MEGAN WILDHOOD / WE ARE GOING STEADILY THROUGH LIGHT THAT WILL BE GOLD
My sister died and I was disappointed, but dying just means she’s invisible now. The body is throw-away nuisance. The body is throw-away nuisance, isn’t that right. This death is when I changed from a person who wanted to be chased out of a room when I stormed out the door to a person who did not want to be chased when I stormed out because attachment is just entanglement. Yet, still a person. But now I cannot be followed at all because my birth giver did not join the resistance (she agreed with the healers: the body is a throw away) even though it was made supremely clear to her that hers was the last generation that could. Maybe she didn’t believe it because she still saw death grazing among her children, taking her least favorite first (my therapists surmise this is why I love(d) my sister so much; she made me shine in my mother’s eyes…except that shine was a bullseye-shaped spotlight). So now I am a brain in a vat of sparkly bitterness, isn’t that right, therapy providers. Just a wrecking ball of awareness shuttered unto only myself.
This death is what got my birth giver ready to tell her story but, as I said (the bitterness), I wasn’t ready to hear it. They took away the ability to blame cold mothers for Autism, my condition, which seems right or at least logical because who knows maybe the arrow goes the other way and I am the one that made mine cold. So there are other reasons why I’m bitter I’m sure. I’m sure I’m bitter, anyway. My birth giver could have been amazing, joined the resistance to save the human body as a body at least until death and there’d be plenty of things left to be bitter about. Like my sister dying. Like my mother not really liking her made other people think that meant my mother liked me more; like people not really seeing that all it did was make my beloved sister like me less. Though maybe her dying is why our birth giver did not join the resistance to keep the substrate of consciousness where it should be: maddeningly, unfigureoutably bound up with blood and bone and broken. So: still my sister dying, in terms of bitterness, then. But I was always just a brain in a vat, isn’t that right. Easier to fix one of those.
As it happens, even the dampened anger shorts circuits, so I’m having work done. Here is the sharp slurry that reminds me look at people when you’re talking to them make sure you get them talking about themselves handshakes the answer to a question is not the truth but something deeply upbeat or coolly cynical depending. Here’s the syringe that’ll get me small talking. This, that. You can learn what homo sapiens want. You should. You suspect, hope? it doesn’t make sense even to them, but you’re just the island of brain in the unrelenting vat: what do you know, you know?
Well: Russian (quick upload). Chess, merely proficient (glitchy upload). How to robot like a sapien (when defragged). Program computers, of course. Sometimes, the uploads are called therapy by the practitioners injecting them in at the behavior clinic. The techs want their lumpy slurries to be rays from the sun itself—think they are, clearly. They walk around thinking they’ve got the only gold.
Their shit doesn’t work, though. It’s like life is conducted in four and each of my stanzas has five beats. That’s not a thing for fixing, I wouldn’t think. Plus, only words shine light (birth giver’s eye shine target: there is a difference between being watched and being seen). But it goes worse than dark when the words don’t mean the same thing in my brainvat I think you all call it as they do in someone else’s mouth. A for-instance would be the time my now invisible sister who was visible when she told me this told me that she wanted to hang with me more. Lo, there was all the light and brilliance, anyone who wanted to look more closely could see the whole of the island that my brain and thus my whole self, right?, is. My sister? She could see even more. A miracle and also, probably the reason she didn’t like me. Lo.
But this thing my sister who I can’t see anymore said wasn’t true. It doesn’t matter if she meant it. It wasn’t true. It wasn’t true because it didn’t happen. I know this isn’t how other humans use the word. She didn’t make it happen. Why she would say a thing I could easily verify happened or did not happen when she did not harbor any intentions to carry it through is the species of question we vat-surrounded brains get in trouble with the whole people for asking. We did not hang out more. Our birth giver doesn’t think she could be anywhere we look like I know she is, must be. I do not know if it is love or fear that drove our birth giver to snag one of the first upload slots—neither love nor fear seem like processes that would occur in my birth giver, but I never get any of that feeling stuff right, isn’t that right. I do know that I didn’t feel fear until my vat was rippled by love.
They were not tidal waves at all, it’s just that things don’t matter enough to fear losing them until you’ve been deeply moved. Is that right?
It was another person. I know I know. How can a brain all lonely in a vat feel any feelings let alone the highest and most complicated in all the land? You know, I’ll just say, actually, that learning the difference between ripples caused by the stuff that swims deep in your vat’s guts and ripples that come from being jostled around on the outside is the first step toward becoming a whole person, for those that still want to be whole—or people.
The hardest thing for our birth giver is that we do not know why my sister died. One moment in time, she was playing ultimate frisbee with the only neighbor kids after walking home from the high school. The next, her very human body was found far from where we lived and impaled, carelessly, like she was a note tacked in haste on a corkboard and not even for anyone else to read ever, and that’s all I know about that. Probably because I will not hear my birth giver’s story, isn’t that right.
I should probably want to hear it. Honor her. Myself as the last generation whose bodies will have sprung from other bodies, except those of us who are so different we are assumed not to have or need anything but our brain in our vat. <--That isn’t right.
