Inappropriation Page 16

  Dinner is boring. Nobody mentions that morning’s political coup or anything aside from Damo’s recent open-ocean swim in South Africa.

  “The Cadiz Freedom Swim,” he tells them proudly. “It’s the race from Robben Island to Cape Town.”

  Jacob looks impressed. “Where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned.”

  “Yes indeedy,” says Damo. “And it’s surrounded by great white sharks.”

  Jacob’s eyes bulge. “The water must be freezing!”

  “Yep. Thirteen degrees the day I swam.”

  Everybody gasps. Except Ziggy. She finds the story unexceptional.

  “What’s the point of it?” she sneers.

  Damo smiles good-naturedly. “The point?”

  “Are you raising money for something?”

  “Sort of,” he says. “But it’s also just symbolic.”

  “Symbolic?”

  Jacob leaps to Damo’s defense. “It’s called the Freedom Swim, and he just told you about Robben Island and Mandela.”

  Ziggy glowers at the swimmer’s vast, bronze forearms. “So you’re pretending to be Mandela swimming to freedom?”

  Jeff gives Ziggy his warning glare. But the human porpoise maintains his sense of humor. “Well, nobody’s in blackface if that’s what you’re worried about.” The three men chuckle.

  “That’s not what I’m worried about,” says Ziggy; though, it is, symbolically, exactly what concerns her. How a few hours of swimming alongside a speedboat stocked with protein bars and energy drinks is not the same as eighteen years of imprisonment on an island. Ziggy places her fork down. “Can I be excused?”

  Ruth pokes her daughter gently. “I think Ziggy is taking the day’s events a little hard.”

  “Oh, it’s terrible,” says Damo, slapping a massive hand over his left pectoral. “She was a great leader. Very strong. And terrible timing for a coup.” He stabs his fork through an artichoke heart. “When we’ve got an opposition leader who denounces abortion and wants to give gay people electroshock therapy.”

  Now Ziggy observes Damo more closely. His eyebrows are definitely plucked. She remembers the offensive karaoke costumes and her heart quickens. If her father’s friends really are cross-dressers, what does that make Jeff? A homoromantic heterosexual misogynist? And what if Ziggy’s dad is actually gay? A catalog of soft evidence assails her. There is the time Jeff said the rash on his neck was a neoprene allergy; that nude swim across the northern beaches; the mankinis he claims are just “part of the scene.” And then there is her email spam. The internet probably thinks Ziggy’s penis isn’t working because her father’s doesn’t. Or not for Ruth. Ziggy stands and clears her salad bowl.

  Upstairs on the home PC, she studies her junk folder. Protein supplements. Bra and panty sets. Now her father’s gift takes on a sinister new meaning. Victoria’s Secret is the kind of lingerie you buy your fake girlfriend as a closeted celebrity in an alien cult. Ruth’s striptease is similarly imbued with a sense of heteroromantic desperation; which makes her staunch defense of Jeff’s cross-dressing even sadder. Admittedly, Ziggy can also think of a few reasons why her father might not be gay. Jeff objectified the callipygous Muslim gold digger (though this might have just been gay diva-worship); Ziggy has often caught him ogling waitresses; and then there is the hetero-sexist bedtime story he used to tell her brother: “Jake and the Magic Blonde.” Ziggy retires to her room, unsure whether to plunge headfirst into the speculative drama of having a gay parent, or else the more banal fact of parents who are no longer having sex. Either way, their physiological failure makes her hate them. They put her in this body. Her biology is their fault; everything from the bent nose to the rashy skin to the stubborn tenure of her child parts. Her queer friends would tell Ziggy to love herself, that she’s being ablest or sexist or triggering their pain. So she doesn’t ask them. Ziggy knows she isn’t male or queer; the correct terminology remains elusive, but her unique identity must still, somewhere, exist. When she logs in, it feels significant that tonight the most popular post on Reddit reads, “Scientists find water on Mars.”

  Part Two

  Chapter 8

  In the morning Jeff stands at the counter, furiously shoveling in his raisin bran. He points to the GoPro.

  “That’s Jacob’s.”

  “I’m just borrowing it.”

  “Did you ask him?”

  “I’ll text him.”

