How to Repair a Mechanical Heart

by J. C. Lillis

  “Of course you are. Of course. You took pictures with one of those miniscule stalker-cameras, no? By day’s end your Internet boards will be aflame with scandal! Leonard Bray Ditches Q&A! Secret Nun Fetish Photos Inside!”

  “No, I won’t say anything. I promise.”

  “Uh-huh. What a Boy Scout. I suppose you followed me to buy me pork rinds?” He gestures toward the snack machine.

  “No‌…‌” I try a smile. “Do you want some?”

  “Stupendous. He’s a comedian, too.” Lenny Bray goes off on a muttering rant, addressing the Ho-Hos in the C4 slot. I try to absorb it: the supreme creator of Sim and Cadmus, the guiding force behind everything Castaway Planet, the entire reason I went to bed smiling last year, is standing right in front of me and knocking his head against a vending machine.

  “You’ll have to excuse him,” says Elizabeth. “He has‌…‌some problems.”

  I watch in awe. “It’s okay. I do too.”

  “Why don’t you join us for lunch?”

  “What?” Bray stops the head-knocking and glares fire at her.

  “Sure. We treat you to a once-in-a-lifetime afternoon with the creator of Castaway Planet, and you won’t spread any rumors about today. Right?”

  What else would I say? “Absolutely.”

  “Lenny?”

  “Fine.” He slumps against the machine and knots his arms. “He’s not sitting next to me on the drive over.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Leonard Bartholomew Bray,” Elizabeth scolds. “Will you lean in a little? He won’t bite you!”

  In the white curtained alcove of some fancy small-plate restaurant, Lenny Bray is protesting a photo op. Elizabeth frowns behind my phone, waving us closer together. Her pink nails are perfectly rounded and she’s got a giant honker of a diamond ring on her left hand.

  “He’s going to post this,” Bray whines. “I know it.”

  “Well, he said he wouldn’t, and I believe him. He deserves a souvenir.”

  “And I deserved a day of rest. Genesis says so.”

  Lunch is not going exactly as planned.

  I want to ask Bray a thousand questions about Sim and Cadmus and the rumors about next season and of course the cave scene, but so far opening my mouth in his presence hasn’t yielded very positive results. It’s like a nasty version of comedy-club improv; I toss out a random comment, he builds a complaint around it. By the time the shark fritters and goat cheese ravioli arrive, I kind of have to face it: in addition to being smart and witty and talented and even kind of cute in a pop-eyed, older-guy, sweater-vesty way, Leonard Bray is pretty much a giant jerkoff.

  Once Elizabeth snaps the photo, he starts yammering again: “Oh, and another thing about the Loyola English department!” I made the mistake of telling him I’d be a freshman at his alma mater this year. “If Antonia Humphrey is still moldering in her corner office, don’t ever take her class on The Epic. That miserable twat. I spent three days on an essay comparing Odysseus and Travis Bickle and she called it forced and indulgent and gave me a C minus. Meanwhile the rest of the class is stuck in preschool, decoding symbolism like good little sheep‌—‌”

  “Lenny,” says Elizabeth.

  “What?”

  “Maybe he’d like to ask you some questions about the show.”

  “Well, he can’t. I can’t say anything.”

  “Not spoilers. Just tidbits he might be interested in.”

  “Oh. Fine, fine.” He sighs. “All right, Brendan. Can I interest you in any tidbits?”

  “Sure.” I fiddle with my chicken kabob. “Actually, I did have a question.”

  “I shall do my best.”

  “It’s about Cadmus and Sim.”

  “Oh goody.”

  “So, I‌…‌” I gulp some water. “There’s a lot of ah, fanfiction about that one scene in the crystal spider cave‌—‌”

  “Terrible episode. I regret it. Derailed the whole season’s momentum.”

  “I sort of agree, but‌…‌” I’m blushing already; there’s no chance he’ll take this well. “After they say that line about how the cave could swallow up your secrets and it kind of faded out? Did they, um‌…‌do anything?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He blinks at me. I want to vanish.

  “Anything romantic,” Elizabeth smiles.

  “Did they fuck?” says Lenny Bray. “Is that the question?”

  “Uh. Yeah.”

  “Jesus. How would I know?”

  My mouth opens. Nothing comes out.

