I lie in bed for a long time thinking about last night, about Alex sitting in that window, his hands on me. I think about Bell and where our meeting went wrong. How I can only go so far with people that matter before my senses make it impossible for me to focus or connect.
I think about what Dr. Steph will say when she gets back from vacation. How she’ll tell me to be patient with myself. Patient and kind. “Would you judge a friend so harshly?” she’ll say.
I look out at the big maple swaying in the sunlight. It’s already afternoon. Eventually I get dressed. I follow the sound of the television blaring downstairs. Before I even hear what they’re saying, I feel it. There’s an energy in the air, a charge. It was like this on the morning of the Blackout Bombing.
I stop at the doorway of the living room. The reporter says they were off base about the number of flu victims. It’s more like three thousand people dead, not forty-one. They say officials are scrambling to make sense of it.
My father notices me standing there.
“You should go back upstairs,” he says. But the room is already starting to take on a dandelion hue. Before I can decide what to do, the news cuts to a clip of Bell speaking from his company’s headquarters. His blue eyes coat my tongue with the taste of chocolate.
“The fact that the outbreak has gotten to this point without the public being informed, without any sort of protocol being put into place, just shows what so many of us have known since day one of her administration: Joan Cartwright lacks the leadership skills necessary to protect our national security.” Even though he’s talking about the president, I feel his attack like it’s directed at me.
I look away as the newscaster returns. “That was tech tycoon Thomas Bell speaking from his California campus, where he says the world’s top scientists and engineers are working around the clock to determine the cause and eventually develop a cure for ARNS.”
“I hate to say it,” my dad says. “But he’s right. This is a big fuckup.”
“Yeah,” I mutter. I try to focus on the idea of the government making mistakes instead of three thousand people being dead.
“Which is not to say I want Thomas Bell to be our next president,” he adds. Everyone expects Bell to run next year. And a lot of people think he can win.
My dad switches the TV to Front Line News. I take a seat next to him. He gives me a look.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m okay.” Right now my imagination would be worse than whatever is actually going on.
On the screen, a cool-nerd interviewer is introducing a pudgy man known as Merz. Just Merz. Like Beyoncé. His face is flecked with acne scars. His voice is confident and clear and it makes my mouth pucker with the taste of sour apple.
“The government’s response on this is like an elephant trying to dance Swan Lake. It’s not pretty,” Merz says. “Front Line has already activated its massive network all across the country to respond to ARNS.”
A banner appears at the bottom of the screen: WWW.FRONTLINEARNS.COM.
“We are on the ground, we are on the streets, assessing what is needed and delivering it. Food, care, information, preventative supplies, we’re doing it. The government is not. This is the Blackout Bombing all over again, and we will be the ones who make the difference in terms of saving lives and getting the country back on its feet when this is over.”
The interviewer pauses for effect. “Will it be over? Seems unlike anything we’ve seen.”
“Everything ends eventually,” Merz replies.
The camera cuts back to a newsroom set. A young anchor stands in the center.
“That was Front Line representative Merz speaking from our headquarters in Brooklyn. We’re going now to the streets of San Francisco, an area that has seen numerous cases of ARNS over the past twenty-four hours. Volunteer correspondent Trisha Huff is on the ground. Trisha?”
The screen cuts to a young black woman standing outside a grocery store describing, in her words, chaos. The camera shows empty shelves and long lines for food and water.
I stand up. “What do we do?” Flashes of yellow are coming one on top of another. I begin to pace.
“We wait and see,” my dad says. I count my steps. “The most important thing is that we stay calm. We don’t need to panic about food, so that’s good.” My mother put a serious stockpile of canned supplies in the basement after Blackout in case something like that ever happened again. “And really, this is what the news does. They scare everyone so we keep watching. I don’t think it’s as dire as they are making it seem.”
“Okay,” I say. I want to believe him.
“I left a message for your mother,” he adds.
“Cool.”
“You okay?” he asks.
I nod and go into the kitchen for coffee, then head back upstairs.
I get back into bed and Janine texts me: U seeing this? I write back yes. She writes: Freaked.