  “He’s at Model UN.”

  “So I’ll text him,” Ziggy says snidely. “It’s only Model UN.”

  Ruth wanders out into the living room, nodding sleepily at Jeff’s cereal bowl.

  “His raisin d’être,” she says in a dopey voice, touched with dejection. Ziggy watches her father devour his breakfast cereal with disturbing animus. He brings the bowl up to his face and power-scoops the remaining flakes. Ruth clears away last night’s empty beer bottles. The breakfast scene conjures up the murky pathos of watching a dictatorship resign its power to the military. Ziggy’s sympathy is reserved for the children.

  From her bedroom, she watches Jeff jog across the driveway to his Audi. The wind is icy, but her father lowers the roof and places a green baseball cap on his head. Lime green. With an unfamiliar triangle logo like some arcane insignia. Ziggy pictures a long chandeliered dining hall with robed men and underage boys. Which is homophobic and way too Hollywood. She checks herself; Jeff is only an accountant.

  Ziggy sneaks out the front door without saying good-bye to her mother. At the front gates, she sees two primary-school boys approaching along the pavement. Ziggy waits for them to pass, watching as she pretends to aim the camera at a kookaburra sitting fat and lordly on the fence post. When the boys are safely at the corner, she hears the words “Google Glass,” then, “head injury.” Knowing she has disturbed them, Ziggy steps confidently onto the street. The GoPro makes her feel tall and brainy and in a rush to get somewhere. On the bus, she ducks (unnecessarily) into a side-facing seat, and stares brazenly at the other passengers. Her head seems to swell, like Ziggy’s whole body has jumped inside her skull, the organs pumping courage at her temples. She smiles at a gawking year-seven girl, and for the first time, Ziggy doesn’t worry if she seems male or female or gay.

  At the school gates, Ziggy connects her phone and watches the GoPro footage in real time. The fish-eye effect gives Kandara’s grounds the neat, picture-book smallness of binocular-view from the wrong end. It makes her giddy, regaining that sense of omnipotence, like a little kid.

  By the lockers, girls eye her suspiciously. Cate gives Ziggy a soft diagnosis of “attention seeker,” while Kate’s is more pointed: “pervert psychopath.” Both girls seem on edge. Ziggy studies Kate’s nostrils, magnified on her own phone. There, on the left: a cruddy pinch of cover-up, which means Kate has a zit. Girls are so vulnerable it’s pathetic.

  “Scared I’ll film your third nostril?” Ziggy says, a little light-headed. Like she has just pulled her pants down in a dream. Like she has suddenly started masturbating but knows it’s a dream so will probably just keep going. Then make herself fly. Or punch someone. An avataristic freedom.

  Kate’s face shocks white, with blue tinges of umbrage. “You post anything online and I’ll sue.”

  With supernatural calm, Ziggy angles her camera directly on Kate. The girl scoots back, then scurries roach-like around the room’s perimeter—pausing to shake her head, mouth psycho, and flip Ziggy the bird. Eventually she flusters.

  “I’m going to Ms. Hawthorne!”

  Ziggy films Kate’s clumsy foal legs scamper out the door, then turns to a group of girls lounging on the sectional sofa. Penny Ward sits up straight and fluffs her hair. Lucy Abbott undoes a shirt button and starts applying lip gloss. Other girls are tracking Ziggy too. She perches on a chair and pretends to watch Kate’s lovebirds. Now the whole room leans toward her. When she looks up, they return to their sham lounging, but Ziggy can see the tension in their muscles, a new alertness in their limbs. It seems some part of them wants to be wa
tched, even preyed upon. It might be the same vanity Ziggy felt when her Jewish school got security guards. The confusing flattery of being a target.

  THE AIR IN MS. HAWTHORNE’S OFFICE is stale and depressed, and Ziggy feels fatigued just looking at the soy sauce sachets stuffed into their plexiglass penholders. Kandara’s principal is a stiff, coiled woman who tends to send crying girls away with a backslap and a Latin aphorism. In rare cases, compassion can be squeezed from her like a pellet of dried toothpaste.

  “They bully me,” Ziggy boldly lies.

  “Who does?”

  “The other girls.”

  “And how does the camera help?”

  “It’s like surveillance.”

