The Virtual Swallows of Hog Island Read online

  I meant: Don’t get over her. Live here.

  I invented a level for a girl who’d been raped by her neighbor in which she got to run through the woods in the body of a lion.

  Nothing to catch. No hunters to outsmart. Just running for as long as she wanted to run.

  I made a world for my wife where she could be happy—in an apartment across town where she wouldn’t be my wife. In the world I made for her, I still love her and drive by her apartment sometimes because it’s the only way to make my nerve endings bristle.

  * * *

  When Helen was about to start her gaming session, I tuned in on a sub-line.

  She was in one of the gaming rooms—which are a lot like racquetball courts—and was fitted with goggles, again not unlike racquetball.

  Klaus cued up her session and then left, as was the standard protocol. But he could always patch himself in from another gaming room. He’d dabbled in coding. That wouldn’t be hard.

  On my small screen, Helen appeared under the built-in table in her Childhood Kitchen and it was just the way I’d made it—appliances and all. Her caustic mother and her loud father weren’t speaking yet, only clomping around in their highly detailed shoes. Helen pulled the terrier onto her lap. The cookies were in place on top of the counter. The heating vent was keeping her and Duchess warm.

  Klaus had told me that the mother and father should speak in Near-Audibles. This means that the hushed tones approximate speech and the player’s subconscious will fill in the words. It had been one of the innovative techniques that made Klaus a renegade.

  I rendered the rest of the house around her. It was just a rough sketch and would only come into play if Helen wandered out of the kitchen. People did, sometimes, wanting to revisit their youths. Like the Near-Audibles, the loose renderings would get filled in by the patient’s subconscious.

  Things were going okay, as I said. Her mother was speaking in a Near-Audible and her father responded likewise. Helen was on task. She wasn’t absorbing their words. She was reaching from under the table to find the box of cookies, her small hand patting around nervously.

  Her parents were hissing at each other. Her father took two quick lunging steps at her mother. Her mother took one small step back. He was shouting when Helen’s hand touched the corner of the cookie box. She sat up a bit to make herself taller. Duchess almost slid off her lap but she kept one hand curled around the dog’s ribs.

  Her father’s shoe stepped on her mother’s dainty foot. He was pinning her to that spot.

  Helen looked up and saw the loose etchings of their faces but quickly, so very quickly, her mind filled it in—her father’s wildly etched hair became actual hair. His blobby hand became sharp and clear.

  The slap.

  Her mother fell back on one leg to try to keep herself upright as her ribs crashed into the counter.

  But Helen stayed true to herself. She pulled the Friar Tuck cookie box down. She popped the lid.

  Her mother was on the marble floor crying. Her father’s shoes paused, pointed toes facing Helen. She froze, holding Duchess and the box of cookies.

  Her mother, with her cheek on the floor, looked over. Their eyes locked. Her mother raised one finger to her lips, blood trickling from a cut above her eye.

  And then a fire alarm started squawking overhead.

  Her father cursed in a Near-Audible and staggered out. Smoke poured from the heating vent and rolled in across the floor. Helen pulled a cookie out of the box and shoved it into her mouth. She achieved her goal.

  The screen should have gone blank. The next level should have started, but it didn’t.

  A new pair of shoes skittered in, white suede bucks. They stopped at the built-in and a voice said, “No, no, no.”

  Klaus’s face appeared, flushed and grinning. “Helen,” he said. “You didn’t start the fire.”

  “But I did,” she said.

  He covered his nose and mouth with his arm and shook his head. “You’re a little girl!” he shouted. “You deserve to be protected.”

  It was a breach that went beyond all rules, policies, and standards of care. Therapists weren’t allowed in the Games. The Games were about the achievement of Self—a kind of healing that also empowers, a kind of healing that the patient controls and therefore owns.

  Not Healing brought to you by Klaus Han.

  A woman’s legs appeared—Helen’s legs. Helen as Self.

  This had never happened before either. There were levels, goals that, once achieved, could move one to the next level.

  But there she was, leggy and beautiful. Her pale skin, blotchy.

  She crawled under the table and pulled Child-Helen out along with Duchess. She had no intention of letting go of Duchess and never had. I realized now from Child-Helen and Self-Helen’s desperation around that dog that it must have died in the actual fire. Child-Helen clung to Self-Helen, the dog’s puffy head between them. “But Mommy,” Child-Helen said.

