Super Flat Times (10 page)

“Look,” Pembroke’s father said, pointing to the looping, skeletal frame. “It’s the twelve years I spent with your mother.” Pembroke cringed at the joke and did not respond. His mother had died giving birth to him and it was a thing he did not like to think about.

“That thing’s ridiculous. Let’s go win something,” Pembroke said, and led his father over to a long row of game booths.

“I’m going to win you something, buddy. I’m going to do it. An animal, a decorative mirror, that feathery thing hanging there — you name it.”

The objective was to get one of the colored balls in the clown’s mouth. He won on the first try. The barker raised an eyebrow in surprise.

“Go ahead, buddy, pick out what you want.”

Pembroke pointed to a plastic shrunken head.

“You want that?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, that’s actually what you want? Out of anything here?”

“Yes,” Pembroke said, unsure what the purpose was of this line of questioning.

“Oh.”

They sat on the boardwalk for a long time, licking sno-cones. Pembroke’s father leaned heavily into his task, slaving away at the fused mass of bluish ice. For the first time, Pembroke got a really good look at the man. He was slight, angular, with coarse, coppery skin — it looked as though he’d been made in layers, like pressboard. Other dads strolled by — great, lolling masses of translucent flesh, heaving young children strapped tightly to their chests. They wore pastel shorts and boat shoes without socks. His father looked like someone who might have worked outside, even briefly. He was wearing one of Pembroke’s shirts.

“Why do you build those things?” Pembroke’s father asked, squinting up at the twin steel loops of the roller-coaster track.

“I don’t know. It’s sort of like I built them in another life.” “The ones you make are angry, though.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

They heard screaming as the linked cars took the first loop. Barely discernible against the sky were the tiny pink arms of the passengers, flailing wildly like the legs of an overturned centipede.

Pembroke’s father poured the remaining contents of the cone into his mouth and then, with great delicacy, folded the paper into the shape of a peacock.

“Ever seen one of these?” he asked, setting the bird on the bench seat. Pembroke shrugged.

“When I was a kid, the zoo started giving peacocks away, because they had too many. This was before they started making the animals themselves, when you couldn’t just throw them away. Too many had been born, I guess, and they couldn’t take care of them anymore. So, for some reason, I decided I had to have one. I carried on for weeks about it until your grandparents finally gave in.”

“You had a peacock?”

“No. That’s the thing. It died on the way home. It didn’t want to be away from its mommy, or something. Anyway, I remember it lying there in the back of our station wagon, just looking at me with one eye, its feathers spread out, beautiful there.”

“That’s pretty funny,” said Pembroke.

“Yeah,” said his father, letting out a breath that seemed to crush his torso.

They were silent for most of the ride home. Pembroke feigned sleep in the backseat, clutching the shrunken head in slick, sweaty palms. The afternoon sun burned a rectangle on his face.

He felt a sickness well up deep inside him, brought on by the presence of his father. He felt terrible about what had become of the old man — he wished he could rub an ointment into his father’s life, lay on a warm, medicinal salve that would revive him. The real source of Pembroke’s shame, though, lay in the realization that he wished he had not brought his father back at all. Having his father around only made him miss Clay and the life he’d had with the robot. Clay was gone, though — in fact, he had never even existed, ever since Pembroke altered the course of his real father’s life. There was no longer any dead father to replace. He remembered the good times he’d had with the robot — lighting fires in the back lot, dropping action figures from the highway overpass, playing Executioners with the neighborhood kids. He puffed up like bread, brimming over with the stupid and irreparable mistake he’d made.

When they got home, Pembroke slipped away to his room and put on the helmet. “Hey, Clay, are you out there?” he whispered under the covers, the thick plume of the helmet tenting the sheets. “Clay, I’m sorry. Clay.”

There was no response.

“Clay, I’m sorry for everything I did. I wanted what I shouldn’t have wanted. My father — that need to know all about my father — that’s all over now. I realized today that you’re my father. I forsook you and am now getting what I deserve, but I want to get you back.”

All he could hear were wisps of static perforating the flat air.

