Human Sister

by Jim Bainbridge

  “Good to see you again,” Luuk said. “You’ve matured a lot since last summer.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m happy to see you, too.” I had hoped Elio would have noticed—at least would notice now that Luuk had said it—that in certain places I’d begun to curve and swell like fruit nearing harvest.

  “This is my girlfriend, Melissa,” Luuk continued. “And this is Liesbeth and her boyfriend Peer.”

  Melissa shook my hand, saying, “We’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

  “Ja,” Liesbeth said, pulling an empty chair close to hers. “Sit here and tell us about California.”

  About a half-hour of small talk and two rounds of drinks later, Melissa and Luuk got up to dance. Liesbeth asked me to dance. I told her I didn’t know how, but she took my hand and led me onto the dance floor, where, in the blare of music, people danced like trees frenzied by wind. I looked back. Elio was watching us.

  “Hold both of my hands,” Liesbeth shouted just inches from my ear. “Feel the music. Just feel it and let yourself go. Don’t think about anything.”

  At first I was annoyed by the loudness of the music and by the people who kept bumping into me, but I tried to concentrate on doing what Liesbeth said. After a couple of minutes, she came closer to me and shouted, “That’s good, but try just to feel it.”

  I half-closed my eyes, trying to eliminate the mass of dancers freeze-framing in my vision. I relaxed, let myself go, and soon a feeling came, as if the music were speaking a language my body understood, rousing it from a deep, childhood sleep and filling it with the wonderfully primal desire to pulse, to dance, with the rhythmic power of the music.

  “Ja!” Liesbeth screamed, throwing loose my hands. “You’ve got it!”

  I felt like a musical instrument resonating in an ocean of sound, and wondered how Michael would respond to being in this club. He’ll never be able to leave his room, I thought, never get a chance. He’ll only be able to experience this in my memories.

  Pushing that negative thought out of my mind, I continued to dance until Liesbeth again took my hands and shouted, "I have to rest a bit."

  “She learns fast!” Liesbeth announced when we returned to our table.

  “It’s the teacher,” Peer said.

  She playfully slapped Peer’s arm, then said, “Elio, you should dance with her. She’s very good.”

  Elio smiled and began to get up, but Peer said, “Hey, it’s my turn!”

  Elio sat back down. “Sure, go ahead.” His speech was slurred.

  On the way to the dance floor, I put my mouth close to Peer’s ear and asked, “Does Elio drink a lot?”

  “No. I’ve only seen him get drunk once before. But tonight he’s slamming ’em down. He’s moody or something. Probably had another fight with his ma. Or with one of his friends.”

  Peer and I danced a song. He bumped his hips against me a few times, and his butt. I’d enjoyed dancing with Liesbeth more. He asked me to dance another song, but I said I wanted to go back to the table. What I really wanted was to dance with Elio.

  When I returned to the table, however, and asked Elio to dance, he said he was too drunk. The talking and drinking continued for about a half-hour more before Elio complained of feeling sick. Luuk and Peer helped him to the bathroom.

  When they returned, Elio slumped in the chair beside me. He leaned over and wrapped his arms around me but didn’t say a word.

  “We promised his mother we’d leave by midnight,” I said to Luuk. “But how can I get him home? I don’t think he can walk to the bus.”

  “Peer’s got a car,” Luuk said. “We’ll take you home.”

  When Elio and I finally got to his apartment door, I propped him up against the wall and quietly opened the door. With my arm around him, we stumbled across the living room and into his bedroom. I pulled back the covers and sheet of his bed.

  “Do you need to go to the bathroom?” I asked.

  He shook his head no.

  “Try to stand still. I’ll take off your shirt and pants; then you can sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

  I took off his shirt, then unbuckled and unzipped his pants. I was shocked to see that he wasn’t wearing underpants. I hadn’t seen him naked for three years. His penis had grown larger, and it was surrounded by a thick, tangled mass of black pubic hair. Above it, a wispy tendril of fur had crept up toward his navel.

