The Obsoletes

by Simeon Mills

  “But—”

  “No buts!”

  “Kanga. I thought he was your favorite.”

  “Kanga? My favorite? No sir. You got the wrong guy.” But I heard Dad’s exhaust fan click on. “This ain’t about Kanga.”

  “I can’t go tomorrow morning.”

  “Don’t gimme that.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon, then I can go. I left something in my desk at school, and I need to grab it first.”

  “Whatever’s in your desk, I’ll buy you a new one. I gotta leave tomorrow morning. Come on, Darryl. Tomorrow morning. I’m dying.”

  “It’s important. It’s something I have to throw away before we go. Pictures. I guess they’re drawings. Some drawings I drew.”

  “Of what?”

  “A family.”

  “So?”

  “A family of robots.”

  “Nobody’s going to know they’re a family of—”

  “Without skin.”

  “Goddammit, Darryl!” Dad’s free hand went to his temple and he let out a grunt. “But okay. Tomorrow afternoon. You tie up your loose ends at school. Toss the drawings. Say your good-byes. But don’t actually say good-bye. Especially to Kanga. All his mother’s coddling, letting him think he ain’t a robot. That’s something we just can’t have. Not out there. We have to be sharp. Kanga—he just gets too damn attached to people. Not like you. You keep everyone good and distant. Might be we have to run and hide in a river or something. I’ve seen you, Darryl. You’re always one step ahead, or at least you try to be. But you still have miles to go. That’s what I’m here for. First stop, I’m thinking, should be Hoover Dam. Big things for us.”

  “Okay.”

  “When we go back out there, when you see Mom and Kanga, act normal. Act like this ain’t the best day of your life.” Dad was having trouble acting normal. He was so excited the butcher knife was quivering, like his hand was laughing silently to itself. I tried to picture Dad hiding in a river, swimming with those hands. I pictured him drowning. He tucked the knife back into his bundle of trousers. “Let’s hug on it, partner.”

  We hugged in the Salvation Army fitting room, a hug I smelled for years to come.

  The next morning at school, I asked the office secretary if I could make a phone call. A private phone call. She gave me a look, but handed over the phone. Then she left to make some copies. I immediately called Gravy Robotics.

  Scratch that. I paused before dialing the number, waiting for a fail-safe mechanism in my programming to prevent me from taking an action that would erase our parents from existence. Yet the longer I waited, the more obvious it became that any fail-safe mechanism in me was linked directly to Kanga’s survival, not Mom and Dad’s. And how certain was I that obsolescence meant destruction? Might Gravy decide to fix Mom and Dad? Or update them? Or have their processors replaced and—

  I dialed the number. I was doing Mom and Dad a favor.

  After school, Kanga and I skipped taking the bus home. I led him to the railroad tracks and showed him how to flatten a penny. It was nearly five o’clock when we got to the apartment. Dad’s new butcher knife sat in the kitchenette sink. Mom and Dad were gone.

  • • •

  Having selected my game-day outfit, I exited the Salvation Army fitting room. I guessed that these clothes had been worn exactly once by a ten-year-old who’d been forced to serve as ring bearer in a wedding. I was hoping for a discount due to Skittles stains on the cummerbund (which I would toss in the trash, along with the bowtie). I went to retrieve Kanga from the sporting goods section, but he was nowhere to be found. I checked other departments as they occurred to me. Electronics? No. Power tools? No. Home decor? No, though I did see an older gentleman completely absorbed in a black-velvet portrait of Elvis Presley. I brisk-walked the aisle where I hoped not to find Kanga, ladies’ lingerie, but he wasn’t there either. I was ready to start searching the parking lot when Kanga appeared in the most unlikely location of all. Menswear. I stood back and watched my brother flip through a shirt rack. He picked a baby-blue shirt, adding it to the clothes already in his arms: yellow corduroys, green socks, red-and-white bowling shoes. Kanga saw me and ran over. “Your bowtie!” he said, snatching it from me. “Can I borrow it?”

