“What kind of pet is it, Belt?”
“Sugar glider,” I said.
“What’d he say?”
“He said it’s called a sugar glider,” Jonboat said.
“What’s it eat?” someone said.
“What’s it eat, Belt?” said Jonboat.
“Worms,” I said. I was trying to breathe. Jonboat reached down and kind of chucked me on the shoulder.
“It eats worms,” Jonboat told them.
I was crying my face off. Nobody mentioned it. No one ever would.
“It eats worms,” Jonboat said, “and also certain legumes. Especially yams. Also zucchini.”
“Feed it a worm!”
“Feed it a goom!”
“Anything that’s shaped like a wang,” said Jonboat.
“Wang!”
“A wang!”
“Like a wang, he says!”
“Alright, now,” said Jonboat. “We gonna ball now, or what? I say let’s ball.” And he grabbed hold of Rory, who was back on his feet, clenching his jaw somehow at me; took Rory by the arm and led them all away.
I sat there awhile. Maybe five minutes. Blank stopped panting and opened its eyes, crawled onto my palm. I lifted my cuff. Blank wrapped around my wrist.
I got up and started walking toward Stevie’s, then found my pride, or lost my nerve, and headed for home instead.
* * *
That I was ditching class would, I knew, be noticed pretty soon, so I stopped at the phone outside the White Hen and got hold of my mom before she heard from the school. “Stevie’s moving,” I said. “Half the world saw me crying. I’m not going back.”
She said to go home, that she’d call up the principal and have me excused.
That night we ordered pizza from Bobby Fongool’s. With no meat-seeking patriarch around to object, we got a large pie topped with olives and mushrooms, and grazed it for hours on the living room couch, Cosby through Late Night, though we mostly watched Blank, which, before the end of Cheers, had not only learned to stand on two limbs (leg and left arm) while waving hello, but to make a new sound: a series of ɑ’s interrupted at random by velar stops and voiceless affricates. So I guess it was more like a few new sounds. We didn’t, though, at first, understand what Blank was mimicking, or if it was mimicking anything at all. Apart from those ə’s with which it had been responding when spoken to directly ever since its hatch, the Botimal was quiet for the ninety-five minutes after Night Court ended (i.e. through all of L.A. Law and NBC News) and wouldn’t, despite our attempts to coax it, make the new sound(s) again til The Tonight Show’s monologue, when Carson landed his opening joke, at which point my mom, grabbing both of my hands, said, “The laughs, Belt! The laughs! It’s trying to mimic the studio audience.”
Thereafter ensued a long and exceptionally intense conversation during which my mom defined anthropomorphism for me, and told me how hard it was for her—how hard it had always been for her—not to anthropomorphize animals, and how Blank, though a robot, so resembled an animal that it was hard for her to see it as other than an animal, and thus hard for her not to anthropomorphize Blank. She said she’d often been laughed at by the men in her life—her father, my father, any number of professors at college—for believing that animals were possessed of desire, possessed of emotion; for believing that animals did not strictly, or even mostly, operate from pure instinct.
She went on to tell me that despite having learned not to express her beliefs about animals, she still held those beliefs, and in fact held them tighter the older she became. And she told me she thought that I was like her. She told me that although she’d never heard an inanimate object speak, and although she didn’t and couldn’t believe they were beings, she was able to understand, given that I thought that I heard them speak, how I’d believe they were beings despite those around me not sharing that belief. And she told me she hoped that, for my own good, I would one day cease to hear the inans speak and that, failing that, I’d one day learn that although I might think that I heard them speak, I was not, in fact, hearing them speak, but that she would understand, if I did continue to hear them speak, why I might continue to believe they spoke, and why I might continue to believe they were beings. She would understand, she said, because I was like her.
Throughout the above-described portion of the conversation, which lasted far longer—and was much more two-sided—than the summary above might seem to indicate, Kablankey had continued to make the laugh sound when The Tonight Show audience made their laugh sounds, and it seemed to us, eventually, to start making its laugh sound at the same time the audience started making their laugh sounds, which is to say that Blank began to make the laugh sound as if it weren’t the audience triggering the laugh sound but rather Carson’s punch lines (or, far more likely, something Carson did with his voice or his face to indicate punch line) triggering the laugh sound. It seemed, in other words, that Kablankey, as the program went on, began to be triggered to make the laugh sound not by the sound of the laughter of others but by the phenomena that triggered that laughter. And it seemed, to both my mother and me, that Kablankey was no longer mimicking an audience laughing at jokes, so much as it was laughing at the jokes themselves. Which isn’t to say that either of us thought Blank “got” Carson’s jokes, but rather that, given the timing of its laugh sounds, it seemed that Blank, in addition to having learned how to laugh, had learned what a joke was (a thing people laughed at) and how to recognize a joke when it saw one (at least when that joke was being made by Carson). My mother wondered, she said, if all of this could mean that Kablankey possessed, or was developing, a sense of humor. What more was one’s sense of humor, she asked, than one’s sense of when it was appropriate to make laugh sounds? And how, she asked, does one first learn when it’s appropriate for one to make laugh sounds if not by observing when others make laugh sounds? And why does one bother to learn to make laugh sounds at appropriate times if not to fit into the group from which one’s learning? My mother said she wasn’t really asking these questions. Rather, she said, she was trying to explain why she was helpless but to believe that Blank was making its laugh sounds out of a desire to be a part of our group, i.e. hers and mine, for she and I (though to a lesser extent than the studio audiences we’d heard throughout the evening) had made laugh sounds ourselves when jokes were being landed. And furthermore, she couldn’t, she said, help but to believe—and with equal force—that Blank, who would turn to us while making its laugh sounds, was, via making those laugh sounds, actively trying to communicate to us that it wanted to be a part of our group. Blank really did want, she said, to be our friend.
It’s easy for me to imagine how someone—perhaps you, reader—would assume my mother’s side of the conversation that night owed a little, if not more than a little, to the as-yet-undiagnosed tumors in her brain. And she was, I admit, glassy-eyed throughout the whole thing, flush-cheeked as well, and breathing quite rapidly even as she smoked, but despite all that, I would much prefer, I would very much prefer to believe that her feverish excitement, the sense of revelation with which she seemed inspired, and the sense of revelation she inspired in me—we’d never spoken so directly, let alone so deeply, about my illness, her beliefs, or anything else, nor ever had anyone, let alone she, insisted so poignantly on sharing a mutual understanding with me—I would, as I was saying, much prefer to believe that my mother’s side of the conversation had more to do, if not everything to do, with our being in the midst of what my father would have called “having a moment.” Maybe it was both. Could it not have been both? Could the tumors not have set the stage for the moment? Set the stage, and then retreated to the wings?