Sunlight 24

by Merritt Graves

  A tingle wound through me as Ethan said the words. This would solve the problem with my brother. It would solve most of my problems: Lena, my parents, school. They were just symptoms of one underlying disease, as Dr. Griswald would say, of not being smart enough to deal with them. You never wanted to treat the symptoms when you could treat the actual cause.

  I shook my head as I finished the cake and moved on to the chocolate mousse. “So what’s your plan? You want to make these suits, right, and you think we’ll find what we need at your uncle’s? But what’s our pretense for spending so much time there?”

  “That’s the beauty of it. He’s my uncle. We don’t need a pretense, we just show up. He’s not going to care as long as we toss him a few stamps.”

  “I thought you got rid of them all,” I said, irked that he was still fucking around with street drugs.

  “I did. Mostly. But kept a few to grease the wheels with Richard. He’s a chore to be around even when he’s buzzed, so going in cold would be a nightmare. I’m telling you. And this is coming after years of Thanksgivings and Christmases so cringe that most of my family won’t even speak his name aloud anymore.”

  “Well, ditch what you can. Alright? The last thing we need is something stupid distracting us.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “And Ethan . . . we are going to need an actual reason to be there. My parents don’t have anything better to do than ask me a gazillion questions, so I’ll have to give them something. He’s your sixty-year-old ex-half-uncle by marriage, so it’s not like it’s the most obvious thing in the world that we’d all be hanging out. Besides, it’s good practice. It might seem small now, but if something happens, whatever it might be, we need to be on the same page down to the smallest fraction of a detail on story, schedules, timelines, transit . . .”

  “Obviously, man. Obviously.” He tapped his head. “But don’t worry; I can see it all now. Everything’s in these huge, white rooms in my head and all I have to do is just zero in and open up the drawers. There’s so much freaking space, Dor. So much freaking space. I’m never going to forget anything again.”

  He stopped tapping and started rubbing his head in contemplative circles. “To think I was going to kill myself before . . .”

  “I don’t—”

  Ethan interrupted, talking over me. “I was going to do it. I’d bought the pills. They’re still sitting in my closet.”

  This was tricky. On one hand, Ethan was the kind of guy who required structure. Who needed, even wanted to be pushed. And overindulgence would sell him, and everything he wanted to be in the future, short. Yet at the same time he was hurting. Feeling things that I didn’t—or couldn’t even pretend to—comprehend. And trivializing that pain seemed like an even bigger, more callous and long-lasting mistake. “I know you’re serious, Eth. That’s why I’m taking it seriously.”

  Ethan thought about this for what seemed like fifteen or twenty seconds, looking down at his plate, and then up at an impressionist oil painting hanging on the wall. “Well . . .” he said finally. “That’s why you’re my best friend.”

  Chapter 17

  “I mean, I don’t like hate rich people. I’m not some little punk ass talking shit. I just hate how smart they think they are, and don’t want to even think about how loaded their decks have been,” I said.

  “No, sir,” said Ethan’s uncle, Richard, cracking open a PBR. His speech had a jolly quality, but there was a sadness underneath, too, that would bob to the surface every twentieth word or so, making his laugh seem brittle. Making his long, bearded face come alive and fall back asleep again. “Been that way for a while.”

  “They get rich. They Revise. They get richer. And since they’ve bought off the folks in charge there’s no one to break the cycle. Humans work in packs, but in cities, countries . . .” I shook my head. “More distance, less feeling. Less feeling, more suffering.”

  The unspoken agreement was that in exchange for getting to pick through his scrap yard, we’d talk with him for an hour first over stamps and beers. It was tedious because he repeated the same five conspiracy theories over and over again, and I found the best thing to do was just drone on about the kind of stuff he wanted to hear, like a pet doing tricks, exercising my new, Revised brain. And when I got sick of performing, I just egged him on instead.

  “People get a little meaner with every dollar. They might give more away, but that’s just a smokescreen, a free teddy bear after they fuck you in the ass. Like that affordable housing down near the highway. GT Automation’s fractal robots dug the foundations in under an hour. 3D printed the homes with fiber-reinforced Ductal. Great PR pony show for the media. Great smokescreen.”

  “They look pretty sharp, though,” said Ethan, baiting him.

  “That’s the worst part. They might spend a penny or two of a dollar on this kind of ‘feel good’ stuff. But where’s the rest going? Lobbying. Stock options so their executives can Revise more. R&D so they can put more construction workers out of work. Charity’s just a way to feel good about running up the score. Feel good about perpetuating the system.”

  They were sour words, but they came out soft and faint, like speaking of some hazy childhood memory. Another laugh followed, and another eye drop on to a stamp sheet.

  “What a bunch of freakin’ bullshit,” said Ethan.

  “You’d think people’d see through it. Try to change things,” I said in my most naïve-sounding voice.

  “Wouldn’t matter,” said Richard, a few decibels louder than we’d been talking. “Not when it’s of the corporations, for the corporations.”

  It was hard to tell sometimes if Richard hated the government or terrorists more. He’d recently built a Faraday cage in a shipping container out back because he was worried about some extremist group or rogue state setting off an EMP that would fry everything electronic, but most of his verbal ire collected on government officials. Especially unelected ones.

