by Simeon Mills
“Get the toaster!” someone screamed.
“Why don’t you take my job first, robot?” another asked.
“Die!”
“Toaster, you look at me! I dare you!”
“We don’t want you here!”
“Crush him!”
“Get back to China!”
“Cut that crap out,” said the Ceiling Fan. “China? You want to send him back to China? That’s just what he wants! This ain’t some silly game. He ain’t a person, like you or me. This thing lied to us. This thing endangered us. This thing—”
“Wŏmen dōushì dōngxī,” said Kanga.
We’re all things.
The Ceiling Fan closed his eyes. He sucked in air, long and loud through his teeth, the entire crowd waiting for his response. “We’re gonna break this thing into a million bits.” He swung his finger around his head, pointing to everyone surrounding the court. “We’re all going do it!”
The crowd screamed its approval.
“TIME OUT!” hollered Mr. Belt, stepping onto the court, bringing his hands together in a T above his head. He walked up beside Kanga but kept his eyes on the Ceiling Fan. “We coaches have a saying, Simms. I should’ve taught it to you sooner. ‘In loco parentis—’ ”
“BOOOOOOO!” somebody yelled.
Mr. Belt continued: “It means we have to take care of these boys, no matter who they are, in place of their parents. I don’t see Kanga’s mom or dad—”
“Because he doesn’t have ’em!” interrupted another.
“As coaches, Simms, we are contractually obligated to ask ourselves, would we be doing this—whatever it is we’re doing on this court—if Kanga Livery were our own son?”
The crowd screamed for Mr. Belt to get off the court, but the Ceiling Fan waved a hand for silence. “Let me see if I got this straight. You want me to pretend I got a son that’s a robot?”
“I want you to pretend your son is Kanga Livery.”
The Ceiling Fan grinned. “Then I’m putting the boy up for adoption.”
The spectators erupted in laughter and approval.
“See, Belt? I got a whole town of people just dying to take him off my hands for me. Isn’t that right everybody? Scream if you want to be this toaster’s daddy tonight!”
Mr. Belt wobbled as the wave of sound crashed against him. He took a final look at Kanga. I read the words on his lips: If you got any big’uns left, Livery, now’s the time. He stumbled off the court and the crowd quieted down, eager for the Ceiling Fan to give them the chance to destroy rather than just cheer.
“You people are why I love this town. You came prepared tonight. You thought ahead, brought your toasters, your radios and TVs, and for that you will be rewarded. Everybody’s going to get their turn. However, some of us have endured this robot more than others, every day for an entire basketball season. These fine boys here.” The Ceiling Fan gestured to the basketball team. “James Botty had this robot sniffed out from the beginning. You got the honors, James.”
James picked up his toaster. He tossed it from hand to hand. “I ain’t wasting my throw now. I’m gonna get him when he least expects it. That’s how me and Kanga go, huh, friend?”
“Fair enough,” said the Ceiling Fan.
“What’s wrong with that kid?” somebody asked. “Kill the toaster! I’m ready! Choose me!”
“When’s my turn to smear some junk?”
“Yeah, let’s go!”
“Everybody calm down,” ordered the Ceiling Fan. “I got a whole team that’s ready.” He stared at his players. “Next man up.”
None of the Birds stepped forward. They shuffled in place, holding their toasters with just the tips of their fingers.
The Ceiling Fan shook his head. “You’ll regret this day. The day I gave you the opportunity to go first, the day you turned coward. Hell, my senior year, if we had a toaster pinned down like this, I would’ve fought my best friend just to—”
Rye stepped toward Kanga, his tiny eyeballs rolling in their sockets, worthless. He blew snot from his nose then sniffed at the air. He lurched toward my brother, palming his toaster as he went.
“Here we go!” cheered the Ceiling Fan. “Give him some of that persistence, Rye-Guy!”
Rye stopped directly above Kanga, squinted down at him. He used the fingers of his free hand to make a telescope, zeroing in on the back of Kanga’s head, a point-blank target. Rye raised his toaster and the crackle got in my eyes. I couldn’t watch.
