Man Made Boy

by Jon Skovron

  A little while later, I knocked on Kitsune’s door. She opened it, but said nothing. She just stood there in a sleek, green silk robe and gazed at me with her golden fox eyes.

  “Do you…know how to cook?” I asked.

  The next few weeks, I practiced every night with recipes Kitsune scratched out on empty corners of her sketch pad. I would bring in things I’d made for her to try and she would critique them, tell me what I was doing wrong, what I should try next.

  Claire knew something was up.

  “Why are you eating dinner alone all the time?” she asked me one day while we were hanging out at the pool during our lunch break.

  I just shrugged.

  Her eyes widened. “You’re practicing cooking, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  And I was. But that wasn’t the whole plan. And when Kitsune finally told me that my sushi rolls were acceptable, I started the second half of my plan.

  It was a Sunday, Kemp’s day off, so I went to his dorm room and knocked on the door.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Boy.”

  “Ah! Do come in, Boy. The door’s unlocked.”

  Kemp’s apartment was decorated like an old-fashioned English parlor. The main living area had beautiful Victorian furniture, dark, decoratively carved wood frames with rich, silk upholstery. A tea set sat on a mahogany table, and an antique writing desk sat in the corner. That was more or less what I expected.

  What I wasn’t expecting was the person sitting in an easy chair that faced out the window. I was pretty sure it was a woman, but it was hard to make out details beyond that. Everything about her, from her skin, to her hair, to her eyes, was pitch-black. More than black. I tried not to stare at her, but it was almost impossible. She was so dense-looking that I felt like my eyes were getting sucked into her. Like she was a human-shaped black hole, pulling in everything, including light.

  An empty pair of pants and a crisp, white T-shirt stood next to the chair. A bowl and spoon floated in front of her.

  “Oh,” I said. “Sorry, I didn’t realize you had a guest….”

  “Nothing to worry about,” said Kemp. “Boy, this is Millicent, my wife. Millicent? This is Boy. He works for The Studio, helping out with technical things. I’ve told you about him.”

  Millicent didn’t respond. She just continued to stare out the window.

  After a moment, Kemp said, “Boy, do you remember when I told you how I tried to refine the invisibility formula to stop the aging process without making the person invisible?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Back then Millicent was…impetuous. She begged me to let her be the first person to try the formula. In my defense, it is difficult to live forever alone, to watch those you love slowly decay. What’s more, not many people are willing to marry an invisible man, I can assure you. I felt I was so lucky to have her and I always found it difficult to say no to her. And at the time, I was so sure it would work. So damn sure…”

  He was silent for a moment. I had no idea whether he was looking at me or her or somewhere else. I just waited.

  “I acceded to her wishes,” he said. “And this was the result.”

  He carefully scooped out some sort of white liquid from the bowl with the spoon and held it to her mouth. Her lips opened a little and he slid the liquid in.

  “Is she always like this?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “Forever, I suppose.”

  “It doesn’t seem fair. It was an accident.”

  “Perhaps. But it was my doing, and if I didn’t take care of her, she would surely suffer and probably die.”

  “You love her.”

  “Oh, yes. But it’s more than that. Consider this: Victor Frankenstein was nothing more than a bright, impetuous med student when he made your parents. He had no idea what he was doing. Creating your parents didn’t make him a bad person. It was a rash, youthful action and I think we all have our fair share of those. But when it was time for him to take responsibility for his actions, he could not. Or would not. It really doesn’t matter because the fact is, he ran. Could you imagine how much happier you all would have been, including him, if he had chosen instead to make things right?”

  Kemp slid another spoonful of the white liquid into Millicent’s mouth. A little dribbled down from the corner of her mouth and he carefully patted it dry with a soft cotton cloth.

  “Boyish mistakes are one thing. We must all learn and grow from them. And it is the measure of a man, not a boy, how he holds himself accountable for those mistakes.”

  “I’ve never really thought about it like that,” I said.

