By Vivian Chou
“When I was eight,” Frances says, chewing a prune over the kitchen counter, “I went to Indonesia with my father for a mission.” She opens the Days-of-the-Week pill box next to the teakettle and removes a capsule.
Tara submerges Kale and Blueberry Crunch flakes under the skim milk in her cereal bowl, pondering the ethics of playing Frances Bingo to stay sane. “Lemme guess,” she says. “He was an oral surgeon?”
Frances lights up. “How did you know?”
Tara waves her spoon in the air. “You told me once.”
“He did so much good,” Frances says. “In Jakarta, he did free root canals, implanted false teeth. People were so thankful.”
It’s day five of cohabitation with Frances at the Intergen CereHealing Center and Tara fantasizes about escaping. Maybe if she falls slowly down the stairwell, someone will call 911 and free her from this hellhole.
Even away from Richard, Tara’s mind echoes with his sniping, like a phantom limb in lancinating pain:
Just give up on being a composer, Tara. I could invest your inheritance in real estate, but you’re pissing it away because you don’t have the balls to leave your job.
Ding-dong. The bell chimes through every room in the facility.
“Good Morning, Intergen residents!” a voice says over the intercom. “Today is Tuesday, January 4th, 2052. It’s a great day for remembering, orienting, and living! Please take your medications and join us for Cooking with Ginseng, Garden Walk, or Seashell Picture Frame Crafting starting at nine-thirty.”
Tara deflates inside, not ready to face another day of combatting the invisible enemy currently replicating in her brain. She slumps over the kitchen table, steeling herself for the humiliation of gluing rocks with Mod Podge to dollar-store balsa wood. Outside is another eerie cloudless day, and she hasn’t seen rain in months.
Tara swallows her pill with a glug of milk and a hitchhiked sliver of kale stem. Ever since the permafrost melted and the prolific Fairbanks Brain Amoeba infected the North American aquifer, the pills have become a daily necessity. Tara blows her nose into a tissue and wipes mucus onto a test strip. It glows magenta-red, indicating high levels of proto-enzyme.
Frances coughs, washing her glass bowl in the kitchen sink. Tara has learned Frances’s coughing is her way of politely ignoring her. Word is no one has left Intergen in less than a year with Meeb levels in the pink zone, much less magenta.
“Well, that’s nice you went to Indonesia,” Tara says. “I always wanted to visit Japan. I even had the money saved up after college. But Richard’s promotion took us here to Chicago. He’s the top salesperson for Arcadia Bank in the Midwest.”
“I never trust salespeople.” Frances says. She watches Tara with her blue eyes encircled by gray arcus senilis rings. Tara holds her breath, awaiting Frances’s next looping discourse. Frances’s catalog of notable life experiences stopped over twenty years ago. Now she retells the same fifteen stories, painting the story of her existence, be it selectively true, false, rosy, or dramatic. Tara doesn’t want to be rude to Frances, because she was taught to respect her elders, but she is melting inside.
Last night, Tara protested her dire fate to the Intergen manager. “I already have a headache half the day. I can’t listen to her anymore.”
The manager shrugged and gave an encouraging smile. “We all need at least four hours of conversation a day to stave off the effects of early dementia,” he said. “You’re helping each other. Frances’s long-term memory is robust, and she enjoys telling her stories. She’s preventing your protozoal load from increasing.”
Tara would not call what goes in apartment 5685 “conversation.” Tara could leave the room while Frances droned on and replace herself with a rack of three-pound dumbbells or a meditation cushion from the Wellness Lounge, and the world would still twirl on its axis.
But before Frances can speak again this morning, the bell chimes.
“All residents,” the voice says, “Please report to the Rainbow Room for morning activities.”
Even though she’s seventy-five, Frances insists on taking the stairs. Tara doesn’t think it’s good for Frances’s knees, but it’s Frances’s brain everyone’s worried about, so she doesn’t argue, and they plod down to morning activities.
During the brief silence in the cold concrete stairwell, Richard’s words resurface:
You think you’re so much better than me. At least I worked for my money. All you ever did was get born.
In the Rainbow Room, the early crowd of blue-haired olds and prematurely confused sixty-year-olds buzz in the room and Tara nearly gags on the funk of Silvadene and Vaseline in the air. It depresses her, being thirty years younger than the youngest inmate.
