She did, leaning against his shoulder as he worked. When she woke, the plane was circling Los Angeles and her father was packing up his tapes. Roxy watched him with a sensation of drowning, but she hardened her face and kept her arms at her sides. She didn’t see him again for five months.
Back at home with her mother and sister, she was morose and adrift. Kiki received her indifferently; Kiki refused even to see their father, whom she’d deemed “a godless man” on learning from Charlie that he’d seduced Jocelyn while she was in high school. Kiki spent all her time with a Christian youth group; Roxy assumed that, being plain, her sister had no better options. God loves everyone, right? But less than a year after Roxy’s trip to London, Kiki ran away with the youth-group leader, who was twenty-six. Roxy remembers the wounded astonishment she felt at being trumped in transgression by her humdrum sister. Their father hired detectives, but they failed to locate Kiki before her eighteenth birthday. She resurfaced a couple of years later, writing letters to their mother from the Far East, where she’d become a missionary. In the end, she married an insurance executive, settled in Connecticut, and had four children who are now adults. She goes by her full name, Krysanne. Roxy has seen her only twice in adulthood, at their father’s funeral and, more recently, their mother’s. But since all they have in common is their girlhood, about which Krysanne can only repeat, “Thank God I got out,” there is little to say.
Getting high, which is hard to accomplish through the methadone （it takes a lot, Roxy has to be careful）， gives her a sensation of power and transcendent rightness beyond anything she could have imagined when she uttered those words: make my mark. Making her mark ended up not involving any of the things she’d banked on—her dancing, her beauty, her sexual confidence—in fact, all of those succumbed to it. Heroin is her great love, her life’s work, and she has given up everything for it, through renunciation or sheer neglect. No one can say she hasn’t been steady—or, rather, everyone says that, but only because they fail to grasp that her scarred arms and swollen fingers, her gray teeth and thin hair and stooped, halting gait, are testaments to her fierce devotion. She’s outlasted even Jocelyn, whom she used to nod off with at her father’s house. Jocelyn got a social work degree in her forties and settled down with a famous guitarist who’d been in love with her since high school. Not Roxy. She will depart this world empty-handed: a sacrifice that only Kiki, in the religious fervor of her girlhood, might have understood.
* * *
The Cube chimes sooner than Roxy expects. She sits up, refreshed and wanting to pee, as if she fell asleep. Maybe she was asleep, for crossing the room feels different, strange. Good. Beside her futon, the Consciousness Cube is warm as a newly laid egg, Artie asleep on top of it. Roxy slides the kitten onto her bed and lifts up the Cube. It feels heavier: the weight of her past. As she plucks the sensors from her scalp, she feels a corresponding lightness, as if she’s been relieved of some internal pressure. She saw a video once about a woman who fell headfirst from a third-story window. Doctors opened up her skull and removed her brain, placing it in a basin of brainy fluid so that it could swell freely without getting squashed against the inside of her skull. That’s how Roxy feels: as if her brain has been released from a cell it outgrew.
She texts the greenhouse that she isn’t feeling well and can’t come in, Effortless Prevarication being another Former Junkie skill. The greenhouse job is a Bright Day program, which means they’ll test her urine tomorrow. Fine—she’s clean! But she wants to give herself to this aftermath, to understand what has changed. Artie hops back onto the Cube when she sets it down. The Cube is her, in a way. It contains the entire contents of her mind: all the things she can and can’t remember, every thought and feeling she has had. At last, she is the owner of her unconscious. She knows where everything can be found.
Everything, that is, until the chime. The twenty minutes since won’t be saved to the Cube until she reapplies the sensors and updates her externalization. For now, they exist only in her mind. And although Roxy has longed for a Consciousness Cube as a means of traveling backward, it is this diaphanous new present, with its fresh-born minutes, that captivates her. She touches her face, feeling the warmth of her skin against her fingertips. She goes to her window and opens it. Blue sky. Brisk San Francisco wind. A sense of the ocean, although it’s nowhere in sight. The satisfaction of one good long breath. She inhales again, even more deeply, and thinks, I am lucky.