  “That’s what Klaus is here for,” Self-Helen said. “He will help Mommy because he’s a professional who helps people.”

  Over Self-Helen’s shoulder, Child-Helen watched Klaus kneel next Mommy and wedge his arm under her.

  Soon they were all out on the front lawn—massive and green with an empty fountain. Daddy was passed out on the grass. Klaus was easing Mommy onto a black wrought iron lawn chair. Self and Child were holding on to each other tightly while Duchess tore around the yard, yapping.

  The screen went blank.

  Klaus Han had gone into the virtual reality. He had entered a patient’s World. He had blurred levels. He’d let Self save Child.

  It was dangerous and groundbreaking.

  I heard someone running and skidding down the hallway. My office door flew open.

  Klaus was beaming. “Who says you can never go in? Huh? Huh? And the two of them! Am I right?” He was breathless and triumphant. His hair slick with sweat, he was one ebullient bear. “How did I look?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “God damn it, you’re right!” He spun around then and headed quickly back the way he’d come, leaving my door wide open. (Helen was technically still mid-session.) How did he know I’d watch? He just knew.

  His voice rang down the hall. “I’m going to present this at the next conference! Bobbies! Did you hear that? Renegade!”

  I will never smell like the DNA of Klaus Han.

  * * *

  I set to work then because I knew what I needed.

  I worked until the last session of the night. It was the Everly boy patching in from his house, which was often the case with minors. I cued up his World from my desk and uploaded a prerecorded video of Klaus reading the rules of the level from the information I’d sent him.

  Soon enough, the Everly boy was peering out from within the massive robot helmet, eyes blinking. He walked through green fields as the winds picked up and the sky turned gray. He clomped heavily through the high grass, over the rocks, searching for white-throated swallows caught in fishing nets and plastic bags.

  He squatted down when he found one, the hydraulic gears of his robotic suit hissing, and he delicately cut it loose with a small knife that popped from a toolkit embedded in his arm gear. Then he found another swallow and another. The birds’ wings fluttered wildly. Pale chests, intricately patterned wings, blunt tails. I coded each of the swallows individually, changing something infinitesimal in each of their wet black eyes, shifting the fine yellow dots and stripes on their heads. I remembered how I’d always loved the pictures in my father’s Audubon books. I admired him now for having a soft spot for puffins even though it had embarrassed me at the time. I remembered Klaus waving his fat-knuckled hand and heard his voice in my head. It is what it is.

  We are who we are. We need what we need.

  As the game went on, the boy collected points for each swallow he set free.

  But, eventually, he came upon one that seemed dead. Still and dry-eyed, its wings were lifeless. The boy cut it lo
ose, but it didn’t move. He held it in his large robotic hand, feathers ruffling, and stared at it from behind his shielded helmet. He looked like he might start to cry.

  Don’t cry, I urged him. Don’t.

  As a boy, I would go for walks on Hog Island alone and I’d let myself cry because I could always blame it on the wind. I was lonesome then in a way that feels so familiar now.

  But the Everly boy didn’t cry. He trusted the game. He lifted his metallic hand in the air, and the bird shuddered. Its wings twitched and it hopped to its delicate pinkish claws, shook its head, and batted off into the air.

  I watched that moment again and again. I watched it as many times as the boy had saved swallows. Maybe more.

  And then I walked out of my office and down the hall, past Bobbies A and B and Marcy, who were joking as they shoved themselves into their coats, heading home for the night—to lovers or not. I didn’t know.

  I slipped by them, unnoticed, and made my way to the row of gaming rooms. None of them were occupied. I opened a door and stepped inside. I put on a pair of goggles hanging from the peg, tightened the rubber strap and thought—ever so fleetingly—of my father’s rubbery bathing suit and how he had seemed part-seal.

  I used the computer in the wall to cue up my game.

  (I’ve told no one about my game and I won’t. The secret rises inside of me, all yeasty ferment. Sometimes I imagine how it shows on my face—a puffed-up, blanched unspoken.)

  It’s a simple game with only one level.

  I go to Hog Island alone and drown myself over and over again.

  I intend to play it until I don’t need to play it anymore.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Julianna Baggott

  Art copyright © 2017 by Mark Smith