by Simeon Mills
“Hurry up,” she said.
I lifted my left LA Gear.
“Closer,” she said.
Our toes tapped twice. Then a three-second union, after which I lost my balance.
“That worked,” she said. “And it counts more than if a stranger just touches your foot accidentally because we both wanted it to happen. Let’s do the next one.”
My big toe felt raw. “The next one?”
“Knees.”
“Touch them?”
“Yes.”
I stepped forward with my right knee out. So did Brooke. This dance brought our faces together, but not our knees. They were still the same distance apart. Brooke frowned. “This isn’t working.”
I slammed my left knee into her right one.
“Ouch,” she said, sniffing, and wiped her nose with her hand. She looked at it. “Hands.” She offered me both hands: palms up, thumbs out—one index finger was streaked with snot. “Let’s do hands.”
I tentatively placed my hands several inches beneath hers then lifted until Brooke’s cold knuckles were resting in my palms. Her hands began to vibrate, so I released her. She wiped her hands on her pants. “Next . . .” She leaned her face toward mine, her eyes glancing down at my belly button. She whispered: “Foreheads.”
I stood on my tiptoes. With our foreheads attached, I could hear deep inside Brooke’s skull: her brain, it seemed, though what I heard did not match my expectations. It sounded like a steady dribble of water in a vast, echoing cave. Then something splashed, loudly, like a fish jumping, and Brooke jerked back from me. She was grinning. “I got it,” she said. She slapped the plywood wall with her open hand. “I got it!” She darted through the door, across the catwalk, and down the ladder. I felt the building shudder from her stomping as she emerged below on the Cave floor, skirting the basketball court, pumping her fists, repeating, “Got it got it got it got—” She slid into her spot against the wall. She heaved her Outbound onto her knees. She raised her hands high above her head. Her fingers began typing, just air at first, until she lowered them to the keyboard. Once her fingers engaged with her computer, they didn’t stop moving for the rest of practice. Wow, I thought. Had Brooke been artistically inspired by . . . me?
I stayed in the box, dutifully recording Kanga’s impeccable basketball fundamentals happening on the court—dribbling, passing, shooting, even picking and rolling. Skills normal sentient beings acquired only after thousands of repetitions. He made fourteen free throws in a row, all with identical form: three dribbles, a pause, fingers tickled the air, the ball chiming the back of the net. An idea stung me like a hornet. What if Magic Johnson had died halfway through practice, and his soul had flown in from Los Angeles and taken root in Kanga’s battery?
That’s when I heard the faint squeal of a compact car struggling through the parking lot. Was this the automobile of the legendary Ceiling Fan Simms? I assumed such a persistent rebounder would drive an oversize truck, like the one Mr. Belt drove. Yet when I focused my ears on the parking lot, I heard the groaning of the car’s steel frame as a massive driver pried himself loose. He entered the Cave a moment later, all six foot six of him, wide as a helicopter. The Ceiling Fan was not dressed for a job interview but rather wore a stained sweatshirt that read INVISIBLE SYSTEMS.
The team sprinted over to surround him, and Rye blurted out, “Did you get the job?”
The Ceiling Fan looked slowly from player to player, as if he couldn’t believe anybody on Earth was glad to see him. He had obviously been crying in his tiny car, and now, with the unexpected attention of twelve adoring boys, the Ceiling Fan let out a long sob.
Rye shuffled over. “We don’t want you to get a new job. We want you to stay our coach.”
“They were just hiring toasters. Toasters sitting in all the chairs, waiting to be interviewed. You can tell just by looking at them. Their eyes. That smell. How am I supposed to compete? Toaster stole my last job too. United States of goddamned Toasters! And now”—the Ceiling Fan covered his face with his hands—“and now Magic’s got HIV!”
The Birds were unable to look away from the weeping man. I found Kanga’s face, wrecked with concern for the Ceiling Fan. It was a flawless display of restrained compassion, one I had never been able to master myself, not after countless hours in front of the bathroom mirror. Somehow Kanga was equipped with an endless supply of human hearts in his chest that he could break on demand.