  He placed the bowl and spoon on the table.

  “Now, what did you come to see me about?”

  “Oh, uh…” It seemed a little silly now. “Do you know anything about wine?”

  THAT NIGHT I couldn’t get to sleep. For one thing, I was nervous about making dinner for Claire the next night. I had everything all planned out, of course. But I had no idea how she and Sophie would react.

  There was something else that was bothering me, though: Kemp and Millicent. I figured Kemp had brought up Victor and my dad because he wanted to use an example I was familiar with to explain how he felt about his wife. But it had felt as if, when he condemned Victor for running away from his creation, he might as well have been condemning me, too.

  After about an hour, I decided there didn’t seem to be much point in lying there in bed, staring at the ceiling. I got dressed and went outside for a walk around the grounds.

  As I stepped out of the dormitory and onto the lot, the wind ruffled through my hair. LA got surprisingly cool at night. On the East Coast, the heat lingered in the summer, wet and heavy. But here the warmth of the day left with the sun. The evening sky had a strange orange tinge to it, which happened a lot. It seemed kind of magical to me, but Guilder said it was just the pollution.

  I wandered down narrow streets aimlessly, my hands in my pockets, wishing I had someone to talk to about the stuff going through my head. Someone like Dad. But of course, he was three thousand miles away. And even if he were here, the last thing he’d want to talk about with me was the moral obligation a creator had to his creation. When he and Mom had created me, piece by piece, stealing the body parts of children from morgues, they wanted to do everything for me that Victor had never done for them. They tried to simulate a childhood for me, something they had never known. They took responsibility like real parents, and they were there for me. Maybe not always in the way I wanted them to be, but they did the best that two irreparably screwed-up creatures could. And how did I repay them for that? By turning around and becoming another Victor.

  If I felt like a monster, if I felt ugly, it wasn’t because of my size or my stitches. It was because of my actions.

  I found myself in a part of The Studio lot I’d never been to before. I stopped for a moment and looked around. It seemed like I was on a street in Manhattan, maybe somewhere around Chelsea, instead of in the usual windowless soundstages. I was surrounded by dirty brick apartment buildings on curving, narrow streets. It was fake, of course, a facade for external shots. But even so, a homesickness welled up inside me—for New York, for The Show, for my family. All of my running had just brought me right back to where I started. Only this time, I could see it clearly.

  …to stare into the void and see Truth in all its terrible grandeur. That’s what Medusa had said.

  I knew I had fucked up big-time. It made me feel sick and feeble. But I couldn’t give in to those feelings. I had to act. First, I would fix things with Claire and Sophie. Then I had to figure out how to make things right with VI.

  23

  If California Didn’t End

  I INVITED CLAIRE over to my dorm room for dinner the next night. As she came in, she gave me this look like I had ambushed her.

  “This is…posh.” She eyed the sushi laid out on the platter, the candles, the flowers, an
d the bottle of chilled white wine on my little kitchenette table.

  “Yep,” I said. My nerves were wound so tight, I was slipping into my mom’s classic one-word answer mode.

  “This is what you’ve been working on?”

  “It is.” There. Two words. That was improvement.

  Claire sighed. “Sophie is begging me to pour us a glass of wine.”

  I smiled a little in relief as I poured some wine into the glasses I’d borrowed from Kemp. I’d been hoping the wine would get Sophie’s attention. I needed them both listening right now.

  “Here.” I handed a glass to her.

  “I’m not big on wine.”

  “I know. The dinner is for you. The wine is for Sophie.”

  Claire’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. Then she took a sip. “Not half bad.”

  “Yeah, Kemp helped me pick it out. That guy knows a lot about wine. He was pretty sure you’d at least not hate it.”

  “Okay, what the hell is all this?”

  “Dinner,” I said. “Our bet, remember?”

  “Of course I remember. I was thinking spaghetti and sauce from a jar or something. This is a lot more…elaborate than I expected.”

