Nina of the Northern Latitude
When Gill thinks I’ve fallen asleep, he wraps his arms around me, presses his nose against my dress, and inhales. In the morning, I tell him he should take a walk, maybe try to smell the cherry blossoms planted beside the overpass.
“It’s not the same,” he whines, swirling his spoon through his cereal.
“You need to knock it off,” I say.
I take deep, cathartic breaths just like the pediatric psychologist suggested. We tried to work through why Gill smelling my floral dresses makes me so upset.
There’s something off-putting, I typed to the psychologist, about an eleven-year-old smelling his mother when he thinks she’s asleep. Things aren’t good here. We go to bed on the same cot just to save room. I know he’s heard how great flowers smell and thinks my dresses are some kind of substitute, but I need space.
Why not buy new dresses? the psychologist replied.
I terminated the chat and paid the consultation fee.
Yes, I suppose I could ask for another advance on my paycheck and order new dresses without floral patterns, but I don’t want to throw the old ones away. I would miss the soft glimmer of wearing my favorite, the one with repeating facsimiles of a purple orchid. The other women at Transfer Hub turn to stare at me, their headsets still wobbling when I catch them looking. I don’t care. Yes, I’ve owned this dress since high school and, yes, it still fits me well. Did it once belong to my mother? Yes. Has it faded? Sure. The threaded roots have dried. The cloned petals have etiolated.
The girls’ furrowed brows bring me less and less satisfaction. Their whispers, the way they vacate rooms and hallways when I come through the doorway or round a corner — none of it makes me feel superior anymore. They’re younger than me and have expansive social circles. Mine begins and ends with my son. I might not resent the other women so much were Franklin still alive. He took up far more space than Gill ever did, but I would give anything to have him back.
He was the one to point out the cherry blossoms behind the chain-link fences and perforated glass. We loved and fought like hell. I don’t think there’s a single word we never said to one another, a single name we refrained from slinging across the room. Our throats sore, our foreheads varicose and pulsing, we collapsed. We huddled on our little cot, and Gill, still too young to make memories, occupied the crescent of space left between us.
One day Franklin took our arguments to heart and wrapped the car around a street lamp. I don’t remember whether we fought that day. I either can’t remember the horrible thing I said to him or have repressed it so viciously that it’ll reappear in my mid-fifties as a small polyp on my frontal lobe.
I told Gill his father made a mistake and ran off the road, but I know it was my fault. How else could such a senseless thing happen? I still think of him when I walk under the overpass with the cherry blossoms. I can’t smell them anymore — their scent has melded with the urban odors of cement, of parking lots, of limpid rainwater and piss whistling under streets and sewer grates.
Have I ever even smelled an orchid? I can’t say I have.
I usher Gill to the bus stop, pass him his tablet, which he’s opened to a sort of quick, accessible, and fun summary of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and hand him the fare for the school bus.
“Try to behave yourself. Try to network.”
“Network,” Gill says.
Before I can clarify, I’ve already turned and started to run down the street. He watches the bright tulip bulbs on my back disappear around a brutalist corner.
Each day I spend ten hours at Transfer Hub plugging wires into various sockets. Maxine, my supervisor, earned her promotion by monitoring thermostats and determining that Transfer Hub could save an absurd amount of money by increasing the temperature in all the server rooms a single degree. She describes Transfer Hub as a vast nexus — civilization’s connective tissue. I’m not so optimistic. I don’t know who’s contracted us to process data old-fashioned and off the cloud. I don’t how many gigabytes flow like blood through the cord in my hand, or exactly what constitutes such precious cargo.
Since I only have twenty minutes for lunch, I hustle to the food stand. A twelve-year-old boy attempts to take my order, his attention torn between me and the television set mounted behind me, the reflection of which glows in the three-inch-thick Plexiglas window separating us. It’s not there for me, but for him.
I don’t eat full meals here anymore. Watching a child work in a place like this makes me want to scream. Soon I’ll lose my appetite altogether. I can’t help but think of Gill, and then I want nothing more than to float through the rest of the day so I can collect him in my arms, chanting not you, not you.
When I come home, Gill sits at the table, his head in his hands, tears refulgent and dripping from his cheeks. He runs, his feet pattering across the hardwood, his gait animal-like, his arms extended and expectant. I hug him, but loathing settles deep in my chest. I inhale and exhale, and my breathing joins Gill’s bawling in a kind of harmony.
He sobs something unintelligible into my belly.
“Gill, honey, what did you say?”
“She won’t let me do my history project on the Peloponnesian War!”
“Who? Your teacher?”
Gill nods into my ribs.
“What’s the project on?”