CNN hums on the flat-screen TV next to floating teak shelves housing tealights and arched pink Phalaenopses orchids. The glare from the CFL lightbulbs flickers, and Tara squints, clutching her temple in pain.
“Cognitive decline and loneliness are linked,” the CDC official announces, “just like anxiety and depression. Since we implemented the Cohabitation Initiative, we have restored thousands of Americans to sixty-percent brain capacity and ten percent protozoal load. Together, we can re-engage with our loved ones, return to the workforce, and restore America to its former dominance. Our goal is: Fifty by Fifty! Fifty percent of the available workforce will work by 2050. We can do it, America.”
Tara ponders the government’s lofty goal of fifty percent employment. Without intervention, the Meeb eats people’s brains and then morphs its host into one giant worm. White matter oozes out of their ears like overnight oats, encasing them in goo, like the dead husk of a tree stump ravaged by a strangler tree.
Tara imagines Richard returning from work to find her a giant worm in the living room, her ass stuck to the couch while watching cooking shows and never cooking. He’d probably blame her for becoming a worm, too. Worse, she imagines finding him as a worm, spewing epithets through his fifty orifices.
“Okay, folks,” the activities leader rings a bell. “Line up by activity under the signs—all three have been shown to lower protozoal load as much as your Meeb pills.”
Tara hopes to escape Frances’s tedious monologues with their camp-like activities, but Frances follows her as if there is an unwritten rule all roommates must never separate, as if their storytelling glue is bespoke to the randomly assigned pair, and if they are disjoined, then they will spontaneously immolate.
“What are we doing today, Tara?” Frances’s face wrinkles into a kind smile.
Tara inhales deeply to steady herself and wonders if Intergen’s gray pallor of senescence and cloud of Ben-Gay and Vicks will age her even more prematurely, entering her brain in a toxic fume mist, and destroying the remaining virgin neurons.
“Garden walk,” Tara says, sucking in air through her teeth. She needs to go outside for fresh air before the Meeb migraine pushes her eyeballs out of her sockets.
The majestic pink magnolia on the garden path bloomed over Christmas, but no rain or wind has come yet to disseminate its petals. Purple rhododendrons pose along the stone path as robins chirp relentlessly. Tara breathes in the perfume of the flowers and braces herself for the verbal samsara.
“Okay, folks,” the Intergen worker says. “Feel free to chat quietly with a friend or walk in silence. They finished repairs on the meditation walking path over by the Japanese maple grove for anyone interested.”
Frances brightens. “Let’s do that! I’ll take some enlightenment.”
Tara hopes Frances will take the cue for silence, but if she’s learned anything about old people, it’s that they don’t like to be told what to do. Maybe she’s ageist for assuming they would cower like toddlers in decrepitude. She doesn’t like to be told what to do, either. It wasn’t until the Cohabitation Task Force threatened her with a fifty-grand fine that she checked herself into Intergen.
Tara walks the stone path’s outer edge and Richard enters her mind:
Why don’t you get a job as a piano teacher? There are musicians who make actual money, you know.
But Tara doesn’t want to be a piano teacher. She wants to write contemporary classical music, and she does, and it’s beautiful, and she’s even got some side gig commissions, but her nights are consumed with how to leave Richard, shed him like a crusted cocoon, and her internet searches at two in the morning are how to break up with a narcissist. But then she’s afraid of what he’ll do when she leaves him, and he’s only struck her twice, but she’s hit him more than that after his many transgressions, so she’s not really abused, and his dad hit him when he was little, and so he doesn’t really know any better, because that’s what he associates with love.
Isn’t it?
Her days at their condo were filled with drilling in data entry remotely, takeout delivered by drones, groceries and sundry items by mail. She could go weeks without seeing a human in real life, except she still frequented the library and bought a mocha at the coffee shop when she won a raffle at work for the highest number of hours billed.
And she wasn’t ever alone because she was married to Richard and even though her cortisol shot through the roof when he was home, she’d heard married people lived longer. It was better for them.
You don’t have to be a football player to get brain damage, to get a brain bathed in constant cortisol, to languish in a constant state of nauseating anxiety, sitting on the bathmat at two in the morning wondering, how did I get here, I’ll never leave him, he’ll never let me.
