The Happiness Machine. Katie Williams

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      “These people, they drilled holes in their skulls, tapped through them with chisels.” There was fascination in Rhett’s flat voice, a PA system announcing the world’s wonders. “The skin grows back over and you live like that. A hole or two in your head. They believed it made it easier for divinity to get in. Hey!” He slammed down his glass, fogged with the remnants of his shake. “Maybe you should suggest that religion to that angry lady. Tap a hole in her head! Gotta bring your chisel to work tomorrow.”

      “Good idea. Tonight I’ll sharpen its point.”

      “No way.” He grinned. “Leave it dull.”

      Pearl knew she must have looked startled because Rhett’s grin snuffed out, and for a moment he seemed almost bewildered, lost. Pearl forced a laugh, but it was too late. Rhett pushed his glass to the center of the table and rose, muttering, “G’night,” and seconds later came the decisive snick of his bedroom door.

      Pearl sat for a moment before she made herself rise and clear the table, taking the glass last, for it would require scrubbing.

      PEARL WAITED UNTIL an hour after the HMS noted Rhett’s light clicking off before sneaking into his bedroom. She eased the closet door open to find the jeans and jacket he’d been wearing that day neatly folded on their shelf, an enviable behavior in one’s child if it weren’t another oddity, something teenage boys just didn’t do. Pearl searched the clothing’s pockets for a Muni ticket, a store receipt, some scrap to tell her where her son had been that afternoon. She’d already called Elliot to ask if Rhett had been with him, but Elliot was out of town, helping a friend put up an installation in some gallery (Minneapolis? Minnetonka? Mini-somewhere), and he’d said that Valeria, his now wife, would definitely have mentioned if Rhett had stopped by the house.

      “He’s still drinking his shakes, isn’t he, dove?” Elliot had asked, and when Pearl had affirmed that, yes, Rhett was still drinking his shakes, “Let the boy have his secrets then, as long as they’re not food secrets, that’s what I say. But, hey, I’ll schedule something with him when I’m back next week. Poke around a bit. And you’ll call me again if there’s anything else? You know I want you to, right, dove?”

      She’d said she knew; she’d said she would; she’d said goodnight; she hadn’t said anything—she never said anything—about Elliot’s use of her pet name, which he implemented perpetually and liberally, even in front of Valeria. Dove. It didn’t pain Pearl, not much. She knew Elliot needed his affectations.

      Ever since they’d met, back in college, Elliot and his cohort had been running around headlong, swooning and sobbing, backstabbing and catastrophizing, all of this drama supposedly necessary so that it could be regurgitated into art. Pearl had always suspected that Elliot’s artist friends found her and her general studies major boring, but that was all right because she found them silly. They were still doing it, too—affairs and alliances, feuds and grudges long held—it was just that now they were older, which meant they were running around headlong with their little paunch bellies jiggling before them.

      The pockets of Rhett’s jeans were empty; so was the small trash basket beneath his desk. His screen, unfolded and set on its stand on the desk, was fingerprint locked, so she couldn’t check that. Pearl stood over her son’s bed in the dark and waited, as she had when he was an infant, her breasts filled and aching with milk at the sight of him. And so she’d stood again over these last two difficult years, her chest still aching but now empty, until she was sure she could see the rise and fall of his breath under the blanket.

      After Rhett’s first time at the clinic, when treatment there hadn’t been working, they’d taken him to this place Elliot had found, a converted Victorian out near the Presidio, where a team of elderly women treated the self-starvers by holding them. Simply holding them for hours. “Hug it out?” Rhett had scoffed when they’d told him what he must do. At that point, though, he’d been too weak to resist, too weak to sit upright without assistance. The “treatment” was private, parents weren’t allowed to observe, but Pearl had met the woman, Una, who had been assigned to Rhett. Her arms were plump and liver-spotted with a fine mesh of lines at elbow and wrist, as if she wore her wrinkles like bracelets, like sleeves. Pearl held her politeness in front of her as a scrim to hide the sudden hatred that gripped her. She hated that woman, hated her sagging, capable arms. Pearl had sat here in this apartment, imagining Una, only twenty-two blocks away, holding her son, providing what Pearl should have been able to and somehow could not. Once Rhett had regained five pounds, Pearl had convinced Elliot that they should move him back to the clinic. There he’d lost the five pounds he’d gained and then two more, and though Elliot kept suggesting returning him to the Victorian, Pearl had remained firm in her refusal. “Those crackpots?” she said to Elliot, pretending this was her objection. “Those hippies? No.” No, she repeated to herself. She would do anything for her Rhett, had done anything, but the thought of Una cradling her son, as he gazed up softly—this was what Pearl couldn’t bear. She would hold Una in reserve, a last resort. After leaving the Victorian, Rhett was back in the hospital again and then the terrible feeding tube. But it had worked, eventually it had. Pearl had eked out her son’s recovery pound by pound. Was that where Rhett had been this afternoon? Had he gone to see Una? Had he needed her arms?

      A subtle shift of the bedcovers as Rhett’s chest rose, and Pearl slipped out of the room. If she were to sit for Apricity again, she wondered if there’d be a new item listed on her contentment plan: Watch your son breathe. Though, in truth, this practice didn’t make her happy so much as stave off a swell of desperation.

      THE NEXT MORNING, the web designer was late for their follow-up appointment. When she finally arrived, she entered in a huff, which Pearl mistook for more of yesterday’s outrage. But once the woman had taken her seat and unwound a long red scarf from her neck, the first thing she did was apologize.

      “You probably won’t believe this,” she said, “but I hate it when people yell. I’m not one to raise my voice.”

      The woman, Annette Flatte, made her apology in a practical manner with no self-pity or shuffling of blame. She wore the exact same outfit she had the day before, a white T-shirt and tailored gray slacks. Pearl imagined Ms. Flatte’s closet full of identical outfits, fashion an unnecessary distraction.

      “Did they tell you about what happened after the Christmas party?” Ms. Flatte said. “Why they brought you in?”

      Pearl made a quick calculation and decided that Ms. Flatte would not be the type of person who would consider feigned ignorance a form of politeness. “Your coworker who killed herself? Yes. They told me at the outset. Did you know her?”

      “Not really. Copywriting, Design: different floors.” Ms. Flatte opened her mouth, then closed it again, reconsidering. Pearl waited her out. “Some of them are joking about it,” Ms. Flatte finally said.

      Pearl was already aware of this. Two employees had made the same joke during their sessions with Pearl: Guess Santa didn’t bring her what she wanted.

      “It’s tacky.” Ms. Flatte shook her head. “No. It’s unkind.”

      “Unhappiness breeds unkindness,” Pearl said dutifully, one of the lines from the Apricity manual. “Just as unkindness breeds unhappiness.” She reached for something else to say, something not in the manual, something of her own, but the landscape was razed, barren. There was nothing there. Why was there nothing there?

      “They’re scared,” she finally said.

      “Scared?” Ms. Flatte snorted. “Of what? Her ghost?”

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