Gill sniffles and hands me the project rubric detailing a ten-minute presentation on a historical topic of the student’s choice. On the bottom of the page, beside a black asterisk, I notice something horrible. Pressure builds in my sinuses.
The local High School Admissions Officer will be present. Plan accordingly!
Even though I haven’t had dinner, I dial Mrs. Heinrichson. She yawns before saying hello. I haven’t bothered to check the time.
“This is Kathy. Yes, Gill’s mother.”
“Look, I just don’t want any blood or spontaneous sex changes. No bestiality. No gore. Not a tall order. Try something pleasant.”
“Look here, the rubric says he needs to ‘exhibit pathos.’ Gill may not know what pathos is, but he certainly feels it for the Greeks.”
“There’s something pathological about it. I’ll give you that.”
“Listen–”
“Kathy–”
“I just don’t get it.”
“I won’t budge on this. I’m not going to let Gill go on another one of his tirades in front of the Admissions Officer. Spastic kids don’t belong in High School. He needs a new approach.”
Gill has already fallen asleep and sprawled himself over my side of the cot. I shake him awake.
“So I talked to Mrs. Heinrichson. You’ll need to change your topic.”
He burrows his drowsy head into me, and the tears start to flow again, quietly this time. They seep through my dress. It doesn’t matter that I’m against him or that I’ve brought bad news. He cries into my lap. I’m all he has.
“But I want to talk about–”
I grab his shoulders and bring my eyes to his. I want to frighten him, to jolt him out of his stupid love for monsters, mythology, and men in buskins, but I look nothing other than terrified.
“Sweetheart, they’re going to have a High School Admissions Officer there. If you don’t get accepted, if you don’t get funding, you won’t be able to go. No more virtual library. No more downloading mythology on the tablet. You’ll need a job. They’ll force you to wear an apron and stand behind a counter for ten hours each day.”
He starts to moan, and I hold him to me.
“We just need a plan.”
Gill begins to snore. Before I fall asleep, I think of every time and place I’ve ever been. My chest surges with nostalgia. My deep breaths begin to sound like sighs. I picture my lungs inflating and spreading like wings, carrying me through time to this same cot, where I resurrect Franklin and stuff Gill back into an infant’s body. We spend the night warm, tangled, breathing each other’s breath.
_
I wake up to the familiar sound of clicking and tapping. Gill sits at the table, the tablet propped up against his usual bowl of cereal. He has a webpage for the Data Center up on the screen.
“Gill?”
“Mrs. Heinrichson wants something new, right? So we go to the Data Center. We get messages from my ancient ancestors and present it.”
He means Franklin. He must mean Franklin. He’ll read all the awful words between us to the entire class—swears and insults, accusations and fears. Life will drain from Gill’s expression. Mrs. Heinrichson will sneer through her glasses at the spawn of two hateful people.
What will the High School Admissions Officer do? He might give Gill a grant right then and there—maybe for his suffering, maybe for the original, probing project.
Gill hasn’t named Franklin as the subject yet. Perhaps someone else in our family has a more interesting story to tell.
“The messages aren’t ancient,” I say, “but they are old.”
“Does it sound like a good idea?”
“I think so.” I pass him the fare for the school bus and leave for Transfer Hub.
According to what I find online, the Data Center only processes ancestral releases in person. I meet Maxine in her office and beg for an unpaid day off on Saturday.
“You’ve consistently hit your plugging metrics,” she says. “So I can sign off on it, and you can accidentally forget to record your overtime next week.”
I thank her and skip lunch at the food stand to get an early start.
_
On Saturday, Gill and I board the monorail to visit the Data Center — a black, cubic office building between two forested hills denuded by autumn heat. I haven’t left the city in years, and I don’t know whether I’ve ever taken Gill on the monorail. His wonder at the moving landscapes and disregard of the tablet suggests that if I ever took him out here, he was too young to recall it.
We hike to the Data Center from the monorail station, and, panting, explain to the desk clerk how we need the data release and requisition forms normally reserved for biographers and government agents.
On the form, I check FAMILIAL CLAIM and under REASON write school project. The clerk tabulates our results.
“As you can see here,” the clerk says, turning his screen toward us, “we have a few hits for everyone related to you, Kathy Cordoza. Unfortunately, we can’t release data or transcripts for any living relations without proper credentials. Franklin Cordoza is our closest deceased hit.”
“My husband.”
“May he rest in peace. Next we have what look like your parents — Nadine and Ken Svetfield.”
I think of their glossy porch, the frosted glasses of lemonade they handed me and Gill from the comfort of their automated nursing home. It was the first and last time I visited them since my mother, unprompted and held hostage by dementia, called Franklin a “lazy fucker,” which definitely didn’t help our marital problems. Gill needs someone he’s never met, someone whose memory won’t make me shudder.