  I felt happy and strangely excited by this sight of his genitals, by their musky scent, and by new stirrings deep down in my belly. I smiled up at him and asked him to sit on the bed so I could remove his pants and socks; then I asked him to lie down so I could cover him. As I pulled up the covers he grabbed my arm and said, “Don’t go. Sleep with me.”

  I quickly took off my clothes. I hesitated at my underpants but decided it would be okay to take them off since he was naked, and then I crawled in beside him. He rolled over, placed his arm across my chest, his head on my shoulder, his leg over my legs. I got goose bumps from the warm, silky feel of his skin. I half-expected to hear him say I was still the best teddy bear in the world, but he quickly fell asleep.

  A few hours later, I woke. It was beginning to get light outside. Elio seemed not to have moved. His breath, always before warm and moist on my chest, now smelled of vomit and beer; and his erection, which pressed against my thigh, was much larger than it had been years before when we’d slept together.

  I had thoughts about how nice it would feel to hold Elio’s penis in my hands and kiss it, but Grandpa’s admonition to respect Elio’s privacy kept interrupting my fantasies, so I lay still, feeling happy in Elio’s embrace, and waited for sleep to return.

  Sometime later, I was again wakened, this time by movement as Elio lifted his arm and leg off me and began to sit up.

  “Hi,” I said, stroking his back with my fingers.

  “I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” he replied as he got up unsteadily.

  When he returned from the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist, I pulled the covers back to let him in, but he stopped by the side of the bed. “I don’t feel good,” he said. “Could you go and sleep in your own bed?”

  I wanted to say: Crawl in. I’ll hold you and make you feel better.

  But obviously that was not what he wanted.

  “Does it tickle a little?” Michael asked a few minutes ago, turning his specimen brush inside me.

  “No. Just a bit cold. Like everything down here,” I answered.

  My long underwear and two pair of pants had been removed. My legs were spread, as if in love with the cold, damp air of this hideaway far under the sea.

  Grandpa had sent along soil samples from the vineyard, neighboring orchards, and the shore of the Russian River. The idea was to prime the immune systems of Michael’s children by early exposure to the millions of terrestrial organisms contained in those samples. In furtherance of this priming project, Michael was now taking specimens of my vaginal and anal ecosystems. The teeming swarms of life from these specimens will become part of the children’s first meal, colonizing their intestines with the important microflora they would have ingested during a natural childbirth.

  “Love pitched his mansion in the place of excrement,” Michael said, looking up at me, his head framed by my bare knees.

  “Yes, I know the Yeats poem,” I replied. “Didn’t some Christian saint precede him in that observation? Something to the effect that humans are born between feces and urine.”

  “Augustine,” Michael said.

  Next, he will vacuum out another egg or two and a few more ovarian stem cells for use in the artificial wombs. Like a dinosaur, I will reproduce simply by laying eggs.

  It was the sounds of Aunt Lynh’s getting ready to go to work that woke me next. Normally, I would have gone out and talked with her, but I didn’t want to be questioned about what had happened the night before, so I waited under the covers. At about 0700 I heard her open the outside door and leave. I popped out of bed, showere
d, and dressed as quietly as I could so as not to wake Elio, then went out to eat breakfast.

  About an hour later, I looked in on Elio. He was still sleeping, so I decided to go for a walk. I left a note on the kitchen table, telling him I would be out walking and would be back by 0900. But even though it was a beautiful morning, I came back to the apartment early; I didn’t want to miss any time with Elio. Thoughts and feelings of his holding me in his bed kept leaping into my consciousness, and each time they did, I felt a strange weakness inside.

  He wasn’t in the apartment, but my note was still on the kitchen table. Below my writing he’d written: “I can’t be with you right now. I’m sorry.”

  What, I worried, did I do? Did I say something wrong?

  To keep my mind occupied while I waited for Elio to return, I tried to work on a few of the statistics problems Grandpa had given me to solve in my spare time. He believed that science was fundamentally a statistical interpretation of nature, and he was determined that, unlike most humans who handle equations with the grunting labor of lifting heavy rocks, I was to see the real world through these precious mathematical lenses as easily and intuitively as a child with excellent vision sees the individual facets on brilliant-cut melee. But I couldn’t concentrate. Worry about Elio kept spilling into my thoughts.

