The Kids are Alright (159)

PSI-2

Erik had set up some of his toys in the dining room, in preparation for more playing with Maggie. He specifically added the ones with little pieces that Lucy couldn’t have. Maggie needed fun. Also, distraction. She hadn’t had any lessons ever since she set Auntie Hyacinth on fire and she didn’t know what to do with herself. It was making her really nervous. She had decided to take a trip around the block as a bird just to be practicing something. The General told her to go play outside. The General told her that.

Maggie didn’t trust it. Erik didn’t trust it either, but Maggie suspected a test of some kind and Erik suspected a setup. Maggie liked her mom a lot more than Erik did. They were both pretty sure the General was monitoring her somehow and she didn’t really mean play. But she wouldn’t tell Maggie what she did mean. She wasn’t talking to Maggie a whole lot.

Erik thought that was really mean. Maggie didn’t understand ‘go play outside.’ She grew up having rules all the time and deciding whether or not to break them. Even when granted the privilege of choosing her own activities, she had a time limit to fill in: a lunch hour, a tea break or Sun’s Days and bank holidays. Having every day with nothing to do was like her mom kicked her out of school. And… and out of having a mom, because they were both kind of the same thing for Maggie. Erik knew when his uncle asked him nicely to go play, his uncle still loved him and just had some stuff to do (even if that stuff might involve crying). Playing was normal for Erik, anytime. It wasn’t for Maggie. She was like a balloon with the string broken.

Balloons like having someone to hold them, Erik decided. That’s what they’re for. They can’t go to the movies all by themselves if you just let them go. They don’t meet up with their balloon friends and have fun. They get stuck in a tree and they’re sad.

He hoped Maggie wasn’t stuck in a tree. You know, for real. Or just being sad.

He thought she was probably sick of being around him all the time as well as worried about her mom maybe not loving her. She wanted to go be a bird because he couldn’t do that.

Not without help and an awful hangover, anyway.

He tried to set up his soldiers in the carpet, but they could only stand in the bald places. There weren’t enough of those to stand all of them up and still have them talk to each other and play, so he set the case on its side like a little mountain, and then he dumped out his puzzle with the seven pieces. It wasn’t really great as a puzzle, but it made some good scenery at soldier-scale. He couldn’t stand the pieces on edge in the carpet, so he laid them flat and put the soldiers on top. The bandage on his hand was a little annoying, that was his smart hand and the edges of the fabric were fraying after three days, but he could still play all right. He’d improvised a pretty good story about a rescue on a river with broken ice when Maggie came in from the kitchen.

“Playin’?” she said. She adjusted the tie on her dress and sat down.

“Uh-huh.”

“Whatcha playin’?”

“Rescue in the Frozen North,” he said grandly. “Episode One,” he added, like the title card for a serial.

“Don’t you get bored of playing?”

“Nope.”

She retrieved the folded instructions from the box of tangrams and examined the puzzles. Erik was usually more of an ‘instructions’ kinda guy. “I guess these are a little old for you,” she said.

Erik inclined his head in her direction and smirked. “Maggie, get real.”

“What? I don’t think you’re dumb, I just think you might like playing with them the real way when you’re older.”

Erik frowned and folded his arms. “Maggie, seriously. I don’t play with that board book ‘the real way’ anymore — it’s ‘cos I don’t… need to. Don’t… tease me about being… hurt.”

She looked stricken. No. Come on. I don’t want Erik mad at me too… “Erik, I’m not teasing, I swear! It took Ann and Milo, like, fifteen minutes to make a square when Barnaby cut up that ad for shoes like that. How in the hell are you supposed to make a teapot out of ‘em? You’re little.”

“How’s it… s’posed to look?” Erik said.

Maggie smoothed out the instructions and pointed to the solid black silhouette.

Erik brushed his soldiers aside (they all fell in, they were gonna need blankets and hot soup) and assembled the teapot. Backwards.

She blinked at him. “Did you do that on purpose?”

“Do what?” he said.

She checked him against the solution on the other side of the paper. It took her a couple of seconds because she had to flip the image in her head. “You’ve had this,” she said. “You memorized it.”

