REGENERATION SONG

Harvard University

Dream journal. This one doesn’t make much sense to me. I am not home. Granted, I felt like this last year when I half-woke every night to the mattress creaking under my restless body and saw my freshman year roommate hunched over her desk, the light from her computer screen pinpricking an aura around her. I swear she never slept, just turned into a statue overnight. It felt like I didn’t sleep either, for that whole year, because of the feeling. It’s this heavy and light, discernible and inexplicable feeling. It’s like when you drift off in an unfamiliar bed and you come to not exactly remembering where you are, but there’s a part of you hovering over your body, omniscient, knowing all and knowing nothing. Only I know I’m home. I fell asleep in my childhood bedroom, and I’ll wake up in the same place. But now it smells like a kitchen sink, burnt pans, cardboard shipping boxes. Am I dreaming? I must be. There are numbers and letters. Hands guiding my face, pulling my hair. They’re gentle. The dream envelops me, and I see an animal flit across my line of sight. We’re standing on the beach, the Fox and me. The waves lapping at our feet. She’s staring into me with those silver eyes. My girl, she says. My poor, sweet girl. She wipes tears from my cheeks. So lost, so alone. She drapes herself over my shoulders, and her weight feels like muscle and skin. Natural. Warm. The Fox sings a song into my ear. It’s an old song, a lullaby. I know its melody well. There are no words to this song. She hums it like a woman I knew. I fall asleep listening to it, or maybe I wake up.

The first time I meet Hannah Ouyang I think nothing of her. This is not unusual. I don’t generally think about people. From a certain distance, people are just stochastic objects. Like here, filling up the lecture hall like microscopic algae quivering about in a puddle, their voices buzzing on all sorts of frequencies. Enough to be maddening. “Hey,” she says, “can you scoot over?” I’m sitting in the aisle seat, second row from last, in the left of three sections. There are 149 seats in this section, barely any of them filled. But Hannah Ouyang and the boy standing by her want to sit in my row. I look left at the line of empty seats. I stand and lean against my folded seat. “Go ahead.”

The guy’s name is Ben. No one has told me his last name. I’ve never spoken to either of them before. I don’t want to know who they are, but I know them nevertheless. It’s a small school. “Thanks,” Hannah says, although I get the sense she doesn’t mean it. They crawl over me and leave one seat between me and Ben. They wanted the aisle, probably. I spend the next fifteen minutes thinking whether I should give it to them, move to the middle of the row like they asked. But I like the aisle. It lets me leave whenever I want—preferably early to avoid the crowd. I think maybe Hannah and Ben wanted to leave early, too. I flick my gaze to my left every now and then. Ben appears inconsequential, sitting there in a grungy flannel with his knees sprawled. Hannah is his foil. She takes notes diligently, one leg bobbing up and down. Her makeup’s a soft sunset, her hair a metallic brown ombre, cascading over one shoulder, fake eyelashes obscuring her monolids. Ben raises his hand and asks if brain-computer interfaces can communicate via chemical signals as well. After the professor answers, I huff. “Isn’t it evident. Have you ever heard of chemical signals in a computer interface?” They hear me, but they pretend not to. I should have kept that to myself, but sometimes there are too many things in your mind that something has to come out. I glance over at Hannah again. She scowls. I think about the places I’ve seen her on campus. On the Green last September 17th, that time during the activities fair she was manning the Digital Art Society’s booth, in the library on April 12th, that grey sweatshirt of hers swallowing her with an ocean’s mouth… The lecture is over before I realize it. There’s a sudden uproar of feet as everyone swarms to the exits, an exponential uptick in noise. I push myself upright awkwardly. There’s a stale taste in my mouth. I haven’t been paying attention. It’s unlike me to not pay attention, but I’m sure I’ll remember what was said later. I stretch. It occurs to me I’m lingering. It occurs to Hannah, too. “It’s nice to meet you,” she says, pointedly. Her hand’s on Ben’s knee, and she’s leaning forward, her muscles coiled all animal-like. Should I introduce myself? I can’t tell. I stick my hand out, but she’s already turned away. I wait by the doors to the lecture hall to see if they will come out. The biomass of people slows to a trickle, and there’s no sign of them. I stick my head back in. The lecture hall is empty. No sign of the professor, either. But a couple hours later, there’s Hannah, walking across the Green. She’s alone, moving with an uncharacteristic urgency. I spot her from my car, where I’m trying to recall the lecture from that morning and finding that it’s only coming back in strands. Perplexed and on the verge of being frightened by my lack of memory, I calm myself down by deciding to follow Hannah. This action is also unexplainable, but I don’t dwell on that. By the direction she’s walking and the car keys in her hand, I know which parking lot she’s headed to. I swing around the Green and the back of the lecture hall and catch sight of her car as she pulls out of the parking lot.

