Mistification (Angry Robot)

by Kaaron Warren

  She had the pains right in the middle of the road, and there was no place to push her to privacy. She couldn't even lay on the road, because she would have been trampled on. I was born in a wheelbarrow in the middle of a riot.

  #

  The man smiled. He seemed very proud of this odd birth, and it was clear to Marvo that pride was a better feeling than shame. Marvo knew he would keep this story, not return it, and he didn't want the story for nothing.

  "Wait here," he said. The man laughed in a dry-throated way.

  Marvo had the coins he had collected in socks in his bag. He did not want to touch the treasures his grandmother had given him. Wary of everybody but the man with the unusual birth, he squatted in the alley to count the money in the dark.

  He bought two hot dogs from a corner stand. Marvo had seen people buying and eating these a hundred times on the TV.

  "Mustard? Sauce? Onions? Cheese?" Marvo nodded to the hot dog seller. He hadn't realised how wonderful the hot dogs would smell, how sweet the voice of the seller would be.

  He took the hot dogs back to the alley and gave one to the man.

  "What about a bottle?" he asked. "Where's the bottle?"

  Marvo's grandmother had told him about alcohol. She said he would be allowed to have it when he was mature enough, but she didn't think he would need it.

  "I'm not mature enough," Marvo told the man.

  "Give me the money then, I'll go buy it."

  "Tell me another story first, then you can have the whole bottle for yourself."

  The man winked at Marvo, though it could have been a twitch. "I only have one story."

  Marvo gave him a sock full of coins and left to find a quiet place to spend the night.

  As Marvo walked away, the man said, "It's all true. People don't lie when they're drunk. They may regret speaking the truth, because they weren't ready for it to be known. But they never lie."

  It began to rain, and Marvo had never felt that cold water raining before. He stood staring upwards, the rain entering his eyes, cleansing his face, soaking him.

  "Get inside, you silly boy," a lady said. She clutched his arm. "It's raining cats and dogs."1

  Marvo could see that wasn't true.

  "It's raining fresh water," he said.

  "And if you stand in it and let yourself get wet you'll catch pneumonia. Come on, come into my house where it's warm." She covered him with an umbrella. He'd seen this on TV and in the house but the sound of being under it, with the rain pounding overhead, was surprisingly gentle.

  Marvo waited in the lady's hall while she ran ahead to clean up. He played with the umbrella; open closed, up down, open closed.

  "Stop it, silly boy. It's bad luck." He thought her the silly one, with her cats and dogs and her bad luck umbrella. His grandmother was the expert on bad luck. There were times every month when he was not allowed to look up at the sky through the skylight, because the moon was new, and his grandmother told him it was bad luck to look at a new moon through a window pane. Marvo took wishes of bad luck very seriously. He did not want bad luck; he wanted nothing bad. He wanted a good and happy life, without loss and sadness.

  "Marvo Mee is my name. Not Silly Boy," he said.

  Marvo used to read the titles on TV shows and saw that everyone had at least two names, if not three. There were no names in the room of his childhood, apart from Grandmother and Marvo.

  "What's my name?" Marvo had said to his grandmother. "Who am I?"

  His grandmother said, "You Marvo, me Jane." Then she laughed, her silent rasp. It was a joke he didn't understand.

  Now, when a second name seemed necessary, he remembered that one single joke his grandmother made.

  "Marvo Mee," he said.

  The lady made him take off his jumper and rubbed his arms. Her hands were even stronger than his grandmother's.

  They stood in front of a heater. Marvo knew the names of most things.

  "Heater," he whispered. He and his grandmother would sit in front of the TV and he would point at something and she would whisper, "Heater. Cat. Dog. Rain. Umbrella. Café. Coffee. Fur coat. Toasted sandwiches. Money. Car."

  The lady's home had TV which made noise.

  "You're not going to spend all night watching the box, are you? I've got plenty to show you," the lady said. Her voice was high and excited. Marvo followed her from room to room as she demonstrated a musical box which plunked away as the plastic couple adhered to the base had sex. Marvo had seen better on the subtitled movies on TV. Those were his favourite movies, of course, the ones with writing at the bottom. He could read the words and hear them whispered in his ear. He knew what they were saying. He loved any subtitled movies, even the boring ones.

  She showed him her kitchen and opened up all sorts of containers and gave him tastes of things. Caviar and Stilton cheese, olives, many different flavoured foods. Marvo's tongue rejoiced. She brought him bread and honey, and though the sight of it made his mouth water, on thinking of the blind man's story – about the wife who kneaded the dough on her cunt – he could not take a bite. He did not want to be in the power of this lady.

