “Should I assume an extra setting for dinner tonight?”
Primo looked up. “Why . . .”
“Swallow your mushrooms, dear.”
“Why would we need an extra setting?”
She sighed, looking tormented. “Primo, I don’t want you to get wound up, but I only just heard this morning. Garter is coming for a few days.”
That was Primo’s older sister. She had run away from home four years ago, and was roaming around Pittsburgh. Ms. Patterson often sighed about her: she was a troubled young person: drugs, jail time, unemployment.
Primo hadn’t seen her in years. She wasn’t Teen Success material.
Primo attempted to resume schoolwork after lunch, but his attention kept flicking on and off like a faulty light, and when the doorbell to Room Three rang, he jumped.
Garter had changed in the past five years. Her braids were gone and her hair , dyed black, went straight down. She had a metal bar through her septum, which Primo was vaguely aware was some sort of trendy thing.
Also, she was wearing a FullSuit. FullSuits, according to an article in last year’s Teen Success, were the “strangest new trend among the teens that dream of being on the farthest-out cutting edge!” Teen Success was always dubious about teen trends that weren’t career-oriented, but its tone about FullSuits more baffled than disapproving.
Primo could see why. From the top of her neck all the way down her body, Garter was wearing a single surface of fabric with absolutely no openings. From the top of her neck it went all the wy down her body, fitting tight against her developing hips and waist and trailing behind her for about twenty centimeters. She couldn’t even take mincing steps to move, so a small friction remover at the bottom of her ‘tail’ moved her forward.
“What’s the bad weather, little bro?” Garter said, leaning forward and pecking him on the cheek.
“Hi. You look like a snake. Where do you put your arms?”
Garter laughed. She didn’t sound anything like their mother. Primo’s mother’s laugh was high delicate, like a series of soap bubbles. Garter’s laugh more like a donkey being born.
“They’re pressed against my side,” she said.
“Does it hurt?”
“Yes, it hurts. Some people put in deadeners so they won’t notice it. Cubical people.”
“What’s cubical?”
“You know. Square, but in an extra dimension.”
Ms. Patterson, face the color of cigarette ash, said from the screen, “Primo, darling, remind your sister that I’ll see you two at seven for dinner.”
“Dinner, schminner, fazzinner,” Garter said in a singsong.
Primo doubled over laughing. Ms. Patterson frowned and disappeared.
Primo wheezed with laughter. Garter smirked and floated over to the bed and sat down next to him.
“So, mothah deah’s got you locked up pretty tight?”
“What do you mean?”
“When’s the last time you left the dome?”
“Left the dome? Is there a food shortage?”
She rolled her eyes and leaned back, kicking up her FullSuited legs, looking like an armless mermaid.
“Listen to you. Have some gum.” She fidgeted a stick out of a pocket on her shoulder; it was in a blank wrapping of dark silver. Primo tore it open and chewed the gum, which was oddly tasteless; Garter had a stick as well. Between chews, she asked, “What does Mom say about me? Don’t be scared. I’ve probably said worse about her.”
“She doesn’t talk about it much. When you left, she told me you were going to Teen Success Leadership Camp. It took me a year to piece the real story together. But there’s no official version.”
“Oh-ho. So there’s an unofficial version?”
Primo gripped the underside of his mattress uncomfortably. “She’s said before that you’re too uncontrollable for family life, and that you’re screwing up your life to spite her, and that you’re an ungrateful you-know-what.”
“Wow! Mom dropped the B-bomb on me?”
“No, no! That’s a literal quotation: ungrateful you-know-what.”
“Well, I’m glad the tone of the neighborhood hasn’t gone down.” She shook her head. “Teen Success Leadership Camp, huh? I guess you’re pretty well ensconced in that whole mess by now.”
“Yeah! Last year I ranked in the Teen Success Statewide Top 100 for academic performance. And I start college work in the fall.”
“Yes, yes, that’s so fascinating I think I shall just die, shall just absolutely die. What a crock, brothah deah.”
Garter slithered to the door of Primo’s room and flung it open. The bird chirp became audible. Primo’s gum had began to tingle in his mouth.
“You know that’s not a real bird, Primo, but it’s meant to sound like it. Why? For atmosphere, for that pleasantly rural charm and atmosphere. Teen Success, this dome, mother’s whole schtick – it is absolutely of a piece, a freeze-dried piece. Like – I guess they still do this, me and my friend sometimes go to Teen Success’s site when we’re taking Xama and need a laugh – I assume they still have those Profiles sections, right?”
