Mrs. K.’s son’s INData memory chip had been sold off to the highest bidder at $20,000CHD, but no one would tell her to whom it had been sold, much less how she might be able to contact them.

When she presented her case officer at the City H Integrated Neurological Data Archives and Donation Centre with Oliver and his husband’s marriage papers, his birth certificate, his passport, his daughter’s birth certificate and passports, Mrs. K.’s own documents—even the household’s bank statements and tax files and her and Oliver’s driving licenses for good measure—Mrs. K. was met with a blank smile and a hollow We’re sorry for the inconvenience. Do you mind taking a seat at reception and waiting for your number to be called while we go through our records again?

And so ten minutes became twenty became half an hour became the entire afternoon. By the seventh hour in the bleakly lit reception hall adorned with rows of blue plastic benches, nursing the beginnings of a headache from the dry chill of air-conditioning turned up far too high, Mrs. K.’s resolve broke. She marched up to her case officer’s assistant’s cubicle, glared through the scratched acrylic window at the mousy little woman in the porridge-coloured cardigan, and demanded to know what the hell was taking them so long.

The assistant smiled at her. A placating and exasperated smile, the kind you saw on carers’ faces when their dotty elderly charges insisted to be let out of the care home because they really must leave early to get roses at the flower market for their sweetheart, who as it happened was waiting for them at the cinema for their first date.

“We’ve been trying our best to process every mislaid chip, ma’am, but identity checks take ti—”

“What more proof do you need? He’s my son, my flesh and blood!”

“Mrs. K., please.”

“I’ve already refunded every penny of what you lot paid for his data chip. You wanted our blood and DNA samples to make sure we’re related? I fucking gave them to you. I spent days trying to get bank statements and proofs of address, his university transcripts, his and Rocco’s marriage documents. Interview his daughter? I had to apply for a leave of absence at her primary school to take her here last month. On the school’s athletics day, no less! She had to miss athletics day!”

Mrs. K. could sense multiple pairs of scandalized eyes trained on the back of her head. The assistant, however, had diverted her attention back to the screen in front of her, irises lit in the eery blue light of her active INData feed. “Sorry for the inconvenience,” she repeated in the same colourlessly bright voice, as if reading out loud from a script, “but I’m afraid there’s nothing else we can do. Although if you’re interested in logging a complaint to the City H Integrated Neurological Data Archives and Donation Centre, I’d be more than happy to put you in touch with another agent who’ll contact you within five working da—”

“Oh, damn your links and your useless agents and your inconvenience. All I’m asking for is a copy of my son’s INData records.”

Again, the same drab voice. “The deceased’s name?”

“Oliver K.,” she said through gritted teeth, too rattled to register what the woman had called him.

“Date of birth? Country of birth? Nationality? Passport number? City H Identity Card number? Insurance, name of next of kin, name of spouse, any criminal record?”

Mrs. K. answered each and every question mechanically, without missing a beat, but it wasn’t until the woman reached the final question that she tripped over like on a missing stair. “And…right. Cause of death?”

“My son isn’t dead,” said Mrs. K.

Whenever his mother-in-law called, Rocco would spend the first ten minutes on mute, listening to her berate him (in near-impossible-to-decipher English, which happened to be also not his first language and thus made communication with her vaguely reminiscent of a game of charades every time they talked) while he scribbled aimless sketches on the notepad he kept carefully out of her sight. She would begin with his fucked-up sleep patterns, then when he protested by telling her 2am in Paris was the only time of night he was awake late enough to wish Violet good morning before she went off to school, Mrs. K. would turn to tutting about how absolutely malnourished and stick-thin he was starting to look these days—and he must come back soon so she could feed him up again, just how can anyone survive on a diet of pizza and salads and cold bland Western food?

Rocco allowed himself a few seconds of staring blankly at his own face reflected back at him in the tiny unflattering window on his screen as Mrs. K.’s spiel took them into the seventh minute: a scrawny, dark-skinned man in a faded white T-shirt and denim dungarees, mustard-coloured beanie over a short crop of curls, and behind him, sunlight spilling into a veritable greenhouse of terrariums and drapes of hanging plants and pots of orchid-blooms in the bright airy space that was not his.