“HEY!” the humans all screamed. “You can’t do that!”
I looked: The toaster was no longer in Rye’s hands—but neither was it embedded in the back of Kanga’s head. Mr. Belt had the toaster now. His boyish, mischievous expression told me he had sprinted onto the court and plucked the toaster away from the big man at the last second, an impromptu Statue of Liberty play. But now that the toaster was in his possession, Mr. Belt had nowhere to go with it. He was trapped, just like Kanga. The crowd taunted the coach, jabbing their fingers at him and howling. Several people raised their toasters, as if to begin the bombardment.
“Catch that son of a bitch,” ordered the Ceiling Fan, “and get him off my court.”
Thus began a farcical game of tag, Rye lumbering after the red-faced loco parentis. Mr. Belt’s loafers slapped the cement like clown shoes as he ran circles around the Ceiling Fan’s car, delighting the small children in the crowd. But then Rye caught the coach’s arm. Rye made a fist—everyone gasped—and clubbed Mr. Belt on the head. The toaster dropped from his hands, and the spectators shuddered, their brains rejecting the sight of a teenager assaulting an adult so brazenly. Rye bear-hugged his dazed coach and hauled him off the court.
Just then a blender went spinning through the air, cord wagging behind it. Its asymmetrical weight caused the thing to dip, as if hit by a sudden gust of wind, and smash ten feet shy of Kanga, though several of the blender’s shards of glass skittered against his bare knees.
The Ceiling Fan squinted into the crowd, unsure if he should berate the thrower or relent to the mob’s restless energy. “Fine!” He threw up his hands. “Hectorville, you’ve been patient. Now all of you! Make that robot pay!”
My brother didn’t budge.
From all directions toasters took to the air. Black toasters. White toasters. Chrome toasters. Some were so shiny they reflected a momentary misshapen image of the host from which they flew. My brother remained on all fours. His head was bowed. “Run,” I whispered, and it wasn’t until the toasters were mere inches from his head that Kanga became Magic Johnson. Scratch that. Not Magic exactly, besides the fact that he seemed to disappear from sight, allowing the devices to crash cleanly through him and shatter on the court. He’d actually become Ben Johnson, the Olympian, exploding from his four-point stance in the hundred-meter final. Like that sprinter, Kanga arrived so instantaneously on the other side of the court that he had to have cheated.
“What?”
“Huh?”
“Where’d he—?”
“How’d he get over there?”
“Damned robot!”
“Gimme another toaster. I’ll slow him down!”
Kanga had awoken. He was up. He had escaped the initial wave of appliances, but there remained a thick human wall surrounding the entire court, and most of their ammunition had yet to be thrown. Those still wielding weapons took careful, deliberate aim. The Ceiling Fan crossed his arms and watched my brother make a slow zigzag through the fishbowl of space.
“Kill him!”
“Break him in two!”
A man standing courtside rifled his toaster at Kanga.
Kanga dodged it.
A shower radio zoomed toward his head.
Kanga swerved from its path.
They came one after another, and my brother leapt every which way, ducking and weaving from the incoming assault. The court was filling with debris.
“Damn!” the crowd gasped when a toaster barely missed his shoulder.
“R
eload!” urged the Ceiling Fan. “Get some of these toasters and throw them again!”
Three brave spectators dared to run onto the court, snatch up a toaster, and run back.
Kanga continued to swim through the barrage of projectiles somehow untouched, contorting his body with a preternatural awareness of each toaster’s corkscrewed approach. The things didn’t fly straight. Some nose-dived the second they left a human’s hand; others appeared to be off course at first, only to veer toward my brother at the last second. He dodged them all. But this dance couldn’t last forever. His battery had to be running on fumes, and the crowd was getting used to throwing these particular projectiles. They were learning Kanga’s pattern of movement, their tosses inching closer and closer to plunking him. If Kanga didn’t vary his method, somebody was bound to get lucky and knock him off balance, and, in a blink, my brother would be buried.