“Sure.” Every week, Teen Success had a Profile of some teen participant who was making waves.“Well, I happen to know the Profile from three years ago. Jennifer Crimea. Remember her? She hangs with me in Pittsburgh. Every so often, I crash at her place when I’m between apartments. You know how it goes. Her Profile read something like Determination and Hard Work blah blah blah, Didn’t Get Distracted yadda yadda yadda, America’s Future and Key Financial Player et cetera.”
Primo could see the profile in his head now. It was a grinning seventeen-year-old blonde with red cheeks and large breasts. His mother, in fact, had bookmarked it, which meant that as soon as he got up in the morning Amicus was nagging at him to read it. She had leveraged enough cash to buy a shoe factory overseas. She had also gotten scores in the top second percentile in all her annual academic reviews, and was a chairman of the Young Neighborhood Engineers. Primo mainly remembered her breasts.
Garter leaned in close. “What Profiles didn’t mention was that Jen, right after the interview, went back to her Room and slept for three days, and then had to drop out of the program and sell her factory to pay for drug-rehab. Her mom had gotten her addicted to Maxidrine and had her working twenty-two hour days to move the financial data around sufficiently to get investors, while keeping up with her schoolwork. Jen told me all about it. She didn’t want to take it, but her mom programmed her Amicus to include it in her daily vitamin drip.”
“But . . . Maxidrine’s illegal. You can’t program an Amicus to break the law.”
“You can program Amicus to do anything. I don’t know a single fucking dropout in Pittsburgh whose parents didn’t do something illegal to get their kids ahead. My friend Susie-Sixx? Her mom actually had, like, eight million dollars in the Mongolian slave trade, so that Susie could get her name on a line of handbags. She got a Teen Success Player of the Year award. Determination is the key.”
Primo’s mouth was on fire and the gum had disappeared. He didn’t believe her, of course – and even if what she was saying was true, it didn’t have anything to do with his mother. But somehow, he could imagine believing her.
He also felt – and this was all in a flash – that he could imagine believing that the world was flat (or burrito-shaped), that all women were men and all men were women, that V was the first letter in the alphabet and 55 the last, that salt water flowed in his bloodstream, filled with a million tiny fishes, each one a novelist worthy of a shower of awards, that homo sapiens evolved from refrigerators and musical notes, that his sixteenth birthday would precede his fifteenth (by a number of centuries), and that sugar could sing.
“What the hell was in that bubblegum?”
Primo had never sworn in front of another person before. It felt . . . good.
“Nothing, bro o’mine. Well, maybe a little something. Dude, when’s chow? Mothah deah is no doubt waiting. Like a hungry wolf.”
Every Thursday night, Ms. Patterson had Primo’s best friend Sanjay Jawarhalol and his mother over for dinner. Virtually, of course: Sanjay lived in Lower Better, a gated community in Maine. So they prepared precisely the same food as the Pattersons, which was simply a matter of hooking up their Amicus programs, and their images were projected to the dining room. Afterwards, Sanjay would project to Primo’s Room or vice versa and they would hang out, as they had since Ms. Patterson had put them together with FriendFinder when Primo was nine.
Tonight it was grilled salmon with lemon and dill, pasta salad with milk-fed swan, and a thin lentil broth, followed by whipped-cream-cake and green tea. A few times Sanjay and his mother had tried to coax the Pattersons into some Indian dishes, but Ms. Patterson just wouldn’t have it. “It gives my Primo indigestion,” she would always say.
Garter and Primo walked into the dining room, one of the prefab detachable portions of Room One, at precisely 6:59 p.m., pausing only to hold out their hands for the ceiling’s disinfectant spray.
“Primo,” his mother said. “What are you wearing?”
Primo usually wore khakis and a sweater to dinner on Thursdays; however, Garter had brought him clothes from Pittsburgh.
“I don’t know what size you are, so I had to guess,” she protested, and they were a little tight: a pair of jeans with barbed wire spiraling up both legs, connecting to a wide zipper that looked like a tongue, and a white t-shirt with a long right sleeve and a torn left sleeve, with a smart-pattern on the chest that juxtaposed images of flies, mummies, and car crashes from twentieth-century movies.
Garter, who had changed out of her FullSuit into a long red skirt and a black wife-beater top, and had powdered her face to a shocking white, grinned at her mother. “This is what all the kids Primo’s age are wearing in Pittsburgh.”
