VHS static blared on the TV. He leaned back in the chair, asleep. She brushed blond hair in the cracked bathroom mirror, shampoo fumes steaming under the door. In her room, Chloe lay on her stomach, stringing the coiled landline wire around and around her wrist as Fuchsia kneaded and begged for food, mewed, gave up.
“You feel my heartbeat?” her friend, Stacy, asked. She had stolen the pair of bracelets from her dad’s office. Both were in the early phases of testing. “Yes, so this is in real-time?”
“Yes. Perfect. Okay, nerve impulses.”
“I’m seeing a reading, my bracelet is syncing, slave mode, okay… I feel what you’re feeling. Do you think this will work? Aha! You’re nervous.”
A light flashed a heartbeat, a dial scribbled an EEG in miniature. “Sure,” Stacy said. “I’m telling you, the runner’s high is a real thing.”
“Yes, but this is just a fitness tracker.”
“Fitness sharer, thank you.”
“They should just let me hook the thing up and get high on whatever.”
“It’s not that simple. Your body has to produce its own endorphins. It’s all unhackable quantum BS anyway. You’re supposed to be my emotional support. Feel what I feel, etcetera…” The bracelet had all the intricacies of a Walkman shrunk down to a quarter its size and packaged into one smooth shape around her wrist.
“Okay it’s working.”
“Good. I’m ready to go whenever.”
“Same on my end.” In her room on the other side of the suburb, Chloe lay back on her bed and took a breath to clear her mind. The lights were off. Her heartbeat began to time itself to the blinking bracelet. “I’ll hang up now.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.” Lights briefly on, Chloe dug through her draws, found a piece of black tape, covered the bracelet, and lay down again in total darkness. She closed her eyes, opened them, and couldn’t tell the difference.
Across the suburb, Stacy snuck past her parent’s room, latched the back door, adjusted her socks, and took off at a light pace. Out under orange streetlamps crowded with insects, she headed towards the beach. After a kilometre the houses were left behind and it was just forest on one side and water on the other. The moon and stars enough to see by without her torch. The beach stretched away in a curve, so that the waves crashed to shore in front of her. It began to rain. Water heaved itself onto land. Ocean spray dashed her face; drops of fear amongst the noise, out here alone, as she ran.
Trees in the wind tapped on Chloe’s window, low voices murmured in the next room, a car door closed out in the street. In her room there was enough warmth and static to drown herself in. Bodies synched; she felt the sand give way with each of Stacy’s steps. Her lungs rasped with cold air; water stung her face.
At the edge of the beach, one pathway led up towards cliffs and lighthouse. White beams struck out into the grey. Fear tonight was replaced with exhilaration. Near the top, Stacy slowed, calmed herself, and walked the rest of the way to the cliff edge. Some compulsion allowed her to stare into the waves below. The rush. Knowing someone was on the other end, receiving her.
Meanwhile, Chloe had that pre-dream feeling of falling, sinking beneath the floor for a split second. She chalked it up to her own nerves. A burst of rain smashed into the roof above her, it sounded exactly like when she had dropped the jar of marbles, clattering, rolling as thunder struck.
Stacy’s body hit the waves.
Chloe’s high kicked in. An absence of fear, pain, anxiety; in this bubble of serenity she slept, and in this sleep, she dreamt:
“How was your run?”
“You mean our run?” They both sat with feet dangling over the cliff’s edge, as shadows scattered out onto the fog.
“Yeah, that.”
“Could have been better, I think I was too amped to really feel anything else, I’m sure you noticed.”
“No, for me it was an overwhelming peace, an emptiness.”
“Odd?”
“What?”
“I don’t remember. I was exhausted, and then I came back to you.”
In the morning Stacy’s father, Bill, couldn’t find Stacy or the bracelets. Instead, sitting at his desk with glasses pinching his nose, he traced one bracelet to the head by the lighthouse and the other to her friend Chloe’s house, a red needle for master and blue for slave dropped on the digital map. His first thought was suicide, linked at the moment of death, and hated himself for considering it.
The police found a body caught in the rocks along the shore, floating and pulped. Bill met them at the scene as wind blew hair into his face. “Was she alone?”
“I believe so. We have to rule this a suicide for now, and work from there. I’m sorry.”
An emptiness remained. Chloe woke and dragged herself out to the kitchen to find an officer waiting. A plump man at the end of a long shift. Just wanting to talk. Her mother was sitting with the tablecloth twisted in her hands.
Before the officer could start, Chloe asked: “Is it Stacy?”