  The Directions defined patience as “deciding not to care about something minuscule for the sake of something crucial.” Being late to work was minuscule. Not flying through your windshield after hitting a fire hydrant was crucial. In this same vein, I decided to assent to Kanga’s rather minuscule request and let him have my beige bowtie. Then I let Kanga change into his new outfit right there in the Salvation Army parking lot before we biked to Shimmering Terraces. Pretty minuscule. Finally, at home, I decided to pretend it was also minuscule for Kanga to shut himself in the bathroom and run the sink and flush the toilet for half an hour. Besides, I had something else to do.

  I locked myself in Mom and Dad’s old room. I told myself not to think about Brooke Noon, but she came stampeding through my bowels anyway. Brooke hadn’t acknowledged me once since we’d touched appendages in the Cave skybox. But I’d seen her often. A week ago I had been seated two tables away while Brooke enjoyed lunch with one of her other boyfriends, Timothy Schwartz. Brooke let him eat her chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes because she wasn’t hungry and because last night she’d heard a song in her dad’s car called “Walking in Memphis,” and now it was stuck in her head. No. It was stuck in her body. She opened her laptop right at the lunch table; it was running on battery power. She sang “Walking in Memphis” to Timothy, typing the lyrics as she sang them. Then she said, “No no no!” and “Wait wait wait!” and she sang the song again, using her keyboard percussively, banging the keys, humming the notes. She said to Timothy: “This is your part.” She said: “Sing with me!” and shook her finger at the computer screen where the lyrics were laid out for him. I hated seeing the potatoes on Timothy’s teeth as he sang. And how they nailed it. The eleventh time through, Brooke and Timothy were on fire, and I knew I would always hate the song “Walking in Memphis,” along with how their lunch had ended: Shoes. Knees. Hands. Foreheads.

  I climbed onto Dad’s old dresser. I stood on my tiptoes, loosening a ceiling tile, and found Dad’s secret catalog in its secret spot. It used to be Dad’s; now it was mine. The words were in Mandarin, which I could read easily enough, but the catalog’s main resources were its 459 pictures of the most expensive body parts, perfect body parts, any robot could buy. I loved the female armpits—a swath of flesh in the shape of an iron-on patch—with or without hair, skin of any pigment. I loved the uncircumcised penises. The circumcised penises. The scrotums. I loved page twenty-eight and the word vulva, a word of English interrupting a page full of Mandarin, and I loved the three pictures of that word.

  Most of all, I loved the picture consuming the entire back cover of the catalog: a Chinese scientist holding a woman’s foot: just the foot, with no leg above her precision-crafted ankle, only a loop of loose wire curling out the top, like the flourish of a cursive O. The scientist was kneeling, holding the foot as if it were a hand, and he was asking an invisible woman to marry him.

  I felt my own hand creeping up under my shirt, my index finger drawing a gentle circle around my belly button. I closed my eyes. I imagined Brooke Noon’s foot buried in her shoe. Then my fingers began to open it . . . It. That private place, according to Mom, I was never supposed to share with anyone. Not even Kanga. I’d only ever touched it a few times before now. My fingernails dug into my belly button, breaking the seal at the bottom. I stretched the opening until it was three inches wide. No spilled lubricant. No messy wires. Just a smooth beige plastic plate with three tiny holes.

  My three-pronged outlet.

  The Directions devoted a sheepish paragraph to these outlets, claiming they were strictly for emergencies. Life-and-death situations. Thirty-three children are trapped in a school bus beneath an avalanche of snow, and somebody needs to recharge a flashlight. But I’d found another use.
Mom and Dad had an old alarm clock in their room. I slid its plug into my three-pronged outlet, and time stopped . . .

  . . . and I yanked the plug out, a second later, or maybe a year. There was the Chinese scientist and the fake-looking foot, and I felt a tug of hate, and my fingers were compelled to flip to a personal note inscribed on the inside cover of the catalog, written from Mom to Dad, dated Christmas, the year Kanga and I were switched on:

  So we never get bored

  (as if we ever would!)

  XOXO

  Tanya

  Suddenly I hated the catalog, hated the word vulva, hated imagining Dad trying to say it aloud, as he surely did with Mom, “Vul-va,” and I stuffed the catalog back into its secret spot, my solitude in their room having expired, signaled by the sound of God’s gift to basketball dribbling down the hallway, toward the bedroom door, which he pounded on three times, causing my voice to retort through the hollow wood, “No dribbling in the apartment!”