  The principal makes a dismissive hmph, signaling her immunity to teenage nonsense. “That’s not how the world works, Ziggy.” Ms. Hawthorne looks down to smooth her skirt, seeming to find her thoughts in the gridded pattern. “You can’t protect yourself through personal surveillance. That’s impractical and antisocial. And it’s not how Kandara girls behave. You don’t need a camera. Esto sol testis: ‘Let the sun be your witness.’”

  The discussion appears to be over. Ziggy touches a hand to the GoPro. It feels both familiar and strange, like a brand-new haircut.

  “You need to remove the camera,” says the principal.

  But Ziggy has the strong, inner conviction that actually she doesn’t have to. She looks straight at Ms. Hawthorne and watches her bristle. The headmistress folds and unfolds her arms like they are too long or very slippery.

  “Camera. Off.”

  Ziggy remains still. The GoPro’s small weight against her brow is coolly fortifying. It makes her think of the third eye—what her mother calls the “higher conscience” or “conscious witness” or “witnessing consciousness.” But Ms. Hawthorne is middle-aged and will be well defended against the counterculture. Better to frighten her headmistress with visions from the future.

  “Have you read Donna Haraway?”

  “I’ve heard of her.”

  “The essay on cyborgs?”

  Ms. Hawthorne rattles her head like a snake charmer.

  “Donna Haraway would call me trans.”

  “Transgender?”

  “Transhuman.”

  The woman freezes; she appears to no longer be breathing. Then she uncrosses her legs and hunches toward Ziggy. Her voice is quiet and intense. “So you’re saying you’re transgender?”

  Ziggy rides a heady crest of righteous indignation. “Donna Haraway says we’re all augmented by technology, which makes us inorganic orphans beyond the gender binary.”

  Ziggy’s principal is pleading. “So you’re not transgender?”

  “I’ll send you a link to the essay.”

  Ms. Hawthorne nods slowly, taking in this information, or the frightening potential of its online residence. “Well,” she says finally, “we’re going to need a letter from a psychologist.”

  “Easy,” says Ziggy, feeling, incredibly, that everything suddenly is.

  The headmistress lurches gracelessly to her feet. She stands there a moment, perhaps searching for the Latin or else quietly conceding that there are some conversations she doesn’t have the language for. Watching the woman, Ziggy’s whole body feels light and inviolable. The thing on her head like a punch line drowning out all other noise.

  “Thanks, Ms. Hawthorne.” Ziggy surprises them both by jumping up and sticking out her hand. The principal gives it a limp shake.

  As she strides out the door, Ziggy wants to laugh. She can keep the camera on. She can film her peers. Ziggy’s shoulders have never felt wider, her thighs more powerful. She strides around the campus, filming the girls then panning out over that view, the awe mixing, for the first time, with a strong sense of the proprietary.

  Ziggy calls Twinkles at lunch. She arranges to meet her grandmother after school at the mall, inside the Apple Store. Ziggy gets there early and finds the GoPros on a back wall beside the drones. Within seconds, a shop assistant is greeting her, offering a tutorial.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” says Ziggy.

  “What sports are you into?” persists the sun-kissed outdoorsman.

  “Sports?”

  “What are you going to film?”

  “No sports,” says Ziggy. “It’s for personal use.”

  The assistant chuckles; his voice is huskily exuberant as if he has been riding waves and whooping at Mother Nature all morning. “You don’t have to be a pro to wear a GoPro!”

  “I hate sport.”

  He eyes her warily. The assistant is clearly a pacifist surfer-type—intimate with sunrise and gratitude. “That’s cool,” he says, smiling. “So you want to film more naturey stuff?”

  Naturey stuff. Ziggy would like to film the ocean swallow this man like a watermelon seed. She shrugs dismissively, then turns around to the startling vision of Twinkles, deeply entangled at an iPad station.

  “Pippikeh!” Ziggy’s grandmother yells over the noise coming through her headset. On the screen, Ziggy sees two bloody kickboxers facing off.

  “You want one of that?” Twinkles points at the GoPro on Ziggy’s head.

  “This is Jake’s,” says Ziggy. “I want my own.” She gives her grandmother a cloying smile.