I press my hands against my hot mug and I hear Bell’s voice: “Are you a problem solver?”
I go over to my desk and pull up the Front Line ARNS site. They’ve listed the places where people can go for supplies. They’ve listed the medical facilities that are receiving victims. And they’ve posted hundreds of video clips with real-time reports from all over the country.
I click on one from Elizabeth C. in Chicago. It opens with a girl sitting on the shore of Lake Michigan. The wind whips her long brown hair and empty sand stretches out behind her.
“I’m Elizabeth. I’m sixteen and my sister died today,” she begins quietly. Tears fill her eyes. “She got sick three days ago. We took her to the hospital today, but it was too late. She was only nine. She liked tap dancing and soccer.”
She looks out across the water and then back into the lens. “Her name was Catherine.” She begins to sob. I look out the window and count the leaves on the maple. “I haven’t cried until now,” she continues. “I think my mom may have it too. Help us, please. Somebody please help us.”
She clicks off. The video refreshes and begins to play again, as though Elizabeth C. is now trapped in this pleading loop.
I pause it. I put the link into LightYears and click Mine. The text cloud starts to build. Words bloom in front of me. Horror. Pity. Compassion. Thirty-four percent Sad. The abstract idea of what the words mean, and the numbers—they’re like a shade blocking out the glare of the feelings themselves.
Wanna chat? The cloud is suddenly obscured by an x.chat window. The sender’s handle, Theodore_Nam, glows on the screen in black boldface. It’s a name I don’t recognize.
Wrong number? I write.
Lu, you’re no fun. A jolt of adrenaline. He knows my name.
Who are you?
A friend, he writes and then disappears, dissolving the chat.
I text Janine: Was that u?
She replies with a question mark. I look back at my computer. I pull up Alex Murphy’s profile page. There’s a photo of him at the Egyptian temple Abu Simbel. He looks miniscule next to the soaring pharaoh statues that guard the entrance to the tomb. His face is inscrutable.
I open a message to him. My fingers hover over the keys. I’m tons of fun, I write. A second later, I erase it. I close his page. Elizabeth C.’s frozen face stares back at me, next to the completed LightYears analysis. Pervasive sentiment: Sixty-eight percent Afraid.
My grandfather is the only dead person I’ve ever seen up close. He was eighty-two and I was seven when he died of lung cancer. I remember his hands placed across his belly in the coffin, his thin gold wedding band glinting in the brown haze of my vision and how my mother cried in my father’s arms. She kept saying it didn’t look like him.
I look back at the tree. I stopped counting the leaves at forty-four. When they all fall off and die in winter, does the tree know they’ll grow back in spring?
I go up to my father’s bathroom and take my temperature again. Still normal.
“Hey,” Ben says, ducking through the doorway.
I jump. “Jesus!”
He zeroes in on the thermometer. “You all right?”
“Yeah. Normal,” I say. “Just checking, like as a precaution.” I rinse it and put it back in the cabinet.
“Dad’s down there, glued to the TV. I’m thinking of heading over to Front Line. Kamal says they need sleeping bags and tents and we have all that crap in the basement.”
My legs tingle at Kamal’s name. “They’re saying three thousand people are dead.”
“Yesterday it was forty-one; today it’s three thousand. Tomorrow it will be back to ten.”
“Yeah. Ten thousand,” I say.
“They have to make it sound like the end of the world or else no one will watch.”
“True. But what if it is the end of the world? And since when are you so eager to help the hippie communists?”
“Phoebe said they need stuff,” he answers plainly, brushing back his eyebrows in the mirror.
“Oh, Phoebe said?” Now I get it.
His face flushes. “Phoebe, Kamal. Whatever. We have like twelve sleeping bags in the basement.”
“Uh-huh.” I walk out of the bathroom.
“What?” he snaps.
“Nothing. I’m just not sure it’s safe to go out.”
“Look, you’re the math genius. There are nine million people in this city. Even if all three thousand people had been in New York, which they weren’t, that’s like what, .003 percent? It’s more likely that we’d be killed in a car accident on the way over there or gunned down by a leprechaun riding a goat.”
