The capsule must’ve docked. Advertisements crowded Avery’s eyes. She blinked them to her periphery, waited for the door to lift—and there was Chloe. The real Chloe, really really real, with that shaggy bob and eyebrows so severe, leaning in so Avery saw her every pore.
“Can you walk?”
Ads drifted back over the blanker surfaces. Avery grunted. “What time is it?”
“Local time or your time?”
“Oh… right...”
Then came Chloe’s moist intrusive hand, the capsule hissing shut and leaving Avery to the station stairs and to the strange new town of Chloe’s—a town like Avery’s own but different, different dangling power lines and ladders draped from different windows. Different rusting corrugated walls. Different sets of eyes that gazed from sagging balconies at whatever only they could see.
Chloe’s door slid open to a pong of rancid oil, bunk bed, kitchenette, sottile table, single cushion—purple with golden tassel trim. Avery waved a hand and ordered one just like it.
“I know it isn’t big enough for two.” Chloe latched the kettle to the tap. “Try and make the best of it.”
Avery groped a collop of fresh bedding. “Is this new?”
“Delivered yesterday. Why? Did you think I had a live-in friend before?”
Avery slipped an arm between the rungs of the bunk bed’s ladder like it was Chloe’s shoulder. “I guess I pictured you with more experience.”
Debits, expenditures unfurled. Avery blinked into the oil stains.
“What about a boyfriend? Or a girlfriend.”
Chloe didn’t answer. Avery flung herself onto the upper bunk, pressed her toes against the wall and stretched her arms toward the headboard.
“You have other friends, though.”
With a nod Chloe beckoned Avery to the table where she placed two bowls of burbling ramen. “Three,” she said. “But I might cancel one. I don’t know if I have time for that many plus a live-in.”
Avery knelt without a cushion. Soreness didn’t matter she was with Chloe. Steaming noodles, shaggy bob and eyebrows so severe. Next time was Avery’s treat for sure for sure for sure
Corner
and
down
y
sp
ong y
...Sponginess receded.
Bare feet on the floor. Chloe’s cuffs and pasty calves covered with prickly stubble. A train or someone’s stomach rumbled. Even the floor was sticky.
“I ordered myself a cushion just like yours,” Avery said. “How long do deliveries take out here?”
There was a sound of water splashing and of tableware squeaking under Chloe’s hands. “Should be here any minute. Wanna shackle while you wait?”
Beautiful Chloe. Avery was pretty sure she smiled.
Phials tipped and bracelets strapped and hap the haptic happening. A googolplex of lacerations, tessellated oscillating flexuous recollections. Heady milky lullaby. Aeons hurling through the roux and through the sweetest sweetness to
somewhere
Somewhen: Avery rose up through the shining waves. She cast her hearty breaststrokes under the fulgent sky, swimming triumphantly betwixt the fluttering white sails of the stately ancient triremes, and reached the shore to warm herself on sun-bleached sands. Thence she found herself once again in the agora, where she knew the vines grew lush round alabaster columns and she knew the braided maidens bearing anaphora of balsam from the mountains. Avery languished, bedizened in the vespertine orisons of Vespasian. Grandiloquent, magniloquent, too circumspect to genuflect, grandiose in all he held except his grand erection.
Ringing.
Ruthless ceaseless galling clanging. The room jerked skimble-skamble into place, a spinning katzenjammer with its nauseous cudgel bludgeoning.
Lucky fucky Chloe, that putrid smudge in lamplight, sleeping while the doorbell clanged. Avery peeled herself from the floor to jab the latch. The drone released and dropped its box. Avery’s guts uncoiled, tickling vomit from her core. The shower stank like rotten eggs. What was wrong with Chloe, that she couldn’t mention that?
Still gagging when she tiptoed out the door, Avery stumbled namby-pamby in the sun. For a second she felt almost decent, but then some surly burly early bird collided with her shoulder. But the space that man had occupied became a view clear across the plaza, to where a woman shook her carpet from her balcony, her pockmarked brow and frizzy upward-curling bits like someone somewhere somewhen.
Was Avery bad for feeling this way? For already being tired of her only ever live-in friend?