  She took him down to the dark cellar. Marvo had seen a show where the boy lived in a cellar with a mattress and a bowl of water. When the woman took his hand he clutched hers. If he did not let go her hand she could not leave him behind. He felt a sense of surrender. Of weakness.

  There were many bottles there.

  "Champagne," she said. She held the back of his head and poured some down his throat. It felt like it looked.

  The woman began to giggle. He had not really heard the sound before, and he wanted her to stop. He wondered why the man with the loud birth had thought it good for his parents to giggle; the sound was foolish and uncontrolled. It frightened him. He put his hand over her mouth. She licked his fingers.

  "Sweet little boy," she said. "Dear little boy."

  She opened more champagne and poured it and took his hand again; he shook loose her hold. She wailed, "Dear little boy! Sweet little boy!" Marvo climbed the stairs and shut the door behind him. He sent mist under the door; it was all he had.

  The lady would sleep, wake with a bad head and no memory of Marvo, just the scent of his hand on hers. She would sniff her hand, the alien smell entering her brain but not triggering an image which made her feel guilty.

  Marvo wandered for many weeks, sleeping out or in, spending his coins carefully. He missed the room more than he could ever have guessed, missed its comfort, his grandmother always there, his things in place so he could walk about with his eyes closed and reach out to them.

  On the street, if he closed his eyes for a moment, the sounds made him dizzy.

  If he listened he could hear single voices rising above the others or single vehicles that he would follow. Or birds that he would watch.

  The loudest voices were the sales people. They sold goods or services. For a while Marvo believed them when they said they held a magic duster, a magic cloth, a magic food, a magic drink. None of these were magic at all. He wished he could show them to his grandmother so they could laugh together at the nonsense.

  He missed his grandmother powerfully and he spoke to people about their grandparents, wondering if his feelings were strange, out of place. He spoke to grandparents, too, once he found that some of them all lived together in small units. He took a ball and played in the driveway of "Sunshine Future Assisted Living."

  They loved him, the grandparents there. They'd bring him out biscuits and lemonade. "Which one's your grandparent?" they'd ask and he'd wave his arm, smiling.

  His favourite grandparent, who made soft chocolate biscuits with an explosion of honey in the middle, told him the story of her grandfather, a story of leaving the old to seek the new, cutting ties and using the string to strap your suitcase together.

  The Child and the Tree

  I don't know what my life would have been if my grandfather had not left in that way. His home was dark and he moved to the Great White Land for
reasons I never understood. Adventure, he said, and the chance to do something unexpected, untraditional.

  I did not like my grandfather. He left my grandmother and my mother behind to struggle alone; he came back to find only me alive, only me to listen to his tales of adventure. It was instinct and desire for comfort which brought him home to me. He told of his life. It was good, to hear the details of a life I knew so well. He told me how trapped he had felt, with everyone knowing his past, present and future. "I had to leave if I wanted to change the future," he said.

  "You escaped nothing," I told him. "We know it all. At the age of twenty-four you felt great sorrow. At thirty, your life became suddenly larger. At thirty-seven, you became very ill."

  He shook his head in disbelief. "Tell me more," he said. "Tell me my story."

  "You were born to a very loving mother," I told him. "She nursed and cuddled you though, the other mothers said you were a newborn and should be left untouched, so your skin may settle around your flesh. They said by touching you so, your skin would be loose and wrinkles would come early."

  My grandfather laughed. "I've learnt about birth in the other world. That's untrue, about the skin. Other people would laugh to hear it." He did not explain his own loose skin though. Old age, perhaps, but he was not that old.

  "Your mother disobeyed and loved you all the more," I said. "When your navel cord fell off, a great ceremony was held. The cord was buried in a sacred place and a young sapling planted atop it. Then you were taken to the priest and named. Now your mother could hold you without words of admonishment from the other mothers.

  "That tree and you grew well. From an early age you would sit beneath it and think. No one else would go to the tree but you."

  "Is it still alive?" asked my grandfather.

  "It is old and very sick. Its bark hangs in folds. You were ill once, a childhood disease many are able to throw off easily. You could not, and the tree bent its head to the ground in sorrow. When you recovered, so did the tree.

  "You grew up, married. You deserted your home and your young wife and child, when you were twenty-one. You did not take anything but a pouch of coins. You left your wife and child to a life of suffering and shame.

  "You did not tell your mother or wife where you were and you didn't care how they fared. You didn't know you had a granddaughter until you returned, and here I am, the last of your family."

  "Where are they?" my grandfather asked me. "Where are my people?"

  "All dead, gone," I told him. I took him to see his tree and showed him the history his wife, my grandmother, had written:

  Age twenty-one: The tree has lost its leaves for the first time, then new branches sprout.

  My grandfather said, "A thief stole my pouch when I arrived in the city."