For a few seconds, Ms. Patterson’s glowing smile faced off with Garter’s.
“How perfectly splendid,” Ms. Patterson said.
Primo sat at his mother’s right hand. Garter dove into the left-hand seat, facing her brother, and winked.
He saw his sister wink, and then it was as if he was watching it again, and again, and again, like a vid on repeat. Moreover, there was a little demon perched inside his ear. Not one with horns or a tail, or any kind of … demonological demon. No, it was just a voice, sounding sort of like an English movie villain, that was quietly, politely and insistently telling Primo to stick his hands down his pants and grab his balls, and he just didn’t know how long he was going to be able to hold out.
What had been in that gum?
“All ready?” his mother asked, rhetorically, and then she spoke her high, flat Amicus voice. “Let’s begin dinner.”
With a flicker, Sanjay and his mother appeared.
“Hired!” Ms. Jawarhalol yelped, putting both hands on her son’s shoulder. “My little boy’s got a summer internship with BioCorp. Oh, this is really going to pay for university.”
“Well, that is just wonderful, Diane,” Ms. Patterson said. “Isn’t it, Primo?”
“What?” Primo looked up from the chunk of salmon on the end of his fork: he had been counting the scales.
“Primo,” Ms. Patterson hissed. “Are you listening?”
“BioCorp,” Garter said. “BioCorp. Didn’t they have investments in modified labor-primate camps in North Korea last year? You know, the ones where they had to shoot half the monkeys because they kept coming out homicidal?”
The room went quiet, everyone looking nowhere in particular. The only sound was Primo’s demon in his ear: Go ahead. Grab ‘em. Give ‘em a little scratch.
Ms. Jawarhalol was the first to talk. “I believe they were acquitted. Not that it matters what a pack of European busybodies has to say.”
“Actually, the Court suddenly decided not to have hearings on it.” Garter was stirring her broth, making smoky spiral patterns. “Easy enough to do when somebody throws a billion Euros your way. BioCorp can certainly afford it.”
“My son’s internship is putting him at the head of his high school class.” Ms. Jawarhalol stabbed the air with her spoon. “I think that’s a little more important than whatever bleeding-heart troublemaker it’s currently faddish to listen to. He is probably going to get into Yale. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets written up in next month’s Teen Success.”
“Let’s not discuss politics,” his mother said. Her knuckles, wrapped around her silverware, were trembling. “The swan in the pasta is milk-fed.”
Garter pushed her plate away. “Little rich. Are you hungry, Primo, Schmimo, Fazzimo?”
Sanjay suddenly cracked up laughing, and a spurt of water went out his nose. His mother dropped her fork and threw her hands up.
“I don’t know what is going on here, but –” To Primo, it sounded as if she were talking in all capital letters. Everyone began speaking at once.
“You know what?” Primo said. Nobody was listening. He tapped his plate with his fork. It made a nice tinny sound, but it didn’t get anyone’s attention.
So he turned his plate upside down. The salmon and the pasta salad bled white on the white tablecloth. He removed the plate to reveal the mushy mess he had created, then began tossing the food on the ground.
Everyone was looking at him. So, without much premeditation, he said:
“I don’t know much about BioCorp or North Korea, which is a country I have not exactly visited, no, not visited, but certainly I’d like to visit someday. Not North Korea, I mean; it’s just that I would like to accomplish visiting, taken all by itself . . . in the abstract? To visit. Visitare, Amicus, Pater. I’ve never visited, except once, in a sense. One time – right after Garter left – mother was working in the garden and I accidentally stepped on that plastiwood rake. Whoo. It hit me right between the eyes. For a few minutes, I didn’t even know I was in the garden – or that mother was screaming and getting me to the Dome infirmary – I thought I was in space, floating up, out of the dome, out of the atmosphere, in no gravity. Like . . . like the atmosphere is Earth’s dome, and God, or whoever, is . . . well, is like a mother for everyone, and when I was waking up in the Dome infirmary’s injury womb, I was wondering, then, if . . . God . . . is the Earth’s mother, then who’s the father? What did she do with him? Would there even be a name for him? And if there was, would everyone in the world have to take his name, like people used to? But that’s not even the point, which is that I didn’t mind getting hit by the rake. It hurt, but it wasn’t bad at all. Sort of like when you get really super fucking hard down there.”
Everyone was quiet.
Ms. Jawarhalol looked as if she were examining some strange specimen of microbial life.
Sanjay looked as if he wanted to laugh. Ms. Patterson looked as if she wanted to cry.