Pembroke awoke to a distant, rhythmic slapping. Peering out his bedroom window, he saw his father in the parking lot, heaving a basketball in the air and catching it in a gloved hand.

He slipped into a bathrobe and slippers and stepped out onto the porch.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I heard you talking to someone in your room.”

“Dad, I didn’t — how could you hear —”

Pembroke’s father kept his eyes on the deep, brimming clouds. “I’ve seen that thing you have in your room. I read the instructions while you were at school. What’s going on?”

Pembroke looked down at his hands. “Nothing.”

“Are you trying to talk to dead people?”

“Sort of —”

“Who are you trying to talk to?”

“Well, see, at first — at first, I was talking to you.”

“What?” His face collapsed.

“Yeah, well, I sort of — see, you used to be dead, kind of, except that I talked you out of it — being dead, and now you’re alive, but it’s like you’ve never been dead. But the person I was just talking to —”

Pembroke’s father crossed his arms, as if in preparation for a cold wind. He shook his head slowly.

“It was an accident. On a parade float. Your face burned off.” His father dribbled the ball with his gloved hand.

“It happened,” said Pembroke. “I’m sorry — it all happened.”

“I can’t think about this anymore,” his father said, and sprinted off toward the convenience store. He stayed in the store for a long time. Pembroke could see him through the massive display windows, wandering the aisles in his bathrobe and baseball glove.

Later, he returned, his face smeared with mustard.

“Okay. So let’s just say you did — do what you said. Who were you just talking to, then? I heard you talking to someone else last night.”

“Oh, that — that was the dad I had when you were dead. He was this robot that got sent to me to protect me when you died. He raised me.”

Someone pulled up in the parking lot behind Pembroke’s father, and he lurched forward, startled. Pembroke stepped back.

“It’s disgraceful. A boy prefers a robot to his own father.” “But I —”

“I bred you, son. Put whatever icing on it you want, you came out of this body.”

“You don’t understand, Dad.” Pembroke crossed his arms defiantly. “I — look, this. . .this robot, in that other life, the one before you came along, he raised me. I can’t erase that. I know that we’re in this, like, totally
other
different life now, and it’s very confusing, but I can’t get rid of him in my head. I still have that life in me.”

His father shrank back, looking away as if from a health-class filmstrip. “So you brought me back from the dead as some sort of experiment?”

“Sort of.”

“And now you’re done with the experiment, is that what you’re saying?”

“No, Dad. I love you, too. I don’t want you to go. I just want both of you. I was thinking I could make it so that Clay comes back and we could all —”

His father looked at him hard, as if he were getting ready to give the boy a big push. “No, son. Hell, no. I don’t want any sloppy seconds.”

“What?” Pembroke felt himself going red.

“I’m not an afterthought. I’m no sidekick, son.”

“But you — you’re —”

“This is ridiculous. I don’t want any part of this.” Pembroke’s insides felt sharp and bloody. He felt, finally, the courage to say what he’d been feeling since the midway. “Well, I suppose you could, just, you know —”

“Leave? Because that is exactly what I’m going to do.” But instead of heading off across the parking lot, Pembroke’s father came toward him.

“Dad —,” Pembroke protested, realizing, as he did so, how empty it felt.

His father looked wrong, climbing the stairs to the porch, and Pembroke noticed for the first time how similar their heads were — ovular, almond-shaped, like bicycle seats.

“But —”

He went into his bedroom and began to pack a suitcase. Pembroke followed at a distance, watching from the door while his father tossed a stack of threadbare shirts into the case. Perhaps, he thought, the old man had sensed all along that the life he’d led there was nothing more than a contrivance, an imposition. Pembroke shut the door to his room and put on the helmet.

“Dude, I’m telling you, you called just in time,” said Clay, handing Pembroke a napkin full of chips while taking a theatrical drag off a cardboard cigarette. “I was just about to be turned into a goddamned bedpan.”