  Age twenty-four: A great storm. The tree absorbed the rain and now leaks water like tears.

  "I married again. My wife died in childbirth. My child lived only three days."

  Age thirty: A sudden growth spurt for this old tree.

  "My business found great success. People knew my name."

  Age thirty-seven: The tree sickens. Its leaves have dropped. Its bark is yellow.

  "I travelled to another country and found a vicious disease."

  "Age forty-two: New branches sprout.

  "I became a father for the third time."

  My grandfather was shocked to learn how shallow his escape had been. We knew his life without having seen it. We knew everything about him.

  #

  Marvo was startled and comforted that another person had a similar start in a new city carrying only a collection of coins.

  "Did he meet a lady with an umbrella?" Marvo asked the woman.

  "He met a lot of people."

  The woman wrinkled her face at him. "I didn't tell you the story to make you sympathise with my grandfather. You've heard the story wrong."

  It was a lesson for Marvo that often a story is expected to elicit a particular reaction.

  "He was a bad man to leave you all behind," Marvo said. "Did he stay with you then?"

  The woman closed her eyes. "I left him. You understand I was only young, with my life ahead of me. I didn't want to act as nurse to an old man who I felt nothing for."

  She shivered. Marvo knew from TV that when women shivered or cried you hugged them, or their crying would get worse.

  "You did the right thing," he said, although he had no idea.

  "You are such a kind boy. Your parents have done a good job." She blinked. Looked around. "Where are your parents? Which one is your grandparent? You're here so often but I've never seen you with an adult."

  "I don't have any parents. I only had a grandmother and she died."

  "But who is looking after you? Where are you living?"

  Marvo was surprised. Did he have to live somewhere? That was a new lesson. He drew a small mist down around them. "I live in a big house with eight brothers and sisters. My mother is a nurse but only goes out to work a few hours a week because she likes to help us with our homework. My father is a builder and we all know how to fix anything. We never talk about my grandfather, Dad's dad, because he abandoned Dad when he was only five."

  The mist worked well.

  "Oh, you lucky boy to have such a loving family," she said.

  He nodded, and gave her a plant that would never die.

  As he walked away, he felt more sympathy for the grandfather and little desire for the family he had created for himself. He thought that a sense of freedom, of individual choice, might be lost in a large family. He did not return to the place of assisted living. He sought elsewhere.

  He enjoyed his search for magic, liked wandering from place to place, being treated like a child, or an adult, depending on how he felt. He liked running for the sake of it and he learned to wear running clothes to become invisible.

  Marvo sought wisdom and magic in untraditional places because he didn't know where other people looked. He stood outside school buildings but could not enter. He had no papers, no certificates proving his existence. He learned that he needed a past and a family or there would be questions asked he couldn't answer.

  He needed to use his storytelling skills in order to get by.

  "My mother is buying some underwear," he said to the young hotel clerk. "The elastic broke on hers and she had to walk around without any." The clerk snickered and passed him the key to the hotel room. Knowing how to blind people with the promise of sexuality – this was a gift from the blind man in the big house.

  There were many strange things in Marvo's world. He had seen things now that he did not think his grandmother had seen; he had seen men in ships going to space. He needed to know from them if it was different; if they had seen magic in space, and did they remember what it looked like?

  He bought a ticket to the large lecture hall where they were speaking to the press and to the public. All the seats were taken so he folded his cape and sat on that.

  "It was the perfect career move for all of us," the captain said. "The only way we'd become famous. None of us is any good at singing, we found out during the year. And none of us can draw and we're not too handsome. So all we had was our bravery.

  "It was a long year out there, and the work, once you got used to the idea of being so far from earth, was pretty boring. Although the explosion was spectacular. And it ended our mission, not a bad thing really. Not a bad thing.

  "We were sent to investigate the ship which had been sent to investigate Mars. It was spinning uselessly, spewing the world's money into the universe. The world and the media are fascinated with Mars – no true observation of the planet has been made, because equipment always fails. So we were sent to find the problem, but the problem exploded and we returned to earth.

  "We landed safely, but had to lie flat in wheeled banana chairs for a week, get wheeled about the enormous lab until we adapted to gravity. We could not lift our arms to drink or smoke; even smiling was difficult."

  "How d
oes the moon look different from outer space, compared to how it looks from earth?" Marvo asked.

  "It is quite ugly," said the captain. "It doesn't glow silver, or look like cheese. It is a large rock which is held in thrall by the earth."

  "When did the moon begin to look ugly?" asked Marvo.

  The reporters in the room were angry with him and wondered what such a young boy was doing there. They wanted to know how it felt to be back with wives (all three were men; the one woman on the programme remained behind to maintain ground control). How was it to see them, what did earth food taste like.