The Obsoletes

by Simeon Mills

  The other announcer was appalled by China’s action, labeling it “a shameless publicity stunt, tantamount to a declaration of war on American values.”

  “You realize,” responded the play-by-play announcer, “that we have robots back in the US too, right?”

  “Our robots don’t wear the red, white, and blue! They don’t represent our country! They don’t represent me!” He then explained, in his mocking tone, that this particular robot had been a sensation in China in the weeks leading up to the games. His name was Ma, which means “horse” in Chinese.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off Ma. His handsome Chinese face. His dribbles that seemed to smash the basketball court with an extra velocity. His losing balance—but not falling down—after being fouled hard by Bimbo Coles, an American point guard.

  Ma made his first free throw, then missed the second, causing the hateful announcer to guess that the Chinese culture had no equivalent to the legend of John Henry. Ma was removed from the game at the next dead ball.

  I’d watched the memory a few dozen times, all the while fantasizing about actually living in China, when Kanga reemerged from our building.

  “Absolutely not,” I barked at him. “March back upstairs and take that off. Under no circumstances am I going to film you wearing—”

  Kanga sat down on the sidewalk. Apparently, not being allowed to wear my old Magic Johnson uniform for our science presentation was a dealbreaker for him. “It’s half mine,” he said, “and you know it.”

  “Please, Kanga. I have a lot of work to do, and the quicker I start filming—”

  He lay down in the driveway. This was how decisions got made in our household.

  “Fine,” I said.

  The jersey barely reached his belly button. His white briefs hung out the sides of the purple shorts. The elastic was stretched to the limit, causing the whole uniform to resemble a two-piece women’s swimsuit. I could see where Kanga had positioned his penis against his thigh to prevent it from slipping out. But the worst part: the uniform still fit me perfectly. Not that I wore it anymore. The limit of my boldness was to occasionally sport the matching purple high-tops (fifth grade’s birthday gift). Kanga had no real boldness, just earnest eccentricity. He was barefoot.

  “Here’s what you have to do,” I instructed him. “Hold the ball in the triple-threat position. But don’t look at it. Look into the camera. Look at Mr. Belt and say, ‘The Principle of Flight: A Video Presentation by Darryl and Kanga Livery.’ ”

  “Flight? Is that what this is about?”

  “Or you can just hug the ball to your belly.”

  “No,” said Kanga, and he was already walking away from me, toward Mr. Renault’s patio. “I got an idea. Start filming me when I give the signal.”

  “If you don’t say the introductory sentence, I can’t use it.”

  “I’ll say it.”

  Kanga had walked past Mr. Renault’s patio. He now stood near Mrs. Voss’s propane grill. Through the eyepiece of the camcorder, Kanga waved a tiny arm for me to start filming. I pressed Record, and before I describe what Kanga did with my basketball, I should explain my history with Magic Johnson. It started with my annoyance at every kid who ever saw a robotic dog catching a Frisbee and said “That’s magic!” because what the kid really meant was “That’s science!” Science was the reason the dog did what it did, not magic, and even Earvin “Magic” Johnson had to agree that a combination of natural aptitude, confidence, and work ethic were ultimately what allowed him to produce his seemingly impossible basketball moves.

  Moves that my brother, it turned out, was able to mimic exactly. For the next ten seconds of video footage my brother was Magic Johnson.

  He got a dribbling start before the invisible defenders surrounded him. Kanga looked at a row of mailboxes, then sprint-dribbled toward a parked car. Behind-the-back dribble. Between the legs. Speed dribble around the dumpster. He pointed at a lawn chair. He shimmied his shoulders. Spin dribble. He cocked the ball behind his head, as though to pass it to a NO PARKING sign. (He was almost to me now. I just needed to follow him with the camcorder.) Kanga leapt into the air. (I couldn’t see the ball anymore. Where was the—)

  “The-Principle-of-Flight-by-Kanga-and-Darryl!”

  My brother landed somewhere behind me.

