by Alan Brudner
"Dad, after I settle in, I'm going to show you how to eliminate all the dead trees and optimize your life."
"The dead trees?"
He had already turned, picked up his huge frame backpack and took a step toward his old room. I tugged his shirttail, which hung below the pack and outside his chinos. He spun around and I hugged him around the neck. The metal frame of the backpack pinched my wrist as I felt his hands reciprocate with a pat across my shoulders.
"Believe me, Dad, your life's about to change." He flashed the same toothy smile Eliza's shutter had captured so often. He had a thin red gash on his temple and, for the first time, I noticed his little silver crescent earring.
"So your Mom and I didn't sell you into slavery, Sky? We're forgiven?"
"Nothing to forgive, Dad. In fact, much to thank you for." He looked heavenward. "That goes for you too, Mom." He smiled again, and I wondered if soon, I'd be able to get a full night's sleep. I had gone the 983 days since Eliza's accident without one.
Chapter 3
"Pasta's good for the soul, Sky," I said at dinner, standing at the butcher block kitchen counter and ladling out a huge portion of ziti I hoped I hadn't overcooked.
"Mom used to say that too, Dad."
"She made it in casseroles with tuna and peppers. I just do tomato sauce."
"Out of a jar, Dad. It's not quite the same."
"Saves time."
"I like it al dente too, Dad. But there are better ways to save time."
"So I'm told," I said.
I ignored the unopened bottle of Chardonnay in my refrigerator and poured us each a Coke instead.
Schuyler jerked his head toward the fridge. "You could have had some, Dad. I can handle just watching." He knew precisely what I had done and why.
We clinked Cokes.
"To your mother," I said. "She'd be proud."
"And Cybronics," he added, taking a sip.
"So tell me about it, Sky. It's been awhile. You deal much with Avery Kord?"
He put down a just-emptied fork but waited. He chewed and swallowed at a lower decibel level than the one I remembered. Somewhere between the Ivy League and Cybronics, my son had learned not to speak with his mouth full. Too bad Eliza hadn't lived to see him discover table manners.
By the time he mouthed, "I've seen the light," I had forgotten the question. But it didn't matter. I was happy my son was home.
"The light, Sky?"
"Cybronics, Dad. Avery Kord's a bona fide genius. A real Yoda."
"Don't tell me. Star Wars. Right?"
Sky laughed and nodded. "In my backpack I have a sampler of programs, Dad. Some are basic—things to increase your reading speed, play chess, learn French or Japanese or Swahili. A communications program you can use to send me CybroMail. Like E-mail, but you can animate it, set it to music, whatever you want. And for you, especially, a scheduler and organizer: ORGON 5.1. I designed most of it myself. So you can burn the dead trees."
"I don't even own a computer. You know how I am around high-tech stuff. It makes me sweat 'til I hyperventilate."
"Relax, Dad. You spend some time around your freaky offspring and I'll morph you into a techno-master. I have a laptop I can use to whet your appetite. But better yet, I have a snazzy desktop being sent here—by FedEx, Saturday delivery. So you'll be wired and connected before sunset tomorrow. It's got the latest microprocessor and all the bells and whistles, but I won't bother you with the technical terms. Let's just say if you compare computers to Greek gods, this one's Zeus. Avery Kord himself set the specs. And I've already installed almost everything you'll need."
"Thanks," I said, sipping some more of my Coke. "But I can barely type, Sky. I still hunt and peck. Or call Lucille."
"God, you still have Celie? She was old when I was a kid."
"Still is. Still types great, too. And says hello, by the way."
He smiled. "No problem, Dad. But the Lucilles of the world are obsolete. Wait till you see the voice recognition software I'm setting you up with. It's not even commercially available yet. You'll have to read a few hundred words and phrases into it—it'll take an hour or so—and after that you can just talk to it. Like you'd speak to a person. Normal speed. No hesitation. It'll type everything you say, up to 200 words per minute. With 99.9 percent accuracy. It'll even translate it into another language, if you want. You'll never again be a data dork. You'll be future-proof."
"Never again?"
"Nevermore."