  Twinkles twirls herself free of the cables, then snatches the box and starts to turn it on a mysterious axis, appearing to read the instructions upside down. “This for bike riders? You riding the bike?”

  Ziggy shakes her head, already weary of the endless interrogations. She is beginning to worry that the camera might be more trouble than it’s worth.

  “Then what for?” But Twinkles isn’t asking Ziggy; she’s asking the assistant who has turned away to assist someone else. Twinkles grabs his arm and holds it an unnecessarily long time. The kindly clerk smiles at the old woman and then at Ziggy.

  “This your granny?”

  “She’s my grandmother, yes.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “Very cool she call me to come shopping!” Twinkles is doing a little waltz around the assistant’s sneakers. He laughs, and now Ziggy is doomed because her grandmother has a willing audience made of lean, golden man-meat.

  “So what the difference between these ones?” Twinkles asks, pointing to the drones.

  Now they get the drone lecture. How the Phantom Three can fly hundreds of meters high and across a distance of many kilometers. How the Parrot is less mobile but smaller and better for stealth.

  Twinkles is enthralled. “Amazing!” she says. “What you use for? To spying on people?”

  “Well, no,” the assistant says, soberly. “They’re good for filming places you can’t get to by foot.”

  “They’re for men who need to climb mountains,” Ziggy says quietly to her grandmother. “Who cares.”

  “Australians,” Twinkles snickers, slipping into a cheerful Eurocentric collusion.

  Then, on the Parrot’s box, Ziggy sees a photo of a boy wearing thick, wraparound sunglasses. They appear to be sold separately.

  “What do those do?” Ziggy asks the assistant.

  “The glasses let you watch what you’re filming.”

  Twinkles giggles. “Like being in the cockpit?”

  “Bingo.”

  Ziggy knows her grandmother has used the word cockpit to unsettle the man, but it appears not to have registered. For a moment, she pities the little blond bouffant in the cheetah-print leggings whose dentures have the unnatural glow of a sleeping MacBook.

  “Can you use the glasses with a GoPro?” asks Ziggy.

  “I guess so,” he says, now hesitant. “It’s all Bluetooth.”

  “What Bluetooth?”

  The assistant speaks slowly. “It’s a wireless technology that sends information across small distances, so between the camera and the glasses or the phone.”

  Ziggy can see her grandmother’s face short-circuiting with further questions, but there is only one more thing Ziggy needs to know.

  “So the glasses
will let me watch what the GoPro is seeing as it’s seeing it?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Darlink, why you don’t get one of these little helicopters? More fun, no?”

  “They’re two thousand dollars.”

  Though that’s beside the point. Ziggy takes a moment alone with the GoPro. She studies the small black box—so compact and mysterious with its internal nanotechnology. She wants it. She wants to wear it every day.

  “Can I try it with the glasses?”

  Clearly, this is an annoying request, but the assistant is a good sport. He begins dismantling the Parrot’s packaging.

  “Which headband you use, Pippikem?” Her grandmother is pointing to a rack of plastic straps and harnesses. Ziggy flips through to something called the Chesty.

  “That one’s good for skiing,” advises the assistant. “I think we have some Junior Chestys out the back.”

  Junior feels like a challenge. Ziggy rips the larger harness off its hook and holds it out in front of her chest. The crisscrossed straps give the Chesty an aura of sexual torture. “Can I try it on?”

  “Sure,” says the assistant, handing her the freed glasses. Ziggy fastens the GoPro to the Chesty’s buckle, fits the glasses, and begins to walk around the store. What she sees makes her wince with delight. Ziggy’s eyeline is level with everybody’s breasts. Gliding down the aisles, the passing boobs seem harmless and fascinating as giant groupers. It isn’t so much arousal she feels, more the thrill of secret access.

  “There’s also the standard FPV,” says the assistant. “Or first-person view, for the head.”

  “Can I get both?” she asks her grandmother.

  “Darlink, what this for? You going skiing? Why you can’t just use Jake’s?”

  Ziggy pulls Twinkles away from the shop assistant. She lowers her voice. “It’s hard to explain, but I need it for school.”

  “They make everyone pay two hundred dollars for a tiny camera?”

  “No one else has one. That’s why I need it.”