“I couldn’t stand the sight of blood,” Frances drones on the meditation path. “It was too much for me, in Indonesia. But my dad, he planted the seed of compassion in me. I couldn’t become a nurse, to help people, but I worked as a therapist for a long while after the Third Depression.”
“That’s great,” Tara says. She wonders what the listening version of Frances was like. If she didn’t have nauseous unease shuddering through her, she’d mention how Richard volunteered with the Boys and Girls Club when he was just starting out at Arcadia. He grew up poor and is not all bad.
“I found it hard to work with clients that didn’t want to help themselves,” Frances says. “There’s a saying in therapy, never work harder than your clients do.” She kicks a pebble off the path absently, her hands in the pockets of her navy windbreaker.
“My therapist says I should leave Richard,” Tara says. She doesn’t mention the therapist said she never tells anyone what to do, but she made an exception for Tara.
“Sometimes I wish I didn’t mind the sight of blood,” Frances says. “Pulling teeth is one and done. The mind, it’s fickle.” She taps her temple. “That’s why we’re all going crazy with the Meebs.”
Tara swallows, and glimpses through a high-up window on her tiptoes at Frances’s soul, somewhere in there, aware. She realizes she has been breathing through her mouth this whole time because her tongue is dry as gauze. Meditation is supposed to be about centered breathing through your nose, or something like that. She’s doing it wrong.
“I can’t leave him,” Tara says. She stops on the path, woozy for a moment.
If the world were perfect, then Intergen would’ve matched them based on their conversational compatibility, because their intersecting themes were like patterns in a Bach Fugue, played upside down and backwards, in a one-four-five-four progression, then back to one. Maybe their repetitive nature was not cacophony but links in a puzzle that made beautiful music.
But the world is melting and causing brains to melt. Tara is unsure how any of this is helping anyone. Frances would be better off talking to a ficus and Tara should just go home and resume drone-delivered Pad Thai and chip away at her inheritance.
Tara and Frances circle the path. Instead of fostering the silence that allows Richard to enter her brain and bully her, Tara opts for the less-dreaded option of conversation.
“Why’re you here?” Tara asks. “Your Meeb levels are low. You could live anywhere.”
Frances sparks a light in her eyes, glowing like the neon sign in the Intergen beauty salon. “My dad always taught me to help people. Don’t give up on them even at the end of life.”
Tara and Frances pass each other on the winding circular path. They will intersect again in a moment. Why is she always talking about helping people? Tara doesn’t have much to say, because she’s just waiting for her Meeb levels to go down so she can go back home. There’s nothing she can do about it. She’s always waiting: for the right modern sonata to launch her career, for Richard to come home and leave, for sleep to come at two in the morning, for a Meeb cure, for Frances to shut up.
“My PTSD clients were under constant stress-response,” Frances says. “All we can do is give the client coping tools for a life too far gone, for those stuck on their path.”
They pass each other on the circuitous path and Tara’s pace quickens, her heart beating with a shudder.
Frances beats her to the middle of the labyrinth and sits down with her legs folded beneath her. Tara marvels at her flexibility and then feels a shuddering sense of doom.
“My dad said we shouldn’t give up on people, even at the end,” Frances’s eyes shine with compassion and pats the gravel next to her, motioning for Tara to sit.
Tara does sit. Frances takes her hands in hers, and Tara closes her eyes. At first, Tara thinks the wetness on her cheek is tears dripping out of her nose, but it’s too thick. She knows better than to hope for rain.
Something cold and slimy drips onto Tara’s knee, and she opens her eyes and sees white and gray goo, the color of overnight oats. She touches her hand to her ear and feels muck, and she slumps down on the rocky path.
Frances cradles Tara’s head in her lap and strokes her hair. Tara wants to speak, to thank her for being there, but no words come out, and before her mind goes vacant and her heart muscle bursts with parasites, she feels an overwhelming love and gratitude for her roommate.
* * *
Vivian Chou is a second-generation Chinese-American writer. Her work has been published or forthcoming in Uncharted, The Forge Literary Magazine, and Apex. She prefers to fuel her writing with naps, exercise, and dystopian dread, but usually manages with black coffee and chocolate. Read more at vivianchouwriter.com.