Knowing that their relationship was unraveling had somehow made everything even less bearable. Even this restaurant, with its tacky novelty cocktails and throwback twenty-tens dishes, depressed him now. Somewhere along the way, he’d agreed it was their favorite local. Somehow, he’d kept pretending to be okay. But the truth was every time they ate here, a sticky kind of claustrophobia overwhelmed him, a sense of being funneled into feelings that weren’t really his.
And tonight, with the juices of the steak curdling in his mouth, he wondered if love could morph into low-key horror without you even really noticing it. Maybe that was what troubled his sleep every night, and not just the gentle hum of Sasha’s tech.
She thought his discomfort was funny and called him “my adorable luddite.” They’d had bitter arguments about it: the way everything revolved around her Peeks, the constant repackaging of their life to share with strangers, the relentless sharing in exchange for products, free food and drinks. I’m just expressing myself, she’d correct him when he complained. Like branded content could actually express a human being.
Across the table, Sasha stirred her food and smiled at him through the whisper of steam. “Yeah, would you mind getting this?” she asked, misreading the reason for his attention. “I fucking love this mood.”
He swallowed the clot of meat. “Sure.”
The routine was always the same: put down the fork or glass or whatever else he might be holding, take her cam, smash through a series of shots while she performed her repertoire of poses. She was good at this, and he wanted to support her. It had taken her years for her to get to this point, to where their lifestyle now depended on it.
But that was where the claustrophobia came in. He’d never asked for any of it. What if you could live unseen, your feelings untold by brands. If you stopped pressing the validation lever, did the cage disappear?
“Can you take a couple low-angles?” she said. “The vines look sick with this dress. It’s pure tropical.” She didn’t even glance at the trailing vines hanging down behind her, but that was also part of her talent: a preternatural awareness of everything as backdrop. The world was her set design.
She pushed her chair back and leaned back faux-casually so he could get the obligatory shot of her thigh holster. Her Peekers loved the holsters, and all the other paraphernalia. They wanted to see the filtration machines pressed tight against skin and tubes sliding into ports. They fetishized the leather straps, the tiny silver buckles, and the butterfly clamps as much as they did her glistening, living interior.
And Sasha encouraged it. She and her friends were obsessed with posting the subtle coloration changes of their organs, comparing and divining insights about their moods or mental health. They livestreamed the slow ticking over of blood stats as they digested meals and competed to reveal ever more intimate views of hard-to-see organs. James told her it was all meaningless and cultish, but she’d just groan and call him dim-gen whenever he said anything like that.
He zoomed in a little more on her face, where the skin was thankfully still intact. He still remembered the sweet, full-epidermis woman he’d fallen in love with, a good year before she started messing around with Peeks and swapping skin for windows. Back then, he’d worried that she’d transform herself, meet a bunch of Peeked-out creeps, and suddenly want to leave him. Why stay with some weird, thirty-something, flesh-covered bore? But she’d stayed.
She tilted her head, giving him the sultry smile that used to keep him awake all night. In those days, the smile had been just for him, and she didn’t yet have her signature look: lips painted merlot to match the tubes that circled and penetrated her neck, the crimson eyeliner to accentuate her silver-blond hair and fluttering pink lungs.
She still kept him awake all night, but in more disturbing ways now.
It was that nightly routine in the bathroom. Whatever she did in there to swap her day tubes out for the evening set, he didn’t know. She opened her epidermis for strangers on her feeds, but she refused to open even the bathroom door for him. The sounds that echoed from that room every night had become a song of dread stuck in his head: the click of the door locking, the snaps of the clamps opening, the light clink, clink, clink as she placed them on the ceramic basin, then the scrape, shuffle, and tiny pump motors whirring into life. Finally, a gurgle of fluids, first loud and then quiet. She would emerge smelling like buttery oils and lingering blood, wearing the shorter tubes that sat flush against her skin.
The evening set was designed to avoid getting tangled or ripped out accidentally, although that had happened once, years ago when she was just starting out. That night still haunted him, seeing the blood spray in a constellation across their white sheets and walls, Sasha’s eyes welling with tears of humiliation and shame. He’d assured her it was all okay, clumsily helped her re-attach the clamps, even made her laugh by telling her it kinda turned him on, and before long, they were fucking in the blood mess. All of it was a lie, but he could pretend. They were similar like that.