Chapter 4
It was late that night. The lights were out. I thought I could hear Sky tapping the keys on his laptop, but maybe it was my imagination. Or was it? I also thought I heard some odd rustling, faint, of a type I hadn't heard coming from his room since the year we found all those Playboy magazines and a flashlight under his bed. Boys will be boys, Eliza had said. Real or not, the sound of my son being home in his room after all this time, no matter what he was doing, was a welcome distraction.
I wondered what parenting was really about. Eliza always seemed to know, but I had struggled with it ever since the day I first carried Sky home as a six-pound ten-ounce bundle in a little blue plastic carrier. Was it enough to have taught him the simple pleasures of catching bluefish off Crescent Beach with sea clams, white tigers at the Bronx Zoo with a Nikon, country barn owls in the blackness of night with a few mock hoots and a flashlight? To have munched Cracker Jacks with him in a box behind the third baseline, analyzing every pitch as the Yankees stole the World Series from Atlanta?
Should I have helped with more of his homework, his science fair projects, his college entrance essays, even though he could count change from a dollar at two, read Newsweek at four and complete the Times crossword puzzle at eight?
I downed one of my nightly shots of Dewar's and had the sense this night might go reasonably well, my blood pressure would stay normal, maybe I wouldn't mindlessly watch the red L.E.D. numerals on my clock radio until 5 a.m. as I often did, in a dark and painful silence which, if I was lucky, was often broken by the cold wetness of my own sweat soaking the sheets or the rat-a-tat heart palpitations that reminded me I was still alive and needed either another drink, some Tylenol, or something stronger. Sky had won the battle against alcohol, and I knew I could too—if I ever really had to. But I wasn't an alcoholic and had no intention of becoming one. It's just that every night my eyes would see the alternating red and white illuminated highway snow and my ears would hear the distant sirens, and I knew I needed a shot or a few to help me fade them away.
It was my habit to talk to Eliza, if briefly and silently, and while I had never been religious and didn't believe in an afterlife and hadn't even thought about it much, I liked to make believe she somehow heard me, that she was somewhere in the room, that the light and energy that had been her life hadn't been completely erased by the freely turning wheels of the smashed Ford Explorer.
This night, with Schuyler home for only the second time in more than a year, her presence felt stronger. There was a vague feeling of the seashore in the air, a fresh touch of moisture, the ions she used to say made the Block Island beach house feel so electric. I hadn't rented that place since the accident.
"He seems to love Cybronics, Eliza," I thought, feeling the warmth of either her ethereal smile or the Dewar's I had just downed. "It wasn't a mistake."
"Never thought it was, Cliff," I knew she'd have said. I wished I could see her there, an image, a mirage. Just after college, during my failed stint in the minor leagues, I had a pitching coach with one arm. Used to be a pitcher himself, until the amputation. But he'd routinely walk to the mound, wind up with his leg and his glove hand, kick—and swear to me he could feel the missing arm swing toward the plate and hurl a strike. And I had read about widows and widowers who saw their spouse's phantom images in bed or at the dinner table. Not that I cared to be crazy, of course, but I thought it would feel wonderful to commune with a likeness, even one I knew to be an illusion.
In her work, Eliza had photographed acci
dent scenes, people claiming they were injured when they weren't, corporate executives sleeping with people not their spouses. She also took pictures in her spare time, as a hobby, and left behind thousands of images, a shot of virtually everything. She had the uncanny ability to use light and shadows and color to make grotesque people look intriguing and beautiful people look bizarre. With a zoom lens and her steady hands, she could capture the unknowing soul of a subject half a mile away. But for a year, I had been unable to find almost any of the pictures I had taken of her, or our wedding album, or the films and videotapes of birthday parties and zoos and school outings and Central Park picnics and ballgames I had been making ever since Schuyler was born. I turned the house upside down more than once and threw an armchair out our second-floor bedroom window one time, frustrated in trying to find them, but they had disappeared. So the memories I could conjure with my eyes closed were all I had. I wouldn't let them die any more than they would let me sleep.
Chapter 5
With Schuyler home, I managed to drift off like a sedated hospital patient until almost 10 in the morning. I hadn't slept that late, even on a Saturday, since I was a teenager. When I woke up, Sky was in the living room fiddling with the computer, which had already been delivered and assembled on the coffee table. Empty boxes, plastic bags and foam packaging material were all over the place. The room had that unmistakable fresh smell of newly unpacked plastic and electronics. It reminded me of the Explorer the day we drove it home from the dealer.
