Francis swiveled in his stroller and looked up at his mother, his dark almond-shaped eyes inquisitive, wispy little eyebrows raised. He wondered why she had stopped pushing him, but also, possibly, more. Francis was a gifted, wise, rather serious person, even though he was only two. Often, he looked at Justine with an encouraging smile, as if to say, “You are going to be all right.” She was not imagining it. He really did look at her that way. And now he was saying, “Perhaps we had better go.”

“We have to go,” said Justine.

“Already?” said Joseph, flaring his nostrils slightly and raising his chin, as if trying to puff himself up with his former power.

“Bye!” she said.

“Goodbye, Justine.” He took her hand and shook it, his expression at once solemn and ironic.

Justine pushed the stroller to the café she intended to go to, heart hammering, and entered. Sitting down, she pulled Francis onto her lap, sniffing him behind his ear, where it smelled like a fresh roll, and waited for the tide of feeling for Joseph to come in—regret, love, rage, desire. She kept scanning herself, but there was nothing. She felt nothing at all for Joseph anymore! She had nearly died from love of him and now it was all just empty images. For so long she had yearned for the pain to go away, and now that it had, she found it chilling. Why bother feeling so much in life if it all turns to vapor? She cast her gaze down at Francis, at his round cheek as he tried to replace the cap of his bottle with a chubby hand, the curls near his neck humid with sweat, then out the window of the café, at the people passing—all these strangers who were in love, or abandoned, or desperate, or happy. “It will pass,” she warned them silently, the heat of Francis’s back against her belly.

TOTAL

They had planned to name her Eva, but after she was born, they always referred to her as E.

Looking back now, it’s hard to comprehend how powerful the Total Phone was.

People who have used one equate the experience to being injected with heroin, or perhaps what a baby feels when breastfeeding. A feeling of complete warmth and acceptance surrounded each Total Phone encounter like a nimbus. The phone was a mind-melder. It dissolved the barrier between the two people on the call.

Some people reached orgasm, though for most it was more of a spiritual sensation, first signaled by a tingling at the top of the head and a feeling of heat rushing through the body. The religious claimed it was what Adam and Eve must have felt before the Fall.