No. “No way,” I thought. No way. I wanted to meet the little thing so bad. To lose it even before it hatched? That would be too traumatic. I wasn’t prepared for that, or anything like it, and, remarkably—at least it seems so, now—I found comfort in my lack of preparation itself. Nothing traumatic had ever happened to me, and I was able to reason that nothing traumatic ever could happen without my first having been prepared for it to happen. Were it possible for me to have killed my Botimal, I would have been warned of it. I would have been warned by the driver of the very car in which I rode. My mother would have warned me, and since she hadn’t warned me, there was no need to worry, everything was fine. That’s what I determined. That’s what gave me comfort. It made no sense, but faith never does.
The car stopped in light, and I heard our garage door grinding shut behind us.
“So?” said my mother, taking hold of my wrist.
I opened my eyes. The squiggle was back, a little wider than before, and freshly adorned with three crooked carets that touched at the feet like the points of a lopsided Basquiat crown.
* * *
Maybe you’re a member of my generation. Maybe you were the first kid at school to have a cure. You may have been one of those lucky few children of senators and oligarchs connected enough to score them their HatchKits a couple weeks prior to the National May Day HatchKit Rollout. Whoever you are, young or old or middle-aged, I’m certain that you were terribly excited to receive your first ovum. I am, however, equally certain that unless you were one of us seventeen Friends Study subjects assigned a Botimal, your pre-hatch excitement could not have been more than a fraction of mine. Even if you are of my generation—even if you weren’t born into a world where an ovum cost less than a ticket to the movies, and standard-issue prams featured PillowNest slots—by the time your new friend had cracked through its shell you’d have already seen the talent show footage of the overloading Sandburg Middle School boy, and at least a few dozen of the HatchKit commercials airing in heavy rotation that spring (and that’s to say nothing of the nightly news specials, the glossy magazine spreads, or the front pages of the checkout-line tabloids). Whereas all I’d had to go on was a bunch of words. I hadn’t had a glance at a single photo, let alone a moving image. A pet that was somehow cuter than a mogwai? One that smelled like candy, spoke and sang, and hatched from an egg you wore on your wrist? A pet of that description that was also a robot? It sounded about as real as genies. As ray-guns, lightsabers, X-ray glasses. As pocket-size, voice-commandable Game Boys that doubled as camcorders, tripled as calculators, and made long-distance telephone calls. That Botimals could be was hard enough to imagine; that one could be mine (that one would be mine, that one already was)—that was even harder. And it was hell on my nerves. Were I ever again, for even five minutes, to enter a state of anticipation as relentless and intense as that which I experienced in those IncuBanded days preceding Blank’s hatch, I believe I would die. Heart attack. Stroke. I was barely able to survive it at twelve.
When we returned from Hyde Park and gave him our report, my father said, “You know, I had a feeling all day—a good, lucky feeling. Thank God for the rigor of the conscientious scientist. They pay for your treatment and we don’t have to house a pet.”
“But we do,” I said.
“Come on, Billy,” he said. “I didn’t raise no dummy. You’re in the control group. That thing on your wrist—it’s what’s called a placebo.”
“No, look,” I said, and showed him the ovum. “These marks weren’t there at all before. They’re changing. It’s growing.”
“That’s just some invisible ink kind of deal. Your body gets it warm, gets it to show. It’s a sugar pill, buddy.”
“That just isn’t so,” my mother told him. “That would be too cruel. Dr. Manx wasn’t cruel.”
“All I’m saying is he shouldn’t get his hopes up.”
Maybe he was right, despite being wrong. I mean, I didn’t, for a moment, think the ovum a placebo, plus I liked my hopes; my hopes made me…hopeful. The obsessions, however, that rode the hopes’ backs—I could have done with being a bit less obsessive. A lot less obsessive. What exactly did it mean to be “cuter than a mogwai”? How could anything be cuter than a mogwai? How many limbs would it have? How many fingers? What color velvet? Would it think it was a person? Would it think I was a Botimal? What was it like to be something’s best friend? Was reciprocity a foregone conclusion? And what if somebody tried to steal it? Wouldn’t somebody try to steal it? What if somebody tried to hurt it? How could I protect it? And when—when exactly—when would it hatch? That was a big one. Manx’s answer was “about six days”—five on my wrist and then one off—but the manual allowed for a lot more variance: between 75 and 125 hours on my wrist plus another 24 off it at most. So: three days of slack. The hatch could come as early as Tuesday afternoon, but it could also come as late as Friday evening. The “squiggle phase” would give way to the “woodcut phase,” then new colors would show, and I’d have to slot the ovum in the PillowNest slit; about that both the manual and Manx were unambiguous. Also that the colors would be undeniable: reds, greens, and blues, bold and bright amidst the pink-white and black. But how long, exactly, would each phase take? No one had told me. And would the new colors manifest as stripes? dots? amorphous stains? Would they be the colors of the Botimal itself, or would they just be the colors of the goop surrounding it? Was it even goop, or was it something thinner? And yes, even questions like these—questions that, in addition to being secondary (at least upon reflection, twenty-five years later), had concrete answers I knew to be imminent—even these types of questions obsessed me. My life was transforming. My life was getting better. I felt I was becoming a part of history—I was—and I couldn’t miss anything. I had to watch the ovum.
* * *
—
Between Saturday and Tuesday, I slept no more than twelve hours total, and maybe—maybe—three were consecutive. I was so set on witnessing the changes as they happened, so afraid to fail at vigilance, that even when I was alone in my bedroom, where no one else could see or hear, I, to protect my waning concentration, severed contact with inans that tried to converse with me. Sunday afternoon, my desk blotter asked me to cut it into strips, and I peeled my elbow from its faux-leather surface, leaned back in my chair without saying a word, and hardly suffered a hint of remorse.
Tuesday night, the chair itself spoke up, not asking me to kill it, nor even complaining, but rather, uncharacteristically for an inan, expressing pleasure in how it was treated, specifically the way I occasionally used it to roll from the desk to the bed or the window. The other wheeled chairs at the secondhand shop where my father had bought it would, it assured me, be envious to learn of its situation. ||Generally speaking, we are vastly underutilized as modes of short-range transport,|| it said. ||I wanted to thank you.||