"This is a mouse, Dad," said Sky, placing my hand on the rolling oval device that sat on the table next to the keyboard. "You move the cursor with it, that little arrow, and click the left button when it points where you want it to. It's the device that brought computing to the masses."
"So now I'm the masses," I said.
"I hope so, Dad. At least in terms of using a mouse." My son smiled. "By the way, I hooked it up to Mom's old phone line. I had to modify the line a bit, widen the bandwith. That okay with you?"
"Whatever you did is fine by me. I don't even use that line. I just couldn't bring myself to turn it off."
I tried moving the mouse around and clicking.
"Way to go, Dad," Sky said, as I clicked on the word "Programs" and caused a submenu to pop out. "Now you have these other choices." I clicked on "CybroLife," and a series of file names appeared on the screen.
One of them caught my eye, but I didn't click on it. It was titled, "Mom.ava". I thought Sky flinched when I noticed it, but perhaps that was my imagination. I clicked on "Scheduler," which promptly caused the image of a monthly calendar to appear. Schuyler's muscles again seemed to relax and he began to teach me how to eliminate the dead trees.
We played with the machine for an hour before I took a much-needed shower. Then we moved it to the study and set it up on my desk. Everything was color-coded. It was easy even for a techno-idiot like myself to attach red to red, blue to blue and green to green.
"I'm going out for a few hours, Dad," Sky said. "I'm meeting a few friends from the CybroNet. The members of a small group I belong to."
"Group?"
"Nothing formal." He knew I was looking at him funny. "Just a bunch of computer geeks. It's like a private little MENSA society."
"Be careful, Sky. And you never were a geek."
"Thanks for the encouragement, but I know what I am." To emphasize his point, he rolled up his chinos a bit to expose a pair of too-white cotton socks. They somehow seemed incongruous with his black t-shirt and his earring.
"You know these people well?"
"We've never actually met face-to-face. Just on-screen. But we're all checked out on the security software. We're pretty cool, for high-domes and nerds." He gestured toward the computer. "If you want to input the words that will enable you to talk to the computer instead of having to type, just turn it on, click on "PlainSpeak 1.0," and read each word that pops up on the monitor. There's a built-in power microphone, so talk normally; it'll filter out background noise. If you need to quit or take a bio-break or something, just click on 'save' and 'exit.' I've designed the interface so those commands and 'help' and a few others are always on the screen, in the upper right. You'll do just fine. Worst that happens, everything crashes or something, you turn it off, turn it back on and type in the word PHOENIX. That resets everything to where it was before the crash. It's a special feature I designed just for you, because I know you're a stress puppy."
"Just one question, Sky."
"Shoot."
"What's a bio-break?"
My son laughed. "It's what you and Mom taught me when I was about two and a half, Dad. You know, when I stopped wearing diapers."
When he turned to open the front door, I noticed a shiny silver crescent on the back of his t-shirt. "Just remember PHOENIX," he yelled over his shoulder from the doorway. "The bough usually breaks on these babies sooner or later, but the cradle doesn't always have to fall."
Chapter 6
After some coffee and a quickie review of the Times, I walked over to the computer. The screen was blank. It took a few minutes for me to figure out how to get started, but I finally decided it wouldn't blow up if I tapped the "Enter" key. Within seconds, I was staring at a cobalt blue display screen with a series of tiny picture buttons across the top, above large-font white text:
GOOD MORNING, MR. LIGHTMAN! ALMOST THE AFTERNOON, ACTUALLY! I'VE HEARD SO MUCH ABOUT YOU FROM SCHUYLER, I CAN HARDLY WAIT TO INTERACT WITH YOU! I THINK YOU'LL FIND ME PRETTY EASY TO GET ALONG WITH. BASICALLY, YOU JUST HOLD MY MOUSE IN YOUR HAND—CAREFUL, SOMETIMES IT TICKLES!—AND CLICK WHEN YOU SEE SOMETHING YOU WANT ME TO DO. YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND! IF YOU EVER NEED HELP, JUST HIT THE HELP ICON. A SCREEN WILL APPEAR TO WALK YOU THROUGH YOUR PROBLEMS. OR TYPE THE WORD 'HELP.' NOW, IF YOU'D LIKE TO NAME ME, SO THAT YOU CAN INTERACT WITH ME ON A MORE PERSONAL LEVEL, JUST TYPE IN THE LETTERS YOU CHOOSE AND HIT "ENTER." OTHERWISE, HIT "EXIT." TO BE FUNNY, SOME PEOPLE MIGHT NAME ME 'HAL,' LIKE THE COMPUTER IN 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. SKY TOLD ME YOU LOVED THAT MOVIE. NEEDLESS TO SAY, I DIDN'T LIKE IT MUCH, AND I DON'T PARTICULARLY CARE FOR THE NAME.