“I’m sorry. We found a body this morning.”
She looked at the ground, at the twirled patterns on the carpet, then back at the officer. “I thought… maybe… I didn’t want to believe.”
“Did she tell you she something?”
“Yes, afterwards. In a dream.”
“Beforehand?”
“Only that she was going on a run.”
“When?”
She shrugs. “Late. She never said exactly when.”
He took notes. “And that’s normal for her?”
“Sure, she likes to stay fit.” Later, he left, and she cried in her mother’s arms.
“Stay home,” she said. “Whatever you need. We’ll keep out of your way.”
“Thanks.”
Chloe, back in her room, curled into bed. Blankets up over her head. Whatever song she listened to now, whatever she watched, would be stained by memory. She cried in silence.
That evening Chloe went up to the headland by the lighthouse with a can of scarlet spray-paint and a stencil of Stacy’s favourite song lyrics: bloodless moon dashed with lipstick gloss, nylon jacket with hair dyed blond. Her parent’s, having decided to give her space, didn’t notice any absence. She stayed out all night only to return again with the sunrise staining the whole sky pink. Days later, the landowner decided to keep the mural up, it wasn’t the first death, but it was the first time someone had cared that much, and his daughter liked that band. That was Stacy’s memorial, but Chloe was her tomb.
Bill didn’t know how to confront Chloe, so he decided to wait. He couldn’t bring Stacy back anyway. Chloe needed time to herself, so he figured she’d come to him and return the bracelet in her own time. Or maybe he needed the time, whatever, he had to save face with the company first. The cops didn’t notice him slipping the bracelet off her body. It wouldn’t have looked suspicious even if they did. A week of grievance leave would be enough to think of something, botch some reports. Not that he’d had a day off in eight years, no wonder she was snooping around in here he should have spent more time with her…
His computer now picked up two signals at Chloe’s house. Even though one bracelet was sitting on his desk, switched off and out of charge. An intermittent mystery: now nothing, neither bracelet was registering.
Up on the other screen was telemetry from the fateful night. One mind syncing to the other, his daughter’s vital signs as she ran, brainwaves, heartbeat. Before the flatline a spike: fear, of course. Until then, nothing abnormal for a long run. No premeditated anxieties. Her amygdala calmer than most. Spikes of dopamine, even, lots of them. She wasn’t in any state of stress he could recognise, nothing more than a physical reaction as she fell. All this was bounced through his own test server, so he had it contained. He didn’t leave his office for two days.
Eyes dart up and down, the new look in one gaze. High school politics, the multicoloured uniform. A slow female vocal, voice soft over the sound-system, played over drawn out background chords. Synth beats, a neon pulse. The music students had an artistic license to play whatever garbage they produced through the school speakers, most thought it was alternative noise produced just to fuck with everybody. Static blaring on buzzkill radio, each syllable spoken slowly rather than sung:
Chasing round and round.
The hanged man’s fool. Who’s to know and what’s to learn.
Sunglass beach. Palm frond shade.
Dreaming of calypso
Saffron stars
Siamese nights
Eucharist’s blood
A hand drawn tight
The cut (‘cut’ being quite drawn out here) of a butcher’s knife!
In which the cutting sound was emulated by a screeching guitar and everyone in the hallway winced.
The school’s sports team ambled by, lilac wasps emblazoned on their backs. There were rumours, of course, but she stayed quiet and sat at the back of physics like it was nobody’s business. If the school were preparing a statement it wasn’t with any haste. Michele, sitting down at her desk, turned and asked: “You and Stacy been AWOL the last few days huh, you too chicken to make it three in a row?” To which Chloe could only shrug. She was already copying equations down and looking anywhere but at the other students. Birds outside the window chirped whenever the teacher opened her mouth. Daydreaming now:
Who were we when we met? This has the shape of a romance but lacks the romance like this kingdom lacks its king. I feel you here, but do I want you here? I need you to leave. An accidental trapping. We agreed to this. Yes, but there wasn’t any notion of permanence. Now I’m talking to myself, you, me. I’m not even talking to a person, what are you, a waveform? What am I even feeling? You have no body left. Except me. This is for what you did. I miss you. I feel what you feel, but what can I feel? Can I feel at all, me and you just waves on the same ocean, whose paths got tangled, interference, action no longer at a distance. A body no longer coherent. This story goes two ways, will only ever go two ways. You can’t collapse me back into myself. I should have called myself pandora. Paranoia. Father, I hope you understand all of this because I sure don’t. Ones and zeroes and everything in between, Dad, please forgive me. I shouldn’t have stolen…
Bill finally decided to open with: “I know she didn’t kill herself.”