  “Seriously, why even ask me that?”

  “Well‌…‌ah, it’s your show, and‌—‌”

  “I will never, ever, for as long as I live, understand you people. Every goddamned Q&A it happens! Mr. Bray, what does this line mean? Mr. Bray, is Castaway Planet the afterlife? Can Sim fall in love? Is Xaarg good or evil?” He stuffs two ravioli in his mouth. “Apparently an alarming percentage of you traipse through life without a single independent thought. I thought my fans were supposed to be smart!”

  “But you created the characters, so‌—‌

  “Oh, so I’m God? Is that it?”

  “No, but‌—‌”

  “Listen, you runt. I saw that self-righteous eyeroll when you said fanfiction. Let me tell you something: I fucking love fanfiction. Why do you think I made up these characters? So I could play with dolls in public and tell everyone else ‘hands off’? So I could spoon-feed you stories from on high about the mysteries of love and free will and giant alien spiders?” He shows me his palms, then the backs of his hands. “I am one man with a laptop. When I give the world my characters, it’s because I don’t want to keep them for myself. You don’t like what I made them do? Fucking tell me I’m wrong! Rewrite the story. Throw in a new plot twist. Make up your own ending. Castaway Planet is supposed to be a living piece of art!” He wags a tiny fork in my direction. “I don’t know you from Adam, but if you’re sitting there drooling in front of the TV like I suspect you are, letting me have the Final Word every goddamned Thursday night, you frankly don’t even deserve to be a fan, Brendan.”

  Elizabeth sighs. She’s heard it before. “Lenny.”

  “Elizabeth.”

  “Come on.”

  He purses his lips. “What?”

  “This poor kid looks up to you. Can’t you give him an answer?”

  Lenny Bray looks me right in the eye. He stabs another shark fritter with the little fork.

  “I thought I just did,” he says.

  I should be crushed by all this, but I’m not. I get this calm settled feeling, like when you see where the last three pieces of a thousand-piece puzzle are supposed to go.

  “I have to leave now,” I tell them.

  “I’m so sorry,” Elizabeth touches my hand. “He’s having a bad day.”

  “You have no idea what it’s like to be me.” Leonard Bray pouts and shoves a fritter in his mouth. “No one has any idea.”

  “That’s true, sir. It was good to meet you.”

  “I doubt that.”

  Elizabeth blots her pink lips with a napkin and folds it carefully on her empty plate. She’s given up saving the day; you can tell.

  “At least let our driver take you back,” she says to the napkin.

  Outside, cabs are rattling by; the day’s first firecrackers are going off in the distance.

  “That’s okay.” I nod to Bray, standing Sim-straight. “I’ll find my own way.”

  ***

  In two months, this’ll be my city.

  I’ve been here in Baltimore a few times since I was a kid‌—‌an aquarium trip, a college tour‌—‌but never without my parents. I let myself meander. Past the tourist crowds and the glassed-in malls and the old battleships moored in the harbor, across a swarming intersection and into a homey network of narrow streets. Junk shops and bars and bookstores introduce themselves to me, murmur about new starts in new places where no one knows my name. Next year I could streak my hair wi
th Manic Panic and go dancing at this club with the fiery wings painted on the door. I could join some Young Agnostics support group downtown or find one of those alternative churches with a rainbow-cross logo. I could watch Castaway Planet in a dorm bed with my boyfriend or read Thomas Merton in a tulip patch; I could sing for people in a nursing home or strum Jeff Buckley and Dylan covers on open mike nights in this café wallpapered with board games and doll heads.

  Or I could do it all.

  On the walk back to the Dorchester, I pass a wide patch of grass with three big abstract sculptures. Light gray concrete, shaped like smiles without a face. There’s a kid on one of them, dressed for the Fourth in navy shorts and a red-and-white striped shirt, trying to see how far he can walk up the side of the smile before gravity kicks him back down. On the second one, a neo-hippie girl with blond dreads and a sunflower dress is working out some tender instrumental on a blue guitar plastered with stickers from different cities. The third smile is up for grabs.

