This Wicked Tongue

by Elise Levine

  Martin stares straight through the neighbour. The man looks confused. Frowning, he places the tumbler on the coffee table, on top of the napkin on top of a coaster, and retreats to a seat in a folding chair by the glass doors.

  Martin knows a lot. Like all the solutions to the big-snore math problems at the Lab School—the school the reason why he and his mother live here, so she won’t have to keep driving him every morning from the North Side where they used to live and she still works, and reverse drive in the late afternoon. Martin also tears through the outcomes to the biology and chemistry experiments, way faster than most of the kids whose parents are faculty at the university to which the Lab School is attached. Parents who, according to Martin’s mother—who is not faculty at the university—receive a hefty discount on their children’s education, unlike his mother. Parents who might win Nobels one day, according to their kids. According to Martin’s mother too, who plumps with pride when Martin returns home from after-school science enrichment and tells her the scuttlebutt, as she calls the kids’ brags. Just home from work, she adjusts the collar on her blouse and straightens from her usual exhausted hunch on the display-model couch she boasts she smartly bought for a song—a real couch, not like the futon-frame job they had in the apartment in which Martin had until now grown up. She tilts her chin and smiles her knowing smile and draws back her shoulders, displaying the remnants of the powerful upper torso of a former college two-hundred-yard freestyler champ.

  Swimming was how she met Martin’s dad. Martin knows the story, which his mother was once fond of relating. She’d finished her laps in the pool at Columbia U and, upon levering out of the water, a tall young man strutting the deck caught her eye. Failing to catch his, she re-entered the water and lapped him several times, hoping and failing again to impress as he crookedly backstroked and unashamedly treaded water. This went on for months, the same time once a week, but never on the same day of the six she trained. In exasperation one afternoon she full-on went for it—maneuvered herself from her fast lane into his slow, passed and then waited for him at the deep-end turn, jammed her leg into his creaky pivot and met his glare with a compliment on his stroke. They married a year later. Another year and they had Martin.

  Martin knows the rest of the story too, what his mother does not relate. His parents divorced after ten years, and here Martin is now, with his mother in the neighbour’s townhouse. Bullshit bored.

  More people assemble in the living room and Martin ignores them too. He concentrates on his modest earache, a recurrence of his childhood infections. He wonders if he can claim the clicking pressure in his head as a reason for returning to his and his mother’s own unit. But she takes a seat in the large easy chair opposite him, her soft stomach mounding on her lap, her chin up. She’s wearing her superior smile.

  Martin nudges a dish of cashews on the coffee table toward himself while his mother clears her throat and leans forward. Her wire-rimmed glasses are smudged. Visible below her baggy white shorts, her legs crack with purple veins. Her frazzled, grey-streaked mane frays around the shoulders of her oversized T-shirt. She clears her throat again and everyone continues to ignore her.

  I believe we have a problem on our hands, she says into the swirling chat. The problem is the easement. We’re leaving ourselves wide open.

  Martin scores a haul of nuts and sits back. Might as well, he thinks.

  The easement? the woman neurobiologist says sharply, interrupting the various conversations, and her husband snorts into his hand, then gazes at his woolly toes.

  Martin’s mother squints craftily. I propose, she says, that each unit chip in, so we can hire one smart cookie of a lawyer. And see about jointly buying out the easement rights.

  A few outright chortles from those assembled. Martin grinds a paste between his molars. Since his parents’ separation, his mother has become an expert in lawyers. She frequently speaks of suing people—for example, the townhouse builder—and obtaining multiple legal opinions on subjects ranging from her contract at work, which leaves her underpaid and unhappy, to her living will, which she wants to redo for the third time since she and Martin’s father split. Martin thinks if his mother could sue his father over Martin’s latest earache she would, if only she could prove the infection was caused by his father’s negligence. Had he or had he not insisted on making Martin shower immediately following his sole and unwilling dunk in the ocean? He had not. But Martin has decided on a personal policy of shrugging away any of his mother’s lines of questioning concerning his dad. Things seem simpler that way.

  Please, another neighbour groans. A lawyer?

