We’d always been each other’s lifelines and then she had to go on and die, which I’m still so angry about. And I know you’re not really supposed to be angry at dead people but the feelings still pour acid into my gut when I think of her. Because in the weeks of editing all the footage I’d filmed of her, some of the pieces started falling into place about how she maybe hit the evac button on life herself. And I can’t forgive her just yet. Not when she was there for me so much when my mom died, and would show up at my place with scallion pancakes from my favorite spot in Chinatown after I’d ignored everyone’s calls. Most days we didn’t need to talk much. She would just climb into bed with me and run her hands along my scalp. And if she could get me out of bed, we’d just walk the city together in silence.

I guess people don’t last that long in my life.

So I don’t want to think about her dying. I want to remember her the night we were each other’s co-stars, after she’d called me up with, “Hon, wouldn’t it be fun if you played some rough clips from your doc about your favorite subject, as in me, at one of my shows?”

She had the grace to frame her “quit your wallowing” advice as a suggestion, like I was one of the kids she nannied.

Before the crowd trickled into the bar, I plastered on a smile as I watched Genesis paint her face backstage. She could read my nerves like the spread of tarot cards on her vanity. She always carried her cards, either lazily shuffling them as we strolled the Floating Quincy Market or keeping them in one of her sequined purses.

I futzed with tarot as a teenager, mostly to piss off my devout mom. Genesis and a lot of other synths used the cards as meditation, with the million possible meanings, stories, and futures hinted by each spread offering an escape from the linear data they were always plugged into. Some made their own decks and traded cards with each other. Genesis carried a classic deck, while her girlfriend and fellow synth queen, Dee Construction, favored one based on human history. The ten of swords was the fall of Tenochtitlan. The queen of pentacles was Nobel laureate and activist Wangari Maathai. Justice, the 350-years-too-late pardoning of Galileo. The highs and lows of the past to tell Dee and the others where the future might lead them.

“Shuffle,” Genesis told me, handing over her deck. The backs of her cards were flecked with nail polish.

“What am I asking about?”

“Tonight’s show.”