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part of the bugouts' arrogant compassion
held that a couple never knew which one of them was defective, so his
family never knew if it was his nervous, shy mother, or his loud,
opinionated father who had doomed them to the quarantine.
His father told him, in an impromptu ceremony before he slid his
keycard into the lock on their new apt in the belfry: "Chet, whatever
they say, there's nothing wrong with us. They have no right to put us

here." He knelt to look the skinny 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, one that stood out in Chet's
memory as the last of such, his father gathered him in his arms, lifted
him off his feet in a fierce hug. After a moment, his mother joined the
hug, and Chet's face was buried in the spot where both of their
shoulders 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 was right, that this couldn't possibly last.
A tear rolled down his mother's cheek and dripped in his ear. He shook
his shaggy hair like a dog and his parents laughed, and his father wiped
away his mother'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 her tucking 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 shoes on the way in the door? Was her
voice soft and sad, as it sometimes is in my memories, or was it brittle
and angry, the way she often seemed after she stopped 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 away from 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 Good night and Be careful, Chet -- then
neglecting the major holidays, the Watch out!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
wild kids in the vertical city with whom I spent my days getting in what

passed for trouble around the bat-house.
I did mention it to my counselor, The Amazing Robotron, so-called for
the metal exoskeleton he wore to support his fragile body in Earth's
hard gravity. But he didn't count, then.
#
The reason that Chet can't pinpoint the moment his mother sealed her
lips is because he was a self-absorbed little rodent in those days.
Not a cute freckled hellion. A miserable little shit who played
hide-and-seek with 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 of them are amorphous,
indistinguishable from each other in his memory, all that remains 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 every other day.
"Chet, you seem distr-acted to-day," The Amazing Robotron said in his
artificial voice.
"Yah. You know. Worried about, uh, the future." Distracted by Debbie
Carr's purse, filched while she sat in the sixty-eighth floor courtyard,
talking with her 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 stashed underneath the base of a hollow
planter outside The Amazing Robotron's apt, and maybe he could sneak
it out under his shirt and find a place to dump it and sort through its
contents after the session.
"What is it about the fu-ture that wo-rries you?" The Amazing
Robotron was as unreadable as a pinball machine, something he
resembled. Underneath, he was a collection 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'm
eighteen, 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-cern your-self with you, Chet. You should do something
con-struct-tive with your wo-rry, such as de-ciding on a ca-reer that
will ful-fill you when you leave the Cen-ter." The Center was the short
form for