  If you talk to veteran parents, one consistent feature of their stories is how their worst blowups at their kids happen on days that are actually going pretty well. It starts with Joey eating a peanut butter sandwich in the living room, and suddenly you’ve spanked Joey raw after he wiped his jelly-hands on the decorative throw pillows. That’s how I could be with Kanga too. Every now and then he caught me off guard. He pushed things too far. How far was too far? Channeling Magic Johnson out of nowhere, with my basketball—my basketball. That torched it. My chest was a fireplace crammed with logs. I was raging. The flames swirled up my neck and around my eyeballs, and my hands went berserk. They slapped the basketball away from him, getting a good portion of his arms and chin in the process. “Grounded!”

  “But—” Kanga was shocked. “I said exactly what you—”

  “Idiot! All that stupid clapping in Mr. Belt’s class! What’s wrong with you?” I picked up the basketball and threw it at him. “Are you trying to get us discovered?”

  Kanga could have caught the ball, but he let it smash him in the chest. I hated him. I hated those enormous hands hanging down past his kneecaps. I hated his dinosaur bone of a jaw, bulging forward, begging me to strike it. I wouldn’t. My previous attempts to corporally punish Kanga had not produced the intended effect. Rather than comply with my standards, he had shut down and ignored me for a day. But there was an even worse outcome. Crying. Kanga had already begun the process.

  “No, Kanga, don’t do that.” The words felt like globs of grease in my mouth. “I’m sorry, okay?”

  He gasped. His mouth jutted into a frown. His eyes closed. When we were two, we’d witnessed another kid pull this move at the grocery store, and Kanga had memorized it in one take. Kanga’s mouth opened, but the cry was still gathering in his neck.

  “I’m sorry I threw the ball at you,” I said, but the sight of Kanga’s chest hair curling out from the Magic jersey reignited my fire: “I said I was sorry, so just shut up!”

  The first sound Kanga emitted was a single word: “Mooooom,” drawn out, maintaining a consistent low pitch over the course of ten endless seconds. The second “Mooooom” was a scream.

  That kid in the grocery store who had taught Kanga to cry—I had been so disgusted by the boy’s lack of shame, by the obviousness of his ploy, by the attention it drew from every sentient being in the store. Yet there was no disputing his results: the kid left the store with a bathtub police boat and a He-Man coloring book. But I wasn’t that kind of mom. “Stop that crying right now, or I’ll unplug the TV and take it to the Salvation Army.”

  The crying halted. “You wouldn’t.”

  “Try me. No TV would give us more time to read The Directions—”

  “I stopped, okay?”

  Few thrills in parenting compare with presenting a hypothetical consequence that immediately changes a kid’s behavior. But I had to tone down my internal victory celebration and act like the threat didn’t just fly into my belly at the last second. In truth, I didn’t feel victorious at all. My fire was extinguished, and all that remained in my chest was a desperate love for my brother. Kanga slowly dragged himself toward the building entrance—no doubt to watch TV until bedtime—and it was crushing me. I needed to stop him. I needed to corral him by my side. I needed proof he still loved me.

  “Kanga!” I called. “Can you help me with the camcorder? I want you to film some objects in flight.”

  He froze. “Really?” He pivoted, sprinted toward me, and wrapped me in a hug.

  Did that part of parenting ever get old?

  Never.

  • • •

  The scientific process was not entirely foreign to Kanga. A random topic
could spark his curiosity and swallow him for days. I recalled the time in second grade when we came across a dead turtle, belly up, in a roadside ditch. It was the kind of unexpected discovery you might stare at for ten seconds before concluding Yuck and booting it under some shrubs. But not Kanga. He picked up the turtle. He held the thing up to his face, the limp head dangling from its shell. He flicked the head with his finger, watching it swing, his dilated pupils indicating the grandiosity of biological death having just besieged him. Kanga brought the dead turtle into our apartment. He kept it under his bed. (Around this time I realized that Mom and Dad, in addition to their more glaring deficiencies, were not equipped with odor sensors.) My brother remained morose the next few days, locking himself in his bedroom at every spare moment to further dissect and annihilate his turtle. He was hysterical the evening I made him flush those putrid remains down the toilet. But we reached an agreement: if he scrubbed the inside with soap, he could keep the empty shell. Mom and Dad had no idea what we were screaming about in the bathroom between flushes of the toilet, but it all turned out okay. Kanga still has the shell under his bed.