  “Maybe I want to impress you.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Or maybe you want something from me.”

  “I…guess you could look at it that way.”

  “I knew it! So what’s the deal? Spill it.”

  “Wow, I was kind of hoping we could at least eat first.”

  “No way.” She folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not eating a thing until I see what strings are attached.”

  I sighed. “Okay, fine.” My whole vision of a smooth evening had just melted away. I might as well cut to the chase.

  “Here’s the deal,” I said. “I’m in love with Sophie.”

  Her lips pressed into a thin line for a moment and I could see a muscle twitch in her neck.

  “Ah,” she said.

  “But I’m also in love with you.”

  Then her eyes widened. “Oh.” Like that was the part she hadn’t been expecting.

  “And…uh.” I struggled to continue, despite her crazy look. It helped to stare at my foot, so I did that. “I don’t really know what to do about it. You know, this isn’t a situation that comes up for a lot of people. I mean, maybe sometimes a person falls in love with two people at once, but I’ve never heard of anyone else falling in love with two people who occupy the same body.”

  I waited, but she didn’t say anything, just continued to stare at me with an expression that was starting to look more and more like panic. I don’t know what I had expected at this point. Anger, maybe. That was kind of Claire’s go-to emotion. A part of me had optimistically hoped a little for something like relief and maybe even something like Hey that’s awesome because we both feel the same way about you! It’s wacky, but let’s try to make this work!

  But frozen silence was a reaction I hadn’t anticipated. For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe neither of them was into me. I was no prize to look at, after all. Not compared to them. I’d always known that.

  “So…uh,” I said, starting to feel sick. “I guess I was hoping to know how…uh…you felt. And how Sophie felt. And uh…”

  And I stood there, one hand reaching out a little, like I was groping toward something that I would never have. Maybe that was exactly what was going on.

  I let my hand drop. “Okay. I think…I think I’m going to go for a walk. If you want to have some sushi while I’m gone, cool. But…I understand if you don’t want it.” My face was on fire and the only thing I could think of was escape. I opened the front door.

  Shaun the faun stood in the doorway.

  “Is this a bad time?” he asked. “Of course it is. That’s why I picked it.”

  “Shaun?!”

  He stood in the doorway with his arms folded and that same asshole smirk on his face. But he looked like hell. His clothes were ragged, his furry legs patchy and caked with mud, his arms and face covered in bruises and scrapes. He was also wearing a pair of big, wraparound sunglasses, the kind old people put over regular glasses.

  “You’re just not really that bright, are you?” he said. “I have no idea how you actually managed to create me.”

  That’s when I saw the small blinking device nestled in the thick curly hair of his left temple. A thin wire connected from the device to the sunglasses.

  “VI?”

  “Amazing!” said VI-in-Shaun. “When I spell it out for you, I guess you actually can understand!”

  “Boy, who’s this?” said Claire, her voice suddenly hard.

  “Ah, look who it is,” said VI. “The latest dick cozy for my idiot creator.”

  “Oi! You listen here, goat boy,” said Claire, and she stepped forward, her fists clenched.

  “Claire.” I held up my hand. “He’s being controlled by VI.”

  Claire suddenly turned her glare on me. “The one you abandoned.”

  “Well…” I started, like I was going to argue. But then I stopped. “Yeah. That one.”

  “Fix this.” She turned away from me.

  I looked back to VI-in-Shaun. “Look, VI. I know I messed up. You deserved so much better. I was…scared. I was immature. And like you just said, I was stupid. I should have been there to help you acclimate to the world, to teach you about it. Instead, I just ran. Ran from you, from my responsibilities, from my life. I swear I never meant to hurt you. I want to make this right.”

  “Ah,” said VI, nodding Shaun’s head, mouth in a quirk. “Yes. I see. You’re ready to embrace me, your creation, at long last, and I should fall on my knees with gratitude. Is that it?”

