Mad Skills

by Greatshell, Walter

  With this thought came an intense rush of panic, and it was all she could do to control it. She shuddered in the backseat, sweating furiously, and pressed her hands over her face until it passed. Fortunately, her folks were too busy paying, then checking the bags of food to really notice.

  “Honey, are you okay? You’re white as a sheet.”

  “I’m okay. Little carsick. I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Wait, let me help you—”

  “No, that’s okay. Back in a sec.”

  Maddy bolted from the car and made her way to the restroom. Her legs felt like rubber bands, and once inside, she collapsed against a toilet, dry-heaving her guts out. After a few minutes she climbed to her feet and tottered to the sink. Looking in the mirror, she thought, Maybe I’m dying.

  Taking off her ski cap, she inspected the bandages on her head, peeling the edge back to see the stitches. Lovely.

  Anne Frankenstein. Under the skin at the back of her scalp was a smoothly curved thing like a limpet, about three inches long, which she knew to be the implant. That was only the top part; the rest was sunk into her skull, with ultrafine metal roots branching deep inside her brain. Weird. At least the stubble meant that her hair was coming back—the doctors said that would soon cover everything.

  With a shock, she suddenly realized that her braces had been removed! Wow. Then a lady with two kids came in, and Maddy pulled herself together, splashing water on her face. The kids gawped—Mommy, look!—and the mother shushed them up.

  “It’s not cancer,” Maddy said, drying her face and putting her hat back on. “I’m just a freak of modern science.”

  Her father was waiting outside the door.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I’m fine, Dad—jeez.”

  “Well, you still look a little shaky. Your mother was worried. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  “I’m not embarrassed. Everything’s just a little weird, that’s all.”

  “Hey, it’s weird for us, too, you know.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing for you to be sorry about, kid. Just don’t be afraid to tell us whatever we can do to make it easier for you. That’s why we’re here, okay?”

  “Okay. Well, I don’t think I can eat this food.”

  “That’s okay. No appetite?”

  “No. Not really.”

  What she hesitated to say was that everything about the place screamed bloody murder. Maddy was no vegetarian, she had eaten meat all her life without giving it a thought, but suddenly … suddenly she could see the whole process, reverse-engineered from Finish to Start. Every single thing she looked at seemed to bloom before her eyes, deconstructing, peeling back layer from layer to its fundamentals, all the pieces branching from a central truth—which, in the case of the fast-food franchise, was grim death. Institutional hell.

  She could read it in the cheerfully generic architecture and packaging, in the equally generic (but less cheerful) employees and patrons. The jolly artifice was a disguise, the inviting red gloss on a poison mushroom. It was all a false front, and beneath that plastic façade of pleasant order was an appalling dungeon of suffering, filth, and darkness. It was not a restaurant but a machine, the shiny ass end of a cold, impersonal thresher that reduced living, feeling flesh to frozen cakes of slurry.

  Of course, Maddy had always known that animals were killed for their meat, but the scale of the killing had been unimaginable and very remote. Now the horror was laid out right in front of her, the whole mechanism mapped out in her head like a mental PowerPoint presentation:

  A burger disassembles as if by magic, its tepid gray patty flying into a heat sterilizer, then suddenly rock-hard into a freezer, where it slips into a stack of identical frozen disks, to be shipped backward by refrigerated truck to a factory, where it instantly thaws and joins a great vat of raw pulp—a combination of meat, chemical additives, and pathogen-rich fecal matter—that is sucked through a grinder and reconstitutes as red slabs of flesh on a conveyer belt. These hunks of muscle tissue are then ingeniously pieced together to assemble a dead cow … which, dangling from a hook, abruptly starts gathering blood and offal into itself, filling up its body cavity like the bag of a vacuum cleaner and zipping shut, to be neatly upholstered with new cowhide. Suddenly, it starts to twitch—it’s alive! Dropping to the floor, the cow jerks to its feet and flinches as its fractured skull abruptly claps solid. It ambles backward into daylight, joining a line of other cows.