  There was no chance I’d get that same maniacal interest in today’s science project.

  I explained our various requirements, and Kanga nodded. I double-checked his understanding by having him summarize the plan back to me: “It’s easy, Darryl. We need video footage of things in flight. Birds, insects, airplanes.” Right on cue, Kanga spotted a flock of black birds sitting on a telephone wire. He snatched the camcorder from my hands and trotted silently, like a jungle cat, stopping right below them. Kanga got a minute of footage, until a diesel truck scattered the birds into the air.

  He returned with the camcorder. “Things are fast. They were talking to each other, calling out warnings when they saw me. ‘Who’s that guy down there?’ Hey! Remember that beehive behind the shed?” Kanga was already jogging there. “This is fun, Darryl!”

  Kanga threw a rock at the beehive, but no bees flew out: it was empty. Then we snuck around a few patios, lifting the tarp off a golf cart, peeking inside empty cardboard boxes, searching a spiderweb between the handlebars of a bike. No insects. Mr. Renault had a strip of flypaper hanging near his patio door. The flypaper was empty. In a frantic split second, two dragonflies flew like darts over our heads and disappeared.

  “Airplanes,” said Kanga. “Just let me grab some milk first,” and before I could respond he’d run inside the building.

  While Kanga had received the outwardly physical gifts of puberty, I was not without my own unique talents. My ears had always gone above and beyond what was expected of them, and from Mr. Renault’s patio I could hear Kanga upstairs, humming along with the opening theme of TaleSpin. I allowed him twenty minutes of cartoons and a jug of milk, which I heard him toss carelessly into the kitchenette sink after he drained it. Another perk of having supersonic hearing was being able to mimic voices. For years it had been a sly trick of mine to whisper a word in Mom’s voice. Any word would do, especially a word Mom would never use, such as tamarack or quadrilateral. This would jar Kanga’s focus, and I could redirect it for my own purposes. I was about to float the word symposium up to our apartment when Kanga bounded back outside of his own accord. “Did I miss anything?”

  “Pterodactyl.”

  His face contorted with stupid pleasure. Kanga always smiled, even at my lamest jokes. It was a valuable adaptation tactic, uniquely human, with the added bonus of making humans smile back at him, a maneuver that, in my own life, always occurred to me too late. I handed him the camcorder and said, in a deep voice, “Mr. Director,” which cracked him up further.

  We plopped down on a patch of grass. For a brief moment I wasn’t his mom anymore; I was his twin brother, and we were searching the sky for airplanes.

  “Holler if you see one,” Kanga said, his finger poised on the Record button. “And jets will work too. They’ll be a hundred miles up there. Maybe if I zoom in . . .”

  But Kanga needed a mom, not a brother. We lay on flat ground, yet I felt dizzy, like a bottomless sinkhole had just opened up next to me and was about to breathe me in. I braced myself, and my hand accidentally touched Kanga’s hip—the shorts of my Magic Johnson uniform.

  “You know that basketball stuff you did for the introduction?” I said. “All that showboating and dribbling around for no reason? Where did you learn that, Kanga?”

  “From Mrs. Stover’s favorite team,” he said, proud of himself. “The Lakers.”

  “That wasn’t the Lakers. That was garbage. Flash. Just razzle-dazzle. Even Magic Johnson would say so.”

  I listened for Kanga to start crying again. I wanted to hear him cry this time.

  “I’m erasing you from the introduction.” I stood up. It was rare to find myself looking down at my brother, but it felt just right. “Do you hear me? You’re never touching my basketball again. Your moves are trash. They’re—”

  “Darryl!” Kanga pointed at the sky, his bare heels drumming the grass. “Look!”

  “I’m the basketball kid—”

  “It’s a jet!”

  I looked up. The sky had gone completely gray. At first I saw nothing. And then: the faint white line of a jet.

  Its roar engulfed us, and Kanga screamed, “BEST PRESENTATION EVER!”

  Kanga recorded the jet footage. My exhaust fan kicked on inside my head. I felt devoid of love and hate for him. Just fatigue. “I’m going inside to defrost the ground chuck,” I announced. “When you come back to Earth, we’ll have dinner.”