  “Richard, what do you think about the Fed cutting rates again?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Stealing our savings and handing it to those goddamn speculators. They should be strung up, the whole lot of them. You’d have thought they’d learned a lesson with that hyperinflation jubilee but, nope, just a new currency to shit all over. How are you supposed to save with a negative fucking interest rate? Answer me that one.”

  That kind of thing made sense, but then he’d say things like, “They say, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t be racist. You shouldn’t be racist.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, then maybe they shouldn’t be acting like animals.’”

  He didn’t like people disagreeing with him, so I stuck to shrugs and half-smiles. There’s nothing really to be gained in convincing some crank to be slightly less racist. You can’t just come out and argue it—you have to warm them up. Lure them onto common ground. And that really wasn’t worth the effort on someone who only cared about his little junk pile.

  But it wasn’t junk to us. Now that we were Revised, we figured out how to fix things up. Old 3D printers. Surplus manifolds. Scrap metal. Chargeless magnets. Car parts, of course. Rusting outlines of automobiles. A halfhull of a small outrigger. Surplus containers killing the grass with whatever was leaking out of them. An orchard of decay and neglect.

  It was perfect because even though we could afford to buy things now, like video transmitters and flight controllers, there was no way to explain how we could afford them. Fixing things raised questions, too, but at least it was plausible, and Mom and Dad wanted to believe. They needed to believe that I could make something of myself without something they couldn’t afford to get me.

  Fortunately, Ethan was turning into a skilled scavenger. He was always calling out, “You know, Dor, if we just ripped this out and gave it a new chassis, it would be golden.” And, “A little S-tape on these irrigation tubes and we could set up a little side stamp-plant biz if our burglary career doesn’t pan out.”

  I think after being disillusioned by things that were so far out of
his control, like sports becoming obsolete and the mean scores on the PLACEs exam shooting higher, having things that actually fit together and followed predictable laws helped the world make sense to him again.

  “Check that right there.” He was on the row across from me, looking through the skeleton of an old auto frame.

  “The carburetor?”

  “No, no. The speakers.”

  I didn’t know where it came from—Ethan had never liked science—but like a lot of things, ideas just seemed to materialize. And we’d be able to see the physics: How objects would move. What would cause drag, lift, pressure. “Speakers use electromagnets to make sound, vibrating air molecules in every direction, but what if we focused it? What if we fine-tuned the pattern so it synced up with another object?”

  “Like some kind of a tractor beam?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s cool, but . . . how does that help us?”

  “Uh, I don’t know. In case we ever needed to . . .”

  Ethan looked off in the distance a few moments—the sun momentarily eclipsed by a smattering of clouds—before clasping his hands together and turning back toward me. “No, no, I got it: You remember that science fair Mrs. Margaret’s been babbling about? Even if it just kind of worked, we could win the freaking Revision. It’s all the story we’d ever need! An excuse for being here in the yard. An excuse for being so fucking smart in public school. And a tractor beam’s cool, but it’s not so space age that people would be like, ‘What the fuck?’”

  “Still,” I said. “People’ll start checking into—”

  “Dude, they will anyway,” he said, stepping around the frame next to me. “Eventually we’ll be Revised enough that we can’t hide it anymore, so we need some legitimate reason for having started. That’s what Chris is doing—trying to win that lame Community Spirit scholarship. It’s what Michael would be doing if his parents weren’t religious weirdos. And it’s what we should be doing. We gotta be official, man. We privately Revise so we can win the science scholarship that lets us publicly Revise. Poetry.”

  “It’s like laundering brain cells,” I said, starting to get excited.

  “Exactly. And it’s a great story: Starting from nothing. Making your own way. It’s the American Dream.”

  “The parents’ll love that I’m getting involved in a science fair. Just the words, science fair.” For a few seconds it was like I could actually feel electricity branching through me, the endorphins and dopamine swimming into my bloodstream. “We should’ve thought of this before now.”

  “We weren’t Revised before now,” said Ethan. “I didn’t even know I liked science until we Revised . . . or should it be ‘I didn’t even know I would like science’ because I needed Revision for me to like it. Or maybe Revision needed me to think that I would like it so that I’d Revise in a way that I would like it.”

  As quickly as it came, the excitement stalled. The logic made sense, but there was a queasiness to it, like being disoriented at a foreign altitude. “It’s such a bald-faced lie, though.”

  “That I like science? What are you talking about, bro? I’m saying—”

  “No,” I answered, interrupting him. “Us competing under false pretenses.”

  “Oh, really? Well, fairness is a false pretense. Sooner or later everyone realizes that the rules are only for the people making them—and so you have to make your own, too. That’s on them, not us.”

  I shook my head.

  “You call me flaky, but I’ve been nothing but consistent on this. You, on the other hand, are only consistent when you’re angry, but as soon as things start going well, you get gooey and philanthropic. You forget what got you there, but guess what, kid? We’re not there yet. PLACEs retakes are only two weeks out so, as much as I’d hate to rush you, we should probably pick another house, too.”

