“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
The cure said, “Anks.”
I turned toward the poster, looked at our reflection in the glass of the frame. Blank was looking, too, once again stretched awkwardly across my left shoulder, upon its right side, pushing its ear against the side of my neck, wedging itself into the crook of my neck, increasing the pressure, its head tilting sharply toward its own left shoulder. “Anks,” it said. “Anks.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, Blank,” I said.
“Anks,” it kept saying, and, while continuing to push with the rest of its body, it reached its left arm across half of my throat, closed its fingers around my Adam’s apple, and pulled.
I let my head fall to the left a little bit, then a little bit more, and though the pulling continued, Blank stopped saying, “Anks.”
We watched our reflection for a minute, maybe less, and the way I looked—my head tilted like that—I looked like someone about to ask a question he couldn’t quite phrase, or maybe like someone considering a question he hadn’t quite heard.
I looked like a fool.
Blank said its word again.
The word came out strangled, or gentle, a whisper.
I shrugged as hard as I could, and it was over.
SETTLEMENT
A COUPLE OR THREE days into the new year, my father was permanently injured at work. He called me from the hospital, assured me he was fine. He asked that I bring him a change of clothes, as he’d be spending the night, and, for the first time in weeks—Grandmother Magnet had died just before Thanksgiving (DUI, maple); he’d been quiet ever since, and occasionally morose—he sounded like himself. Better than himself, really. He sounded happy. I asked him what happened; how he’d gotten injured. “Longest story ever,” he said. “I’ll tell you all about it after you get here.”
I found him in a gown in a bed in a semiprivate room without a roommate. A square of gauze taped over his forehead, a bandage on his cheek, but no tubes, no apparati, nothing beeping or blinking.
“No one came with you from the plant?” I said.
“They did. Those guys. Good guys. They just left.”
I handed him a chiclet from a blister pack of Nicorette I’d picked up at Pang’s on my way to the hospital. He popped it, chewed, took a stagy breath. “You’re a gem,” he said. “I haven’t had a smoke since this morning. What a day, Billy. Man. You know, I thought I had a heart attack.”
“But you didn’t,” I said.
“No,” he said, laughing.
“How high are you right now?”
“Not very,” he said. “Maybe not at all. They got me on something, don’t remember what it’s called. Fucken miracle, really. I’m clear as a bell, but the pain—it’s far away.”
“So you’re in pain.”
“Only if I really pay attention,” he said. “Or try to sit up.”
“Are you going to tell me what happened?”
“Soon as this gum starts kicking in a little. Maybe give me a second piece, huh?”
“You need to park it,” I said.
“Is that like, ‘Shut up, Dad’?”
“No. That’s what the instructions on the box call it. Parking.” I showed him the box. “You chew a couple times, til you start tasting pepper, then you wedge the gum between a cheek and your gums and leave it there awhile. You park it. That’s how the nicotine gets absorbed. If you keep on chewing like that, I guess you’re just gonna swallow it, digest it, not feel it for a while.”
“So I’ll park it then,” he said. He stopped chewing, parked it, said, “Hey, that’s nice. Park it. High-tech. Okay. So, okay. I was about to get the handoff from Chuckie—”
“What?”
“I’m telling you what happened. I was about to get the handoff from Chuckie’s how it starts.”
“Who’s Chuckie?” I said.
“The handoff machine.”
“So that’s a nickname,” I said.
“A nickname. Sure.”
“For a guy or a machine?”
“What are you asking me?”
“Is Chuckie the nickname of a machine that hands off, or is there a guy called Chuckie who’s so good at handing off—or, I don’t know, maybe so bad at handing off—that you gave him the nickname the handoff machine.”
“You making jokes or something, Billy? Making fun of your injured old man and his job and the people he works with?”
“I’m trying to understand.”
“Alright, well…Chuckie’s like this giant, articulated fork at the end of a conveyor. Chuckie hands off to me, so I can do an impel.”
“Hands what off?” I said.
“Exactly,” he said. “Depends on what I’m tasked to impel that day, which depends on what the plant is making that day, and what part of what it’s making my crew’s been assigned to. So sometimes Chuckie hands off a crank truck, sometimes Chuckie hands off a pipe stack, sometimes Chuckie hands off a spindle, and then occasionally Chuckie hands off a switch block, which is what we—you’ll like this—we call it a bitch block because it’s so heavy and uncomfortable to grip, like you can only grip it one way without dropping it, so when you pivot before you start your impel, you gotta be extra careful, and then, when you actually do the impel, I mean…obviously, right?”
“Obviously?”
“Christ. It’s a bitch to impel. That’s all you have to know. The bitch switch is a bitch to impel, and today, Chuckie, which is supposed to be handing off a pipe stack to me, not only does it hand off a bitch switch instead, but it hands off a bitch switch at an angle that is just not right. It is so not right that I would not have even tried to accept the handoff, except the way the crew’s arranged—in anticipation of a pipe stack—the way the crew’s arranged, if I don’t take the bitch switch when Chuckie hands it off, it’s gonna crush Leif’s foot, and maybe kill Mikey.”
“Kill him,” I said.
“Yeah. There’s a spike on the bitch switch. About eighteen inches long, two inches around. That spike is not pointed the direction it should be. Like I said, it’s not a good handoff, say the least. And so things go slow-motion, right? For me. Adrenaline, adrenaline. I’m living frame-to-frame, thinking frame-to-frame. Wah-wah-wah. Lee Majors, right?”