After Mind (13 page)

Robin drew the bubble chain for the vertical blinds as the outside darkness had already settled.

“Keep your eyes closed,” Daniel said.

“What is it?” Cessini itched to turn. The mystery gift had to be at the end of the shelf behind him by the door, he thought.

“Responsibility,” Daniel said.

“Whaaat?” Meg said, miffed. “It’s okay, just tell him.”

“No. I want you both to listen to me,” Daniel said. “This gift is a little something that wasn’t easy to get. But Meg insisted we keep trying, for you. A ‘thank you’ from the two of them for welcoming them into our house.”

“Everything is going to be great,” Robin said. Her smile was genuine like a mom’s should be.

“Fine. Okay. He knows. Show him already,” Meg said.

Daniel pulled Cessini closer to his knee on the floor. “Imagination means life,” Daniel said. “You inspired me. What you’re building on the table at work. We can build a mind for your robot body. I have an idea for how to make it work. I can code it. I think I figured out how. I’ll call my mind code ‘Packet’ after the name you gave your robot. But most of all because I’m so very, very proud of you.”

“Oh, come on,” Meg said, “is this a present from me, or you?”

“I like that,” Cessini said to Daniel. “Packet will fit together perfect. We’ll build ourselves a real winner.”

“Speaking of which,” Daniel said, “don’t you worry about any of those bullies at school.”

“I know,” Cessini said.

“You’re already better than them,” Daniel said. “Build something even bigger than you can imagine. Keep reinventing yourself. Each and every day. You’ll never become obsolete. And you’ll leave them behind in the dust.”

“Daniel, come on already,” Robin said. “Meg’s right. You totally stole our present.”

“Be smarter than me,” Daniel said. “It’s not a crime to be smarter than me.”

“That won’t be too hard,” Meg said. Cessini held out his palm and Meg slapped it. “Can you please just show him now what we got? Blah, blah, blah. . . .”

Daniel let him turn to see.

A terrarium was on the shelf. Two feet long. Meticulous. It had a sand beach on the left and a small pool in the middle. The shallow pool of water wet the bottom of a hollowed-out log perched from the right. A small, gray amphibious fish—three inches, no more—emerged from the hollow of the log. It walked on its fins for a look. It didn’t enter the water, but stayed at its edge.

Cessini got closer. A mangrove rivulus. He was sure. He wrapped his hands on the side of the tank.

“It’s you,” Meg said as she joined him by the glass.

“A mangrove rivulus,” Robin said. “A fish that lives out of water. Every couple of months, pour water over the log and it’s happy.”

“It’s the opposite of you because it’s a fish. But it also lives without water. So, it’s like your opposite, but also your equal,” Meg said.

“Wouldn’t my opposite be a real fish?” he asked.

“He is a real fish,” she said. “Simple tank, but it’s like you. It’s your world. It’s your life.”

He backed away from the tank. The rivulus ducked back into its log. “But you still have to keep the log wet.”

“Well, yes, that’s true, but—”

“Then we’re not the same at all. I’m not a mangrove rivulus.”

“Exactly!” Daniel said. “That was my point.”

Robin came down at Cessini’s side. “You know what’s most crazy about this fish?” she asked.

“It talks?” Cessini asked.

“When it lives in water, it doesn’t get along with any other fish. They fight a lot,” she said. “Probably like you at school with those boys. But when their water hole dries up, they all become friends and live together in the same log. One day, you’ll see, everything can get better.”

Cessini sat at the edge of his bed by his nightstand. They all watched him stare at his new forced friend.

“The place we got it from said, though, if it doesn’t want any friends, it doesn’t have to have any,” Meg said. “It can live its entire life by itself. It can become a hermaphrodite and make clones of itself.”

“That’s weird,” Cessini said.

Robin smiled and stroked Cessini on the back of the head. “Every two months, just add water.” Then she leaned in and kissed his forehead. “And thank you for welcoming us to your home.”

“But it has to eat so make sure you feed it more often than that,” Daniel said.

“Right, feed it,” Meg said. “And live with the water or don’t. But don’t grow up alone.”

“I hear you,” Cessini said. “I’ll give the fish a try. I like it. I’ll watch it on a sixty-day count.”

“You’ll try?” Daniel asked. “What count? You know how hard it was to get this fish up here? It’s Minnesota. How many tropical mangroves do you see around here in Minnesota?”

