(Originally published in Monstrous Futures.)
My brother is three years younger than me. It says that on the little card tucked into the crate with him. His name is Harold, and Mom and Dad and BioMates LLC sure hope I’ll love him. Dear Millie, It’s time you cared about someone other than yourself, the personalized portion of the note reads. Consider this an opportunity to grow. Love, Mom & Dad. As the delivery men left my house, they looked at me with a mixture of sympathy and bemusement.
Inside the crate, under layers of compressed cardboard and biodegradable packaging, BioMates LLC’s flagship product—my new InteriMate, Harold—hovers in a transparent pod that’s warm to the touch. The murky gel inside coats his skin, webs his fingers, plasters his shaggy black hair to the sides of his face. Clothes, shoes, a phone and wallet are packed in the crate with him, but inside the pod, he’s naked. Is he going to be able to dress himself, or do I have to dress him?
Until I slice that pod open and do whatever it is I’m supposed to do to activate him, he’s nothing more than a creepy, life-sized doll with lips and a nose that looks vaguely familiar, high round cheekbones same as mine, a jawline that’s set tight enough to make me wonder if he grinds his teeth while he sleeps like I do. It’s a roll of the dice with BioMates LLC—just like with genetics formed the old-fashioned way, you don’t know exactly what any specific mix of DNA is going to produce. Sure, it could’ve and should’ve been simply a combination of my mother’s and father’s DNA, but they had BioMates LLC swirl in a healthy serving of mine too, so a selfish only-child would be guaranteed to love her reflection. All I can do now is curse every stray hair and flake of skin I left at my parents’ house on my last visit six months ago.
So in a way, this makes Harold also my son. Since I’m selfishly taking too long to give my parents a grandchild, I guess they fixed that for me too.
Consider this an opportunity to grow. Fuck that. I’m already grown.
•••
Their little plan is working. I could’ve refused the delivery. I could’ve left Harold in the crate. I could’ve locked him in the basement, left him cold and hungry until he expired in a puddle of his own piss. Instead, he sits next to me on the couch. He smells like hand sanitizer, a whiff of rubbing alcohol under something vaguely lemon-fresh. It makes me think of how animals will reject a littermate that’s been to the vet. At least he showered and dressed himself.
“’Bout time you invited me over, sis,” he says, swiveling his head to take in the surroundings.” Unopened mail, empty glasses and candy wrappers litter the coffee table, swept aside to make way for my brother’s big feet. A thin layer of dust coats every decorative surface. I haven’t been lax in my housekeeping to spite my mother, but she does come to mind every time I spot a dust mote twirling through the air.
“Have I done well for myself?” I ask. “What are you gonna tell Mom and Dad?”
Harold pulls his phone from his pocket. “I’ll text Dad now: Got here safe. Millie’s being a little bitch, but her house is nice,” he dictates, then shows me the screen before hitting send. I wonder if his phone has a history—implanted like his own history—a whole lifetime of friends and photos and late night musings preloaded, evidence of a life that never existed.
“Tell them I learned my lesson. I’m no longer a selfish loner. Marriage and babies incoming.”
“C’mon, Mills.” He pokes me in the ribs and I swat his hand away. A stranger just touched me. The stranger on my couch is teasing me like we’ve done this our whole lives and the only thing I feel is a jovial kind of irritation. “Don’t let them get to you,” he tells me. “You’re too easy and they feed on that. Just tell them what they want to hear.”
I nudge his knee with my own; I don’t even think about it. My body knows him, even if my mind doesn’t want to.
“So, how long are you staying?” I ask. This is a cruel question. Though BioMates LLC is working on a PermaMate, the current technology allows InteriMates only thirty days before they start degrading. I want to know if Harold is aware, if he knows he’s temporary.
He leans back and props an elbow on my shoulder. “You got anything to eat around here?”
•••
My InteriMate brother sits at the kitchen table eating a sandwich. Turkey, cheddar, strawberry jam, arugula. He seems to like it.
Make your own fucking sandwich, I wanted to say, but instead I emptied out the fridge while he sat there and watched me. It was more effort than I put in for myself most days. The gentle curve of his jaw lopes up and down as he chews, sloppy with delight. Is this what I look like when I’m face down in a chocolate cake? My mother’s voice echoes in my head: That’s not very ladylike—you’re being a pig. If I’d been a boy, would she have said such a thing? Would my parents still have viewed everything I did as selfish? Here I am feeding and housing a lab-grown meat sack that’s going to expire like so much ground beef in thirty days because my parents think I need a sibling to teach me a lesson. I’m more fucking nurturing than they ever were.
“So good,” Harold mutters through a mouthful of meat and cheese and bread. An arugula leaf bobs between his lips. “Just like Dad’s.”