He didn’t much like to admit it, but being able to stay at his sibling’s place while they and their partner were off on a wine-and-cheese-tasting holiday in the south of France was a bit of a relief. Oliver’s family home in the seething metropolis of City H, on the peninsula side of a tiny subtropical island-and-peninsula hybrid in the Southern Sea, made him claustrophobic, as if he was too much for the skin that was the city he’d tried to pour himself into for his husband’s sake.

Somewhere along the line of his and Oliver’s marriage, he’d ended up falling in love with H as well. Despite the suffocation, despite the thick air of uneasiness that clung onto every surface of the city like a stubborn stain on an otherwise-perfect pencil sketch that couldn’t be erased or covered over no matter how hard he tried to scrub at it. Oliver and City H—it was always going to be a package deal, take it or leave it. Can’t have one without the other. It had taken Rocco a while to make his peace with that. Rocco once joked of Oliver being an insect specimen nailed to the display block that was H, but the jest struck much closer to the truth than he’d intended it to. Oliver’s INData chip was a complex thing, almost an illness, that required constant monitoring and rewiring every few weeks by specialist surgeons at any of the City H public hospitals in town. Violet, too, was bound to H through her own INData chip, stitched into her since she’d entered the foster system as a very young child. The chip, a relatively new development that never gained much traction in most parts of Europe or a select few states in the US, had been made mandatory for all citizens in H above the age of ten—via a bill rubber-stamped with very little fuss in the City H legislature two decades ago on the grounds that having centralized access to a record of one’s own neurological data was a convenience to everyone involved. Rocco’s research into INData removal informed him it was a rare procedure with an alarmingly high fatality rate especially for a kid Violet’s age, and more frustratingly, that as a former charge of the state her INData was and had always been the property of the government instead of her legal guardians, even after the two men had signed the adoption papers.

Back then, City H didn’t seem like that terrible a choice for a new home. Oliver was an only child besides, his older sister having passed away from SARS mere weeks before registration for preadolescent INData profiling opened to public access, and despite the strain in Oliver’s voice whenever the subject of his mother was brought up, Rocco could (almost) understand why his husband would feel he had some kind of, of duty or obligation or whatever it was, to stay and take care of Mrs. K. (Rocco flat-out refused to consider the sick irony that ever since the accident, it was now the other way around instead.)

Settling into the city in which Oliver grew up wasn’t so much a culture shock as a rude awakening. Rocco considered himself worldly (hell, he’d globetrotted and went on volunteer excursions and gone through an obligatory and embarrassingly youthful wanderlust phase, not to mention bore a slew of remarks both racist and homophobic wherever he went) but that hadn’t prepared him for his first few years there. The flats in H were so tiny and cramped, is the thing. A cluttered shoebox for a family of three (four if you counted his mother-in-law, and, well, five if you count Waddles the turtle), high up on the thirteenth floor of an imposing concrete housing-estate slab, no balconies, barred A4-paper-sized windows, not even enough space to squeeze in a dining table. He didn’t want to appear like one of those foreigners though, so he bore it in stoic silence. A small price to pay for Oliver’s peace of mind. And although Rocco got along handsomely with Oliver’s friends, some of the other H-ers he met were another matter. They were…cold. Withdrawn. Snappy and abrasive in a way not even the most snobbish of French folk were, or they’d be overly impressed by him (an expatriate artiste living in a housing estate! Who was learning Cantonese, and who frequented the urban sprawl of Ninedragons which most Westerners hardly ever stepped foot in if they could help it!), and it made him shy and withdrawn in a way Oliver liked to rib him over. They were friendly enough once he got into their good graces though, and he had to admit the food in the city more than made up for any of the unpleasantness.