  I know one or two, Martin’s mother says, face lit. But we should interview five or six, and make each sign a confidentiality agreement. You never know.

  The neighbours seem to avoid each other’s eyes, unsure of where to direct their attention. Helpfully, Martin lets his lower jaw drop open and his coated tongue protrude. He ignores the startled expressions.

  His mother is looking at him but not with The Look. This is one he’s never before seen. He ignores it too.

  Hours after the townhouse meeting, by the gleam of his computer screen, Martin dislodges cracker crumbs from his keyboard. He tugs at the scratchy bandages his mother has wrapped over his ears and wriggles his pointer finger beneath them to poke the wadded cotton balls. He runs another algorithm then closes some of his programs for the night and turns off his screen. He stands and for a disorienting second the still-unfamiliar carpeting swells and falls. Dizzy, he considers calling for his mother, until his eyesight adjusts and he makes out the reassuring hallway light at the bottom of his bedroom door. His mother’s clear voice suddenly carries from her bedroom. To whom am I speaking? On her phone again. The floor settles beneath Martin’s feet and he mounts his bed, still a novelty to him. In the apartment he’d slept stretched and dreamless on a mattress on the floor of his room while his parents crashed together on the futon sofa in the living room—life when Martin’s dad was still around, in those years when Martin’s mother was finishing med school and then hardly sleeping at all through her internships.

  Like the parents of his classmates, Martin’s mother does important work too. At the VA on the North Side she is a psychiatrist who medicates criminals, as she refers to her patients. She mostly knows them by their social security numbers, not their names. Some of these people, she confides to Martin, are more criminal than others. Some of her work is Top Secret, for the government, and some of her work means the late-night phone conversations. Does Martin understand? she sometimes asks. What Martin understands—aside from Homeland Security maybe and maybe global peace—but neglects to let on is that she will never win a Nobel, like some of his classmates’ parents, as the award would require everyone to know what his mother does. As such, Martin can’t brag about her Top Secretness. He can only keep it secret too, storing it in his chest where he thinks of it swelling his soft stomach and floating his man-boy tits, inner keeps where he hides other secrets too, other tales he refuses to tattle, no matter the temptation. Like the one about the boogie board his dad promised and then neglected to buy Martin to make up for his missed dinner a few weeks back. Or the mere single day at Gran’s—because his dad just had to book, as he called it—instead of the three Martin was supposed to have. And she was upset and had words—Gran’s word—with her son—Martin’s dad—and as such forgot to make the Oreo cheesecake Martin likes so much. And the trip back to Chicago taking three long days, Martin’s dad stopping at crappy towns to hear bands and leaving Martin alone in the dinky motel rooms. At least he’d finally kept himself from calling his mother, watching, instead, a lot of bullshit TV.

  His dad. What a fuck. For fuck’s sake.

  Martin arches his eyebrows and makes a mock O with his lips. He clamps his hand over them. Language, he thinks in the voice of his mother.

  Martin is also not supposed to yank off the bandage itching his right ear. He w
ads the material under his pillow anyway and by the dim light inspects the outlines of posters on his walls. Electro, Gakutensoku—the pictures of vintage robots are among the only decorations from the old apartment his mother has allowed in the new place. Their outdated programming and vaguely human likenesses fascinate Martin. They’re the past imagining the future. The future’s past.

  Sometimes Martin’s mother tells him he’s not doing his best to cope with their current situation—their referring to Martin and his mother and not his father anymore. His father, Martin understands, is now fully in the past, the future’s past. But his dad is a far less good deal than the robots.

  Martin’s ears hiss and sputter. The sounds remind him of the surf on the late afternoon his dad finally shook off his hangover and shuttled Martin to the beach. While Martin’s dad strolled the boardwalk, Martin kicked at sand flies for twenty-six minutes, according to his phone, before his dad showed up coffee in hand and ordered Martin—minus the boogie board he’d been holding out for—into the water. For fuck’s sake, Martin’s dad grouched, a quick dunk won’t kill you. Neither will taking two minutes to get out of that big head of yours.