Scratching. Something scratched a warehouse corner between the pillars of a workpiece. A meerkat craned its neck and yawned until its head became a socket. It looked ready to leap into Avery’s arms. She almost laughed. She offered it her hand. It turned and bolted through a hole.
“There you are!”
Avery started and whipped round. “I wanted to explore the neighbourhood.”
Chloe stood there frowning. “Why?”
“Curious. Why don’t you show me around?”
Chloe chuckled mockingly but took Avery by the hand. She led her through a narrow gorge and half a dozen alleys to another, grander plaza, where the highest rooftops grazed the bellies of the airborne gardens. But you couldn’t touch the bellies. That orchidaceous demonstration demonstrably fallacious.
“Have you ever been inside a garden?” Avery asked. “Or know anyone who has?”
Chloe shook her head. She squinted at the distant row of bobbing derricks pecking at the hill, belching fire into the poisoned sky.
Avery thought about the wasteland past the hills and the distance through the wilds her capsule must have travelled, and the wormish holes that banked and burked the nests of stubborn xerophytes while she was dead to the world.
“Are you disappointed?” Chloe asked.
“No! I just thought it would be… more different. I don’t know how.”
Chloe was silent. But her shoulder against Avery’s felt warm. Could they be more than friends? Avery wondered. Did it ever happen that friends changed status on a whim, without either putting in an application?
Suddenly Chloe slipped her arm through Avery’s. “I’ll show you where I had my interface installed.”
The two of them skipped giddily between the rows of doorless storerooms, to debouche into a courtyard heaped with circuit boards and old filleted terminals. In its centre was the institution, blue and single-storeyed, shrubs groping at the bottoms of its portholes. Pulling Avery down behind the heap, Chloe raised a finger to her lips and pointed toward the whirling, toward the stuttered puerile recitations.
“It must be stage one,” Avery whispered. Her fingers rose involuntarily to the scar in her own temple. “You can almost see the knife arm coming up.”
Chloe rolled her eyes. “They don’t do it surgically anymore. It’s all nano-imp these days.”
Avery sank against the trash. “I used to always walk through this one alley on my way to pre-op,” she said. “This little nook—I never used to notice it. Then I did one day and I looked in. There was this terrace and this window. And inside—all these flowers. I wanted—I mean, I don’t know. It was off my route. But I kept wanting to see the flowers. And then one time I got close and saw this lady shaking out her carpet. I couldn’t really see her. She didn’t look at me or anything. And I just—I know, it’s weird—I kept wishing I had a way to talk to her.”
Chloe’s eyebrows made an obtuse-angled arrow. “Why?”
“I don’t know! I made up whole stories in my head about who she was, what kind of person she was...” Avery was blushing hard. “Well, anyway, she was gone one day, and so were all the plants. The whole place was cleared out.”
“Well, yeah,” Chloe snorted. “She probably didn’t even have a license.”
Avery’s gaze lost focus on the institution’s walls. Information scrolled. She shut her eyes and groped for grounding. “Hey,” she said. “You wanna see a meerkat?”
“Ew. No. I don’t like animals.”
Avery watched as Chloe clambered to her feet. Watched the folds and wrinkles in her coveralls. Watched her callously retreating shadow telling Avery she was coded in, the scanner knew her eyeballs.
“I’m gonna go see my other friends.”
Avery rose and beat the dust from her own coveralls. “D’you maybe wanna get together sometime? All of us?”
“Yeah. Maybe. Sometime.”
Chloe merged between the wiggling fingers of the sidewalk and disappeared around the corner. The crowd beyond the courtyard was a swathe of writhing arms and crackling fricatives. From inside the institution came the staccato sound of weeping. Avery cranked her white noise high. Still the weeping seemed to follow her, rising to a wail through all the nooks and alleys and all the way back to Chloe’s sliding door.
Chloe sat oblivious, flicking her wrist and batting fingers.
Avery skulked into the upper bunk and rode back down to the blue underground. But no sonic chthonic megashow was ever half as good the second time. No sound or texture blocked the smell of Chloe’s cooking—and would there even be a plate for Avery? So long as she stayed shackled, she wouldn’t have to know.