“A leprechaun riding a goat. Excellent.”
“Don’t you want to see what it’s like out there, with everyone freaking?” he asks.
Not really. But I do want to see Kamal. “All right, fine. I’ll go.”
I follow Ben down the stairs.
“Have you ever heard the name Theodore Nam?” I ask.
“Don’t think so. Why?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
The television is off. The door to my dad’s music room is closed.
I hesitate. Toward the end, when his using was getting really bad, I would stand in the hall and listen to a strange snorting sound coming from the other side of that door. I realized a few years later it was my dad getting high. But even then, I knew it was something bad because I would hear it like the smell of vinegar. It would sting my whole face to stand there and listen to that sound.
To this day, I hate the smell of vinegar. And I hate that door.
Ben knocks gently.
“Come in,” my dad calls. He’s sitting at his piano with a sheet of music paper and a pencil.
“Front Line needs some extra camping supplies,” Ben says. “So we’re gonna drive over and give them some of our old gear. Cool?”
My dad looks up. “Mmm, I don’t know. It’s getting pretty weird out there.”
“It’s like a ten-minute drive,” Ben argues. “Kamal’s over there. Lots of people are there helping out. And we have all that stuff downstairs that could help people. We don’t need it all.”
“Did I really raise two do-gooders? Imagine that.” He glances at me. “You okay to go out?” I nod. “Just straight there and back, yes? Nowhere else.”
“For sure,” Ben says.
“And don’t take anything we might need.”
Ben and I go down into the basement. The wall of shelves packed tight with gear oozes with the actual smell of bug spray and wood-fire ash. It rockets me back to our summer trips to Maine, to the top of Mount Katahdin at the head of the Appalachian Trail. We’d roast hot dogs and marshmallows in the fire, tell stories, wish on stars. In the morning, Mom would wake us before dawn so we could be the first people in North America to see the sun rise.
“We have seven sleeping bags and nine tents,” Ben says. “Plus all this stuff.” He starts digging through a shelf piled with camping stoves, dishes, headlamps, and climbing rope. “But they just said tents and bags. So we keep four of each?”
“Seems right. Why do they need this stuff anyway?” I ask.
“They’re expecting a ton of new volunteers to show up at their tent cities, apparently.”
We stuff everything into two big garbage bags, then load into the ten-year-old gas-guzzling station wagon that has seen us through so many trips home, so many arguments, so many good times and bad.
“This reminds me of Blackout,” I say as we pull out onto the empty street. “When we drove around with Dad.”
“Sort of. But that was fucking bizarre. New York with no lights is like another planet.”
A wave of white from my mother’s smell left behind on the seatbelt. “This is pretty bizarre. It’s summer and there’s no one on the street.”
“Not no one. There’s a guy walking his dog.”
“Yeah. He’s wearing a gas mask.”
Ben shrugs. “I was hoping for more of a chaotic feeling. This is just, like, a Sunday morning vibe.”
We arrive at the gates of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. A masked Front Line Peacekeeper steps forward holding a tablet. His hands are sheathed in black gloves and my eyes go straight to the gun on his hip.
Ben puts the window down.
“Good evening, sir. How can we help you?” The man’s voice is firm.
“We’re here to drop off a donation. To Phoebe Lowe.”
The Peacekeeper taps his tablet. “Identification, please.”
“So official,” I whisper to Ben as I hand him my learner’s permit.
“Hippies don’t trust anyone,” Ben jokes. The guard hands us face masks and gloves.
“Make a left at the stop sign and park in spot number twelve. You’re going to building D-6, second floor. Put those on before entering the building.”
The wrought-iron gates slowly hinge open. We drive through, park, and get out. I put on my mask and gloves. I feel ridiculous.
We unload the bags. I notice Kamal’s black Tesla Model X parked two spots over. I glance at my reflection in the window. I sweep my hair off my forehead.
A large three-story building marked D-6 stands in front of us. Just behind it, Manhattan looms across the river. Sharp angles of steel and glass define the skyline—One World Trade Center at the center and a large waxing moon shining down. It bathes everything in silver light.
