Independence Day

I cleared my inbox today. I think the last time I was less than thirty messages behind was the summer I spent trying to convince my Mom that the time had come for my first bra. She said something about umbrellas in the desert, as I recall. Or maybe fish and bicycles.

I was in a hurry to be grown up, back then.

But today I cleared the stack to zero. I dealt with four more while I cleaned my apartment. No sense leaving a messy apartment. Three more messages while I packed some things and threw away others. Mostly I threw away. There was a health care bill from when I was sick a few weeks back, and an acknowledgment from Apostrophe telling me my latest submission was under review by their editors, and a special offer from my bandwidth provider, delivered by their Virtual Footman (pat. pend.) who waited, quivering like an eager greyhound, poised to speed back down the pipe with word of my new order. I told it I was canceling my account instead, and its pixilated face fell.

"But surely you see there's a huge increase in value here for only a very modest increase in price," it said, after an unhappy moment's silence.

"True," I said, (and it was a good deal), "but I'm going offline."

*

The day after I heard about Abuela, I took a water-taxi to Central Park and then a ferry to the mainland. From there I caught the long white unirail that glides and stops, calm as a stork, along the edge of the Hudson delta before turning inland along the river valley. The train runs fast and quiet. A shimmering transparency of leafshade and sun slid endlessly across the dark glass windows.

The last time I remember going on a trip with Abuela, we were on a plane together, headed back to Barcelona. It was late and the cabin was dark. The plane was half-empty, and most of the passengers meant to spend the four-hour flight napping, but I was used to staying up late, and Abuela couldn't sleep on planes. I suggested telling ghost stories to pass the time, and we did, and hers were scarier. Comes from having seen more dead people, I think.

Then, when I had conceded the contest, she astonished me by saying, casually, "There really are Passers, you know." I blinked, and said I had always assumed Passers were a figment of the ARM's imagination. "Not at all. I saw the first one Allen built. They are robots nearly impossible to tell from humans, but they're imprinted on their masters with the old seven-word keys. Intellectually, they evolve; but emotionally, they are helplessly bound. I know for a fact there are four Passers in Congress," she added. "Maybe as many as six."

"Oh my God! Is Julia Mann…?"

"Good grief, child. She's as human as you or I? Can't you tell by that frowsy hair?"

I was never completely sure she wasn't pulling my leg. I guess now I'll never find out.

*

In the time I have been writing, two more messages have come in. One from BWU Datasphere Services, with the subject line, Curious observation about terminated JSalla node. The other is from Nancy, marked, Laia-URGENT!!!!

I have decided not to read them.

*

Mephista didn't mind the country so much, but she would have screamed blue murder inside my head if I had tried to drag her away from the City on the 4th of July. That creature dearly loved fireworks. She lived to watch them up close, right out on the water, so we could watch the sparks of red and blue and gold burst overhead and spin hissing into the water around us. Once, at her urging, I sweet-talked my way onto the actual firing stage, the decks of a couple of giant garbage haulers anchored side by side next to the Statue. I batted my eyes prettily and made admiring noises while the fireworks engineers swelled and strutted, Mephista laughing inside me all the while.

-Behold! she murmured. Is this the face that launched a thousand scows, and lit the Catherine Wheels of Brooklyn?

I switched trains, catching a little two-car bullet and riding it to the end of the line: New Harmony, Pennsylvania, in what used to be Amish country. Like a lot of rural populations, the first hammer blows of the Warming had hit them pretty hard, with cancers dropping them in waves when the original ozone gave up the ghost at last. Now New Harmony was mostly slow in the way most small towns are slow, but even though I knew that intellectually, I found myself waiting for some black-bearded patriach to come up the road in a mule-drawn cart, or a gas-powered car. No such luck.

It would have been fun, in a naughty way, to wander down the few dusty streets of pious New Harmony, with my little witch's cat purring on my shoulder, Mephista that was, all sly love and merry impudence. But today it was hot and there was no school; kids were running around buying sparklers and there was a picnic on the city square. I could hear the local high school band warming up somewhere in the distance, but the laughing voice inside my head was gone. The sky above was blue but empty, and the truth was, the good folks of New Harmony were all having a lot more fun than me.

*

Another message I don't intend to read, this one from the celebrated Katya Rukowski. Notes Against 7 to 1. Wow: personalized propaganda. I give that a miss too. Instead, I'm staring into my mostly empty fridge-the one where I almost managed to suffocate myself before Grandmother rescued me-wondering what sort of sandwich I should make for the journey: peanut butter, or lox? It's one thing to grab a snack for a day trip down to Washington, or Durham; quite another, somehow, to pick The Official Sandwich of Your Retreat From The World. I can't remember what my mother packed the day she abandoned me. Sardines? Olive bread? Something Spanish, anyway.

I go with peanut butter. It seems like the better choice. Simple food. Pilgrimage food. And anyway the lox smells funny.

*

My mother brought me to New Harmony the August when I was fifteen. I had just had my heart broken for the first time, by a boy who lived in Grandmother's building. I had met him at the beginning of our annual summer stay in New York. His name was Paolo. He was nineteen years old and he did street-corner magic to make his money, card tricks and conjuring and sleight of hand. He said I was more interesting than the regular American girls. He liked to hear me talk just to listen to my accent, so I worked hard not to lose it after the first week like I had every other summer. Paolo came from whole different world than the nervous, fumbling, apologetic boys I knew at home. He lit me like a candle. He tipped my face up and made me watch his eyes when he undressed me and I thought my heart would burst.

To make a long story short, it took me about six weeks to realize that when he said I was one in a million, he wasn't exaggerating by much.

The Salla women are great languishers. I refused to leave my room, I pined over our chatlogs, I cried until my pillow must have been solid salt. I listened to depressing music. I committed poetry. I fleetingly thought of becoming a nun, except I had read they had a really high rate of cervical cancer, which struck me as God's way of making a point. When Mom said we were going out, I sulked and drudged and dragged my feet. I was insufferable, and I won't say she bore it like an angel.

Mom hadn't said much for the whole time we were hiking, just a few words when she offered me a water bottle, or pointed out trees and gave them names which I immediately forgot. We stopped at the crown of this particular hill, and looked out across the countryside and she said, "Sometimes, if it wasn't for the simple biological joy of being alive, I don't think I could make it through the day."

There were crows in the field, circling down to land among the grain and then rising up again together as if answering some inaudible call.

"Sweat," my mother said. "Breathing. The way the trail smells. Bark and dust. It's good. Or I guess I mean, it's true."

I think that's still the best summary I've ever heard on how we're different from the robots. Up top, we think and talk and pretend to be the same. But the body knows a different, deeper kind of truth.

Now, at twenty-four, I hiked up to the little hilltop we had come to nine years before. It was evening by this time: the sky peach and bright in the west, where I was looking, but behind me, back towards New York, the blue gloom of twilight was already thick. The crows were still there, loosely bunched together, a straggly cloud of them, beating slowly for some unknown resting place where they would spend the night. The night was running inland from the ocean, you could hear it: a kind of silence falling over things. No mother here beside me, this time. She had left long before. Mephista silent. Abuela gone.

The decision to go offline seemed very solid. I sat there in the gathering dark, feeling it like a stone in my hand. Crows thickened, rising up in a black mass from a line of walnut trees. The sun slid from view. A moment later, a night wind kicked up out of the west, and the mass of crows broke open like a black firework, a mute explosion of wings beating over the silent land. Sitting there on the hilltop, profoundly alone, I watched them flap, and wheel, and begin to settle like black sparks, drifting down, and finally extinguished in the dim fields.

Independence day.

*

Thanks for everything. Goodbye.