Traces strafed her brain. Warnings blinked of funds due to expire. Fingers lingered. Stomach churned. Lamplit Chloe in the bunk below, eyebrows arrowed at the floor.
Two tasselled cushions sat at the sottile table.
Avery had been so stupid. Look at those steaming boxes of scrumptious molten meat and green stuff! She fumbled with her funds and pungled up, tucked herself in at the table. She hoped Chloe would be the first to speak. Whirr and hum and hiss and crackling far-off thunder. Pasty clicks and Chloe’s chewing. But was there to talk about? The memories of crispened darkness and Chloe’s airborne arms shoulders warm and soft against Avery’s—all that seemed like a life ago.
“No, it’s just, like… Yeah, that one. Mos def. Yeah… Are you serious?”
Raucous laughter jarred the night. Chloe’s lamp was blasting. Giggles and affirmations stretched like taffy into morning. Avery clenched her teeth. Pressed her pillow to her head. Cranked her white noise high enough she wouldn’t hear Chloe call any other girl by name. Avery knew only that she hated her, whoever that girl was—hated her, hated herself for ever putting in that application, and most of all she hated Chloe. Stupid, stupid Chloe. Prancing in her underpants with turds for areolas and her stupid ugly shoulderblades.
And Avery kicked herself again, for being so horrible to the one person who meant more to her than anything in the world.
Into the afternoon she sailed on a kaleidoscope of moiling doilies. Recrudescence was the crudest and the cruellest. Dreams defiled idly, sparged with sputum, fading in a daedal doodle. Cock-a-doodle-doo. Venal old Vespasian and his senescent phallus. Jacqueries, casuistries, and pastries.
When Avery wasn’t high she silently begged Chloe to come. To be there for her when she’d whinge and pout and pule and sough. Avery held her bladder until she couldn’t, then slipped in and out the lavatory so gingerly Chloe didn’t notice. Avery stifled in her sweat. Shilly-shallied in the bunk, a heap of inanition brooding. Stewing, stale and macerating. Ruminating. Fulminating. Remonstrating. Defecating. A tantrum stirred somewhere inside, but it was corked by torpor. She was a frowsy mess of stunted masturbation, knocking her numb head, eternally nocturnal, waiting on a sign or hint from her so-called friend’s unblinking eyes.
Days later Avery found her way outside. She wandered to the plaza, waited by the pillars of the workpiece near the warehouse wall, crouched and glowered for an hour near the hole, pointlessly waiting a meerkat that would never come.
Chloe was slurping noodles at the table.
“Do you maybe want to transfer?” Avery asked. “Maybe we could transfer together.”
Chloe chewed and gulped and hauled her bowl and chopsticks to the sink. “What would be the point?”
Again Avery retreated to her bunk and half-dreamed of the meerkat. Chloe asked for half the rent. Avery waved a hand and made the transfer. She was sleeping when she thought she heard the sounds of door and footsteps. It was well past morning when her eyes opened. Chloe wasn’t there. The sottile table was flanked by two brand new orange cushions, Avery’s rumpled tasselled own kicked into the corner.
Avery hesitated at the door. Maybe she didn’t really have to leave. Maybe there was still a chance. But she knew the glassy ping now sounding in her ear. She didn’t even need to read to message. But she flicked it open anyway, just to revel for a second in the pain.
The ads came tumbling in.
Avery closed her eyes. She’d work harder on her profile. Be more careful next time.
She passed the warehouse with its workpiece one last time. Gave the meerkat one last chance to appear. Her unspent funds were blinking—and why not? It wouldn’t cost too too much to have all five senses interfaced.
Then came the virtual meerkat’s warmly nuzzling clucking at her calves, the scent of freshly laundered fur and softness, soft and warm but different, hers alone and no one else’s, following her down the station steps to curl up beside her in the capsule.
Tremain Xenos is a writer, translator, part-time teacher, mediocre flautist and very clumsy paragliding pilot. He lives with his wife, cats and chickens in Japan’s smallest and least productive prefecture. Some of his recent stories have appeared in such places as The Heduan Review, Rivanna Review, and Channel Magazine.
Read Tremain's story in Propagule 1 here.