  Later, while his dad chatted up some girls not much older than Martin, he shivered on the boardwalk, damp towel around his shoulders like a bedraggled cape, shaggy hair uncombed and filthy, he was sure, with microscopic bacteria. When the girls left, his dad insisted on buying Martin a fortune printed on a small yellow ticket stub from a mechanical fortune teller embarrassingly named Zoltar, a crap automata wearing a turban and silk vest—Martin’s school pals Shehan and Jyoti would have flamed it with sarcasm, not to mention the fortune itself. You will love wisely or not at all. Lucky numbers 17, 201, 6. What bullshit, Martin’s dad said, laughing.

  Martin had refused to even begin rearranging his face into a bullshit cute-kid grin. For fuck’s sake, he thought, splashing the words around in his big head while his dad bought him a dripping soft serve and hustled Martin into the car, no shower or change of clothes, or late real breakfast or real lunch. His dad then crawled them through rush-hour Virginia, DC, Maryland, and sped like a fiend through Delaware, cursing the tolls since he had no transponder, and on into New Jersey, stopping three times the whole trip to hit the can—as his dad, somehow looking at once sunburned-pink and puke-pale—referred to it. The can. Martin referred to nothing until two in the morning when Gran tripped down her driveway lit by her buggy landscape lights and nearly crushed him in her arms as if he were still a bullshit kid. For fuck’s sake, he told her, and the shocked look on her face struck through his chest the same way it felt the day his mother announced she and Martin’s dad were splitting.

  But no, Martin will never divulge to his mother the extent of his father’s lapses. Aside from complicating Martin’s day-to-day with his mom, at some point the deadbeat bullshit might prove useful in ways Martin hasn’t yet entertained. As such, he is storing the idiocies like important data, something some superbad AI might one day unleash. As such, Martin believes in keeping a lid on tight, as his mother sometimes complains of him when he refuses to answer the questions she asks. Are you happy? Can you tell me how you’re feeling? Describe the room? For fuck’s sake.

  Martin lifts his big head—the one his dad thinks he should get out of, the one with the lid on tight—and punches his pillow into shape. He will go to MIT when he’s older, where he will construct bots who wreak fuckery. He knows from information his mother has scrounged that it’s in the bag—the Lab Rats have a high rate of acceptance at MIT, at anywhere they want to go.

  Martin locks his hands behind his neck and sighs at the ceiling, with its poster of Michael Phelps before he got busted and entered rehab and staged a comeback. The poster is an oldie but goodie, as Martin’s mother says of it, the swimmer’s nearly inhuman wingspan spread wide over blue water.

  Martin blows a wish-kiss Michael Phelps’s superbad-angel way, even though it isn’t necessary. As much as he knows anything, Martin knows his future.

  Unless the cancer gets him.

  Because she is smart too, his mother figured out he harbours the cancer gene. She likes to tell the story of how, when he was a baby, she had him tested not once, not twice, but five times. She was that sure. And sure enough, the last test revealed his pre-diagnosis. This is why she microwaves organic pot stickers for his dinner and serves him organic apple juice. After dinner she microwaves organic popcorn and lets him fill up while he watches his shows about evil turds and smart-girl secret agents perfect as the AI Martin himself might create some day. He bets those bots won’t dream at night either.

  Sometimes Martin’s mother will say, Anything interesting happen last night? She’s concerned he never remembers his dreams—never has, as far as he knows.

  Two nights, Martin hears his mother say now from her bedroom. As if he can’t hear. Ten mil Zyprexa. Restraints.

  Martin adjusts his bedcovers. Now his ears squeak and rustle and he feels a phantom motion, the in-and-out tugging of waves—nausea from the antibiotics his mother has him on. He considers phoning her to say, I’m here, even though she is just down the hall. He imagines her questions, so he gives up on the idea of calling. He tries to remember his old room but his mind thickens. He removes the bandage from his other ear and presses the fabric to his nose. The wad smells metallic, comforting. He hears his mother open her bedroom door and the hallway light switches off and then she closes her door again.

