by Lisa Bunker
“Yeah.”
“Oh.” More silence. Then he says, “But you’re still smart, right?”
For a second all I can do is stare at him. He stares back, and the same pulling-away look starts to come back into his face, so I say, a little louder than I mean to, “Yeah, I’m smart.” A couple kids at the next table look over, but they look away again.
“Normal smart.” Now he’s almost whispering, because of the other kids.
I lower my voice too. “Yeah, normal. Whatever that means.” Then he smiles for the first time. Only a little smile, but still, whammo.
“I thought so,” he says. Yet more silence. Lunch is almost over. He finishes first and puts his hands on each side of his tray. Before he gets up, though, he says, “I know what it’s like.”
“You know what what’s like?” I say, and then I think, Hey, that came out easy. Just like talking to Bea or Mom or Grandy.
“Having people think you’re stupid, because you’re not what they think of as normal.” He wrinkles his nose—not quite a smile, but still—and adds, “Whatever that means,” and I actually laugh. I never laugh at school. He goes on. “You know, ’cause of …” he says, and he does a move with his hand that means his curly hair, the brown of his face.
I don’t know what to say, so I just nod.
“So anyway, I just want to thank you,” he says. “’Cause you’re one of the only people at this school who ever really talks to me.” Then he gets up and leaves, giving me one last look back as he goes.
What? I’M the only one who ever talks to HIM? What? What? I said, What?
20 Days to Go
We have just had another evening of chess fun with Rick. Usually he comes on Friday nights, but Saturday is the last dry run for the Procedure, which we have to leave for at some ridiculous hour of the morning, like four, so Mom set it up for him to come tonight instead. I could tell she was tense about it before he got here, though. I think he’s been pushing her about the chess, and I guess she’s still not sure how she feels about that.
At dinner Rick was acting in a way I haven’t seen before, sticking his chin out and waving his fork around a lot when he talked, and when he looked at me it felt like his eyes had screwdrivers coming out of them, jabbing at me. I had to remind myself that all he knows is the Story. He doesn’t understand that in twenty days I will either not be a chess player anymore or I’ll be dead, in which case I won’t be a chess player anymore either, so, in twenty days I won’t be a chess player anymore.
Mom tried to drop hints, mentioning my “surgery,” which is the Story version of the Procedure, but I don’t think he heard. A couple of times he talked right over her, and the second time he did it she sat back in her chair and looked at him like, Who are you?
Whatever. Zyx was making me jump all through dinner chess pretty
I was wondering how long it would take for you to speak up. Yeah, chess pretty. I’m starting to understand it a little myself, which is cool. Anyway, as soon as dinner is over, Rick pushes his dishes to one side and pulls out his tablet and says, “How ’bout it? Let’s play some chess!” All fakey, you know, like a Little League coach or something. Serious eye-roll moment, but aside from knowing Zyx wants to play I’m getting more interested too, so as best I can—Zyx has me practically tied in knots—I go around and sit on the chair Rick has pulled out for me.
Next he explains that he has set up a new account with my name. Mom makes a concerned noise, and he says, “Don’t worry, I paid for it,” and she makes a concerned/protesting noise, and he says, “Oh, that. Don’t worry—just his first name.” He looks at me. “Actually, Felix was already taken, so I did Felix1, because you’re going to be number one!” Over his shoulder Bea does a combo eye-roll and vomit-tongue, and the only thing that keeps me from laughing in his face is a straight look from Grandy under the bill of veir cap. Then I guess Rick gets the idea that he’s coming on a bit strong, because he drops his eyes. “The password is chess4fun,” he mumbles. “There has to be a numeral in it.”
Bea asks to be excused and goes and starts practicing, and Grandy gets up and clears the table, paying attention as vo comes and goes. Mom sits and watches, sipping her wine. She’s frowning, but interested too.
