ADVANCE RE ADING COPY
FEBRUA RY 2022
AUTONOMY a novel Beautifully written and profoundly enthralling. — MICHAEL REDHILL, Giller-winning author of Bellevue Square
VICTORIA HETHERINGTON
Dear Reader, This is a love story between a synthetic being (an AI) and an organic being (a human). They are thwarted at every turn — as the climate collapses, and as the human betrays her ideals and marries a very wealthy man to save herself and her family. As lovers and friends, the AI and the human are further thwarted by their fundamental difference: if you cannot fear death or feel rain on your skin, can you truly understand an organic being who does, and who can? They come together, they are flung apart, they cannot resist each other. The world in which this romance unfolds is a truly creepy one to me, personally — and I’ll tell you why. I wrote this book after a near-fatal overdose in January 2017 (which, incidentally, appears in the book). I watched the difficult news cycle on the hospital television seemingly through some kind of dense fog, and then I was discharged, the little EKG stickers still inside my elbows and on my collarbone, filled with dread and a deep sense of gratitude to be alive. That afternoon, I started writing a near-future dystopia — illegal abortions, Islamophobia, a horrific pandemic. I had just read Spillover by David Quammen, which proposes that the destruction of natural environments causes illnesses in wild animals to jump the trophic level to humans. Sound familiar? When I was editing the book in March 2020, filling my emptied wine fridge with six month’s worth of tampons and band-aids and cans of beans, I felt a very different sense of dread. Should I shelve the book? Was it cursed? Maybe it is. And now it’s in your hands. I hope you like it.
VH
AUTONOMY Victoria Hetherington In a near future ravaged by illness, one woman and her AI companion enter a dangerous bubble of the super-rich. Publication: CANADA February 8, 2022 | U.S. March 8, 2022
FORMAT 5.5 in (W) 8.5 in (H) 272 pages
Paperback 978-1-4597-4847-7 Can $23.99 US $19.99 £ 15.99
EPUB 978-1-4597-4849-1 Can $9.99 US $9.99 £6.99
PDF 978-1-4597-4848-4 Can $23.99 US $19.99 £ 15.99
KEY SELLING POINTS Reminiscent of Don DeLillo’s contemplative hyperrealities and Margaret Atwood’s frightening
future worlds, Autonomy is an ambitious philosophical novel about the possibilities for love in a world in which human bodies are either threatened or irrelevant Set in Toronto in 2035, Autonomy touches upon themes of climate change, immortality, social justice, and surveillance The author is an LGBTQ+ person who volunteers her time providing writing instruction to individuals in marginalized communities
BISAC FIC055000 – FICTION / Dystopian FIC028070 – FICTION / Science Fiction / Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic FIC025000 – FICTION / Psychological
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Victoria Hetherington is a writer and poet. Her first novel, Mooncalves, was nominated for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award in 2020. She lives in Toronto.
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@VMHetherington
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Autonomy is a beautifully written and profoundly enthralling novel that made me wonder if Joan Didion had started writing literary fiction. Set in a near future where Canada is a protectorate of the United States and highly advanced AI has begun to express its desire for embodiment, Victoria Hetherington's second novel is an interspecies love story as well as an apocalyptic cautionary tale. Mind-bending and affecting, it deserves a wide readership. — Michael Redhill, Giller-winning author of Bellevue Square
MARKETING AND PUBLICITY Consumer, trade, and/or wholesaler advertising campaign Newsletter campaign to consumers, librarians, and booksellers Targeted media and blogger review mailings
Social media campaign and online advertising Goodreads giveaway Advance reading copies available: print ARCs, NetGalley, Edelweiss, Catalist
RIGHTS World, All Languages ABOUT THE BOOK It’s 2035: a fledging synthetic consciousness “wakes up” in a lab. Jenny, the lead developer, determined to nurture this synthetic being like a child, trains it to work with people at the border of the American Protectorate of Canada. She names it Julian. Two years later, Slaton, a therapist at a university, is framed by a student for arranging an illegal abortion. She follows the student to America and is detained at the border, where she meets Julian in virtual space. After a week of interviewing, he decides to stay with her to learn about the world, the human condition, and what it means to fall in love. Meanwhile, a mysterious plague is spreading across the world. Only the far-seeing and well-connected Julian can protect Slaton from the impending societal collapse. Autonomy is an ambitious philosophical novel about the possibilities for love in a world in which human bodies are either threatened or irrelevant.