The buildings. The bridges. From dirt and grass, humans built this city, this civilization, this world full of people making decisions and asking questions, hurting each other, loving each other, laughing, sleeping, living and dying. But the moon, the sun, the earth itself—they don’t depend on our existence. They are indifferent to our experience. I close my eyes.
What if when I open them, everything is gone?
We arrive at the door of D-6 as my watch trills with a call: my mother. I tap Decline and we go in.
People are everywhere, rushing, loading up supplies, carting pallets of water and boxes of food. They’re talking on phones, typing on tablets. They are electrified by their urgent tasks. And they’re all wearing the same black gloves and masks.
“Stairs?” Ben calls out to a guy in a Detroit Lions T-shirt. He barely stops to point us to the right. We make our way up to the second floor. Central air pumps in an arctic chill with a hum. There’s a large room with about a hundred chairs arranged in a series of concentric circles. A small army of volunteers watches an orientation video on a multidirectional projection screen. Faceless in their masks, I wonder if some of them will be dead by next week.
Kamal appears with a rush of pine from behind a closed door. His thin gray T-shirt falls perfectly over those broad shoulders, its hem just grazing the top of his low-hanging black jeans. He even manages to make the face mask look good.
We follow him back into a hallway that runs along a glass-walled conference room. Phoebe and three men are inside talking. One of the men is Merz, the Front Line rep from TV. He’s not particularly handsome, but he looks like the kind of guy who could talk you into anything. My gaze darts compulsively between him and Phoebe.
“It’s the end of days,” Kamal says.
“A bit much, don’t you think?” Ben replies. “All this fuss?”
“They’re pretty freaked. Sounds like it could take down several million people, and quite quickly.” Three taps.
“Are you joining the cause?” Ben asks.
Kamal laughs. “Not officially. But I don’t really have anywhere else to be. ” His eye twitches. “And Phoebe is very persuasive.”
“I bet,” Ben says. Ugh. We all turn and look at her through the glass. She speaks with her salty eyes, with her body. I can’t hear a word, but I feel myself agreeing with whatever she is saying.
“I have to admit though,” Kamal says, “I’m scared.”
A flash of yellow. “Me too,” I say. Our eyes meet. His smell shoots through me quicker than my own pulse.
He grabs the bags from us. “Thanks for these.”
I notice a screen inside the conference room. On it is the image of a young boy lying on the ground in the middle of a road. His wild eyes stare straight at the camera. My heart plummets into my stomach with more yellow, then red.
“What is that?” I murmur as Phoebe opens the door.
“Guys, hey. Could you help us with something?” she asks. “We’d like you to watch something and give us your opinion.” We file in behind her and she taps her watch.
I eye the door, already wishing I could bolt. Instead, I steady myself against the large table in the center of the room.
The video of the boy starts to play from the beginning. He’s walking down a suburban street. A Spider-Man backpack tugs on his shoulders. He’s maybe seven or eight. There are birds chirping in the background.
He starts to cough. It’s the same cough Clara Adams had at Missy’s party. My stomach twists and my vision blurs red. Within seconds, he falls to the pavement. He wheezes. His tiny arms claw the air.
“He can’t breathe,” I blurt out. I dig my nails into the table and look away. Ben puts his hand on top of mine.
The gasping sound stops. I glance back at the screen. The boy isn’t moving. His eyes are fixed open, his mouth agape. None of us says a word. Phoebe taps her watch again and the screen goes dark.
“So,” Phoebe begins gently, “the question we’re dealing with is whether we release this.”
“Are you joking?” Ben charges. “Absolutely not. How is that even a question?”
“People need to see what’s happening. This is awful, true, but if this is what we’re dealing with, the world needs to know,” Phoebe counters.
“It will create hysteria. And who’s the asshole who filmed it and didn’t help him, by the way?” Ben argues.
“ARNS is creating the hysteria,” she says evenly. “The video will save lives by forcing people to take it seriously. And we don’t know who shot it; it was sent to me by some untraceable deep web handle. But there was nothing he or she could’ve done to save this boy and they had to make the tough call to capture something that can help others. If we put it on the air.”
