The Aperture app came back at 2:14 a.m.
A new dashboard view. Heavier-looking. The notifications had been re-skinned in a grimmer typeface, like someone in the back end had decided to stop pretending it was Stripe.
Emotional contamination detected. Buyer memory sync rates climbing. At 100% sync, the seller's original personality will be overwritten.
I sat on the rug of my new living room and read those three lines three times.
It was the first time I understood what was actually happening.
It wasn't that I couldn't laugh anymore.
It was that my laughter had been sliced into forty-three small pieces and was being sent into other people's bodies.
They would like the things I liked.
They would dream the people I dreamed.
In the end, they would become me.
What I would become — the app did not say.
I opened the seller backend.
Forty-three transactions. A sync rate next to every buyer.
White-roses buyer: 31%. Crescent / Sterling Whitford Shaw IV: 47%. Tessa-wedding buyer in Lakeview: 52%.
I tapped the highest one.
The Lakeview buyer's profile picture had been replaced.
It was a selfie of me.
Username: Joy Léveille.
A new message from her was sitting at the top of the chain.
Joy-girl, I got my hair cut to match yours today. Stylist said it suited me. My husband says I'm prettier when I smile now.
A photo loaded under the message.
A woman standing in front of a bathroom mirror. Hair, lipstick shade, dark-pearl drop earrings — all mine.
What made me sit up was her eyes.
There was a light in them that I recognized.
It was the way I used to look at Tessa when Tessa was happy.
My phone rang again.
Tessa. Crying so hard she could barely speak.
"Joy. She's on my street."
"She's wearing the same bridesmaid dress I had at my own wedding."
"She called me shorty."
I grabbed my car keys.
The elevator opened.
Whit was standing inside it. Black overcoat, the kind of pale that makes you put your hand on the doorframe.
"I'm coming with you."
I put my hand on the elevator door to hold it.
"I don't need help from somebody who's been stealing my memory."
He looked at me. His voice was low and rough.
"Then let me do it as penance."
Two NOPD units were already on Tessa's block when we got there.
The woman was sitting on the low brick wall of Tessa's front planter, holding a framed photograph in her lap. The frame was the one I'd given Tessa at her wedding — a Polaroid of the two of us in the courtyard, Tessa in her veil, my hand on her arm.
She saw me and her whole face brightened.
"Joy. You came."
Tessa was behind Marcus, behind the open front door, the color of bone.
"She said she was going to move in with us," Marcus said, low and steady. He was a music journalist who'd covered second-line funerals; he was not a man who scared easily. He was scared.
The woman stood up and started walking toward me.
"Tessa can't do without me. The day she got married I cried so hard. I was so happy for her."
I stepped in front of Tessa.
"That isn't your memory."
The smile fell off her face.
"I bought it."
"You bought an emotion. Not a life."
She let out a noise — a thin scream from somewhere flat in her chest.
"You sold it to me. What do you mean it isn't mine."
She lunged at my hair.
Whit caught her wrist before the closest officer could move. His face went a worse white than before. He didn't let go.
She thrashed and snarled at him.
"You ate her bottles too. Don't pretend you're clean."
The sentence went through the air like a needle, and everyone in earshot — two cops, Marcus, Tessa, me — went still.
The veins along the back of Whit's hand stood up.
"That's how I know," he said. "I know what it feels like to be kept alive on somebody else's life. It's disgusting."
The officers got her wrists behind her back. She turned her head as they walked her toward the cruiser and looked at me.
Her mouth moved.
I read it.
She said: I am you.
Tessa came across the lawn and into my arms.
"Joy. What is going on."
I opened my mouth. I couldn't make a lie come.
Whit spoke for me.
"She's sick."
Tessa looked at me.
I waited for her to push me out at arm's length. To ask. To be afraid.
She held on tighter.
"Then we fix it."
My eyes burned. Hot.
No tears came down.
I had sold the easy cry years ago.
Whit took me to a coral-pink shotgun house on Governor Nicholls Street in Tremé. Plumeria in coffee cans on the screened front porch. A small gold cross sticker on the doorframe.
I'd expected a lab in a basement. Men in coats.
What I got was a woman in a starched white cotton day-dress sitting on her own front porch, reading the Times-Picayune, a red cotton string knotted at her left wrist and a small gold cross at her throat. Seventy, maybe. Hair white and braided tight. She did not stand for us.
"Whit," she said.
"Miss Odette."
He used a tone with her that I had not heard him use with another human being.
She looked at me. Her eyes were very clear.
"How many."
I didn't answer.
Whit said, "Forty-three."
The cup of iced tea in Miss Odette's hand thudded once on the side table.
"Foolishness."
I frowned.
"Do you know what this is."
She looked back at me.
"Feelings aren't goods. They're nanm-souf. Spirit-essence. When you sell your happiness to somebody, you're cutting them a piece of the life you've already lived through. You understand me."