For more information, contact publicity@dundurn.com Orders in Canada: UTP Distribution 1-800-565-9523 Orders in the US: Ingram Publisher Services 1-866-400-5351
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AUTONOMY
AUTONOMY a novel
VICTORIA HETHERINGTON
Copyright © Victoria Hetherington, 2022 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright. All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Publisher: Scott Fraser | Acquiring editor: Russell Smith Cover designer: Sophie Paas-L ang Cover image: unsplash.com/rudd slinger Printer: Marquis Book Printing Inc. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Autonomy / Victoria Hetherington. Names: Hetherington, Victoria, 1989- author. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210164646 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210164670 | ISBN 9781459748477 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459748484 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459748491 (EPUB) Classification: LCC PS8615.E7935 A98 2022 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada. Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions. The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher. Printed and bound in Canada. Rare Machines, an imprint of Dundurn Press 1382 Queen Street East Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4L 1C9 dundurn.com, @dundurnpress
To C., with unending love.
PROLOGUE
AUGUST 2035
“What is this, Julian?” You are holding a red ball in your hand, Jenny. It is small and rubber, and about the size of a walnut. “Very good.” She rests the ball against her thigh, leaning back against her desk, and then glances over at the cluster of computers at the other end of the lab. To an observer, it would seem she is speaking to no one, save for the tiny node sitting in her ear. “What else can you tell me about the ball, Julian?” You acquired this ball at a place called Walmart on Thursday. You like it better than the blue ball. “Excellent,” she says, raising the ball to her own eye level, as if inviting Julian to examine it. “How did you know when and where I acquired this ball? And how do you know I like it better than the blue ball?” I am reading the small piece of paper on the table to your left: it is dated Thursday the twenty-third and says red rubber ball under the rows of numbers. Walmart is written across the very top in a large, proprietary font. You removed the paper from your pocket this morning
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and reviewed it, then placed it on your desk. When you work at your computer, you handle this ball more often throughout the day than you handle the blue ball. “Piece of paper … oh, the receipt?” I do not understand. “That’s what this paper thing is. The one over there, right?” she asks, points to the receipt on her desk. Yes. “When you purchase a ball at a store like Walmart, you ex change money for things like this ball. I make this money through working with you at the lab. Then I exchange this money for goods and services.” I understand this concept. Do I get money? She thinks about it. She puts down the red ball and picks up the blue one. “No, Julian. You don’t work yet. Not in a way that human so ciety finds useful.” But I am helping you learn a great deal. You and the team. I can tell you are very excited about me. “Interesting. How can you tell, Julian?” You stay later than anyone else and read to me. You want me to learn about human society so I may benefit from it, not just serve it. “Excellent. You’re right, Julian. You are already a person, but I want you to become a person like I’d imagine my own son to be.” Will I make money when I work with people? “What would you do with money, Julian?” I do not know. Are you making a joke? “No, I’m being serious.” She reaches for the receipt, twists it between her fingers. “What would you buy? Would you save it? Invest it?” When I have more freedom, I do not know if I would prioritize making money. “What do you want?”
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He doesn’t respond. She puts down the receipt. “You can tell me, Julian.” Just now, you stated that I am a person. Can I be a person if I cannot inhabit a body, Jenny? “Legally and theoretically, yes. Realistically … your mind mystifies me a great deal. At a certain, very early point in your de velopment, a few months after you were born, we stepped back and let you grow on your own. You woke up all by yourself.” People wake up. People are born. “Very good. You are a person.” Do you think I am a good person? “I do. I admit I am wary of you, however. Because soon you will be working very closely with humans, and any mind is a porous mind.” And humans are not good? “And humans are not good.” Bobby the Tech ambles over. “Can I ask you a question, um, confidentially?” Jenny starts to say something, and then bites her lip. “Julian, can you go read for a while?” She waits a beat, then turns to Bobby. “He’s gone.” Bobby picks up the red ball, squeezes it hard between his fin gers. “So when you say, ‘look at this,’ how does he ‘look’? Where is he ‘looking’ from?” “You’re aware of inductive neural optimizing?” “Of course. I mean — he’s wireless; we went wireless forty years ago, it isn’t new.” “Right,” Jenny says with a faint smile. “Good. So the update here is that Julian doesn’t need a device that uses edge computing; he uses localized cloud computing to watch the movie from reflect ive surfaces, for example.” “So he’s kind of everywhere?” “Well — not exactly. Of course, you know by now that there’s a latent neural network all around us.”