“Okay, wait, wait.” She shuffled closer to the vines and adjusted her shoulder strap to better show off her left lung. It inflated and deflated delicately behind the plasti-skin window, a rhythmic pulsing he’d grown used to.
She dropped a hand to the haptic control strapped to her thigh and adjusted her internolights. Her lungs and trachea glowed a little brighter in miserable violet.
He took a few more shots as she tossed back her hair and arched her neck, the transparent plasti-skin stretching over her trachea as smoothly as her real skin used to.
She reached over the table, took the cam, and checked his shots. A pleased smile softened her face. She was a perfectionist when it came to her Peeks, but he was a pro now—he’d taken thousands of her over the years, become a pretty decent cam-hubby.
A waitress paused by their table. “Any more drinks? Complimentary.” She nodded at the cam in Sasha’s hand and gave her a smile of transactional intensity.
“Yes, please. Something pretty,” Sasha said. “What do you recommend. I was thinking the Lunar-Glo flute cocktail??”
“That will look perfect with your hair.” The waitress smiled approvingly. “And you?”
“Another whiskey.” A boring drink for a boring man, he could almost hear her thinking.
She gestured to his barely touched plate. “Is everything okay?”
He fake-smiled. “Amazing.”
She collected his empty glass and turned away. Her dress was backless, and the rotating lights accentuating her kidneys cycled through a steady rainbow pattern.
Sasha peered into her screen, chewing her bottom lip. She always did that while selecting photos or uploading digestion stats, worrying over her numbers and whether she looked authentic and candid enough.
He turned away, and his gaze fell on the young couple at the next table. They were drinking pink-and-orange swirled cocktails, giggling as the glowing booze frothed brightly down their transparent throats. The darker-haired guy had turquoise micro-bulbs implanted around his areola, casting his face into a strange upside-down twilight. His boyfriend wore next to nothing and had a full-body plasti-skin to show off his viscera. He caught James staring and tossed him a what-bitch? look.
And now James felt their judgment of him, the old-fashioned flesh man who kept his innards obscured, yet rudely stared at other people.
The waitress delivered their drinks and vanished again in a rainbow of lights. Sasha picked up her luminous drink, adjusted her grip so her nails were in shot, and took a selfie with the straw in her mouth.
She took a sip. “Mm, it’s nice. Want to try?”
“No.”
She shrugged, as if his lack of playfulness didn’t bother her, but he knew it did. “So, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” she said. “And I know what you’re gonna say, but just hear me out, okay?”
“So, it’s bad news.”
“Just keep an open mind.”
“Sasha, what body part are you getting removed now?”
“My god. Get over those pointless ribs.” She glanced at her stats, watching how her cocktail was affecting her graphs. He couldn’t make out the number exactly, but her live follower count looked like it was in three digits.
“It’s butchery.”
“My skeleton, my choice,” she said absently. Then she frowned in the cute way he’d seen her practicing religiously in her cam. She could deliver an expert level cute-mad. “Come on, are you going to be a dick about this forever? I don’t criticize you for staying dim. Besides, I’m not removing anything. I’m enhancing. It’s called a Supernova Smile, and it’s gonna look wild.”
“Sash. No. Tell me you’re not doing anything to your face–”
“I already knew you wouldn’t love it. That’s why I’m giving you a heads-up before I make an appointment. But you’ll get used to it, babe.”
“You pulled your bones out. I’ll never get used to any of it.”
“True, but you never get used to anything. I guess what I’m saying is, you’ll be okay.” She raised the flute of luminescent moon-stuff. “Let’s just have a nice night?”
His neck felt too hot. “But where does it all end? How much more do you cut open?”
She shrugged. “Who knows. It’s art. And it’s fun.” She took another sip and licked her crimson lips. “You know, this whole Peeks thing has been kind of a crazy journey for me. And you’ve been there for me through it all, from my very first mod, even though it’s not your thing. That’s pretty cool.”
“When did you start talking like that, Sash? I can’t even remember when it started.”
“Talking like what?”
