The white men were surprised at the generosity of the black paraplegic. They both thanked him, gave their apologies to Kai Lin, and left.
“There’s a clinic in the hills,” Chill was saying. They had wheeled him into his mother’s room and cranked his cot until he could sit up too.
“What have they done to my baby?” Misty cried. But when Chill smiled in a way that Misty hadn’t seen since he was a child, her tears subsided.
“... up there they cain’t be bothered and so they can operate with no problem. They wanted my eyes—”
“And you give ’em up?” Misty said, louder than she had spoken in years.
“That was one million seven hundred an’ fi’ty thousand,” Chill said. “My eyes were a perfect fit for a Swiss banker’s son who lost his in a ski accident. But when I was there they had a emergency. It was a Russian general needed the nerve in the spine where he could use his legs. They offered two million for that. I figgered that if I cain’t see then I really don’t need to walk. One thing led to another and I got outta there wit’ six million. They transferred the whole thing into my name ’fore I went under the knife.”
“Why you do that, Uncle Chilly?” Ptolemy asked.
Chill put his hands up in front of him and found his nephew’s face.
“I was worried that I couldn’t keep on payin’ for the house, baby boy. You know mama’s social security an’ disability been payin’ for me, so now my disability be payin’ for her.”
“Thill, no,” Misty cried.
“It’s okay, Mama. You know I been lost outside’a the house anyway. Anytime I ain’t here I just wanna come back an’ hear you laughin’ or Popo readin’ an’ playin’ his radio. Don’t worry, Mama. Everything’s fine now.”
5
That night, when Misty and Ptolemy were asleep in their beds, Kai and Chill had their talk.
“I want you to marry me,” Chill said, his empty eye sockets staring at the ceiling.
“What?”
“I cain’t see. I cain’t walk. I got the money to p’otect Popo but I cain’t move to block a thing if they wanna come in here and take him away from us. But if you marry me, and move wit’ us to Jackson, we could get a big house and a Prime Com Link for Popo’s education. You could have boyfriends and free time, just look after Mama and Popo like you been doin’. Just do that an’ we can share the money in style.”
Chill could have told no more about what she was thinking even if he still had eyes. Kai’s face was impassive, even hard.
She blinked once and fifteen seconds passed.
She blinked again.
“Okay,” she whispered. “I accept.”
“You do?”
“Of course. It’s a trust. It’s holy.”
“There’s one thing I gotta tell ya,” Chill said.
“What’s that?”
“I sold my manhood too. With no legs I knew I wouldn’t be able to function no way. So you wouldn’t be marryin’ a man at all.”
“Oh yes I will be,” she said. She took his hand in hers and hummed a song she’d once heard on the radio and thought that she’d forgotten.
6
No one believed the lie about a fall at work that left Chill Bent paralyzed, blind, and rich from the insurance he got. They all knew that poor men and women often sold pieces of themselves to the rich in order to give their children a chance. Hazel Bernard tried to get the marriage between Chill and Kai annulled but failed. At the age of nine, in 2030, Ptolemy Bent joined the Jesse Jackson Gymnasium for Advanced Learners so he would have a social life among other children. But his education came from tutors and texts provided by the Prime Com Link. He worked hard on his radio receiver, which he never discussed outside of home, and one day he convinced Kai to buy him a $300,000 transmitter, the state of the art in amateur radio communications.
“Chilly, you awake?”
“Is that you, Popo?” The ex-convict put out a hand to gently caress his nephew’s face.
“Uh-huh.”
“You got peach fuzz on your chin.”
“You always say that. When you gonna call it a beard?”
“Peach fuzz,” Chill said behind a chuckle.
“I made contact, Chilly.”
“You did?”
“Uh-huh. An’ I told ’im ’bout you.”
“You think the big man’d have somethin’ better t’ do than worry ’bout a blind an’ crippled thief.”
“You the best man in the world, Uncle Chilly. He said he wanna meet you, you’n Gramma Misty.”
“Really? He said that? Damn. Well I guess it won’t be too much longer anyways. Kai said that the doctor said that my kidneys wouldn’t get a nickel down in Panama.”
“You don’t have to die, Chilly,” Ptolemy said, his voice wavering between high and low adolescent tones. “I’m’a just put some wires on your head. You and Grandma.”
“You there, Mama?” Chill called out.
“Yeth, baby. Popo gonna make uth out a ethperiment. He thure look fine.” Misty’s ancient voice was weaker. Chill knew that time was short for both of them.
“I bet he do, Mama.”
After what seemed like hours of preparation, Ptolemy said, “Ready?” Then came a white-hot flash at Chill’s temples and then the feeling of electric fingers going up under his skull and into the brain.
Suddenly he could see again. Ptolemy was sitting there looking at another Chill lying on the bed. The boy, almost a man, wearing a lavender andro-suit with no shirt, had hair that made him look like the king of lions. He was still skinny, and darker than he had been. From brown to black, Chill thought, and then he was gone forever from the Earth. First his thoughts were elsewhere, and then slowly, electron by electron, the matter of his soul was transported. Somewhere there were bursts of stars and lines of reality that connected uncounted voices.
God, Chill thought. But there was no answer to his assertion. A halo of winking lights radiated next to him, mingled with him, and he knew in some new language that this was his mother. The word freedom occurred to Chill, but the meaning faded with the clarity of his light. So much he knew that he was unaware of. So much beyond him even then.
It’s like I’m a breath, he wanted to say.
Yes, Misty’s new form replied.
Ptolemy Bent was arrested and tried for the euthanasia killing of his uncle and grandmother. He was sentenced to twelve years to life in a private prison run by the Randac Corporation of Madagascar.
At the trial God was ruled an improbability.
“He is aware that he disintegrated their brain tissues,” claimed Morton Tremble, the prosecution’s expert psychiatrist, “by using feedback from a powerful radio transmitter. Maybe he thought, consciously, that he was sending their souls to God or whatever. But in truth he only did this because both were so close to death already, as he himself has testified. He admitted that he knew their bodies, including their nervous systems, would die. This is a classic case of mercy killing. And Ptolemy Bent was completely aware that euthanasia is against the law.”
Kai Lin, who was by Ptolemy’s side every day of the trial, stored his radio equipment in her basement. She never visited her husband’s grave.
The Greatest
1
“Ladies and gentlemen!” veteran ring announcer L.Z. Scappelli proclaimed. “Now you’re in for a treat. For the first time anywhere the Universal Boxing Authority has sanctioned a pro heavyweight bout between the sexes.”