I was inside the enemy, a fake head among the thousand others, all thinking with the same infected brain. Did these “people” even notice the crackle anymore? Or was it a mosquito mind, immune to its own horrible buzz? Another toaster missed Kanga, and I watched the multitude of heads shake furiously. Except for one. Except for her. The late arrival in the back of the crowd. Another outlier, like me.
Brooke Noon.
She should’ve been anywhere but here. The pink backpack on her shoulders was leaking oil. Brooke! Did she realize her parents were standing right in front of her? Flee, Brooke, flee! Instead, she glared at me. Brooke was adept at communicating with looks, and I didn’t need an interpreter: Why are you standing around, Darryl? THIS is why you stood me up? To watch your brother get killed? BORING. Do something, you chicken, before I have to do it myself . . .
But do what? I still had my toaster cradled to my belly. Should I chuck it at each human, one by one? That would never work. There were too many of them for a conventional fight. And whom was I even fighting? It wasn’t the humans. Their warm bodies were simply the vessel for the Ceiling Fan’s depravity—but it wasn’t him either. The crackle. It had been stoked by the Ceiling Fan, and now it was raging on its own. The crackle was my true opponent, the web of wires connecting these otherwise independent minds. How could I snip every wire? They would just grow back. What could I do?
Since it was impossible to silence the crackle, I would just have to get louder than it.
My entire life I’d been passing the ball to Kanga. From Mom forcing me to share it, back when I was still the basketball kid, to being his rebounder on this very court. Little did I know that all that passing had been preparation for this moment . . .
“Kangaroo!” I called, but it wasn’t my voice. It was Dad’s. And when my brother looked in my direction, I cocked the toaster in my new hand to heave it toward him, mouthing the words: “Layup!”
Kanga caught the toaster in stride. He knew better than to stop. He flipped the thing from hand to hand as he ran with it.
“Is that your mother?” somebody hollered, but most in the crowd seemed unnerved by the sight of Kanga holding his own toaster. Was he taunting them? Was he actually going to throw it at someone? Was he keeping it to use as a shield? As he jogged from one end of the court to the other, the crackle raised in pitch around him, stressing the brains of the closest spectators.
“Layup!” I shouted again as Dad—the word wussy caught in my throat. “Layup, son! Show ’em what you got!”
It was risky, shouting encouragement to Kanga, but the humans didn’t seem to notice me. They were too focused on my brother and the weapon in his hands.
But it wasn’t a weapon—not like they imagined. On the next trip under a basket, Kanga reached the toaster high and casually flicked it against the backboard, like I’d seen him do thousands of times. It fell cleanly through the hoop. A layup.
“AHHH!” the crowd grunted in frustration. He was taunting them. Everyone narrowed their eyes at Kanga zooming around the court. A group of young men counted down from three and launched their toasters in unison—a plan Kanga must have seen coming, as he leapt seven feet in the air while the toasters flew harmlessly beneath his sneakers—one of which destroyed a headlight on the Ceiling Fan’s car. Everyone held their breath, waiting for the huge man to berate the reckless thrower. But the Ceiling Fan’s scowl was fixed solely on Kanga.
My brother landed, and his hand dipped below his knees to scoop up another toaster.
“Jump shot, boy!”
He carried it across midcourt, came to a jump stop at the elbow, briefly sized up his shot, then tossed it up . . . his aim looked horrible, at least a foot to the right . . . but as the toaster spun, it fishtailed left . . . and rattled down through the hoop.
The crowd was all but silent. For several laps, nobody threw a toaster, or even raised it above shoulder level. They all just watched. “Three!” Dad’s voice rang out, and Kanga floated up a third shot from behind the three-point line, his toaster zigzagging through the air before exploding against the back of the rim, its pieces falling through the netting. In response, several humans went so far as to nudge the person next to them. Others were confused by the turn of events. Shaken. They itched their necks, unsure what to do with the steam inside. Then the children got to work. They took over my job of encouraging my brother and began counting Kanga’s shots. At first, it was a scattered handful of grade-schoolers, perhaps not even aware that their mouths were registering what their eyes were seeing: “. . . fooooour . . .” they whispered, “. . . fiiiiiiiiiiiive . . .” But with each number, their voices expanded in volume and enthusiasm. “. . . SIIIIIIIIIIIX! . . .”