  4

  WHEN KANGA AND I WERE babies, our world was the apartment floor. Dad would get home from work and stand in the middle of the living room, watching TV, sipping from his keg of warm beer, throwing darts at his dartboard. I would chase Kanga around Dad’s boots, feeling the sizzle of beer drops on my bare skin. Dad never so much as reached down to wipe us off. It wasn’t his fault; the problem was his hands. Gravy Robotics hadn’t created them for tenderly touching babies. They were thick, rubber, unfeeling things—cheap peripherals, truth be told, with fingers that didn’t know how to move from their permanent position. They were the hands of an oversize action figure, thumb and pointer finger touching, leaving a cylinder of open space between them, as if for the handle of a sword or medieval torch. Dad was embarrassed by them, and I understood why. I couldn’t imagine having to navigate my life with those humiliating relics at the ends of my arms. Predictably, Dad avoided all situations in which he might be forced to shake hands. He never attended school pageants, science fairs, or conferences; he let Mom struggle through those on her own. Aside from going to work, Dad hardly ever left the apartment.

  Still, there was plenty Dad could do with his hands. He could carry a cardboard box. He could drive a stick shift and smoke a cigarette at the same time. He could turn the page of a catalog. He could work the tap of a keg. He could complain about Gravy Robotics, how screwed he was to have been brought into existence by those jokers, those cheap-asses, because nobody could support a family on that dinky Gravy stipend every month. Dad could count on his rubber fingers all the things Gravy was too stingy to pay for: “van insurance, phone bill, cable bill, taco bill, beer . . .” And of course Dad could place a dart between his finger and thumb, cock his hand back, and fire the thing at his dartboard. “Bull’s-eye.”

  I once heard Dad confide to Mom that he could have been a professional darts player if someone had just told him which bar to go to after work. He was a good darts player, in my opinion, but he wasn’t perfect. Sometimes Dad missed. Every few nights a dart would hit the wire frame of his dartboard and bounce off down to the floor. A sound recording of one such miss was buried deep in my processor—the thook of the dart against the frame, Mom’s gasp from the kitchenette, Kanga’s body buzzing like he had a bumblebee caught in his rib cage, Dad saying, “It ain’t nothing.”

  The dart was sticking out of Kanga’s back. I could see it had driven in deep, probably puncturing Kanga’s heater.

  D
ad reached down and yanked it out. “Kid’s fine.” He looked at Mom. “Don’t say a word.”

  Mom said nothing, just turned back to the taco meat she had removed from the microwave.

  Dad wiped the tip of the dart against his shirt, cleaning it. “I know what you’re thinking.” He took a drink from his tap. “Don’t say it.”

  “Dinner’s ready,” she said.

  “Toughen him up is what it’ll do. Look at him.”

  Mom looked down at Kanga, crawling and giggling again like normal. I believe that was the moment when Dad seemed to decide he liked Kanga more than me. For getting hit by his dart. For being fine. Worse, though, was that Mom decided the same thing.

  “Boy’s just fine,” Dad concluded, and he tossed another dart. “Attaboy, Kangaroo.”

  After the dart incident, Mom was obsessed with the idea of Kanga attending college. Neither she nor Dad had received any college-level programming, but that didn’t stop Mom from buying an overpriced college-themed onesie set for him. The Big Ten pack. The way she batted her eyes at Kanga in those garish outfits, you’d think he’d already graduated summa cum laude from all ten schools. Dad was slightly more measured in his adoration. He approved of exactly one onesie. It was crimson, with a block white I.

  Indiana.

  Dad loved Indiana. More specifically, he loved Indiana’s head basketball coach, Bobby Knight. But love can have strange effects on a man. The weather in the apartment darkened whenever Bobby Knight was on TV. Dad stomped. He grew incredulous and shook his fist at random objects. He paced back and forth, looking at the floor, then froze and stared at Mom like she was his worst enemy. And there was the language: the threats and insults piling up around him, making the apartment so crowded and unbearable that even Dad couldn’t stand to be in it anymore.