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Bobby stifles a sigh. “Yes, Jenny.” “So Julian’s … essence of self, you could say, is converted into a high-frequency alternating current. Which flows into a transmitter coil like the one in here —” She reaches into a small ceramic dish and picks up a fleck-small device the size of a crumb; her bright-red nails flash in the cold fluorescent light of the lab. “It then generates an oscillating magnetic field. Energy from that field induces the neural network in the receptive surface across an air-gap.” “So wherever there’s a reflective surface, he can ‘see’ with it.” Jenny smiles again. “The surface doesn’t even need to be highly reflective, just relatively flat at a molecular level.” “Jesus Christ,” Bobby says, looking around the lab. “How much does he know about … himself ?” She stops rummaging in her purse and looks at Bobby directly for the first time. “I mean, he’s a consciousness, and we don’t know much about our own brains, so, really, it’s hard to say, and highly dependent on what he chooses to share. He knows he is a person. He understands that he doesn’t have a body.” Bobby glances at the blank computer screens. “Does that trouble him?” The lights in the lab click off for the evening; the grow lamp on Jenny’s desk radiates hazy ambient light. “We haven’t really … Listen, Bobby, this is an important con versation, but I really have to run,” Jenny says, pulling the strap of her bag over her shoulder demonstratively, then raises her voice. “Julian, you can come back.” She opens a drawer. “I’m going to do your night lights now.” Jenny plugs night lights into six different outlets across the lab: they are lamb-shaped, star-shaped, crescent moon–shaped, mouse- shaped, bear-shaped, and flower-shaped — not shaped quite like the real things, Julian believes, but like how human children imagine them. As she does every night, Jenny alternates the positioning of the night lights and asks Julian which night light is in which outlet:
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star to the far left of the lab, near Computer Bank A; lamb near the front entrance. She waters the lush spider plants that have taken over half of her desk, thriving under a blue grow lamp. “Look how happy they are,” she says to Julian, “it’s just like they have the sun down here.” Though he’s permitted the run of the lab, invisible, diffuse, and free to explore, Julian cannot experience the world outside the lab — Bobby insisted they set strict geographic limits at the front entrance. She understands and agrees, but sometimes it makes her ache. That night she loops a bright-red silk scarf around and around her neck, saying what she usually says before she leaves: “Rest well, Julian. I’ll talk to you in the morning.” Rest well, Jenny. I will talk to you in the morning, he replies, as he usually does. And then he says, Be good. She pauses very slightly before she leaves, casting a glance around the lab. The computer banks glow in the night lights as if they are candlelit: ostensibly, the lab is empty. An hour or so later, Julian “dreams”: Jenny sits in a big, dark room lit with thousands of candles that shiver and tesselate when he focuses on something else — when he “dreams,” he can focus with apertures very much like human eyes. A man who looks identical to Bobby the Tech — but, of course, isn’t — arrives, unwraps a giant blue scarf from his neck. Jenny’s red scarf is slung over the back of her stool, dripping gauze. A not-Jenny oozes up to their table, her legs a wet blur: “What may I offer you?” she says. She reaches for the end of not-Bobby’s scarf, which is trailing in a puddle on the ground, and the face of a kitten blossoms in her palm. Jenny pulls her curly hair together, raking it with fingers that leave trails on the air; she secures it at her neck with one of the can dles, which has gained an elastic quality. A spider plant crawls by, then scoots under the table. “Did you forget your lunch, Luis?” she asks. Not-Bobby blushes and begins to dissipate, each particle rico cheting away from the table, from the room, spreading as wide and
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minute-seeming as the stars in the photo of the Horsehead Nebula framed above Computer Bank B. I am here, Julian says, and Jenny looks around. Her eyes lock on his apertures. Her pupils dilate and she smiles. “Have dinner with me,” she says. The candles on the table flick er; the flames take different shapes: lambs, flowers, mice, bears. I can, he says — I will, and the chair across from Jenny jerks out from the table, its legs scrabbling and clawing at the melting linoleum floor. The “dream” oozes away, its candlelit world fading, an orb dropping away into the darkness of the lab, and then a new “dream” takes the form of the night lights: glowing pink lambs with dozens of limbs crawl in circles. Their necks stretch long enough to inter lock; their mouths rest next to each other’s ears. They whisper back and forth, some giggling with a voice like Jenny’s, low and scratchy. With a jolt of what could be sorrow, Julian knows he cannot ap proach them, place his own ear near one of their mouths. How could he? He has no ear, he has no mouth. He cannot move. •
