by Leif Wright
Whatever it was, he was proud of his relationship with Amie, the first pretty girl he could see as anything other than a pretty girl. He could see how pretty she was—especially at a time like this, when she was caught up in hope and happiness—but it was the kind of pretty that didn’t require action on his part, didn’t require him to think of her as pretty and attractive.
“Robby, what would you like for dinner?” The therapist again.
“Let’s eat out”, “Do we have anything good?” and “You choose” were his top three iPad choices. He kept looking until he got to the third line: “I’m not really hungry yet.”
“I’m not really hungry yet,” the iPad said.
“Holy shit!” the therapist jumped up and clapped. “Holy shit!”
The room erupted in applause again.
“The system has some limitations until we can train it better,” the therapist said, his tone a bit more excited than he probably had practiced. “Right now, unless the system realizes it’s in the middle of a conversation, someone has to say your name first to get its attention. And it’s still kind of slow as it learns how to differentiate between background noise and conversation. But overall, we’re very pleased with its progress. And we’re very pleased with how well you’re learning to control it.”
Robby thought whoever had written the software had done a better job than they expected, because “controlling” the system felt less like controlling and more like looking at appropriate words that popped up on a screen in response to ambient conversations. It was an amazing feat of technology, as far as he was concerned. He looked at the keyboard icon. A keyboard popped up on the screen.
“C” … “A” … “N” …
The word “Can” appeared in a temporary text area, then a list of options popped up above it. “I” was the first one. Robby looked at that word, and it appeared after “Can”. Surely, he thought, he would have to spell out “keep”, but that was the next word in the top spot. He looked at it, and it appeared after “I”. “It?” appeared in the top spot. He looked at it, and because of the punctuation mark, the iPad spoke the sentence.
“Can I keep it?”
Everyone laughed and clapped again.
“It was made specially for you,” the therapist said, smiling. “The hardware works perfectly, and the software needs to be around you a lot to learn, so yes, you can keep it.”
“Thank you,” the iPad spoke almost immediately. Then, after a much shorter pause than Robby or Amie might have expected, “This is going to change my life.”
“You’re welcome. But we’re not done here today. We have to teach the iPad to communicate with your computer so it can send information to the computer and receive information back from it. It will also store conversation data on the computer so we can improve the system. You’ll be able to edit what it stores, but we recommend you mostly leave that alone, because having more data helps us make it work better for you.”
“Haaaaa,” Robby said.
“Thank you,” the iPad said again. Then, after a shorter pause, “I’m so happy!”
5
AMIE WAS GLAD FOR A DAY OFF. NOT THAT SHE DIDN’T ENJOY EVERY minute of working with Robby—she did. She was swimming uncharted waters, working with a man who had been shut off from the world all his life and who was just now learning to communicate, to share thoughts and feelings that must have built up inside him for decades.
She poured herself a cool glass of Moscato, grabbed a tray of cheese, and prepared to start catching up on the two seasons of Game of Thrones she was now behind on. She was really having trouble keeping the Starks, Lannisters, and Baratheons straight, but she was fairly upto-speed on who the bad guys and the good guys were. She started watching the series to appease a former boyfriend—she really had no interest in swordplay, dragons, or kingdoms. The boyfriend was now long gone, but the show had hooked her by having the balls to kill off its main characters, ostensibly the heroes of the series, which she had never really seen in a TV show.
But that first season of the show seemed like it had happened a lifetime ago, because right in the middle of season one, Robby had come along. Or more specifically, her boss at the home health business told her about an assignment they received from the state.
Some pencil pusher over at the Department of Human Services had discovered being low man on the Totem Pole meant inheriting the case of Richard Turner and his barely-there son, Robby. When the worker had seen Turner’s name on an email, he had almost deleted it without reading it, and according to the report Amie had read, no one at DHS would have blamed him. Turner was somewhat of a pariah at DHS, with office workers routinely playing “not it” when the case would come up for review—or worse, assignment.
Turner had physically assaulted two caseworkers back in the 1970s, prehistory in the world of bureaucracy. Since then, with threats from the local police, he had tolerated—barely—the scheduled welfare visits of caseworkers who were anything but committed to the case of a vegetable and his belligerent father. They had real cases to deal with—child abuse, neglect, starvation, abject poverty. Richard Turner was more trouble than he was worth, and his son, sadly, was just an annoying name on a piece of paper.
But then the caseworker at DHS had double-clicked the email instead of hitting the “Delete” button. And everything changed. The email was one word, typed out in all lower-case letters:
“hellpp”
It turned out Robby taught himself to read while watching Sesame Street, which his dad left on all day to keep him quiet. His family’s lower-middle-class income had never allowed them to get extensive testing for Robby, so everyone just assumed his extreme physical handicaps also affected his mind, because he had always been completely unable to even answer the simplest of questions.
The only thing he could say was “haaaaa”.
So Amie had immediately signed on to become Robby’s full-time nurse and therapist. And what she learned was beyond anything she could have imagined.