I tail her downtown, where she slows in front of the Red Lotus, Asian supermarket and restaurant. I park across the street and watch her in the rearview mirror. My father’s friends, the Fu’s—can I call them family friends if my father is the only family I have?—own this place, and it doesn’t seem one where Hannah Ouyang would go of her own volition. The Red Lotus can’t be mistaken for upscale, and it’s kind of far off campus. Hannah’s car disappears around the block, presumably to find a parking space, and I settle in. Distract myself with the problem at hand.

Movement in the mirror. I look up to see my father entering the restaurant, cell phone up to his ear, the tie I remember him wearing during lecture this morning gone. The door closes, chasing his heels. Moments later, Hannah comes down the sidewalk, her phone clutched in her hand. She enters mere seconds after my father, and the door shuts on a secret. “Oh. Interesting,” I say. That night, my father brings home takeout from the Fu’s for dinner. “I thought you went there for lunch,” I say. “Mm-hmph,” my father says through a spring roll. “I went to your office around two, and you’d put up your ‘gone for lunch’ sticky note.” This is a lie, but I’ve learned that my father will usually put up the note if he leaves campus, regardless of whether he’s at lunch or not. He doesn’t pause or squint at me, so I know it’s true. “I went out with some colleagues.” “Who?” He flaps a hand. “Harry and Jose. And some others joined us.” This is how you know when either of us is lying: we’re unspecific. My father craves specificity. I can’t help it. “Where did you go?” I say. “Just the bagel place down the road.” I ask him if it was busy, and he stuffs another spring roll into his mouth, so I switch tactics. “I was looking for you after class this morning, too. But I couldn’t find you anywhere. Were you with some students?” He sighs. “Make some friends, Bailey.” Then he points to the expression on his face. “What’s this?” This is a game we’ve played for as long as I remember. My father used to make an expression and have me guess what emotion he was portraying. Now he springs it on me at random times. “You’re…sad,” I say. I can’t tell. I don’t like meeting his eyes. “No, try again.” I glance at him again, and the only word that comes to mind is constipated, which I’m sure is not an emotion. I shrug. “Frustration,” my father says. “Notice how the lips are tightened in the corners, my brow is drawn. I’m frustrated, because I wish you’d stop asking me all

these questions, you see.” “Okay.” “What does frustration make you think of?” He’s forcing me into another one of his games. Word associations. I sigh. “Anger.” “Try a color.” “Green?” “No. Red is more commonly associated with anger.” He frowns, then points to his face again. “What’s this?” I know this expression without having to see it. “Disappointment.”

The next week after my father’s class, Hannah asks me if I want to get boba tea with her. I’m taken aback; I look behind me to see if she’s having a conversation with someone else, but no. It’s just me and Hannah. Ben didn’t even come to lecture today, and Hannah still sat in the same spot. Beside me. Only 30% of people sit in the same seat for the second lecture as they do for the first. But the ones who don’t change seats after the second lecture will rarely change after that. I say yes. We take my car. I put it on self-driving mode, and Hannah inputs the address of the boba tea place. I sit back and thumb the steering wheel, feeling useless as it glides under my hands. Hannah looks out the window intently—like a dog. I’m pretty sure dogs would jump out the window of a moving car if they didn’t feel a level of attachment to their owners. I study Hannah’s body language and get the sense she wants to jump out. That’s an interesting conclusion. I’m usually wrong about these things. I’m probably wrong. What’s Hannah’s attachment, then? “Brains are so fucking weird,” I blurt, and I certainly didn’t mean to say that out loud. Hannah hears me, of course, but she pretends not to. Which I’m grateful

for.

Then, a chill comes over me as I realize. Did she see me last week when she went to Fu’s? I look at her. Her arms are crossed, and her foot’s tapping. I wish I could just pry open her skull and know. “Sorry,” Hannah says once my car brings us to the boba place. “You were

saying?”

