The Electric Grandmother

THE ELECTRIC GRANDMOTHER
By Edward Morris




Five A.M. The front door swings open with a click on the firework boom and strobe and flutter of lightning dancing in the skies above the scrub woods and kudzu-fields, over and under the sounds of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs exhorting me to go home, go home, and kneel by bedside and pray.

I will, but not right away. When they make the drop-off, when I'm finally sure I can go, I'm going to a hotel and sleep for seven and a half weeks....

Uncle Reb's back in Jamaica, sitting in his own lab on data-silence, brooding and twittering over his pages and pages of math, all the schema on all those holopanes, all those hours until he hears from me on the antique cell number he still rarely gives out.

Wait. I was nebbing there. I wasn't supposed to tell you about that. Never mind. Just...


I'm always the last to leave anything. You uncles charged me with this, each with your own reasons. Uncle Reb's biochemistry degree and your encyclopedic knowledge of positronics and AI's should have gotten together a long time ago. Who knows what could result, if your little hammer-stroke ever became public knowledge?

But like so many other things, this stays in the family.

Now it's almost time for me to 'take responsibility', like you and Papa keep throwing in my face, like you or anyone else ever really had the heart or the guts or the unclouded intellect to...

I bite my tongue, swallow my heart, and look down at the tiny steel earring-knob of the Pincam tacked to my right lapel.

You two uncles have a lot of nerve, not being here for this. I... Wait, I volunteered. Don't... Oh, don't start in on me, Walter, you remember every damn thing anyone ever said to you since you were in the womb, in...

Sorry. Poor choice of words. You were blessed to be the fruit of her womb, Grandma Claire Crowe nee Two Blades, the holiest woman I ever knew. She practically built that little church in the valley they go to, the one where, at the funeral, you said you hadn't been up to that pulpit since you were seventeen and in your sophomore year at MIT.

Hi, Uncle Walter, there on the other end of the Pincam. You're not at MIT any more, Toto, but racked and shackled into a well-paid scientist tenure at Georgia State. If there were room, you'd bang a tin cup on the bars of your cage... All right, look, now's not the time. Reb's trying just like you are, Walter, just like I am, just like the rest of us.

Oh. I just heard the van touch concrete, up the driveway a piece. See the headlights on the wall? Your research assistant's right on time. Bonnie, was it?


"Papa, you've got company coming," I observe. The headlights whicker down into the driveway. Papa stands in the doorway, eating laser holes in me with his Eastwood eyes. His iron-gray hair is wavy like mine, but cut short, slicked back. He wears a white Archie Bunker undershirt and boot-cut bluejeans, no socks.

"Who'n hail---" SMSGT Reginald Crowe, USAF (Ret.), was up making breakfast at 0430 sharp, avoiding me until I got the fuck out the door (he thought.)

( I couldn't sleep. I could still hear Grandma in this house, smell the hand lotion she always put on her deft, hard-working hands to make them so soft that anyone would feel them and think Mother. I heard her voice in every relative who spoke to me at the funeral. I felt my heart torn out of my chest when her continent-sized one finally gave out after ten years of congestive bouts. All I could think of was that maybe she'd finally get some sleep, and that I'd miss her so awfully that the whole world would look strung-out and empty years later. )

You told me she was a long time dying, Uncle Walter. Ten years. Papa barely told anyone how bad off she was, and she wouldn't. That wasn't how she was raised. She never even groaned, you said, unless she was semi-conscious. She never made a noise. The actual death only took three days, then out like a light, blissfully, in her sleep, under a calm tide of painkillers. Not enough to float her away, but as one of Papa's favorite dirty jokes ends, Just Enough To Win.


Except that my ship back from Mars took five days. No FTL travel for this gutter-punk. Like our ancestors, I went strictly steerage.

It all happened so quickly. None of us saw it coming, in that no man among our number, or woman either, could know the minute or the hour. I got there two days too late.

Remember when we talked to my Mom about this, your big and only sister leaning on her walker, with tears in her eyes? Papa wanted her to stay down here. She's nowhere near where Grandma was, at the last, but the MS is taking her slowly. I know all three of us would do anything she asks.

The dexamphetamine-and-coffee circles under my eyes speak as loudly now as the way your lower lip trembles, the stubble on your face; the sadness in Reb's hooded gaze, and the fatigue you all showed on the way out the door.



"Show him," my mother Darlene Kalashnikov, nee Crowe, exhorted us with tears in her eyes. "Show me. Show me that you can be there for him, no matter how he acts. The man just lost his wife. Show him some compassion. Show me some, too, for that matter. Show me some, too..."

Laurel, my sister, got us some of the parts, but she wasn't any too happy to compromise her commission in the United States Federated Military Corps (even if there was no way they could prove that the prototype her unit was to have disposed of was not, after the fact, merely a bunch of old electronic equipment and a department-store mannequin they threw in the flash-chamber.)

But Laurel did it. Because she saw the sense of your plan, the plan that Reb adapted slightly. I threw my own shoulder to that wheel so completely that I felt like I was about to die in the traces.

Though she never would have used such a word, Grandma Claire believed that blood is thicker than bullshit.

So may we all, Walter. So may we all.


#

I hear the battered Chevy-Grumman van lift off from the driveway. There comes the soft clack of sensible pumps up the flagstone walk outside, and a gentle whirr more delicate than the rain, more powerful than Georgia lightning.