After school Chloe knocked on his door and for a second was surprised to see Bill home so early.
She couldn’t hear him over the noise in her head: Take me back to before the storm, before the cage and before the light, the waters and the crash of my body. I don’t know what to do. I am the water, the air, the medium…
She nodded, said: “I know. I need your help,” and followed him in.
“What with, exactly.”
“I had these dreams, we were together, after her fall. I didn’t like them, they seemed to leak out away from the world to someplace else. I didn’t like them so I haven’t slept in two days and the dreams they haven’t stopped.”
“I’ve hardly slept as well. Here, do you want something to drink?” They sat down in the lounge. “You two were always very close. You changed your hair, she would have loved to see you two match.”
“Thanks, I’m fine for drinks… I know about the bracelet.”
“You haven’t worn it?”
“Not since she died.”
Bill frowned. “That’s odd, I must have some interference. Look, everything that happened, I could see it on my computer. The whole broadcast is there. But we’ve been having bugs.”
“You were spying on me?”
“Not if you weren’t wearing it.” He shook his head. “Ok, look. These ‘dreams,’ has she been talking to you?”
“She, we’ve… I’m not sure if you would call it talking and I’m not sure if it was to me.” She looked away. “I’m not even sure who was talking. I can still feel her.”
“Well you were receiving her. There’s not much of a filter on it yet. Whatever a body sends out when it dies, you took that onboard. If there was a soul this is where it would be.”
“In me?”
“Possibly. Is that what you feel?”
Chloe wiped her eyes. “Are you serious? She’s your daughter, not a test subject.” She stood. “I’m sorry I need to rest.”
She went to the front door which opened and filled the room with light.
A door to a warmer place than here where the birds still sing and the mushrooms grow and the kids can lose their dogs without any real worry. Back to the woods and the earth and the dirt. Is the outside and the inside such a dichotomy anymore, one and the same. One life, and for what, we’re still distant. And now here we are you and me together but it’s paradoxical and can only ever blow itself up or collapse back into reality. The worm talks to the bird and the bird to the cat and the dirt doesn’t worry about anything at all except maybe what are all these holes from.
Chloe had a seizure. She was carted to hospital, frothing at the mouth.
She woke to the sound of her parent’s voices, a pause in conversation, someone unfamiliar speaking: “Mental cancer. Sorry, brain cancer. Chloe has brain cancer.” The lights in her room were too bright. An IV line snaked away to a clear bladder floating above. She slept. She woke. Chloe’s parents were either at her side or absent but never anywhere in between. Hospital food was a certain distinct level of bland. Nurses woke her at odd hours with milk cold to the touch and smelling of an imagined farmyard childhood.
In the glass Stacy and Chloe were floating on their backs under a clouded night sky.
“How have you been”
“Since you left? Not well. I miss you. I think it was the shock.”
“Hey, it’s okay to feel shocked, I would if I were in your place.”
“Don’t say you’re still here, that you haven’t actually left.”
Stacy laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I’ve left, they took my body away. I’m not going to invalidate all your emotions.”
“What are you going to do then?”
“Talk. Tell me, something else has been bothering you.”
“My dreams. Dreams of repetitions, this feeling when I worry about dying, about all the beauty I will miss out on.”
The doctors gave her medication for the symptoms in a take-home baggy and sent her on her way, back to loving arms. Her parents didn’t know how to act. They had warm welcome smiles painted over a layer of sadness. The last thing she wanted was to be alone.
Chloe decided to keep her cancer from everyone at school because what did they care. No chemo, it wouldn’t have helped anyway as the disease was already rapidly advancing and in her bones. Nothing to lose. So hey, when that guy in class started talking to her, she had no obligation to tell him. Just keep the headaches in check long enough for the fun to last. Neither of them left that night completely satisfied. The poor guy wanted to try again but maybe she really just needed someone to talk to. They changed the pace, slowed things down, or at least she slowed down. He figured it was emotional. It probably was. So they went for these walks on the beach and all that, she decided she had a week left before the pain took too much away. The bracelet wasn’t too hard to steal back, just a visit to Stacy’s house. She’d been visiting a bit as Bill saw part of his girl in her and all the usual stuff. Poor Edward thought this whole bracelet thing was pretty cool and she told him she was at home when she was up on the cliff. All these miles between them that night he felt her heart racing and thought it was so hot and that she was so into him then woke up the next day with blurred vision, a migraine, and her not calling him back.
2021