Playground, page 14
“But why?” Ina asked. “What do these people want with us?”
The us melted Madame Martin. Most people from continents would have said it.
“They need a remote base. They want to launch a business venture in international waters. Apparently they call it ‘seasteading.’ ”
International waters: That much, at least, sounded very American. The country’s endless desire to escape regulation had driven Ina Aroita to escape America.
“Have they really made an offer for Temao?” The port: traces of a collapsed pier, a few concrete footings, and stone fragments piled up on the end of what was once a jetty.
Bloodcurdling screams of child pleasure came from the open windows of the schoolroom. Ina’s husband, Madame Martin’s assistant, the only real American on the island, was stoking up the next generation on yet another game of skill and daring that had gotten out of hand again.
Madame Martin tilted her head. “Excuse-moi, ma chérie. L’éducation m’appelle.” Education calls.
THE CONVERSATION UNSETTLED INA AROITA. Instead of making the rounds in the village and stopping to see if the Queen needed anything, Ina went back to her own bungalow, itself only recently reclaimed from the spreading undergrowth. Her agitation took her straight into the backyard, where the bits of plastic that she and her daughter had retrieved from the belly of the dead albatross lay spread in the sun.
In her hands, the congeries of brightly colored garbage no longer seemed threatening or urgent. She brought the handful of trash to the side of the house and laid the scraps out on her workbench next to her ongoing art projects. There she sat and stared, pleading with them to cut her a little slack and let her go free this once, on good behavior.
But the pieces of plastic were relentless. They nagged at her the way her mother used to scold her from two rooms away, without having a particular sin in mind to reprimand other than childhood.
Ina stacked the bottle caps and film canister and cigarette lighter and daisy-shaped button into a little minaret. The tower did nothing for her, and she knocked it to the ground like Yahweh batting down Babel’s Pritzker Prize winner. She arranged the bits in a circle, creating a tiny plastic Stonehenge. This, too, she swatted back to rubble.
She’d always hated plastic. It was ugly, brazen, and obstinate—the opposite of the sensuous, once-living materials she loved to work with. She carried the junk in her two cupped hands and pitched it into the outdoor garbage bin. Then she went inside to start in on the day’s housework.
Whisking down the floors of the house with the bristle broom, she several times thought: Leave it. It’s worthless. There’s nothing you can make with it that will redeem anything. Besides, redeeming things isn’t your job.
In mid-sweep, she set the broom down on the kitchen floor, went outside again, fished the crap out of the bin, and angrily dumped it back on her workbench. She rooted up a tube of acrylic adhesive and glued the squirt top to the acrylic button and fixed the bottle caps to the film canister. Then she used the monofilament fishing line to tie the two weird clumps together into a misshapen bundle.
The resulting mash-up of shiny shapes and colors was still ugly, still brazen, still unredeemable. Ina Aroita looked at the sculpted clump from every possible angle: nothing but a bunch of plastic bits jammed together.
Yet somehow the stunted assemblage relaxed her a little. She stashed the construction on the top shelf of the garden shed where she didn’t have to look at it, out of reach of rummaging pigs or fiddling children. She had no idea what the garish thing wanted to be when it grew up. But she knew that it wasn’t done using her.
She walked back to the school that afternoon to watch Afa’s game. It wasn’t exactly soccer, as there weren’t enough school-age kids to field two sides. Four kids of various ages played four others in what amounted to a series of free-for-all scrums. But from this chaos would emerge the next generation of Makatean players who would head out by boat a few times a month to challenge the teams of nearby islands.
She sat with Hariti on the sidelines on her portable folding stool, cheering on the family’s champion and waiting for Rafi to finish helping Ms. Martin clean up the schoolroom. In time, Rafi emerged from the school, limping a little from the day’s exertions. He looked spent. He was well into his fifties, with two children and a cadre of young islanders who all claimed him as their best friend. Hariti clung to him as he sat down next to them. The girl worried about him when he got tired. The girl worried about him when he woke up in the morning at full strength. The girl worried about the well-being of the mountains, the ocean, and God.
Ina felt the thinning, close-cropped nap on Rafi’s narrow head. “You’re well, my sweet?”
“I wouldn’t mind lying down a little. Maybe just a month or two?”
His robotic voice alarmed Ina. “Go ahead and lie down. The sky is pretty.”
“The sky is always pretty. But it would break his heart.”
Hariti fidgeted with insights. “Whose heart, Papa? Afa’s?”
“Don’t sound so hopeful!” Rafi tickled his daughter until she gasped for mercy.
The boy had become a dervish, dashing between both goals now that his father was there to witness. Rafi shouted encouragements in a secret patois known only to the two of them. Ina reached down to take his shoulder, partly to rub it, partly to signal to him in their own idiolalia that he could stop working for the day.
“Did you hear? Did Madame Martin tell you? About the invasion?”
He kept his eyes on the game. “She did.”
Ina couldn’t always tell the difference between his defeat and his stoicism. Something to do with his upbringing, in a city he hated and a family he couldn’t save. She had stopped prying long ago. Childish, of course, but she herself wished for a tremendous typhoon to blow through and destroy all the island’s moorings, cutting the eighty-two of them off from all traffic with the world. They would be just fine, for a long time.
