of those who thought they were blessed when their things came back on. Bystanders gathered around the twinkling machines, peered over their owners’ shoulders. What happened next, Andriy said, was always the same: the screen would light up already cued to a text. Or an email, or an image, or a document, a video or audio file. And the owner’s delirious relief would harden into something else—fear, or panic, or anger. One young woman he had seen, Andriy said, peeled the rubber bunny backing off her phone and smashed it on the rim of a metal trash can. Then she sat in a snowdrift and cried.
“I try to console her,” he said, adding wistfully, “My daughter has same case.”
In the grocery store, he found more of the same. The cashier behind the belt where Andriy plunked down his order, a lanky redhead with an asymmetrical haircut, ran away halfway through the transaction. The man’s phone, sitting next to the register, had begun to emit moans and gasps. Andriy looked down to see a sex tape playing at top volume. “Two men, both have gray hair, equivalent penis size,” he reported to Orla. “I was not staring. The quality was very good.”
When the cashier left, Andriy said, he took his things into the next lane, to a Hispanic girl with doorknocker earrings who was pretending not to watch her coworker. She rung up Andriy’s things without making eye contact, snapping her gum. Suddenly, a ding rang out from her midsection. She looked down. A square of white light shone through the thin purple cotton of her apron.
The girl pulled the phone out slowly and looked at it. Swiped once, twice. Put the phone back and picked up Andriy’s bag of trail mix.
“What are you seeing?” he asked her. “What makes everyone go so crazy?”
“Not the same thing for everyone,” the girl said. “I hear they got stuff for everybody.”
“What stuff?” Andriy said. “Who is they?”
The girl shrugged. “Nobody knows,” she said. “Had a guy in here, FBI or something. Said that everybody who has stuff turning back on, it’s weird. The first thing you see is something you don’t want nobody to see, and then you see where they sent it.” She was dragging items over her scanner even though it wasn’t working. “Like for me, they say they sent my mom a lotta shit I talked on her, like a lotta lotta shit. I said I fantasize about her dying.”
“You said this in a text?” Andriy asked.
The girl, he said, had shaken her head. She was oddly calm. Only the gold in her ears shook. “Copies of notes from my shrink,” she said, and she showed him. “Apparently, that’s a big one. They’re in the medical systems. It’s like they know how to look for secrets.” She punched at her calculator, held up the total, closed her hand on his exact change. “So if you got something fucked up, man, spill it now. Before they do it for you.”
* * *
Andriy was very sorry; in the three-bedroom penthouse, there were no beds. Floss was right, all those months ago—he lived in Delaware, close to his ex-wife and daughter, and when he stayed in the city for work, he slept on the couch. But there was a beanbag in the corner of the largest bedroom, so Orla sat there, her whole body screaming from the lack of support. She let Marlow eat and looked around uneasily. The room’s walls were covered with the sort of posters Orla remembered from dorm rooms—models in shreds of swimsuits and lingerie, kneeling seaside or draped over beds. At college, boys stuck them to the cinder block with putty, but Andriy had framed and hung his.
He made Orla eggs, scrambled and dry. Next to her plate, he set down two Advil. It was all he had, he said. It was better than nothing, she answered.
They sat and ate the eggs while Marlow slept on the couch, the pillows in a makeshift fortress around her. They were almost finished when the screen of the television went black, then blue, then, suddenly: it was all back, confusing Orla’s eyes. The channel guide stared at them like it had never left. Andriy jumped up. He lunged for the remote on the coffee table. Orla watched, half-aware her mouth was full of eggs and open, as he fumbled, pressing buttons with both thumbs.
Most of the stations had not recovered. They were dark or rainbow-blocked or frozen on something from before.