He sighed. “Maggie, why would I memorize something so dumb?” He frowned and put up his hand. “Don’t… tell… Milo. He was… trying to be… nice. He didn’t want it to be too hard, but it’s not… fun.”

“Milo…?” Maggie said. She pointed a finger at him and accused, “Is this like how you’re better than me with the slingshot?”

Erik snatched up the instructions and stared at both sides. “This… looks… hard to you?” He looked up at her and then back down at the instructions. “They’re… supposed to… get… harder?” The three wine goblets down at the bottom right were supposed to be hardest? They were the same as the bunny! You just put the little shapes to make the big shape! It was like racking numbers into a payphone! What the heck?

Maggie was still pointing at him. “It’s your eye, Erik! It’s your friggin’ eye! You’re cheating!”

Erik covered his metal eye with his hand. “Nuh… uh!”

“Did you ever try it without your eye?”

Erik made a narrow, twisted frown. He opened his mouth, closed it, then he sang, “The broadcast’s done, your fans can’t cope! Pictures came, you lost all hope! Put the blame on kinescope! You like trying to do stuff with no depth perception, Maggie? Is that fun for you?”

She held out her hand. She wasn’t wearing her gloves. She hadn’t had them on in days. “Give it,” she said.

He tipped it out and put it in his shirt pocket.

Maggie mixed up the shapes with both hands on the carpet. “Don’t do the teapot again. I’m suspicious of you. I’ll pick one.” She examined the sheet and chose the swan. She didn’t want one with obvious pieces poking out like the fox or the turtle.

Erik made an extremely longsuffering sigh, adopted the expression of an anthropomorphic basset hound and had a look at the swan. I don’t know why we’re doing this. It’s boring and dumb.

Obviously it needed a little triangle right there and then, um…

Obviously…

Okay, but…

It wasn’t the same! He didn’t have… He didn’t know what he didn’t have! When he was doing this before he could see where everything went! This pointy bit had to be a square instead of a triangle because you needed the triangles for over there and over there, and the square had to be right there because the triangles were making the other pointy bits. He could see all of it at once! Now it was like someone had spilled ink on the stupid thing and he had to guess.

No. What happened? What’s wrong with me?

He switched to the bunny and it was the same. He could logically figure that the ears were the little triangles because you couldn’t get that shape by combining any of the other pieces, and the head was the square because the little triangles were in use, but he couldn’t see it. And he couldn’t even logic the bunny’s body.

Without noticing, he began to rub the edge of his empty socket where it was merged to the skin and it used to hurt so much when he was healing. His upper lip had practically vanished and the lower one was beginning to quiver.

Maggie reached out and touched his hand, “Erik…”

“…No!” He shoved the pieces away but it was carpet and they didn’t go very far. He snatched the instruction sheet, twisted it and threw it before Maggie could stop him. “I… don’t… like… being… broken… Why… do… you… want… to… do… science… to… know… how… broken…”

“Erik, Erik…”

“Let… Me… Talk!” he snarled.

“Erik, you’re not broken, it’s supposed to be a puzzle!” Maggie snapped. “I saw Ann and Milo doing it and it was just the same way! It’s not supposed to be easy, you dingbat, it’s supposed to be fun!”

“Not… fun.” Erik muttered. He shoved at the pieces again.

“Well, I don’t know what you want me to do!” Maggie said shakily. She put up her hand and turned her head away. “I try to explain why I thought it was too hard, and it really is too hard, and you’re still mad at me…” She got up and walked into the kitchen.

“…Maggie?” Erik managed at last, blinking.

She wasn’t in the kitchen. Nobody was in the kitchen. Milo and Auntie Hyacinth were doing the decoys for magic season and Calliope and Lucy wanted to help. Magic season was probably going to be really fun this year. You know, for the people not hurt and sick in the basement. But at least the decoys cut down on the magic strikes.

“Why is everything my responsibility…?” Erik half-sang as he edged his way past the empty chairs. He really needed a song like that, but it seemed like he was gonna hafta write it himself.

He opened the back door and peered into the alley.

She wasn’t out here either.