Mr. Belt swooped in. “That’s practice, men. I want you to go home. Watch some TV. Relax. Drink plenty of fluids. Just remember to use the bathroom before you go to bed. We don’t need any accidents. You’re freshmen in high school, for Christ’s sake!” He escorted the Ceiling Fan to his office, where they could catch up in private.
I made my way down from the skybox. There was Brooke Noon, still hooked to the wall, still typing. My exhaust fan was running so loudly I could barely hear myself ask her, “What is your story about, Brooke?”
She pushed her chin to her chest and shut her eyes. She pounded the keyboard louder and louder. “Stop shouting at me.”
I didn’t think I was shouting. Not unless she could hear my fingers, which were shouting to untie her shoelaces. I whispered, “Bye, Brooke.”
Kanga waited for me at the bike rack. His homemade Magic jersey had been destroyed, so he was shirtless. A good mother would have been distressed at the sight of her son’s exposure to the harsh November night, but for the moment I couldn’t care less about Kanga. We biked home together, yet separately. My processor felt divided too: before Brooke, after Brooke. I recalled the heat of her forehead against mine. Somehow, that had changed me. I’d never had a connection like that with someone before—an artistic connection. Certainly not with Kanga. My processor quickly whipped up an entire future with Brooke Noon: living in a secluded cabin in the forest, writing science fiction stories all day, reading them to each other all night . . . and touching shoes, and knees, and hands, and foreheads, and—
I nearly road my bike into a ditch.
• • •
Later that night, both of us relaxing in the glow of an Oxy Clean medicated pads commercial, Kanga pressed the Mute button. He had never done that before. “Darryl?”
“What is it?”
“I wish Mom were here.”
My typical response to this type of a statement was a firm She’s not, and she’ll never be, so get over it. But tonight I knew this wasn’t about Mom. It was about the box Kanga and I had been living in our entire lives, the box we’d just peeked our heads out of for the first time. I said, “Mom would have been proud of you tonight.”
“If Mom were here, I’d ask her if, maybe, I could go to basketball practice again tomorrow.”
Tomorrow? Practice? I had forgotten the “one practice” plan entirely. Not forgotten, exactly, because robots don’t forget things. Our memories are perfect. I had simply deleted the plan because it was no longer relevant. Oh, we would go to basketball practice tomorrow. And for the rest of the season. My copy of The Directions would combust if it knew how blatantly I was abandoning its supreme tenet of anonymity. Brooke Noon had said my name, and now I pined for her nonessential human contact. Of course, I would need to remain diligent in protecting our identities, now more than ever. But we’d be okay. I’d have my eyes on Kanga, always, like the perfect mother I was.
“You want to go to basketball practice tomorrow?” I smiled. “Say the magic word.”
He tackled me with a hug. “THE MAGIC WORD!”
8
I REMEMBERED GETTING SWITCHED ON for the first time.
Here was what it looked like: blackness.
Here was what it felt like: roughness.
Here was what it sounded like: gentle scratching.
I became aware while inside a canvas sack, and these initial sensations were recorded by my processor with perfect clarity.
Impossible to recall, however, was the genuine ignorance of those first seven seconds. The words canvas and sack
were just disparate pieces of data in my processor without a connection to the physical world. I even had photographs of them in my vocabulary file—a generic sack, a folded piece of canvas—but they were useless without context. I was cognizant only of myself, the crude sensory input I’d gathered from the sack, and the wires protruding from the top of my head toward the end of the universe.
My solitude ended during my eighth second of life. I felt a jab from somewhere outside the canvas sack. Followed by another jab. Then I heard a wail. The sound was tonally similar to the tiny sounds I had made with my own mouth. I reached a foot toward the source of the jabs. To my delight, I met something of the approximate size and shape of my foot. The wailing stopped. We pressed our feet together, curling our toes hello.
Suddenly, a new barrage of sounds attacked us. They were low, repetitive, and sharp. I would later connect those sounds with the word laughter, but from inside the sack, they were horrifying. I felt my enclosed world separate from my partner—his renewed wails fading away. My sack stretched and groaned as it spun through space. Light entered the sack from above, and I was falling. Above became below. The sack was spitting me out. Light blinded me. I splashed into a warm thickness . . .