The front door whispers in. The old soldier has some company. I hear that voice that still let everything roll from it like water, gearing up louder than the storm, "REDGE."

Involuntarily, at the mere sound of the voice, I hear the old soldier's heels click together, and the vertebrae in his neck give a twenty-one gun salute. I hear his over-prominent Adam's Apple, so like mine, go up and down in his throat, like he's swallowing his own skull.


Are you seeing this, Walter? Are you seeing the old man who once called the Sherriff on you over a nickel bag of weed, are you seeing him unmanned?

Are you seeing Freud's wolf-god stripped of his teeth, his bark, his bite, his cane and whip? Are you seeing everyone who ever hurt you, now put in their place with a toy you helped devise? Are you---


Seeing Papa come in and look at me, with the Walther PPK pointed right between my eyes; instantly, by his own lights, understanding what has come up to the house to see him.


"You did this. I ought to beat your ass shut. You---"

Clack-clack. The hammer falls back in the darkness. Somewhere, lightning strikes. Just then, DXE-1 shuts the door behind her.


The android crosses the room, in the red silk jacket that you snagged from her closet when you were removing the stuff Papa couldn't look at, the one with the little gold angel pin on the lapel. I remembered every time that smile ever turned on me. "REDGE," Grandma Claire's reproach falls unto Grand-Dad yet again, louder this time, with a sense of real urgency. I can't look.

They got her better than better than Sandro Botticelli or George Bernard Shaw, or even Philip K. Dick. And all because of--- "They all did it together. I know everything you gonna say, so you just sit. No. Redge, you just SIT."

As she speaks, her faded blue eyes turn white, and begin to crackle. Something else grows in smeary coronas around her pale, liver-spotted right hand. Papa finds that he's sitting in the big, overstuffed blue armchair where Grandma died. It is still her voice that pulls him up short, even more than the touch of her shimmering hand. He tries to do something about it, then can't. "Why, you---"


From his non-physical shackles in the big blue armchair, the Senior Master Sargeant begins calling me everything but 'white' and 'a boy.'

And I sit there, and take it. Because I'm on camera. Because I promised you I would, Uncle Walter, comrade in arms on the same front line as me.

I sit there and take it, the way we all sit there and take it from martinet martyrs by blood or circumstance. I'm not even paying that much attention to Redge.

I'm looking at both her hands.

Her hands. I can't even see through the tears. Her hands holding mine, clasped where they hugged me, wiping away my tears, in the yellow-white antique days when everything was Sunday school and swimming-holes and a whole world we didn't even have to think about, because it started and stopped with Grandma and Papa, with Mom and Dad, with order and routine...

. I remember the fraction I know, the fraction, everything they'd done, all the people who remember her, and packed the church for the funeral, and would probably either thank us or ride us out of town on a rail for what we'd done ourselves. "Other than Walter, and..." I swallow my gum, my pride and most of what's left of my soul, "Laurel, we're kind of spread out all over the world. We wanted to keep an eye on you. She sent us all a letter, before she died. She... she asked us to. Hard as this may be for you to believe, or fathom, or even get your mind around, Redge, we... we cared, not like you give us much of a reason to, but..."

I can't continue. I fall to my knees, in a weird way, like I'm holding a sword I plunge into the deep carpet like William Wallace's monastic uncle in that old, old, old movie, saying goodbye in his own way.

"My God," Papa observes, in a weird little Jerry Lee Lewis croak, "Don't think I ever saw you pray." I can't look up. More incredibly still, Redge Crowe picks up the slack. He won't look at me, or the droid. "Pastor said... I might get lonely, I might want... a companion..." His eyes narrow more. He's almost ready to talk. "So you... Walter was in on this?"

"Redge, it was very hard for him," the android affirms helpfully. "Your grandson, here, stepped in and did a lot of the heavy work. Walter was his eyes. He---"

Papa's head's about to explode. "Did what?!He never worked a damn day in his life, never did take responsibility for nothin', he---"

"REDGE." The droid's left hand contains a ranuncula of syringes full of the meds Redge won't take otherwise. Her right holds the gentle shepherd's crook of the repulsor. "He learned s'fast he was suggesting things to both of 'em. You would have been proud."

Papa sulks and scowls in the chair, looking like a surly little kid about to hold his breath until he turns purple. "He's a shiftless, shifty-eyed layabout, no better than his damn D---"

". He's an artist. It took an artist's eye to see how to get everything to fit, and still keep that power supply as small as it could be. If it weren't for him, I'd be luggin' it around on a little cart, but he showed them how, if you fold the mag-skin, it---"

Papa refuses to believe this. "He didn't do no such thing. Boy couldn't find his ass if someone loaded it up with plutonium and turned off the lights..."

The eyes go lightning-white again. "You watch your language around a lady, Senior Master Sargeant Crowe, what do you think you mean by it? I know your Mama raised you better, when you weren't out with your brother Junior on that moonshine whiskey..."

They begin arguing, but Papa already sounds like he knows he's licked. The best place for me now is arm's length, and for some time, while Papa lets the chariot of The Rest Of His Life pick him up at the station, lets her spirit rest, and one day finally finds the off-switch we planned into the design, after roughly three months of mourning, then stands the silent droid in the closet like a wedding dress for someone else to Oooh and Aahh about, while he starts up his truck in the morning and drives out into the sun, into the white light and timeless haze where he's never been alone at all.

My cab's waiting, Walter. Mission Accomplished.

Have a good life.