The Obsoletes

by Simeon Mills

  “Come on,” he said, heading down the hallway. Through the open door, I heard him leap down the flight of stairs, landing with two feet.

  The next thing I knew I was outside, looking around at everything—the bare trees, the smoke trickling from the apartment building roof, the crown of snow sitting atop the mailboxes. Then it occurred to me that Kanga would surely nail me with a snowball. My hands flew to cover my face. I scanned the parking lot for him.

  He was already walking around the building, shortening his stride, creating a set of foot holes for me to follow him. He carried a shovel.

  • • •

  We were in somebody’s woods. Their garbage was strewn throughout the trees and shrubs, as if shot from a cannon. Asphalt shingles. Rusted appliances older than me and Kanga. Scrap metal tied into bundles. Plastic tubing. Kanga made tracks through the debris without comment.

  The towering deciduous trees abruptly gave way to rows of pines, spaced apart like wide rows of corn. The pines watched us, their scent hanging thinly in the air like poison. Kanga ignored the trees, punching more holes in the snow, which was speckled with pine needles and twigs. He stepped into a pile of brown capsules. I saw deer-hoof holes too, zigzagging through the pines, as if a pair of different brothers had come walking before us on stilts.

  Kanga took a sharp turn, pushing between two pines.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “We’re almost there.”

  On the other side of the pines we joined an existing trail of shoeprints. I guessed these to be Kanga’s from a previous trek. Due to the incredible distance between each print, I imagined my brother bounding through the trees like a deer.

  “There.” He pointed toward a shadowy glade and slowed his steps, crunching the snow more quietly. He whispered, “There’s a tire nailed to a tree over there.”

  I saw it. A car tire. Kanga’s previous shoeprints had trampled the snow flat. I stayed back as Kanga approached the tree.

  He stuck the shovel upright in the snow, freeing both hands, but he did not touch the tire. He just peered down into the bottom of it. “You’re the robot expert. Come over here and tell me what this is.”

  I got just close enough to peek into the belly of the tire. There was a white tube at the bottom, a couple of feet long, bent slightly in the middle, like somebody had tried to break the tube over a knee. My processor reimagined the thing as a bloated earthworm. Maybe an eel. Or—

  You’re the robot expert.

  An arm.

  But the arm had no hand. If it ever did, it had been sliced off at the wrist. On the other end, the arm was chopped through the bicep. I examined these end cuts, leaning my head into the tire, but not daring to reach down and touch the arm. The inner workings of the arm, the tubing and wires on either end, had turned gray from exposure and were speckled black with mildew. I saw no pink lubricant leaking out, just droplets of dark sludge.

  “It was a woman’s arm,” said Kanga. “Right?”

  “Yes.” Somehow I was certain. “It was a woman’s.”

  “But was it ever attached to a woman? Because maybe it was just a replacement arm, like from a catalog. Maybe somebody ordered the arm through the mail, and it came, and they took the arm out of the box and put it out here, without ever attaching it to—”

  “It was definitely attached to a woman.”

  “You’re sure?”

  No. I wasn’t scientifically sure. I saw no scars. No creases on the inner elbow from years of hard labor. Besides, any such markings would have been smoothed away by prolonged exposure to the elements. But I knew. I imagined the arm hanging from the shoulder of a woman’s T-shirt on a spring day—shivering from a sudden breeze, being rubbed by the hand of its twin arm. Conjuring up this hypothetical woman forced my processor to involuntarily adopt the sick characteristics of the man (it was definitely a man) who had delighted in the removal of her arm—or perhaps her hand first, then the rest of her arm—and its placement in the woods. “How did you find this?”

  “I just found it.”

  “You just found it?”

  “I was walking around. I don’t know, I just got this feeling. I felt like I was going to find something. And that’s when I found it. Now I wish I never had.”

  We stared at the arm.

  Kanga said, “We have to bury her.”

  The sun was setting and the woods were almost completely dark, but my brother attacked the snow with his shovel, sending gray ice everywhere. He was a machine, jabbing the blade downward, quickly reaching the frozen earth beneath the snow.