  When Aunt Lynh arrived home from work, she asked where Elio was. I said I didn’t know and handed her the note he’d left behind.

  She appeared to read the note several times. “Has he called you since he left?”

  “No.”

  “Are you upset?”

  I felt myself rapidly losing composure, but I shook my head no.

  “Of course you’re upset. You’re a good pretender, though.”

  With that, the levee holding back my tears crumbled. She hugged me. “It’s not so bad, honey. I told you he’s gotten in the habit of running away the instant something bothers him. Why don’t you tell me what happened at the club?”

  “We met Luuk and some of his friends. Then we danced and talked.”

  “Did Elio get drunk?”

  I hesitated.

  “That’s all right. I shouldn’t ask you to get your brother in trouble. So, that’s it? Except for a few little things you’re afraid would get him in trouble with me, that’s all that happened?”

  “Yes.”

  She appeared deep in thought. “Maybe it’s that everything comes too easily for him: grades, swimming, admirers. I can tell none of it means anything to him. His life has become like that club you went to last night: all noise and hollow distraction.”

  “But why did he write that he couldn’t be with me?”

  “What can I say? He’s young, confused, impetuous.”

  “Grandpa told me that Elio likes to make love with boys. If that’s what he’s afraid of—that I’ll find out—he shouldn’t be, because I don’t care. It’s fine with me.”

  Of course, that last statement wasn’t exactly true. I wanted Elio to do what made him happy, but I couldn’t help feeling that those boys, whoever they were, were stealing away the intimacy and affection that belonged to me, and I was confused by and ashamed of such feelings.

  Aunt Lynh smiled. “You’re a good sister to him. Just keep on being a good sister, and I’m sure everything will be all right.”

  I stayed up late that night, waiting, hoping. But Elio didn’t call or return.

  The next morning Aunt Lynh and I were having breakfast when the phone rang. She grabbed it. “Hello.” She was silent for about a minute. Finally, in a controlled voice she said, “Honey, don’t do this. It’s Sara’s fifteenth birthday tomorrow.” She listened a while longer. “Well, then, maybe she shouldn’t come back again next summer.”

  I detected shouting from the other end.

  When the shouting subsided, Aunt Lynh said, “I don’t like it, but if you want to do this, I suppose you can. Do you need anything?” She glanced at me. “Do you want to say good-bye to Sara?” She glanced at me again, shaking her head. “Okay, call us when you get there. Promise?”

  She put the phone down, stared at the cupboards for a few seconds, then threw her hands up into the air. “He’s taking a train to Brussels in a half-hour. With Luuk. Just like that. He says I drive him crazy, and he doesn’t want to be crazy in front of you. He says he needs us to give him space. Not that we have much choice. He’s gone—just like that.”

  My eyes filled with tears. How could Elio leave me? How could he do this?

  “Don’t take it personally,” Aunt Lynh said. “I try not to.”

  But I had the note: “I can’t be with you.” That sounded personal.

  The next day, feeling confused and disappointed on my fifteenth birthday, I boarded a plane home, a week and two days earlier than planned.

  Elio called me from Brussels within an hour of my arrival home. He wished me a happy birthday, then began telling me what Luuk and he had been doing. I interrupted him: “Why did you say you couldn’t be with me? Why did you go to Brussels?”

  “It’s Ma. She’s always bothering me. Screaming at me. Look, I’m really sorry about the way I acted. Please promise you’ll come back to see me again next summer. I’ll be better then, I promise.”

  Though I remained unsatisfied by his answer and confused about his behavior, I assured him that I would come to see him the next summer, and every summer. He was, after all, my summers, my dreams.

