“You're asking me?” She shouts to make herself heard over the fans. “I’m not the one who just stood there and swallowed that bullshit. When have you ever backed down from a fight?”
He dismisses her question with a wave of a hand. “It’s a fucking elementary school. You knew they were gonna freak out.”
She strides down the hall, far enough that the hum of the fans fades to a dull roar, then turns to face him. “Are you seriously defending them? You? Mr. All-Authority-is-Illegitimate?”
“No, I just—” He exhales. He’d thought this was a test. But apparently she’d expected him to come out swinging? “Look, I am trying not to embarrass you.”
She laughs. “Oh, please. If I was worried about being embarrassed, you wouldn’t be here.” She offers a curt nod as the couple who had been behind them in line scoot past, giving them the widest possible berth in the corridor. “I am, like... so far beyond giving a shit what anyone else thinks.”
“And the kids? Did you think about what’s good for them?”
“Only every second of every day of my life.” She exhales something between a laugh and a weary sigh. “Look. When they were little, they needed me. I was their universe. Even more so, after Tavis died. And for so long, I kept my mouth shut, even when I wanted to explode, because God forbid anything happen to me.” She pushes away from the wall and starts down the corridor again, hesitating when they come to a split. She looks both right and left, frowns, and then reaches into her purse to consult her phone. “But I’m not the center of their universe anymore. I can’t be. On Wednesday I’ll be going to the hospital again, and—” She shakes her head as she scrolls through her email, tapping when she finds whatever information she’s seeking. “Their circle has to be bigger than one.”
“Yeah, I get it.” He spreads his hands, palms upturned, to encompass the entire building. “Teachers. Friends. Parents.” He lets his arms drop. “And you want to bring me in here to fuck it all up?”
She looks up from her phone, eyes wide. Then she snorts. “No? God, no, Cyril. They’re not the circle. It’s you.”
So, she’s lost her mind. “Why, so the other kids can point and laugh? So I can mortally offend their teachers, and—”
“They’re black kids,” she interrupts, with the sudden sharp impatience of someone who has had to explain the obvious one too many damn times. She waves her phone in the direction they’ve come, back toward the doors the kids took out to the playground. “They don’t get to be swaddled in wide-eyed innocence until they’re eighteen or twenty. The sooner they learn not to invest too much in what other people think of them, the better—because if they take every word these people say to heart, they’ll find themselves shattered. I won’t always be here to protect them, but I can show them how to speak up, and who they can trust to be in their corner.” She drops her phone back into her purse and presses her palm to the pocket of his garish Hawaiian shirt. “That’s you, Cyril. You. Are the guy. In the corner.”
For about half a second, they look each other in the eye. And then he says, “Well, shit,” because if she expects him to be touched, she should fucking know better. “Is that why I’m dressed like Dennis Nedry? If people are looking at me, maybe they won’t notice your kids are brown?”
Robin's fingers contract, gripping the fabric of his shirt, and for a moment he wonders if she’s going to punch him. A small, strangled sound comes from deep in her throat. Then her hand relaxes; she gives his chest a pat, and points to the hall on the left. “Seth’s class is that way. Number fourteen. Try not to take this as license to make his teacher cry.”
“Maybe a parent or two?”
She starts off to the right, waving a dismissal over one shoulder. “Acceptable.”
Seth’s teacher is tall and slender, with copper hair and skin like milk. A bombshell by any measure, and not afraid to dress the part in a dark jade suit-dress, fishnet stockings, and stiletto heels. Not exactly what he’d envisioned, but it means everyone is staring at her—and not the enormous felon shuffling his way to the back of the classroom. He stands by the bank of open windows, six feet away from anyone else, because there is no possible way he can seat himself in one of the diminutive student chairs. He studies the linoleum flooring as she introduces herself (“my pronouns are ‘she’ and ‘her’”) and talks about distance learning strategies and engagement and fields questions about the district’s plans for re-opening. She concludes with a smarmy riff on inclusiveness that feels like it’s intended expressly for the dozen curious eyes casting furtive glances in his direction.