So we sign in to the site and the chessboard pops up, and Rick says, “You’re a new player now, not me anymore, so nobody will have any way to tell who you might be or how strong you are. Do you understand?” I do a convulsion that is supposed to be a nod. “And sometimes really strong players create new accounts, so it won’t automatically look like you’re using a computer.”
Mom says, “Did you get your account unfrozen?”
“No, they kicked me off the site. I had to start a new one.” He sounds like he doesn’t care even a little bit, so nobody says anything. “You’re going to have to play some weaker players at first until your rating starts to go up, but that won’t take long. Because you’re so incredibly fast, I figure you should play bullet.”
I can’t speak, but fortunately Grandy steps in. “Bullet?”
“Yeah,” says Rick. “One minute for each player for the whole game.” Grandy raises veir eyebrows but says nothing.
Zyx must like this, because my hands leap onto the tablet by themselves bullet fun but slow
Slow, huh? Maybe you would like to play the whole game in one second?
more games that way
Riiiiight. Well, bullet is what we play, and once again the sense of Zyx driving my body is very strong. My hands get statue still, except when the fingers flick to tap out the moves. It’s two taps for each move—the piece you’re moving, and the square to move it to—and just like the first time, the games are mostly the other player thinking, so the rhythm goes taptap pause … other player moves taptap pause … other player moves taptap longer pause …
Once I figure out how to let go and let Zyx play, I am able to relax somewhat and glance up from time to time. The first time I do, Mom gives me a little question smile, and I nod back: Yeah, Mom, this is OK with me. If I could talk, I would say, Sometimes I can almost understand what’s happening on the board.
Well, as expected, Zyx wins game after game. There are clocks on the screen, and ours always has at least fifty seconds left when the other player gets checkmated or resigns or runs out of time. Rick sits next to me, fidgeting and making noises, which would be distracting if it was actually me playing. He keeps saying things like “Ab-so-lute-ly incredible” and “I can’t believe it.”
We go on for about an hour without stopping. There’s a way people can observe your games, with a counter so you can see how many, and by the end of the hour there are about a hundred people watching. There’s a chat box too, and people are guessing who I am, and Rick says the names they are guessing are some of the top players in the world. Others are saying that I have to be a computer, and then someone types, “Too fast even for a computer … It’s God!” and then there are all these lols and laughy faces.
Um, Zyx, you’re not God, are you?
god question mark
That’s what I thought. But even if you’re not THE God, mightn’t you still be some kind of … You know what, never mind. I don’t want to know. Sorry I asked.
…
By the end of the hour I’m starting to hurt, so I exchange another look with Mom, and she says, “This will be the last game.” Rick looks like he’s going to argue, but then maybe for the first time all evening he actually sees her face, so he closes his mouth again. Zyx wins one more game and then Rick signs us off and we all sit silent, with only Bea’s music for sound. Then Rick says to Mom, “Margie, your son is a genius.” Her name is Margo, as I’ve mentioned, but he calls her Margie. Gack.
Mom makes a little sound, like, Oh, really now …
“He is.” He puts his hand on my shoulder, and I can feel it trembling. “The greatest natural chess genius the world has ever seen. He’s going to be famous.”
Mom’s eyes dart back and forth like she’s thinking
of a whole bunch of different things to say and not saying any of them. Finally she says, “Yes, perhaps. Someday. If he wants.”
Rick is back to not listening. “I know someone. A very strong player, a Grandmaster. She lives in Portland. Her name is Ursula Ots. She’s from Estonia. I’d like to bring her to watch Felix play.”
Now Mom’s face looks chiseled out of granite. “I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“She might be willing to coach him.”
“We are done here.”
Rick opens his mouth again, but Grandy cuts him off with a loud chair scrape that makes us all look. Vo stands up, putting down veir knitting. “This would be the sort of decision that needs to be slept on,” vo says in a voice that I can hear is stagey but Rick probably can’t. “Right now it’s time for chores. Felix, get to it. Lickety-split.” I jump up, or lurch up anyway, and figure out something to pick up and carry into the kitchen to look busy, and the discussion is over.
