“My name is Rob,” the guy from NASA kept reiterating. Trying to get the kid to focus. Trying to explain NASA to the kid. Space, Mars, all this stuff that was irrelevant to some kid who didn’t even really know what just happened to his brother. “Can you tell me what happened last night? Do you know what happened?”
The kid’s father was sitting next to him now, with an arm around the fucked-up kid, and the father, looking like it was all well beyond him, was crying as the kid tried to talk.
“Moose,” the kid said.
“Moose,” the NASA guy repeated. “Your brother. You were home with your brother?”
“Home.”
“Watching things on the television monitor here?”
“Waterfall.”
“You were watching a waterfall?”
The NASA guy deferred to the father, who didn’t really have anything at all to add to the account. But he had some translation skills with regard to the kid. It was really hard to understand the kid, that was for sure. He had every speech impediment it was possible to have. His big, fleshy lips were not made for the pronunciation of anything but the simplest words.
“Is it possible that your brother made you angry somehow? It’s important that we—”
“We tried that one,” Detective Paradiso called from behind the camera.
“I think I can ask the questions,” NASA guy rejoined, without much conviction. “So did your brother make you angry?”
Retarded kid just fidgeted with the plastic sword, which they had tried to take away from him but which he would not relinquish, and which was still covered with dried brown blood, and the kid was obviously really tired and wanted nothing more than to go to sleep, but probably he could sense that something horrible had happened. Whether he understood the question or not, that was debatable, but still the kid seemed to summon up some kind of response, something that you could film on your departmental video camera:
“No.”
“You weren’t angry?”
“No.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
At which point the father got himself involved.
“Look, we’ve been going around and around on this stuff for four hours, and you’re talking to a child who is not verbal, and he didn’t answer this question earlier, and he’s not going to be able to answer it now. And I don’t know what all of this is about, but I know that this is the only boy I have left, and he is exhausted, and I’m exhausted, and I don’t care, personally, if this is some international diplomatic incident or whatever the hell it is, but we need to be able to go to sleep here and to try to come to some kind of closure.”
NASA guy ignored the heartfelt plea, and who can blame him, since one of the most popular web-based, enhanced-reality brands that autumn was the program entitled Closure, in which a crack team of life coaches went out into the world to help people who needed closure, for whatever reason, whether because of natural disaster, or abandonment, or murder, to find the persons they needed to find in order to make their appeal for, you guessed it, closure. The NASA guy didn’t give a shit about closure; he thought closure was some TV shit, apparently, and from the way he was talking about the whole thing, he was willing to sacrifice the retarded kid and the dad too to the dumpster of history, in order to get what he needed. But he tried a more personal appeal, and maybe it was this appeal that finally got the attention of the retarded kid, even if only for a minute.
“Corey,” he said, and it was as if some light were being switched on in the murky proceedings, by virtue of a proper name, “I’m going to tell you a little bit about me. I’ve got some kids of my own, one of them about your age, and I haven’t seen my kids in a while. In fact, my kids, along with their mom, left me not too very long ago, because of all the work I’ve been putting into the planet Mars. You know what the planet Mars is, right? I’m betting your brother told you all about Mars and the other planets. Mars is a beautiful, deserted place, and, you may have heard, last year we tried to put some men on Mars. Some women too. And what we learned, Corey, was that there are some places where people just aren’t meant to go. And when you send astronauts places where they aren’t yet meant to go, all kinds of things go wrong. You know what I mean, right? In this case, some things went wrong when we tried to bring the men back from Mars. Some men and women died on the way to Mars, and some men and women decided to stay on Mars, and then there was the one man coming back from Mars, and we did everything we could to bring him back, so that he could be reunited with his family. We’d failed so many times, in so many different ways, but we tried to paper over our failures with this one success: we were going to bring this man home. Then something went horribly wrong even there. The man was made sick on Mars, and now it’s possible that some people are going to catch the sickness of the man from Mars, and because of this it’s urgently necessary that we—”
An incredible story, when you thought about it for a second. It wasn’t the story of the Mars mission as anyone else had heard it. Detective Paradiso, who was trying to get some nice close-ups and all, was being warned by the people from the CDC that everything he was hearing in the room was top secret, and while they were willing to tolerate temporary video storage for documentation internally at the RBPD, any leak could occasion mass hysteria, public disorder, a national health emergency, and other horrible things, and so he was to keep completely silent about all of this, all that he saw in that dim, moist living room, and therefore Paradiso was trying to listen carefully to all these dire threats, or so he told his buddies back at the precinct first chance he got, and he was sort of electrified by what he’d heard, when the kid said something that was apparently very important, and right away NASA guy got plenty interested, and all the CDC guys gathered round. What the kid said was the word arm.
“Arm?” NASA guy said right back to him. “Are you saying this had something to do with an arm?”
“Arm.”
“Like an arm that wasn’t attached to—”
“Arm.”
“Can you tell us where the arm was?”
“Maybe he means the iguana,” the father said. “We got rid of the iguana.”
“Arm,” the retarded kid said again.
But the NASA guy knew what he needed to know: “And at any time did the arm touch you, Corey? Did you have any contact with the arm? This is really important. Can you remember? Did you touch the arm?”
He couldn’t fucking feel one fucking thing in his leg, not one fucking thing; his leg felt like it wasn’t even his own fucking leg, and when he looked down at the leg, or at the other leg, at the pair of legs, it was like they were not legs at all, like they were fucking lengths of PVC piping or something, or like a severed tree limb, or like they were made of marble, and he could still move his legs, a little fucking bit, but it was like the legs no longer fucking belonged to him, but they belonged on some junk heap, like the junk heaps of the Mexicans who sat out at the empty corners on the margins of the city, sheets over their heads, selling bits and pieces of junk, a wagon wheel, a fucking human skull; they would have been happy to have one of his legs, his legs that no longer belonged to him but which were now a kind of anemic white, his former fucking legs, they might as well cut the fucking legs off of him, and at first it was his fucking feet that felt like they were dead and would have to be fucking amputated, but then it was the fucking foot