“Let me call 911, Dad,” she’d instructed; “I’ll have a helicopter meet you at the hospital.” The ER he’d be taken to was a little over a two-hour drive from The Hub, but it had a helipad, and Gogol doctors could start working on him during the flight to the medical facility adjacent to The Hub. It was state of the art to the point of hilarity. Concealed speakers throughout the premises pulsed a series of soothing yet definitively upbeat ambient sounds—it really seemed like a noise that could keep death at bay, the way certain low frequencies drive off vermin and insects. I tell you what, one patient said in a promotional video; Hazel thought she remembered Byron saying he was an oil baron. It’s like you get to time travel to the future and go to the hospital thirty years from now, this place. I had a quadruple bypass two days ago and it was the most relaxing thing I’ve ever done. I can’t wait to have another!
“Hazel! Hazel! Hazel!” her father had continued. “It’s not an emergency. I mean it is, but not in a medical way. I had what those artist types call an epiphany.”
At that point, a large blinking question popped up on the bedroom wall in red neon letters; it had been sent by Byron’s Sleep Helmet, detecting her alert state of increased stress. WAKE BYRON? it asked. The helmet didn’t automatically roust Byron when she woke in the middle of the night with a racing pulse because every single dream she had at The Hub was a nightmare, and if the helmet woke Byron every time she sat up in bed gasping in panic he’d never get any rest. So the helmet made it her choice.
She’d never once decided to wake Byron.
When Hazel slid two fingers to the left in the air, the question went away. “So you’re all right, Dad?”
“I’m better than okay,” he’d said. “I’m going to start dating strangers! My friend down the street set up a profile for me on a Web site!”
Hazel looked down at sleeping Byron and felt a pang of jealousy for her elderly widower father’s new shot at amorous joy.
Since Hazel got married, her capacity for envying others was one of the few areas in which Hazel had experienced growth rather than paralysis, to such an expansive degree that she was able to disconnect and observe it from afar with a sense of pride, like a racehorse set loose and dominating the track: Can you believe how fast that marvelous beast can RUN? She felt justified in describing her emotional impoverishment as “gifted.” It was definitely in the top percentile.
Hazel tried not to watch Byron’s Sleep Helmet, but it was hypnotic. Tiny strips of blue light ran upward from the helmet’s base across the main facial panel, parting into separate paths at the top of the head. The glass was dark; it made him look larval and unfinished in a way that made her afraid to disturb his sleep. She’d had nightmares where he’d removed the helmet to reveal a half-formed face with his skin’s internal layers showing.
But waking Byron unintentionally would be difficult. Inside the helmet, a soothing delta-wave-beat pattern was interacting with his REM sleep cycle, guiding it along like a set of training wheels to make sure it didn’t get disrupted; no light whatsoever could penetrate the helmet’s glass. Hazel didn’t like to wear hers; it sat on a pedestal on their dresser and seemingly watched her all night in a creepy vigil. When she put the helmet on, she felt like she was practicing being dead, and it was a little too convincing for her taste. It seemed too easy to go along with, was the scary thing. The average user fell asleep in less than two minutes of helmet engagement. “I don’t want to be such a convincing understudy that I get the role,” she’d told Byron, but of course his gadgets had an answer for everything; they always did: Sleeping inside a sensory dome was the safest sleep possible because it monitored your vital signs. If your pulse were to dip dangerously low, an alarm within the helmet would attempt to wake you; if your vitals were still nonresponsive, it would wirelessly alert emergency medical personnel. And even though she didn’t wear her helmet, since Byron wore his, Hazel’s safety was covered: their model, the Omega, had been programmed for partner awareness. It monitored all detected life within a set radius. If Hazel experienced a problem, Byron’s helmet would know.
The following week, her father had tried three different dates with three different women but gave up when all of them opted to call it a night within the first ten minutes of meeting him. “I’ve never been much of a conversationalist,” he told Hazel.
This was true. She’d sometimes had the urge to confide in him about the state of her marriage, but his style of sympathy was very “back-bar sports commentator on a satellite delay”; had she said something along the lines of, Dad, I think I made a mistake marrying Byron, he probably would’ve talked about something else for a few minutes, to the point that she’d decide he hadn’t been listening and had failed to hear what she’d just said, and she would feel partly hurt but partly relieved by this. Then, just as she’d begun to relax and think of something more benign to talk about, his entire body would suddenly bolt to life: Wowza! Miserable, are you? Huh! Ho! That’s a tough one. Better to avoid this talk until it was unavoidable, she’d decided.
Which had now happened.
It was strange to feel sad leaving his house instead of giddily emancipated. Perhaps this was the first time it had ever happened. During her marriage, she sometimes visited her father just so she could feel better about her life when she left. A trip to his home always made a pretty convincing argument that his gruff personality, heavy flaws, and the shortcomings of her childhood were fixed roadblocks that would prevent her from ever experiencing true joy, so her choices and lack of personal ambition or work ethic or relative sobriety didn’t really have to matter. Her mother was at fault too, of course, but dying had reassigned the parameters of her mother’s despotic reign. She couldn’t actively ruin Hazel’s life anymore because Hazel, like all living things, now fell outside her mother’s jurisdiction.
Maybe this was partly why Hazel decided to marry Byron after her mother died. It was a way to pick up some of the slack—to make her own life awful all by herself.
3
MAY 2008
MEETING BYRON HAD BEEN AN ACCIDENT. ONE OF HAZEL’S GO-GETTER friends in college had been assigned to interview Byron for their campus newspaper. He was coming to graduation to give what he’d termed “a digital commencement speech.”