Robby wasn’t just able to communicate; he was smart, she realized. How maddening, how horrible it must have been to be a smart person trying his best to communicate with the outside world while his body refused to obey and allow him to even say “yes” or “no”. She spent many sleepless nights trying to imagine how she would have handled it. She couldn’t imagine it, no matter how hard she tried.
And that was before Robby started confiding in her, telling her—ever so slowly—how tough it had really been, how kids at school had been so cruel, how he had developed a nickname that followed him throughout the twelve years of hell during which he was viewed more as a burden than a student: Robby the Retard. Kids, he knew now, had no idea how their words hurt, had no idea how he had wanted to cry when his third-grade classmates ran around his chair, some accidentally kicking his feet as they got closer and closer, holding hands and singing, “Robby the Retard, Robby the Reeeetard. Poop in your pants, Robby the Retard!”
The jokes only got crueler after that, he said, and junior high school was intolerable. But he could complain to no one, confide in no one.
That was the worst part, he said—the fact that there was no one to tell him it was okay, no one to listen to him, no one to offer any hope that, at some point in the future, he would find a way out of his isolation. Instead, he had to sit there, stupid smile on his face, and say “haaaa” when people made fun of him, kicked him, poked him, pulled his hair, and grabbed his hand and put it on girls’ butts to make them scrunch up their faces and squeal, “Ewwww! Robby the Retard grabbed my ass!”
Then, of course, the girls’ boyfriends would come up, flick his ear or his forehead, and threaten him, “Stop grabbing my girlfriend’s ass, you pervert retard!”
Robby would always smile and reply, “Haaaa.”
The thought of it made Amie cry.
The Moscato helped, so did Game of Thrones. Sometimes, it felt good to just stop thinking about it despite how much she liked Robby. The state paid her sal
ary, which was a good thing, because Robby’s dad—before someone had caved his head in, at least—hated the idea that someone was coming into his house to help his son more than the state-mandated nurse, who visited twice a week and really never did anything but sign her time sheet, then watch soap operas until it was time to leave.
After Robby emailed for help, however, the state discovered horrifying conditions that the nurse apparently didn’t care to notice. Robby had the dried food from multiple meals crusted around his chin and body; though he could hold it until someone helped him to the bathroom these days, his pants were still soiled from days of being unchanged; his body was covered in bed sores. Canker sores filled his mouth, which was dry and cracked from several days without water.
Tears had poured from Robby’s eyes as the state workers had entered the home over the loud, largely incoherent protestations of his father.
After failing to get Robby to repeat the typing he had done to compose the email, the state called in an expert from New York who was the author of software and designer of hardware for a famous scientist with similar difficulties. Even with the expert, it took almost a month to determine for certain that, with great effort, Robby could get his left index finger to move, millimeters at a time, enough to distinguish between involuntary and voluntary motions.
A team of designers and fabricators then came in, some donating their time and efforts, to create a system specifically tailored to Robby and his special needs to enable him to, for the first time, talk.
And, boy, did he have a lot to say. He hated apple juice. That was the first thing he said, eliciting laughter, applause, and tears from the room full of experts who had waited patiently for an hour for him to say it. He missed his mother, he said. And as much as he loved Sesame Street, could he watch something else?
The Department of Human Services got an emergency injunction forcing Robby’s dad to allow state workers into the home daily to care for Robby, and he reluctantly gave in after a cursory objection. And that’s when Amie came in, getting her first full-time assignment.
At the time, she was intimidated. Everyone, of course, knew about Robby’s miracle from the newspaper, and she didn’t know if she could handle such a famous case. All eyes would be on her, and she didn’t want to make any mistakes. Robby immediately set her at ease, however, and they built a rapport quickly, through their laborious interactions via Robby’s special computer.
She cleared up his bed sores, kept him hydrated, kept him changed and dry, and she helped fill him in on all the TV he had missed while watching PBS. He particularly loved Seinfeld and Frasier, which he said was possibly the funniest show he had ever seen.
She hadn’t shown him Game of Thrones yet, but she knew he would immediately fall for it. She was saving it for a special treat. And tonight, she was treating herself. She didn’t like lying to the police detective about having a boyfriend, and she was glad her friend Wesley had agreed to go along with it, but she knew it was clear to everyone she didn’t like Robby’s dad, and she couldn’t risk becoming a suspect and jeopardizing her gig taking care of Robby. It was just a tiny lie. She really was home at the time. She just figured it would be easier to believe that if someone else corroborated it.
What happened to Robby’s father was terrifying and horrible—at least it would be, if it had happened to a better person. He largely stayed out of Amie’s way, but if half the stories Robby told about him were true, it was a miracle he had survived.
Robby’s mother, apparently unable or unwilling to live with such a severely handicapped son, had just walked away one day, taking nothing with her except clothes and makeup. And Robby’s dad never missed an opportunity to throw that in his face, blaming Robby for how his own life had turned out. Robby wouldn’t even discuss his mother, so Amie knew the wounds ran deep.