He looked up at the misty gray sky. Maggie, if you did the bird thing again without eating anything, you’re gonna lose a finger or something. Did you do that?

If I called Mad Bartholomew, I could…

He winced and touched a hand to his head. It was so much easier to think of things that way. He sprained something when he decided to let St. George help him kill those guys. Violet fixed it… Okay, that wasn’t ‘fixed’ because he still couldn’t go visit John and his uncle had a broken arm and he was still really messed up about the whole thing. Violet broke it different so he didn’t have to kill those guys and the other stuff happened instead, but he’d already done all the deciding by the time she popped up and gave him an easier choice. His uncle had said (just not to him) that killing people was like having a switch in your head. Erik didn’t have that switch, he didn’t think, but there was one in there for calling gods. He’d had that one, he put it in all by himself, but now the stupid thing was loose.

If he was willing to call someone to kill people, why not call someone to get a lid off a jar? Or help him find Maggie? That stuff wasn’t even bad!

Maybe that was what Violet wanted to happen. The broken arm and maybe not having a friend anymore was just stuff on the side.

“I can… do… stuff,” he reminded himself. But he didn’t like the slowing and he scowled.

He ducked back into the house and half-closed the door behind him. “Maggie? Are you… in here?”

“Go away!” said Maggie’s voice, muffled by the bathroom door.

Oh, see, I got that for free, he told himself. I’m a smart shopper!

He squeezed through the chairs and knocked on the door.

“Don’t you know what ‘go away’ means?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Can I come in?”

“No! I just… I just… I just make everything worse!”

“Nuh-uh. I was being dumb.”

“…I don’t want you right now.”

Erik huffed a sigh and rocked back and forth on his shoes, heel-to-toe. “I’ll let you play with my eye so you can figure out why I’m better than you at slingshot. And puzzles. Okay?”

The door popped open, just a crack. He could see a damp brown eye and a little bit of a nose. “I’ll break it,” she said.

“Don’t care,” Erik replied, rocking. “Milo can fix it. He likes that stuff.”

———

There was only one place to sit down in the bathroom. The bathtub got used up during the siege. Erik thought that was okay. There wasn’t any plumbing, so it wasn’t like a bathtub in the bathroom would be any better at baths than the washtub in the kitchen, and Uncle Mordecai kind of had a thing about bathtubs.

But it was a little weird sitting on a toilet with a girl in the room.

Never mind that she was leaning over the sink and staring at his eyeball.

The box of tissues was in the sink. Maggie didn’t have a hanky and she didn’t want to go back upstairs or have anyone see her.

“So it’s not like you actually see stuff,” she said. “There’s not a line helping you aim the slingshot and the bunny doesn’t break up into little pieces for you. It’s not giving you this information visually.”

He sighed. “But it is, because I hafta look at stuff to tell. I see it better, not different.”

Maggie frowned at him. “The fact that you’re two years younger than me and you don’t go to real school or have, like, a vocabulary is really frustrating sometimes.”

“Hey!” Erik said. “My uncle is really… smart! I get it from him!”

“Maybe your uncle can figure how you mean better but not different, but it’s not much help to me,” Maggie said. “It doesn’t help you with flipping things backwards, though.”

“I…” Erik began, then he trailed off with a frown. “It… might, but… Auntie Hyacinth doesn’t… make me do it… anymore.”

“Billy Joel,” Maggie said absently.

Erik gave her a verse from ‘Piano Man.’

“What doesn’t Miss Hyacinth make you do anymore?”

“P and Q and B and D,” Erik said. He turned his head aside. “But I know that’s being broken and I don’t want to check if I still am and it’s just my eye fixing me.”

“We don’t have to,” Maggie said.

Erik shook his head. “No. I said you could figure it out. But don’t tell Auntie Hyacinth or my uncle.” He stood on the toilet seat, learned towards the mirror and fogged it with a breath. “Do P and Q. Lowercase.”

Maggie obligingly wrote in the mirror with her index finger: p q.

Erik shook his head again. “I’d be… guessing. Write a… word with one.”

Maggie considered, then she breathed on the mirror again and wrote: popcorn.