  “Why is the door locked?” hollered Kanga, and then I heard him spinning my basketball endlessly on his finger. “And why does it smell like something’s burning?”

  9

  KANGA’S FIRST GAME DAY.

  Not only were we dressed like stuffed shirts on our bike ride to school, but Kanga felt the need to be superstitious about it. My brother’s self-imposed rule was this: Once his new black shoes pushed off our driveway, once his feet began to pedal, no part of his body could touch the ground again until he arrived at Hectorville High. Or else. Not that Kanga said this aloud, but, as his bike-riding companion, it was impossible not to notice the pains he took to stay in continuous motion. Braking, coasting, circling—all in an effort to keep his shoes on his pedals. The wild card was the stoplight at Summit and Putnam—which turned green just as we arrived. We flew beneath it with ease.

  Kanga reaped his first cosmic payout in science class. Staci Miles, dressed in her Cheerbird uniform, raised her hand and announced that Stickzilla had asexually produced six eggs in her terrarium last night. Staci’s pronunciation of terrarium had caused Kanga to quake in his seat. Mr. Belt’s reaction was a pragmatic intake of air through his nostrils.

  We gathered around the terrarium as Mr. Belt carefully cupped Stickzilla in his hand, separating her from the special leaf dotted with her eggs, and set her down in the newspaper shreds below. Then he pinched off the leaf.

  “No—” gasped Staci, watching Mr. Belt light a Bunsen burner. Desperately, she grabbed Kanga’s hand, as if he might spring to the eggs’ rescue. “Wait, Mr. Belt!”

  But Kanga just froze, hand-in-hand with Staci, as Mr. Belt fed Stickzilla’s leaf to the flame until all that remained was a blackened stem. He wetted the stem between his lips, then turned to my brother, assessing Kanga’s game-day shirt, which had come untucked. Mr. Belt pushed the baby-blue shirttail down the back of Kanga’s yellow pants. “Kanga,” he said, “for your sake, for the team’s sake, get your game face on.”

  It was then that Staci finally let go of my brother to cover her eyes as she wept.

  “Everybody needs to get their game face on.” Mr. Belt straightened Kanga’s bowtie. “And a game uniform. You’ll need one of those before you call yourself a Bird. Get your game uniform from Brooke.”

  “Who’s that?” blurted Kanga, shocking Mr. Belt with his suddenly aggressive tone. “Who’s Brooke?”

  “Are you joking? She’s the manager, Kanga. You and Brooke have a date after school in the equipment room. Don’t keep a lady waiting.”

  Perhaps Kanga’s game-day clothes had given rise to this new attitude. This new swagger. Dare I say, this new arrogance. Throughout the day, Kanga took every opportunity to look at himself. A window. A trophy case. A mirror inside a girl’s locker. Not only that: Kanga raised his hand in social studies.

  “Kanga? Really?” said Mrs. Galvin, perplexed.

  “The answer is canoes made of cedar bark.”

  “Right!” she said, and added, “Mr. Livery.”

  Mr. Livery indeed. When the final bell rang, Kanga strutted down the hallway near the Cave, anticipating yet another new article of clothing: his game uniform. I followed behind. Brooke sat beside the sports equipment room door, typing away on her laptop. She also wore a button-down shirt and tie for game day, and had spruced herself even further with a black vest dotted ad nauseam with red hearts. My fan clicked on.

  “I want number thirty-two,” said Kanga.

  Brooke ignored him. Her face jiggled as she typed, the chubs of fat below her eyes, the things people called “cheekbones” but that in robots are tiny pockets of air. I imagined puncturing Brooke’s cheekbones with a toothpick and sucking out whatever was inside.

  “I want Magic’s number,” Kanga said. “I want number thirty-two.”

  The equipment room door swung open, and there was James Botty. He held Kanga’s brilliant green jersey, showing its white block numbers. Three. Two. Magic’s number. Kanga reached for it. James yanked it away and headed past us toward the school exit.

  “Where’s James going?” Kanga demanded. “Where’s he taking my jersey?”