I tell her it doesn’t matter. I fumble with the door—push or pull?—and I try to hold it open for Hannah, but I stand too close and don’t open it far enough. She squeezes by me, her arm brushing against my arm. My face feels hot. “What were you thinking about?” I ask her, pretending to look at the menu. I can’t tell if this is an appropriate thing to say or not. Is it too late in the day to be asking a question like this?

Hannah could have thought about plenty of things by now. Not to mention all the thoughts she ever had before. She sighs. “Just had an idea.” “An idea for what?” “A song.” I ask her if she writes songs, and she says that she tries to. She has a tentative deal with a record company, but they want to hear more before they sign her. She’s been working on that deal for nine months and still hasn’t written anything new. I’m not sure what to say to that. The lullaby from my dream comes to mind, and so I hum it quietly as I read the menu. I don’t get very far, overwhelmed by drink combinatorics. “What are you getting?” I say. Hannah says that she gets the same thing every time: a large milk tea, extra boba. I order the peach tea with popping boba, but Hannah tells me the flavored ones are bad. They taste like preservatives. “Okay,” I say. “Okay…” she says. “Or you could just try it.” “Okay,” I say again. We get our drinks and sit by the shop window. Hannah swirls her tea around but doesn’t drink it. I take one sip of mine and try not to gag. My father never bought me boba when I was growing up, no matter how much I asked. He still says the pearls look like 药丸子 (yao wan zi), medicinal balls: why would you eat medicine of your own volition? “Look,” Hannah says, and I turn my head around before I realize she means metaphorically. She sits up straighter. “Ben and I aren’t dating, but we’re kind of exclusive right now.” The shift of topic to Ben doesn’t interest me, so I sip at my tea. I manage to get a popping boba up the straw, and I crush it against the roof of my mouth. Nectar in the flavor unpleasantly sweet coats my tongue, runs down the back of my throat. I play with the shell between my teeth. Oh. It’s not until then that I realize. “Honestly,” I say. “I don’t care.” Hannah laughs—the kind of breathy, humorless chuckle that sounds like you’re trying to spit out a bad taste. “Oh really.” I get the sense she misunderstood me. I don’t know what I can say to change her mind, since the idea has probably been replicating more sinister versions of itself inside her for about a week now. It’s a baseless idea, but she might not believe the contrary. “That’s not what I meant.” I look at her hands and say it as clearly as I can, “I’m not interested in Ben.” “Oh.” Her shoulders sag. With relief? Mortification? Disbelief? I’m not sure. I ask her why she would think that, and she doesn’t answer for a long time. “You know about the Fox, right?” she says finally. That tugs on something in my mind, a dream maybe, a memory, but I

know if I pull, it will overtake everything in the present. And I want to be in the present, here, with Hannah. I shake my head to clear it. “The new feature?” Hannah sidles in closer. Her bare knee brushes against mine under the table. Once, then away. It’s usually not a good idea to talk about recreational brain-computer interfaces in public—it’s like mentioning methamphetamines; you’ll get looks—but the shop is empty, and it’s not like the automated boba machines are listening. “I have it,” Hannah whispers. “What do you mean, you have it.” You hear about people doing it all the time. The illegal, back-alley operations to get the recreational BCIs inserted into their brains. They’re popular, and just by looking at someone you’d never be able to tell that they had a transhuman implant sitting right under their skull. There are several features that come with the rBCIs. For example, Pan is the intelligence enhancement; Cat, the movement and coordination enhancement; derived from research into BCIs for paraplegics and stroke patients and the like. The Fox, a matchmaking enhancement, is the newest one. It seems unfeasible to me that an algorithm can help its users find love, much less be able to subtly control their actions, words, and movement patterns to help them achieve it. But apparently, its program is running right now in a small electrode under Hannah’s cranium. “Ben and I were supposed to get it together, but he chickened out last minute,” she says. I gulp down a few mouthfuls of tea before I realize she’s expecting me to say something. “What did you want from it?” “Shit, I don’t know. I thought I’d wake up and know who my soulmate was the next day. Graduate, get married, start a family. But I just had a headache. God, why am I telling you this?” I blink. “I don’t know.” “Would you understand if I said that all I want is to fall in love—and I mean really fall in love and know it was love?” I think about the woman in my dream who spoke out of the mouth of the Fox, who called me her girl. For the first time, I do understand. It’s a feeling of wanting something so badly you’d sacrifice your own mind, your own reality, for it to be true, so I say, “I think I do. But it doesn’t seem real.” “Who cares if it’s actually real? As long as it seems real,” Hannah says. “You know, the person who did my implant said they named the Fox after the mythical Chinese fox spirits, 狐狸精 (hú lì jīng). Have you heard of that?” “They’re demonic creatures that take on the shape of beautiful women in order to seduce men in power and create chaos,” I say immediately, but I’m not quite paying attention. In my mind, I keep hearing Hannah say, the person who did my implant. I conjure up the image of Hannah following my father into the Red Lotus. That day, I stayed there for two hours, missed my afternoon class, and never saw either of them come out. Is it just a coincidence that my father is teaching

