Appropriate

It was a thud, not a ping. The automated salesman said it would be a ping, and that’s why Lee chose it. Now she realized she should have gotten the chime, for it was by definition melodic and could not be twisted—as apparently could a ping—to mean a dull and monotonous thud, not dissimilar to an anvil striking stone.

Maybe Lee shouldn’t have chosen the alert at all when she’d bought Millie’s device, bought her own and Millie’s devices to get the mother-daughter discount. That had been voided, anyway, by the extra fee to make the alert “blind” and not “shared,” in other words, sent only to Lee’s device when an inappropriate image or idea appeared on Millie’s (it made no sense to “share” the alert with the teenager receiving the image or idea, did it?). So the whole thing had been a wash, savings-wise.

Still, Lee had only a second of self-doubt about getting the alert. She felt it had been the right thing to do, meant she cared, wasn’t being intrusive or controlling or a censor or any other negative interpretation. Lee thought of her own mother and how she had acted about the same issue, and while Lee knew it was apples and oranges, was a different world now, she believed her own behavior was a big improvement, ping or no ping.

Lee’s mother, Sable, had been contradictory and confusing about what Lee could or couldn’t see: her rules were weird. In those days, of course, consuming entertainment sometimes meant leaving the house, if there were enough people signed up to justify opening one of the last theaters left, now being used for other purposes (retail, religious, military). Sable teased that Lee was “old-fashioned” for occasionally wanting to see things on the outside, where a mother couldn’t completely control her choices, Lee had suspected, with the bitter worldly cynicism of the fifteen-year-old. Yet which narrative conventions and story tropes Sable made off-limits was unclear. Allowed: unjustly accused robot lovers on the run...virtual prostitutes seducing and killing virtual cops...sadistic space aliens eating the brains of humans. Forbidden: animals learning to speak and shoot guns...infants and the elderly body-switching...doomed, drug-addicted suburbanites having hypocritical love affairs.

Peculiarly, it was this last that most provoked Sable’s prohibition. The situation had reached a head with the dropping of “Intimate,” the most talked-about deca-drama of its day. It was six-hundred ten-minute episodes about infidelities, marriages, and murders in a gentrified development built on a town’s collapsed downtown, not unlike the one to which Lee and her mother had moved after their neighborhood was flooded into extinction. (”Intimate” had two meanings, was both adjective and verb, meant familiar and to be suggestive, something much cited by automated critics.)

“But why not?” Lee had asked when Sable forbade her to see it.

“You know why,” Sable answered, yet Lee did not.

Lee hadn’t obeyed: she couldn’t, not when all the kids were talking about that scene in the 266th episode of “Intimate,” in which people performed that act. You had to see it in person, with a full house; it wouldn’t be as deliciously excruciating in the privacy of your home; it was the kind of phenomenon that occurred once a decade and defined an era, she mustn’t miss it. So Lee had lied that she was studying at her friend Frieda’s and even turned off the GPS on her old device, primitive compared to today’s models in that it could be turned off.

Lee sensed the tension in the giant, packed theater (which had been a roller rink the night before and would be a prison holding pen and botanical garden in the days ahead, all remaining public events using the one available place). She put on 3-D holographic glasses, adjusting them to maximum sharpness, so she could touch and be touched by the performers, even feel their breaths lightly blowing on her skin. When that scene began—and everyone knew which scene it was—there was utter silence in the enormous, adjustable space, all sounds (moaning, crying, begging, giggling, screaming, puckering up, blowing out) coming just from the wall-spanning screen.

And then...Lee thought it must have been her glasses, a glitch in their reception, that only she could see it. She saw her, saw Sable, her mother was in that scene, committing that act, playing a part or playing herself, Lee didn’t know. She would never know for she would never mention it to her mother, who would never mention it to her; no one ever mentioned it, so only Lee could have seen it, maybe only imagined it. Right? (“Appropriate” also had two meanings: adjective and verb: suitable or proper and to take, often without permission.)

From then on, Lee never defied her mother and only saw what she deemed acceptable. She’d done so from incredulity and fear, having been shell-shocked by that scene, not from the belief that her mother had been right. She vowed to raise Millie differently, to be open and honest, to discuss why she could or couldn’t see something, to share the decision as they shared this new device and the ping that would alert Lee when her daughter went astray, even if Millie would never know.

The ping—the thud—had been going the whole time, half-heeded by Lee, preoccupied by her past. Today, a reboot of “Intimate” was dropping on devices, since there were no more mass public events. It was animated, as all entertainment had become, humans replaced by creatures living (raccoons, ducks, bumble bees) and inanimate (robots, dishes, germs). That scene had been retained yet altered for the new less physical, sensual, and tactile world.

Lee was sure that this was what had appeared on Millie’s device. The alert would let Lee see it first: another extra charge had given her an exclusive preview before its premiere for Millie.

She cut off the ping with a flick of her finger above a key, no contact needed any longer between digit and device. The screen below her bloomed like a bouquet (she had shelled out for the exploding flower feature, too). There, as Lee had anticipated—desired and feared—was that scene, re-imagined.

Alone, as rapt as the crowd years before, Lee squinted, then stared at this new, non- human version. It was part pure cartoon, part computerized photo, part some other technology Lee couldn’t identify, which hadn’t existed until this instant. Lee caught her breath. She swore she saw her mother again, an artist’s or machine’s rendering. Then she realized it wasn’t Sable but herself, committing the same shocking, scandalous, awful, forbidden, thrilling act forever.