It was late at night. On the television, protesters were gathering outside Pembroke’s newest coaster, Human Chocolate. The newscaster was interviewing a woman who had been stung more than seventy times during the ride. Her face was puffed like a cauliflower, weeping with pus. He looked over at Clay, reclining next to him, tipping back the tattered ottoman with his heel. Everything was more vibrant there, back in the first life. It had been just a few short moments, but already he felt the sickness dissolving in him like an effervescent candy.

Crutches Used as Weapon

One

We are field-testing the new snow. I am waiting at the summit, pressing the binoculars into my eye sockets, training them on the cloud ship in the distance.

“Go ahead,” I say into the speech bead. “Let it snow.”

I have been waiting to say this. Instead of laughter in the receiver, or even a slow, empty grunt, I hear only static, room noise, the sound of hot drinks being poured out into paper containers.

Sure enough, though, the snow starts to come. Great sheets of it, pouring out of the belly of the cloud like taffy.

“Number F, come in.” It is the Minister.

“Yes, Your Royalty. . .ness, Your Highness. Yes, sir.” “What does the machine say, son?”

I take a look at the machine. It is not moving.

“Well, sir, it doesn’t appear to be saying anything just yet.” The cloud approaches swiftly, laying out a carpet of dense snow about a mile and a half wide. When the snow falls on the trees, some of them break in half.

The Minister does not respond. Instead, I hear the scraping of a stylus on a slate pad.

“Son,” the Minister says after a time.

“Yes, sir?”

“How close are you to the snow?”

I do not respond to the Minister, because the snow is already here. The cloud drapes a massive coat of it, about three feet thick, right on top of the machine and then me.

“Son? Son?” I can hear the Minister calling through the speech bead, but I can no longer move my arm to lift the bead to my face.

Two

We lost our daughter in the new mall. Condescendingly overdesigned and implemented, it seemed the last place a person could disappear into. The wide, carpeted aisles and glass panels appeared to us as massive receptacles, built to draw us in and protect us, channeling us along from one store to the next in a carefully forethought pattern. What purpose could those sleek neon balustrades, the swatches of unbelievably bright, primary-color, faux-tribal murals, and forking, multitiered fountains serve but to deflect tragedy and grief ? It was incomprehensible that a body could find its way through this halcyon barricade, and yet we managed, somehow, to misplace her, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we put her in a place from which it became increasingly difficult for her to return.

I may have let go of her hand hours before we discovered she was gone. It was hard to tell in that place, immersed as we were in the flow of bodies around the center spire, the puffed, flared cylinder of canvas that brought a centrifugal force to the structure. The one thing I remember clearly was the leering orange clown face that topped a public trash barrel, into the gaping mouth of which a thin, gauzy woman had just inserted a foam tray heaped with a family’s worth of crumpled tissue paper and crushed drink cups. Our daughter feared clowns, so I was bending down to shield her from the looming bust when I realized she was not there at all, that the weight I’d been interpreting as her body tugging away at my arm had been nothing but two overstuffed plastic bags. I looked up at Karen, who put as much of her fist in her mouth as she could, as if to bite it off might somehow stanch the delirious onset of panic.

We paced the center court in ever widening arcs, peering wildly into the storefront display windows, because, the logic seemed to be, to look in the crevices, the dark, hushed rooms — the most obvious places — would be to cheapen the disappearance, to disrespect it. We took turns shouting her name, hands cupped to our mouths to channel the sound out over the heads of the passing crowds, the word as it broke away from our faces seeming only to rise and disperse flaccidly into the complex, fluorescent web above, bringing
down
the noise level, as if one’s voice could sweep a room clean of sound.

We found an Orange Jacket, a beefy, wedge-shaped white woman, who took us into a small, low room.

“Could you describe the child?” she asked, situating herself in a small yellow plastic chair.

I took the first stab. “She was like this,” I said, holding my arms out to my sides.

“When she walked, it was like this,” Karen said, walking around in a circle, hunched over slightly, taking small steps on the balls of her feet.

“And when she opens her mouth you always think she’s going to spit something up, but words come out instead.”

“She hates fruit,” Karen added.

The woman looked at us for a long time. Then she tried to sketch a picture of the child using the information we’d given her. When she was done she passed it across the table to us. “Keep in mind, it’s not going to be perfect.”