If Kanga were to miss a shot, the spell would break.
But he wasn’t missing. Not tonight.
He was making.
I had seen my brother in this kind of trance before, but the crowd hadn’t. They leaned forward as Kanga jump-stopped at the NBA three-point distance, raised his toaster above his head, and released it toward the hoop, his fingers tickling the air. Kanga didn’t watch his shot fly, a bloated bird bobbing through the air, or wait for it to splash through the rim, or even acknowledge the children’s roar when it did, “TEEEEEEEEEEEN!” He just kept circling the court, making his way to the opposite hoop, scanning the ground for another toaster to launch . . .
Robots aren’t known for their spontaneity. I wasn’t, anyway. Before taking any action, I always needed a plan. And a backup plan, and a plan C, and an escape plan, should any of my initial plans implode. So imagine my surprise when I stepped from the crowd onto the basketball court. When I knelt and scooped up a toaster. When I called out, “Brother!”
Kanga looked at me with shock—then joy, then confusion—but I didn’t give him time to process any of these emotions.
“Catch!”
He caught the toaster I threw to him.
He shot it.
“ELEEEEEEEVEN!” the children responded.
There was no plan. No target outcome. I’d run no numbers before becoming Kanga’s rebounder—nor would I, until our shootaround was over. The only number that mattered was the one that grew each time the kids yelled.
“TWEEEEEEEEEELVE!”
I was slower on my feet than Kanga, sometimes having to kneel and dig through the shattered remains to find an appropriate toaster for him to shoot. My passes were haphazard, to say the least. But we found a rhythm, and Kanga’s baskets seemed somehow more impressive after the toasters had come from me.
The children began cheering me on.
Kanga started launching toasters from farther away.
He swished his twentieth shot from near midcourt, and I spread my arms like an airplane and flew around the entire court, ending with a high five for my brother. Emboldened, I scooped up a toaster and tossed it to him behind the back. Kanga canned the next shot, and this time the children and adults erupted: “TWENTY-OOOOONE!”
I punched the air with unbridled joy, jumping as high as I could, screaming. Brooke! Are you still watching? Here I am! Living entirely in the moment—
Which ended when a toaster nailed me in the head, somersaulting me to the cement.
“Got him,” announced the Ceiling Fan. I was flat on the ground, staring at his car. He’d climbed down and was now advancing toward me. “I thought we exterminated this one, but they’re like cockroaches, always coming back.” He snatched up another toaster, twisting it in his huge hands. “This was supposed to be a good time out here, but it’s turning into a chore. Nobody’s taking this seriously. Nobody but me.”
Kanga stepped between me and the Ceiling Fan. I could feel warm air hissing from the back of my head. I had no idea if the rest of my body was damaged. I didn’t even try to move. There was nowhere to crawl.
“Looks like Kanga wants to go first,” said the Ceiling Fan. “I’m happy to adjust my schedule.” Without breaking his stride, he raised his toaster, ready to smash it down on my brother.
Which was the exact reason I usually had a plan. Because the person with the plan was the person who could do the saving. Me saving Kanga. But now the roles had been flipped; I needed to be rescued. Kanga had no plan for that. He was all alone, staring up at the Ceiling Fan’s toaster, which was streaking toward his face, when the Ceiling Fan balked.
Because Kanga wasn’t alone.
James Botty was there. “You ain’t touching him,” said James, standing in front of my brother on his tiptoes. There was still a toaster in his hands, and James looked ready to use it.
“Gone soft?” asked the Ceiling Fan. “Or am I looking at another one of them?”
“You ain’t ever killed a robot,” growled James. “You ain’t ever had to live with it.”
“That’s right. I’m not as lucky as you. I’ve been waiting my whole life for this, and now I got a benchwarmer standing in my way. You want to atone for your past deeds, James? You want to keep one of these greasy liars for a pet? You can have that busted one down there. But I’m taking Kanga.”