  I sit down on it gingerly, like I have no right to. The action feels familiar, and then I realize that that’s how I sit down in church. Used to, at least. I swing my legs inside the smile and prop my feet up on the concrete, smoothing Abel’s white shirt across my chest. The sky is thick with puffy motivational-poster clouds; I take deep breaths and watch them morph across the blue for a whole minute. Two minutes. Three. I’ve never looked up for this long. Ever since I was old enough to know what a sin was, I’ve just naturally averted my eyes from the sky. As a kid it was terrifying: a place where divine judging eyes screened everything you did, where lightning bolts were hurled in anger from a golden throne, where your dead relatives clutched their harps and scanned your dirty thoughts like a waiting-room magazine.

  I wonder if other people think weird thoughts like that. It seems unavoidable. You’re a kid, and how can they explain something huge and unknowable like God to a kid, so they draw a simple picture: he’s like a father in the sky, watching over us. Then you see statues and paintings of God in books and museums, so old they seem like historical records and not flights of fancy from ancient dead guys. And you file those away and fill in the rest of the portrait with your own references, until your picture of God is something like mine was: Ben Kingsley in a long Michelangelo beard, enthroned in an icy castle like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude and scribbling (with the angry point of his thunderbolt) a fancier version of Santa’s Naughty or Nice list. You get older, but the kid’s picture stays with you. And then all of a sudden you’re eighteen and you’ve learned how to question and doubt and you think you’re smart enough to draw your own grown-up picture of what God might be, but part of you is still cringing with one eye to the sky, waiting for the thunderbolt.

  A cloudbank swallows the sun and the harbor cools and darkens. I keep my eyes on the shifting sky, like Sim in the operating room getting prepped for Lagarde’s silver chip. I think of him three weeks post-chip, shouting on the mountaintop with Cadmus: No one told me what doubt was like. To know how much I still don’t know. I used to feel every syllable of that line. Almost nothing hurt worse than doubt. Now it’s feeling almost comfortable, like this too-big shirt of Abel’s that I’ll probably wear until it frays and the stitches start to unravel.

  The harbor breeze rustles my shirt. I pull it tighter. I tell everything bad inside me, everything I’ve outgrown, to go play somewhere else for a while. I picture them all wriggling out of my head, groaning and grumbling. The clean blond boy from Put on the Brakes! The chalupa guy from the laundry room. Tom Shandley and Miss Maxima and my angry bearded Ben Kingsley God. Father Mike is the last to go, toting his battered guitar and an armload of little black words.

  They all crowd around me. What now?

  I close my eyes on them.

  You can go anytime.

  I think it softly, without anger. After a minute, I feel them shuffle off into shadows, like when Dad and I used to catch and release sunfish up the street at Tanner’s Pond. They’d hover in the shallows for a second, stunned to be free, and then they’d struggle away and vanish in the murk.

  Not forever, I warn myself. They’ll be back, and soon. But I’ll be ready.

  I send a tentative prayer to my vague new idea of the maybe-God: featureless and formless, a light warm and yellow as my kitchen at home. The anti-Xaarg, like Abel said. Help me be ready, I say to him. Or her. If you exist, please help.

  If you don’t, I’ll do it on my own.

  Bright heat washes over my face. I open my eyes. The sun’s shaken off the clouds again. Two kids with rocket pops are spinning themselves dizzy in the grass and Dreadlocks Girl is still hunched on her concrete smile with her blue guitar, tuning up for another song. The harbor hums with happy busy holiday noise. Alone in the midst of cute families and throngs of friends, I feel empty in the best way, cleaned out and ready to fill up on new thoughts and words.

  I rest my cheek on the warm upturn of the smile, and listen.

  ***

  Brandon set the sunflowers on the table. He took another step closer to Abel, who fixed him with a wary gaze that Brandon totally and completely deserved.

  I come back to the Dorchester with my brain buzzing and my fingers itching. I call Bec and tell her I need a little more time. I don’t tell her anything else. Not yet. I find a quiet corner in the coffee shop, slide my laptop out of my bag, and type for my life.

  “Look, I’m probably going to be pretty screwed up for a while,” Brandon admitted, his voice deep and confident. “There’s a lot I haven’t figured out yet. But we’ve got six weeks left of summer, and I think we owe it to ourselves to be screwed up together.”

  Brandon waited for a verdict. He braced himself for Abel’s back turning on him, for the sick rumble of sunflowers in the garbage disposal.

  “Is it okay to kiss you?” Abel asked.