And Garter was smiling.
Love you, little brother, she mouthed.
“You guys are acting weird,” Sanjay said, his image appearing on the roof of Room Three where Garter and Primo were sitting. It was dark – at night, the dome’s lights dimmed – and Sanjay was the brightest thing there.
“Pfff,” Primo said. It was as if his world were blazing away in the wastebasket. The hallucinogen in the gum had a short lifespan, and peaked about the time of his soliloquy, but it had left his mind tattered and ragged. It felt like reality was just as hallucinatory as any chemical.
“Hey, how come Amicus let you up here?” Sanjay asked.
“I disabled it,” Garter said. “Anybody can do it. Hey, let’s get out of here. Let’s go to Pittsburgh. Come on! You can meet Susie-Sixx. She digs young guys.” Garter smiled pimpishly.
Primo thought about it for a minute. It had always been sort of understood that he would eventually go to college, and though that could be done virtually – and his mother had always pointed that out to him – physically going to the campus was still the rule. But all this was years away.
Primo had never been outside of Saddle Meadows. He had never even left the dome where his house was.
All at once, he started crying.
Garter moved around and hugged her brother, pressing their foreheads together. “What is it?” she said. “Primo, Schmimo, Fazzimo, what’s going on?”
“I’m not a man,” he moaned. “I got an A in history last semester for my paper on Sir Walter Raleigh. Sailed around the world, just in a boat. He got rained on and got sick and had to decide every day what to do with no Amicus to help him. I’m not a man. I’m not an adult or a fucking anything; I’m scared even to go to another fucking city for fuck’s sake.” All the profanity Primo could muster was pouring out of him; he felt like he could sweat the word fuck out of his skin.
Garter stroked his hair. “It’s OK, Primo. It’s OK. I know what you need. Drink this.” Garter passed Primo a flask.
Primo uncorked it and sipped. It tasted like a fire far away. He sipped again and moved it around in his mouth before swallowing.
“Good old-fashioned Jack Daniels,” Garter said. “That’s the man for me. Sanjay schmanjay, go project yourself over by Room One. Good, don’t move – we need the light for aim. OK, brothah deah, you all liquored up?”
Primo took another drink and swayed. “Guess so.”
“Don’t fall,” Garter said, although she didn’t hold out a hand to stop him. “Now whip it out.”
“Whip what out?”
“Your pump. Drop your pants.” Garter tugged them down. “I don’t care. It’s dark out anyway.”
Primo formed a fig-leaf with his hands.
“What’s going on up there?” Sanjay called out, his form glowing white.
“Primo, your time has come,” Garter shouted. “Let her rip.”
Primo squeezed hard to hold it back.
But then he thought, why fight it?
He had read that animals urinated to mark their territory.
Why shouldn’t he have a territory?
Because of his erection, it burned a little coming out, but it shot far. He only shot off a short burst, suddenly overcome by embarrassment – what if mother sees? – and he heard a small clattering noise.
“Sounds like you hit a window!” Garter shouted.
Sanjay stood on tip-toes. “Are you doing what I think you’re doing?”
And then Primo couldn’t hold it back any longer. Piss came storming out, as if he were a faucet on full blast. It shot out at a high angle and struck Room One.
“Ha!” Primo started laughing, and then he cut loose, shooting all over the place. It went through Sanjay’s flickering form, who laughed uproariously. All three went into hysterics.
And it kept coming out of Primo.
“Piss on this house!” Primo bellowed. “Piss on everything! Piss on everything forever!”
He had never been so happy in all his life.
In the middle of the night, Primo’s stomach woke him up, roiling inside, and he had to sprint to the bathroom and bend over the toilet as if in prayer while his body felt as if it were exorcising demons. He had never smelled anything so bad in his entire life, and the taste seemed to have worked its way into his teeth, which were coated with a filthy film so thick that fifteen minutes with the toothbrush couldn’t get rid of it. Garter laughed at him. Then he fell on the floor and slept some more.
Then there were too-bright lights and trumpets and an explosion in his brain, and all he could see was his mother, standing over him.
“Get up. Get up.” Her voice was like an icicle, penetrating his head.
Primo propped himself up on his elbows. His mother pinched her nose. “My God,” she said. “The smell of you.”
“Damn, ‘lil ‘bro, you made a lot of noise.” Garter shook her hair and blinked her eyes several times. “Hey, ma.”
“Do not ‘hey, ma,’ me, you little you-know-what. I don’t even want to tell you what I smell out in the garden.