“Dad?”
“Yeah, you remember. Mom thought the jam was gross, but Dad was right. He’d make them for us when we couldn’t sleep. You’d be crying and he’d make you a sandwich and everything would be all better.”
It makes no sense, but I ask anyway. “He made you this sandwich?”
“All the time. Both of us.” Harold’s eyes dart around the table and I hand him a napkin. He wipes it roughly across his mouth before speaking again. “We’d eat them in bed. Mom would get so mad. Our faces were all red and we’d get red all over the sheets.”
Nausea sweeps from my throat to belly. I head to the bathroom, leaving the food out so Harold can make himself another sandwich.
•••
Alone in my bed that night, I turn that sandwich over and over again in my mind.
Dad never made me—us—any kind of sandwich. On those nights when the nightmares wouldn’t leave me alone, I made sandwiches with whatever I could find. I do remember having a lot of sleepless nights as a child. I remember crying because Dad hit me when I woke him. I remember blood in my mouth, not strawberry jam.
“Selfish,” he spat. “You’re too old to be afraid.”
“Your father has to work in the morning!” Mom admonished me as she shoved a wad of tissues in my face and shut the door.
Of course Mom and Dad wouldn’t want Harold to have those memories.
My brother sleeps in my guest room. I picture him in there, mouth open, drool running down the side of his face and pooling on the pillow. I know because I slept like that as a kid. Dinosaur printed sheets, Lego and Barbies all over the floor, sneakers lost under a pile of dirty laundry. In my memory, his childhood bedroom looks just like mine.
I know this isn’t real—this memory of my brother is really a memory of my own childhood because he’s made from my DNA; he’s me. It’s disarming, though, to have these vivid flashbacks of family portraits and snowball fights and bubble baths where I held his head under the water until he bit my arm. Harold is in every snippet, so seamlessly spliced in that his presence feels not only unremarkable but natural. I know the rhythm of his breath when he sleeps, the way he curls into himself after a night spent watching scary movies. I know right now that his throat is dry but he’s too cozy—too lazy—to get up for a glass of water. What’s particularly perplexing is that he remembers a comfort sandwich when all I remember is a fist and crying myself to sleep.
•••
“You should bring Harold for a visit,” my mother tells me over the phone. “How many days left now? Twenty-eight? I’d like to see the son I never had.”
Her perfect, built to her specifications son.
“What you want to see is your money at work,” I say. “You want to know if I’ve taken this opportunity to grow.”
“Millie! Why do you have to be so cruel? Everything we do is to make you a better person, help you see outside yourself, help you succeed in the world. If we hadn’t pushed you, you wouldn’t have—”
“Yeah, I know. College,” I finish.
My mother sighs heavily, exhaling her burdens across the state. “You got that scholarship because we pushed you. You could’ve been a doctor or a lawyer. So much potential. Instead, you studied art just to—”
“Spite you,” I finish for her again.
Another sigh. I picture her standing in the kitchen, one hand on her hip, nostrils flaring as she sucks up all the air in the house. I’m the reason she has to spend hundreds of dollars every month getting her greys touched up. “Oh, Millie. Do you even still paint?” she asks, barely pausing. “All that money for school and you stay in your house all day doing data entry and watching TV. You never visit.” Here her voice wavers, a wet nudge of guilt. “We want to see Harold. We want to see you. Your father and I, we’re getting old. We won’t be around forever, not by the time you finally realize how much you’ll miss us. Don’t you care?”
Why did I pick up the phone? I usually ignore my parents’ calls, but I always listen to the subsequent voicemails as if I too believe I deserve to hear how selfish and myopic I am. Only a nagging sense of filial guilt keeps me from blocking their number.
“I’m feeding and watering him, Mom. And I put him in his crate at night, just like you taught me. I gotta go. Tell Dad hi for me.”
Harold comes out of the bathroom as I’m hanging up. “Mom?” he mouths. He reaches for my phone, but I turn it off.
Really, I should take my little brother shopping, dress him up nice, put him on the train to my parents’ house. Let them fall in love with their perfect child, only to watch him wither and die at the end of the month.
•••
“You still talk to this guy?”
Sprawled out on the couch, Harold holds up my phone as I descend the stairs. I rush to grab it from him. A text from Graham hovers on my lock screen: I’m free Friday. How about a drink?
“He moved here a couple weeks ago,” I say. “We’re gonna catch up.”
“Are you fucking crazy?”
Harold’s lips curl with disdain. A memory of my brother standing outside Graham’s house with a baseball bat comes to mind. It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s as upsetting as it was all those years ago.
“He was there for me,” I say. “Every time Mom and Dad locked me out of the house because my grades weren’t good enough or I didn’t do my chores fast enough or whatever bullshit they came up with, Graham was there. He gave me a place to stay. Who knows what would’ve happened to me if I’d had to sleep in the park or something.”