These were the details of my birth. I could tell my processor to re-feel them at any moment, and the sensations would return to me. Swimming in the bathtub of heated lubricant. Seeing Kanga for the first time through the shimmering liquid. Feeling his body, skin to skin, at the bottom of the tub: arms, legs, heads, wires. And the word snowballing through my vocabulary: brother.
But I couldn’t relive not knowing him. Those first seven seconds when it had been just me, along with the naive belief that I would always be alone in the world—that was gone. Now Kanga’s grease was smeared on every thought in my processor. Whether I wanted it there or not.
• • •
After that initial basketball practice, Kanga survived the remaining November workouts, earning a well-deserved Thanksgiving break to prepare himself for the Birds’ first game of the season on December second. Now it was Kanga’s wardrobe, rather than his skills, that needed the most attention. Mr. Belt required his players to appear “gussied up” at school on game day. “Dapper,” “spruced,” or “swanky” were also acceptable states of dress. What they all had in common was a button-down shirt, tie, slacks, and shiny shoes. Kanga owned none of the above. We headed to the Salvation Army.
Nineteen ninety-one was allergic to nostalgia. If you watched five minutes of TV from then, you understood that people didn’t sit still long enough to reminisce about the days gone by. They were too busy dancing uncontrollably, jumping from airplanes with snowboards attached to their feet, racing cars around enormous beer bottles, or splashing into vast bodies of water. Zippers on the flies of jeans were not strong enough for today’s hustle and bustle, so flies now included buttons. The definition of sports had to be rewritten to include “cross-training,” which meant being proficient at all sports at once. This required a special shoe, a “cross-trainer,” but rollerblades were also acceptable if you wanted to go faster than your opponents. The Salvation Army had none of the appropriate gear for 1991. Luckily for us, men’s dress clothes had remained consistent since approximately the beginning of time.
The smell hit you first upon entering the store, like a bunch of sunburned humans packed into a closet. Then, the organization. I often wondered if the Salvation Army had its own set of Directions for how to arrange everything just so on the shelves. To me, it required a certain nerve to place a used commode, for instance, next to a used stepladder, as if those two items shared an intrinsic bond that could never be broken.
Kanga bounded immediately to the sporting goods section, just like he’d always run to the toys section when we were little kids. I borrowed Mom’s strategy of finding an armful of potential fits for him, carrying them to his location, and draping them across my brother’s body while he perused the Salvation Army’s eclectic treasures. I stacked his keepers in a pile: black shoes, two pairs of black socks, navy pants, charcoal pants, two white shirts, three clip-on ties. Then I searched for my own game-day clothes, swallowing my pride and entering the boys’ section. It was a humiliating endeavor. But soon my arms were bulging with shirts and slacks, and I was waiting in line for the fitting rooms.
The Salvation Army had three fitting rooms, but one was special. The middle room. That was the place where, back in fourth grade, my life changed forever.
I was with Dad, standing in line for the fitting rooms. He had a clump of trousers in his arms and leaned down and whispered to me, “That’s the one we’re waiting for.” He nodded to the middle door, which was occupied. The other two rooms were available, but we stood there patiently until the special door clicked open. A tall woman exited, hugging a pile of clothing to her ribs. Her curly hair was sticking out in odd directions, and her face was red. I couldn’t read her expression. Was it shame? Anger? Or maybe, in the process of changing, did she accidentally disturb a nest of spiders that had taken root in her belly button? That’s how she was holding the clothes. “Stop staring,” Dad said, and I followed him into the special fitting room. He chucked the trousers in the corner and locked the door behind us. “There.” He pointed. “Sit against that wall.”
“What?”
“The outlet. I want you to plug in right now. Your mother only lets you boys charge up at home. Sometimes that’s not an option. So go on. Plug in.”
It was true. Home was the only place I’d ever plugged in, and just at one particular outlet. My outlet: the one in the living room, behind the big orange recliner. The Directions was kept under that chair. And the spot was hidden. Nobody could see me charging up at home, and that was the way I liked it. And now Dad wanted me to plug into this outlet? It was cracked and beige and splattered with tiny chicken pox.
