by Lisa Bunker
Of course, even as we pull up to the convention center I’m already scanning for Hector. It’s tricky because I don’t know if he cosplays and if he does as what character, so I can’t just scan for his hair and color and Hector-shape, I have to look hard at everyone. I don’t see him anywhere. Once we’re inside I also immediately start scanning for Ash’s table. I don’t see it at first and I start to wonder if Hector got it wrong, but then I catch sight of the Novaglyph symbol on a banner, and there she is.
Ash turns out to be a person of medium height with black hair buzzed short on one side, a nose ring, and tats on her hands and neck. She’s wearing layers of mostly black clothes and an unusual hat, and she has a loose floppy way of sitting in her chair, like she’s actually a rag doll instead of a human. She doesn’t have much on her table—a stack of comics and some stickers and stuff—and she’s flopped there, watching the people walk past.
By this time Bea has gone off on her own, so it’s just me and Grandy. My heart starts to beat faster and I step closer to Grandy, who is in Vern mode, it being Saturday, with boots and jeans and a big belt buckle. Vo knows my fandoms and says, “There she is. How about it, Felix? Shall we approach?”
“Um. I’m feeling shy.”
“Yes, but you can still go talk to her.”
“I wish I had brought my sketchbook. No, I’m glad I didn’t.”
“Come on,” Grandy says, and vo puts a hand on my shoulder and steers me forward.
When we get to the table Ash looks up and says, “Hey.” Her voice is gentle and soft and her face looks sad, but her eyes are calm. All I can do is nod. “What’s your name?”
“Felix.”
“Hey, Felix,” she says, and smiles, and her smile is sweet and also sad.
We look at each other for a second and then her head drops a little and her eyes go away and I think, Hm, maybe she’s shy too, and that makes it possible for me to say, “I love your—”
“Thanks,” she says. “Wanna sticker or something?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“You draw, Felix?”
I look at her face again, and this time her eyes stay on mine and she does the sad smile again and this little shrug with one shoulder, like, Yo, we’re just talking, so I start twitching and stuttering, trying to say something about Jarq, and she’s nodding and listening, and then because I know it’s safe I say, “If I had brought my sketchbook I could show you,” and Grandy’s hand comes over my shoulder holding veir phone with one of my drawings on the screen and I make a noise that is supposed to mean, No, stop! but it’s too late and the phone is in Ash’s hand and she’s swiping, swiping, nodding, and I look up at Grandy with my eyes burning like laser beams, but vo looks right back, so I add a snarl-face, but vo points veir eyes at Ash, and when I look back at her she says, “These are good. I like how you use perspective. And your shading is excellent.”
Wow. Wow. I feel like I have fireworks going off in my body, but I’m back to not being able to speak.
Then she turns her head sideways and scrunches up her eyebrows and asks in a hesitating way, “How do you feel about your proportions?”
What? She can see that? Of course she can, she’s Ash Cortez. But I’ve already stepped the last step to the table. She turns the phone so we can look at the screen together, and all of a sudden I can talk. I tell her about how hard it is to get the shoulders and arms and hips and legs to work right, something’s always too long or short or big or small or just shaped wrong somehow, and she tells me how she spends all this time drawing her characters doing odd things they won’t ever do in the comic, standing on their heads, doing somersaults, scratching their butts, and my brain goes Kaboing! because it’s such a good idea, and … well, anyway, we have this amazing conversation and the fireworks just keep going off and all of a sudden I feel like I’m about to cry, so I do this sudden awkward goodbye and we walk away and my face is burning but she gives me one last smile and says, “Nice to meet you, Felix. Keep on keepin’ on,” and, and, well, it was incredible, the whole thing.
