Stella saw Corey too, sitting at her desk beyond the door in the receiving room, talking to her pencil.
“It’s just a memo,” Corey said. “Thirty or forty words, no more. I won’t even press hard.” If Stella’s traveling senses could have reached Corey’s inner ear, she would have heard the pencil’s tinny voice in reply. “I’m only good for five thousand words, and that’s if you write small ones, but you like ‘tremulous’ and ‘serendipity.’ Please, write with someone else.”
Corey put the pencil on her desk. It was an ordinary yellow pencil with number two lead, but with the addition of a sentient chip. Everything had a sentient chip. Her chair reminded her occasionally that she was gaining weight, and her desk chatted amiably about waxy buildup and the loose paperclips in the bottom drawer, just as her car talked about traffic, and her blouse reported dirt and perspiration. Everything talked, but her pencil was difficult. It talked of death.
“My doctor needs to know what I want to do,” Corey said. “If I don’t write it down, he won’t know.” She placed a fingertip on the pencil’s pointed end and another on the pink eraser, holding it above the blank paper. “You need to do your job. This is important. You’re just a pencil.” She thought about the tests she’d already taken, and how her doctor had blanched when he told her, “You’re pregnant.”
“I haven’t ordered a baby,” she had said, her hands pressing the sides of the papery robe to the examination table.
“No,” the doctor said, “You are pregnant. Your body is.”
He’d left the room after giving her a handful of brochures with fifty-year-old copyright dates and illustrations of third-world women in front of mud huts.
She had to write him a note, but she didn’t know what to say. Nothing on her small and tidy desk helped. A clock. A leather-edged desk pad. A picture of her mom leaning against a tree the year before she’d fallen sick and died. If Corey stretched her arms, she could wrap her hands around both of the desk’s edges lengthwise. A hat rack stood near the door next to an uncomfortable chair. The walls were a clean, smooth beige and had a wiped-down shininess to them that made her think of dentist offices.
The pencil moaned. “My life is measured in words.”
In the other room, Stella cleared her throat, and Stella heard it in the telephone and the stereo and the sink and every other voice-activated device. She was wired in everywhere, as fast as a thought, dexterous and lively in her mind, not old and declining. With effort, she concentrated on her throat, swallowing hard, controlling the muscles and making sure that it was clear when she was done. The nurse told her that she had to be careful with her swallowing. A careless moment could mean choking to death, not that being careful would prevent the inevitable.
“Corey,” she croaked, but it was too soft a sound. She imagined it didn’t even reach the end of her bed.
In the other room, Corey said to her pencil, “I’m not talking to you anymore,” and she wrote a note furiously.
“Corey,” Stella said, louder this time. Her lungs wheezed shut like wet tissues. Stella would have pushed the call button, but she couldn’t find it. She couldn’t feel her fingers well, and it was possible that she was holding the button without knowing. Disgusted at her faltering body, Stella slid into the television, upped the volume and boomed, “Corey, dear!”
Corey put the pencil down, read her note, then threw it in the trash can, a wadded ball. “Thank you,” said the trash can’s voice in her ear. “This is a type one recyclable.”
“Coming.” Corey’s chair creaked without comment when she stood. Then, as if on cue, the outer door opened and Harlow walked in, his jacket hanging on one arm, his thick blonde hair tousled across his forehead in a nonchalant fashion that said, “I’m carefree; can’t you be too?”
In a blink, Corey pictured him in a different light, his clothes carefully draped over the top of a chair under his neatly folded jacked, his face close to hers, breathing fast but delicious and warm as roast beef. What she noticed most in the memory, though, was his hair with its deliberate indifference, the same as it looked now.
“How’s the old Stella-witch today?” he said, with a long, slow, polished smile as he walked by.
Corey started after him, then flinched. Had she thrown away the note? A glance assured her it was in the trash.
Stella saw the flinch from three angles. A quick dip into the trash can’s sentience didn’t help. No visuals. Paper, the sensor told her. Low rag content.
Reluctantly, Stella pulled herself back into her head. Harlow’s hand rested on her arm. He gave it a tiny squeeze, then said too loudly, “Hi, Stella. It’s me, Harlow, your nephew.”
She tried to clear her throat again. No luck. Phlegm, solid as a hockey puck, clogged it. “I know who you are,” she bellowed from the television.
“Jeeze!” Harlow jumped. “I hate it when you do that.”
Stella used the mental connection to turn the volume down. “I’m old, not ignorant.” She tried to focus on him, but her eyelids hurt to stay open, and she teared easily. He was a tall, dark blur against the ceiling lights. Switching to the television made him easier to see—of all the devices in the room, it had the best optics—but his back was to that point of view. Corey stood on the other side of the bed, though, and her face was clear, not looking at Stella. Her head was down, studying Harlow from beneath her long lashes.
“You’re not that old, Stella. The doctor just yesterday told me how well you were doing.” He winked at Corey. “We’ll have you dancing again in a week.”
Corey smiled back, but Harlow had already looked away. She watched his hand on Stella’s arm. The night they’d been together had been so vivid. His hand had toyed with the top button on her blouse for the longest time, not unbuttoning it, but not going away either.
Harlow sighed, somewhere between annoyed and bored. Until two months ago, he’d always lingered longer at Corey’s desk then he did at Stella’s bedside. But that was two months ago. Corey could almost see him checking the time. She searched for something to say. “Stella’s improved her connections. A tech was in here this morning. He told me that’s he’s never hooked up so many devices into one interface, but Stella doesn’t move much, so there isn’t a problem with range and interference like there would be for you or me.”
“Really?” Harlow crossed his arms. “Expensive, I’ll bet.”
“I don’t know. I suppose.” The interface relay, a flat box an inch thick and six inches on each side, hung on the wall directly behind Stella’s head.
“I like to keep the seat of my consciousness movable,” Stella said from the small refrigerator on the counter. “What’s really expensive is the internal gear. Sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. The whole shooting match.”
Harlow glanced around the room. “What have you got in here with a sense of taste?”
“Not me. That’s for sure. Coffee maker. Microwave. I’ve got a stirring ladle at the house that could probably tell me a bunch. Can’t access it from here, though.” Stella laughed from the refrigerator’s speaker, which normally only said things like, “The milk has gone bad,” or “There’s a special on broccoli this week.”
Corey wanted to move to Harlow’s side of the bed. Maybe if she got close enough to him, he would have to acknowledge her. He’d been so distant lately, as if she was someone he’d never met before. Only his hand on Stella’s arm seemed vulnerable, and even that gesture looked perfunctory. His jacket hid his other hand, and he held his arms close to his side. He was self-contained. Locked in.