Human Sister

by Jim Bainbridge

  I took off my clothes and sat cross-legged on them in the shade of the green canopy of leaves. For about fifteen minutes, I sat clearing my mind. Then, expanding outward with my newly ripened senses, I noticed the world anew. I’d expected the vines would have grown heavier in my absence, but I hadn’t expected them to be so exquisitely filled-out, or the soil so soft and comforting, or the air so sweetly redolent of green. I knelt in front of a vine and ran my fingers from the ground up along its rough trunk, caressing its jagged calluses. I kissed a leaf, feeling with my lips its velvety underside. I licked a small cluster of little green orbs of nascent fruit. I gently wrapped my arms around the vine, hugging its gnarled reality; and then, sensing I was part of life infinitely greater than my own, I looked up at the sky, felt sunshine pour through the leaves onto my back, and pinched dirt between my toes—as my body shivered its own shimmering smile at this precious Earth.

  After dinner that first evening back home, Grandpa came in to visit Michael and me. “So, Michael, how was your day?” Grandpa’s sly smile indicated he’d known that Michael had been full of questions.

  “Elio’s coming to live with us!” Michael burst out. Whenever he became excited his eyes and face twitched like the surface of a puddle quickened by a sudden gust of wind. “Here, with Sara and me!”

  “Elio is coming here?”

  “He wants to,” I said, trying to sound as unconcerned as I could. “He’d like to come live with us and begin his university studies this fall at Berkeley.”

  “Does Elio know about Michael?”

  “Please, Grandpa, sit here,” I said, touching the back of his chair at our study table. “I’ll explain everything.”

  The muscles in Grandpa’s face and neck visibly tightened. I nodded to Michael, and he and I quickly took our chairs across the table from Grandpa.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” I said. “I remembered that you said I shouldn’t tell Elio about Michael until Elio went to university, but I was confident he wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize Michael’s safety.”

  “Jeopardize Michael’s existence,” Grandpa interrupted. “Our safety and freedom.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  “What’s wrong?” Michael asked.

  I shook my head, communicating to Michael not to interrupt.

  “Grandpa, I’m sorry I didn’t do exactly as you’d wanted, but Elio agrees with us about androids, religion—everything. And he wants to help with Michael in any way he can.”

  As in the blueing of the sky at foredawn, the darkness in Grandpa’s face softened, but he didn’t reply.

  “Elio loves me,” I said. “He’ll do anything he can to protect me and everyone I love. You’ll just have to explain the security considerations to him. That’s all.”

  “Let’s hope he listens to me better than you did.”

  I nodded.

  There was another pause in the conversation before Grandpa asked, “How did you communicate this information back and forth with Elio?”

  I explained about biking to a hedgerow near Schiphol and forming the aluminum foil dome over the notepad, even about taking off our shirts because of concern about possible monitoring devices in our collars. Then I narrated everything Elio and I had written, and I explained how I’d burned our writings and scattered the ashes in the wind.

  When I finished, Grandpa sat impassively. Michael broke the silence. “I’m extremely happy that Elio is coming to live with us. I’ve examined him in Sara’s memories and agree that he won’t do anything to harm us, especially if you teach him what to say and do.”

  Grandpa breathed in deeply and sighed. “It would appear that we have no choice other than to try to make the best of the situation—more proof, as if we needed it, of how close erection is to insurrection.”

  Michael hugged me. I could feel him bouncing up and down with glee. Then he turned to Grandpa. “You asked how my day was. It was wonderful!” Michael proceeded enthusiastically to describe in graphic detail how he’d experienced my masturbation while we’d been brainjoined. And he again stated how excited he was about meeting Elio.

  While calmly listening to Michael, Grandpa glanced at me several times with eyes that were not full of enthusiasm. When Michael finished, Grandpa cleared his throat—perhaps more of a growl than a clearing of the throat—and peered at me.

  “I hadn’t anticipated coming home and finding that Michael had become an eager sex expert,” I said, trying to defend myself from the silent stare.

  Grandpa pursed his lips, apparently thinking, then said, “Yes, well, this brings up a serious matter. All of Elio’s experiences have taken place outside of these rooms, under circumstances quite different from those that obtain here. Unlike either of you, he’s gone to schools where his ideas and values undoubtedly have been challenged by people who didn’t love him. Unlike either of you, he’s undoubtedly played at school and in the streets of New York and Amsterdam with children, some of whom were unkind to him, swore at him, fought with him. And in response to such personal attacks, he’s undoubtedly developed both aggressive and defensive traits quite different from yours.

  “What I’m getting at is that Elio is not a buffet. We can’t pick and choose what we like. When he walks through Gatekeeper’s door, we can’t say, ‘Oh, Elio! You’re so handsome, charming, intelligent, and playful. Come in! Ah, but check all those other things, all that silly aggressiveness and defensiveness, all those crazy ideas and desires of the outside world, at the door.’ Elio is a whole person, a whole, unfathomably complicated and wonderful person, and we must love him and respect him as such.”

  “I will,” Michael said.