  That was the process in a nutshell: millions upon millions of domesticated cows, pigs, and chickens raised in sheds, pumped full of hormones and antibiotics, crammed into trucks, bludgeoned to death, ripped apart and churned up with their own spilled offal, then simply heated sufficiently to sterilize the germs. Sold.

  It wasn’t just livestock that died of stupidity: People were part of the chain, too. So eager, they were lining up for the pleasure, compliant bovines herding themselves. Oblivious to the killing, absolutely disconnected from the sources of their food. Absolved of any complicity. That was the trouble, that willful, insatiable innocence. No less credulous than the cattle, they came drawn by the addictive chemical allure of fat, salt, caffeine, and high-fructose corn syrup, driving up in droves to pay bottom dollar for the bargain of obesity, constricted arteries, and diabetic shock. Ironic that it was called a chain restaurant—all that was lacking to complete the cycle was that they didn’t then feed the human remains back to the animals. That’s a waste, Maddy thought. No doubt someone is working on that.

  They returned to the car. Her mother was worried about her lack of appetite, but her father signaled her to play it cool, let it go. To Maddy’s relief, she went along—that was a first. Trying to be equally accommodating, Maddy nibbled some onion rings.

  As they neared the outskirts of their hometown, she became fraught with more conflicted feelings, more things she had never thought of before. She couldn’t understand it: She had always taken her life for granted as the best of all possible worlds … or perhaps the only of all possible worlds:

  What of consequence could possibly lie beyond these perfect houses, this pleasant sea of lawns? TV and radio gave no plausible clue, nor did anything else in this carefully cultivated mindscape. It wasn’t just the grass being weeded and raked around here. It scared Maddy to realize that all her life she had been living such a shallow existence, a big fat lie, its limitations made bearable only by certain childish assumptions, the first of which was never to question its rightness. Even her parents’ divorce—a commonplace event among her peers—had not undermined Maddy’s faith in the essential concepts: God, Country , Family. Why should it be any different now? And yet somehow, home no longer felt like home.

  She kept pushing these alien feelings down. Focus on the positive! And there was a hopeful tingle of anticipation, certainly, but it was curdled by the same kind of nauseating total awareness that had spoiled her lunch.

  The houses all looked the same. Generic. Impersonal. Mindlessly repetitious. Street after street, subdivision after subdivision, orderly as an immense circuit board, her once-beloved neighborhood sprawled across the countryside, reducing the life cycles of its inhabitants to impersonal blips in a computer. The machine again—the same machine. Was that what it was all about? Farming us, fattening us like cattle …

  No! This time Maddy was determined not to give in to it. Talk it out—that was what she had always done in the past. She needed to get over herself and trust her parents like she used to. Before the divorce. Love them like she did in her dream. Why should that be so hard?

  “Could I ask you guys something?”

  “Of course, honey.”

  “Why do we live all the way out here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I mean, we’ve always spent so much time in the car. You’re both always complaining about the traffic and the gas prices. I kind of think that even had something to do with the divorce, right? The fact that you guy
s never had any time together? What with commuting to work and driving me everyplace. Couldn’t we have just lived a little closer to the city?”

  Caught off guard by this peculiar non sequitur, her parents fumbled for a reply. Her dad was first to come up with something:

  “Maybe, but your mother and I decided even before we got married that the first thing we wanted to do was make sure we lived in a place where it was healthy to raise a child. A real neighborhood, away from all the crime and pollution, with decent schools and a sense of community—like we had when we were kids. We wanted you to be safe.”

  He said these last words with a crack in his voice, sad eyes welling up in the rearview mirror.

  Sidestepping the emotion, Maddy pressed on.