  “Kanga,” I said, but he didn’t stop, not until the hole at the base of the tree was half the length of the shovel. Then he took a break, sitting back in the pile of snow and dirt he’d created, his sweatshirt grease-darkened around the neck and in the armpits, steam drifting from the top of his head. He just stared at the tire. He got to his feet again, reached into the tire, and lifted out the arm.

  It glowed in his hands, reflecting a moon that wasn’t in the sky. Kanga cradled the arm near his belly, unwilling to drop it into the pit he’d just dug, and, suddenly, I wanted to tell him about Brooke Noon. Tell him that I knew the feeling of a human touch. Shoes, knees, hands, foreheads. Did Kanga even notice Brooke had disappeared from school? Did he notice I was in love? I wanted to tell him. Suddenly, it was the most important—

  The arm flinched from Kanga’s grasp. He bobbled it from hand to hand then gripped it tight, his fingers squishing into the withered skin, causing black slime to squirt from both ends. I screamed, I’m embarrassed to say, despite the fact that nothing could be more natural for this robotic arm than responding to Kanga’s stimulus. My brother held the thing out for us to observe. It flexed, sleepily, appearing to look back and forth, from me to Kanga, with one of its black mouths.

  “She’s weak,” he whispered. “But she’s not dead. I wish she were. That would make it easier.”

  I pictured us back at the apartment, sitting on the couch with the arm between us. Our pet. “Bury it,” I said. “The movements are just reflexes. The woman this thing belonged to, the actual person with a processor, she’s somewhere else. This piece of her doesn’t have any thoughts. It has no feelings.”

  Kanga frowned at the arm. It was undulating in his hands, a friendly, gentle motion, almost like it was trying to dance with him.

  “Bury it now, Kanga.”

  He blinked and widened his eyes, waking from hypnosis, and dropped the arm into the hole.

  It just lay there, relaxed, as if having found a comfy bed, until Kanga started refilling the hole with dirt and snow. This sent the arm into a frenzy, writhing against the sides of the hole, trying to worm its way out.

  Kanga shoveled faster. I aided him by kicking snow into the hole with the toe of my sneaker. When the hole was packed tight, Kanga jumped on top of it several times. He stood back and smacked the top with the flat edge of the shovel. “Let’s go, before—”

  Neither of us looked over our shoulders as we walked quickly through the pines, but I kept my ears focused behind me for any trace of the arm slithering after us. I heard nothing. Kanga was in front of me, leading the way, and the woods were silent. I hadn’t felt this close to my brother all winter break. I said, “We know Mandarin.”

  “What?”

  “We know Mandarin, the Chinese language. It’s programmed into us, even if we never get a chance to use it. That’s what The Directions says. I think it’s there just in case we ever need to talk to a Chinese scientist or engineer—”

  “Cut it out, Darryl. I’m too tired for this. I don’t know Chinese.”

  “Think about a word in English, any word, and then wonder what the word sounds like in Mandarin. Try it. The Mandarin word will just come to you. It’s crazy. Try it!”

  “I don’t know Mandarin, and I don’t want to know Mandarin. So shut up.”

  “But you do know Mandarin.”

  He kept walking, ignoring me. We were stepping through the junk now.

/>   “And I was thinking,” I continued. “We need to be able to signal each other in secret if something ever happens at school, or, I don’t know, anywhere in public. We could use Mandarin as part of our secret signal.”

  “Darryl—”

  “So if you’re ever in trouble, just say cù. That’s the Mandarin word for vinegar. You say cù, and I’ll know something’s wrong.”

  “And nobody will think I’m crazy when I just start speaking Mandarin?”

  “Nobody’s going to know it’s Mandarin because it’s just one word. Cù, and you could pretend to sneeze while you say it. Cù! Okay? Cù! Go ahead and say it. Cù!”

  “I’m not saying it.”

  “And we’ll use a different word when everything is okay, when you’re fine, and you don’t need any help at all. Then you’ll say năi. That’s the Mandarin word for milk. You know, năi, milk, and that’ll be easy to remember because it’s your favorite drink.”

  “No it isn’t! You’re gross!”