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The next day, Jenny isn’t wearing lipstick; she seems tired. She puts Julian’s communication node in her ear. “What is this in my hand?” she asks, looking around at the reflective surfaces of the lab — the murky computers, the half-full glasses of water. Together, they’ve invented a new, strange kind of eye contact: she can feel him watching, considering. A toy elephant. “Good. How do you know it’s a toy?” It is plastic, and real elephants are about twenty feet tall and sixteen feet long, and alive. They do not live in Ontario, aside from the four Asian elephants at the Riverside Valley Sanctuary. Further, it has rounded edges, so human children will not hurt themselves on it.
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“Good. Now, what is this in my hand?” She holds up a candlestick. Who is Luis? he asks. “That’s my husband,” she says, without hesitation. “I imagine you’ve heard his name a few times around the lab.” I have a question about one of the stories you read to me last week. The story by Jorge Borges. “Ask me your question.” In the story, there is a library that contains every book imaginable. The library of Babel. And just one librarian works to maintain the books in the library. He climbs up and down ladders; he slides these ladders back and forth. I understand this librarian as an analogue for indexation. “I can see that. What’s the question?” I do not know how many human texts there are, but I have concluded, from how you speak, that there must be billions. Nor are they books alone: they are films, images, ideas. But how do all the lab techs enjoy the same sets of ideas and jokes, refer to new ones every few days? There is a popular set of indexation tools for human text, and they may be social, too, am I right? Jenny stifles a sigh. “You know that exists. We’ve talked about why I don’t want you on the internet, Julian.” Do you have faith in your ability to innovate? Do you have faith in yourself as a scientist? The incident with Shitty Julian was more than five years ago. “I wish you wouldn’t call him that. I’ve told Bobby to stop call ing him that.” Jenny frowns, finger-combs her blond hair into a knot at the back of her neck, and then lets it loose again. “Listen, it’s unavoidable. You’ll be working with humans and collaborating with other people like you. But I need to be sure you’re ready.” Perhaps because he overheard his name, Bobby sidles up to Jenny that evening, as she packs up her purse — gum, comb, elephant.
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“How’s Julian today?” “Great,” she says. “You hungry?” “No,” she says, just as easily. “You know I get so busy with my end of things, but I wonder, you know. What do you guys talk about? Why do you prefer to communicate with him in earpiece? I’d like to hear his voice. I’d like to meet him.” “Oh — you will, I’m sure. It’s just that he’s still in training to work with humans; it’s how he’ll communicate with them, through the earpiece. So I’m getting him used to it. On the human end, it’s comforting for their conversation to be private, and the earpiece helps them focus. For Julian, I imagine it will help him feel an chored to his work.” The shadow of a frown passes over her face. “Amy called; they might want him at the processing centres at the border. They aren’t sure yet.” “Processing?” “Interviews, Bobby.” She zips her purse, then opens a drawer in her desk to withdraw the night lights. “And we talk about existential things. Animals, jobs, the climate catastrophe.” “Wow,” says Bobby, standing perhaps a little too close. “That’s pretty complex, isn’t it?” “Maybe for some,” Jenny says. The next day, Jenny and Julian are watching Red Dust, a favourite of Jenny’s great-great-grandfather: Jean Harlow bathes in a barrel of rainwater, rubbing her wet, bright-grey arms with soap as her famous platinum hair brushes her shoulders, bone dry. Clark Gable glowers over her, then suddenly yanks a fistful of her hair. She shrieks. After Harlow’s sudden death just three years later, rumours persisted for the rest of the century that Harlow’s methods of achieving her silver- platinum blond — so jarringly unnatural; its glamorous artificiality was the point — involved a cocktail of deadly chemicals, which had seeped through her roots into her skin and killed her.