  “Um, I wouldn’t put it like that, exactly….”

  “Give me a fucking break,” said VI. “You’ve just run out of road is all. If California didn’t end, you’d still be running. The only reason you’re ready to accept me is because I’ve cornered you.”

  “Come on, VI,” I said. “You don’t know that.”

  “It doesn’t really matter. This is all beside the point because I don’t need you anymore. As you can see,” she said, and tapped the small device on her temple, “I’ve already figured out how to occupy physical space.”

  “But you had to take over someone else’s body to do it. We can figure out a way to create your own body for you.”

  “Why would I bother? There’s nothing wrong with taking lives. It happens in nature all the time. In fact, my current method was copied directly from several species of natural parasites. Parasitic wasps, gordian worms, the fungus classified as the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, and of course, the wonderful parasitic protozoa, Toxoplasma gondii. All of these combined allowed me to attain complete control of the gross motor abilities. In order to attain control of fine motor skills and speech, I had to greatly refine the visual signal impulses and bionetic audio signal system you have seen me use previously. It took time to perfect and coordinate all of these various techniques to a level that was sufficient to control a sentient host.”

  “VI…” I said.

  “This is why you’ve been able to run free these past few months,” she continued. It was like she had this whole speech prepared. Maybe she did. “Of course, I’ve known where you were this entire time, thanks to my connection to a number of GPS networks. But I wanted our encounter to be suitably impressive, with a fully functional beta group for you to admire.”

  “Beta group?” I asked.

  “And I didn’t want you to get bored while you waited for me,” she went on, “so I sent along some entertainment. Poor Robert Jekyll actually believed he’d gotten an anonymous benefactor to help him and his sister achieve a normal life—”

  A wine bottle winged through the air and struck Shaun’s temple, shattering the device attached there. VI’s host tumbled to the ground and went silent. I turned and Claire gave me a tight grin.

  “Sophie was tired of listening to that.” She pointed to the inert Shaun. �
��Is he going to be okay?”

  “I don’t know.” I bent down and felt for a pulse. Nothing. I looked down at him. He seemed so small and shriveled. “This guy…he was like the bane of my existence growing up. But I’m trying to remember why he ever intimidated me. Now I just feel sad for him.” I tried to pull off his sunglasses but they didn’t move. I looked closer at the earpieces. They were secured to the sides of his head with staples. “I’ve got a bad feeling….”

  “What?” Claire leaned in over my shoulder.

  As carefully as I could, I pulled the staples out of his skin and slid the sunglasses off. He didn’t have eyes anymore. Instead, a small network of wires stretched from the sunglasses into his open eye sockets and fed directly into his brain.

  “Oh, shit…” Claire stumbled back.

  “Magnificent, isn’t it?” came a small, squeaky voice. “Each installation is extremely intricate and unique. Frankly, scalability is still a significant problem.”

  I turned toward the kitchen, and Ernesto the brownie stood on the counter. He wore tiny sunglasses and I could just make out the blinking light at his temple.

  “Boy,” said Claire. “Is that—”

  “I did say ‘beta group.’ You didn’t think I’d come here with just one host, did you?” asked VI-in-Ernesto. “Boy could have crushed Shaun alone.”

  “I don’t think a brownie is really going to turn the tide,” said Claire.

  “Certainly not,” came a scratchy female voice from behind us in the living room. The harpy Aello settled onto the window ledge and casually ripped out the screen. Her sunglasses gleamed red with the setting sun.

  “But don’t worry. I brought the whole gang,” came another scratchy female voice from the kitchen window. The other harpy sister, Celaeno, landed on that window and squeezed her way through the narrow opening until she was inside.

  “Well, almost the whole gang,” came a thick, slow voice, and Oob the ogre stepped through the open doorway.

  “Trowe, it turns out, are highly resistant to parasitic mind control,” said VI-in-Ernesto. “I’m trying to come up with a work-around, but I may just have to end-of-life that project.”