Home Again, Home Again

whetheryou were normal, or batty. Some of our neighbors were clearly batshit: the womanwho screamed all the time, about the bugs and the little niggers crawling overher flesh; the couple who ate dogturds off the foam sidewalk with lip-smackingrelish; the guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla.

  I don't want to talk about him right now.

  His parents' flaw -- whatever it was -- was too subtle to detect without thescifi helmet. They never knew for sure what it was. Many of the bats were in thesame belfry: part of the bugouts' arrogant compassion held that a couple neverknew which one of them was defective, so his family never knew if it was hisnervous, shy mother, or his loud, opinionated father who had doomed them to thequarantine.

  His father told him, in an impromptu ceremony before he slid his keycard intothe lock on their new apt in the belfry: "Chet, whatever they say, there'snothing wrong with us. They have no right to put us here." He knelt to look theskinny ten-year-old right in the eye. "Don't worry, kiddo. It's not for long --we'll get this thing sorted out yet." Then, in a rare moment of tenderness, onethat stood out in Chet's memory as the last of such, his father gathered him inhis arms, lifted him off his feet in a fierce hug. After a moment, his motherjoined the hug, and Chet's face was buried in the spot where both of theirshoulders met, smelling their smells. They still smelled like his parents then,like his old house on the Beaches, and for a moment, he knew his father wasright, that this couldn't possibly last.

  A tear rolled down his mother's cheek and dripped in his ear. He shook hisshaggy hair like a dog and his parents laughed, and his father wiped away hismother's tear and they went into the apt, grinning and holding hands.

  Of course, they never left the belfry after that.

  #

  I can't remember what the last thing my mother said to me was. Do I remember hertucking me in and saying, "Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite,"or was that something I saw on a vid? Was it a nervous command to wipe my shoeson the way in the door? Was her voice soft and sad, as it sometimes is in mymemories, or was it brittle and angry, the way she often seemed after shestopped talking, as she banged around the tiny, two-room apt?

  I can't remember.

  My mother fell away from speech like a half-converted parishioner falling awayfrom the faith: she stopped visiting the temple of verbiage in dribs and drabs,first missing the regular sermons -- the daily niceties of Good morning and Goodnight and Be careful, Chet -- then neglecting the major holidays, the Watchout!s and the Ouch!s and the answers to direct questions.

  My father and I never spoke of it, and I didn't mention it to the other wildkids in the vertical city with whom I spent my days getting in what passed fortrouble around the bat-house.

  I did mention it to my counselor, The Amazing Robotron, so-called for the metalexoskeleton he wore to support his fragile body in Earth's hard gravity. But hedidn't count, then.

  #

  The reason that Chet can't pinpoint the moment his mother sealed her lips isbecause he was a self-absorbed little rodent in those days.

  Not a cute freckled hellion. A miserable little shit who played hide-and-seekwith the other miserable little shits in the bat-house, but played it violently,hide-and-seek-and-break-and-enter, hide-and-seek-and-smash-and-grab. The lot ofthem are amorphous, indistinguishable from each other in his memory, all thatremains of all those clever little brats is the lingering impression of loud,boasting voices and sharp little teeth.

  The Amazing Robotron was a fool in little Chet's eyes, an easy-to-bullshit,ineffectual lump whose company Chet had to endure for a mandatory hour everyother day.

  "Chet, you seem distr-acted to-day," The Amazing Robotron said in his artificialvoice.

  "Yah. You know. Worried about, uh, the future." Distracted by Debbie Carr'spurse, filched while she sat in the sixty-eighth floor courtyard, talking withher stupid girlie friends. Debbie was the first girl from the gang to get tits,and now she didn't want to hang out with them anymore, and her purse was stashedunderneath the base of a hollow planter outside The Amazing Robotron's apt, andmaybe he could sneak it out under his shirt and find a place to dump it and sortthrough its contents after the session.

  "What is it about the fu-ture that wo-rries you?" The Amazing Robotron was asunreadable as a pinball machine, something he resembled. Underneath, he was acollection of whip-like tentacles with a knot of sensory organs in the middle.

  "You know, like, the whole fricken thing. Like if I leave here when I'meighteen, will my folks be okay without me, and like that."