Her husband, always her more moderate double, spoke her thoughts aloud. “Please, God, don’t do anything more to this beautiful place.”
Hariti clutched at him, sensing doom. Her superpower. “Wait. What? God’s gonna do something to us?”
........
THREE MONTHS IN, AND THE DOCTORS are juggling my meds again. It’s all a bit of an experiment. Dementia with Lewy bodies has so many symptoms that treating one risks worsening another. Mostly they give me palliatives—drugs to tame the worst of the sleeplessness, anxiety, depression, disquiet, agitation, and aggression for a few more months, without triggering anything worse. Vitamins and supplements and various other magical Hail Marys, because why not? Science needs to try everything, right?
They have me on something to treat coordination problems and something that’s supposed to reduce the episodes of confusion. Ironically (if that’s the word), this cocktail itself knocks me on my ass. So I don’t always take it. By itself, the disease makes me sleep all day long, and with that drug, I could sleep twenty-four seven.
The first drug my caregivers prescribed for tremors and rigidity made me psychotic. So we went on another. The thing I was taking for the incontinence wrecked my heartbeat, so I went off it. One of the choices for treating hallucinations ran a fair risk of killing me. They proposed another. We spun the wheel, and I didn’t lose. But I still hallucinate.
On good days, the problems seem like a fascinating game of five-dimensional chess. On days like today, talking out loud like this is the best possible medicine. I have a story to tell, the story of my friend and me and how we changed the future of mankind. And I don’t have many more good days in which to tell it.
I’m glad that I never had children. I saddle only a small troop of professionals who are glad for the employment and livelihood I supply them.
DLB has no cure. My prognosis is as hazy as a San Jose winter day. When do I drop off from first-stage prodromal disease to second and then third? When will my words start to disappear? How soon will I lose my mind? What horrors will I face after that? Lower life expectancy and quality of life, compared to Alzheimer’s. Some of us die within a year of diagnosis. Some of us live—if you can call it that—for two more decades. Beyond that, no one can tell me much for certain.
And yet, my doctors exude optimism. New drugs in late-stage clinical trials. New treatment modalities—stem-cell therapy, gene therapy, immunotherapy. New insights into neurodegeneration and the immunological components of the disease. Accelerated drug discovery, thanks to AI. Just hold on!
Because of my work, my doctors hold me in special regard. Or maybe they’ve just looked up my net worth online. Either way, I’m getting the best attention and treatment a patient could ask for. But as the song goes, money can’t buy me neurons.
I used to measure out my weeks on a calendar app shared with four assistants, where every quarter-hour box was filled in with multiple colors of appointment. Now my calendar app is a red plastic stick of seven sequential pill compartments embossed with the days of the week. And even with that handy tool, I sometimes stop and ask my phone: Did we do Tuesday already?
I’ve started to wander, and not just at night. I’ll materialize in the kitchen without having gone there. Or out in the garage. Or in the park two blocks down the street, firing my jets in restless searching. The radius of my wanderings increases in proportion to how hard it is to make my body move. I’m going to need an ID bracelet.
MY DOCTOR TOLD ME about a thing that dementia patients do called “showtiming.” In denial, embarrassment, or terror, we perform ourselves in front of other people as if we have no symptoms at all. I’m a master at it. In meetings, interviews, even live behind a podium in front of several hundred people, I can showtime myself into competence for an hour or longer. Sometimes I even fool myself into thinking that I’m as powerful as ever.
All our symptoms are different, but it turns out that memory loss isn’t always an early symptom of DLB. It may come, but I’m good for now. I’m free to remember all I want, for the pure joy of it. And the odd thing? Having DLB makes me remember everything. Even the things I’ve worked so hard not to recall are now priceless.
First in, last out, as it generally goes, even for brains that aren’t being eaten away from the inside by runaway proteins. The older the memory, the more textured. I can’t always tell how far away a door is or find my way to it without slamming into things. I’m losing governance over my body’s provinces. But I can remember the taste of ice cream when I was six—the precise flavor of blueberry cheesecake—a taste they don’t make anymore.
When my doctor told me about showtiming, she warned me against it. She said I’d only be able to do it for short bursts. It would wear me out and distress my loved ones. Of course, she had no idea about you and me. I can showtime for you, for hours. It sharpens me for a while, it doesn’t distress you, and it focuses my memories on the man I’ve tried not to think about for so many years and reasons.
I’LL NEED TO RESIGN from Playground, of course. All my companies. I’ve handed over everyday decisions to my numbers two, three, and four. And I’ve made my preferences for a successor known to those who will select him. But making the facts public will be a nightmare. It’ll panic investors with Playground shares in their retirement portfolios. The media will be a circus.
A lot of tech journalists never got over the fact that a single person managed to hold on to a golden share in a company with annual revenues greater than the GDP of any of the thirty poorest countries on Earth. For the founder, chief architect, CEO, and golden shareholder of any information company of any size to announce, My brain is shutting down, is not what you call good optics.