  I tried to think of something else, but stopped after realizing that I’d been thinking of nothing else for two years. I wasn’t doing this because I was an asshole looking for an excuse to rob people. I was doing it because this was the only way to be a relevant member of society. It wasn’t a perfect rationale, but nothing anymore was perfect and neat and straightforward.

  And I believed it. Or at least believed enough of it to nod when he asked if we had everything here we needed. “Got the oscilloscope and I saw an old DC/DC converter back there by the electronic pile. Copper wire. Cables. I guess we could use a transducer, but we could probably buy that without raising any eyebrows, like we did for Syd.”

  He let out a sigh, half smiling. Despite not always seeming to really know me, he usually knew what to say to get me to do something.

  “The funny thing is I never thought to enter Syd back when Mrs. Margaret brought the contest up,” I said, still dwelling on the thought. “I mean, I thought about it, but . . .”

  “She wouldn’t have won,” said Ethan.

  “Right. It’s just funny that it didn’t . . .”

  “Dude, if we had had all the ideas back when we were normal, we wouldn’t have needed to Revise in the first place. This is just proof that we’re doing the right thing!” He slapped me on the arm. “Now come on and help me look for some batteries that aren’t too far gone.”

  I let my shoulders drop as I picked through the scraps. It was a good story. Even better, it was the kind of thing that would impress Lena. Judging from Syd’s footage, she was put off by the selfish, snobbish, Lawrence thing, and this would play right into that. She’d never actually date someone unRevised, but someone who earned their Revision would be perfect. It might even help make up for how behind I was.

  “Shit, what’s this doing here? It’s like brand new.” I took out a shiny orange power drill which, to my surprise, roared to life when I turned it on.

  Ethan look puzzled for a few seconds before stating, “I bet my uncle doesn’t even know half the stuff he has back here.”

  “But this looks just out of the box.” I glanced back at the decaying trailer and unmowed lawn. “And it doesn’t seem like he’s exactly out and about procuring new merchandise.”

  Ethan shrugged. “You’d be surprised; he oscillates between deadbeat and highly productive tweaker. He probably needed it for something when he was blitzed and forgot about it.”

  He paused. “But . . . what do you think about the fair?”

  “I like it,” I said, putting the drill back. I hated to admit it, but deep down I liked how Ethan pushed me, too. That’s a valuable quality in a friend. It made me wonder what it’d be like to have one who convinced me to do the opposite. There were Christopher and Michael, of course, but they weren’t very convincing. “You know, though. This’ll be someone else’s spot who actually hasn’t Revised yet.”

  “No shit,” said Ethan.

  “Well, I mean . . .”

  “Dude, do you think I want to take someone’s spot? Of course not. But we’re beyond ‘wants’ at this point. It’s easy to be high-minded when you’re up, but if you’re not, by God, you better be able to scrap.”

  “What if we just got second place and . . .” I paused, not knowing where I was going with this, cognizant that I was drifting between opposite poles, grasping at different arguments. Fuck. I was smarter now. I should know what to do. It should be obvious.

  “Listen, man,” said Ethan. “I didn’t ask to be put into this position, okay? So quit making out like you’re the moral one. You, of all people.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Ethan shrugged, feigning ignorance.

  “What have I done that’s so bad?”

  “Well . . . this whole thing was your idea.”

  I was about to say that it was all a kind of fantasy until he’d kept bringing it up, but stopped short. It wouldn’t be prudent to let him think he was running the show. As confused as I was, he was all over the place, with no real coherent idea about who he wanted to be. “All I’m saying is that we should be as honest as possible.”

  “Agreed. And if you
have a better idea, I’m all ears. But if not, how about playing ‘cover your ass with your conscience’ on your own time. Okay?”

  Was that what I was doing? I didn’t think so but then again, I wasn’t exactly grilling myself over the details since I generally thought I was on pretty decent footing. But maybe I should be. The question occurred to me then of what Lena would think if she did know everything. Would I tell her or would I make up something else to explain it? And how many other things would I need to make up to explain that thing?

  Ethan’s shoulder slap brought me back to the moment. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “Stay the fuck away from me,” I shot back, brushing off my shirt. “Just fucking stop. Jesus Christ.”

  “I’m with you. Taking the science scholarship is a shitty thing to do. It’s a shitty hand we’ve been dealt. But just think, once we’re public, we can help others who’ve been dealt it, too: Michael. Chris. Nathan. Billy and Glendene from bio class. We can be like Robin Hoods. We can be anything we want.”

  Chapter 18

  As time passed, my eyes were opening more and more. Summer was over but the heat wasn’t, and the elms and the oaks and the sycamores were left as stupefied as everything else, their leaves not really knowing whether to fall or not.

  Ethan and I were getting surer in step, though. He’d developed clear, form-fitting masks of our faces that had just enough different lines and depressions that they wouldn’t show up on facial rec scans, so we wouldn’t be tagged near any crime scenes. He’d also turned the Community Pollinator Network or CPN into a program that tinted our film displays different colors depending on our proximity to different drones’ lines of sights: green for none, yellow for nearby, etc. And he’d begun building more drones of our own—blue morpho butterflies—that would expand our casing radius and give us a better lookout system during jobs.