“It’s almost noon. Come in for lunch in fifteen minutes. We have a lot to discuss.”
Lunch was quiet but Primo and Garter kept things going by making faces at each other whenever their mother wasn’t looking.
But finally, as she was cutting the beef, Primo’s mother rose and stated:
“It’s time for you to go, Garter. And don’t come back. If you like it so much in Pittsburgh, you should stay in Pittsburgh. It was better the old way, where you just asked for money every few months and our actual lives didn’t get mixed up with each other.”
Garter replied, “Didn’t Primo tell you? He’s going to come out to visit me.”
Ms. Patterson pulled the knife out of the beef and slashed a slick wound in the tablecloth.
“I have not . . . you shut your filthy little mouth. I have not invested the money, and the time, and the . . . everything else that I have invested in Primo for him to spend a week slouching around in sex-clubs sniffing cocaine and getting his septum pierced. I have not. You suggest it again and I swear by God, you will never see a penny from me again.”
Garter put a chunk of potatoes in her mouth and said, “Screw you, Ma.”
Primo felt as if he were about to make his first capture in chess. “Yeah, Ma. Screw you.”
Ms. Patterson slammed her fist down on the table. The glasses fell to the floor and broke. Her fist curled and twisted like a creature dying of snakebite, until it formed a claw and yanked the tablecloth out. With a thud, she fell down into the broken glass on the floor.
Garter kept eating her potatoes.
“Mom!” Primo jumped up and ran over her, bending by her face and fanning her. She had gone pale as death. He touched her shoulder gently. Her eyes opened and she sprang up, as if she were rising from the grave.
“Amicus, call the police. You.” She pointed at Garter. “You never come back. If I ever see you again, I’ll rip the skin off your face. I’ll hang you from the highest steeple in the country. I will kill you. That is not a figure of speech, Garter: I will have you murdered.”
“Oh, I would just love for you to try.” Garter was out of her seat, and she was a snarling fury with fists up and eyes front. “Come out on my turf, deah mothah. Come out on the streets where it’s knuckles and boots. It’s not Saddle Meadows everywhere, Corona.”
Ms. Patterson knocked her daughter down with a slap.
She raised her hand to slap again – which would have hurt, for Corona Patterson was a large woman with a heavy arm – but stopped her hand in mid-flight, because Primo stepped between the two of them.
“Don’t touch her,” he said. His voice seemed to have dropped down two octaves in a second.
All the blood drained out of his mother’s face. “Primo. No.” Her eyes sparkled with tears.
She turned around. “Garter. Clear out before the police arrive.”
Walking up the stairs to her bedroom, she turned and said:
“And Primo: you don’t leave this house until I say you leave this house.”
“Sweetheart, you’ve missed three days of school. Why won’t you talk to me?” Ms. Patterson spoke from the screen in Room Three.
Primo gave her the finger. He had been doing it a lot lately; his mother had gotten used to it, since it was the only terms on which Primo would communicate.
Garter had left before the police arrived; since then, Primo had simply remained in bed, staring at the ceiling, getting up to go the bathroom or to eat bowls of self-heating oatmeal. The floor of Room Three was littered with half-empty bowls; if Primo got up, he usually stepped in one, and left a trail of liquidy oats on the floor. He ignored Amicus, and when his mother contacted him on the screen, he flipped her the bird. He had no idea how long he could keep it up, and he refused to think about it.
Suddenly, his mother’s face dissolved into a mess of black and white patterns, swimming in a sea of squiggles, and then resolved into the face of his sister.
“Brothah deah,” she smiled. “Pissed off any good rooftops lately?”
“Garter!” Primo wanted to hug the screen. “How’d you break into this line?”
“It’s tricky. Susie-Sixx is helping. We’ve only got a few minutes before it’s back to the Corona Patterson channel. Do you still want to come stay with me in the city?”
“You have to ask? Are you kidding me?”
“Here’s how you do it. You have to put in the right codes to open the front door,” Garter said. “If you miss it even once, alarms go off and the whole place shuts down. The codes are – and I think you’ll remember this – 02-14-59.”
“My birthdate.”
“Always were the favorite.” Garter smirked. “Not for much longer, I think. Susie-Sixx can’t wait to meet you. We’ll send a car –”
There was a blizzard on the screen, and broke into his mother’s face.
“Primo,” she said.
“Schmimo, fazzimo.” He draped a blanket over the screen and climbed into bed.