He’s not sure he’ll be able to resist saying something stupid and cruel if she asks everyone to introduce themselves, but when she tells them to “get up and stretch!” it’s only to conclude the meeting with an invitation to parade clockwise around the room, so everyone can take turns looking at a selection of student projects completed online but which she has printed out and posted in a facsimile of normalcy. They all look the same to this asshole, until he spots a wobbly MS Paint illustration of a block-shaped superhero. He stops to admire Seth’s attention to detail, and the parent behind him stumbles into his backside.
“Oh. Gosh. I’m sorry, I, uh. Um. Guess I kind of failed at social distancing, didn’t I?”
Cyril ignores the man. Can’t get in trouble if nobody else exists. But the guy can’t just let it go, can he? No. He leans forward, waving a hand in Cyril’s field of vision as they continue to file around the room. Cyril looks at the appendage, noting the professionally trimmed cuticles and plain gold wedding band, before raising his eyes to the face which, were this prison, he would simply have punched.
“Excuse me? Hi. I’m Jake’s father.”
Which means absolutely fuck-all to this asshole. “My condolences.” He keeps walking, around the last corner and then out the door, into the hall.
The man—white, tastefully tanned, in a starched button-up which is clearly his “casual” wear—lets out a delighted (if slightly nervous) laugh that suggests Cyril has not only just met but exceeded his expectations. “Jake tells us you’re putting together a Dungeons and Dragons group.”
Seth. God damn it. “News to me.”
“Oh!” Jake’s father laughs again, more comfortably this time, and shakes his head. “Kids. Oh, uh, this way,” he adds, pointing to the yellow arrows leading toward the back of the building. “All the hallways are one-way.”
The arrows terminate at another set of double doors, propped open to the blacktop. A dry erase board propped on an easel instructs parents to wait for their child in the chalk circle marked with the number corresponding to their child’s grade. Robin is absent from the one marked with a large purple K.
“Over here!” Jake’s dad has already taken his place in the circle marked with a five, over by the empty tetherball poles.
His new best friend. Jesus. He shuffles into the circle. A teenager with a clipboard asks him for the name of his child. “Seth,” he grunts.
“You know,” the man continues, “if you do decide to give it a shot, I think Jake would get a real kick out of it. I used to play, as a kid.” He hesitates. Though Cyril says nothing, he colors slightly, as though caught in a lie. “Well, kind of. A friend of mine had a, uh, what do you call it, a manual? When we were kids. We tried to play a few times, but we didn’t really know what we were doing.”
The man’s voice trails off into an awkward silence which Cyril feels no compulsion to fill. The sense of unreality he experienced, waking up that first morning after getting out of Taft, descends again like a smoky haze. This conversation, such as it is, feels like something he’s watching on television, or a dream. It is not the morbidly obese hacker or the felon standing here, having this conversation. He must have been unceremoniously dropped into someone else’s life. Some other four-hundred-fifty-pound man.
“And, I mean, it’s got such great educational qualities,” Jake’s dad adds, rushing to fill the dead air. “It’s got all the STEM stuff—or STEAM, I g
uess it is now?” He ticks points off his fingers, gold ring glittering under the fluorescent lights. “Math, art, imagination, problem solving, teamwork—Oh! Anna—” He turns, holding out an arm to embrace a small woman with glasses and straight brown hair chopped off at the shoulders. “Anna, this is—Cyril, right? Yeah.” That nervous laugh, again. “Of course.”
Though Anna is as carefully groomed as her husband, the veins on the backs of her hands betray the fact that they are both at least a decade older than either Cyril or Robin. “I just wanted to meet you,” she confesses, in a voice so soft it sounds incapable of expressing even the slightest irritation, “face to face, before we agreed to this.” She gives him an anxious smile, as if to say, of course you understand.
Two weeks ago, his closest companions had been a drug dealer and a car thief, so, yeah, he understands. That these people are even talking to him is peak absurdity. They seem to think it’s a thrill.
And then Seth thunders up, trailed by a smaller boy who is clearly the recipient of his father’s compact physique and his mother’s eyes. “So?” Seth demands. “Can we?”
Cyril raises an eyebrow. “Can we what, exactly?”