“Our next best option is Nathan Svetfield, your great-grandfather.”
“Never knew him.”
“Lucky for you, we have a goldmine of activity from his mid forties. The bulk of data collected and stored from his AOL account was international, the first stuff they collected back in the day. Seems Nathan emailed extensively with a contact from Greece and another from Russia.”
Gill’s eyes widen and his mouth opens into a smiling void.
“Greece?” he asks.
“And Russia,” I say. I remind him the Greece of Nathan Svetfield’s time was not the Greece of Homer’s time. It had no gods, few pillars and temples, economic and political senselessness—it was, in other words, a land pathetically stuck out of time. Gill doesn’t seem to care.
“We’ll take one of Nate, please!”
The clerk leads us through a long hallway of glowing data modules reminiscent of Transfer Hub. I wonder where I could find my messages with Franklin. Somewhere in here, our arguments, errata, and sexts crackle at the base of a flea-sized microchip. Thinking of Franklin, I sweat and shiver. Only his ghost could make such competing sensations feel perfectly complementary.
“Here we are,” the clerk says, handing me a thumb drive.
I head to an available terminal and insert the device. Nathan’s emails appear on the screen.
NATHAN.SVETFIELD@AOL.COM DECEMBER 14, 2004 AT 10:54 PM
TO: INFO@FINDABRIDE.COM
SUBJECT: INQUIRY
Hello,
I took look at your Eastern European catalogue and want to make a purchase. I’ve already submitted my application through your website.
Cheers,
Nate
_____
INFO@FINDABRIDE.COM DECEMBER 14, 2004 AT 11:49 PM
TO: NATHAN.SVETFIELD@AOL.COM
SUBJECT: RE: INQUIRY
Mr. Nate! Hello!
Successful adjudication of your request! FindABride! is very happy to process your request in a timely manner. Please become aware you will need a deposit. Also you need specifications. Russia? Belarus? Lithuania? Ukraine? Whom do you like? Do you have any prior convictions in United States? We are very discerning and only want the best for our girls.
Very pleased to make your acquaintance!
Phillippos Carnassus
Talent Acquisition & Distribution Manager
FindABride!
_____
NATHAN.SVETFIELD@AOL.COM DECEMBER 15, 2004 AT 09:20 AM
TO: INFO@FINDABRIDE.COM
SUBJECT: RE: INQUIRY
I want the finest Nina of the northern latitude. Country doesn’t matter. First rule: No bad breath. I mean it. Let’s also get another problem out of the way. Freedom and the right to self-determination are sexy. Sure. You know what else is equally if not more sexy? Subservience. A wife totally and only devoted to her husband. If you can live with that, we can work out a payment plan.
Cheers,
Nate
_____
INFO@FINDABRIDE.COM DECEMBER 16, 2004 AT 11:24 PM
TO: NATHAN.SVETFIELD@AOL.COM
SUBJECT: RE: INQUIRY
Mr. Nate! I am very happy to send forward your specifications! You will hear from one of our Ninas soon, who I am sure will be quite happy to have found a match of her own!
Very pleased to send forward your specifications!
Phillippos Carnassus
Talent Acquisition & Distribution Manager
FindABride!
_____
“I don’t get it,” Gill says, looking at the screen from behind my shoulder. I shush him and read on.
NINAINDENKO@FINDABRIDE.COM JANUARY 2, 2005 AT 10:04 PM
TO: NATHAN.SVETFIELD@AOL.COM
SUBJECT: HELLO
Mr. Nathan,
Do you ever feel lonely? I have, which is why I registered for the world’s most reputable marriage service, FindABride!
I am from Russia.
It’s cold. I brush my teeth and wear dresses.
Please tell me more about yourself.
Nina Indenko
Matrimonial Partner
FindABride!
Nathan’s next email needs no explanation. Greek myth has taught Gill all about lust and rape. He wrote about having her in the barren snow, the heat draining from her exposed skin, the world swirling white around her, her lips purpling hypoxic, her vaporous breath forced from her lungs with every hypothetical thrust.
He didn’t have much more to say about himself.
Legalistic and logistic talk followed, mostly through Carnassus. Passports were sent and documents signed. Carnassus tried to elicit something of a promise that Nate wouldn’t lock Nina in a freezer, but this read more like a suggestion than a command.
“You think this will make a good project?” Gill asks, his face a bit ashy in color.
“We’ll need to take some stuff out. You can’t present it the way it is.”
Gill doesn’t say anything.
I kneel down and tell him no family is perfect.
“We must all come from rapists and murderers and thieves at some point. Who and what we are now has nothing to do with a man who ordered his wife online.”
“Okay,” Gill says.