a course on brain-computer interfaces? That after lecture last week both he and Hannah disappeared? That he lied about where he was at lunchtime? But those are questions for later. Compartmentalization, I urge myself. Hannah swirls her tea like a zealot. “Exactly. It wasn’t real for those men.” “Why should we think about it as men?” “Is there a difference?” “Perspective bias. ‘He who holds the pen holds the power.’ Origin unknown,” I say. “Why did you ask me to come here with you?” “Honestly?” “If you can.” Hannah heaves a deep sigh. “I thought I had to warn you off Ben.” “Alright,” I say. “You did that. And I have class at three.”

Love story. Or a history. My mother was a singer. She met my father at a bar she was playing, and he bought her a drink. Nine months later, she died during my birth. My father was not at the hospital. He had not known about the pregnancy.

That’s how he tells me the story. Bare bones, plucked clean of emotion. When I was younger, I refused to believe there was nothing more. I searched for clues. A button in a pair of old pants that didn’t match any of my father’s meant, on a walk one night, it had come loose from my mother’s coat, and she’d slipped it in his back pocket for safekeeping. The old-fashioned photograph of a woman with dark hair and fervent eyes in his dresser was a portrait of her. A scuff on a retired shirt of his was from where he helped her carry her peeling guitar case. Never mind that the button turned out to be a piezoelectric transducer and the photograph was a picture of my father’s own mother and my mother didn’t even play guitar. Never mind all of that. I conjured a whirlwind romance for them that I repeat to myself today. It’s my favorite story, my favorite thing to remember, and it’s only logical. Because my story is the only way her death would be justified. The only way my existence makes sense. The only reason that I’d remember that lullaby she hummed to me through layers of flesh and blood.

Dream journal. We’re back on the beach, lying back in the sand. My toes in the Fox’s fur. There are no stars in this dreamscape sky, only memories. Real or fake, I don’t know. The shadow of my mother is beside me, around me, inside my heart.

Mom, I say. Why did you leave? The Fox rolls her pelt onto me, covers me like a warm blanket. I didn’t want to, my girl, she says. Believe me, I didn’t want to.

Mom, I say. How do you know when you love someone? But the Fox doesn’t answer, just flicks her tail in a silent swish, wiping the beach away. I wake up crying, seawater running into my mouth, curdling on my tongue. Half-asleep, I can still hear my mother’s voice, singing her lullaby.

When my father sees my red-rimmed eyes, he looks overjoyed. I ask him what’s the matter, and he starts laughing. I ask him, “Why are you laughing,” but he only laughs harder. His laughter makes my thyroid throb, and before I even notice them, he springs forward and catches my tears in a mason jar. I don’t tell him about the memory loss. It’s expected, I tell myself. My pediatrician told my father that my eidetic memory might fade with time. Most children who exhibit photographic memory lose it by the time they turn eighteen. But it’s not only that. My thinking is all jumbled, too. I put on a pair of pants that are out of my daily rotation, the ones that cinch in too tightly at the wait, and when I look in the mirror, I study myself the way Hannah might see me in lecture today. I can’t remember if I’ve always felt like this before. I must have been capable of thinking these thoughts before. I must have, because I’m still me. These sticky-sweet thoughts that cling on and don’t let go, that make me envision instead of remember. That make me cry. They must have been a part of me before, because where else would they come from? What separates now from before? Nothing, so far as I can see. My memory stretches back, long and untarnished, apart from this past week. A snake, each moment a scale. Each scale accounted for. In class, the words my father says slip in and out of my brain and don’t catch. Hannah doesn’t look over at me once, but after lecture ends, she stands and says, “I’m sorry. Can I make it up to you?” We get coffee, and Hannah teaches me how to order. She giggles for a full minute after I tell her I’ve never drank coffee because I read on WebMD that it makes your urine smell. Her laugh lines weather her face in a pleasant pattern, and I get an urge to feel the texture of her hand, even though that serves no practical purpose. On the drive back to campus, Hannah sings under her breath, You’re the light between my fingers, I catch you but can’t hold on. My blood runs cold. My hands scramble for some semblance of a grip on the steering wheel. That song. That melody. I’d know it anywhere, like a coffee stain on a map. “What are you singing?” Her neck goes ramrod straight. She sings a few more lines for me, in her performance voice, now that she knows she’s being listened to. It’s unmistakable. The song is my mother’s lullaby. “Who’s the artist,” I demand. “Are you okay?”