  “What are you talking about? You love milk.” I could see the glow of Shimmering Terraces at the edge of the woods.

  “Năi means breast milk,” said Kanga. “Human breast milk. I drink niúnăi. Cow milk. Get it right, Darryl. God.”

  • • •

  Christmas morning, Kanga opened a new pair of green-and-white Converse Cons. Ma’s shoes. The exact pair every kid in China would have cut off his arm to find under the Christmas tree. My brother buried his nose in the sneakers and took a deep sniff. Gravy Robotics had somehow even known his feet had grown during the basketball season. Kanga was now a size fourteen. He strung the plump laces through the eyelets and put the shoes on his feet. Stepping gingerly around the apartment, Kanga seemed surprised by the stiffness of the new high-tops.

  “You look incredible,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He grinned. Then the idea struck him to put on his game uniform with the new sneakers. He jumped to his bedroom to change.

  My gift was still sitting on the living room floor. Ten blank videocassettes. Um, thanks, Gravy, I guess. I slid a cassette into my RCA Pro Edit camcorder. When Kanga emerged from his room, I focused my eyepiece on him and pressed Record.

  He didn’t notice me at first; he was looking at himself in the dark reflection of the kitchenette window. I recorded him making a basketball cut to the sink. Then he jumped and tapped his head on a ceiling tile. Kanga closed his eyes, jogging in place, and I knew his processor was in the Cave. He pretended to dribble. He pretended to shoot. He raised his arms triumphantly, then stood still, basking in the cheer of the imaginary crowd, his throat mimicking their sound: “Haaaaaaaaaaaa.”

  It was a perfect Christmas morning video. Almost. It needed a little something else to stamp this moment in time. I knew just what to say. “Nǚshìmen xiānshēngmen, wéiyī de Kanga Livery!”

  Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Kanga Livery!

  Now we’d have everlasting proof of the best Christmas ever.

  “Shut it off.”

  He was still in the frame, so I kept filming.

  “God!” he said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I just wanted to record you—”

  “Shut it off, Darryl.” He was hugging his shoulders, blocking the number on his jersey, embarrassed. “I said no Mandarin! I can’t understand it, and I hate it!”

  “Okay.” I stopped filming. “I thought it would be our inside joke—”

  “You’re the joke!” He grabbed the camcorder and ejected the videocassette. “If you ever say another word of Mandarin”—he shoved the camcorder at me, keeping the cassette for himself—“I’ll never talk to you again!” He charged into his bedroom, slammed the door, and locked it.

  A word crept into my processor then. An ugly, familiar word. It was the first time in my life I ever felt truly obsolete. It wouldn’t be the last.

  Kanga stayed in his room for the rest of winter break.

  12

  SHE WAS BACK.

  As if nothing had happened. Just sitting there in art class, listening to Mrs. Asquith list the characteristics of cubism, writing them down on a piece of paper. (Her computer was nowhere to be seen.) She was different—different from the different she used to be. She was in band now, a clarinetist. Her eyebrows had gotten longer and wilder. The rest of her had settled down. She was slower. Quieter. The stomping that had gotten her from place to place now exhausted her. Her hands hung heavily at her sides when not in use.

  I was too frightened to approach her. Winter break had scrambled my confidence to interact with humans. Even walking down the school hallways suffocated me. Everyone seemed bigger than before, fattened by the gear they’d received for Christmas, stopping and posing at unpredictable moments to show themselves off. They had that smell of new plastic, the girls with their ankle weights, the boys with their wallets containing an impossible number of flaps and sleeves. Both sexes had molted their outer layers and now wore red-and-black zebra-printed sweatpants and Starter jackets emblazoned with Bulls and Pistons and Pacers. But the winner of Christmas was senior Zandy Martin, who had installed her Remington Lightweight Facial Tanner on the upper shelf of her locker, so she could catch some rays between classes and blind approaching enemies.

