Brilliant as we were, no one answered him.
I thought about Tony’s enthusiasm. It communicated to everyone, yes. What had it communicated, however? I realized how the media might have seen the boy—no, must have: as a bright but wacko kid. He waxed with a high-vibration mania over Hocus.
Hocus: Meg Astor’s pronunciation of “Focus Automaton” early in the project had planted the name in Tony’s noggin. It went by the handle of Hocus from just about day one.
Verry must have been thinking along similar lines, for she smiled faintly. I wondered if she might be remembering holding Hocus during the press conference.
“It’s the rabbit,” she said.
“Hocus was perfect,” I said.
“Tony and Hocus,” she said.
Verry wore clear, wire-rim glasses today. Blind since birth, she had Men early into the habit of hiding her eyes, a practice encouraged by those around her: it served as an identification-tag to the seeing. After I told her how lovely her eyes were, even though she would never see herself, she bought clear plastic lenses. She would never concede to doing away with eyepieces entirely. They had become an identification-tag within herself, too.
I never pressed the point. She looked lovely in glasses, too.
“No, no,” I said. “Tony was perfect, too. Absolutely wonderful.”
“He was wonderful,” she said.
“So how can you say Tony and Hocus are a problem?”
Meg looked back at us. “Because— maybe we’re thinking the same thing, Verry—because it looks so screwball. And it is screwball. My god, the kid is stuck on rabbits!”
Meg spoke with some difficulty. While still young she had suffered nerve damage equivalent to a light stroke; the doctors could identify no direct cause. She lost control over some muscles of her face.
Before I knew this I thought her the most preoccupied and serious person in the world, since I never saw her fully smile.
I learned better.
“That’s just how Tony is,” I said. “He’s just that way.”
“Sure he is,” Meg said.
“So he was a little excited—”
“Excited! Jumpy just like a damned rabbit!” she said.
We laughed at that. Had to. Tony, who was living a childhood dream of creating an artificial animal, and who had the brights to enable a project with precisely that aim and sufficient maturity to see it through to fruition, had the temperament and nervous energy of exactly the animal he chose to fabricate.
“And the whole thing,” said Meg, “is his inability to get beyond rabbits. He doesn’t want to look beyond. It’s rabbits this, rabbits that!”
“There are things to clean up in the programs,” said Verry. “Probably always will be. If he wants to, he can do rabbits all his life. He’s created an entirely new industry.”
Robert shook his head. “I wasn’t talking about Tony.”
He pulled the car around the corner. In another block we would be in sight of the bar. Tony and his mother followed somewhere behind us.
“Tony isn’t the problem,” he said.
“Then who is?” I said, wondering if I should have said “what.”
Robert glanced at me in the rearview. “Joe,” he said. “Joe’s our problem.”
That froze things tight, right there. In the car and in my gut.
Joe bombed out of Med-Dyne. As a kid he showed incredible aptitude for modeling psychomotor interrelations—or not modeling them, but creating the base-sets of rules from which to grow muscular systems— something of which I had no understanding at the time, though I now did, and he looked to be headed for the Big One, the kind of project that would make Med-Dyne’s star burn in the ascendent and transform Joe overnight from talented, teen-genius computer geek with a hand for biological engineering into an acknowledged, world-class leader in self-organizing automatons, overnight.
It would have been overnight. He dropped out before nightfall.
An accident, a bizarre mistake, a moment of violent passion: call it what you will. He caught a glimpse into the blackest corner of his own soul and grew alarmed—deathly alarmed—and backed out. Gave up on his brain. On his abilities. On his promise. On the project. Everything.
He picked up a gun and shot his dad.
Now he ran a bar.
Everyone in the car stared at me.
Robert kept his eye on the street as we wheeled toward Joe’s place; Meg looked out the side window; Veronica for heaven’s sake could hardly stare, being blind and having her clear-plastic lenses pointed forwards.
Yet they did. They stared at me.
“Here we are,” Robert said, pulling the car to a stop and cutting the hum of the motor so the others could hear the thudding and pounding of my own internal engine.
“Don t put it that way,” said Verry.
“Why not? It’s true,” I said in the darkness.
In the bedroom I sometimes shut the door, jam the rug against the bottom crack, and pull the shade to the bottom, to gain a delicious taste of the uttermost night in which Verry operates at all times. At bedtime, when we share everything else, I want this, too. I fail in it: always do. Light seeps around the door frame and the edges of the shade; and if I shut my eyes, within seconds I see patterns of light etched there by retinal memory.
“It’s true,” I said again. “I was an utter asshole! Or I was worse than—”
“But you’re a gentle man. I know this. You’re 100 percent a gentle man. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t know that. So how can you change from what you say you were, to this?”
We leaned against each other in the bed, our skin touching, my left arm over her, her right over me. Our heads sank against the pillows, weighted by a long day, by feelings, by thoughts, by comfort. Intimacy includes a thousand shadings and more, only a few of them active and sexual—something I failed to learn with my first wife.
“Maybe I didn’t,” I said. “I feel like after that—after that shock—I fell apart. I had to put myself back together. And it wasn’t me doing the reconstructing. It wasn’t Robert either, though he certainly helped. He helped a lot. It was as if I was made of a million blocks, and the first time I piled them up, I blew it; and once I made a few mistakes, then I made more, and more. And then—but then the blocks toppled, and I had to pile them up again. Did a better job this time.”
Or the underlying rules—the parameters for self construction—they rebuilt me more soundly.
Such is the way I think, ever since Robert turned me around.
Tony and his mother Twilla stood on the sidewalk, two patches of color against the gray of the doors at the Fox Theater.
Twilla, a small woman with straw-yellow hair, played with the gloves in her hand—I remembered her doing the same during the news conference—and with the straps of her slim black purse. She had a good many such nervous gestures, making me wonder if Robert had tested her for unused aspects of the mind.
Tony made his mother look short, being tall and gangling, apparently more like the absent father. He grinned crazily at us. He, too, had hand motions: his left hand made short swooping and cupping pulls inward, the way a child’s might who imitated catching hardballs—although in Tony’s case, knowing his obsession, I suspected it amounted to nothing more than animal-petting motions. In his daily life he walked around with a rabbit in his arms, either a live one or, more often recently, Hocus.