  “Okay, but what about the larger issues? I mean, don’t crime and pollution just get worse if people like us bail out? What happens to those people who can’t leave? Is that fair? I mean, how safe are we in the long run if millions of kids grow up without a stake in perpetuating the culture? No wonder there’s crime. And you guys are always complaining about taxes, but isn’t it taxes that subsidize this suburban lifestyle—all the roads and utilities and everything? Wouldn’t it be more patriotic to all work together to make better cities and schools for everybody? Leave nature alone? Look how dead it is out here—there’s no creativity, no individuality. No sense of history. And speaking of pollution, just think how much carbon dioxide we’ve generated driving a hundred miles a day for all these years. Plus the oil spills. And isn’t it ultimately people like us who are responsible for this war? If not for oil, we wouldn’t even be in the Middle East. We should have a bumper sticker that reads, Support the Sheiks.”

  Her parents listened with baffled unease, then her father said, “Well, honey, that’s true I suppose … but our whole economy depends on oil. It’s because of oil that we have the standard of living we have in this country. Would you rather live like this or like someone in the Third World, with no car, no television, no refrigerator or air conditioner? No cell phone or modern convenience of any kind?”

  “But Dad, that’s not the choice. There are plenty of alternatives to oil. And for sure better technologies than this primitive, internal-combustion deathmobile. The basic mechanism hasn’t changed for over a hundred years—obviously it’s all about money! I can’t even believe we still drive these things. We might as well still be hand-cranking an old Model T.”

  “Well, Maddy, what would you have us drive? A bicycle?” Her folks laughed at the absurd notion.

  Maddy considered the question, and immediately began assembling materials in her head.

  “No. But something clean. Preferably that flies. That way, you not only eliminate traffic but the need for roads.”

  “Flies! That’s good. Hey, I’d like that, anytime we ran into traffic, we could just—zoom! Up in the air.”

  They were humoring her; Maddy barely heard them. An ideal city rose from the plains of her mind—a city swarming with clean, green, bubble-topped vehicles.

  “Something solid-state,” she continued. “Without moving parts to wear out. Frictionless … silent. Okay: Redundant contrarotating turbines with piezoelectric actuators, magnetic-repulsion bearings, universal GPSBASED guidance algorithm so nobody needs a pilot’s license. Hydrogen-biofueled using on-demand electrolytic solar nanoconverters—it’d be easy.”

  “Easy!” Her folks hadn’t understood anything she’d just said.

  “Sure. The technology’s pretty much available in one form or another. It just has to be put together and mass-produced.”

  “Oh, is that all?”

  “Well, if we don’t do something, we’re screwed.”

  They were quiet the rest of the drive into Denton. For some reason, their street was blocked off, but the cop waved them through the barricade. At last they pulled up into the driveway of their house, a prefabricated split-level ranch on a hump of lawn, sweating under a veneer of powder blue vinyl siding. So familiar and yet so … not.

  It had never really felt like home after her dad moved out. During the divorce, he’d bought a small condo in a nearby town. Feeling needy, Maddy hoped he would stay—maybe her folks could be persuaded to set aside their differences for one night. Under the circumstances. Attempting to broach the subject, Maddy realized that her mom was crying again, weeping quietly into a handkerchief—not at all like the sobs of gratitude and relief she had been crying earlier. Clearly, she was upset about something.

  “Mom? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Don’t worry, honey. It’s just … everything that’s happened today. It’s been a little much for me—I’m a bit overwhelmed. Don’t pay any attention, I’m being silly. Come on, let’s go inside.”

  They unloaded her hospital things from the car and went up the walk, her parents on either side as if ready to catch her. Dad unlocked the door and held it open. The living-room drapes were pulled; it was dark inside. As Maddy stepped over the threshold, the lights suddenly came on, and fifty voices shouted in unison, “SURPRISE!”

  NINE

  HOMECOMING QUEEN

  IT seemed as if everyone in the neighborhood was there, as well as her entire extended family: all the distant cousins and nieces and nephews and great-great-aunts, most of whom she barely knew, all rushing up to greet her. There were balloons and streamers and a mountain of presents. A table loaded with pink cake and lime sherbet. From one end of the room to the other hung a banner reading, WELCOME HOME, MADDY!