Nelson, I just had to go into the bathroom again. Never mind not having enough time to draw everything I want to draw, I don’t even have time to draw anything I want to draw. Gah. A thousand times gah. And I never saw Hector, but Grandy went back to Ash’s table and got me a comic, and it’s so cool to see the art on paper instead of only on a screen. I would say maybe I could see my art on paper someday too, except my life is probably already over. How can things be so amazing and so horrible at the same time? This living stuff, it hurts worse than dying. I’d rather be dead. No, that’s not true. I … I … GAAAAAAAH!
Yeah, you know what? I’m done for today. The words just don’t work anymore right now.
10 Days to Go
So you might have noticed I got a little stressy again yesterday at the end of my entry. That’s because I wasn’t completely truthful when I wrote about getting up yesterday morning. I just said I decided to get up, which makes it sound easy, but it wasn’t easy. I left out so much, it was really the same as a lie.
lie question mark
Are you kidding? Remember I tried to explain to you before? It’s as bad as jokes. You are never going to get it.
…
Good. Anyway, I did wake up on my own in the gray light, like I said, and I was able to pry my eyes open, barely, but other than that I couldn’t move at all. I was locked up worse than ever before—even breathing hurt—and this time when Mom finally came upstairs I couldn’t break out of it and she found me like that. In a couple of minutes the whole family was clustered around the chair trying to help me move, and finally, with their help, I was able to do it, but it felt like actually breaking things. Then I had to admit that the lockups have been happening for a while and Mom got mad and made a phone call and now Dr. Yoon and everyone at the Facility know too, and they’re saying given this new information, it’s a lot more likely than they thought before that if we don’t do this, Zyx and I will both die, but they can’t move the date up because they’re already getting the Apparatus ready as fast as they can. And then there was the part of the phone call where Mom’s face went slack and she said, “As bad as that,” and when I asked her after what she meant, her eyes got skittish and she said that Dr. Yoon had said that the chances of dying from the Procedure were also higher than they thought before, and I said how much higher, and she said one in five, and I said a one in five chance that I’ll die and she kept her face down and nodded.
So I’ve been all la-de-da, there’s a slight chance this might go badly but it’s worth the risk, when actually I’m probably screwed either way. Great. Fabulous. Wonderful. And, Zyx, don’t you type a word. I don’t want to hear from you right now. I don’t want to think about it, and I don’t want to type about it anymore myself.
It’s later and I’ve been kicking around, being crabby and stuff, and I’m realizing that even though I don’t want to write about looming death, I still want to write about something. I’ve gotten into the habit. So, how about some more backstory instead? I’ve been thinking about the time right after the accident, and Grandy is here and says vo’d be happy to narrate for Zyx the magic typist, so here we go:
“It was a complicated and frightening time. Your mother was practically mad with grief over your father, and for several days the doctors thought you were going to die. Recall that we had not the least inkling at first about the presence of our new friend *zyxilef in our lives …”
[Um, better explain that: *zyxilef is Zyx’s full name. The * is a new letter Grandy invented. It stands for a cork-pop sound you make with your lips. The rest is my name spelled backward—also a Grandy invention (of course). Vo says since my name ends with XYZ, and since that’s like the X and Y and Z axes in a graph of three-dimensional space, we needed another letter for Zyx’s extra dimension. But it’s hard to make a Z sound right after a cork-pop sound, so everyone but Grandy just says Zyx.]
“… just an eradicated impetuous scientist and that scien
tist’s young child so paralyzed as to be rendered practically incapable of breathing, let alone moving. They tried everything to revive you—drugs, mostly. That was hard to watch. You were still little older than a baby, and I couldn’t bear to watch when they put the IV needle in your soft little arm.
“I was not there the whole time. Your mother was in another room the first day, sedated, and after that needed a good deal of looking after for several days. And, of course, I had my own grief to cope with too. Still, I ended up spending many hours at your bedside.” Vo falls silent, then goes on more softly. “You were a heartbreaking sight, Felix. Your little body frozen in that bizarre posture. You looked like a statue of a child cast in bronze. As though you would ring if struck.