The two of them had met when Rocco was still at Gobelins. He and his mates were out at the Latin Quarter celebrating the start of their sophomore year, and on the terrace of a pub just around the corner from the tourist-trap bookshop, he’d seen a young man he recognized from campus, rugged boots and ripped black jeans and tatty band T-shirt and all limbs and elbows, his mass of dark hair pulled back in a half-tail with wisps falling into eyes which accentuated his sharp jawline and made him look particularly fetching in the golden hour before sunset. The stranger had been alone, too focused on the e-reader propped up against a cider bottle to have noticed Rocco until he took the chair across from him and, bold as brass, introduced himself to Oliver.

What’s that you’re reading?

Last Words from Montmartre. I’m just about to finish it for the second time. Cliché, I know—don’t judge me for that.

Oh, wouldn’t dream of it. Tell me more, why don’t you?

He propped his elbows on the table, all business-like. The last lines aren’t the author’s own words, but they go, “Everything I touch causes me real suffering and does not belong to me. There is always someone who says: This is mine.” Rather nihilistic, no? Anyway, it’s much darker when you know she died at twenty-six before this was published. Suicide. 1995. Experimental autofiction.

Rocco privately thought a person must be deeply fucked in the head for that to be their conversation-opener, but declined to comment on that. Instead he said, Why, that’s not much older than either of us are. You’re not contemplating suicide-as-art, are you? As grand as so-called sacrifice to the altar of passion and beauty might sound, it’s still an incredible waste of a life, if you ask me. Ars longa, vita brevis, and all that.

A small grin of mischief, and understanding, but one that didn’t seem to reach Oliver’s eyes. I’ll tell you a secret: I’m in a bit of a bind about that. The city I’m from would very much rather people like me off ourselves so they can dig around our spines for anything useful for them, so staying alive would be the logical fuck-you to those bastards. But with the whole world spiralling into catastrophe, death and oblivion seems a pretty damn enticing option compared to whatever the future holds.

He’d said it lightly, like it was a morbid joke, which made it difficult to tell whether he meant it or not. Rocco raised an eyebrow. Dig around your spine? Thought that’s the sort of thing the papers made up.

Oh, trust me. It’s real enough. Oliver turned around and lifted his hair, twisted his arm behind himself to tap his many-ringed fingers at the back of his spine where neck and shoulder met. A small scar was sliced into one of the knobs, ugly and old and half-healed, and beneath the pale skin Rocco caught a glimpse of faint blinking light.

He tried (and failed) not to sound surprised. You’re INData-ed.

Not out of my own choice, I assure you.

(So much for death as a fuck-you, Rocco reflected now. Having your entire self be torn from your corpse and trawled through like an archaeologist digging among the rubble of a long-buried temple would put a bit of a damper on a person’s desire for death.)

Back then Rocco’s only thought was that Oliver was one odd, fascinating fellow he wanted to get to know more. And so he laughed, and Oliver laughed, and as a flock of pigeons took flight above them to wing across the Seine, their romance had begun.

Nothing about the relationship had been illicit, but in those few subsequent months there had been a certain thrill, a bittersweet mutual understanding that they had only so much time together before the year ended and Oliver had to return to his home in City H, which lent a sense of desperation to their early courtship. Oliver copied Last Words from Montmartre over to Rocco on the last day of the semester, who in return gifted Oliver his battered dog-eared physical copy of Giovanni’s Room when Oliver admitted it was one of those books he’d always meant to read but hadn’t yet. Then an unexpected and foolish (or brave, however you choose to see it) act of impulse from Rocco, after two years of agonizing long-distance—packing up everything to follow Oliver to the other side of world the moment he handed in his end-of-year animation.

And now. Ten years, two wedding rings, an adopted daughter (and a particularly snappish turtle Violet ended up keeping as a pet) later. All of them still alive against the odds, even if Rocco still very occasionally had misgivings about his own by-necessity nomadic tendencies.

Oh, and the catastrophe several months ago. A bloody stupid hiking accident of all things, because Oliver was dumb enough to go climbing up cliffs in the middle of a fucking storm without a goddamn belayer and ended up breaking his bones and his INData chip to boot, and Rocco had been in Okinawa then doing research for his next project on Iriomote wildcats but dropped everything to rush back to City H on a red-eye flight and had spent a full terror-choked day believing that git was dead before the news had dropped onto Rocco’s lap that no, Oliver K. was still alive, they’d managed to get him to the ER in time to save him, but he’d be spending a few weeks at least in urgent care, but his INData chip—

Rocco shook himself and sat up straighter before he could sink any further into the darkness of those long hours in the hospital by Oliver’s bedside. Mrs. K. was now saying something about her absolutely harrowing ordeal at the INData Archive Centre the day before, and a simmer of anxiety roiled in his chest. He cut across Mrs. K. the moment she stopped for breath.