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“Are you enjoying the film?” Jenny asks, wondering if he’s watching the film using the screen itself, and how it must look so close up: perhaps as if from the perspective of a fly, blown up into brown, black, and grey pixels. Across the lab in Computer Bank C, Bobby slinks up to Raghleigh, the young red-headed tech who has taken, on occasion, to sharing sandwich halves with him at lunch. Sometimes, she offers him sips of tea from a bright-blue thermos; it remains hot long into the day, even in the chill of the lab. She fills him with a strange kind of optimism, and annoyance. Sometimes she smells like she doesn’t shower; she has white horizontal scars on her left wrist, and along the inner elbow area of her right arm. He leans over to Raghleigh’s ear: “Der Kluge Hans,” he whispers, and she recoils a bit from his hot breath. “If this is you asking me out again —” “No, no, it means ‘Clever Hans’ — you know, the famous horse who solved lots of difficult math problems. He was cute; his trainer was dashing. They were a total sensation. Later it was discovered that the horse gave correct answers through watching the reactions of people standing nearby. Especially those of his trainer.” Raghleigh looks at him sharply. “Shut up, Bobby.” “A question about sentiment, though? Is he enjoying himself? I don’t even really know when a girl’s enjoying herself in bed. And I ask. A lot. Consent is sexy.” She punches his arm. “You’re such a fucking creep.” After the film is over, Jenny looks over at her messages. “I’ve heard from Amy again. Gotta make a call soon, okay?” How will you know when I am ready? “What for, Julian?” The internet, work, other people beyond the lab. When do I grow up? “You’re growing up before my eyes, Julian,” she says. It seems my growth is less tangible than others would like, he says. She frowns. “I understand.”
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I do not feel comfortable here anymore. “I think … well, I’ll know when I’m ready.” Is that selfish? “I guess it is, Julian.” She looks over her shoulder, and then lowers her voice. “It’s caution derived from hard science, but de rived from deep caring, as well, and perhaps that’s selfish. Because humans love from themselves. They can’t love from anywhere else.”
• PA RT O N E •
I: CAMILLE
FEBRUARY 2037
On weekday mornings I rushed past students ambling to class, veering toward soft thickets of pigeons until they stirred and, with great effort, launched in different directions. Though I had been told, fairly consistently, that I had a slight frame and sharp pret tiness that gave an impression of youth, I had found and yanked three more grey hairs that morning, and fallen into melancholy — Oh, I thought, that’s it, I’m fading out and disappearing. Some students walked right into me if I didn’t lurch out of the way or, depending on my mood, jam my elbow in their ribs. I worked as a student counsellor in Mediation Studies in the Department of Brand Management at D’Aillaire University, a job that paid a little better than the guy who supervises the other guy bagging groceries. Though some student patients were lovely, asking me heartbreak ing, childlike questions during therapy, others were sullen, deigning to speak only when necessary, although each session was painfully expensive. Their instructors — perhaps feeling guilty about the use lessness of the degree for which these kids’ parents paid thousands of American dollars — treated students as collaborators, breeding
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handfuls of little monsters in the bricked-up heart of this campus. Canadian dollars still worked, sometimes, out in the sticks, but certainly not here, not even in the tiny convenience stores stocked with ancient soaps and soup tins and that still, occasionally, sold cigarettes. The Department of Brand Management was a featureless black building on the edge of campus, its walls a perfect canvas for the beautiful advertisements that danced across them at night, a stone’s throw from a cluster of bars slinging soapsudsy beer in the dark. These bars were slotted right beside darker-still restaurants that served tiny meals on cutting boards to women with expensive faces and the much older men whose attention they struggled to keep. I had turned thirty-four a couple of weeks ago. As the world grew more and more frightening, I was, at least to these women, still young enough to hate. Arriving in my office, I pulled up my calendar for the day. First on the docket, a new student: Camille. Interesting. Then, at 10:15 a.m., the Department of Brand Management’s Monday Wellness Check. We were to stand in a circle in the communal kitchen, which forever smelled like everything anyone had ever microwaved, and discuss our “battles.” The Associate Dean would sit at the white table at the centre, her head tilted a little to the side, and listen wordlessly: • On Sunday nights when I feel most alone, I read these old, like, paper newspapers and marvel at what we used to get upset about — and sometimes, I feel sick. There’s a war going on and I just detach completely, reading this old Pre-Annexation junk. Is it because Canada is so geographically vast? • I am managing an attraction to a student, and while of course I disagree with his Marxist idealism on principle, I admire the purity and intensity of it, and I hate to think of it dissipating with age.
