How to Repair a Mechanical Heart - By J. C. Lillis Page 0,12
sitting up in the cab with Dad while Mom reads an Agatha Christie with her Mickey ears on and Nat broods in the loft scrawling postcards to potheads. Dad’s St. Christopher medal dangles from the rearview, scattering splinters of light on the ceiling. Somewhere in North or South Carolina the CD changer calls up “In My Life” and Dad turns all sad and tender like when he watches Field of Dreams or drinks too much Miller Lite at the Donnellys’ Super Bowl party. “Someday you’ll be sitting here behind a wheel, and your family will be back there,” he says to me, just the thought of my future making him smile, “and you’ll feel like this, like everything is exactly the way it’s supposed to be.”
I look up. Bec and Abel are staring.
“I don’t feel good, you guys,” I say. “I think I need to go.”
***
I sit in the Home-N-Garden lot where we’re stealth-parked for the night, sipping Dad’s generic antacid on the pull-out metal steps of the Sunseeker. A warm wind sifts through my hair and skips a crushed beer can across the empty parking lot; in the distance, it rustles the tarp on the garden center’s koi pond and the white rose bushes that look like my father’s.
On the ride back from the bookstore I made my first I’m-fine call to Mom and Dad.
Liar.
Down the street, a church points its sharp white steeple at the moon. I’ve never been inside it, but I know what it smells like on a summer Sunday—old-lady perfume and new-baby powder and the sweet creamy scent of memorial carnations. I miss a lot of stuff about church. Strumming “Morning Has Broken” at the 6:00 Folk Mass, flipping pancakes with Dad at Sunday socials, laughing with everyone at the jokes Father Mike would crack as he read off the weekly announcements. I feel bad that the stuff I miss doesn’t have much to do with God, that I don’t miss the prayers or the psalms or that quiet time after Communion when Father Mike said the Big Guy Upstairs could read our hearts. I never liked that idea, even when I was younger and the idea of God seemed simple. I’m not optimistic enough to trust in a kind and merciful higher power like my mother does, so it’s almost more comfortable to doubt one exists at all. In my strongest moments I become Sim. Programmed for poetry and logic, destined for a scrap heap, no Bible verses rattling out of context in my head and no possible reckonings or afterlives to worry about. And then I pass a church or see a priest on TV and I’m back where I was when I was twelve, sweating every swear word and boy crush and offering up a guilty rushed prayer. Just in case.
“The android felt himself slowly awaken.”
Behind the RV door, Abel’s reading Bec a bedtime story.
“Desire surged through him, flooding his processors. He remembered the day he and Cadmus jumped into the Red River, the current making helpless marionettes of their bodies.”
“That’s…actually not bad,” I hear Bec say.
“It’s murklurk,” Abel says. “So tragic, when bad pairings happen to good writers. Listen to this…”
I make my arms a nest and rest my head inside. Father Mike finds me in the dark, like he did when I was thirteen and he caught me and Mark Tarrulo coughing on cigarettes in the church basement. He’d pull out the same I-am-calm-yet-concerned voice he used on me then.
Abel reads, “Cadmus released the remnants of his fear. He pulled the android close in the dim amber light of the cave, searching his face for the sign that said yes, our time is now, I want you too.”
Brandon, God sends us signs. It just takes courage to read them.
“Sim felt his features respond, arrange themselves into the happiness he had seen so often on the faces of others…”
Do you really think He’s happy with you? You spend all year doubting Him, and then you run off to nowhere with a boy?
“’I want to stay here with you,’ Cadmus whispered. ‘The two of us. Here together. Alone.’”
Come home, bud. Just come home.
I choke down the last swig of antacid. It tastes like chalk and the cherry cough drops at the bottom of Gram’s purse. I think about Lester and Gladys. What their house must look like, a queen-size bed that’s always made and a dinner table with a clean white tablecloth and walls hung