Human Sister (14 page)

On the morning of Michael’s birth, I sat on one end of the sofa in the main room and watched as Grandpa and Grandma, wearing matching bamboo-leaf-patterned kimonos, carried my new brother out of the womb and laid him on the sofa, his head lowered gently onto my lap. His eyes were closed; he appeared to be sleeping. He had neatly combed, short black hair, like First Brother’s, and wore only a white diaper. His body stretched out over the full length of the sofa. In the center of his tummy, where a navel might have been, was a socket with three rectangular holes—for the electricity to charge his many internal batteries and capacitors, I presumed. At 1.73 meters tall and weighing 51 kilograms, he was nearly twice as big as I. On the outside, he appeared to be First Brother’s twin, but I knew that on the inside he was different.

“Look what has blossomed from the richly endowed encyclopedia of your cells,” Grandpa said. I felt a surge of pride and caressed the cool, smooth skin of one of Michael’s arms. Never would I give him away to someone else, as Mom and Dad had given me away. Never.

“Pass your hand over his eyes, and he’ll wake up fully for the first time,” Grandma said.

“Turn his head toward you so that the first thing he sees is your face,” Grandpa added.

I carefully turned his head toward me and passed my hand over his eyes. His eyelids opened, revealing hazel eyes that appeared surprised as they gazed up at me.

“Oh, Grandma, he’s beautiful!”

His mouth began opening and closing in an O shape, reminding me of a fish, and his fingers and toes repeatedly flexed open and closed.

“Yes, honey, isn’t he though? Here, I think he’s hungry already.” She handed me a warm baby bottle, light blue with a tan nipple.

I put the nipple in his mouth and he began sucking. His fingers and toes relaxed. He lay quietly while I stroked his hair. In my mind, I finally had the brother I’d dreamed of, but I was aware that Grandpa and Grandma had a different view of things: I was to be Michael’s mother. They had repeatedly explained from the beginning of the project that this meant it would be my responsibility to feed him, change his diapers (with Grandma’s or Grandpa’s help, as it turned out, since he was too big and heavy for me to change him by myself), keep him amused, and as time went on, discipline him and educate him, as they had me.

In addition to feeling sensory pain when he bumped something too hard or tore his self-healing skin, Michael had a “hard-wired inclination,” as Grandpa said, to develop a strong emotional attachment to me, his primary caregiver; and the worst kind of pain for him seemed to consist of the sensations he felt, and the interpretations he made, whenever that emotional attachment was threatened.

He displayed this pain when I stopped holding him, when I left the room, when I stopped talking to him, when I expressed displeasure, or when a thousand different things I didn’t understand brought forth from him heart-breaking screams and staccato crying (“uh, uh, uh…”), his eyes pumping out tears that tasted like mine. At those times, those many exasperating times that he screamed and cried, I would take him in my arms and talk to him and caress him.

In addition to his unique crying, Michael’s earliest vocalizations sounded like syllables consisting of only a vowel or a vowel and a consonant, such as “ee,” “ah,” and “da.” For a while, I felt that his first word was my name, for he often said “Ah-ah” when he reached for me, but Grandpa and Grandma weren’t convinced that those sounds amounted to a word or a name.

He was nearly three months old when I first noticed his interest in a miniature pear tree in our hydroponic garden. By then he was able to crawl and to sit upright without assistance from me. For several weeks, he seemed fascinated with one of the pears as it ripened from green to light yellow to a darker yellow with brown spots.

One day he looked at me, smiled—as he usually did when our eyes met—then pointed at the pear hanging heavily on the little tree, and said, “Pretty.” He pronounced the word without the
r
sound and with carefully delineated syllables, so that what he said sounded like “pi-ty.” This, I knew, was definitely a word and I hugged, kissed, and praised him whenever he used it. Soon I was “pi-ty,” Grandpa and Grandma were “pi-ty,” and everything appearing on the scenescreen was “pi-ty.” Grandpa counseled me that I should be more selective in my praises if I wanted Michael to have more than a one-word vocabulary. Grandma said she wasn’t sure it would be all that bad to live in a world where everything was pretty.

Though encouraging new words into Michael’s vocabulary turned out not to be a significant problem, the ripening pear did. Michael continued to spend a lot of time watching it, sometimes for hours each day, and every few minutes he would turn to me, point at it, and say “pi-ty.” That pear definitely was not destined to be picked and eaten.

As weeks passed, the little brown spots on the pear’s skin became big brown spots, and though nothing as large as an ant or a fly ever made it past the antoids and Gatekeeper 3, mold spores must have hitched a ride on my skin or hair, or on Grandpa’s or Grandma’s, for by the second week of December white filaments and clusters, some resembling small spider webs, began growing in the oldest patches of brown.

Day after day as the brown patches merged and the mold grew, Michael watched ever more intently, still calling the whole thing “pi-ty.” Late one afternoon the pear fell, spewing its syrupy insides onto the ceramic floor. His scream brought me running from my studies. By the time I got to him, he’d already picked up what he could of the pear and was trying to reattach it to the tree. Seeing me, he held out the gooey mess imploringly and started to cry.

The “uh, uh, uh’s” wouldn’t stop. Eventually, Grandma came to get me for dinner. After trying unsuccessfully for several minutes to calm Michael, she told me she’d seen something while out shopping a few days before that might help. She said she would be back soon and would send Grandpa in to help me. Grandpa came in, asked what had happened, then sat in his chair at the study table and watched. He’d often made it clear that it was important for Michael to be raised as exclusively as possible by me, and besides, he said, it was good for me to learn to struggle alone with “the messes and the weight of life.”