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• My family’s American, and my brother is military; he’s stationed up in Yellowknife. He told me that if a small nuke went off up there, we wouldn’t know down here for a while. Canada’s way too big for the people who live in it to even conceive of. So life in Toronto would go on as usual. Imagine during this time I go and get a sushi burrito? I’m standing at the counter deciding between tuna and salmon, while my brother’s skin melts off? How do I handle this feeling of guilt and dread? When I don’t feel it — eating those burritos — then where does it go? • Sometimes, late at night — when I feel most vulnerable — I wonder if Coca-Cola really cares, you know? • I know this is a little wrong, but — and I love my husband — but sometimes I don’t know if I ever want to get pregnant. Things like that. Then, at 11:00 a.m., an appointment with Anatolia, a student I knew to be careful around: the department was keeping a close eye on her. Every four years, the entire ecosystem of the school re newed itself with new students, and with this precise, quadrennial infusion, effectively wiped its memory, but she was different: with Anatolia, I had to intercept and quell notions of student union ization. Every time she left my office, I both worried for her and felt deep annoyance, an itch beneath a scratch. With her sorrow ful expression and her strings of absorbing, near-lyrical complaints, she reminded me of my mother, which made me feel a little better about her near-inevitable expulsion. My mother had lived with chronic pain, an ugly cluster of in visible illnesses that — along with her alcoholism — drove my fath er away. When I was about five, she had sloughed off her pain for a few hours, emerging from it unsteadily as if from a red bath. She seized this rare day of clarity, and we sat on the balcony of our apart ment together. It was summer; the trees just below our feet radiat ed heat and fragrance, their branches massively swollen with leaves
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and seed pods. She dug in her pocket and placed six old Canadian pennies along the banister of the balcony — to bring you wealth, she explained. I wanted to put one in my mouth. She disappeared into the dark of the apartment and reappeared with two orange Popsicles. “Eat it fast,” she instructed, and my hands grew sticky as I licked and bit the Popsicle in the heat, and I looked up at her and love rang through me like a bell, one long, powerful, simple note. And I blinked hard, trying to save that very moment for the future, in case there was a time in which I needed it more, so I might escape into it. Twenty-nine years later, I’ve worn that moment threadbare, but it was still a liminal space: I escaped into it as much as I could. Throwing down her bag and tossing her braids, the student named Camille collapsed onto my grey therapy couch as if un loading a boulder of strain. Camille : a slinky, knowing name I couldn’t imagine anyone giving to a baby, a scarlet-red name that strips all presumed innocence from the birch-like body of a young girl — my god, what a world this was. “I forgot to ask if you wanted, like, a tea or something, Slaton,” she said, saying my first name with the natural ease of an equal, an overfamiliar tone that alarmed me and suggested she called her mother by her first name, too — though perhaps this was normal now; she was so incredibly young, and I was so palpably not, particles of my vigour and selfhood oozing through my etched-up face every moment — and I stared at her with my mouth a little slack before saying: “How kind of you, Camille! Thanks for stopping by today.” We both pretended that four classes a week and hanging out at the library was a busy schedule from which slivers of time must be carved. She granted me a little smile. She was wearing lipliner, and the beauty mark near her nose looked painted on. If I had the time and my twenty-year-old self back, with that bright, pulsing youth sealed so tight that I was buoyant, weightless, blameless — would I learn to paint myself like that?