While Gill arranges Nathan Svetfield’s emails into his school folder, I order a thumb drive of Franklin’s messages. I deleted all of mine after the car crash. I told myself I didn’t have the heart to see them again, but feeling gross and jittery and a little bit like a bad parent, I can’t help but crave those times after we fought — when the cold leaked through our windowpane and Franklin gave me his sweater and held me a bit more forcefully, or when he’d whistle at me from the street, a plastic bag of groceries in his hand, my stomach ovoid, stretching the flowers on my dress so they looked bigger and brighter, the days when I was pregnant but espaliered.
_
I edit the explicit material from Nathan’s emails, and Gill arranges them into a slideshow. He’s titled it “Love Online: How My Great-Great-Grandparents met.”
We both agree to the lie — Nathan and Nina somehow fell in love. I search for traces of Nina Indenko online, but find nothing. Another call to the Data Center only turns up the FindABride! email address.
What happened to her when she arrived?
Did Nathan even let her online?
Hunched over his tablet, Gill types these questions into the slideshow and, hesitant, deletes them.
_
At Transfer Hub, I spend the day thinking of Nina and fall behind on my plugging metrics.
“This isn’t like you,” Maxine says. “Time to turn it around.”
Everything has fallen apart, I try to say.
“Time to turn it around,” Maxine says again.
Gill has snuffed out all light in the apartment by the time I return from Transfer Hub. I skip dinner and lie down beside him on the cot. Unconscious, he turns over, presses his face to me and inhales my dress.
I dream of an icy landscape. My joints freeze together. My breath emerges from my mouth thick and white like steam. I spend an impossibly long time supine in the snow, onion domes peeking through gelid fog.
I wake up perspiring but cold. I slink away to the counter and plug in Data Center’s thumb drive into the tablet. Franklin’s messages appear on screen, and I cry and cry. My face strains and throat seethes with unarticulated wailing. I stay quiet and reread our final moments together, curling my legs into my chest, rocking forward and back on my chair. Reread these words enough times and they become inconsequential shapes and symbols. Soon I’m left only with Franklin’s little picture. A younger version of me stands at his side. Even though my lips tremble, they manage to bow in a smile.
I imagine myself playfully shoving away Franklin’s ghost.
Stop confusing me, I seem to say.
_
The day of Gill’s project arrives. I do what the tablet’s spellcheck can’t by rereading the slideshow for context and tone.
“It’s perfect,” I say. I believe it. Gill has grown Nina’s email in size and heart, and Nathan now sounds more like a lover and less like someone ordering from a food stand.
_
Maxine announces a reversal of her temperature policy after an old, overworked unit liquefied overnight.
“A fifteen degree drop,” Maxine says, her voice quieter than I’ve ever heard it. “Straight from corporate. We have high traffic inbound this morning, and the servers can’t slack. Neither can you.”
The temperature drop seems to amplify the percussive clop of my heels against the linoleum floor. While the other women wear sweaters and suit coats, I cross my arms and clench my teeth, my orchid dress feeling thinner than gauze.
Of course I think of Nina. With each gold-tipped analog cord speared between my fingers, I drift further and further away. I try to imagine traversing vast spaces, screens, cities, planets. I imagine Gill, his voice hoarse and his cheeks bright bull’s-eye red, tottering before the High School Admissions Officer.
The ventilation roars overhead in a great ferrous scream. Fiber optic cables and cords dangle from their sockets, disconnected. Others reach their inputs. Not all fit, so I jam them through. Maybe the cold has warped the metal. The quivering diodes suggest something worse.
I leave the server room without Maxine’s permission—first to return sensation to the tips of my fingers, then to experience the sunlight on my skin, then to reach the bus terminal, where I buy a ticket across town to Gill’s school.
Through six inches of bulletproof Plexiglas, the bespectacled school secretary lets me know I’ll need a requisition form to withdraw my son during school hours.
“I only need to talk to him for a moment. No need to pull him from class. Please.” I slide my ID into the booth’s retractable bin.
“Don’t take too long, Mrs. Cordoza. They have an Admissions Officer here today.” She disengages the turnstile and lets me in.
I find Mrs. Heinrichson’s nameplate beside an otherwise indistinct classroom door. Through the latticed, slightly frosted window, I watch a student close his presentation on The Rise of American Synergy. A few kids clap.
Mrs. Heinrichson ushers Gill to the front of the room. I lean away from the door, my chest heaving. I turn around and watch. The High School Admissions Officer, clad in a suit and wrist-mounted tablet, sits in a semicircle on the carpet with the rest of the students.
Gill brings up his presentation. With a single mule kick to the heart, I see Fraklin grinning to the room, his arm around me. The title slide reads: Frank & Kate Cordoza: The Brief but Happy History of My Family.