“Do D-and-D!” He casts a quick glance over one shoulder, but, not finding what he seeks, turns back. “Kai wants to come, too.”
“Of course, it’ll have to be on Zoom, for now,” Anna interjects. “But maybe in the future...”
“Uh... yeah, I...” He meets Seth’s eyes, round and wet with longing. He sighs. “Sure. Little heads-up woulda been nice,” he adds, as Seth bounds off.
“Can I ask you a question?” Jake’s dad asks.
Cyril still doesn’t see Robin. Not anywhere. “If I said no, would that stop you?”
“How does it work?” Apparently not. “Dungeons and Dragons, I mean. Like, is there a story already written out?”
He closes his eyes, attempting to summon the self-control necessary to answer without profanity, and then somehow twenty minutes have passed and he is surrounded by a ring of parents, writing on the whiteboard easel in the doorway by the light of one of the flickering solar lamps that dot the exterior of the building.
“Okay, hold on.” Jake’s dad flashes a hand. Again. He’s seated on the edge of a planter in the long-neglected school garden, taking notes with a stylus on his phone. “The whole, uh, chaotic thing. Is that part of the character’s abilities?”
“No. That’s alignment.” Cyril uses his forearm to wipe away half of the stat chart he’s sketched. He draws a large tic-tac-toe board and fills in the left-hand column. “Good, neutral, evil.” Then, left to right. “Lawful, neutral, chaotic.”
“And do they roll the dice for that?” This follow-up question comes from Seth’s teacher, Ms. Janusevskis, who had seen them out the classroom window and decided to join the fun. She lifts her phone to snap a photo of his chart.
Cyril shakes his head. “It’s just a guide for how the character should be played. If a kid decides he wants to be a chaotic evil half-orc, he’s probably not going to go around saving villagers. Unless,” he adds, lowering his voice and pausing for dramatic effect, “he’s saving them to eat.”
Everyone laughs. They laugh because he is, when he wants to be, good at this. Humans. Manipulating them. Exploiting their most basic insecurities, their desire for acceptance and belonging. Even with those giant meaty brains, they are disappointingly simple. When he’d realized the military contract at Cooke’s company offered an entry point into Tav’s command, he hadn’t even touched the software. He’d just flattered a couple of junior engineers with his attention, and then invented a pretext for needing access. He could just as easily select any one of the parents on the playground and, in the space of half a minute, humiliate them in front of their peers. He’s done it dozens of times, to his own advantage, in the past five years. Anna, for example, is clearly self-conscious about the port-wine stain on the left side of her neck, still visible through a layer of concealer—
But then he glances to the right, and Robin is there. He does not know how long she has been leaning in the open doorway, arms crossed over her chest, but the cheeky glint in her eyes says long enough.
He pops the cap back onto the dry erase pen. “You want more, it’ll cost you.” Everybody thinks that’s funny, too. The dozen parents who stayed “after hours,” as it were, head out over the blacktop to collect their children, thanking him as they go. As if he has given them something of value.
When he turns to look for Robin, he finds Seth’s teacher instead.
“Thank you so much for that,” she says, pulling the double doors shut and securing the padlock. “You know, if you have any extra time, my class would absolutely love it if you wanted to do a Zoom lesson on character creation. I could incorporate dice into the math unit, and they could write stories using—”
“Not a single fucking chance.”
She shrugs off the expletive, probably because he’s spent the past half an hour putting on a good show of being human. “You know where to find me, if you change your mind.” Invest five minutes in winning someone’s trust, and they’d give you the benefit of the doubt for months.
Neither Robin nor the kids are anywhere to be seen on the playground, though a few other adults and children remain. Behind him, Janusevskis clears her throat; when he looks at her, she points across the blacktop, indicating a second set of double doors which he recognizes as the ones the kids came through to get to the playground.
“Thanks,” he mutters.
He finds Robin standing at the top of the steps in front of the building, watching the kids play in the dark under the trees. The screening table is gone, as are the administrators who had staffed it. She turns, tugging her mask down to her chin, as he comes out the entrance. “Well, that was not what I expected to find you doing.”