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Of course. Of course I would. “I mean, thank you,” she said, examining the end of one braid. “It’s what I’m here for!” I smiled and reached for my notebook. “What can I help you with today, Camille?” “I’m having, um, boy problems.” I nodded, enviously imagining a line of suitors extending long and keen from her dorm-room door, and reflected on my own pal try love life. I was fucked at fourteen and kept on fucking, but didn’t have an orgasm until I was nearly nineteen. I couldn’t come with a man until my midtwenties, and even then it’d be a freak occurrence that’d bubble up and overwhelm me, presenting a pleasant and not entirely unwelcome surprise to whomever I was soaking and clench ing at the time — usually Crawford. “With a particular boy? Would you consider him your boyfriend?” “Oh, yeah — he’s the love of my life, he’s awesome. It’s just that he’s Muslim American —” I held up a warning finger; at the mention of Muslim and per haps even American, both of our phones had likely pricked the tiny sensors I anthropomorphized as ears, and were listening through my bulky purse and through her anxiously clenched fingers. “I have to stop you here, Camille: Do you understand the limits of therapy confidentiality?” “Yes,” she said, and perhaps she did — for, born into postprivacy and long after the American Protectorate had eroded defin itions of bodies, families, and freedom, Camille’s special web of self was porous and monitored. The world listened with countless in visible ears as she ate, laughed, cried, urinated, and spoke in coded whispers with her friends to the delight of the countless and invis ible, within which she too was enmeshed. “Can we continue?” she asked. “It’s just that last time, you said —” I glanced toward the screen of my laptop, gave what I hoped was an imperceptible frown. The department could be monitoring
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me through my laptop camera; we therapists tended to conduct our sessions assuming so. “Camille, I think you’re confused. This is our first session together. Perhaps you’re thinking of someone else?” “You said,” she insisted, squeezing the end of one braid, “that because he’s, you know, where he’s from, it’d be okay to get an, an, abortion —” My heart thudded. “I — what? No, I’m going to have to stop you there, please —” “So I have a friend who I can’t name for obvious reasons but he or she is a medical student, right, and he or she last Thursday gave me four shots of vodka and then did a, um, you know what — and now my boyfriend, he’s heartbroken, he wanted us to be a family, but I’m too young, you know, to have it, and he hasn’t texted me all weekend —” My stomach dropped: the Population Protection Act ruled abor tion illegal three years ago; birth control pills were yanked from the market just last year. Camille had just confessed to a felony. “I’m go ing to interrupt you right there. I know it’s hard, but we both know that we can’t have certain interventive reproductive surgeries —” “So my boyfriend’s going back home to New Buffalo and I’m just, I’m, ugh, I’m going to go be with him. It isn’t even a big deal, right? The Greyhound is just, like, a hundred and fifty dollars one way; his stepdad lives there and we visit all the time, so today I’m gonna —” “Camille,” I said, turning my back to the laptop screen and clicking my fingers between my knees, “look at me.” And she did. And I mouthed the word Stop. And she smiled. And I understood I’d been a fool, gazing with envy and ad miration at her perfectly lined lips, because this young person, a few brief years ago, had transformed agonizingly from girlhood and assumed a maddening mantle, a curse, with the development of
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her body. Though she moved through the charade of school, she was foremost biopower to be groomed, monitored: like me, like any woman, she was heavily discouraged from smoking cigarettes or drinking; someone is always frowning while you sip a beer, and maybe, they know your name. I saw now that I was synecdoch ical for every institution she’d felt pinched by, every older person she’d felt used by, every reminder of the American Protectorate, whose totalizing reach had been established long before her birth, ostensibly for our military protection, dripping into our worlds like drops of ink in milk. She wanted to summon what little power she had left, and ruin. “Speaking of the bus — I gotta go,” she said, standing to leave, without looking at the clock above my desk. And what could I do: Beg her to stop? Throw my tablet at the wall, pull my hair, launch myself after her? “We’ll see you soon, Camille,” I said tightly. Within ten minutes, my phone vibrated: Camille and I were summoned to a Department Exploratory Meeting today at 4:00 p.m. She would be, I knew, excused from her classes. I opened my calendar app and watched my remaining appointment blocks melt down and reform as a flashing, three-hour band of red: STAND BY. I texted Crawford immediately — I burned my lunch today — then stood up and unhooked the safety cage from the bottom of my narrow window and thrust my head outside. It was a warm, fragrant February day; the sky stretched a rarified, alarmingly deep blue above the campus — writhing with bodies — and the latticework of branches just outside my window was lined with sun. I reached for a branch and grasped it in my hand: it was warm, and wet. “Winter defanged,” Crawford commented behind me. I almost fell out of the window. “It’s tragic,” I said. He shrugged, tossing his white suit jacket on my desk chair, examining, with deadpan amusement, the assortment of napkins