Primo’s alarm went off at four o’clock in the morning. He rose from bed, pajama pants swelling. In the darkness, he felt like a sun-god.
He hurriedly dressed: blue jeans, white t-shirt, heavy pseudo-fleece jacket, workout shoes. A splash of water on his face, a backpack with a change of clothes and some toiletries over his shoulders, and he was out the door.
At the gate, he entered the codes: 02-14-59.
The door slid open, clean and easy, like a beautiful dream.
He walked out into the darkness.
Primo followed the road for two hours, shaky and tense, every muscle shivering, even though his fleece kept him warm. He chalked it up to no sleep and figured he would rest in Pittsburgh or wherever.
There were trees all along the road, not like the careful little bonsai trickeries of his mother’s yard, but wild monsters with a hundred arms and countless leaves, like some army of titans, hurled down from heaven and frozen in defiance forever.
And the air! It smelled different. With every sniff, Primo encountered something new. Sometimes it was the exhaust from cars rolling by, but more times there were smells Primo simply couldn’t name. And they were all held in a medium that itself had a different smell: colder, fresher, wilder. He sniffed and sniffed until he was drunk with it, really drunk, stumbling into trees.
That was why he sat down to see the sunrise. At the dome, there were lights that were only on. He had only seen pictures of the sunrise. So he watched it, and wondered why anyone ever slept late, when you could wake up and see this, every morning.
He took off his shoes and wiggled them in the dewy grass. He looked into the mellow redness of the horizon and breathed out deeply.
Or at least he tried to. Suddenly, he couldn’t breathe.
He jumped up and pressed his fist into his stomach, trying to do the Heimlich maneuver on himself. But there was nothing blocking his throat. It simply didn’t respond.
He felt an impulse to run, but where? With great effort he managed to suck in a sweet gulp of air, but then his throat was stuck again, and the seal felt even tighter.
At first he started running back to the house. But then he realized he wouldn’t make it, so he ran the other way, trying to scream.
Nothing. Nothing.
He waved his hands as he ran down the street, the trees and sky all blurring into a dirt-colored smear. Smells disappeared. He heard a ringing in his ears.
It took him half a minute to realize the ringing was from his head, striking the road, because he had fallen face down. He tried to get up but his limbs refused to move. He couldn’t even feel them.
And he thought of his mother’s words: You don’t leave this house until I say you leave this house. This was her revenge. How? He didn’t know, but he knew it was her.
His hearing began to disappear, and all he could hear was her voice: You don’t leave this house until I say you leave this house.
At least, he thought, at least I can have something else in my head when I die. I can have the sun. And he struggled to turn his body over, to fill his eyes with sky.
But his body refused to move. He would see nothing but darkness and hear nothing but her voice in his head. She had her triumph: he knew only that. And then he didn’t know anything at all.
Two perfect tears rolled down Corona Patterson’s face. She blotted them up with a tissue, dropped the tissue in the evaporator, and turned back to the screen. It was only a sideways view of the outside, with trees stretching horizontally out of a wall of ground on the left, touching a wall of sky on the right, as if a camera had fallen to the ground.
She would never see Primo again. Nanites in his body, held in check by a signal as long as he was in range of the dome, would dissolve his body in less than an hour.
“Amicus,” she said. “I’ll miss Primo.”
Ms. Patterson then walked to the bathroom. On the far wall, she touched the tiles, and a door opened up. She went through the door and down a flight of stairs into Room Two, Garter’s old Room, which had been moved under Room One years ago. The room was clean and white, with a container in the center the size of a large elevator car, filled with blue liquid.
Ms. Patterson pressed her face to the glass. A human skeleton, about one and two-thirds meters high, stood upright. Through the liquid, you could see what looked like an army of ants roving over the bones. In one corner, muscle tissue had formed; beneath the ribs, there was a half-finished lineament of a lung. The more the ants worked, the more these details formed.
“It’s a good thing I made a backup of your memory two weeks ago, before Garter arrived, before all the unpleasantness,” she whispered to the skeleton. “I should have done this to Garter. But I’m going to get you right, no matter how many times it takes.” Inspired by her own resolve, she sang:
If at first you don’t succeed,
Don’t wallow in your mess!
Determination is the way
To TEEN SUC-CESS!
Jason L. Corner lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife and daughter. He teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University. His work has appeared in Abyss and Apex, Ideomancer, Nautilus Engine, and Electric Spec. He can be reached at jasonlcorner@gmail.com.