So, maybe this Ursula person will come. That could be interesting.
chess pretty
You mentioned that. I have to do my homework now.
19 Days to Go
The only thing I have to report about today is that it has been less fun than usual for a Friday because tomorrow, all day, is the trip to the Facility to finish the Fitting of the Apparatus. Gah, all these Capital Letters. But, that’s how it feels, so, Whatever. The Facility is the science complex where the accident happened and where the Procedure is going to be performed. It’s a long way from here, back where we used to live. (Of course the fifty-mile rule doesn’t apply to driving there.) And may I just say I am not looking forward to any part of this, at all?
Anyway, since we’re returning to where it all started, I thought I would do some more backstory.
After the accident, when I was paralyzed, Mom says they couldn’t get any response from me at all, so at first they thought that my brain had been damaged. Not just damaged—destroyed. They thought I was brain-dead. (That was no fun to type.) I wasn’t, though. My brain was working same as always. Zyx, I know you remember that time, because you remember everything.
not remember know be
What was it like for you?
not dance more
By which you mean who knows what.
…
Fine. Anyway, the kind of paralyzed I was was the rigid carved-in-stone kind, not limp, and of course I was paralyzed in the Pose, so they had me strung up with a bunch of those pulley-and-weight things. I’ve seen a picture. All I could do besides just hang there was breathe and blink, and it was a slow, slow, heavy blink, cllllooooooooose, and then ooooooooopen, like a steamroller rolling back and forth. Of course my heart was still beating too, but otherwise I couldn’t even twitch a finger. I could hear and understand everything that people were saying when they were in the room, though. Sometimes that was incredibly frustrating, but sometimes it was kinda cool.
Frustrating was Mom and Bea sitting by my bed and crying and me feeling really really lonely and scared and wanting Mom to hold me but not being able to say anything or reach my arms toward her.
Cool was watching and listening to the doctors and nurses and getting ideas about what kinds of people they were. There was one nurse who would look into my eyes like she was really looking at me, and she would talk to me. It’s going to be all right, Felix, she would say. Everything is going to be fine, sweetie. And she would put her hand on my forehead and smooth my hair. It was so nice.
And there was this one doctor who was talking to another doctor once, a man doctor and a woman doctor. They were standing at the foot of the bed, right where my dead glass zombie eyes were staring at them, but they didn’t know I could see them with my dead glass zombie eyes, and man doctor kinda looks around, and then he hooks a thumb at me in the bed and says, “Zucchini.”
Woman doctor makes a little noise that could mean anything, and man doctor goes on in the same jokey braggy voice, “Hopeless case. Yoon and Perkins think there’s a chance of recovery, but I know a persistent vegetative state when I see one.” Which shows what he knew, I guess.
Perkins? Yeah, I think that’s right. Wow, it really comes back when you write it. Zyx, are you helping me remember?
no
But it was Perkins, right?
yes
So I remembered myself. Cool. Aaaaand Mom just called lights-out. Early bedtime because of tomorrow morning. Four a.m. Such a time should not exist, and I definitely shouldn’t have to get up into it. I am tired, though. I wasn’t quite completely locked up this morning, but wow, did I have to push to get moving, and my body hurt all day. So I guess I could sleep. Good night, Zyx.
good night
Sweet dreams, don’t let the bedbugs bite.
question mark
Never mind. Good night.
zyx love felix
Sure. Thanks.
18 Days to Go
So the Fitting happened, and we’re home again. Besides that, though, something else happened that I’m not sure I’ll be able to explain … but maybe I should just let it come into the telling when it comes.
When Mom rousted me out of my chair, it was still completely dark. I growled at her, but she kept shaking me until I broke through the creaky-pain-freeze and stumbled around getting dressed, and then stumbled out to the car. It was just me and Mom and Bea—Grandy stayed home. I chose the backseat, and as soon as Mom started driving I put my player on shuffle and scooched down as far as it seemed like she would let me. She gets freaky about seat belts across stomachs, as opposed to “low and tight across your lap,” because, I suppose, if we were in an accident I would get sliced in half right back to my spine, which now that I think about it, yuck, so I guess she has a point.