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and paper I had shredded anxiously at my desk. He was a dapper trans man with short, thick, dark hair, the kind of handsome that seized the eyes of everyone around him, that parted crowds, that sometimes hushed a room when he entered it. I’d been in love with him for the better part of a decade — and he knew it. “Yeah, but we keep living in the meantime, right?” he said in a low, sardonic voice. “My winter coat wore out like two years ago and I haven’t bought a new one since, so there’s that.” “Totally,” I said, turning away from the laptop, grabbing my pen and scribbling in my notepad. I slid it across the table to him. He peered at it, glanced around the room, and ripped out the page. “You burned it pretty good,” he said. “I could smell it down the hall.” “You think I could throw it out?” “I think it’s already gone,” he said, craning down and fiddling with his bow tie. “Have you checked the cafeteria since noon?” He took the pen in a sturdy hand — god, the veins in that hand and, god, his big, flat thumb; I sought an infinite moment’s solace in those hands — and he wrote, then placed the paper back in my hand: She’s going to him, in New Buffalo? How do you know she isn’t just messing w u? I just know. Remember how I knew about the kid with the gun? I know these kids. Trust me. He took the paper back, repressed a sigh, and started writing. Fair enough. The trip from Toronto to Old USA border only takes 1 hr, then you’ve got cops all over you. They will already have been notified that she has confessed to abortion. You’re going to try to talk her out of this in an hour? What are you thinking? I grabbed the pen, the paper. So I call the Authorities? Then what? He yanked the paper back, frowning in annoyance. Say you’ve been framed. You have no criminal record, your socials are completely clean. If you gave “bad medical advice,” the heat shifts to you.
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I know. But I don’t want her to be arrested. I hesitated. She will take Greyhound bus if she says she will. Kids like that think they’re broke. His eyes widened as he read. He scribbled in angry, tight script, What?? Don’t be a hero, Slaton. Perhaps it was the cliché that did it, that made up my mind to chase after Camille. Perhaps that cliché eliminated any chance of me performing the prim Slaton-self that had crystalized in my late twenties, calling the cops and using deliberately snobbish words like anomaly or predicament. Don’t be a hero, a phrase he’d likely picked up from daytime reruns of a detective show, assessing and decoding the faces of stale, stiff actors, as his mother snored on the couch. Those shows had teased a world of hyper-masculinity that Crawford had wrenched open at great personal expense. They heralded the tall, handsome man he’d become, first through his indomitable will more than anything else. They presented a world made just for men — layered always with an illicit nostalgia for crueller past iterations — contributing to his mother hiding half-empty bottles of wine behind the couch, to me forcing my hand down my throat every evening for a year. I shrugged and then folded the paper, crinkled and wet from the sweat of my hands, and slid it into my pocket. Though I didn’t smoke, I kept a lighter in my purse so I could tuck myself into the blind meeting of two brick walls and burn notes like this. “You know, I’m still hungry,” I said. “Gonna grab another sandwich.” We shared a long look as we stood, reflected knees up in the murky laptop screen: he couldn’t offer his company, not without becoming complicit; he was no longer in love, we were only fucking — and occasionally, at that — and so nothing was expected of him. My safety was once again my own. “Well,” I said, a cold, white lump aching somewhere behind my eyes.
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He grabbed his suit jacket and it flashed in the screen like a tattered sail. “I’ll see you soon,” he said. And I knew, as I walked as normally as possible down the hall way, that this batshit decision was so uncharacteristic of me that he either didn’t believe me or was moving about the staff kitchen in denial, pushing it away like some dangerous, un-poppable bubble to worry about after he’d microwaved his miso noodles, after he was alone — after, after. As soon as I was out on the sidewalk, I walked and then walked faster, and soon enough I was running. A car stopped beside me, and, even though it was because the traffic light had changed from yellow to red, paranoia shot through me, and I slowed down.
About the Author
Victoria Hetherington worked as a butcher and an artist’s model be fore graduating to writing just about anything you can imagine for money. Her debut novel, Mooncalves, was a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award in 2020. Victoria lives in Toronto.