The Resisters : a Novel / by Gish Jen
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ALSO BY GISH JEN The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self World and Town The Love Wife Who’s Irish? Mona in the Promised Land Typical American THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Copyright © 2020 by Gish Jen All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies. www.aaknopf.com Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jen, Gish, author. Title: The resisters : a novel / by Gish Jen. Description: First Edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. Identifiers: LCCN 2019004308 (print) | LCCN 2019006477 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984898227 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525657217 Subjects: | GSAFD: Science fiction. | Fantasy fiction. Classification: LCC PS3560.E474 (ebook) | LCC PS3560.E474 R47 2020 (print) | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ 2019004308 Ebook ISBN 9781984898227 Cover image based on a photograph by ballyscanlon/Getty Images Cover design by Kelly Blair v5.4 ep For all the Eleanors I know Let us have faith that right makes might. —ABRAHAM LINCOLN If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else. —YOGI BERRA Contents Cover Also by Gish Jen Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph PART I A Girl with a Golden Arm PART II The Underground Baseball League PART III Among the Netted PART IV A Perfect Game Acknowledgments A Note About the Author As her parents, Eleanor and I should have known earlier. But Gwen was a preemie, to begin with. That meant oxygen at first and, after that, special checkups. And her early months were bumpy. She had jaundice; she had roseola; she had colic. She had a heart murmur. Things that I can now see distracted us—especially with the One Chance Policy, we were focused on her health to the exclusion of all else. For the Netted, it was different, of course, but for us Surplus, the limit was one pregnancy per couple, and Eleanor was just out of jail. Outside the house, she had a DroneMinder tracking her every move; the message was clear. She was not getting away with anything. And in any case, we loved Gwen and would never have wanted to replace her, worried though we were that she was delicate—that she might never consume the way she needed to, the way we all needed to. Not that charges of underconsumption couldn’t be fought in the courts. This was AutoAmerica, after all. For all the changes wrought by AI and Automation—now rolled up with the internet into the iBurrito we called Aunt Nettie—we did still have a Constitution. And if anyone could defend what was left of our rights, it was our own fierce Eleanor, of whom even the platoons of Canada geese who patrolled our neighborhood—the pit bulls, one might say, of the waddling world—were afraid. But as Eleanor’s incarceration brought home, these battles had a price, and in the meanwhile, even worrying and weighing the options distracted us from realizing other things—things we might have noticed a bit earlier, had Gwen had a sibling. It is so hard for a new parent to imagine a child any different from the one he or she has—children do so have their own gravity. They are their own normal. And so it is only now that we can see there were signs. All children take what’s in their crib and throw it, for example. It is universal. But Gwen threw her stuffed animals straight through her bedroom doorway. They shot out, never so much as grazing the door frame, and they always hit the wall of the staircase across from her bedroom at a certain spot, with the precise force they needed to bounce forward and drop clean down to the bottom of the stairwell. Was she maybe two when she did this? Not even, although she was already a southpaw. And already she seemed to have unusually long arms and long fingers—or so I remember remarking one day, not that Eleanor and I had so many babies on which to base our comparison. Ours was just an impression. But it was a strong impression. Her fingers were long. I remember, too, having to round up a veritable menagerie on the landing before I could start up the stairs. The stuffed hippo, the stuffed tiger, the three or four stuffed dogs, the stuffed orca and toucan and platypus and turtle—I gathered them all into my arms like the storybook zookeeper of some peaceable kingdom. It was as if I, too, ought by rights to have been made of plush. Of course, our house was automated—as all Surplus houses were required to be, by law—and the animals could easily have been clear-floated. All I had to do was say the word and the HouseBots would emerge from their closets, their green appendages poised to help. Clear-float now? Aren’t those animals in your way? And, We can roll’n’clear if you’d prefer. You have a choice. You always have a choice—the choice business being a new feature of the program. A bit of cyber-ingratiation, you might say, to balance its more habitual cyber- intimidation. If you trip, it will be your own fault, for example. And, Do note that your choice is on the record. Nothing is being hidden from you. Your choice is on the record. Meaning that I was losing Living Points every time—Living Points being something like what we used to call brownie points when I was growing up, except that these were more critical than money for everything from getting a loan to getting a plane ticket to getting Gwen into Net U one day, should we dream of doing that —a goal that people said involved tens of thousands, or maybe even hundreds of thousands, of points. But I picked the animals up myself anyway—as did Eleanor, when it was she who came upon them, her silver hair and black eyes shining—and all because we wanted to dump the animals into Gwen’s crib ourselves and hear her quick cresting laughter as she immediately set about hurling them again. Everything was a game to her, a most wonderful, loving, endless game. Her spy-eyes lit up with mischief; her tea-brown cheeks flushed the hot orange pink you see on the underside of clouds at sunset. Often she laughed so hard, she fell as she threw— plopping down on her soft bottom but grabbing the crib rails so hard as she scrambled back up that the whole crib shook. Was this the delicate newborn we had once so anxiously tended? Now breathtakingly robust— indestructible, it seemed—she wore an old-time soft yellow blanket sleeper with attached feet and bunny ears, a hand-knit, extra-warm version of a suit Eleanor remembered from her own childhood. None of this baby- zone heating over Gwen’s crib, in other words. She hardly seemed to need zone-heat in any case, having learned so early to blow on her hands if they were cold and to cuddle with us, if she needed to, for warmth. Indeed, we were all given to cuddling, and we all wore sweaters, too, to avoid turning on the zone-heat, for which we were constantly house-scolded. Don’t you find it a bit chilly? Why not choose to turn on the zone-heat? You’ll be more comfortable—Eleanor, especially. Don’t you find it a bit chilly? But we ignored it. For this was how the AutoHouse started, wasn’t it, with thermostats that sent to Aunt Nettie first data, then videos? Then came DroneDeliverers and FridgeStockers, KidTrackers and RoboSitters, ElderHelpers and YardBots, all of which reported to Aunt Nettie as dutifully as any spy network— recording our steps, our pictures, our relationships, and (back when we soon-to-be-Surplus still had them) our careers. And she, in turn, took what she knew and applied it—even proffering, along the way, solace and advice. Indeed, in the early days of Automation, I myself brought up AskAuntNettie more often than I care to recall and can still remember her consoling voice as she volunteered I’m here and insisted I want to hear everything and reassured me Of course you feel that way, Grant, how could you not? You’re only human. I did laugh at that You’re only human. Still I found not only that part of me responded to the words, but that it responded deeply, that it listened gratefully as Aunt Nettie advanced some surprisingly useful advice on a range of subjects, including the many —I hadn’t realized how many—for which noble Eleanor had no time. Would someone like me, whose mother had had him with WhoNeedsThemMen, have trouble knowing how to be a father, for example? The answer to which was that, given what men could be, I might in fact be better off without a role model anyway. Or how about: Did someone like me really need to own both black and brown shoes now that I was no longer teaching? The answer to which was yes, if I cared about social acceptance, which yes, my data showed that I did, underneath, and which, really, was just as well— correlated as such concern was with mental health, especially among Unretrainables such as, yes, she had heard I now was.