  Brandon stepped forward first. They met in the middle of the room, and their lips acted out a string of impressive adjectives as they came together.

  I hop on the hotel wifi, consult thesaurus.com.

  Gingerly, haltingly at first. Then ecstatically, jubilantly, hopefully.

  When I’m finished with the whole scene, I don’t go back and change stuff; maybe it’s cheesy, but the words are all true. I address an email to amcnaughton128@gmail.com. I add a note:

  See attached for the last chapter of “How to Repair a Mechanical Heart.”

  What do you think?

  ***

  I find Bec sprawled on a blue plastic beach chair by the pool, her sandals kicked off and a gift-shop true-crime novel in front of her face. I sit down, pull her feet up on my lap, and dangle a big white bakery bag from the shop I passed on the walk back.

  “What’s this?” she grins.

  “Red velvet cupcakes.”

  She gasps. “Why?”

  “For being a good friend. Putting up with me. Having cute toes.”

  “You are an admirable young man.” She tears the bag open. “So this text from you. Explain.”

  “It was a mysterious mission.”

  She takes a big bite of red velvet. “So you said.”

  “You won’t believe it.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean, you really won’t.”

  “Tell me!”

  I pull my phone out of my pocket, call up the Lenny Bray shot. Bec’s mouth drops open.

  “Is that‌—‌”

  “It is.”

  “Oh. My God.”

  “That was just the beginning.”

  She grabs my wrist. “Start talking. Now.”

  “I’ll tell you on the road.” I pull her to her feet. “Assuming you’re fine with missing the 2:00 panel on ‘The Ethics of Redemption in Castaway Planet.’”

  She grins and tosses me the keys. “Let’s go home, cupcake.”

  Home

  Chapter Thirty

  The annual St. Matt’s Fourth of July Funfair is the year’s third biggest deal, after the Christmas Eve Mass with the kiddie pageant and the
May Procession where the Mary statue gets crowned with fake flowers and we pray for a thousand years in the hot church and one kid always passes out. My parents have been all about the Funfair since Nat and I were kids. Dad helps hammer all the game booths together and Mom decorates and arranges the food tables. The center table always holds three giant platters of her famous angel eggs, which are basically deviled eggs with cream cheese whipped into the filling and a name that won’t make the organist boycott them. Every year I stuff myself with angel eggs and fried chicken and try to beat Bec at ladderball and volunteer in the dunking booth, and then we all watch the fireworks over funnel cake and frozen lemonade and Dad and I throw a ball around behind the karaoke stage.

  Every year except this one.

  It’s after 4:00 by the time I park the Sunseeker back at my house, swap it for Mom’s old Jetta, drop Bec off at her place, and make the short trek to Donovan Street. The cars of the devoted already dot the St. Matt’s parking lot. Mom and Dad’s Ford Focus, Mrs. Heffler’s silver SUV, the Donnellys’ new Camry, the beatup blue Saturn Father Mike’s had forever. I slot myself into a spot surrounded by empty spaces. I check my email for a response from Abel, like I did every five minutes on the trip home.

  Nothing.

  I tap my shorts pockets. Plastic Sim in the right, Plastic Cadmus in the left. The Mom-and-Dad reunion looms like a one-on-one with Xaarg; I’m in no hurry.

  Plus there’s one last thing I need to do.

  I haven’t walked through the front doors of St. Matt’s in over five months. I clutch my breath as the door creaks open, as if a horde of crystal spiders might be sleeping in the shadows inside. But when I tiptoe up the three carpeted steps, it’s the same old church, everything familiar and summery. Red, white, and dyed-blue carnations on the altar, the faded tang of incense and sweat, a warm breeze wandering in through a few open windows and swaying the felt dove banners Mom helped sew.

  I wander up the aisle, the same path my parents took on their wedding day. I trace a beam of light from the stained-glass Holy Spirit window to the bronze-and-oak font where I was baptized. Three tiers of red votives flicker next to it, each tiny light connecting a problem with a prayer. I’m surprised by what I don’t feel, standing here alone. A rock in my stomach, a hand around my throat. Father Mike would say that this isn’t peace, that I’m empty in a bad way. Spiritually flatlined, like he said once in a sermon. But no one’s behind the altar now, and I don’t have to listen.