  Brooke finally looked at him. “You’re upset,” she said, “but how upset are you? Somewhat upset or only pretty upset?” Then she added: “Or are you extremely upset?”

  Kanga bolted after James.

  “He’s not upset at you, Brooke,” I explained. “He’s upset at—”

  She stared through me, like I was a blank computer screen. “Very upset. That’s what I meant to say.” She resumed typing.

  I held a rewritten copy of my science fiction story, “Buford’s Dilemma.” It was for her. I would have preferred Brooke to read the same draft Mr. Jacobowhite had adorned with his compliments, but Kanga’s name was written at the top. This new draft was by Darryl Livery. But I froze. I could feel the grease leaking through my fingertips, ruining the pages . . .

  “Bye, Brooke.” I crumpled the story into my pocket and headed after Kanga.

  • • •

  The hill behind Hectorville High School had to be at least twice as tall as the school itself. There were boulders mixed in with the dirt, tripping us as we climbed, and random patches of tall grass blowing in the wind. Every few steps my shiny black dress shoes sank into some mud. The rest of the Birds were waiting for us at the top of the hill, standing around the birch tree like the attendants at a funeral, their dress clothes slashing in the wind. Only James Botty smiled, one hand resting on the handlebars of a battered red bike. There was no chain. There were no pedals.

  “You want number thirty-two?” he asked Kanga. James stepped away, offering the bike as if it were a prize. It was aimed down the backside of the hill—a slalom run around rocks and crevasses, leading to a plywood jump on the bank of Culver’s Creek.

  Kanga climbed atop the bike. He grabbed both handlebars.

  “It’s freezing up here,” someone said.

  “Kanga. Tell James he’s crazy and let’s go.”

  “This tradition sucks.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Look,” said Rye, calmly approaching Kanga. “You sat on the bike. That’s good enough. That’s all any of us did. You’ll still get your jersey—”

  “After I spit on it,” said James.

  “Yeah.” Rye winced at the memory. Then he pointed at the birch tree. “It says everything you need to know right there.” Carved into the white bark was a single name:

  james

  The players nearest the tree bowed their heads to give the carving its due respect. “James gets to spit on your jersey, Kanga, because he’s the only one who’s ever gone down the hill. He did it during summer basketball camp. But spit washes out.”

  “Crazy idiot.”

  “Who in their right mind would do that jump?”

  “James did it.”

  “I know.”

  “Man, he just went off that jump and—”

  “He was, like, in midair, over the creek, and he just bails off the bike. Just tosses it into the
water. Ka-splash!”

  “He did a battle roll on the other side. He was bleeding, but you know James.”

  “All right. All right,” said Rye, waving his arms, shivering. “We all know how this goes. Kanga gets off the bike. James spits on the jersey. We get on the bus. We kill DePew tonight. Come on, Kanga. Hop off the bike.”

  “Wait,” said Kanga, staring down the hill. “James does what to my jersey?”

  Nobody opened his mouth. I imagined the impending reality of my brother lifting his dress shoes from the earth, then getting smaller and smaller as he flew down the hill on the bike, and the aftermath: a thousand plastic pieces reflecting from the bottom of the icy creek.

  “You have to understand,” Rye finally said. “James actually went down the hill. We saw it happen. If James had chickened out too, well, there wouldn’t be any spitting at all. We’d all be equal. But that wasn’t how it happened, so just make your choice and do it quick.”

  Kanga stared down the hill.

  Some memories are part of you, whether you like them or not, hovering like hands at your belly, ready to dig in with their sharp fingernails. Here was one: James Botty dropping a glob of green saliva between the 3 and the 2 of Kanga’s jersey, bunching the jersey into a ball, and firing it at the side of my brother’s head. But if I keep the memory going, I’m even more shocked by what I see next: Kanga unwadding the jersey, wiping James’s spit onto his new dress pants, and pulling the jersey on over his dress shirt. If I listen closely to the recording in my processor, I can hear something click inside Kanga at that moment, a tiny switch being flicked, one that instantly changed my brother’s focus in life. Basketball, he seemed to realize, forgetting all about James Botty’s spit. The whole point is basketball.