It was the height of the Age of Cyberpunk and the calendars said 2016. A seven-year-old Kendra Oswald wandered around her father's penthouse apartment. She passed by a couch where Dane Oswald was staring at one of his mistresses. It was the blonde. "Daddy?" she asked, her Hello Kitty glasses framing her face.
"Sure, pumpkin, what's up?" Dane took some time out of his busy face-appreciation hour to turn his head to face her. His salt-and-pepper hair and swimmer's body made his many extramarital adventures more than understandable. At least, he liked to think so.
"Where'd you put my fancy red pen?" she asked.
"Isn't it in your pencil case?" he asked.
"It went missing," Kendra said.
Dane and Mistress #2 exchanged flirtatious glances. Unbeknownst to the young girl, he'd written some very explicit things on some very specific parts of her body two days ago. It was one of those games that men in Malibu did. Dane stifled a chuckle. "Oh, right. It must be in my bedroom." Dane took great care not to say "Your mother and I's bedroom" around the mistresses. He found it bothered them.
"Thanks, Daddy!" Kendra said, as Mistress #2 brought up Trump and Dane mentioned some shocking thing the racist slob said on the campaign trail. She made her way to her parents' bedroom, its cloud-like grey comforter resembling Heaven's streets. Dane Oswald had assured an anxious and politically aware Kendra a year ago that the streets were not in fact guarded by United States Marines despite what she may have heard from her cousin in JROTC. Above the bed Kendra saw an authentic Norman Rockwell painting. It was titled Golden Rule, and they lived by it. Kendra knew by heart that it had come from a grateful Nicholas Cage for his time in the role of Yuri Orlov in the film Lord of War, which Dane Oswald boasted was "His favorite role in his favorite movie by his favorite director". It had won Dane Oswald the Oscar for Best Director of 2005 over Eastwood.
She crawled onto the bed and searched the sheets. After fifteen minutes and nearly giving up, the dogged daughter found the red ink pen. She spotted the painting of individuals of various cultures, with the text in the center in gold. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
With the confidence and lack of impulse control that could only come from a seven-year-old, Kendra crossed some letters out and wrote a new maxim: Do unto others as if they were Nic Cage. She walked out of the apartment and returned to the living room. "Daddy, I fixed your painting," she said. She could barely hold back laughter.
"What? Which painting?" he asked. His eyes darted around.
"The one in the bedroom," she snickered.
He leapt off the couch and ran into the bedroom. Mistress #2 followed. Kendra heard screaming. "What the fuck did you do?" His hands balled up, and Kendra immediately imagined him decking her across the face.
He didn't.
"You have no idea how big you've screwed up. No wine or beer for the next year, no laptop for anything but schoolwork for the next six months, and no playdates." His breathing was as if he wore a gas mask. "Stupid little goddamned motherfucking brat. We're talking to Mom!" He turned to Mistress #2. "Dawn, call Liza."
"Not Mom!" Kendra whined.
"Got it," Dawn said, drawing her phone from her handbag and calling Liza Oswald.
"What do you want?" Liza yelled in Dawn's ear, with you cheating slut implicitly addended to the statement.
"Um, Mr. Oswald needs you to scold Kendra," Dawn said. She trembled.
"Oh, of course! God forbid I ever get affection out of that piece of shit, but as soon as Kendra needs to be scolded he calls me. Glad I know what I'm for," she snarled.
Dawn fearfully handed it to Dane, who turned on speakerphone.
"Kendra, what'd you do?" Liza asked.
"I wrote on Daddy's Norman Rockwell," she said. She knew it was a Norman Rockwell. She didn't know why Dane cared so much, but she knew.
Liza, currently wasting away in a hipster bar, brought her cosmo to her lips. "You know what? I told her to do it. I was sick of you bragging about your goddamn painting, so I had her deface it."
"You slut, that was worth a quarter of her college fund!" he screamed. Dawn scurried away.
The lesson had been taught, and Kendra left the room.
When Kendra was thirteen, she'd heard that Dane Oswald had been accused of drug possession. She wore her finest black dress, and she stood with her mother outside of the courtroom. "Mom, I'm scared," Kendra said.
The place was a monolith of wood. "You don't need to be scared," Liza said. "This is gonna turn out OK. There's nothing any of us need to worry about." Liza held Kendra's arm tightly.
"What if Dad goes to jail?" Kendra asked.
"He won't. Do you wanna know why?" she said. Her face was iron and porcelain.
"I dunno," she said.
"It's because you're going to tell them the truth, that your father would never abuse drugs. He's not that kind of man. He's a good, sober person who's dedicated to his work. He barely even drinks."