“Well, there we sat with the beeping of the heart monitor, and that truly horrible fluorescent light that leached the color out of your face so that you looked dead. I remember on the second day, I dredged up a little table lamp from somewhere, to add some yellow to all that gelid blue. I had no idea if you could hear or understand me, but in case you could, I talked to you. I made up silly stories about a two-dimensional frog—”
“Tidy Teddy, 2-D Toad. I typed out one of the stories the other day. Zyx helped me.”
“Why, yes, that’s right. I’m so pleased you remember.” Vo pauses a moment, I guess to enjoy feeling pleased. “In any case, for many days nothing we did seemed to have any effect whatsoever. Then, finally, one morning Dr. Yoon was there, shining her penlight into your eyes and such, the way she did, when we both heard a little sound, just the least little squeak. We both leapt to your bedside and looked into your face, and we saw a flicker of movement in your eyes. I neglected to mention before, you did occasionally blink, but this was different. This seemed to be a sign of returning life. Then you started working your jaw muscles, and then, finally, you whispered one word of two syllables, with such a long pause between them that it took us a minute to figure out what you were saying. And you know what you whispered… .”
I’ve heard the story before, of course. “Firs … tee.”
“Yes, that’s right. My dear grandchild wanted a drink of water.” Grandy swipes a finger at the edge of veir eye. “I still get emotional when I think of it, because that was the moment we began to hope that we weren’t going to have to lose you, too.
“Dr. Yoon didn’t want you trying to swallow liquid water, but when she held an ice chip to your lips, your jaws prized open enough to admit it, and your eyes flickered again as it melted in your mouth, and your throat worked, and we were on our way.
“The news of your returning speech and movement revived your mother more than anything else could have done, and from then on she was constantly at your bedside. We all were. We talked with you, played with you, and especially we read to you—long hours of reading. Sometimes I held you in my lap, and I still remember the curious stiffness of your body against mine.
“What we thought we were doing was teaching you to move and speak again, but what we were mostly doing, without realizing it, was teaching *zyxilef to move and speak. Veir presence in our lives finally came to light about three months after the accident. Dr. Gordon had come to see you, and he had brought with him a laptop, which was a much rarer object in those days—still something to exclaim about. He sat beside your bed and began typing, and your hands shot out and grabbed the computer with tremendous strength. Dr. Gordon tried to grab it back, but your mother said, ‘No, wait,’ and your hands found the keyboard and twitched and stuttered there. At first you produced only gibberish on the screen, but then letters started appearing more than other symbols, and then words. The first words were ‘go goo good,’ which is marvelous—a found poem—and then your body went very still and your fingers painstakingly typed, ‘goodnight nobody,’ which is a line from the book Goodnight Moon. Your mother had just been reading it to you.
“Uproar, consternation—The child has learned to parrot back words seen on the page, we all exclaimed—and then you, except, of course, it was dear zyxilef, typed the words ‘here now all,’ and a look went between Drs. Gordon and Yoon, because apparently they had some idea by then of what might be happening, and Dr. Yoon said, ‘Is that someone besides Felix typing?’ and zyxilef typed ‘not felix,’ and that was the beginning of figuring out what had truly happened to you and to *zyxilef and to us all.
“Dear *zyxilef. It has been such a curious pleasure and honor to have you in our lives.”
What? Oh, Grandy is talking straight to Zyx now. Guess that makes me the telephone. Joy.
zyx love grandy
That gets a smile. “Grandy love Zyx.” Silence. Grandy clears veir throat. “*zyxilef, there’s a question I have long wanted to ask you. May I ask it?”
yes
“To your knowledge, has there ever been any other connection between our two planes? Any communication, any comings and goings?”
yes
“Oh, good. I thought so. Or I hoped. Can you tell us anything about it?”
not know how say
“Ah, yes, these foolish words of ours. You must find them so cumbersome. Very well, leaving aside the specifics, if connection has happened before, could it happen again?”
yes
“In any way we can control, make happen?”
maybe
“How?”
round round round
“I beg your pardon?”
round round round sing sing sing
Grandy and I stare at each other and all of a sudden veir eyes widen, and I wonder if it’s a look of fear I see on my Grandy’s face. It’s hard to be sure, because it’s a look I’ve never seen before. Vo drops veir eyes and says, just a little flustered-sounding, “Well, perhaps some things are better left unknown,” and that’s the end of the conversation.