My chest got cold.
"How do I get it back."
Miss Odette went quiet.
Whit said, "Tell her."
She gave him a look I couldn't read.
"The buyer returns freely. Or the buyer dies. I don't bend that rule."
Tessa, who had ridden out with us in the back seat, drew in a hard breath behind me.
I put my hands flat on the small painted table between us.
"And if they won't."
Miss Odette looked at me, level.
"Then the seller goes emptier and emptier. Last thing, she's a husk with nothing in it."
I made myself ask: "Does the husk die."
"No."
I exhaled.
Her next sentence pinned me where I sat.
"But the husk gets overwritten. The buyer with the highest sync — she'll wear your face, your voice, your name. She'll live the rest of your life for you."
Tessa grabbed my hand.
Whit said, "Who's highest."
I pulled up the app.
The sync rates had moved since I'd last checked.
Sterling Whitford Shaw IV: 61%.
The kitchen of the coral-pink shotgun went very quiet.
Tessa exploded first.
"You said you only ate a few."
Whit looked at the screen. He went whiter than he already was.
Asa, who had come in behind us, said quickly, "Mr. Shaw hasn't had a bottle in over a month."
Miss Odette tapped the table with one knuckle.
"Some bodies are born with thin spirit. They take in somebody else's joy the way a dry sponge takes in water. Sync runs faster in them."
I looked at Whit.
"So you're going to become me."
He didn't look away from me.
"I won't let that happen."
Tessa let out a small, ugly laugh.
"With what. With the same handsome lying face you've been using on her?"
Asa frowned. "Miss Boudreaux. Please."
Tessa rounded on him. "He stole my best friend's life. You want a bow?"
Asa stopped.
I should have found this funny.
There was nothing in my chest.
Miss Odette reached behind her and brought a small thing out of a cabinet. A vintage glass apothecary jar with a glass stopper. The kind, she'd told Whit's mother once, that had stood on a shelf in the French Quarter pharmacy where her grandmother had worked.
"We try a return."
Whit took the jar from her without a second's hesitation. He pulled a small folding knife from his coat pocket and opened a cut along the soft pad of his palm.
Blood pearled. Three drops hit the inside of the jar.
A pale gold light ribbed up the inside of the glass.
Miss Odette closed her eyes. She started a quiet line of words — fragments of Psalm 23 in English, then something older, in Kreyòl, that her grandmother had taught her.
A few seconds in, Whit made a small low sound and his knee went down.
A picture broke open inside my head.
A boardroom. A champagne tower. The first time, in a year, that swallowing didn't feel like punishment.
Then a second picture, this one mine.
The stairwell at the agency. My forehead on cool concrete. My aunt Yvette's voice, my mother's voice through her. Ma joie, regarde-toi.
That satisfaction came down into me like a fist of hot meat slid back into a socket I'd forgotten was empty.
The room blacked at the edges.
I caught the table.
For the first time in months I wanted to cry.
Whit was on the floor on one knee. His lips were the color of paper. A thread of blood unspooled out of his mouth.
Miss Odette's voice went flat.
"No more."
My head jerked up.
"Why."
She looked at Whit, then at me.
"Child. His life's tied to your happiness now."
Asa drove Whit back to the Garden District. I rode in the front of the second car with Tessa.
Tessa cried and cursed at the same time.
"He deserves it. But if he actually dies you'll be a wreck, Joy, you know that."
I looked at her.
"I'm not a wreck."
Her hand stopped halfway to her face.
She looked at me for several long seconds. Her face caved.
"Joy. You didn't used to talk like this."
I lowered my eyes.
I knew.
Old Joy would have second-guessed. Felt guilty. Gone soft. Worried, even about a man she actively wanted to hate, whether his hand still hurt.
Now those reflexes were all behind glass.
I could see them. I couldn't touch them.
At three in the morning Whit was awake.
Asa came out to the corridor and nodded me in.
Whit was flat on his back, breathing thin.
"Miss Léveille."
I stayed by the door.
"You almost died."
His mouth pulled at one corner.
"Didn't."
"Are you going to keep returning."
"Yes."
I closed my fingers in on themselves.
"Miss Odette said you'll die."
He looked at me.
"What's yours can't stay with me."
The first real anger came up in me then.
"Mr. Shaw. Don't perform devotion at me. You knew there was a side effect. You wanted exclusive supply anyway."
He listened.
"Yes."
He admitted it so fast that I didn't have any traction left.
"I'm not a good man," he said.
"The first time I ate one of yours I thought, finally, I can live. Then I started seeing your memories and I didn't stop. I was greedy."
He breathed.
"I wanted to know what it was like to be someone who could be happy that easily."
The word easily went into my ribs.
Easily.
Those small joys had been built one at a time in a very ordinary life.
And then I had sold them off, one by one, with my own hands.