Siege 13 (37 page)

“He didn't make it?” she asked, reaching for the picture of Krisztián as if he was there, as if she might with a curled finger again caress his face, even as she knew that what she was seeing, for the first time since Béla had found her huddled in the street, was not a ghost but an image. “I wanted so much to know he was alive,” she said, “to know he had a happy life.” Béla nodded, and said “Yes,” and then slowly put the photographs back into the dossier as the curtains blew in through the window and what ghosts there were withdrew forever. Because Adél and Anikó
had
withdrawn, frantically apologizing—“She was there! A second ago! We saw her!”—trying to keep up to Krisztián as he stormed out of Chez Queux and away from them, wondering if either of his aunts had any idea how often he'd sat in bed as a boy, how often he still did, haunted by what wasn't there—the memory of a face, a touch, the voice you most wanted to hear—as if absence could live on in you like a ghost.

The Homemade Doomsday Machine

OBBY WANTED
to build a device that would end human civilization. It had to have a fuse.

He was nine years old when Otto Kovács visited us with his prototype, which I still have, sitting in front of me on the kitchen table. Bobby himself—
that
Bobby—is long gone.

Before Kovács there were trips to the wrecking yard, the letters Bobby sent—to the Chalk River Nuclear Reactor (requesting “mail order isotopes”), ComDev (asking, just for the sake of theory, if you could build a guidance system that was lit with a match), the New Mexico Allied Atomic Project (wondering how things were going in the “capacity-for-destruction department”), and the Federal Mining Research Institute (querying how deep an explosion would have to be in order to “trigger massive tectonic cataclysm”)—and the books, articles, blueprints, diagrams, whatever you want, that he bought, ordered, or borrowed from the library, stacked on
his desk, the shelves in the kitchen, the floor by the toilet, everywhere.

I can't tell you how many times I drove to the Toews Wrecking Yard, along Wellington, left on Grand, Bobby popping out of the car to run up the steps of the dirty trailer where Vic the proprietor kept his “head office.” Vic would look up from the latest issue of
Playboy
and smile at Bobby (only six years old at the time) and say, “I just got an old Ford Pinto—a doomsday machine if ever there was one,” and then lock up the office and show Bobby and me around.

It always made me nervous, watching Bobby climb into those wrecks—torn metal everywhere, burns along the interior, the smell of gas—not that he ever asked for permission. He'd crawl through a shattered windshield while Vic and I tore stuff off the outside or grabbed at fallen bits of motor underneath, bringing whatever it was to Bobby for inspection. That day, Vic managed to pry off a door. “This would be good for shielding,” he said.

Bobby looked at it. “It needs to be made out of lead.”

“Of course!” Vic said. “I know that!” He winked at me over the top of Bobby's head.

“Victor,” said Bobby. “Cars are never made out of lead. First of all, it's a very heavy metal, and would therefore suck gas like no one's business. Second of all, it's incredibly pliable, which means if you ever got into an accident you could basically kiss your ass goodbye. Now, I know Pintos are notoriously dangerous cars, what with the whole bursting into flame thing, but I doubt very highly that Ford would be so stupid as to build them out of lead.” Bobby paused to
let his words sink into Vic's head. “At the same time, I must admit there's a certain poetry in using one's imagination and simply pretending that such a door would provide adequate shielding. But make no mistake, Victor, poetry, no matter how poetic, is not going to be worth jack when the doomsday machine goes off and fries everyone within a globular radius of 24,901.55 miles.”

Vic stared at Bobby for a minute, mesmerized. Then, when my son went back to looking through the yard, he looked at me. “Fuck, I love your kid,” he said.

 

That didn't last long, a year or two at the most. Bobby was quick to figure out that our basement assemblages, stuff I welded together with a hand-held torch, were all fantasy, and that going to Vic's wrecking yard to look for parts was, in his words, “like looking for the Manhattan Project at the bottom of an outhouse.” So, while Bobby understood rationally, he had
emotional
trouble with the fact that you couldn't build sci-fi machines out of household detritus, and that maybe he should turn his attention, like other boys his age, to soccer or hockey or baseball. He was quite good at sports, maddeningly good in fact, where he could score and pass and make plays even while none of it interested him a bit, and it showed, on his face, in his body language, the way he shrugged and turned away from the play even as the puck or ball he'd hit went into the net or out of the park.

No, the thing that really broke him up was the failure of our doomsday machines, and so his mother, Rebecca, and I had words.

Rebecca insisted he had Asperger's syndrome. She'd taken him to a therapist who'd run four three-hour tests, and there was no doubt.

“You took him to a therapist?” I shouted into the phone. “Aren't you supposed to have my permission for doing something like that?”

Rebecca said she knew I'd disagree, so she just went ahead and forged my signature on the forms, which is of course exactly the sort of thing I divorced her for, and why I happened to get primary custody of Bobby, and why I'm continually tormented by fantasies of ripping off her head. It was also why I was powerless to do anything more about it: she had nothing left to lose where she and Bobby and I were concerned.

“The therapist,” she continued, “concluded that for sure Bobby has borderline Asperger's, which is now actually included in the broad spectrum of autism disorders . . .”

“I know what Asperger's is,” I said, trying not to sound bitchy. “It doesn't fit at all. Those people are introverted freaks. They turn their backs to you when you're speaking to them! When they're speaking to you! They say goodbye through the palms of their hands. They can tell you the exact train schedule between Kitchener and Sault Ste. Marie for the months of August through February, but don't know how to ask a checkout girl to give them the price of milk.”