  "Your pa-rents are able to take care of them-selves, Chet. You must con-cernyour-self with you, Chet. You should do something con-struct-tive with yourwo-rry, such as de-ciding on a ca-reer that will ful-fill you when you leave theCen-ter." The Center was the short form for the long, nice name that no one everused to describe the bat-house.

  "I thought, like, maybe I could be, you know, a spaceship pilot or something."

  "Then you must stu-dy math-e-mat-ics and phy-sics. If you like, Chet, I canre-quest ad-vanced in-struct-tion-al mat-e-rials for you."

  "Sure, that'd be great. Thanks, Robotron."

  "You are wel-come, Chet. I am glad to help. My own par-ent was in a Cen-ter onmy world, you know. I un-der-stand how you feel. There is still time re-main-ingin your ses-sion. What else would you like to dis-cuss?"

  "My mother doesn't talk anymore. Nothing. Why is that?"

  "Your mo-ther is. . . ." The Amazing Robotron fumbled for a word, buriedsomewhere deep in the hypnotic English lexicon baked into its brain. "Yourmo-ther has a prob-lem, and she needs your aff-ec-tion now more than e-ver.What-ev-er rea-son she has for her si-lence, it is not you. Your mo-ther andfa-ther love you, and dream of the day when you leave here and make your own waythrough the gal-ax-y."

  Of course his parents loved him, he supposed, in an abstract kind of way. Hismother, who hadn't worn anything but a bathrobe in months, whose face hecouldn't picture behind his eyes but whose bathrobe he could visualize in itsevery rip and stain and fray. His father, who seemed to have forgotten how togroom himself, who spent his loud days in one of the bat-house's workshops,drinking beer with his buddies while they played with the arc welders. Hisparents loved him, he knew that.

  "OK, right, thanks. I've gotta blow, 'K?"

  "All-right. I will see you on Thurs-day, then?"

  But Chet was already out the door, digging Debbie Carr's purse from under theplanter, then running, doubled over the bulge it made in his shirt, hunting fora private space in the anthill.

  #

  The entire north face of the bat-house was eyeless, a blind, windowless expanseof foam that seemed to curve as it approached infinity.

  Some said it was an architectural error, others said it was part of thebat-house's heating scheme. Up in nosebleed country, on the 120th level, it wasalmost empty: sparsely populated by the very battiest bats, though as more andmore humans were found batty, they pushed inexorably upwards.

  Chet rode the lift to the 125th floor and walked casually to the end of thehallway. At this height, the hallways were bare foam, without the long-wearcarpet and fake plants that adorned the low-altitude territories. He walked ascalmly as he could to the very end of the northern hall, then hunkered down inthe corner and spilled the purse.

  Shit, but Debbie Carr was going girlie. The pile was all tampons and makeup and,ugh, a spare bra. A spare bra! I chuckled, and kept sorting. There were threepennies, enough to buy six chocolate bars in the black-market tuck-shop on the75th floor. A clever little pair of folding scissors, their blades razor-sharp.I was using them to slit the lining of the purse when the door to 12525 opened,and the guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla emerged.

  My palms slicked with guilty sweat, and the pile of Debbie's crap, set againstthe featureless foam corridor, seemed to scream its presence. I spun around,working my body into the corner, and held the little scissors like a dagger inmy fist.

  The guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla was clearly batty. He was wearingboxer-shorts and a tailc
oat and had a halo of wild, greasy hair and a long,tangled beard, but even if he'd been wearing a suit and tie and had a trip tothe barber's, I'd have known he was batty the minute I laid eyes on him. Hedidn't walk, he shambled, like he'd spent a long, long time on meds. His eyes,set in deep black pits of sleeplessness, were ferociously crazy.

  He turned to stare at me.

  "Hello, sonny. Do you like to swim?"

  I stood in my corner, mute, trapped.

  "I have an ocean in my apt. Maybe you'd like to try it? I used to love to swimin the ocean when I was a boy."

  My feet moved without my willing them. An ocean in his apt? My feet wanted toknow about this.

  I entered his apt, and even my feet were too surprised to go on.

  He had the biggest apt