I will say that this love—it was returned! until they also decided to upload—clearcut the dark and after things stopped being so seared that I could see higher and deeper and wider and longer than the lights that were words or the mass-manufactured light that hardly seemed like light up against the seven-karat shine that is love and not a target. You can see everything with this light and you cannot hide and it is finally clear that the only place you can hide, been hiding, is hiding because having to hide is what makes the hell.
Actually, I don’t see everything in love’s light. I still don’t see what happened to my sister.
I have been told I am very self-contained. My birth giver was told this about me, too, isn’t that right. Our opinions about this differed, which caused some conflict. It’s weird: two opposing forces don’t have to cause conflict, do they? Sometimes, isn’t this right, they can cause stabilization. They use tension to hold entire buildings together. I think they design that into structures that have to maybe endure earthquakes. But she doesn’t understand this, any of it, and she’s stressed enough about my sister and how that all looks that I have to often think to myself (because feelings are wrong), what would a brain in a vat do and then try to do it. She’s calmer when reality meets her expectations. For example: answer emotional questions intellectually. Strive to figure out all things via self-reference. No hugs. Social awkwardness. Special interests, which I figured out apparently means wanting to learn a lot about something that may or may not be expected of your gender or age.
The work I’m having done caused all kinds of sharp perturbations in the fluid in my vat, which seems to be the aim of the therapists. The rocking you see me do periodically, because I do see you staring, yes, is to keep all this liquid from spilling out of my ears. It’s rude to spill. Sometimes the disturbances last a long time, though, and I have trouble thinking of who I am under all the marionette motions those slurries ‘enable’ me to perform. Trouble not like I can’t do it; trouble like I’m troubled by it. Guilty for some reason. Existing, probably.
But the slurries are confusing. They help me behave, yet what everyone, professionals to regular citizens, expect of people like me remains in place. This one is the hardest for me to know what to do with: I am supposed to be rigid and linear, isn’t that right according to the experts. But I did not tell you about my love before and I won’t yet because right now I’m thinking about the seeable version of my sister. We played like kids in the 50s and maybe even up to the 90s played: we were outside which doesn’t make sense now that I think of our birth giver and her self-exclusion from the resistance but I am not capable of understanding the complications of average humans I think the literature says, so this is to be expected.
So my sister: our play was dark and wild. Our birth giver thinks it might be gold—that it might be able to shine some light on why she died if only I would tell her exactly what I remember. But you don’t get the light from looking back. You get the light from looking up, straight up into the moment you’re in and all I remember is that my sister was always going toward a light that I couldn’t see. If it had been safe, I maybe would have told someone, but the safest person was her and she always knew more about light than I did isn’t that right because she was supposedly the normal child. O. She knew more about light than I did. This is why she was least favorite. O.
The Literature on my kind makes me out to be a machine already and this is also confusing because I’m not sure why my birth giver is so gung-ho about becoming a machine if the reason she rejects me is because she thinks I’m too much like one—you know, no empathy, inflexible, has select superpowers and significant communication issues. I wish I was as intuitive as an algorithm ,but I don’t want to be that creepy.
The communication issues. If I were to tell you that I didn’t understand light until that person I loved walked into it, would that make sense? Is it too precious? That person was a romantic interest I think they say, which means wanting to chase or be chased by them and have sex with them and be with them for a long time, right? and I think that’s what I was feeling but also safe. No one of us is perfect so no one of us is totally safe, but if you can make someone who the world was not made for and doesn’t concern itself with beyond behavior moldifications so it is comfortable then I think you are in the light.
This person came to me after my sister went invisible and believed me that she was invisible and that is why the light is going gold—because this person believed me. About my sister and about me.
“If everyone thinks you’re so self-contained, why aren’t you allowed to make up your own mind about who you are?”
This wasn’t all it took, but I have been going steadily through the light they were already in ever since that question which they volleyed over a game of chess I was stereotypically beating them soundly at. Serious play is my favorite kind and we were playing it on a table where the table was the board and we were outside and it was so foggy that the sun looked like the moon.
I didn’t start loving this person because they believed me. I loved them first. There are actual reasons—this person is real, won’t let anything get between them and truth, is shy, revels in the sun, talks to me in the easy times and the hard times, goes after what they say they want, hikes the mountains that are falling to bits into the womb of the wind and keeps a beautiful, loyal company—which is weird isn’t that right because it’s less romantic if you know why you feel what you feel. But I don’t have feelings. I do not have feelings. But them believing me—I think this is the name for letting someone vouch for their own experience without evaluating or judging it—made it so that my own heart could be my mother. I think that is what self-care really is. And when your own heart is your mother, you are not an island and you can excuse yourself from the other resistance—the one you wage against yourself when you’re different in this world—and you’ll probably be impaled with all that the world is and all that it isn’t but also: you can walk in the light, too.
Megan Wildhood is an erinaceous, neurodiverse lady writer in Seattle who helps her readers feel genuinely seen as they interact with her dispatches from the junction of extractive economics, mental and emotional distress, disability, and reparative justice. She hopes you will find yourself in her words as they appear in her poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017) as well as the Atlantic, Yes! Magazine, Mad in America, the Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more at meganwildhood.com.