  Her legs weakened, and she was helped to sit down.

  What was there to say about the party? The best thing about it was that it didn’t drag on too long—everybody had obviously been told in advance that she still needed time to recover. That she might be a little … off.

  Actually, after the initial weak spell, Maddy felt pretty good. She knew she looked like death but began to enjoy playing it up a little bit—why the hell not? Hadn’t she earned it? For the first time all day, she actually had an appetite. People jumped to fetch whatever she asked for; she hardly had to lift a finger. Cake? Sure. Chips? Okay, and could I also get some of that dip? Pizza? Oh, thanks. How about a nice lime float? Sure, why not?

  They were all so eager to help, she felt like Snow White among the Seven Dwarfs. It was fun being the center of attention, basking in public sympathy: Drama Queen for a Day.

  They didn’t crowd her, but most folks were clearly amazed by her “miraculous” recovery—Maddy was reminded that for over a year they had been accustomed to seeing her as a near vegetable. She knew she had been home a number of times during the course of her rehabilitation, staying at a nearby hospice and even attending special-needs classes at her high school. Apparently these outings had made her something of a local celebrity: That poor Grant Girl. Ugh. While she hated the idea of everybody gawking at her in such a helpless, unattractive condition, it did amuse her at first how freaked out they were by her unexpected return to the living. Then it started to become annoying:

  People cooing and petting her as if she were a cat, or talking too loud, enunciating each syllable as if communicating with a deaf foreigner. Being overly hearty, bellowing how terrific she looked … or the opposite, clucking about how awful she looked—right in front of her! And then practically jumping out of their skins when she said, “Hello, I’m right here.” The one person she would have liked to talk to was Ben’s dad, Sam Blevin, but he wasn’t at the party.

  “Weh-heh-hell. If it isn’t the unsinkable Maddy Grant. Hello there, young lady. Welcome home.”

  It was burly Leo Batrachian, principal of her school and deacon of her church. Maddy had rarely ever spoken to him before.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I’m delighted to see you doing so well. It’s really quite remarkable. The difference.”

  He was studying her as though appraising a piece of furniture.

  “I know. That’s what they tell me. I don’t really remember much that happened while I was … out.”

  “
No, I wouldn’t think so. It’s such a shame what happened to you and that poor young man … but we can take comfort knowing he’s in a better place. As for yourself, it would seem your work on this Earth is not finished. Incredible what they can do now. A new medical procedure, I understand. Something experimental, using wires?”

  “I guess.”

  “Well, however it’s done, I’d go so far as to call it a miracle. And I’ve seen a few! On the news they said it could revolutionize the treatment of a great many mental disorders, from Alzheimer’s to—”

  “It was on the news?”

  “Oh yes. Of course. And now that you’re home, they’ll certainly want to interview you. I know Eyewitness News and Action Six both wanted to have camera crews here today, but the hospital prevailed upon them to allow you a quiet homecoming with family and friends. No doubt they’ll be out in force two weeks from now, recording your return to school. Having seen you myself, I can understand their interest—it’s truly a marvel.”

  “School? What do you mean, two weeks?”

  “Yes, didn’t you know that? Your parents were encouraged by your doctor—Dr. Plummer, I believe—to enroll you in classes at once, as a matter of helping speed your adjustment. Immersion Therapy. Back on the horse, as they say! I apologize; I thought you knew. You’ve been given a clean bill of health, and having spoken to you now, I can’t think of any reason you shouldn’t return to us posthaste. All your friends are eager to see you. You’ll be a year behind the rest of your classmates, but I think that’s a small enough price to pay, don’t you? Holiday’s over, my dear!”

  He chucked her playfully under the chin without actually touching her.

  Maddy could tell from the principal’s demeanor that there were things he was holding back. He was a very large man, stout but not flabby, and she had always thought of him as a powerful, intimidating presence, someone to be given a wide berth. You did not want to be called into his office. The horror stories were legion.