“He's borderline!” replied Rebecca, getting agitated, as she always does, whenever she's contradicted. “Right now he's a kid, so it's not so noticeable. But the therapist said that as he gets older, and social interactions become more complex, he's not going to be able to keep up.”

“Crap.”

“Jesus, have you ever listened to him? He sounds like some smartass twenty-year-old! No kid talks the way he does. And all that stuff he's into—he's memorized it to the last detail.”

“Rebecca,” I said, adopting the grandfatherly tone I used when I wanted to send her into a screaming frenzy. “Bobby's the most popular boy in class. What do you mean ‘borderline'? He's even got girls working on his goddamn doomsday machine.” I couldn't believe we were having this conversation, talking about Bobby as if he were some kind of outcast loitering on the edge of the playground, when in fact I'd pick him up from school and always there was a crowd of kids listening to everything he said, hanging on every word, running errands, even offering him their toys, and then calling at night, on weekends, one parent after another wanting to arrange play dates, sleepovers, birthday-party invites. “Everyone wants to do everything for Bobby,” I said to Rebecca. “Our kid isn't one of those invisible loners. He's Charles fucking Manson! The only person who doesn't worship him is you.”

“That's because he doesn't like to come here,” she said, accusingly.

“You think that's my fault? I spend all my time trying to get him to like you.”

She burst into tears and hung up the phone.

 

I called the therapist. Or, rather, I called the therapists, looking them up one by one in the phone book—anyone that had “child psychology” or “educational counselling” or “learning disabilities” beside his or her ad in the Yellow Pages—threatening each of them in turn, “Do you realize the trouble you
could get into for treating a boy without the consent of
both
parents?” until finally one of them, Maryse LeBlanc, said, “You don't need to threaten me, you know.”

“Does Bobby have Asperger's?” I said, not bothering to apologize.

“What is it with you people and Asperger's?” she said. When I asked what she meant, Maryse replied, “Your wife, what was her name?” I could hear papers being shuffled. “Right, Rebecca. She just would not get
off
it! Asperger's, Asperger's, Asperger's. She came in here with books and articles and . . . you name it!”

“You don't think Bobby has Asperger's?”

“I think
Rebecca
has Asperger's,” she said, and when I laughed, Maryse took heart and continued, “Bobby, I think, is a genius. Off the charts on every test.” For some reason, Maryse was now breathing hard. “He is the most amazing young man I have ever met.”

This sounded more than a little excessive. “‘Young man?' The kid's six years old!” I waited for her to respond to me, but Maryse said nothing. “Do you realize he's trying to build a doomsday machine?”

I was thinking this might put the brakes on Maryse a little, and she remained silent for a long time, but then: “Well, Mr. Howe, if anyone was ever to succeed at something like that, I'd say it's Bobby.” She laughed. “Can you say hi to him for me? And let him know that if he ever gets that machine built I'd love to join him in his post-apocalyptic world.”

 

Everyone always assumed there'd be some kind of world after doomsday—that the Earth, in some shape or form, would go
on—and there'd be this lucky few whom Bobby would save and take with him into the next phase of human history. But Bobby kept this list of names—if it even existed—very close, and it was painful watching the assumptions of people like Vic and Maryse crumbling as they joked with Bobby about being notified of the apocalypse, a kind of nervousness creeping into their laughter as they waited for my son to offer some reassurance that he wouldn't abandon them along with the billions of others when he finally lit that fuse. What made them think they'd be saved, that he'd want them around? I always wondered. The fact is, they needed Bobby to love them, and he knew that's what they wanted, and he withheld it on purpose, watching them squirm, trying to please him in some way.

The only one who didn't squirm was Otto Kovács. But, then, he had no intention of leaving the world, much less humanity, intact. There wasn't going to be any new phase of human history in
his
apocalypse. No friends saved. No elect. Not even himself. I still wonder if that's what fascinated and disturbed my son so much about Otto, why they started writing letters back and forth: here was someone, finally someone, who didn't care whether Bobby liked him.

Which brings me right back around to Rebecca. I always believed, and still believe, that Bobby wanted to make the world better, wanted to destroy what
was
in order to bring about what
could be
, and that this idealism was obvious in everything he did, including his relationship with his mother, whose problems with Bobby could be traced exactly to her failure to understand this. He was, after all, the reason Rebecca and I got divorced, which began on that Monday morning
in 1991 when we sat down to breakfast. Bobby watched as the two of us grumbled at each other over how little milk there was in the fridge, who should and shouldn't have gotten groceries, why I'd showered before she did when I knew she had a 9:30 meeting, why she'd not folded the laundry last night, just once folded it, when I'd been doing it for weeks, and Bobby looked at both of us over his cantaloupe and quietly started whistling Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Not just part of it—the famous opening—but the whole thing, start to finish, and when he was done he picked up his breakfast plate, took it to the sink, and left the room, as if his actions, including the verdict on our marriage, was just business as usual, something that needed to be done, and we should for God's sake get on with it.

We sat there staring after him. Of course, divorce had been on our minds a long time, but like most parents noodling along in the dry comforts of a dead marriage we'd convinced ourselves that our laziness was a kind of martyrdom, that staying together was the good thing to do—for the kid. But after that morning it was impossible. During every fight Rebecca and I had, Bobby would enter the room, cross his arms, and begin whistling the toccata and fugue.

When we finally told him it was over—the marriage—he let out a low sigh, and said, “Finally.” Then he looked at Rebecca and said, “It's going to hurt for a while, but in the long run you'll both be a lot happier—and so, by extension, will I.”