Kendra gave it some thought. "I can't lie, Mom!" she hissed. The very idea was inferno.
"Do you want your father to come home or not?"
It was Kendra's freshman year of college, and the world was falling apart. The old flat-screen in the corner of the sports bar went on about how rebel zones in SoCal were engaging in live fire with LAPD and California National Guard troops. It was CNN, which meant that it was hideously right-wing and the stories were full of more holes than a cheese grater.
Kendra wore her sluttiest top and purple eyeshadow with glitter. She made her way to the bar counter.
"Card," a furry-armed bartender said.
"Oh, I get carded all the time," Kendra said, drawing her student ID. She'd used sandpaper, a very strong marker, and White-Out to change the "18" to a "25". It was a crude job, but she gave him a smile and made her motions smooth.
"Yeah, I don't doubt it," he said. "What do you want?"
"Gimme a Jagerbomb. Like my dad used to make," she joked.
"Cool dad," he said.
Film school wasn't as easy as they made it sound. As she finished an art film from 1968 that Kendra struggled to force into any kind of logical structure, she reached into a drawer of her desk. Her laptop's OLED screen made the film look as good as it could, even if Kendra still had little interest in "art flicks". She drew from the drawer a bottle of Xanax.
It was easy to get Xanax. You found the lowest-rated doctor you could find on WebMD, you told them you had severe anxiety, and they prescribed it for you because if they didn't they'd be broke. So she downed a pill with a bottle of allegedly electrolyte-filled water. One pill became two, two became four, and as she began to drift into what seemed to be the black void to which all must return, she had visions of her mother and father. Her world was ending.
She saw her mother at her funeral: "Our daughter Kendra tragically suffered from a heart defect and had a horrific response to her medication."
She saw her father, older, at a dinner party: "Oh, Kendra? She's going on a gap year in France. You know how film students are. She keeps to herself."
She saw her mother talking to an eventual Mistress #5: "Oh, Kendra, you must be thinking of that girl we fostered. We have no idea what's going on with her. She's probably done great things."
Kendra faded away.
When she woke up, it was in a hospital bed, and she saw nobody around her but the nurses.
Ruby Singh and Kendra Oswald could not look more different. The former wore a red armband and tank top. She was short, with a shaved head and a soldier's expression. Kendra, meanwhile, wore a pre-revolutionary designer cocktail dress. "Designer" didn't mean anything anymore, but she'd kept much of her clothes. Kendra had a cosmo between painted nails, Ruby sipped a beer. "I didn't take you to be into drones, HundredFlowers. Or, should I say, AssMuncher9000," Kendra said.
"Nice detective work," Ruby said.
"I hate how bars are now," Kendra complained. "They expect you to do the dishes and sometimes you have to mix your own drinks, it's bullshit."
Ruby laughed. "Wait a minute," she said. "Oh my god, someone totally yelled at me in that dress when they got sushi in 2029. That was you, wasn't it?"
"Oh god, yeah," Kendra said, burying her face in her hands. "I'm, um, sorry for calling you a lazy idiot," Kendra said.
"Apology accepted," Ruby said, playfully bumping Kendra's arm with her elbow. "Well, to answer your implicit question, bars are for people to hang out and drink, not so you can get waited on hand and foot by someone who has to put up with all of your crap," she said.
"This is what Puyi felt like, isn't it?" Kendra said. "Like, I read about his life. He was this Chinese emperor who spent his entire life being taken care of by servants. He didn't even know how to tie his shoes. Then he oversaw a bunch of war crimes. After that, he was obsolete and Mao sent him to a brainwashing camp, right?"
"Brainwashing camp," Ruby scoffed.
"Look, I get that those don't really exist in America, but in China—"
"First, it's the 'Worldwide Council Republic of Socialists', and second the re-education camps were both necessary and humane."
It was Kendra's turn to playfully bump Ruby's arm. Kendra downed her drink and got up to mix another one behind the counter. "Tankie."
"Shitlib."
"Come on, you're totally into me, right?" Kendra said as she downed another cosmo in one gulp.
"Fine, I have a thing for movie bimbos."
"Bitch, I know who Puyi was, I am not a bimbo," Kendra said. "I am an artist."
"Then can you make movies that aren't just reviving capitalist products with added homosexuality?" Ruby asked.
"No, then I'd be my dad," she joked. "Seriously, I'm trying to get one made after Captain America," she said.
"What was your dad like?" Ruby asked.
"Great first date question," Kendra said.
"This is a first date?" Ruby asked, an eyebrow raising just a bit.
"I was hoping it was."
"Same here," Ruby said, wrapping a strong arm around the stick-thin directorial princess's waist.