“Ma, you should let me handle it. When I return next week I can—”

“You think any of those brainless drones will give you special treatment just because you’re a gwai-lo?”

Well.

He resolved not to be offended by that comment. “Speaking of that…” he began. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

In the screen, Mrs. K. was now busy ironing Violet’s football shirts in a stubborn show of only half-listening to him, and abruptly he wished he didn’t have to do this. Damned Olly. Damn that man for leaving him with this fucking mess, especially when Oliver knew perfectly well all that talk about INData made Rocco uncomfortable at best. They’d had so many fights over it—Oliver hadn’t liked being made to have his entire life revolve around City H any more than Rocco did, but discussions about the future and how to navigate the road ahead invariably led to what would happen to Olly’s data after he died, and death wasn’t something Rocco ever wanted to spend too much time thinking about outside of his own art. But then came the accident, and the doctors telling him that even though they’d managed to save Oliver’s life in the nick of time they had to pluck out the INData chip nestled in his spine. Then on their way home with Rocco’s suitcase rattling in the back of the taxicab, Mrs. K. had insisted the entire ride that she knew nothing about the mess-up that caused the lab workers at INData profiling to have sent Oliver’s data out to the Archive before he was legally declared dead.

Rocco cleared his throat. “It’s been half a year since he got out of the ICU. Olly’s doing a lot better lately, and I reckon it’ll be another few weeks before he can be out and about without supervision, maybe even be able to come back home. And I thought…with Violet starting her last year at primary school…it was something Oliver and I had been mulling over on and off for some time before…the incident, but it’d been always just a backburner plan until now…”

“Just get on with it.”

Damn. There was no dancing around the issue. He just had to come out and say it. “Once Oliver’s in a good enough state and Violet’s done with sixth grade, we’re making the move to Quebec. We might not ever be able to get her INData out, but there are unlicensed surgeons able to decommission her chip—the risk is much lower even if the cost is ghastly. And Oliver, he was willing to go ahead with it so long as Violet gives her consent. We’d been meaning to tell you—”

He broke off when Mrs. K. gave a sharp shake of her head and raised her iron threateningly up at him through the screen (an effect vastly undercut by the slight lag from her end). “I’m in no mood for this kind of talk right now. I still have the dishes to do, and you may be a hopeless night owl, but your daughter’s just gone to bed and I need a bit of peace and quiet.”

It took effort to hide the disappointed slump of his shoulders. “Suen lah,” he said in surrender. “Ng gaan yiu. Okay. Tell…tell Violet I love her.” He rarely attempted speaking in the H-er language in his thick, clumsy accent, but he wanted Mrs. K. to know he was sincere.

Rocco sighed and shut his laptop the moment the videocall ended.

“J’aime tu, maman. Je suis désolé,” he mumbled to the storyboard sketches and blueprints and eraser gums and pencil shavings strewn haphazardly between him and his laptop. (He could allow himself to say this to Mrs. K. now that she wasn’t there to hear—even if she did, she couldn’t understand French anyway.)

He’d spent several years after moving to City H teaching at the local Alliance Française and at miscellaneous university language centres, about the only steady jobs he was good for in this city as a foreigner. When he wasn’t teaching une, deux, trois to secondary school students who were too timid to even look at him at times, or bouncing from a translation gig to a tutoring gig to curating film festival line-ups for Le French May like a pinball, or making sure Violet didn’t get into trouble, he was trying (with increasing desperation and the knowledge that time was running out for him) to complete his animated film about Oliver’s life.

Frankly speaking, sometimes he would waver on the conviction that all of that was worth the three hours of sleep he got most days.