Still 10 Days to Go
It’s Sunday night, and I just got offline with Hector. It should’ve been amazing—our first chat, and he began it—but it wasn’t. It was the opposite of amazing. How can I explain what happened? I guess I will just cut and paste the whole chat. Gah. Gah times infinity.
Before I do that, though, the other thing that has been going on is the family talking about whether I should play in Ursula’s chess tournament. Mom is still saying no because she’s mad at Rick, but Grandy is reminding her of her own idea of me getting to see and do things I wouldn’t otherwise get to see and do. I’m staying out of it, because right now I can’t make myself care. Of course Zyx wants to play, and if you’re going to say chess pretty, you can save it chess pretty
Or not.
Anyway, besides the Hector chat disaster and the great chess debate, the other other thing that has been going on today is the heavy-arms-heavy-legs feeling has come back again. The joy just seems to have drained out of everything.
Can I be honest? Express my feelings the way the therapists say we’re supposed to do?
yes
Rhetorical … never mind.
All right, here it is.
I’m afraid.
Again.
Still.
The Procedure is only ten days away.
I may only have ten days left to live.
Shouldn’t something, you know, more important be happening? Instead of just another boring day do your homework keep up appearances continue to act normal WHATEVER THAT MEANS! I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS AND I DON’T CARE AND ANYWAY I DON’T WANT TO BE NORMAL WHATEVER IT MEANS! I WANT TO BE ME! AND I DON’T WANT TO DIE!
OK, I’m back. I’ve never cried like that in my life before. I cried so hard, I choked. No one could hear me—the door was closed—so I lay curled up on the floor and about puked my guts out. G. A. H. I need a drink of water, and to wash my face.
zyx love felix
You shut up. That’s not going to work this time. I’m taking my hands away now so you can’t type.
Back, but I’m still not letting you type, Zyx, and I don’t feel like being honest and expressing my feelings anymore tonight. So here’s my chat with
Hector. I can’t believe I hit enter on the one line, but it’s just so automatic. And make sure to pay attention to when it’s H and when it’s F with mixed-case typing and when it’s F with all lowercase typing (no italics this time—you’ll have to figure it out for yourself). It’s important if you want to understand how badly everything sucks.
H: Hi
F: Oh, hi. You surprised me with your window popping up there.
H: This ok?
F: Yeah sure. Didn’t see you at the con.
H: I was there
F: When?
H: Last couple hours. We were late
F: Oh. That’s why. We left early. I looked for you.
H: Cool
H: So how u doin?
F: OK. Bad mood.
H: :(
F: Tx. Just kinda black …
H: No wonder
F: You mean, with the procedure coming?
H: Yah
F: You mean yeah?
H: I mean yah. What, you the spelling police now?
F: No. It just looks like something else. Like, yah, you moron.
H: No, just how I spell yah
F: OK then.
H: Ok
F: So how are you? What are you doing?
H: Ok homework hanging out
F: Me too. Except for the homework part. I just can’t seem to care right now, you know?
H: I’m serious about school. I want to get into nursing school, and competition is tough
F: You want to be a nurse?
H: Yah. I want to go do nursing in Haiti
F: Cool.
H: What do you want to be?
F: I don’t know. At this point I’d settle for alive.
H: :(
H: You there?
F: Yeah.
H: You didn’t answer for a while
F: Yeah sorry, I was thinking about something.
H: What
F: felix love he No shut up stupid
F: Hector, are you there?
F: Hector
H: Don’t you ever call me stupid. Ever
F: I’m so sorry, I wasn’t talking to you.
H: Who were you talking to?