“What about his parents?” Kamal asks with a shaky voice.
Merz stands up. “Exactly. We don’t know where this came from, if it’s real, who this boy is. It’s not good journalism in the traditional sense and there could be a backlash.” He pauses and turns to me. “What do you think?” I inhale, looking at the black screen, certain I can make out the ghosted image of the dead boy. I hold the table.
“I think it’s horrible. But it’s not the first time the world has seen someone die on camera.”
“This is a child,” Ben mutters.
“But if it can save a life now,” I continue, “then maybe he didn’t die for nothing.”
Phoebe nods. “Smart girl. Look, Merz, these are extraordinary circumstances. I don’t think the usual rules of ethical journalism apply.”
He narrows his eyes. “Okay,” he says. “Push it out for a vote and have it prepped for the ten thirty broadcast in case it passes.” The other two guys nod and rush out. “I hope this doesn’t bite us in the ass,” Merz adds, following them.
Ben shakes his head. “This is not right.”
“It’s up to the Front Line stakeholders to vote now,” Phoebe replies. “It’s not just my decision. But I do appreciate your conviction.”
“And I appreciate yours, even if you’re wrong,” Ben says. A flicker of something passes between them. It’s like the force of their opposing views combusts into a single charge moving from one to the other and back again before burning out like a dead shooting star.
“I have to get back to work,” she says. “Good luck, and thank you for your input. Seriously. It means a lot.” She opens the door and struts away like a plane taking off. I want to hate her for being all the things I worry I’m not, but I can’t. She’s too nice and too smart.
In the hall, a curvy woman with two long braids comes by with a tray of granola bars. Kamal grabs one. “I always imagined my last meal would be a cheeseburger. But I guess this’ll do.”
“Uh, pretty grim to be imagining your last meal,” I tease.
“Also, don’t bury me,” he says.
“I know, ’cause what if you’re actually still alive?”
“Exactly.”
“Totally.” We stand there like idiots.
“Can we go now?” interrupts Ben.
“We’re gonna see each other again, right?” Kamal asks.
“No doubt,” Ben replies. “This whole thing will blow over. Trust me.” Kamal’s eyes settle on me like the double barrel of a shotgun. I freeze.
“Be safe,” he says.
“I will.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know,” I say, still immobilized.
“Let’s go.” Ben heads for the stairs and I force my legs to follow him. We get back in the car and I enter ARNS into my database of sensations. Touch: rolling stomach. Sight: red light. Ben pulls off his mask and gloves. I don’t.
I watch the old industrial buildings along Flushing Avenue flicker by as we drive. The darkness makes them look like melting candles dripping into the street.
“That Phoebe is . . . I don’t even know what to call it,” my brother says as we shoot up Washington. “Maddening,” he adds.
“I like her,” I say. We drive in silence, block after deserted block. “I can’t get that boy’s face out of my head,” I mutter after a while.
“You shouldn’t have encouraged them to use it. It’s irresponsible and it’s going to needlessly torment his family and everyone who sees it. People don’t need help panicking; the news is already doing a great job of making sure they do.” He’s probably right.
I pull up the Front Line ARNS site on my phone. They haven’t put it up yet. Maybe it won’t pass the vote. I scroll through the thousands of videos, all the faces and titles, then re-sort the pages by number of views.
The most popular by a lot is called “Thorny Rose” by someone named Evans B. in Redlands, California. I click on it and an older woman springs into frame. Her eyes are haunting and translucent like a wolf’s. Her skin is paper-white. She’s so close, I can see the fine hairs inside her nose. I could swear I’ve seen her somewhere before.
“This is the information they don’t want you to have,” she says, conspiring with the camera. Her eyes are manic, but her voice has the steady authority of a teacher and it smells faintly like wood-fire. “The more people die, the better. That’s what they think. They act confounded, but it’s basic. It’s simple science. And they don’t want you to find that out.” She holds up a hospital ID bracelet. “Two days ago, I was locked up like a monkey. They left me for dead. Then I got free and I cured myself. You won’t see me on the news, but this is the truth. I can help you.”