“I—yeah. Who’s the artist?” Hannah tells me. It’s an unfamiliar name, but hope has latched on and won’t let go. I ask her everything she knows. The artist came out with this song years ago, and she doesn’t make music anymore. She lives in New York City, possibly doing some work for a nonprofit. Hannah isn’t sure about the details. She looks at me like I’ve grown three heads. I chew on my lip. “New York’s only four hours away.” I mean to say that to myself, but it comes tumbling out of my lips. “Can you please tell me what’s going on?” she says. I can’t say it out loud, as much as I know I should explain. It’s too insane. What are the chances? There are so many more logical explanations. What’s to say I heard this song at a young age and misremembered? Coagulated my yearnings and the truth. I don’t remember anything Hannah says for the rest of the ride back to

campus.

Friday night, Hannah calls and tells me she was planning to go to the movies with a friend but they canceled last minute and she was wondering if I wanted to come. It’s another remake of the X-men. The CGI is something novel—they keep thinking of new ways to depict explosions—but the story has been resurrected countless times; it’s more holy than Jesus. When He kisses Her at the end, flowers bloom and fireworks burst like apple jelly in the sky. “Doesn’t it make you mad?” I say to Hannah as we’re walking out into the lobby. “What?” she says through a mouthful of kettle corn. “The way he can just obtain her, and then it’s happily ever after. The way every story about a man isn’t over until he’s subjected a woman to be with him, until love is resolved, even if it’s not about love, just about explosions. And is it even love if you don’t know what they both want? And the way the woman doesn’t get a say in the matter. She’s expected to be happy. And everything, including the woman, just happens for the man.” Hannah shrugs, dismisses me too quickly. “That’s just how movies like these go.” “But doesn’t it make you mad,” I say again. “It’s not like I can change it.” I open my mouth to say more. I’ve never spoken like this before, with something racing through my veins. Something compelling me to speak more. It’s Hannah’s doing, I decide. Everything strange convalesced from the beginning, when I met Hannah. “But don’t you think we’ve bought into it? Haven’t you bought into it?” “What’s gotten into—” Hannah starts to say, then her eyes jump to something behind me, and she grabs my arm, jerks me over to the side, pulls me into a women’s restroom. She’s giggling, a little nervous. “What?” “Shhh.”