  I had thought that for Grandpa problems were challenges to be enthusiastically explored, broken down into manageable components, and, often in a flash of emotionally charged insight, solved. But when I described Elio’s hot-and-cold behavior, Grandpa didn’t ask any questions or offer any suggestions. When I pressed him for help, he said, “Sara, please, listen to me. I know you want to help. But whatever it is that’s troubling Elio, his intuition is that now is not a good time to force a resolution of the problem. You love him; you should trust his intuition. Besides, you have Michael and your studies. Your plate is full. Enjoy the feast and stop worrying about things you can’t do anything about.”

  Perhaps Grandpa was short with me because his mind was occupied with other problems. He informed me the next day that he’d been reviewing intelligence reports which estimated that at least five hundred androids of different designs, including my brothers, had escaped to Canada after or immediately before the U.S. outlawed them, and that since then, nearly all had mysteriously disappeared, as had Aita. How long, I feared, would Mom and Dad be able to keep my brothers safe?

  Ten days later, a rally was held in Sacramento to pressure the California State Legislature to ratify an amendment to repeal the Twenty-second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It was the first time I was allowed to watch WNN news at home (I’d watched it a few times before with Elio).

  “I want you to see what 157,000 people praying and meditating looks like,” Grandpa said as I sat down beside Grandma on the living room sofa.

  The streets and lawns of the Capitol were crammed with people, most of them sitting on red-white-and-blue ERP meditation cushions. The silence amidst a gathering of so many was eerie. Occasionally, a WNN commentator would announce in an almost reverential whisper (“as during a golf tournament,” Grandpa growled) the presence of a high-ranking person of this or that religion.

  When a member of the presidium of the World Council of Faiths was pointed out, Grandpa gave his own commentary. “There’s the real power. They want Jairison to be able to run for a third term. He and the other presidents and prime ministers are slowly becoming little more than feudal princes and princesses of the World Council’s holy empire.”

  “Bad things often come from good things, and vice versa,” Grandpa had cautioned several times before. He had explained, for example, how even science, as it had encroached ever further on what had been considered the core of the human self—its mind and consciousness—had inadvertently fueled the rise of the World Council. Slowly, a majority of people had fallen in line with ecumenical efforts to agree on
one overriding religious principle: that though our bodies may have risen by evolution from earth, as soon as humans had evolved to a sufficient enough likeness of a god, this god had intervened to give humans a divine soul, which carried with it universal human values and meaning. Man was both of this Earth and divine, but man’s tools, even his intelligent creations, were of this Earth only; and to try to make such creations equal or superior to man was hubristic and idolatrous in the extreme. For the World Council and for the ERP, the things of greatest value on Earth were human souls, and these two organizations were their god’s primary protectors of those souls against the hubris of science and big international corporations.

  When a segment came on showing a smiling, waving President Jairison and his family leaving their Sunday morning church service, Grandpa said he couldn’t take it any longer and turned off the news. “I’m told,” he said, getting up from the sofa, “that by day, Jairison meditates in his White House office on the divinity of the human soul, and that by night, he sleeps under a large reproduction of The Dream of Constantine by Piero della Francesca. The man is a dangerous lunatic, and I, for one, think that eight years will have been quite long enough.”

  I refused to let Michael join with me through the braincord while I told him what I’d seen on the news. I was concerned about frightening him with my fear: that all those people crowding the Capitol would think he was a soulless, dangerous thing. Whenever we joined together, Michael could feel what I felt, sometimes, it seemed, even more acutely than I did. For example, he had cried when he’d reviewed my memory of Elio’s asking me to go sleep in my own bed that night we’d returned from the Red Dog, whereas I had merely felt hurt and confused. Perhaps a part of me—a part that Michael had found—had wanted to cry but felt repressed by Grandpa’s warning that boys don’t like girls who cry over seemingly trivial things.

  I felt calmer by the time Michael and I crawled into bed together to sleep, so that when he asked me then to brainjoin with him, I consented, as I did about once each month when I let him watch my dreams unfold. He reached behind his head and tapped on the trepan door there. The braincord came out, moved up my nostrils, and we lay quietly, waiting for my sleep—and dreams—to begin.