But who am I kidding? I may be the public face of Playground, the only person anyone thinks of when they think of the company. But my little experiment in empowering and connecting people got away from me twenty years ago. I haven’t been running it for years. No one has. It’s a living system, with its own agenda. Every business beyond a certain size grows its own hive mind. The company itself will find a person who can implement its collective will. And the people at the helm will be convinced of their own agency, just as I was.
Add that to your table of definitions for what it means to be a human being. We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we’re desolate when that’s what they become.
Here’s another matter that needs considering. I’ve begun to have doubts about my last will and testament, which always seemed a bit fictional. My massive act of philanthropy that I never really believed would happen is now looming. I want to keep the sum together, a fantastic force-multiplier that will further the things I’ve believed in. But you’ve sown the seed of doubt in me about the forward-looking venture that I’m endowing.
I’m not ready to speak to the lawyers, because any single thing I do with that much money will seem insane. It’s more than the country spends on dementia research each year. But I’m running out of time. At what point will I no longer be “of sound mind and body”?
For now, we’re keeping my condition on the down-low for as long as we can. To shore up the stock price and keep our competitors wrong-footed, the boards of my companies want me to stay mum at least until after our bombshell press conference, when we will announce the next big step in evolution: a whole new kind of being, one that will make companies seem as slow, small, and powerless as companies make human beings.
THE QUEEN WENT UP THE RISE, SINGING.
She didn’t call herself the Queen, of course. But everyone else on the island did, and not unkindly. Her neighbors had called her the Queen for so long that more than one person had forgotten that her name was in fact Palila Tepa.
Palila didn’t like her given name. But she didn’t entirely mind being the Queen. The title came with privileges, among them the right to sing and dance the old dances anywhere and anytime she wanted, even if the song seemed a little crazy and the occasion didn’t especially call for dances old or new.
She allotted two full hours in which to wind her way up to the community center for that night’s gathering, and the walk only took her forty minutes. But there was so much community to attend to on the road up to the community center that it was always best to get a head start. She factored in time for visiting along the way, as well as for holding still and singing, because sometimes the Queen had trouble remembering the second verses of complicated songs, and she needed a little extra time to line up the lyrics and get them sung.
She had over a thousand songs in her memory to help her up the rise. Genealogy songs and geography songs and historical epics and classic fa’atara odes. Some of them were hers but most were only on loan from the past, and when she herself went out—this year or next or the year after, at the latest—when the time came for her to stop walking up the rise and sail back out on the tide, a lot of those songs would never again be sung by anyone.
She had a song about ’Ōio, the father of all the Mihiroa, and about all the named currents that he struggled against to reach Makatea in his tiny single-hulled va’a. She had a song about the secret words spoken by the kings from the skies when they first set foot on the island. She had a song about how and where to find the foundations of all eight of the marae that once graced the island, although archaeologists had only ever located the remains of three. All kinds of good stuff.
She had songs about how the entire population of the island fled into the heart of the Pōmare empire in order to escape the Pōmare imperial expansion, and other songs about how they came back to the empty island and made it their kingdom again. She had songs and dances about how warriors from other islands came to Makatea in their war pahī because they’d heard that the Makatean vahine were the most beautiful in the world. There were verses about how the men of Makatea barricaded themselves in the caves of the cliffs from the invaders and valiantly fought them off until all the defenders died. And that was why people could sometimes still hear ghosts calling from inside the caves, the way the Queen heard them now as she limped along on her way to the center.
Palila knew songs about the arrival of the Popa’ā—first the British, then Germans, then French—although she didn’t like to sing those much. She did sometimes sing the one about the Mormon missionaries who came to the island and built the Sanito church, to which her family had long belonged and to which she herself felt committed. But she also knew Catholic hymns and truly ancient fa’ateniteni about Māui the trickster and Hina the moon goddess and, of course, Ta’aroa, spinning in his egg while dreaming up how to make the world.
She had gotten many songs from other people—from her grandmothers or her aunties or the old nurse from the mining days, who was the first to collect them. Several came from an on-again, off-again lover—an old fisherman she kept going back to over the decades because he knew so many good lyrics. The man was truly crazy. But crazy memorable.
She also knew big band tunes and plenty of hits from the ’50s and ’60s, her years of travel in the employ of the French. She had learned so many tunes from working in offices, where someone always had a radio going, usually against regulations. She could learn an entire song by heart in only two or three listens. If she was Queen of anything, it was the Queen of song learning.
But the song she sang late that afternoon—dancing a little to it as she walked, even with a hip that had never mended properly following her surgery—was a song of her own invention. It was about a Mihiroa girl born on the tallest atoll in the sea, on the day that Japanese bombs rained down on another former Polynesian kingdom, a mere twenty-five hundred miles to the north. With a father who built and repaired buildings for the Compagnie Française des Phosphates de l’Océanie and a mother who cooked for the CFPO’s workers, the little girl was a true child of the island.
The lyrics were long and rollicking. In them, the girl grew up to be good at many things: tennis, pool, soccer, basketball—all the sports that Makatea enjoyed, being, at the time, French Polynesia’s most developed island. Stanza five went:
