Meadow never believed that folktale about La Llorona who wandered the Earth searching for her lost children until she’d become her. La Llorona’s crying was simply the sound of the wind, she would have said. But there was no wind here in WORLD.2, no weather at all. Unless the light of her computer screen counted: on-screen, the standard-issue avatar she received shuffled along with the standard- issue avatars given to the hundreds of other men and women who happened to be joining at that moment, the long line of nude, featureless, and hairless bodies she was in snaking toward a portal named Eden….
“So many, I had not thought death had undone so many,” William had joked the time that the two of them had first surfed over—just to see what
people were talking about. A population meter in the corner of the screen—3,567,432—rolled ever upward like the odometer of a spaceship on cruise control. Some took the ‘.2’ to mean W.2 was a work of restoration of what the world had been. Paradise Lost. During the last pandemic, people sheltering at home had used the time to upload tourist photos of waterfalls taken before they had dried to a trickle, or West Virginia mountaintops before they had been dumped into their valleys, or pristine Alaskan plains before they’d been bisected by pipelines or swallowed by rising seas.
Software created 3D versions of what these spots had looked like in 1970—the year of the first Earth Day. Some thought the Earth was far too broken by 1970 and that W.2 should be reset to 1847, the last year elaborately constructed tide tables were more important than train schedules, that is, a time when men and women were still forced to conform their rhythms to those of the Earth instead of crossing it with rails and time zones, severing their dependence on its turning, its days and nights.
To placate everyone, a historical slider was installed so people could visit the world at different times. Then arguments broke out over whose history would be remembered: a digital model of Trump’s Wall was inserted by Russians while the Chinese blocked a replica of the Goddess of Liberty. A database was created of every lynching in America, and avatars of bodies were hung from geotagged trees, along with avatars of George Floyd and others whose cause of death was “cop” until the project was blocked by the governor of South Carolina because it went against the can-do spirit of the state motto, Dum Spiro Spero.
Many wanted to use W.2 as a whiteboard on which to draw blueprints for the redirection of rivers to aide drought-stricken areas, or use mirrors to create new weather patterns, and other geoengineering that would save the planet.
That’s what fucked it up to begin with! NGers cried.
Just like in the Old World, though, many didn’t care one way or another. Since so much of the world had moved online during the last pandemic, some sociologists equated the stream of people joining W.2 with a desire to connect with the earth, though most thought it had more to do with a desire to abandon a dying planet. The words that William quoted were Dante’s awestruck reaction to his first view of the underworld that 700 years later, another poet used to describe the stream of office workers in identical gray flannel suits, pouring off the Staten Island Ferry.
William had been an English major. An English major trying to be ironic, she knew, joking about himself for joining W.2 to sell his didgeridoo; but he’d also been referring to the life he’d lived as one of those hollow men, working as a tech writer in an office cubicle before he chucked it all to live in a metal shipping container in Oregon: a postmodern version of Thoreau’s cabin, he’d thought, delivered by flatbed, and dropped onto the land he’d bought for it.
He couldn’t have known that Dante’s words had also rolled through her mind as they went from makeshift morgue to morgue after the tsunami. If he had, he wouldn’t have repeated them, as they got online, realizing how they would have conjured memories of that vast landscape of bodies and wreckage, and the unimaginable violence it had caused in stark contrast to the last pandemic, which had killed far more people, but had moved through cities silently, invisibly passing from one person to another as they did things as ordinary as buying groceries. Somehow, William had been able to move on while she, like some kind of shell-shocked survivor, still couldn’t get off that beach. Couldn’t live as though she didn’t know what she knew, hadn’t seen the things she’d seen, hadn’t lost what she’d lost.
Back then, before she’d moved to Chicago to join Olympia’s lab, Meadow would bolt upright at night, thinking that she had to look in on Nico, their son. Then that awful feeling would come over her as she remembered that she didn’t have to check on him any longer. She didn’t have to pick him up after school. Didn’t have to make his lunch.
In the predawn gray of those mornings, she’d stay sitting up, William in bed beside her, his body a bulge in the sheets like a rise in a snow-covered field. The featureless shape could have belonged to any of the people they saw swaddled in sheets and laid out in a gym serving as a morgue. One family had been carefully placed together as though sleeping: a small boy the same age as Nico between mother and father, making Meadow do all she could to not just lie down beside them and die herself.
There but for the grace of god….
To this day those people sometimes seemed like the lucky ones. And years later, she still longed to be as they were; as she, William, and Nico had been: together.
It wasn’t like William wasn’t affected, she knew. Rather, what made him stay back in Oregon while she came to Chicago was that it affected him as well. Maybe more so, or less, but in any case, differently, each of them realizing—there but for a twitch in the Earth…. But if anyone could have taken their place in death, the two of them seemed to realize afterwards, then the same would be true in life. That is, she’d known back then, looking at William’s sleeping form, that if the partner function in her life could have just as easily been filled by another man, the same was certainly true about her place in his life. And she wondered if he got as many messages from women in W.2 who wanted to meet offline as she got from men.
If nothing else, W.2 was efficient in matching people who 'had' to people who 'wanted': artists looking for galleries; galleries looking for collectors; bands looking for drummers; men seeking women; women seeking women; adoptees seeking birth parents…. And also, she’d heard, mothers seeking children….
Maybe it was all just VR smoke and mirrors. Since the last pandemic had made everyone virus-phobic, some avatars had affairs for years without their real-life counterparts ever meeting F2F. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that their son was out there in W.2, as the rumors implied. Not him, exactly, for there wasn’t any Nico anymore to actually be anywhere. But the feeling persisted that some trace of him was out there, a ghost, or memory, or whatever it was that could be conjured by an old photo of someone who was gone. Something real, if intangible: like a mother’s love. She’d surfed over to MyDeath.com, that site that gathered all the iFace profiles of people who had, in life, posted their bios, photos, and favorite bands. Pictures of their pets. And then died—by nature or culture. Many were teenagers killed in auto accidents. Or over Conflict Minerals: Pfc. Brian Williams, 18, Youngstown Ohio, stepped on a landmine in Paraguay. Too many were suicides. As she went from one blurred-out young face to another, though, she saw how pointless this was. The sad emoticons and the rock-star philosophy became oppressive—We lived so wild that Death shook to take us!—even if she ignored the ads for sexy DeathSpace.com short-shorts, and beer-bottle openers. Mostly though, it was because some part of her always imagined Nico growing up, dating, driving, grooming his iFace page and doing all the things the teenagers who posted on this site did. Nico never made it that far, though.
God, what she would give to at least be able to say goodbye.
As her Avatar stepped through the portal and into Eden.2, she found herself in a fantastical garden. Flowers too bright to exist. A waterfall cascaded in the background with that fake shimmery look of waterfalls on mirrored clocks sold in Chinatown. Get Clothes Here. Get Hairstyling Here. Get…. She used hand gestures, a stirring motion, to rotate her view, and found she was surrounded by other newly born avatars in various stages of dress, trying on different outfits, everything from colonial wigs to space suits. Some were also trying on different bodies, morphing the standard manikins they’d been given into different genders,
or no gender, or dragons, or else giving their bodies zebra stripes, or the dimples of a tortoise shell, as easily as putting on a hat.
A woman with the hair, ears, and features of a Kittychan strode up to her and asked, “Est ce que je peux lécher votre chat?” She wore a bright purple jacket, miniskirt, and carried a walking stick with a brass knob on its end that, when she held it out to Meadow, began to vibrate. Meadow wasn’t sure what she’d been asked, but the purr in the woman’s voice gave her an idea. When she just stood there mute, unsure which icon to click to answer, the Kittychan moved on to another avatar, her motions so smooth compared to the herky-jerky movement of newbies that Meadow could tell she was a veteran of W.2—maybe some sort of virtual stalker preying on newbies? But Meadow wished she could catch up with her anyway, ask her if she knew anything about finding people who had vanished from the original world only to reemerge in W.2.