Anyway, she didn’t seem to be paying any attention, so I got my head down below the bottom of the window and just kinda dozed off and on, watching during the eyes-open times as the sky got lighter. Random things went flitting by in the part of the sky I could see: telephone poles, traffic-light poles, buildings and signs and trees. They had no rhythm. Flick, flick, flickflick … empty stretch … big building zooms by … little empty bit … flickity-flick … never repeating. And it was cool how my tunes were going beat, beat, beat, against this other randomness.
music beat music free rhythm between sing dance
Um, sure, you could say that. Anyway, it was one of the first really not-cold mornings of spring, and in the breeze from Mom’s cracked-open window I zoned out and managed to let worry be somewhere else for a little while. So, good.
The sun was halfway up the sky by the time we got to the Facility, and they were expecting us. The guard waved us through. I got the same squirt of adrenaline I always get looking at the concrete buildings and the fences and all the power pylons, and the worry came back. Bea glanced back at me, and I could see the worry in her face too.
When we parked, Dr. Yoon and Dr. Gordon were there to meet us, and as always I had to keep myself from laughing at the size difference between them. Dr. Yoon is so small, and Dr. Gordon is so huge. Beyond that, Dr. Yoon is like somebody’s cheerful bustling mom, but with shrewd eyes watching you all the time too, and Dr. Gordon is this big lumbering mumbling man who never looks anyone in the face. When he talks, which isn’t much, he talks to his shoes, except when he’s working on the Apparatus, when he acts like the world’s largest twelve-year-old science nerd. Dr. Yoon is a medical doctor, and Dr. Gordon is a PhD doctor.
After hi hi hi all around, the two doctors led us down the spiral stair into the cubical chamber where the Apparatus is. There are cables and hoses everywhere, and in the walls there are huge fans for sucking the air out and then pumping it back in again, because, I forgot to mention, the ZeroMoment needs to happen in as close to a total vacuum as possible.
The Apparatus itself looks like a giant twenty-seventh-century robot baseball. There’s a hatch that opens, and inside there are a bunch of armatures that together make up a skintight Felix-shaped tota
l-body cast. I have a mask for breathing, and the armatures fit so close that I cannot move at all. For this to work, we have to re-create the Pose exactly, and how we will know we have it exactly is, Zyx will tell us. Vo can feel when we are microscopically farther away from or closer to the precise position, so they’ve installed two halves of a keyboard, one for each hand, under the fingers at the end of each arm-armature. Once they close the hatch, all I can do is wait while they use enormous machines to twiddle my left little toe up a half a millimeter and then down again, based on what Zyx types.
almost dance
You mean, when the position is exactly right?
yes almost dance
But not quite.
…
Still, it must feel good. I don’t know about you, but even though I am scared out of my mind about this, I would sure love to be able to move any way I want.
…
Do you even move, where you live?
dance dance dance
Which doesn’t exactly answer my question. Whatever. I’ll tell you something though: if this does work, one of the very first things I am going to do is stretch. I’m going to stretch myself into the exact opposite shape of the Pose, hands way up high, feet way down low, back arched back … oh, Mother Hubbard, I bet it is going to feel incredible.
Anyway, back to the Apparatus. Let’s see—what did I leave out? Well, did I mention I’m naked for this? And smeared with slippery goop? And, not yet, but on the day, every hair on my entire body shaved off?
And there’s one other thing, not for practice, but on ZeroDay: they are going to stop my heart right before the ZeroMoment and then restart it right after. They say it’s because I have to be absolutely still. Mom doesn’t like the heart-stopping part one bit, and now that I mention it, neither do I. I still laugh, though, when I think of the time Dr. Yoon said about the ZeroMoment, “You won’t feel a thing,” and Bea and I had a look go between us that was the same as both of us saying, “Because you’ll be DEAD!”