  His thoughts lift when he thinks of tomorrow. He will run the simultaneous localization and mapping robotic programs he downloaded tonight—SLAM, data in, reaction out. Such programs can create maps using scanning lasers and then, interfacing with a bot, use the maps to navigate in real time with other path-planning and obstacle-avoidance algorithms. It’s the stuff of driverless cars, robot vacuum cleaners, maybe excellent biological adventures in the future, like nanobots in the bloodstream. Like the miniaturized submarine and crew from the golden-oldie Fantastic Voyage Martin and his mother streamed ages ago one Friday night in the old apartment while they waited for his dad to come home from a show at a bar and he never did. Probably such programs have military applications too. Like bomb defusers and who knows. SLAM, problem solved.

  Now Martin imagines his mother in bed, falling asleep with her smudged glasses on. He tucks his head under the covers. Describe the room, he orders himself in a corny robot voice. Martin recalls his posters in immaculate detail. Problem solved, he reports. Then he laughs inside so his mother can’t hear the mock-fiendish crescendo that echoes in imagined 3D over stormy seas and interplanetary space travel stations. Like something in a movie he might watch if he could convince his mother to take him to see it. He can almost get a load of the poster for it as he drifts toward sleep.

  Shit, he thinks. He shakes himself alert enough to reach into his nightstand desk drawer. He tapes new bandages over his ears so his mother won’t be upset when she checks on him in the morning before she leaves for work, when he is still asleep and dreamless as machines.

  Martin’s ears feel better in the morning but his head hurts. He’s hot but the AC is turned low to save money. He tipsies down the stairs to the second floor before the workmen arrive. They never speak to him, barely nod his direction. This suits Martin fine. He drinks a glass of organic chocolate milk standing over the sink. His mother has already left.

  Martin has his own work to do. He wobbles past his mother’s latest Post-its to the first floor and cracks open the first-floor bathroom door. Dank air drifts out and the two cats leap from the tub to greet him. They are large, beautiful, golden with black spots. Bengals. A birthday present just before summer break from Martin’s mother, with the understanding, as she referred to it, that they stay in the bathroom and Martin tend to them. This past winter, right before Martin and his mother moved, he’d seen an article on the breed in a magazine while waiting to see the dentist. The creatures made him think of Cheetah the military bot. Martin campaigned h
ard and accepted his mother’s terms. As such, he now fulfills his part of the bargain every day, nudging the vanity under the sink open and scooping cat food while the animals purr and rub against his bare legs. He refills their water dish and replaces it in the tub. With a plastic shovel he digs through the litter in a plastic box on the floor next to the toilet and bags the waste for the trash. From a hook on the back of the door he takes the toy, a long stick with a feathered mass on one end, and dangles it while the cats jump and pounce.

  August arrives. Martin’s ear infection clears and his mother drives him each morning to science camp in Evanston where he applies his mad skills. Evenings, he quality times it with his shows and sometimes fails to get out of accompanying his mother to more association meetings. At least the adult talk eddies undemandingly around him while he basks in the potent AC and perfects his scowl between mouthfuls of snack foods. He is here, he understands, to keep his mother company among the hitched. As if he and his mother also form a couple, a childless one like the Jewish neurobiologists, to somewhat balance out the two South Korean pathogen-research couples who each have a daughter much younger than Martin and both of whom are also Lab Rats. There is also a white not-Jewish couple, internists both, with a large doughy baby.

  Martin does find himself warming to the idea of the Jewish couple. Oddballs, his mother has recently taken to calling them, to account for their increasing stand-offishness. But of interest to Martin is the large, loud black dog they have recently acquired, an excitable pedigreed beast—a near-child only better, by Martin’s count—that the man and woman parade to the nearby park. Martin would love to play fetch with the animal. By his count his own pets don’t rate as full playmates or as kids, since by his mother’s decree the animals exist only in the first-floor bathroom. But the couple haven’t offered and Martin’s mother can’t get behind the idea, as she puts it. Too unpleasant that a child should need to beg, she says. I’m not begging, Martin keeps insisting to her steely smile. And I’m not a child.