He slumped back against his chair, stretched his legs, and rubbed his eyes with charcoal-stained hands. Bright spots scattered around the sunlit, airy second-storey apartment with the iron-filigree balcony that was his home for another three weeks, all his clothes and the chocolates he’d gotten for Violet dumped on the Persian rug behind him, the old Isherwood book he’d brought with him. The rapidly cooling summer breeze drifting through the sheer draperies was starting to make his head hurt.

Rocco had never exactly been tapped into City H’s current affairs, even if he did try to make an effort for Oliver and Violet’s sakes. It was difficult, to say the least—he spoke their language poorly despite a decade in the city, barely enough to get him through a brief conversation with diner staff or the security guard at their housing estate, and what words he could read and write were minimal. He usually relied on either the English papers or on Oliver’s translations, but that was already enough for him to be worried. People who prowled the INData market like sharks were usually one of either three sorts: administrators sent to collect sensitive INData from the corpses of those who might have known something of certain government officials’ scandals or briberies or various petty wrongdoings of the rich and famous, scholars and wide-eyed research students and the occasional writer (and there were a lot of those) who wanted to collect the ultimate primary source for whatever rabbit hole they’d fallen into, or black-market traders who’d sell a deceased person’s chip back to their family for fifty times the price (or to the highest bidder, whoever was willing to pay more money for it).

Rocco couldn’t help but feel like an absolute bastard for wanting to drag Oliver and Violet away from H. Something about the way Olly made small talk with the old lady at the haberdashery across the street when they went in for Violet’s uniform fittings, and the glee with which Vi stuck her hand out of the ferry to catch the wind whenever they’d make a field trip to one of the outlying islands scattered on the fringes of H. Rocco wished at times he had his own INData chip so he could bottle up every piece of those small, inconsequential memories, decant them and re-live such moments whenever he could.

And yet, almost everyone he knew in H who could afford to uproot their lives and leave the city had left now, by this point. It was only a matter of time.

Violet loved visiting days, even if she had to wake up several hours early before school once a month so papa and grandmama could take her to the rehabilitation centre to see da. She loved visiting days not exactly because she had a full fifteen minutes with da every few weeks, but because after grandmama left them to do her morning shopping at the wet market, papa would bring her to the bingsaat just around the corner and they’d share an assortment of pineapple buns and satay noodles and French toast (not really French, but proper City H French toast oozing with gooey maple syrup and peanut butter that dripped off the plastic dish) as breakfast, and then top it all off with ice-cold Horlicks for her and yuenyeung for papa in sunflower-print paper cups. It was a secret of sorts shared between the two of them, since grandma didn’t approve of papa feeding Violet the amount of oily junk food he did.

With papa out of town for two months though, grandmama wouldn’t even dream of taking her to the diner. Oh, no. It was a stale sandwich and a carton of soy milk (not even the chocolate flavoured or malt ones Violet loved best) from the 7-11 stuffed into Violet’s backpack, then grandmama would march her straight to school with a pat on the head and an absent “Be good today, sweetheart,” right in time for the morning assembly bell.

She was glumly certain it would be no different today.

Left alone in the bright visitor’s waiting-room at the rehabilitation centre while grandmama went to fill in the registration forms, Violet switched her INData review on instead so she could look through her memories for the vocabulary test notes she’d copied down the day before, swinging her legs which were still too short to touch the squeaky-clean floor. She was in her school uniform: pair of black-and-white Oxfords polished to a gloss and uncomfortably tight at the heels, tartan pleated skirt (which she would prefer to call a kilt, thank you very much), and matching tie over a white blouse.

Grandmama ambled back to Violet’s side, an ear pressed to her phone as she took a call. The voice on the other side of the line was turned up loud to ease grandmama’s increasing deafness, and the staticky drone reminded Violet of those salt-shaker robots’ voices from the show about adventures in space she’d been watching the other day. People were staring at grandmama too, mortifyingly enough, and Violet very much wished that she would turn the speaker off and use her implant like a normal person.

