Page 83 - Vol. V #6

ing their phones or listening to their music. No one seemed to pay her any mind. She could not find a camera or even a set of stray eyes. This wasn’t a prank.
intersected, just passing objects in space. The Couple discussed the movie they saw the previous weekend. Another lab mate offered greetings to them. Conversation rose and fell.
But Googling him revealed the same web pages, the same tributes. She even tried adding “alive” to the search. Nothing. Abby found no new solutions, just further complications. He was dead, still.
Her phone was silent throughout the rest of the morning. None of the other boys had texted her back. She might as well mourn the lot of them, then. Start over tomorrow with another set of profiles, another bunch of baskets of personal information to sift through and try to find the glimmering anecdote or fact that would spark hope for a romance.
Abby boarded the train. The tracks glided above parking lots of housing developments where peo-
While she waited outside her advisor’s door, she went through her phone and deleted the conver- sations of the boys whose responses had stagnat- ed and then stopped. Tim. Delete. John C. Delete. Then there was The Ex-Whatever.
“If this was a dream, it was a remarkably vivid one—
free of the foggy uncertainty and numb legs of sleep.”
Below this were text conversations with Rachel and Abby’s mom. That was it. She thought back to the dinner party, the sparseness of her life.
ple may or may not look to see her pass. Then the train descended into darkness, under the water.
The response from The Ex-Whatever came a few hours later. It was well past nine. The revisions on the paper were nearly complete. She’d read it at home once more and then send it back to her advisor.
Rocking in the train’s seats, it occurred to Abby that she may be exhausted. Her advisor had been pushing her to get the paper ready to present at a conference next month. So maybe she was just imagining these texts. Or, at the very least, she was letting some practical joker get the best of her. But when she emerged back above ground, her phone chimed to indicate a new text: “What did you think of the latest episode of Westworld?”
“Not so bad. I don’t have to worry about hitting my health plan’s deductible anymore.”
This time, Abby didn’t flinch. She replaced her phone in her pocket and continued on. Whatever this person was trying to accomplish, it wasn’t worth her time.
He threw back the conversational ball later that night. “Does Taqueria Cancun count?”
~
As Abby went to sleep, it occurred to her what she was doing was strange. She was actively commu- nicating with someone who claimed to be dead. She had no idea who was responding to her mes- sages—a serial killer, a mom in Topeka, or, more likely, just some other random bored stranger.
The lab was quiet that morning. The other lab mates worked in her orbit—operating the ma- chines, dosing lab samples, typing on the ancient computers. But she and her lab mates rarely
He or she probably didn’t even like Vertigo, didn’t
“So how is being dead?” she typed. Clicked send.
She laughed as she took the bus to BART. “Are you in heaven?” she wrote.
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