I chuckled to myself at Sky's humor—we argued more than once about whether 2001 was profound or just intentionally obscure; then I thought for a few seconds and typed in CHIP. Then I hit "exit" and the text disappeared. I moved the mouse and watched the cursor move in tandem with it. As I moved it over each icon, a little explanation popped up: "Opens a new file," "Edits an existing file," "Saves an existing file," and so on. I clicked on "Programs" and the list I had seen with Sky appeared again:
-CybroWord 6.9
-CybroLife 3.6
-CybroChess 3.9
-CybroMail 4.5
-NetTeacher 1.0
-MultiLingual 5.0
-CybroXXX 5.7
-PlainSpeak 1.0
-Legalese 3.6
-MedicalRef 3.9
-CybroPharm 2.9
-CybroSports 3.9
There were others, but you get the idea. I planned to begin setting up PlainSpeak, but my curiosity about "Mom.ava" had been gnawing at me since I noticed it. I clicked on "CybroLife 3.6," then on "Mom.ava." The screen simply read: "This program is in development stage. Need password for further access."
I didn't have a clue about a password, so I clicked "Exit" and then "PlainSpeak," the voice recognition program. As per CHIP's instructions, I began to recite a list of words in alphabetical order, along with a few prefixes and suffixes, as they appeared on the screen:
Aardvark.
Aaron.
Abacus.
Abandon.
Abduct.
Aberrant.
Abet.
Abhorrent.
Ability.
I had barely gotten through the G words—Guinea pig, gymnasium, gynecology, gypsy, gyrate—when Schuyler got back. His skin looked flushed and he was mildly out of breath.
"Jogged home," he said, pulling up and stretching his t-shirt far enough from the waist to wipe his forehead with it. "Clears t
he mind."
"Good for the ticker, too," I said. "I try to do it myself."
My son put his palm over his heart, Pledge-of-Allegiance style, and glanced at the screen.
"Getting CHIP ready for voice commands, Dad?"
"How'd you know I named it CHIP?"
"You really want to know? I've gotta tell you off-the-record, Dad. This is ultra-sensitive information. Remember how we used to tell each other supersonic secrets?"
"You haven't told me one of those in about two hundred years, Sky."
"Eight-point-two, Dad, to be exact. Last time was when I told you I just lost my you-know-what to you-know-who."
"And I still haven't told a soul, Sky."
"So it's an S-S-S?"
"Faster than the speed of sound," I nodded. "Now, how'd you know what I named ol' CHIP here?"
"I caused you to, Dad. It wasn't completely your free will that chose the name, even though it felt like it."
"Like a card trick? Pick a card, any card?"
He winked and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper even though we were alone. "Subliminal suggestion. Sometimes they call it subliminal seduction. In the old days, they used a primitive version in the movie theaters to get you to buy a soda. They'd flash an image of a Coke or a cool drink on a hot desert—only once per minute or so, only on a single frame of film, three or four times total. Each time, it went by so fast you wouldn't even be aware you'd seen it. And they'd link those images to a trigger image—a certain scene to come later in the movie. When the picture reached that scene, your mind would think of that image you didn't even realize you had seen, you'd get thirsty, and you'd go buy the soda. Not to mention the popcorn that went with it. Just as if you had been hypnotized or something."
"Years ago," I said, recalling parts of some old book, "people thought magazine ads had subliminal pictures hidden in them. Like naked women hidden in the ice cubes in a glass of scotch, or the word 'sex' written in some kind of code on Ritz crackers. To make you want the products. But nobody ever proved it."