It occurs to me that we’re now the same age. In fact, she might be a little younger. Despite her discoloration from freezing, I have to admit that her features are beautiful. It’s not something she passed on.
“Mother? Because I missed you. Sometimes I was so mad at you that I told myself I didn’t miss you. I even swore that I hated you, but inside I knew that was never true, no matter how much I wanted it to be.”
“I was frozen, nitwit. You can’t miss people while you’re frozen.”
In my bunk I pull the covers up over my head and wonder if my relationship with Brady is strong enough to accelerate—to the point of me seeing his face, but also to us meeting and perhaps cohabitating.
Mother could maybe not come with me.
The next morning I pop the question to Brady.
Cargobabe: I know this is sudden, but I’ve been through a lot in the past four days and it has really made me realize what’s important in life. And that’s loving and being loved. I love you, Brady. I want to marry you and be with you forever. I want us to live together and to end each day in your arms. Please say you will?
FluidTransfer69: Get married in person?
Cargobabe: I know you’re ashamed of your scars, but there’s no shame with me Brady. I don’t care if your face looks like it’s been melted by acid. Just as long as you’re nice to me, like you have been. What we have together is something I’ve never known before.
FluidTransfer69: Will ur mom come too? I think I have room.
I quickly peer over my shoulder to make sure Mother is still finishing her home tattoo. She’s deep in concentration over an electric toothbrush motor and a Bic pen.
Cargobabe: Mother will not be attending the ceremony.
We discuss logistics. Although I want to leave this afternoon, Brady has a biohazard run to finish and only one radioactive suit. We decide on Friday.
The truth is, good things do happen to good people; sometimes it just takes awhile. And bad people do get punished. Mother already got hers, sort of. She should’ve gotten it for longer but I wanted to give her a second chance.
The rest of the week proved to be quite a struggle. I managed to get through it only because I knew it would all be over soon, I in Brady’s protective embrace.
On Tuesday, incredulous that I wasn’t holding any hard drugs, Mother burnt my vinyl curtains to create a tar-like mixture she could huff. Once high, she insisted we have a series of home-Olympic strength competitions that included arm wrestling, leg locking, and kickboxing. These were followed by a medal ceremony in which Mother awarded herself the two remaining tin cans of food on board. I went to bed hungry. This was probably for the best because my stomach was already so full of swallowed blood.
Bored on Wednesday, Mother dislodged a ceiling panel and went up into the cabin’s airshaft. She emerged adorned with several pieces of apocalyptic jewelry she had fashioned from living rats.
Thursday was a delight of secret packing. Although most of my sparse possessions had been transformed into some type of weapon, I had been able to hold onto one pair of decent underwear, elastic still relatively sturdy, for my first meeting with Brady. That night I decided to set things as right with Mother as I could.
“Mother, I want you to know that despite all that’s happened, you’ll always be my mother, and I love you.”
She seemed to possibly absorb this. Her fingers fidgeted with her rattail necklace. “I can’t believe they did away with television ten years ago,” she said. “I really didn’t see that coming at all.”
I get up in the early hours of morning, dress, and start towards the exit pod. Suddenly the shadow of the doorway takes form and I feel a grave disruption in my breathing that gives way to unmistakable pain. Mother, wearing an eye patch donned for purely aesthetic reasons, is holding a homemade knife. As she pulls the blade from my chest, I see that it has been whittled from a tin pork-n-beans can. Its label is still partially on.
Knowing I have just minutes, perhaps seconds to live, I don’t dabble in the muck of blame or anger. Circle of life, I decide. Mother giveth, Mother taketh away. But I can’t live with Brady thinking that perhaps I’d gotten cold feet, or worse, never loved him at all. I use my last remaining strength to scrape towards the WordCall console.
To my surprise, it is already lit up. There is a message between us, except the words are not my own.
Fluidtransfer69: You better hurry up and do it. Good ‘ol Tons-of-Fun is ready to bolt.
Cargobabe: Consider it done. I love you, ‘Brady.’
Fluidtransfer69: I love you, Sicko.
“Sorry to burst your bubble.” Mother hoists me over her shoulder and begins walking. “He’s a steady I met back in the pen, pre-freeze. Been in wait ever since for an opportunity to spring me. As a former felon, he wasn’t be allowed to buy my permacapusle, so when he found out I’d be going up for auction he decided to get to me through you.”
The room is starting to turn a dark shade of magenta, waving at the edges like a flag of silk. Mother hoists me down and then latches something around my wrists and neck. I realize I’m in the prison capsule.
Before closing the lid, she unzips the purse on my waist and removes all my shower ration cards. From the inside of the capsule, her voice sounds echoey and god-like.
“Don’t worry, I’m freezing you, not leaving you to die. It’s just a flesh wound. Albeit a deep one. I’m going to have to dump you somewhere that no one will find you for fifty years or so, long enough for me and Skinner, or Brady, or whatever you called him, to have a nice life together without you showing up to blow the whistle.”
With that, the cold smoke starts. It burns in a surprising way. The fact that this should not be happening to me, that Mother and my pretend boyfriend formerly known as Brady are bad people and I am not, doesn’t provide quite as much insulation from the pain as I might like. In fact, I am very cold, so cold that no one thing can be any different from another. My thoughts and my left arm are equal-sized chunks of ice. The small window of the capsule begins to frost over and I know this is my chance: this where I get to make the face that I will have until I wake. I decide to stick out my tongue. As if this painful freeze is just a snowflake I can catch and eat, as if my mother is just a bad medicine I can swallow.
CORPSE SMOKER
My friend Gizmo who works at the funeral home occasionally smokes the hair of the embalmed dead. The smell does not bother him; he is used to horrible smells. He claims that after a few minutes of inhaling, moments from the corpses’ lives flood his head like a movie. He won’t smoke the locks of children. “I did that once,” he tells me, “and I watched a dog die over and over for two days.”
“What happens if you smoke the hair of the living?” I’m a little intoxicated. I like Gizmo romantically, and I wonder if rather than having to tell him he could just smoke my bangs and figure it out.
“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “Maybe then I’m just breathing burnt hair. Or maybe then I’d steal their memories and they’d never get them back.”
Memory theft is a pleasant concept to me. I’ve just been through a horrible breakup with my ex-boyfriend. As it dragged itself out, I often called Gizmo late at night while he was at work. In between tokes of hair he gave me really great advice.
The next day I decide to go to the salon and get the past fourteen months of hair chopped off. “I want the hair back,” I say, holding up a Ziploc bag. Since I knew I would feel strange requesting this, I decided to go to the Save-N-Snip where there is a large hand-drawn sign near the register that says IF WE FIND LICE WE CANNOT CUT YOU; the wording is sinister and when I leave with my hair bagged I don’t feel like the oddest animal they’ve ever seen.