Shelly was in her bedroom, a compartment just a little larger than a prison cell. I knew that Hector and Larry had been by to see her a few hours before—they always dropped in on Saturday morning. I had timed my own visit to fall shortly after theirs, so they would have had a last chance to be with her.
I found her in her wheelchair, turned to face the window. How I wish she’d had something beautiful to contemplate. A green park of oaks, a place with a fountain and benches and children. But her room looked out on a sun-baked parking lot and a pair of dumpsters.
She had her Walkman in her lap, a pair of headphones on her head. Hector always put her headphones on when he left, so she could listen to the soundtrack of Stand by Me—the songs she and Larry had danced to when he was new in the country and she was just out of high school.
The music was long over, though, and she was just sitting there, her head twitching on her neck and spit hanging off her chin, sitting in a diaper that needed changing. I could smell it. Oh, the dignity of the silver years.
I slipped off her headphones and eased the chair around to face the bed. I sat on the mattress across from her, so our knees were almost touching.
“Birthday,” Shelly said. She looked at me briefly, looked away. “Birthday. Whose birthday?”
“Yours,” I said. “It’s your birthday, Shelly. Can I take your picture? Can I take some pictures of the birthday girl? And then—then we’ll blow out the candles. We’ll make a wish together and blow them all out.”
Her gaze snapped back to me, and there was suddenly an almost avian interest in her eyes. “Picture? Oh. Okay. Bucko.”
I took her picture. The flash flashed. And again.
And again. And again.
Pictures fell to the floor and developed: Shelly’s bent grandmother drawing a pan of date cookies from the oven, a cigarette poked in one corner of her mouth; a black-and-white TV set, children wearing Mickey Mouse ears; the name Beukes written in blurred black ink on a raised pink palm above a phone number; a fat baby with his fists raised in the air and jam smeared on his chin, Hector’s hair already a mess of fizzy curls.
I shot a little more than thirty pictures, but the last three didn’t develop, which is how I knew I was done. They were gray, toxic blanks, the color of thunderheads.
By the time I rose, I was crying, silently and furiously, a coppery taste in my mouth. Shelly slumped forward, her eyes open but seeing nothing. Her breathing was congested, hitching. Her lips were pursed—as if she were about to blow out the candles on her birthday cake.
I kissed her forehead, breathing deep the fragrance of the room where she’d spent the last years of her life: dust, feces, rust, neglect. If I was wretched in that moment, it was not because I’d pointed the camera at her—but because I’d waited so long to do it.
17
HECTOR CALLED THE NEXT DAY to let me know she had passed away at two in the morning. I didn’t care what the cause of death was and didn’t ask, but he told me anyway.
“Her lungs just quit,” he said. “Like her whole body suddenly forgot how to breathe.”
18
AFTER I HUNG UP THE phone, I sat in the kitchen listening to the clock on the oven tick-tick-tick. It was a very still morning, very hot. My dad was out, had the A.M. shift then.
I went into my bedroom and got the Solarid. I wasn’t scared to pick it up now. I carried it outside and put it down in the driveway, behind the front driver’s-side tire of my Civic.
When I backed over it, I heard it shatter with a plasticky crunch. I put the Civic into park and got out to have a look.
When I saw it, though, in the driveway, my heart leapt like a bird caught in a gale, thrown helplessly into the hard wall of my ribs. The case had been smashed into big, glossy splinters. But there was no machinery within. No gears, no ribbons, no electronics of any kind. Instead it was filled with something that looked like tar, a thick gallon of black soup—a soup with an eye in it, a great yellow eye with a slit pupil at the center. A great blackberry-colored glob of Panama Thrill with an eyeball in it. As that tarry crap spread out in a puddle, I swear that single eye rolled to look at me. I wanted to scream. If I’d had enough air in my lungs, I would’ve.
As I watched, though, the black liquid began to harden, rapidly turning silvery and pale. It stiffened at the edges, crinkling up, fossilizing. The shiny hardness spread inward, reaching that yellow eye at last and freezing it solid.
When I picked it up, the whole black splash had become a blob of dull, lightweight steel, a little smaller than a manhole cover, and about as thin as a dinner plate. It smelled like lightning, like hail, like dead birds.
I held it for only a moment. That was all I could stand. No sooner had I picked it up than my head began to fill with hiss and static and lunatic whispering. My skull became an AM tuner dialing in a distant station: not Radio Adulthood but Radio Madness. A voice that was ancient when Cyrus the Great crushed the Phoenician people under his heel whispered, Michael, O Michael, melt me down and build. Build one of your thinking machines. Build a com-puh-ter, Michael, and I will teach you everything you want to know. I will answer every question, Michael, I will solve every riddle I will make you rich I will make women want to fuck you I will—
I flung it away with a kind of revulsion.
The next time I picked it up, I used tongs to slide it into a garbage bag.
Later that afternoon I drove to the ocean and threw the fucking thing in.
19
HA-HA. SURE I DID.
20
I DID USE TONGS TO handle it, and I did put it in a garbage bag. But I didn’t throw it into the ocean—I threw it into the back of my closet, where I had kept the Solarid for so many years.
That fall my mother flew to America to meet my father and me in Cambridge and see me installed at MIT. I had not set eyes upon her for over a year and was surprised to discover that her mouse-colored hair had gone completely silver and that she had taken to wearing rimless bifocals. We had a meal together as a family at Mr. Bartley’s Gourmet Burgers on Mass Avenue, one of only a few meals I can recall us sharing together. My mother ordered shoestring onion rings and just picked at them.
“What are you looking forward to the most?” my father asked me.
My mom answered for me. “I imagine he’s glad not to have to hide it anymore.”
“Hide what?” I asked.
She pushed her shoestring onions away. “What he can do. Once you’re in a place that lets you be your fullest self . . . well, you never want to leave.”