“What the fuck is that?” Ben barks. “Some crackpot?”
“Yeah, I guess.” I shuttle back and freeze on the bracelet. It’s got her name underneath the Redlands Community Hospital insignia, the date—day before yesterday. And four letters printed on the corner: A.R.N.S.
We stop at a red light and I look up. The electric orb glows intensely overhead, as though it is calling, stop: danger, do not pass. It unsettles me, that red. Crimson is now a synonym for ARNS. The light turns green and Ben hesitates.
“Go,” I snap.
“Dude. Chill,” he replies.
“Sorry.”
We pull up to our house. The parking spot we left earlier is still empty. I turn so I can see Ben’s eyes. “Do you think we’re all going to die?” I ask. He backs the car into place.
“I fucking hope not,” he snorts. We go inside. My dad is asleep on the couch with the television on. I watch him. One arm is slung up over his head like a shield. He reminds me of the images from history class of the ancient Romans fossilized by lava from Mount Vesuvius—anguish frozen on their faces for eternity.
I listen to his shallow breath. How did he get here, to this moment, asleep on a couch in an old house in Brooklyn with his daughter staring down at him? My parents’ lives are like a mystery novel that’s missing half the pages.
I go into the kitchen and pull the tinfoil off the banana bread. I cut a hunk and grab a small bowl of pasta from the fridge.
I pass by my dad’s music room. I turn back and linger in the doorway. He left the light on over the piano. I go in. I look at the sheet of music paper he was holding earlier. It was nearly blank then. Now it’s filled with notes—his feelings translated into sounds by a language I can’t read.
I go up to my room. I pull up FLN on my computer. The anchor is just introducing the video of the boy. The vote was a yes.
I turn off the sound and look away while I wait for the comments to appear. The screen lights up within seconds. Already thousands of people are weighing in.
I open LightYears and put the link to the video into the search bar. I watch. The response morphs along an undulating wave of popular opinion. There’s a crest as people question its origins. Who is this boy? Where did this come from? Then the collective view shifts: the hashtag hoax shoots to dominance, pushing Disbelief forward in the text cloud. The comments are all theories of a government conspiracy. They think the video’s a fake.
But then, the hashtag hisnameishugo emerges. It steadily climbs toward a peak as somewhere, somehow the boy’s identity is revealed. The number of comments and posts grows from tens of thousands to millions. The video is becoming the most widely shared piece of content on the Internet.
The boy was from a small town in Colorado; he had been walking home from the bus stop when he fell ill; he was found dead an hour later by a neighbor—all the details come to light and the curve shifts in real time as the world expresses its feelings.
Different descriptors occupy the field of “pervasive sentiment” at different points until one word comes to represent the most widely felt emotion: Empathy. LightYears characterizes 33 percent of people’s posts as empathic. The next closest sentiment is Anger at 24 percent. Then Sadness, Disbelief, and Fear.
I look at Hugo’s face, then back at my text cloud. So people care? So what? The usual comfort I feel from the words on the screen eludes me. Instead, the room seems to darken. My stomach aches. I crawl toward my bed under the weight of an invisible pressure.
Maybe Bell was right. Maybe this thing I built actually has no value.
I text Janine: U up?
She replies: Y.
U OK? I ask.
Y. Sad. Did u see Hugo vid?
The worst. Meet tmrw? Bike the bridge? I write, buoyed slightly by the thought of seeing her. There’s a long pause.
OK. Meet at Jane’s at 10?
Y. C U then, I write. I bury myself under my sheets. My watch buzzes with the voicemail from my mom I’d forgotten to listen to. I press play.
“Hola, cariño. I spoke to your dad. I’m fine. Let’s talk tomorrow. Cuídate, okay?” she pauses and then says, her voice trembling slightly, “Te quiero, Luisa.” I can’t remember the last time she said my name, or that she loved me.
“Yo también, mama,” I whisper to myself. And in this moment I do love her. I love her and want her to wrap me up and carry me away in her green dress.