She’s close. She smells like cosmetics and something milky. I feel the atoms coming off her skin prickling my skin. The hair on the back of my neck rises. “Okay, honestly?” she whispers. “If you can be.” “My friend? The one who I told you couldn’t make it? He’s right there.” She points, and I see Ben standing in the middle of the lobby, looking lost. She laughs, and I can’t think why it’s so funny. “I just didn’t want to come with him, so I lied and told him I couldn’t come, but it looks like he came to see it by himself.” Oh. I laugh with her. “That’s awful of you,” I say, but I don’t mean it, and I think she can tell I don’t mean it. We sneak out through the window and run to her car. As the car takes us away from the movie theater, Hannah licks the salt and sugar off her fingers from the kettle corn bag, and I have to force myself not to look at her mouth work. I stare straight ahead, and I have the urge to say something impulsive, like, “Will you come to New York with me?” Hannah glances over, her thumb in her mouth. “Why? “When?” “Tomorrow.” “Okay. Why?” I want to say I think my mother’s there, but it feels like I’m breaching some sort of barrier. “I can’t tell you, but…but it’s important.” “What’s so important that you can’t tell me?” she says. “I mean, not because it’s me. Just, if you want me to go with you, I will, but I need to know why.” “I’m not sure,” I say, and I lie, “I need you to be there.” I don’t need her. I want her. But they feel close enough in that moment that I don’t feel bad about the lie. I will later, though, I imagine. “Stop being so selfish, Bailey. Just tell me. Hell, make something up.” “I’m not being selfish,” I say. “I don’t think that’s a fair assessment.” “I think it’s perfectly fair. You didn’t even ask if I was free. I have plans tomorrow. My parents are coming up to visit. I have a group project to work on for a class. I have a song to write.” “You’re never going to finish that song,” I say, and I mean to be hurtful. I’ve never felt like this before, like I’m holding a knife. “You’re going to fall in love, and who cares if it’s real. You’re going to get married and buy a house and have sex and pop out a few children, and maybe you’ll sing lullabies for them when they can’t sleep, and maybe you’ll keep telling yourself you’re still thinking of ideas for your song, but you’ll never write it. You’ll never sing it. You’ll never sing—” I’m imagining the green rage building in Hannah’s eyes when she reaches over, grabs the front of my shirt, twists my body awkwardly away from the dash, and kisses me. I think I reciprocate, or maybe I’m too stunned to move. She works quickly. She sucks all the marrow in me out, then starts on my blood. I only think to use my hands to hold her and keep her there once she’s pulling away. “You’re so fucking immature,” she says.

She crumples up the kettle corn bag. There might be tears in her eyes. *

I can’t sleep. At six in the morning, I leave for New York. On the way, I dig through search histories and find the address of the nonprofit where the woman who sang the lullaby works. It’s a women’s health organization. I buy her song for $3.99 and listen to it on repeat for the four-hour drive. The streets are quiet. Every now and then someone—or a pigeon—walks by but doesn’t enter the nonprofit’s building. Around lunchtime, the doors open, and a few women straggle out. They look young. And strong. I put my hand on the lock of my car, and then I realize I am not as strong as them. I delete the song from my device, and I drive back home myself. I make it in three.

“Tell me about Mom,” I say to my father. He’s brought home takeout from the Red Lotus again, which he’s done every day this week. He chews loudly, gestures with his chopsticks. “I’ve already told you all you need to know.” “But you haven’t told me everything. I want to know everything about her.

Please.”

My father shakes his head, and points to his face. “What is this?” I take one look, and I choose not to register what I see. I don’t want to play this game. “Sorrow,” I say like a command. “Regret. Misery.” “No, Bailey. Impassiveness.” “Just tell me,” I shout. I’m angry. I’m green. I’m sick. What are you hiding? I want to say. Why do you treat me like your patient and not your daughter? Instead, what comes out is, “What were you doing with Hannah Ouyang at the Red Lotus nineteen days ago?” “What?” he says. “I wasn’t.” “How much money are you getting to stick Foxes in people’s brains?” My father is silent for ten seconds. I can feel his glare. I can hear his calculations. “Who told you that? Was it the Fu’s?” “No one told me anything,” I say. “Are you going to try to stick something in my brain, too? To fix me? Is playing psychiatrist every second not enough?” “You’re emotional,” he says, and I hear in his words almost a tone of awe. “Listen to all these things you’re saying, Bailey. You’re being emotional.” “Fuck you. I wish you were dead instead of Mom.” He’s completely calm when he says, “Your mother isn’t dead.” He’s lying, I tell myself. I try to delete the memory of him saying that, but it plays back on itself, again and again, overtaking every thought with my father’s immeasurably calm face.

“She’s not dead. She just left,” he says. “She didn’t want you.” I stand. “You’re feeling like you made a mistake.” He spreads his hands. “It’s the truth.”

I arrive at the Red Lotus just before it closes. I used to come here a lot as a kid, play in the kitchen in the back while my father disappeared. Grandpa Fu would give me the butts of cabbages to play with, along with tasting spoons, garlands of dried chili pepper. Grandma and Audrey Fu would let me sneak bits of noodles out of the pans, present me with canned aloe vera drinks “on the house.” Audrey’s blasting her playlist as she mops up, moving with absolute dexterity. She’s still the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen, even after all these years. It’s hard to believe that she and my father are the same age. While my father is withering, silver hairs spreading across his head, ears, nostrils like invasive vines, sapping the life from him, Audrey is immaculate, even in her stained apron, the bit of pudge she has filling her out beyond the lines, making her presence larger than life.