  “Let me give you an example of what I’m getting at, Michael,” Grandpa continued. “You should have picked up from what you’ve read, if not from Sara”—he shot a sour glance my way—“that most people in our culture have a highly developed sense of privacy regarding the workings of their genitals. Now, suppose that shortly after you meet Elio, you tell him you’d like to watch him masturbate. I can tell you with near certainty that most young men would not react well to that request. They would think it quite impertinent. They might even strike you angrily with their fist.”

  “No!” Michael’s hands swept up and covered his face. This was how he hid from us whenever he didn’t like what we were doing or saying. We always honored Michael’s ability to suspend reality in this manner for as much time as he needed to deal with it again. He couldn’t, after all, run outside and hide with Lily in her house, as I occasionally had as a child when the going got tough.

  After a few seconds, two of Michael’s fingers parted, and an eye peeked through.

  “I’m not saying that’s how Elio would respond,” Grandpa then said, “but it would be terribly unfortunate, Michael, if you inadvertently hurt Elio’s feelings and he ended up disliking you. Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes! I don’t want that to happen. I promise I’ll never do anything to hurt Elio’s feelings. I want us to be full of love and happiness together.”

  “Good. And one more thing: Sara, please try to teach Michael to refrain from touching Elio as much as he touches us. Elio, I believe, would have a word for it: weird.”

  Grandpa was referring to Michael’s joy in touching our hands and arms and hair. Years before, we had had difficulty “socializing,” as Grandpa had put it, Michael’s constant sucking on his own fingers—not just his thumbs, all of his fingers. Unlike the rest of his skin, Michael’s hands and lips were soft and spongy, somewhat like the inside of an orange peel. Grandpa said those areas contained an abundance of synthetic Krause corpuscles, which, when caressed, elicited the production of endorphins, and thus calming pleasure, in the biologic part of his brain.

  In an attempt to wean Michael from his fingers, Grandpa brought in many items for Michael to touch: sheets of velvet, a brown teddy bear, leaves, twigs, bark, vegetables and fruit and blossoms not available in the hydroponic garden. But though Michael lov
ed to touch and kiss and caress all of these items (as well as the many others we tried), it wasn’t until Grandpa began bringing in books and musical scores printed in Braille that Michael found a satisfactory alternative to finger-sucking. He would spend hours in reverie over these texts, for the pleasure of touch, I believe, as much as or more than for the information contained therein. Perhaps for him touch and information complemented each other, as voices and instruments do in opera. Sometimes, I would see him smiling or crying while reading with his fingers and ask about the text. Each time he would say something to the effect that the dots felt so wonderful: beyond them was a world of shapes, colors, tastes, scents, and sounds.

  We had not, however, discouraged Michael from expressing his love by touching and kissing us. He seemed to experience his skin (what Grandpa called his integumentin) not as a limit or boundary of the self but as a place of exquisite and joyful interaction with the world.

  It was within an hour of sunset when Grandpa and I left Michael’s rooms. I asked Grandpa to take a walk with me in the vineyard. As we strolled among the lush, green rows of trellised vines I told him of the feelings I’d felt when Elio and I first made love and of the marriage vows we later exchanged. Grandpa appeared thoughtful and interested, frequently raising his thick eyebrows and nodding, even as I rambled on, trying to explain and justify what I feared he might think had been impulsive and immature actions.

  “What are your intentions in telling me all this?” he finally asked. “Are you afraid I’ll think you were a silly, foolish girl?”

  “Maybe.”

  Laughing, he stepped toward me and we hugged. “I was sensitive about these matters when I was sixteen, too. You love Elio, so love him fully. You don’t need to justify your feelings to me. Grandma and I love and respect you, and we completely support your feelings for Elio. We all feel a need for a special other. However, I ask you to keep in mind that you will be disappointed only to the extent that your desires or expectations fall out of harmony with reality.”

  “But, Grandpa, I don’t know much about this aspect of reality. You do.”

  He chuckled. “One of the problems with knowing, or thinking you know, is that it often makes keeping your hands off what is not yours quite difficult. If we aren’t careful, we’re tempted to transform our knowledge into a license to change and control. But there are some things—actually, I believe there are many things—that we should not get involved in changing or controlling. Your sexuality, how you express your love, how you express your wonder and awe at the world—such things are yours, not mine. I love you, and in loving you, I humbly defer in such matters to you.”

  We walked awhile longer in silence; then I said, “Elio wants to come live with us, but there’s a problem with Aunt Lynh. He told me she hates America and is adamantly against his ever returning here. He loves her and doesn’t want to hurt her. We need your help.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I’d like you to go visit her in Amsterdam. Tell her we’re concerned about her feelings, and help Elio express his desires without getting into a shouting match with her. I want Elio to come live with us as soon as possible, but I’ll encourage him to delay if you think delay is called for.”

  From the moment I first mentioned that Elio might be coming to live with us until the morning I left to pick him up at the airport in early September, Michael pestered me with questions: What do I do if he says this? How do I respond if he does that?

  One day, Michael requested that I pretend to be Elio so that he could practice greeting him. I went out through Gatekeeper, then came back in, put on a kimono in the dressing antechamber, and walked out to greet Michael.

  He stood strangely erect and said, “Hi, Elio.”