“He was all too happy to have you come to his house all vulnerable and shit,” my brother reminds me. “He was happy to take your pants off for you while you were crying.”
“I didn’t do anything I didn’t want to do.”
“Really? Because I remember you used to shrink when you saw him at school. I remember how you’d turn away when he tried to hold your hand.”
His words sting. It’s a truth I’ve easily denied, justified, then filed away. Maybe I only keep score when it comes to my parents.
My phone buzzes. Graham again. I slide it into my pocket. “It was better than sleeping on the porch, knowing Mom and Dad were gloating about the lesson I’d learn if I didn’t fucking freeze to death,” I tell Harold. “At least Graham was there for me. All my other friends, they wouldn’t let me in or their parents just drove me back home.”
“When you came home in the morning, Mom and Dad called you a slut.”
Another blow. The shame is fresh again. “You remember that?”
“You didn’t deny it.”
“Why didn’t you unlock the door?” My voice rises, a high-pitched crack that makes my face hot, swells under my eyes and puts me right back there on that front porch, banging on the window as my parents steeled their focus on the TV. “Why didn’t you let me back in?”
“I was out there too,” Harold says, his gaze softening. His hand reaches for mine, but I pull away. “I was a little shit. I deserved it.”
Later, after dinner, Harold falls asleep in front of the TV. I check my phone. Three new messages from Graham: a bar he wants to try, we should get dinner too, hey, we can keep it chill, have drinks at my place instead. I can feel that baseball bat in my hand, the hollow wooden clack it made against his front door as I tested it. His chestnut and clove cologne on me, in my hair, even after I showered. I knew all of it was wrong, but it was easier to give in, to be a girlfriend.
I consider blocking Graham. Instead, I turn my phone off, leave Harold on the couch, and head upstairs to bed.
•••
It takes a week for Harold and me to fall into a routine. He does my laundry, but he forgets to put his dirty dishes in the dishwasher. I threaten to send him back to my parents; he tells me they’re not so bad. We bicker. We watch TV together. He jogs around the neighborhood when he gets bored in my house. Halfway through the month, I take him out to dinner. We eat off each other’s plates, filling our cheeks with sushi, daring each other to smear on more wasabi, holding the other person’s glass out of reach when our tongues catch fire. The laughter comes easily and I realize how much I miss this, this not being alone. We have in-jokes, preloaded, stuff from my childhood. Our childhood.
It’s good, as long as we don’t talk about Mom and Dad.
Late one night, I walk in on Harold sitting at the kitchen table. He’s holding a pair of scissors, the blade tip pressed to his forearm. His back is to me, and I wait for him to make a joke about me being creepy, or some crack about why all my knives are dull. I stand there in the doorway for a long time, but he doesn’t move. I can’t hear him breathing. In the blue white light from the microwave display, I study the hairs on his head, on his arms, willing a single one to shift. It’s too soon for this.
InteriMates don’t spontaneously combust at the end of their lives. After thirty days, they wind down. Actions and reactions become slower, delays that have you second-guessing yourself at first. You think the joke you told didn’t land, then you hear your InteriMate laughing alone in their room in the middle of the night. The food you made for your hungry InteriMate sits untouched until you find them the next morning, fork in hand, laboriously chewing each bite despite their desperate eyes. Eventually, they stop moving at all, their mechanical heart wound all the way down as the organic matter bloats with the gasses of decomposition. Consider yourself lucky if you find your InteriMate slumped in a chair or their bed, eyes closed in peaceful repose.
BioMates LLC suggests you compost the skin and hair and muscles and fats that coat the various machine-made organs. They even have a video on their website showing the prize-winning vegetables and flowers satisfied customers have grown from the remains of their temporary loved ones. One customer made a kinetic sculpture from the titanium skeleton of his InteriMate wife. These are just helpful suggestions, of course. BioMates LLC will pick up anything you don’t want, for a fee.
Some people hold funerals for their expired InteriMates. The public laughs about it. Late night pundits theorize it’s ego fêting ego, a shameless celebration of the self. InteriMate funerals still get a listing in the local paper, though, usually in the “Oddities” section.
I’m planning the funeral in my head when Harold finally speaks.
“These don’t match. Nothing in here matches.”
I switch on the light and join him at the table. He’s got the scissor blades pressed against a small, pale crescent-shaped scar on his left forearm. There are several of these scars, sprinkled from wrist to elbow. He moves the scissors’ tip to each one, demonstrating how it could not have made these marks.
“I tried all your knives, too,” he says. “No match.”
