My mother fell away from speech like a half-converted parishioner falling away
from the faith: she stopped visiting the temple of verbiage in dribs and drabs,
first missing the regular sermons -- the daily niceties of Good morning and Good
night and Be careful, Chet -- then neglecting the major holidays, the Watch
out!s and the Ouch!s and the answers to direct questions.
My father and I never spoke of it, and I didn't mention it to the other wild
kids in the vertical city with whom I spent my days getting in what passed for
trouble around the bat-house.
I did mention it to my counselor, The Amazing Robotron, so-called for the metal
exoskeleton he wore to support his fragile body in Earth's hard gravity. But he
didn't count, then.
#
The reason that Chet can't pinpoint the moment his mother sealed her lips is
because he was a self-absorbed little rodent in those days.
Not a cute freckled hellion. A miserable little shit who played hide-and-seek
with the other miserable little shits in the bat-house, but played it violently,
hide-and-seek-and-break-and-enter, hide-and-seek-and-smash-and-grab. The lot of
them are amorphous, indistinguishable from each other in his memory, all that
remains of all those clever little brats is the lingering impression of loud,
boasting voices and sharp little teeth.
The Amazing Robotron was a fool in little Chet's eyes, an easy-to-bullshit,
ineffectual lump whose company Chet had to endure for a mandatory hour every
other day.
"Chet, you seem distr-acted to-day," The Amazing Robotron said in his artificial
voice.
"Yah. You know. Worried about, uh, the future." Distracted by Debbie Carr's
purse, filched while she sat in the sixty-eighth floor courtyard, talking with
her stupid girlie friends. Debbie was the first girl from the gang to get tits,
and now she didn't want to hang out with them anymore, and her purse was stashed
underneath the base of a hollow planter outside The Amazing Robotron's apt, and
maybe he could sneak it out under his shirt and find a place to dump it and sort
through its contents after the session.
"What is it about the fu-ture that wo-rries you?" The Amazing Robotron was as
unreadable as a pinball machine, something he resembled. Underneath, he was a
collection of whip-like tentacles with a knot of sensory organs in the middle.
"You know, like, the whole fricken thing. Like if I leave here when I'm
eighteen, will my folks be okay without me, and like that."
"Your pa-rents are able to take care of them-selves, Chet. You must con-cern
your-self with you, Chet. You should do something con-struct-tive with your
wo-rry, such as de-ciding on a ca-reer that will ful-fill you when you leave the
Cen-ter." The Center was the short form for the long, nice name that no one ever
used to describe the bat-house.
"I thought, like, maybe I could be, you know, a spaceship pilot or something."
"Then you must stu-dy math-e-mat-ics and phy-sics. If you like, Chet, I can
re-quest ad-vanced in-struct-tion-al mat-e-rials for you."
"Sure, that'd be great. Thanks, Robotron."
"You are wel-come, Chet. I am glad to help. My own par-ent was in a Cen-ter on
my world, you know. I un-der-stand how you feel. There is still time re-main-ing
in your ses-sion. What else would you like to dis-cuss?"
"My mother doesn't talk anymore. Nothing. Why is that?"
"Your mo-ther is. . . ." The Amazing Robotron fumbled for a word, buried
somewhere deep in the hypnotic English lexicon baked into its brain. "Your
mo-ther has a prob-lem, and she needs your aff-ec-tion now more than e-ver.
What-ev-er rea-son she has for her si-lence, it is not you. Your mo-ther and
fa-ther love you, and dream of the day when you leave here and make your own way
through the gal-ax-y."
Of course his parents loved him, he supposed, in an abstract kind of way. His
mother, who hadn't worn anything but a bathrobe in months, whose face he
couldn't picture behind his eyes but whose bathrobe he could visualize in its
every rip and stain and fray. His father, who seemed to have forgotten how to
groom himself, who spent his loud days in one of the bat-house's workshops,
drinking beer with his buddies while they played with the arc welders. His
parents loved him, he knew that.
"OK, right, thanks. I've gotta blow, 'K?"
"All-right. I will see you on Thurs-day, then?"
But Chet was already out the door, digging Debbie Carr's purse from under the
planter, then running, doubled over the bulge it made in his shirt, hunting for
a private space in the anthill.
#
The entire north face of the bat-house was eyeless, a blind, windowless expanse
of foam that seemed to curve as it approached infinity.
Some said it was an architectural error, others said it was part of the
bat-house's heating scheme. Up in nosebleed country, on the 120th level, it was
almost empty: sparsely populated by the very battiest bats, though as more and
more humans were found batty, they pushed inexorably upwards.
Chet rode the lift to the 125th floor and walked casually to the end of the
hallway. At this height, the hallways were bare foam, without the long-wear
carpet and fake plants that adorned the low-altitude territories. He walked as
calmly as he could to the very end of the northern hall, then hunkered down in
the corner and spilled the purse.
Shit, but Debbie Carr was going girlie. The pile was all tampons and makeup and,
ugh, a spare bra. A spare bra! I chuckled, and kept sorting. There were three
pennies, enough to buy six chocolate bars in the black-market tuck-shop on the
75th floor. A clever little pair of folding scissors, their blades razor-sharp.
I was using them to slit the lining of the purse when the door to 12525 opened,
and the guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla emerged.
My palms slicked with guilty sweat, and the pile of Debbie's crap, set against
the featureless foam corridor, seemed to scream its presence. I spun around,
working my body into the corner, and held the little scissors like a dagger in
my fist.
The guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla was clearly batty. He was wearing
boxer-shorts and a tailcoat and had a halo of wild, greasy hair and a long,
tangled beard, but even if he'd been wearing a suit and tie and had a trip to
the barber's, I'd have known he was batty the minute I laid eyes on him. He
didn't walk, he shambled, like he'd spent a long, long time on meds. His eyes,
set in deep black pits of sleeplessness, were ferociously crazy.
He turned to stare at me.
"Hello, sonny. Do you like to swim?"