“A journey. It’s not a journey. There’s no destination. All you’re doing is turning yourself inside out for followers. You’re turning in circles, peeling yourself open for–”
“Neat. A James lecture.” She dropped a hand to her thigh and lowered her internolights. The unsettling violet dimmed, and their little table was enclosed in gloom. It was almost comforting.
She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths, and then she reached out to cup his left hand. The metal plasti-skin cuffs near her wrist pressed against his fingers. “I get it,” she said, looking into his eyes as if he were a child. “There’s so much chaos and uncertainty out there right now, and you like things familiar. We all do. But sometimes you have to embrace change, or you’ll end up left behind. You know?”
The couple at the next table dissolved into giggles at something. He squirmed his hand out of hers.
“I think this is my last stop,” he said.
“Last stop of what?”
“I want off your journey, Sash. All these dumb fights and lame speeches, the endless Peeks.”
“They’re not lame speeches.”
“I care about you, but…I’m tired of seeing your insides, tired of the lights, and the videos, and the sharing. And I really don’t want see whatever you’re about to do to your face.”
Her lungs fluttered quickly in the gloom. “Don’t say stuff like that. Can you just relax? You threatened to leave last time I got a new Peek, too.”
“But this time I’m not changing my mind. I don’t want to fight about it anymore, or even talk about it. I just want to not see everything for once.”
He stood up, and her crimson lips pressed tight with anger, the pumps whirring loudly as her heart rate increased.
“You’re serious?” She glanced at her cam. “Shit. Look at my stress. This is off the scale.”
“I’m heading back to the apartment to grab a few things. I’ll stay somewhere else tonight. Just give me a half hour to get out of your way, okay?”
She looked around as if to see who was watching. Her internolights pulsed low and fast. “Wait. Are you seriously going to take a drama-walk out of here? And just leave me here like this?”
“I’m sorry.”
Her cam screen lit up with notifications – her fans alerted to some kind of physiological drama unfolding. When she glanced at the screen, he turned and walked away.
On the way to the front of the restaurant, he could almost feel the shots she was snapping of him. He knew exactly how it would go. Later, this view of his retreating back would appear on her feed, the garish lamps casting him as silhouette, strangely opaque and windowless. “You know I’ve always shared everything with you all,” her post would start. And then she’d narrate her vulnerability, her authenticity, the precise trauma of their breakup articulated through a shimmering peacock’s tail of hashtags. She’d make her Peekers feel that only they truly understood her pain, and then she’d gift their loyalty with a rare vid of her glossy, incandescent heart, pulsating wet and broken. #therealme.
He stopped at the front desk to swipe for their meals, tipped the waitress double, and then exited into the soft murmur of night rain. The soft sound mixed with the chatter of patrons at the other restaurants and bars. People had shuffled their tables away from the wet sidewalk to shelter under the awnings, crammed close together. They laughed and drank, a glowing kaleidoscope of colorful ghosts in the dark. The scent of rain on warm concrete mixed with the cigarette smoke and perfume.
Two young women giggled and peered at him as they walked by. The puddles on the pavement flared tangerine in the glow from under their raincoats. He wondered if they were followers of Sasha and had just seen his little tantrum. Probably. There were no such things as private moments anymore.
It was a few blocks to their apartment, and he hadn’t brought a jacket, but for the first time in years, he felt almost good. Only the unknown lay ahead, darkness, quiet, a part of his life that was mysterious and only his. The drumbeat of rain on the awnings lifted his mood.
As he approached a Turkish restaurant, a table of teenagers looked up, and he almost tripped over his own feet in shock: all four had wide-open mouths lit with blue-neon fire, snarling grotesquely like lunging vipers. By the time his logical brain caught up and made sense of what he was seeing, he already felt stupid, and old. They were just kids—just laughing and smoking kids who had split their cheeks high, sweeping incisions that curved from lips all the way to ears. Their teeth shone with radiant oral diodes, and their tongues thrashed in the wisps of blue.
The four supernova-bright faces turned to track him as he passed by, and he realized how dim and awkward he looked. Poor man, all closed and wet.
He walked faster, away from the gleaming bright people and their cameras, and let the rain envelop him in its dark veil. And he breathed.