By the time Grandma returned about an hour later, Michael hadn’t quieted a bit. She asked Grandpa to help her get something through Gatekeeper. When they returned, Grandma had what she said was a Christmas tree ornament in her hand. The ornament closely resembled the pear of a few weeks earlier, green with some areas of yellow highlighted with subareas of reddish tint, as though it had been mildly sunburned. There was even an artificial leaf extending from under the clasp at the ornament’s stem. Specks of glass had been embedded in its surface, lending the pear sparkle as it moved.

Grandma helped me turn Michael, who clung to me, still crying, so that he faced away from the tree. Then she cleaned up all evidence of the former pear and hung the ornament on the same branch from which the old pear had hung. When everything was in order, Grandma and I maneuvered Michael into a position where he could see the ornament. Then she and I pointed and repeatedly said, “Michael, look. Pretty. See how pretty,” until he finally looked.

The “uh, uh, uh’s” slowed. Stopped. He stared. He cocked his head this way and that to see the new pear from different angles, thereby undoubtedly seeing its sparkles. He smiled, pointed, and said, “Pi-ty, pi-ty.”

Grandpa called this episode “The Death and Resurrection of the Pear.”

First Brother

S
he examines the dog’s collar and tag. “So, your name is Rusty.”

The dog wags its tail and licks her face.     

She runs her fingers through the dog’s hair. “Your fur, just look at it. Burrs and twigs and sand. What a mess. Poor boy. Yes. Yes. Can you sit? Sit. That’s a good boy. Oh, my, it looks as though no one has groomed you in weeks.”

She combs the dog’s hair with her fingers and picks out various forms of matter. Intermittently, she looks up. She appears to scan California Highway 1 and to peer at the town of Jenner across the estuary. She continues to perform these grooming and observing activities.

Five minutes pass.

“There, that’s the worst of it.”

The dog rises from its sitting position and licks and nuzzles her.

“Is that boat yours?” She stretches out her right arm, hand, and index finger toward the sailboat 37 meters south of them along the shore. “Is your human there?”

Sara

F
or the next two years, I was a little mother with a big baby, and I felt tired much of the time. Events such as Mom and Dad’s moving to Calgary a couple of months after the ERP’s candidate, John Jairison, won the presidential election; my summer visits to see Elio; a three-day trip with Grandma to visit Mom and Dad (but not my brothers) during their first winter holiday vacation in Canada—events that otherwise would have seemed important to me—paled in significance when compared with my responsibilities for Michael.

During his first year, I had to feed him his special nutrient liquid nearly every hour during the day and every two or three hours during the night, assuming he slept. The liquid was clear, not white like milk, for it contained only trace amounts of minerals, such as the calcium necessary for growing bones. Michael’s skeletal structure, like First Brother’s, was fully formed at birth.

That same year, I watched Michael learn to point to his bottle, reach for the bottle, throw fits for the bottle (fortunately, his strength had been adjusted to a low level during his first months), hold the bottle, crawl to the bottle, jabber “juice, juice” while playing with the bottle, and, finally, lead me by my hand as he crawled on two knees and an arm along the floor to the cooler where his bottle was stored.

As with humans, Michael’s personality and intelligence were grounded in feelings and actions, and symbols and words began for him as surrogates for these feelings and actions. For example, the command “Juice!” became a shorthand way for him, beginning in his fifth month, to take my hand, lead me to the cooler, and slap its door. First came desires, actions, and experiences; then, emerging from that foundation, came intentionality, language, and self-reflective consciousness.

As they had for me, numbers for him acquired meaning that derived from an emotional sense of more, less, big, and small. Every mouthful of nutrients got him closer to full and closer to recognizing the pattern of addition. Subtraction, likewise, became meaningful through the common experiences that got him closer to empty, to less, to out-of-time. More and less, going farther away and coming back closer—from such experiences, not from programmed arithmetic rules, came his first sense of addition and subtraction.

Like humans, Michael was an intuitive mathematician before he first uttered the name of a number and long before he was allowed access to his Sentiren mathematics module. By contrast, my other brothers had begun with neurologic modules primed for, and right on the verge of, language, math, and science. A few learning drills, enough to establish some groundedness and meaning to their actions, and they’d been able to speak and solve problems. Emotions such as love were to have been learned later.

When Michael was six months old, Grandpa said it was time for Michael and me to begin connecting with each other through the braincord. By then I’d had eight months of practice at being connected with a computer through the braincord, and I thought I’d become quite proficient at relaxing and letting my body and mind be controlled in part by instructions coming in through the cord. But I was about to discover that unlike the computer, Michael was not programmed to narrowly focus on one feeling, thought, sensation, or motor activity at a time.

Grandpa had Michael sit beside me at my study table; then he told me to gently tap the center of the back of Michael’s head. I did, and a round segment of Michael’s skull flipped up. The braincord emerged, its bifurcated ends waving slowly in the air, appearing alive, appearing to search for something—for me.

Following Grandpa’s instructions, I took hold of the ends of the cord and guided them to my nostrils. The cord moved up my nose and locked into place in the junctions of my cribriform plate. Then something new and frightening happened: a hurricane of images, sounds, smells, emotions, and fragments of thoughts swept into my mind, each sensation lasting only a fraction of a second before it was whisked away from the spotlight of my conscious awareness, only to be instantly replaced by another. The warmth of my skin, Michael’s bottle locked away in the cooler, a feeling of hunger, an image of Lily dozing in one of Grandma’s flower beds, the scent of Grandpa’s body lotion, the odor of his breath after breakfast (invariably, blueberries, cinnamon, steel-cut oats, and matcha tea)—many such disconnected sensations hurled in rapid, strobe-like fashion through my mind, making me feel confused, then dizzy, then nauseated.