Erik puzzled over that for a few seconds. “Pop… popcorn?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, gimme my eye back. Do B and D.”

Erik peered at the letters, with both eyes this time. “Uh-uh,” he said sadly. “Now a word.”

“Button!” Erik said, right away.

Maggie pointed at him. “There it is. Wait…” She rubbed out ‘button’ with her sleeve, breathed and wrote: dog.

“Um… dog?”

“Guessing?”

“Yeah.”

Maggie blocked the mirror with a cupped hand and wrote a full sentence in neat printing: I qet a nice bog.

“I pet a nice dog,” Erik read, with no hesitation.

“That’s a P and a D. You’re sure?”

“Yes.” He put both hands on the sink and leaned closer. “Right?”

“Context,” Maggie said. She pushed back from the mirror and began to pace. She could only go about three steps, it wasn’t a big room. “It’s feeding you context somehow. You can still get it on your own, but with the eye it’s faster. That’s how come Miss Hyacinth doesn’t make you do B and D anymore, Erik. She knows you can’t get the letters by themselves, but when you’re reading you get it from context, so it’s okay. Except she didn’t notice you’re getting help to do it faster.”

Erik tipped his head forward and took out the eye. “Is this thing making me… dumb?”

“I don’t think so,” Maggie said. “Not dumb. Maybe it’s like training wheels.”

“Is it gonna help me less when I get better at reading?” he asked, examining it.

“If Milo were smart he’d make it like that,” Maggie said.

Erik frowned at her, “That’s not ‘if.’”

“Okay,” she allowed. “But he’s weird, Erik. He’s weird. He’s different smart. He doesn’t always do things like I would. He drives my mom crazy.” She grinned. “Hey, give it back a sec.” She took it and held it up so they could both see, “Show me.”

“…Whoa,” Erik said.

The gold surface of the eye sprouted a webwork of fine white lines, like an itty-bitty novelty lamp. While Erik and Maggie leaned in and stared, a few of them crawled off the rounded metal and diffused themselves in the air, surrounding the whole object with a halo of faint yellow. Some of the lines were blinking and a few of them were in red and green, but they were so tangled and close it was impossible to tell how many. It might’ve just been one long white line spun around itself with random red and green bits on it like variegated yarn.

“Oh, my gods,” Maggie said. “Milo does magic like a cat knits a sweater. No wonder my mom can’t take him apart. He’s not better than her, he’s… He’s wronger. Erik, does this thing ever make you throw up?”

“No!” Erik said defensively.

“…not anymore,” he admitted.

“There aren’t any ends to it… It’s like it fell out of the sky like this!

“Ends?” Erik said.

“Well… Like… You build things in pieces. Out of pieces. Okay, it’s like… A is here,” she held up a single finger, “and B is over here,” she spared her index finger from the eye, “and you have to connect them up, and you have this box of toothpicks you could glue together however you want. But no matter what shape you make on the way there, you can still see the individual toothpicks. If you wanted to take it apart you could do that where they join up. This,” she spread her arms apart and bobbed both hands with each syllable for emphasis, “this is One Big Toothpick, Erik!”

“That’s some vocabulary, Maggie,” Erik said dryly.

She smirked and shook her head. “Okay, but you get what I mean?”

“I guess?” he said. He took the eye from her, carefully, but she let him do it and the lights didn’t go out. “Aren’t these pokey bits ends?” He indicated the lines that ended in the air and made the halo.

“No,” Maggie said. She narrowed her eyes and leaned in. “I dunno what the hell those are. It’s like it wants another toothpick, but there isn’t one. It’s feeling around for one. Like those are little arms.”

“It wants a hug?” Erik said. He thought of Lucy asking to be picked up.

“No,” Maggie said. She drew back with a perplexed expression. “Maybe? I dunno. How do you mean?”

Erik held up the eye and then popped it into his socket. The lights went out. The lens whirred and adjusted.

“Oh, you’re a toothpick,” Maggie said.

Erik shrugged.

“But I can’t,” she said. She put a hand to her mouth. “Wait.” She dropped her hand and grinned. “Erik, I’m gonna black out the window, it’ll look much cooler that way, okay?”

