He wore it backwards and had to turn for the webcam. It was late in the afternoon and people were splicing, everyone drinking or maybe just water in their beer bottles, no one needed to know but the camera knew. It was invite-only. Pär met his friends online waiting for someone to wink about the shirt thing.
It was like the old days—the earliest days—those chatrooms where lines of text concealed everything except your wit or the way it unraveled but they had already unraveled, now that everyone was home-bound except those who didn’t and got caught by the authorities and everyone wanted that job.
The authorities got to be out and about, catching people, binding them. It was better than fake drinking, and beer keeps better than water but costs more so save the bottle and use it again. Pär spelled out the message with tape on the front of his shirt before he swiveled it on. When he turned he couldn’t see anyone and it was thrilling and thrills were scarce, so he wore the shirt again and again in the places he went and it helped a little. But the wink. Where was it?
It had been three years since they hung out in person and new alliances bloomed. Some people you couldn’t remember why you liked them because it happened in that caged space, that hot proximity, so deadly it burned the brain out, not like this cooler arena where people could breathe still, alone in their rooms.
And new people, they came online: a friend of a friend invited them in and so the organs wobbled. They were hanging out in a lung, that was the name; it had been ironic once. Kidneys were available–the older people liked those better, but for twenty-four-year-olds the lung was best because the word held just that frisson of danger, just enough to barely feel. And that was it, yes? To feel the old feels and the new ones coming better now because everyone needed everyone even if people were the same they weren’t.
This was a good lung. They didn’t kick people out usually, just ones who spoofed the authorities, just faking it, but the real danger was the mod. The real power. The mod ran the lung. It was a right lung. Not political, not that, just the particular things about the right lung, who could say what, which clothes stayed on. Pär didn’t really go for left lungs. He steered clear.
The mod was quiet. Someone drank from a corona bottle and no one groaned because it was post-post ironic, like a möbius. A steady back-beat pulsed. Crowds were everywhere, sometimes you had to leave the room to get away. Pär clicked on origami and watched the same newspaper fold and unfold as a butterfly. This was real-time. It had to be real-time or you couldn’t feel it. There were lungs that faked it, the real-time, and if you got washed by one of those, you wondered if anything was real. You wondered and wondered.
Now the wink happened, on top of the butterfly, just an emoji bubble, so someone had been watching him or they did a capture and it was a girl. Maybe, but this was a real-face lung, so yes maybe, a girl.
Pär sent a wave. He sent his name. He applied to learn hers.
Cinda, she sent.
Rella, he typed and erased. Nice name, he wrote instead. Nueva?
She sent a nod. Pär’s name was new, too, he used it in most of the lungs. Not all. There was a group of his old flesh buddies out there and they kept their names and no one had sported them out yet. It was that risk. They needed it.
Sdrawkcab, wrote Cinda.
First! wrote Pär. She was the first to shoot backwards backward to him, here in this lung, in this hour.
You win a date, he wrote. He made his application, asking to see more than her profile, more than her thumbnail pic.
No answer for some seconds. Then a close-up. Her face. Her actual face. She’d chosen dim light and there was the nose shadow and she looked pasty and real, which was the look now, never polished, never air-brushed, the realer the better. Pimples were good. Stray hairs. Pär had a nose hair he’d been cultivating, just casually flicked out of his nostril this morning and gelled in place.
He sent his face.
Authentic, she said.
She had a pinkish blotch below her temple. You okay there? Your cheek? he asked. It’s real, it happened, she said, and he wanted to believe her.
A bubble flashed on her forehead, a third eye. Someone blinking in.
My boyfriend, said Cinda.
Pär sent a shrug. He liked her. Want to go somewhere?
The boyfriend grabbed the screen. His face large and greasy, huge pores, a master blemish nestled in the stubble on his chin.
I’m the boyfriend, he wrote and already Pär saw it would be easy. It would be fun, if he could do it without scaring off Cinda.
Glad you cleared that up. Tight blemish.
The boyfriend hesitated. He didn’t expect flattery.
Thanks man. Stay away from my girl.
This guy was a freaking congressman, but Pär would keep that language to himself.
Cinda and I might take an outing, he told the boyfriend.Talk about the weather. Pär knew Cinda was there. Though she’d turned off her bubble, her tag floated in the corner.
Nope, said the boyfriend, and flicked his cheek.
So crude, the face-touch, but Pär was ready. He tapped his nose. The boyfriend was incensed. He rubbed a hand over his jaw and the blemish burst. A dribble of white pus. So it was real. Pär was afraid he’d lose out, lose Cinda, but then her message: I ekil uoy.
Em oot, Pär said and sent a map to a back valve in a kidney.
He hoped she was real, not a bag job. He’d had one once. Never again.
He’d thought it was a girl but it was the birth controls—those kids with nothing better going, too young to remember hook-ups, the little bitter virgins. Because those were gone and done, hookups, anything less than commitment, sharing air.
Pär had a lot to offer. A job making music for musicians. All the blood tests. He was, in truth, a catch.
And the lungs were state-supported, for that reason. They needed people. To self-perpetuate. Whether bio or lab-assist, someone had to raise up the next generation.
Pär was willing to do it, for the right girl, be screened and sanitized and re-homed in a room somewhere.
He was kind of a romantic.
Cinda flickered onto his screen. He waited to hear her. He braced for her voice, hoping they weren’t bagging him. If it was those little drips he’d be steamed. He’d track them down. They couldn’t know what lung-hopping was like at twenty-four, not in the viscera.
They thought it was jokes and games when it was all they had. The last hope of humanity, Pär thought.
Him in his backwards t-shirt. Her wink.
Genevieve Abravanel’s short fiction is available or forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She has published an academic book with Oxford University Press (Chinese translation with The Commercial Press of Beijing) and teaches English in Lancaster, PA, where she lives with her family. Twitter: @gen4ea
Photo by Nick Demou from Pexels