“Hey, Sprout,” she says when she sees me, but doesn’t pause in her cleaning. She does it with muscle memory: swift, clean strokes, not an ounce of energy wasted. I lean against the counter and watch, breathing in the familiar smells of the restaurant. The kitchen sink, burnt pan bottoms, cardboard shipping boxes. “Whatcha need?” Audrey says, taking the mop bucket into the janitorial closet and reappearing without missing a beat. “We have some leftover spring rolls we can throw into the fryer for you.” “I’m good,” I say. “I need to know something, though.” Audrey stutters. Turns around slowly, rakes a few flyaways away from her forehead. I skip straight to the point. “What’s my father doing here?” Audrey’s face flashes through a few different shades. “I don’t think it’s my place to tell you, Sprout.” “Look.” I take a deep breath. “I think I already know. I just need to hear it from you. It has to do with the rBCIs, doesn’t it? And the new feature? The Fox?” Audrey looks positively wrecked. “I told him he should have told you,” she says, the words all rolled together. “For one, it’s unethical, I told him. She deserves to know. It’s not your place, I said. But he went through with it anyway. All these years—I’m sorry, Bailey.” “Wait wait wait,” I say. “What are you talking about?” “Oh god… Okay. I told him, when he first did it, if you ever asked, I was going to tell you.” I feel like I’m in a vacuum. “Tell me what?” “You’ve had an rBCI ever since you were sixteen months old, Bailey. That’s why you have an eidetic memory. It was good for that, and not much else.”

I feel nothing. What is there to feel? “I’m sorry I never told you,” Audrey says. “I’m so sorry.” I look at the restaurant, the water damage in the ceiling corners, the sounds of Grandma and Grandpa Fu cleaning up in the kitchen, bumbling pots and pans together with their arthritic joints, and I don’t blame her. “Did you upload… other features?” Audrey wrings her hands. “We uploaded the Fox programming last month. He said it was for your own good. I think he thought he was doing the right thing, too. I don’t know anymore. He said it would help you… connect with people. You’ve been so alone your whole life, Bailey.” “Okay. Thanks for telling me,” I breathe. My lips are so numb I barely register saying it. I think Audrey says something else, but I don’t hear her. I turn to go just as the song that’s been playing ends, and the next one begins. A soft guitar strums. I know what song this is before I hear the words. You’re the light between my fingers, I catch you but can’t hold on.

Dream journal. It’s just the Fox now. The beach is dry, starfish plopping about where the tide receded. Who are you? I say to the Fox. She opens her jaws, and only a whine comes out. Her body seems to fracture, splitting into pixels, stacks, data. I watch as the world is torn apart and built anew. I’m looking into a mirror. I feel my mother in my heart.

The boba place is empty again, as if Hannah and I are meant to be here right now, skipping lecture on a Monday morning. I order another artificially flavored tea. Hannah wrinkles her nose at me. We sit, not knowing what to say. We’re at an impasse, I can feel it. A single move will jolt us. But does she feel it? “Was any of it real?” I say at last. She looks at me quizzically. “All my life I feel I’ve been searching for something,” I say, and she laughs. I ask her why she’s laughing at me, and she says that literally everyone feels that way.

“Well, not me,” I say. “I never felt this way until my father put the Fox in my brain. And I thought I was looking for my mother, but I think I found whatever I was looking for in you.” “Wait a minute,” she says. “You have a Fox?” “Yeah, but not because I wanted one. I guess what I’m asking is…Was any of this real? Or was it just because of the Fox? My father pulling the strings.” Hannah puts her hand on mine, and I get the urge to slip away. “Does it matter?” she says. “Yes. To me, yes.”

“You don’t have to know.” “I’ve known everything all my life,” I say. “So yes, I do have to know.” “But who cares if it’s real?” Hannah says. “As long as we felt it was real. Isn’t that all we have to go off of anyway? Our feelings. Our perceptions of the world.”

I start to think back to all the memories I have stored, each in their own box, available by command. They’re my perceptions, I think. I get the urge to leave, to run. To contemplate everything and anything. Hannah leans forward. “Stay for a while?” The moment is sun-spiced and smells like artificial sugar. I’m not sure what will come after. I’m not sure what will came before. I leave my hand under Hannah’s.