“Okay,” he replied evenly.

———

The crack under the door still let in a little light, but everything looked washed out in dark grays and deep black shadows. Erik’s eye had its lens racked open to the widest setting. He kinda wondered if he could see in the dark better than her too.

“Will it hurt?” he said.

“Nah,” she said.

“…It shouldn’t,” she amended. She put her hand on top of his head. He let her, watching in the mirror.

“Show me,” she said.

“…Whoa,” they both said.

The familiar novelty-lamp effect began from the top down. The tangled lines spread downward like trickling water, but they zipped sideways to weave themselves together, making rats’ nests of white light around his head and chest. The light strands binding his chest were somewhat thicker towards his shirt pocket, which he guessed might have something to do with his heart. The ones on his head covered his vision like gauze and made it hard for him to see details. Those gathered and brightened around his metal eye, some of them making loops that ran into the air from his face and the top of his head, then turned around and came back through the eye. The lines crept down his legs, straight down like they were being drawn with a ruler, hit the floor and kept going in all directions. They broke up the tile in geometric shapes like Erik had pictured the ice under his soldiers, then they hit the walls and crept up to the ceiling. On the way there, they were met by even more lines working their way out from his hands and head and heart.

Maggie was reminded of one of Calliope’s funny postcards, which had an image of a pouty-looking toddler affixed to the wall with strip after strip of black tape, captioned: Cheapest Babysitter I Ever Had! Erik thought he looked like a tree with bare branches, or maybe a broccoli. As they were staring, some of the white lines filled in red or green and some began to blink.

“Holy crap, Erik,” Maggie said. “I thought I’d just get you and your eyeball. I think I’m getting information on your connection to the universe right here. You’re not a toothpick, you’re a bulb in a socket.”

Erik held up his arms, which had slight effect on the composition of the lines, then flexed the fingers of both hands, which didn’t seem to do anything. He leaned in a little closer to view the effect around him in the mirror, then he turned to have a look at the room. He sang a verse of ‘Jingle Bells’ and snickered.

Maggie planted both hands on her hips and inclined her head in his direction. “You know, this is not fair. I put a lot of work into magic. You have all this,” she waved her hands through the lines — which continued about their business with no regard for her, “and all you do is cheat at tangrams without noticing. You don’t use it.”

“I am it,” Erik replied, examining both hands in front of his eyes. “Did you figure out how my eye works?”

“No,” Maggie replied. She was doing a slow circuit of the room, touching the walls. Minus the visual effect, it looked like both of them had got hold of some really good drugs. “This is like being hit in the head with a dictionary and you want me to tell you what’s the first word on page two-fifty-nine,” she said. She grinned at him. “Beats the heck out of me! It sure is heavy, though! Ow!”

He put his hand on her arm. The lines went through her without pausing or changing. “Does it… hurt?”

“It’s not hurt,” she said. “But I think I don’t like it. I feel like a teacup and someone keeps pouring into me even though it’s all going into the saucer. It’s like a waste. Either the spell isn’t enough or I’m not.” She cut both hands through the air and crossed them in front of her, like when Milo wanted to convey an extra firm no. The lines faded all at once and the room returned to grayish darkness.

Erik blinked and his metal eye whirred in adjustment. “We could ask Milo about it. I bet he’s got drawings.”

“I kinda think Milo doesn’t know how it works either,” Maggie said. She climbed up on the kitchen chair they’d stolen and let the light back in the window, then she sat down. “Not exactly. He made it to… to listen to you. And talk to you. You’re having a conversation about what you need from it and what it’s able to do for you, all the time. Well, when you have it in.”

Erik put up his hand and adjusted it self-consciously, but not without affection. “Sometimes we have fights.”

“I bet,” Maggie said. “I don’t think it thinks…” She laughed. “And thank goodness, because you’re not supposed to do that. It’s like it’s operating a whole mess of checklists. It quits asking about stuff you don’t need, but the stuff you do need and kinda need stays in rotation.”

“Like I go to one restaurant all the time and they remember what I like to eat?” Erik said.