  I continued to observe Brooke from a distance. I was watching her when James Botty stole her clarinet, inciting in Brooke a regression to her explosive behavior. It happened near her locker, with a crowd of students surrounding. James held the instrument delicately with his fingertips, then shoved one finger up his nose and scooped out a nailful of snot. “GROSS!” everyone shouted as James strung the snot across the keys, and Brooke became a toddler. Screaming. Punching. Kicking. Principal Moyle had to swoop in to confiscate the clarinet, which looked like an expensive pen in our principal’s huge hand. “Do we need to make a phone call?” Mrs. Moyle said to Brooke. “To a certain young lady’s father?”

  These words sedated her immediately. Brooke sat on the floor, leaned against her locker, and closed her eyes in pretend sleep.

  Principal Moyle motioned for everybody to back away from the crime scene. Get to class! she mouthed, then gently tucked the clarinet under Brooke’s arm.

  It was now or never. I had to prove to Brooke that I was different from everybody else. That what James did to her clarinet was not funny—not to me, anyway. That I’d been thinking about her nonstop since she’d disappeared. That I was still her boyfriend. Assuming she still wanted me to be.

  But as I approached her, the right words played hide-and-seek in my processor, and all I could whisper was, “You okay, Brooke?”

  Her eyes snapped open. “You.”

  “It’s me, Darryl. Your boyfri—”

  “That story you gave me. It was all wrong. Totally unrealistic. I could barely finish it.”

  “My story?” In a fraction of a second, I reread “Buford’s Dilemma” twelve times inside my processor and arrived at the conclusion that Yes, it was very unrealistic. But I couldn’t just give up. The story was supposed to connect me and Brooke, not drive us apart. So I offered this measured defense: “I know it’s a little unrealistic. I mean, it’s fiction. Science fiction, if you want to be technical. So I guess it makes sense that parts of my story seem unrealistic to you, Brooke, but—”

  “I know what science fiction is. It’s supposed to have real characters, people that act in real ways, even if the stuff that happens to them is not real. God! If I have to explain this to you, then you need to go back to kindergarten. The parents in your story are fake. Nobody talks like that. Especially while eating tacos. Besides, there were three spelling errors, two glaring grammatical gaffes, one plot hole, and you have a tendency to run on.”

  “Are you breaking up with me?”

  “Your descriptions were okay. I laughed. Once.”

  My body felt like it had been suddenly disassembled and pieced back together again. I was a new person. Someone who made her laugh, a fact now insc
ribed on the “Greatest Lifetime Achievement” plaque in my processor. “What part made you laugh?”

  “The part at the dentist’s office. You know. When Buford steals the drill when the dentist’s back is turned?” She emitted a chuckle—then tried to pretend it was a cough. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

  “Am I still your boyfriend?”

  “Only if you promise to never use three similes in the same sentence again.”

  My exhaust fan was whirring. I nodded and attempted a particularly difficult smile, one that conveyed equal degrees of confidence and aloofness. It was time to go for broke. “So where did you disappear to last month, Brooke?”

  At that, she hopped to her feet and drove her knee into my own, a painful mockery of our beautiful moment in the skybox. She leaned in close. “The dentist.” She marched off.

  I remained frozen in place, floating slightly above the tile floor. But my joy was stifled when I noticed Kanga across the hallway smirking at me. It was clear he’d watched my interaction with Brooke, but from the other side. James Botty’s side. Since returning to school, I’d seen little of my brother. He was always somewhere near James, studying the bully’s every move. And now James and Kanga knew about me and Brooke.

  Them and us. That had always meant me and Kanga against the world.

  Now I felt further from him than ever.

  Later that day, I saw James approach a girl at the drinking fountain, Melissa Holloway, who had completed puberty more thoroughly than any other person in ninth grade. She was a half-foot taller than James and a hundred pounds heavier. Melissa clutched the drinking fountain in terror, ingesting a fish tank of water as James repeated to the back of her head: “Jabba the Hutt! Jabba the Hutt! Jabba the Hutt!” to the laughter of a gathered crowd. Even Kanga laughed. Then everyone dispersed, and James led Melissa behind a pop machine and kissed her. Kanga kept lookout from a nearby cafeteria chair. When it was over, Melissa straightened up, red-faced, not daring to look at him. James said, “Get out of here, Jabba.” She disappeared. He turned to my brother. “See what I mean?”