“Go ahead and sit by that puppy, just like you do at home, but I’m going to show you how to make it look natural, just in case somebody walks in on you.”
“Is somebody going to walk in on me?”
“Just sit your ass down and do as I say.”
I sat down cross-legged, facing the outlet, like always.
“No, Darryl. You gotta lean against the wall. You gotta slouch. Think of yourself like a hobo, slouching low, like you got nowhere to be for the rest of your life, and you’re going to sleep against that wall until somebody boots you in the head.”
“Is somebody going to—”
“No. Slouch lower. Good. Now you tuck both hands under your armpits. Haven’t you ever seen a homeless person? Loosen up, kid. Tuck them high. Pretend you’re trying to keep warm. Now your fingers are right there by the outlet, but hidden. So go on and plug them in.”
I drove my fingertips into the outlet. The thing bit me. Hard. Then it felt like a hundred cats were licking my hand at once. This was not the same electricity we had at home. It was dirty. It was used.
“I can see you perking up. Now we gotta talk.”
The air in the tiny room popped like bubbles. The air was pink. “What if somebody knocks?”
“Look in that mirror over there, Darryl. Your eyes. Your ears. Your eyebrows. Your nostrils. See your face? People are going to call you ugly, if they call you anything,” Dad said, laughing, “but they won’t call you robot, and that’s the important thing. This is your camouflage, kid. Look at me. I’m ugly. But there are worse things than having a misshapen head. Being ugly is the best thing about you and me.”
“Mom’s not ugly.”
“No. She isn’t. Gravy missed the mark with the 415s. Too symmetrical, but don’t you go telling her I said that.”
“Neither is Kanga, and he looks just like me.”
“Maybe so. But my point is, this whole ‘family’ thing we’re doing, none of it matters. We’re all just lone robots in the world. Throwing us together in one house was Gravy’s way of cutting costs. All you can do, Darryl, is take care of yourself. Just you. Got it? There’s gonna come a time when it’s yo
u or Kanga. You’ll have to choose. Thing is, you need to make up your mind now who it’s going to be.”
“I don’t want to choose.”
“Then you’ll die with him. Your brother, he’s—” Dad shook his head. “You think he’s even your brother? We got piss-all of an idea what’s programmed in his head or when it’s gonna blow. He might have one of those magic words programmed in him, and the moment some scientist walks up behind him and whispers it, Kanga’ll turn into a completely different person. You got a plan for that situation?”
“No.”
“I do. It’s called not being around to see it.”
I shivered. Maybe from the electricity, which felt like a toothless mouth chewing on my fingers. But maybe it was the look on Dad’s face.
“I can’t go nowhere yet, because I’m not programmed to. I got one goddamn program, and you know what it is? Take a guess.”
“Darts?”
“I wish! Me and your mother got the same thing. One program. Programmed to raise your and your brother’s asses. Who knows how many programs you boys have waiting inside you? I’d kill for that kind of uncertainty. A chance for something new. Something mysterious. Try to imagine living with someone who has the exact same program as you. Sometimes I wish I was in prison.”
“How many programs do you think I have?”
“We can find out. Not everything there is to know comes from The Directions. You’ve got to learn to talk to people, whoever they are, and not take no for an answer. I can teach you that. I can teach you stuff like this, using outlets anywhere. I’m going to make this offer to you one time, Darryl. Let’s split. You and me. I’ll be doing my program, raising you good, and you can lead us wherever you want. We can see the whole world, us together, out on the road. What do you say?”
“And just leave Mom and Kanga?”
“Don’t tell me you ain’t fantasized about this. Don’t tell me you ain’t seen those professional truck driver commercials and gotten a funny itch. Come on. You know we got to do this. You and me. And look.” Dad pulled a butcher knife from his bundle of pants. He must have secretly chosen it from the kitchenware section. The knife was a perfect fit for Dad’s permanent grip. He chopped at the air with it. His teeth flashed in the fitting-room mirror. “This’ll be our weapon. And tomorrow morning we’ll get in the van, and we’ll never come back.”
