The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [33]
“You ask a lot of personal questions for a man who hasn’t even told me why we’re talking,” she said.
“It’s all very relevant to me, Ms. Gold.”
She scratched with one finger behind her right ear. “You know what it was for a lot of them, I bet?”
“I don’t.”
“Appliances.”
Jameson frowned, confused.
She said, “There are dozens, even hundreds of electrical appliances everywhere we go. At home, at work, at the store, at the doctor’s. And they are all humming. You don’t notice it because your brain has learned to tune it all out. But the neurostimulator tries to make sense of all that humming. Maybe because it’s a machine itself, it organizes all that low unnatural ambient noise into songs and choruses. That’s my persistent Muzak. All day, every day. Can you imagine being sad because your blender and your humidifier and your computer printer all combine into a depressing minor chord?”
Nada made a slight gesture with her head and pouting lips. Her eyes directed Jameson some fifteen feet around the turn of the bar. “There’s a girl sitting behind you and to your right. In a bright yellow top. Study her face for ten seconds.”
Jameson turned and stared. The girl noticed him after five beats and brusquely turned away.
“Now look at me. What do you remember?” Nada asked.
“Pretty. Brunette. Ribbon in her hair. Long nose. Thin lips. Large bosom.”
Nada leaned forward an inch. “During the day, she wears glasses that pinch her just a little bit here. She’s wearing blue-tinted contacts over hazel eyes. Her shade of lipstick is Plum Berry. She cut her own bangs this morning. Her name is Gwen. She whitens her teeth with one of those home kits. Although she tries to cover the scar with makeup, she’s had some sort of surgery in the area of her thyroid, probably as a child. She’s left-handed but plays tennis with her right. Her friend in the pink is Shelley.”
“You picked up all that since you sat down?”
Nada made a circle in the air with her finger, indicating the rest of the room. “Now multiply that by a hundred.”
“There’s so much information coming in, some brains don’t have the ability to handle it.”
“Between you and me, I think the real issue for most of the others was just … knowing. Knowing too much stuff. Knowledge can be a burden, especially if you feel compelled to do something with it.”
Jameson rubbed his neck. “Most would say knowledge is power.”
She scoffed with a squint. “Selective knowledge, intelligence, is power. Unfiltered knowledge is just noise.” Jameson was listening, but he still wasn’t getting it. “Look, blue and yellow make green, and that’s simple, elegant. But you mix all the colors together and you get black. When you see everything at once, you can’t make it add up to anything, and that’s depressing. That’s what the world looks like to me—hopelessly complicated. I see so much stuff that the world’s not green; it’s black.”
“So what do you do?”
“Like I said, I’ve learned to deal.”
“Why you and not the others?”
“I don’t know. Lucky. What I do know is that the neurostimulator is a part of me,” she said. “It might not have been with me when I was born, but taking it out now would be like giving me a lobotomy. That little spider is who I am. It is me. I’m it.” She turned her head toward the dance floor and said, “Take this out of me and I’m nobody.”
Unembarrassed, Jameson said, “Before your father’s legal difficulties, what was your relationship with him?”
“What do you care?”
“I’ll answer that question. But I asked first.”
“I loved him.”
“How about your mother?”
“I haven’t spoken to her since I was a teenager.”
The long months of the televised trial strained the family in every direction. Nada had always