  “Hi, Michael! I’m so happy to meet you.”

  Michael stepped stiffly forward and stuck out his hand to shake.

  “I don’t think Elio likes to shake hands,” I said.

  “Oh!” Michael responded, jerking back his hand.

  “He likes to hug his friends.”

  “Let’s try again,” Michael said, shooing me back to the antechamber.

  I went back and reentered. We said our greetings, stepped toward each other, moved our arms up and down, trying to find a fit—then we both froze. Moments later, as Michael began to cry, I realized there was no prescribed way to hug. Years earlier, when Michael began walking, I stood only a little over half his height, so we became accustomed to hugging by having me wrap my arms around his midsection and by having him place his arms over my shoulders and back. As I grew taller, we continued hugging in this manner.

  In contrast, Michael had always hugged Grandpa and Grandma, who were both taller than he, by wrapping his arms around their waists as their arms went over his arms and around his torso. And to complicate matters even further, Elio and I hugged by having him wrap his arms around my waist while I slipped my arms up over his shoulders and around his neck.

  “Please don’t be upset,” I said, hugging Michael in our accustomed way.

  “I want Elio to like me.”

  “Elio will like you. I’m sure he will. Just relax.”

  “But I don’t know how to become a friend. People meet many others, but only a few become friends. What is the process? What if Elio doesn’t pick me?”

  “The probability of Elio’s liking you is extremely high.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “I know both of you intimately. Each of you wants to like the other, and each of you wants the other to like you. Just look at yourself right now. I’m sure Elio has similar anxieties about your liking him.”

  “But what is the process of becoming friends? I don’t know what to do.”

  “There’s no formal process. It happens naturally. You both share many of the same interests. All you have to do is relax, be yourself, treat him kindly and with respect, as Grandpa said, even if some of what he does seems strange or misguided to you at first. If you do those things, I’m all but certain he’ll become your friend.”

  “But look, we can’t even figure out how to hug.”

  Concern welled up in me: Would these two very different people whom I loved like each other? There was, I knew, an elusive ingredient in the feeling one gets when one first meets another.

  “Of course, we’ll figure out how to hug,” I said. I let go of him and stepped back, trying to remember how Elio hugged Luuk. “That’s it! Each raises his right arm over the other’s left shoulder. Simultaneously, each wraps his left arm around the other’s midsection—and they hug. Let’s try.”

  First Brother

  The gate in the fence surrounding the house is open. She breaks the pace of her walk as the dog runs through the gate ahead of her. She walks to the door of the house and presses on a button. No sound associated with that of doorbells is detected.

  She raps on the door with the knuckles of her right hand. She pauses. She again raps on the door four times, though with approximately 50 percent more force than before. Seventeen seconds pass. She shouts: “Hello! Anyone home?”

  She turns the doorknob and pushes. The door turns on its hinges. Through an approximately 10 centimeter opening she calls: “Hello! My name is Sara Jensen. Are you okay?”

  She waits 8 seconds. “I don’t see or hear anyone anywhere. I’m really frightened.”

  She waits 11 seconds. “The front door is unlocked. I’m coming in to see if you’re all right. Is that okay?”

  She turns, leans her back against the doorframe, closes her eyes and moans, then looks out over the yard, the estuary, and beyond.

  Sara

  Shortly after Grandpa returned from his trip to see Aunt Lynh and Elio, he was told that Berkeley’s chancellor had attended a party that was also attended by a woman, Diane Dorner, who was an elder of the ERP and also a university regent. The chancellor had made a remark about special admission for a bright young man related to Professor Jensen. Regent Dorner had replied that it would be inappropriate for the
State of California to give special privileges to “such godless people, rich and intelligent though they may be.”

  Grandpa hastily made a few appointments with old friends and former students who were on the faculty at Stanford, and Elio was accepted there. When we called to tell him the good news, Elio was elated—until Grandpa said that, as a Stanford freshman, he would have to live in a dormitory where he would have at least one roommate.

  “You’re joking,” Elio said. In the background was his unmade bed that I missed.

  “No, I’m not. If you go to Stanford, then you will respect and honor their rules.”

  “But the whole idea was for Sara and me to live together.”

  “Well, your idea is just going to have to expand a little. You may come home on the weekends, and I suppose it’ll be all right if you visit once during the week, as long as you are back in your dorm by midnight.”

  Elio arrived on an Air France-KLM flight on 3 September, Grandpa’s ninetieth birthday and Michael’s seventh. At Grandma’s suggestion, she and Grandpa waited in the parking lot while I went to the arrival lounge to greet him. “When you see Elio walk out of Customs,” Grandma said, “you’ll be glad we’re not there.”

  I didn’t fully appreciate what Grandma had said until about a half-hour later when the doors on which was printed “No Admittance” parted, and there he was, dressed in a light-gray pullover and charcoal pants, pushing a cart on which lay a suitcase and a carry-on. Had Grandpa or Grandma been there, I probably wouldn’t have jumped up and down with joy, probably wouldn’t have laughed and cried at the same time, probably wouldn’t have melted so completely into him when he finally held me still and kissed me.