“…our files indicated that you’ve signed the declaration confirming your release of all ownership of Oliver K.’s INData to our company, and insurance doesn’t cover new-chip installation surgery. What we can do, however, is have a third-party auditor conduct a survey of the estimated value of his INData chip prior to removal, and a sum of compensation will be paid to your family within one calendar year. Of course, this may mean a commission fee of twenty-percent for the auditor, as well as an upfront deposit of $5,200CHD, if you’re willing to proc—”

The loudspeaker in the corner of the waiting room blared to life, calling out a number, then a name, and grandmama raised her head as if stung as the double doors swung open.

Da.

He emerged in the doorway, in a clean gown that hung too loose on his frame and comfortable-looking slacks, swaying a little as he leant on the crutches he’d begun to be able to walk with two weeks ago. Violet almost didn’t recognise him, which brought an absurd lump in her throat like a stuck piece of candy. Da was always skinny like a stick insect, but he was gaunter than she’d ever remember him being, the hollows of his cheekbones deep and skull-like, eyes sunken and tired. His hair, which papa used to twirl around his fingers and play with when all three of them were curled on the sofa in front of the television during film nights, was shaved bald for his latest bout of surgeries, and he had a piece of gauze wound tight around his neck like some strange collar or noose, to fix the scar on top of his spine where a fresh INData chip was installed—as opposed to when she’d seen him earlier in the year, when he still had the neck brace on and couldn’t move except to blink or make terrible sounds from his throat.

Violet also hated the sting of hospital antiseptic that clung to da. It made her half-want to turn and run in the opposite direction, out of the reception area, the sterile entryway, into the humid smog-filled morning streets.

She let grandmama usher her up to greet da instead.

Da didn’t ruffle her hair or call her Vivi or pick her up her up and swing her around the way he used to do before the accident. He returned Violet’s hug, but stiffly, as if he was handling something terribly fragile and made of glass.

“How are you?” he asked, when the three of them have settled on hard plastic bench by the vending machine.

“I made a drawing at school last week.”

He smiled. “Really?”

Violet unzipped her backpack and pulled the drawing out to show him. She’d brought it with her even though she didn’t have art class today. It was a rough oil-pastel copy of a painting she’d seen from memory, a field of gold against a darkening sky, with a flock of smudge-dark crows taking wing. The summer before the accident, when da and papa had taken her to Europe to visit papa’s family, they’d gone on an excursion to Amsterdam and spent a long slow afternoon in a circular, glass-panelled museum filled with light, and da had stood in front of that particular painting as though entranced, like there was something about the raw ridges of blue and yellow and sharp strokes of black paint that hid something behind its layers which drew him toward it. A story, perhaps, or a feeling, a code, a mystery. Da had told her all about the man who painted it later, and the painting itself had stuck in her mind long after they’d flown back to smoggy boring old City H, but try as she might, Violet could never manage to replicate that something impressed into its contours that had reeled da in like a fish on a hook nor dig up any of the specifics about the painter she’d learnt from that trip—it was as if her own INData had been scrubbed of any mention them and replaced it with a hazy void.

“It looks…beautiful,” said da.

The copy was in no way beautiful. She knew this because Miss Wong had said so—she kept saying Violet didn’t have talent. She hadn’t even known that Violet had copied another painting, the worst crime Violet felt an artist could do. But maybe the crash had addled da’s brain and gave him a particularly strange idea of beauty, so she didn’t bother to correct him. Papa had said that da would need some time to get back to normal, to the cheery, mischievous self he used to be, after all.

Violet missed da.

Da was right here, but she still missed him—which didn’t make sense at all, because it should be impossible to miss someone who was sitting right here with her.

She wondered if she would ever stop missing him.

The other day at the school social worker’s office, Violet had told her social worker about what happened to da. He had a big row with grandmama the day after papa went off to Okinawa. Later, I asked papa why da was angry with grandmama, but he told me not to worry, he’ll get them to make up when he comes back from his work trip if it doesn’t blow over by then. That Sunday, though, I woke early to get ready for football practice but da wasn’t at home, and he wasn’t answering his messages either. And then…and then—

No. Da wasn’t dead. He was here. But at times, it felt like he wasn’t here.