He yanks a piece of yellow copy paper out of his pocket and shoves it at her with a growl. It contains the email addresses and phone numbers of interested parents. Anna had taken the liberty of writing everyone’s information down. “Apparently I’m running an after-school D&D campaign now?”
Robin looks at him, eyes wide, and then abruptly throws her head back and laughs, long and loud. “Oh. Oh my God.” She bends forward, holding her side. “Ow. Oh my God. Congratulations?” She snorts. “Good luck?”
“They do know who I am, right? Traitor? Felon? Fresh out of prison?”
“I can’t imagine they don’t.” She hooks her arm through his, still grinning. “But you can be very charming, when you want to be.”
He pulls away. “I realize I’m a phenomenally good liar, but Jesus, how stupid can people be?”
She cocks her head to one side, squinting in thought. “Is... that what you think you’re doing when you’re nice to people? Lying?”
“All social niceties are lies.”
“So I should be flattered if you tell me this outfit makes me look fat?”
“No, it’s just... better than the alternative.” He hesitates. “But it, uh, doesn’t.”
“Thanks? I think.” She jogs down the steps and waits, hands on hips, for him to follow. “Are you saying you’d rather I be brutally honest with you? Even if it hurts?”
“Doesn't matter.” He grips the railing as he descends, suddenly conscious of how his gut sways with each step. “I already know this outfit makes me look fat.”
Robin laughs, and they fall into step together, heading back toward the truck. “Look, you’re not pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes here. Even if people disagree with your methods, everyone knows you and Tavis did what you did to save a kid. So.” Her earrings glint in the light of a streetlamp as she lifts a hand toward the mission-style building. “This right here is gonna be your most sympathetic demographic. Plus, I mean, how many people are on this list?” She tilts it toward the light. “Six? Of thirty. Twenty-four people probably hate your guts.”
“If there’d been half that many kids who wanted to play nerd games when I was in grade school, I
wouldn’t’ve gotten the shit kicked out of me every week. Where are these people coming from?”
“Nerd stuff’s enjoying a renaissance, haven’t you heard?” She glances over a shoulder. “Seth! Nora! Let’s go!”
“Star Wars, superheroes, sure. But D&D? I mean, that’s pretty niche.”
“There’s a show.” She moves her hand in a circle, attempting to jog the pistons of her memory. “Stranger Things. It’s an eighties throwback about some kids who play D&D.”
He snorts. “And now everyone’s suddenly remembered how cool it is. Right.”
“We’re in the greater Bay Area.” Robin spreads her arms. “Where geeks come to spawn. And you? You’re basically every neo-libertarian tech-bro's patron saint.”
That might have been flattering, five years ago. When he’d gone to prison, the Bay Area had been the wild frontier of technological innovation, quirky startups crammed into every nook and cranny of empty real estate. There’d been an unspoken code of conduct; an understanding that everyone flourished when information was free. Google’s motto had still been “don’t be evil.” Now everything’s been gobbled up by the many-headed hydra of social media, and they’ve abandoned even the pretense of collecting data in order to “provide a streamlined user experience.” Manipulation has become breathtakingly overt as they’ve followed the money straight to the lowest common denominator, and the pioneers of free thought have gladly become autocrats, granted enough power. “Tech-bros, or fascists? Because according to the internet, I’m also popular with, like, actual Nazis?”
“Really?” She sucks air through her teeth. “That's par for the course in 2020, so... I guess I shouldn't be surprised.”
Cyril stops. “Five years is not a long time. What the fuck happened to the world?”
“Honestly?” Robin shrugs. “Shit got weird.”
It takes Robin so long to get Nora to bed that Seth doesn’t even protest when it’s his turn to switch off Minecraft and hit the sack. Cyril tucks him in—Nora pops up to give them a chipper hello—and then returns to the empty living room, where he retrieves the tuning instruments from the case inside the piano and seats himself at the bench. He’s nearly finished with the highest octave, plucking softly, when Robin comes in with a glass of water and a handful of pills. She watches him work as she swallows them, one by one.
Cyril in the Flesh Page 15