Now, however, Robby was free from his father’s influence, no matter how that freedom had come. Not only was he an adult, but with the state paying, he could live somewhere besides with his hateful father when fabrication was complete on a specialized wheelchair that would allow him to move around wherever he wanted. Since he had been legally ruled competent, he could make decisions for himself, and in his forties, Robby was finally seeing the light at the end of an impossibly long tunnel of being imprisoned in his own body, and she was glad she had a front-row seat.
She took a sip of Moscato—then a gulp—as Jamie Lannister fumbled with holding a sword left-handed. In many ways, she felt like the Hodor to Robby’s Bran. And like Hodor, she was happy to do her part, simply serving him as he embarked on a journey of discovering how his crippled body could still enable him to accomplish great things.
Tomorrow, she would do physical therapy on Robby’s wasted legs. He would probably never regain their use, but there was no reason he had to sit in pain, either. Robby hated leg day, but he knew it had to happen. And he loved the massage that always followed. She smiled.
With the realization that someone was in there, doctors now were working to find therapies that might help Robby regain control of some of his body. The neural pathways had been seriously damaged when Robby sustained his brain injury as a child, so full function would never be restored, but he might be able to gain enough control to maybe one day even engage in rudimentary speech.
Already, his left hand was moving more deftly, though it took a trained and experienced eye to notice. That breakthrough came as a result of an electrical pulse implant that helped calm the muscle spasms that wrested control from Robby’s brain.
It was when Amie stood up from the couch to replenish her glass of Moscato that she came to the realization that she would do anything—anything—to help Robby get to the point of being able to do that very thing. For the first time in his life, to feel almost normal, to experience the little things that everyone else took for granted.
Standing up from a couch, even when her equilibrium was compromised by alcohol, was so easy that her body didn’t even have to get instructions from her consciousness to do it. Her brain decided it wanted to refill her glass of Moscato, and her body simply performed all the complicated actions necessary to make that desire a reality. But for Robby, typing a single letter on a computer screen required a monumental level of concentration. Where most people could think a word and watch it appear on screen as their hands found and pressed the appropriate letters without pausing to think about it, Robby could think of nothing else while trying to get his body to respond to even the most simple of instructions: point my finger.
As her body automatically poured itself a glass, she realized she wanted to make Robby her life’s work. She sat the glass down. No more drinking. No more Game of Thrones. She had some more work to do.
6
IT WAS AN ELECTION YEAR, AND SHERIFF JOHN HUMPHREY NEEDED this old lady’s case like he needed a hole in the head. The last thing he wanted was a murder investigation inside the city limits dragging on for weeks or months while voters grew more convinced that the sheriff wasn’t holding down the fort.
Those assholes at dispatch probably called him for just that reason. They knew city cops handled city crimes, but they called him anyway, interrupting a beautiful night’s sleep, he might add. Now, despite tantalizing clues, he was stuck deeper than a tick on a hound’s balls, and it didn’t look like a flea collar was coming around anytime soon to get him out. He pored over the evidence. Weird letters on her head. Skin in her mouth. Weird old photo that could have been from a local picture place thirty years ago.
It was bullshit, all of it. They sent the skin to the DNA lab, but no results were back yet, and even so, if the perp wasn’t in a DNA database somewhere, it would be no help whatsoever until after they arrested someone. Everyone seemed baffled by the letters on her noggin, and the photo paper had been narrowed down to “maybe it was from a local photo place that’s now out of business.”
It had all the makings of election-year ballast.
Quickly what should have been a simple case became a confoundi
ng conundrum: an apparently bumbling criminal who, despite his numerous mistakes, was still a complete mystery.
He ran a hand over the acrylic pyramid he was given when he passed the fourteenth degree of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. Encased inside the acrylic was a gold ring with a black Hebrew letter whose name he couldn’t remember. Yod or some shit. It was supposed to be the first letter of God’s name and represent perfection, which it probably did, but he dozed through most of the rituals, which were carried out from the fourth to the thirty-second degrees in a two-day marathon of plays and lectures. He hadn’t been the only one dozing, he noticed as he had looked around the theater. It wasn’t that he counted his Masonic degrees lightly; it was just that they had gotten him up too early and kept him up too late. He passed the degrees and got the special Masonic hat for the 32nd Degree and learned the secret word and all that, but it was all kind of a blur now.
He loved being a Mason, and he loved that he was 32nd Degree, because he could shut up all the conspiracy theorists who thought Masonry was secretly serving a mystical light named Lucifer. He had been there, he would tell them, and the only light he heard anyone mention was Jesus. But other than that satisfaction, Masonry only served as a good place to get together with old friends and hang out for a few hours a week.
And it gave him a nice, acrylic pyramid to rub when he had a particularly vexing problem like the one he faced now.
What he wanted to do was punt and shove this case so far up City’s ass they could taste the computer ink it was printed with, but they were swamped with cases of their own, and they’d be pretty pissed off if he dropped this one on them, too. He got along pretty well with most of the city cops, and they’d probably be more understanding than he was thinking they might be, but it was an election year, and losing the police vote might be bad, even though he really was facing no credible opposition. Some ex-cop from a town over and a lawyer were running against him, but Humphrey was part of the fabric of this county, born and bred.