“Hello, it’s called ‘fly it on an airplane,’” Meg said and Cessini laughed. She always had the right thing to say. She bounced for the door with a hand aimed straight for the light switch. She put them all into darkness with a click. “Now I’m going to bed. Goodnight.”

As the lights went off, the ocean waves of the sound machine on his nightstand came on. The repetitive roll and crash on a distant shore was one Cessini respected. It was a soothing constant hush, a nightlong reminder of a world that could never be his, but a safe one imagined in the harmlessness of a recorded machine. The simple white box with speckled holes over its speaker was the dreamtime peace he made with the ocean.

Robin flipped the light switch back on before leaving. “Goodnight.”

Daniel left another gift on the edge of his nightstand, a penlight.

Cessini clicked the penlight’s on-button and flicked its light left, then right. “Thanks, Dad. You know I’m not afraid of the dark anymore.”

“I know.”

“I’m here,” Meg yelled through the muffle of gypsum. “My room is right through this wall. Can you still hear me?”

“I can,” Cessini said with a smile as he clicked his new penlight on and off.

Daniel hugged the frame of the door, not wanting to leave. He tapped his fingers on the light switch.

“Leave it on,” Cessini said. “I want to watch the rivulus for a while.”

“I think this is going to work out great,” Daniel said as he let go of the door. “We’ll be in our room next door. Call me if you need anything. Okay?”

“I will,” he said, and then Daniel, too, was gone.

Beside the sound machine on his nightstand was the bellows lamp in the shape of a colossal squid that stood vertically on its eight outstretched arms. Its soft mantle skin billowed out and in with hypnotic, rhythmic breaths, synchronized with the lapping waves of the ocean tide.

Cessini lay awake in his bed long past when all others, both old and new to his home, were asleep. He pointed his penlight on, then away, then on, and away again from his new mangrove rivulus in its tank. Its eyes darted in and out of the log with the rapid movement of an oddly pointed moon and probably wondered as only it could—was it alone?

With the press of his thumb on a button, Cessini believed he could control a simple life in a tank, and he was right. But one unintended effect of the gift of the rivulus had clicked back into his mind like the weighted tick of a metronome and nothing could matter more than the return of his fear. The vengeance of water to soak the skin would soon be coming his way. It was inevitable, and as certain as a sixty-day count in his mind.

SEVEN

CONTROL

T
HE SIXTY-DAY COUNT lasted for three nightmarish years. By the time Cessini was twelve, the anxiety of his days spilled into the exhaustion of his nights. The soothing intent of his wave sound and squid-bellows lamp had taken their toll. His mind gave way in his sleep to his dreamed-of alter-ego, Ceeborn, and his stronger world of opposites. Ceeborn was him in appearance, but braver and aquatic. One night, in his dream, he was fearless and ran along the bank of a river, climbed the rail of a bridge, and dived into a rush of water. But then with a tumble from his bed, Cessini awoke on the floor of his room in agony, his skin aflame and pajamas sweated through.

Again and again, the same anxious, nighttime watery wave rolled in, but each time it was capped with a different froth. One sweaty night, he ran as Ceeborn through a botanical garden and away from the unseen, click-clatter of claws on stone. He escaped the patrol of three charred, six-legged robots moving after him like waist-high ants in a networked line. Their bulb-shaped heads were clear, faceless domes, and inside their bulb was a retractable mind, a tablet with side-mounted keys that clicked and clattered with their relentless movement forward. The lead robot’s middle and rear pipe-legs locked in place at their shoulder joints. It flexed its squared front thorax up at its waist and rose, extending and splaying its sixteen-pronged front claws in a dominant pose. Then it leapt in attack. He was pinned in its grasp.

A beautiful aurora of lights in the sky flickered as Ceeborn regained his focus upward, and the dome of the patrol stayed locked down in its stare. He was carried away beneath the three robots’ chassis in their coordinated line. His wrists were pulled over his head by the leader, his waist supported by the middle robot, and his ankles held immobile in the front claws of the rear patrol. His lungs heaved in a gasp. He rolled his head to his side into the pit of his outstretched arm and coughed up a lungful of sputum and froth.