“I guess,” Maggie said. “But a restaurant has real people who remember things. If you never ordered the liver and onions before but one day you did, they’d be surprised but they’d give it to you. I’m not sure what that thing does when you need something you didn’t need before.”

“Oh, I know,” Erik said. “When I get really tired or hurt, it starts asking me everything all over again, like it’s mad at me for being bad. Sometimes I can tell it to quit that, and sometimes I can’t and I have to take it out.”

“It’s outsourcing,” Maggie posited. “It doesn’t think, but you do. When you’re not thinking right, it starts over everything from the top, trying to adjust.”

Erik tipped his head forward and popped his eye out to examine it. “I guess, but it feels like it’s mad.”

“Does it hurt?” Maggie said.

“No, it…” He sighed. “It’s like it knows how it’s supposed to act but it won’t and it’s on purpose. Because it’s mad. Like a little kid.”

“I don’t think it has to be mad to do that, it could just be doing what Milo told it to do.” She shook her head. “But I’ve seen Milo get into fights with the toasters and the radio, so I dunno. Maybe he thinks machines are supposed to get mad and he put it in the toothpick on accident.”

“Could he make it miss me when it’s out?” Maggie said some of the lights were like little arms, and he didn’t like to think of his eye sitting in the jelly-glass, asking to be picked up every time he walked by. And he didn’t even notice. That was mean.

“I guess he could do whatever he wanted, but that’s kinda silly,” Maggie said. “All I can tell is it doesn’t switch off. It keeps looking for you when you’re not there, so it’s ready right away when you are.”

Erik frowned at his eye. Somewhat apologetically, he pressed it back into the socket. Like putting a goldfish back in the bowl. There ya go, little guy.

“If it’s a restaurant, I think they’re over-serving you,” Maggie said. “You keep ordering context because you need it to read, and probably lots of other stuff, so it thinks that’s your favorite and you get plates and plates.”

Erik snickered, picturing himself at a diner trying to see over a three-foot-tall stack of pancakes with more on the way. Check, please!

“But is it gonna lay off when I get better at reading?” he asked.

Maggie shrugged and leaned in to examine the eye, with context. “I dunno, Erik. It’s not so much the reading as the bilateral symmetry, you know? Mirror images. It’s not just letters, it’s everything.”

“So as long as I can’t tell when things are backwards, I get super powers,” Erik said.

Maggie nodded. “Yeah, seems like.”

He grinned. “Good… deal.”

“Well, now I know you’re cheating,” Maggie said. “So when you do something spatial, I’m gonna compliment Milo.”

“I do… special stuff on my own,” Erik said, frowning.

“Spatial, Erik. The perception of objects in space. Your spatial ability is special. You’re a spatial guy.”

“I like that!” he said.

There was a rap on the door that made them both jump and Soup’s voice piped up on the other side, “Hey, what’re you guys doin’ in there, the laundry?”

“Maggie’s doing magic to me!” Erik said.

There was a brief pause. “…You both got all your clothes on?”

Maggie checked her reflection in the mirror, did not detect much evidence of crying, and opened the door. “What do you want? We don’t have food in the bathroom.”

“With this house, I never know,” the blond boy said. He tipped back his chequered cap and held up a paper bag in his off hand. “I already raided your pantry. It’s not all for me. I was gonna go to school.” He sidled up a little closer and spoke sideways, as if offering stolen merchandise, “Wanna come?”

“To school?” Maggie said, blinking.

“Illegal school,” Soup replied with a grin. “You’re still on the outs with your mom, right?”

“I guess,” she allowed. “She told me to go play outside.”

“I detect four walls and most of a roof around us, Miss Magpie,” Soup said. He doffed his cap and bowed. “Since you seem determined to break the law, may I suggest we go outside and not play, just to mix it up a bit?”

Maggie considered this. She’d never been to Seth’s school before, she’d only been past it. Her mom thought it was terrible, hardly a school at all. Spending a day trying to teach it and returning home exhausted and defeated after silencing the trains and instigating a knife fight with a seven-year-old had not improved this opinion.

She smiled. “Yeah.”