I hold up my own arm and show him the matching scars that mar my skin. I press my index fingernail against each one. It took years for me to stop biting my nails, to let them grow long and thick again.
“When we were kids,” Harold says.
I nod. “Thirteen? Fourteen? I learned to do it in the tub so Mom wouldn’t get mad about the mess. I used to bite sometimes too, but this felt better. The digging…I could control that.”
Harold considers his arm again before putting the scissors down. I was in the tub. We were in the tub. Bubbles as thick and fluffy as frosting, some treacly peach scent from the mall. I bit down. I cried. He cried. My fingernails fit better; pressing deeper and deeper, that give, that moment of hesitation before breaking the skin. A flash of pain; then that thick, satisfying sinking into flesh. Did my brother savor that tug, the clarity as the pain focused? Does he hold the same image in his mind?
“They said we were weak,” Harold says.
“‘I brought you into this world perfect, and you do this to yourself?’” I mimic my mother.
The memory pulls a rueful hitch of a laugh from his chest. When he mimics our father, it’s too close, too much. “’You think this hurts? We’ve been protecting you your whole life. How are you going to survive in the real world.’”
“We were weak, though,” I say. “All that shit they did and said to us, and we turned that anger inward, on ourselves, because it was easier, because we were afraid. They deserved our rage, but we were too weak to give it to them.”
“We were kids, Millie.”
“We were old enough to hit back, to hold a knife.”
Harold looks wounded at this. “We couldn’t. They took care of us.”
“We were misbehaving pets to them, and when we didn’t perform—” I pick up the scissors and make a stabbing motion, “—we were weak. We just took it and took it. All those times…you didn’t do shit for me. Why didn’t you—just once—stand up for me?”
I forget the scissors are in my fist as I continue making stabbing motions, slicing too easily through the air between us, my arm loose and reckless as Harold grabs at me, trying to still me. He’s yelling my name, but I want that flash of pain, that satisfying sinking into flesh.
“You’re so fucking stupid. They never loved you,” I tell my brother.
At that, he releases my arm, turns, and walks out of the kitchen.
•••
Harold’s crying in his room. I can’t hear him, but I know. He’s in there, curled on his side in bed, using the comforter to rub away his tears and snot. It’s what I used to do.
I can’t sleep anyway. I get out of bed and let myself into his room across from mine. He’s as I imagined, back to me, his every inhale wet and clotted. He doesn’t move as I climb into his bed and shape my body around his.
“You remember this?” I ask, pressing my cheek into his back. The sanitized vet scent is gone. He smells like fabric softener and my lemongrass shampoo. “We used to hold ourselves and squeeze and squeeze until we were invisible.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. It’s not until I’m getting up from the bed that he says, “It worked.”
•••
When I find Harold late one night, frozen in the dark kitchen with a vacant stare and a steak knife in his hand, I know it’s no longer too soon.
He’s slow to respond. I hear him climb the stairs hours after I tell him to snap out of it and go to bed. The next morning, he makes it halfway through breakfast before he stops chewing. Bits of scrambled eggs and toast fall from his mouth, his eyes dull and his features slack. He’s still got the steak knife in his hand.
Five days left.
This is the point where BioMates LLC suggests you get your compost area ready, if you’re so inclined. A sunny spot in your yard, far enough from your home so you won’t be bothered by odors or rodents. A large shovel to turn the compost. A friend or neighbor to do the early turning for you, if seeing your dead InteriMate is too hard.
Instead, I take Harold shopping. He accepts what I select, though his complacency is part of the expiration process. I buy him a blue button-down and khaki slacks, a look my mother will appreciate. I send a brief email to my parents and buy my brother a train ticket.
“You can’t bring that with you,” I tell him as we’re waiting at the station.
It takes a full minute for him to consider his hand stuffed inside his jacket pocket. The tip of the steak knife dents the fabric, a dot of silver threatening beige twill. “No,” he says quickly, turning back to me. This is an improvement over yesterday, a spark in his eyes that gives me hope.
“They’ll take it from you. They’ll kick you off the train.”
I hold out my hand until he slides the knife out and passes it to me. Scanning the crowd, I drop the knife into my purse. No one seems to notice.
“There are knives at Mom and Dad’s house,” I say. “Gasoline in the garage. Matches in the kitchen.”
“I only have a few days,” Harold says.
I didn’t tell him I bought a one-way ticket.
“You’ll do great,” I assure him. “I trust you.”
When his train arrives, I walk my brother to the gate. He throws his arm around me in an awkward shoulder-squeeze, hard enough to unsteady me. “Be good without me, okay, Mills?” he says.
I stay at the gate and wave once he finds his window seat. He waves back eagerly. As the train is pulling away, I get a text from Graham: Hey, you there? We still hanging out??
I delete the thread and block Graham’s number.