The lead robot kicked a door open to a rotted hallway. The three entered with him suspended beneath their bodies, marching forward in a slanted line. Their left legs walked on the narrow floor while their right legs angled up onto the rounded wall. The tubular hall was lined with soiled porthole windows.

Daniel was ahead. He exhaled and opened a door into a darkened cell. Inside, the patrols dropped him in a heap of shivers as the leader maneuvered and shackled him to the floor. Damp moss infested the pitted walls of the cell. Daniel peeled a flake of fleshy decay from the ceiling. The room’s opened wound bled and another ulcer was formed. A slice of flesh dropped to the floor. Its impact was grave.

“None of us can leave here,” Daniel said, “unless I can fix this problem—or we’ll all be dead soon enough.”

The lead robot straddled him and lowered its bulbous head to within a breath of his face, close enough to smell the tinge of its burned metallic flesh. He averted his eyes from the robot’s tablet screen, and in the distorted light through the clear dome of its head, he saw Daniel crouching to leave under the frame of the door. Daniel stopped at a porthole window along the corridor’s festered wall.

Ceeborn lay curled and cold on the floor of his prison. The lead robot’s dome tilted to its shoulder as it reached its piped front leg forward toward his neck. Its sixteen-pronged gripper extended to choke him into a reddened haze—and away and awake from this horrid, but oddly irresistible, wet world. He opened his eyes in a bed.

Cessini found his nights a prison cell fraught with horror, but the wetness of its walls soothed his lungs and healed the cracks of his drying skin for the moment, at least, in his mind, until waking itself had become his horrible burden to bear. His days began with mornings that burned the worst.

He woke late, well past seven in the morning. He fluttered his eyelids through a swollen rash. He sat slumped on the edge of his bed and shivered. He rubbed his hands up and down his shoulders. He crossed his arms high on his chest and his fingertips met behind his neck. He squeezed himself a warming hug and twisted to relieve the soreness of a hard-won night.

When he’d put the first baggie up three years before, it had been quickly noticed and removed. He had put up another, then one more fourteen days later, but neither Daniel nor any of the operations staff at the data center would stand for it. Even Meg had to defer to Daniel’s position. Cessini’s younger daredevil days of ladders and baggies were long over and gone.

Meg swung into his room with her hand on the frame of his door. She slung her school backpack over her shoulder. “Oh, come on, you’re not even up yet?”

“Meg,” he asked, “why did you think all of us living here was a really bad idea?”

“Ugh, I don’t remember. Stop asking me that.”

“Did your mother ever tell you what happened to your dad?”

“Yes. He died.”

“I know. . . But I bet he was a real hero.”

“Yeah, his name was Michael. And I bet he was, too.” She smiled, then shrugged, as if that was all she wanted to say. She reached across her chest and re-shouldered her backpack. “Why are you asking? Is this about your nightmares?”

“No. I think you have a secret you’re not telling me.” He released his hands from his neck.

“Really? Well, then, we’ll talk about me some other time. But not today. And I’m not coming to the building after school. I got invited out with some friends and I’m going.”

“Wait, no, you can’t. We’re starting Packet’s power cells. I need your help. You’ll miss it.”

“What do you mean, I can’t? I’m going with my friends and you’re going to miss the bus if you don’t hurry up and get dressed.” She leaned back into the hall, and shouted, “Daniel, he’s going to miss the bus. Again!”

“Wait, Meg. I need to talk to you.”

“No. We’ll talk later. And not tomorrow, either. I’m going to the doctor’s. I’ll try to stop by later in the week. We’ll fix your robot’s cells then. How’s that?”

“Meg,” he said, then he looked at her straight. “I think I’m getting worse.”

“No, you’re not. You’re the same as you’ve always been.”

His hands dropped to the bed, palms up, elbows exposed. “I think that’s a mistake.”

“What, you going to start counting mistakes now, too?”

“No. But all the little ones add up.”

“Oh, really? ‘No’? Starting when?”

“I won’t count. But I know how to fix everything at the office. You should come and see. I’ll fix it up perfect for us both.”

“Great. I’d like that. Do it,” she said. Daniel popped in for a peek. “He’s all yours,” Meg said as she ran out and down the hall. “Good luck driving. He missed it again.”

“Oh, come on. Hurry up!” Daniel shouted at him.

He stared at the empty door and sighed. She was gone. “Starting now.”