While da inspected the drawing, Violet turned back to her grandmother. Grandmama’s attention was still wholly focused on the phone call, though and even with the distance between them Violet could tell from the voice on the other end that grandmama was speaking to someone else now. “As I understand it, Mrs. K., before your son’s INData chip was transferred to our department for repossession you held the legal rights to his chip.”

“Yes,” her grandmother said in a guarded voice.

“Good, good.” Violet tried to imagine the person on the crackly end of the phone, and her mind conjured up an image of a dowdy, mousy-haired woman in a prim ponytail and a pale cardigan and small rectangular glasses, nodding wisely in full approval of grandmama’s answer. “Now. Normally INData repossession only happens in one of three circumstances: either the INData-installed person is clinically deceased and a certified copy of legal proof of death for said person has been uploaded onto our system for inspection and no other checks need to be conducted before the repossession autopsy can take place on the next available session, or a replacement INData chip is registered and the deposit paid for, and the legal registered bearer of the INData chip declares themself to be of sound mind before the indemnity contract is signed and INData replacement surgery can take place, or the third, in which it is the legal owner of the registered INData chip who possesses full rights to the chip—in which case it falls to the legal owner to…”

Violet couldn’t make head nor tail of all that fancy grown-up jargon, but from grandmama’s stricken expression it wasn’t anything good.

She looked up at da, who had a sort of placid, serene curiosity over his face, then back at grandmama.

Grandmama was shaking. Her hand trembled, and the phone dropped with a crush loud enough to make Violet want to curl up into herself when people turned sharply at the noise, but when grandmama got on her knees to pick up the device and the remnants of the screen now scattered over the polished floor in crystalline shards, clutching the phone to her stomach as though she had been stabbed by it, Violet could only stand and watch.

“I just wanted to keep you here with me I didn’t want you to leave me alone I thought you’d died that was why I sold it I wanted you to stay you were going to leave with Violet and Rocco I would do anything to take it back I’ll take it back—” Grandmama was whispering, still on her knees.

And Violet could only watch, reach out to tug at grandmama’s elbow, frightened and ashamed, looking down at her Oxfords now glistening wet with tears, mortified at the way all those adults were turning to stare at the three of them in the corner of the room, red-faced and wishing she could just disappear.

Violet did not disappear. That was the horrid thing. She was here, she would always be here, be seen—every train of thought and her favourite foods and the fact that she couldn’t stand the new girl in her year who everyone else adored because she and Violet were both tied for being sixth grade prefect, how she’d secretly thrown away the too-sweet truffles pa had sent her the last time he was away on a work trip because she didn’t want him to know that she hated them, and that she’d threatened Waddles by telling him she’d turn him into turtle jelly if he went poking at the garbage can again, and especially her memories of that day when Mr. Rakesh had called her up to his office through the intercom in the middle of History class and had informed Violet with a forced gentleness which made her want to punch a fist through his condescending face that her grandmother wanted her to go back home at once because of an emergency (and would she tell him her class and student number again so he could mark her as absent for the rest of the day?). One day long into the future when she died, she’d still be here and all her guilt and her mistakes and her entire life would be laid out in the open, a name marked on a chip, and anyone could take it and read it and know, and—

Some of the doctors and nurses were running towards them and were trying to get grandmama off the floor, but grandmama was still shuddering, sobbing, and refused to move even though she’d cut her hand on the jagged edge of her phone’s screen and was bleeding all over the floor. A few of the other waiting families had also begun to switch their INData to recording mode, pairs of eerie electric-blue eyes cataloguing the entire proceedings, and through the underwatery white noise of humiliation in her ears Violet could hear them muttering under their breath about hysterical and senile old women who ought to be sent to care homes.

Violet looked up again, and met her father’s eyes—a stranger’s eyes—and looked away again because she found nothing in them she recognized. Then she put her own hand to the back of her neck and felt the icy metal and the plastic wirings at her nape that clung to her like the strings of a marionette, wondering what the price of her own INData would be when the day came her time to die one day far into the future.

 

(Editors’ Note: Ewen Ma is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2023 Ewen Ma