She was glad to have a chance to cook and eat, because they’d told her at the hospital that she had problems with her appetite. It was very true, too—if food was put in front of her she’d be happy to eat it, but if food wasn’t put in front of her then she wouldn’t miss it. She’d hear her stomach rumble and she’d get weak and maybe a little dizzy, but there wasn’t any real hunger. It seemed she’d gone a little bit food-blind somehow. She could smell food and she could taste it and she liked to eat it, but the tiara said there was some kind of glitch in her hypothalamus. They were hoping it would pass. If it didn’t pass by itself, then they’d have to do something about it.
Cooking was great—she never had to think about cooking, she just relaxed and it flowed right out of her hands. She listened to the reporter brag for two hours about all his important contacts. She fed him and made him a tincture. He was just a kid, only forty. She was really tempted to start kissing him, but she knew that would be a critical error at this point. They’d outfitted her apartment like a telepresence site. She couldn’t even scratch without every finger being instantly recorded in real time in some 3-D medical database.
When the reporter left, she hugged and kissed him at the door. Not much of a kiss, but it was the first kiss she’d had in absolutely forever. She couldn’t believe she had gone so long without kissing anyone. It was unbelievably stupid, like trying to live without water.
Then she was alone in her apartment again. Alone, wonderfully, sweetly, and incredibly alone. Except for all her medical monitors. Just herself. And all the surveillance machines. She cleaned and washed everything and straightened it away.
When she was done with cleaning, she sat perfectly still in the apartment at the lacquered cardboard kitchen table. She had the oddest sensation. She could feel herself growing inside. Her self felt so big and free. Bigger than her body. Her self was bigger than the entire apartment. In the silence and the stillness she could feel her self pushing mutely at the windows.
She jumped up restlessly and put on a tab of Mia’s music. It was that awful yard-goods background music that people listened to nowadays, twinkly discreet music that sounded like it was stapled together out of dust. The walls were covered with hideously offensive antique paper art. The drapes looked like they had died against the walls. Someone had shriveled up inside this apartment, it was like the shrunken insides of a dead walnut. A dead woman’s wrinkly dry skin.
She tried to sleep in Mia’s bed. It was a nasty little old person’s bunk with a big ugly oxygen shroud. The mattress had been designed to do peculiar things in the way of firm spinal support. She didn’t want her spine supported anymore, and in any case it was a very different kind of spine now. Plus her monitors itched and crunched against the sheets. She crawled out into the front room and wrapped up in a blanket on the floor.
The hamster, which was mostly nocturnal, had come awake and was gnawing vigorously on the bars of its cage. Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw. In the darkness. Scratch, scratch, scratch.
Around midnight, something snapped. She got up, put on her underwear, kicked on her Mia slacks. Too short, they showed her ankles. Put on a Mia brassiere. A total joke, this brassiere had no connection to reality. Put on a Mia pullover. Found a really nice red jacket in the closet. The jacket fit great. Found Mia shoes that pinched a little. Found a purse. Too small. Found a big bag. Put some underwear in the bag. Put in some lipstick. A comb, a brush, a razor. Sunglasses. A book to read on the way. Some socks. Some mascara, some eyeliner. A toothbrush.
Her netlink began ringing urgently. She’d had it with the netlink.
“They have got to be kidding,” she announced to the empty room. “This is not my place. This is nowhere. I can’t live like this. This isn’t living. I am out of here.” She walked out of her front door and slammed it.
She hesitated on the landing, then turned, opened the door, went back in. “Okay, okay,” she said. “Come on, you stupid thing.” She opened the cage, grabbed the hamster. “Come on, you can come, too.”
She threw the tiara off just outside the apartment. A hospital van arrived, flashing its way up the street and parking outside her building. She ditched the earrings and all ten finger rings on her way up Parnassus Avenue. While she waited for a taxi she slipped out of her shoes and socks and got rid of the nasty toe gadgets. The skin under there was all pale and sticky.
The taxi arrived.
Once in the taxi she shimmied out of her slacks and ditched the knee buckles and a large gluey complement of obnoxious stick-on patches. Out the window with them. On the train on the way to the airport she went to the ladies’ and shredded her way out of the breastplate, and about a dozen more patches. The patches were a big itchy pain and when they were gone her morale began to soar.
She arrived at the airport. The black tarmac was full of glowing airplanes. They had a lovely way of flexing their wings and simply jumping into the chill night air when they wanted to take off. You could see people moving inside the airplanes because the hulls were gossamer. Some people had clicked on their reading lights but a lot of the people onboard were just slouching back into their beanbags and enjoying the night sky through the fuselage. Or sleeping, because this was a red-eye flight to Europe. It was all very quiet and beautiful. There was nothing to it really.
She walked to a departure stairs and worked her way up. The stewardess spoke to her in Deutsch as she entered the aircraft. She opened her bag, pulled out the hamster, showed the hamster to the stewardess, put the hamster back in. Then she spun on her heel and walked with perfect joy and confidence right down the aisle. The stewardess didn’t do a thing.
She chose a nice brown beanbag in business class and lay down. Then a steward brought her a nice hot frappé.
At three in the morning the aircraft took off and she finally fell asleep.
When she woke up again it was eight o’clock in the morning, February 10, 2096. She was in Frankfurt.
She deplaned and wandered around the Frankfurt airport, lost and sticky eyed and blissfully without plans. She didn’t have any money. No cashcard, no credit. No ID. The civil-support people from the flight were deliberately checking in with the local authorities, but the Deutschland authorities didn’t bother to go looking for you if you didn’t go looking for them.
She had some water from a fountain and went to a bathroom and washed her face and hands and changed her underwear and her socks. Her face didn’t seem to need much makeup anymore, but she direly missed her makeup. Walking around without makeup made her feel far more anxious than any mere lack of ID.
She emerged from the bathroom and walked along with the other people so that no one would notice her.
The crowd led her through about a million glass-fronted halls and kiosks, down escalators into an ivygrown train station. It seemed that Deutschlanders were really fond of ivy, especially if the ivy was growing really deep underground where ivy basically had no business growing.
There was a young European girl down there with very short hair and a bright red jacket. Since she also had very short hair and a bright red jacket, she thought it would be clever to follow this young girl and do as she did. This was a very wise plan, as the girl knew just where to go. The girl fetched biscuits in a paper bag from a Deutschlander civil-support kiosk. So she fetched a bag, too. She didn’t have to pay. The biscuits were really good. She could feel the vitamin-stuffed government-subsidized nontoxic goodness racing through her grateful innards.
Once she’d wolfed down half a dozen biscuits and had some more water, she began to feel quite cozy and pleased with herself. She gave some crumbs to the hamster.