After their second full day inside, Mothbert teaches George to gamble. “You say hit when you want another card,” he tells him.
“Hit!” says George. “Hit!” Outside, the city is quiet.
“You’ve busted, George,” Dad says.
They use pennies, dimes, and nickels, and George gets pretty good. Mothbert teaches him Gin Rummy, then blackjack and Texas Hold ‘Em. When Dad’s there, he flips Mothbert’s cards. When he isn’t, George has to do it. George puts them face up behind a stack of books and tries not to look, though sometimes he can’t help it.
“Am I bleeding?” asks Mothbert.
George sits back. He loves this saying for when you’re accidentally showing your cards. He loves the sayings more than the games, little blind, river, full house, all except for the one Dad used when he pushed back from his cards and said, “I’m out. If I get in any deeper, I’ll wake up with cement shoes.”
The shoe incident happened the day schools reopened. Nothing to do with cement, but still, this is how Ms. Marcy refers to it. “The incident was not your fault,” she’ll say, or, “Do you feel ready yet to talk about the incident?”
George doesn’t see what the big deal is. His shoelace got stuck in the elevator door, and he tripped. Still, he has to go see Ms. Marcy every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She used to forbid Mothbert from coming, but George wouldn’t talk, or if he did, he’d only say, “Beats me.” Now she lets him join. George can tell she’s not happy about it.
“How’s your week been, George?” she asks.
Mothbert points to a blue plastic brick. George attaches it to his spaceship. “Ok.”
“Any exciting weekend plans?”
Mothbert points to a wing piece. George takes it. “Beats me”
Ms. Marcy puts a hand on the table. “We talked about that phrase.”
George knows, but he doesn’t want to say the real thing.
Mothbert catches his eye. “Mom’s birthday,” he mouths.
“I have Mom’s birthday party,” George says.
Ms. Marcy looks at the space in front of George, where she knows Mothbert is sitting but cannot see him. “That’s wonderful,” she says coolly. “What will you do?”
George doesn’t want to think about it. Dad says she’s just unwell. He says to give her time. But George knows it’s worse than all that. “Beats me,” he says, heart beating quickly.
He cannot find the other wing piece. He looks at Mothbert for help, but Mothbert has crossed his arms and fixed George with a disapproving stare.
“We’re going to order food and watch a movie,” mumbles George.
Mothbert relaxes, and he points to the wing piece.
Mothbert walks George to school. Buildings rise like gravestones around them and a faded sign listing Flu-2 symptoms flutters past. Excessive drooling. Disorientation. Death. Dad comes when he can, but usually, he’s too busy. It’s just as well. He’s always so rushed in the morning he never lets George work the elevator mechanism. Either that or he won’t let George do it because of the incident. George has to work the mechanism with Mothbert, though, which Dad knows but must intentionally forget.
The sun shines into the bus, and George hoods his eyes. Mothbert and he have decided to buy Mom a present. Children wait on the sidewalk as George and the other passengers get off. Like him, they have red blinking lights on their wristwatches and behave like people being watched.
George and Mothbert stop outside a bookstore. The front is made of dark wood and big, sweaty glass panes. Around them, several adults flicker in and out of sunbeams.
“What about here?” asks Mothbert.
Mothbert’s eyes are dark like the wood, and his hands are lean and strong. When he smiles, it’s like salted caramel. Only later will George realize he looks like a shorter Jimmy Stewart, playful yet genuine, but that won’t be for many years, long after Mothbert is gone.
“Ok,” says George.
It’s quiet in the bookstore, and the air smells old. Mothbert scans the nonfiction section. George runs his finger along graphic novels. He walks farther into the stacks. They rise high above him. It’s like a maze, or a labyrinth. The air becomes close, and his stomach flutters. He wonders what he’ll find in the center. Treasure? A magical helmet?
He rounds a bookcase and meets the vacant blue stare of Kevin Lonaghan. Kevin is the only kid in George’s class with a bio nanny, and he’s always asking George if he wants to have a playdate. It’s bad enough George has to sit next to Kevin in science and hear him suck his fingers. “Hi, George,” says Kevin. “Want to see something gross?”
George glances around. They are alone. “Where’s Miguel?”
Kevin shrugs. “I don’t know. Here, look.” Kevin holds out a book.
George doesn’t want to look, but he must.
The page contains several drawings, each done in a hyper realistic way, though George can see the individual pencil strokes, which makes the effect more unsettling. It’s a book for doctors. In the first picture, a woman’s head is tipped back, her throat unnaturally bloated. In the second, the woman is staring straight ahead, naked, her breasts and pubic hair visible. In the third, her skin is translucent, and her muscles and bones are visible.
Kevin points. “That’s a vagina. Your mom has one.”
George fills with a terrible mixture of disgust and shame.
“Preparing for your medical boards, Mr. Lonaghan?”
Both boys turn. Mothbert stands behind them. He must be in quiet mode because Kevin hasn’t closed the book. This is his default setting, concealed from everyone but George. But that can’t be right, either. Kevin is staring straight at him.
“My parents say holographic caretakers are a way for the 1% to avoid spending time with their children,” says Kevin. “Not only that, but they take away jobs from hardworking people who are often undocumented and desperately in need of usable income. Additionally, holographic caretakers can’t actually care about anything, not houses and not children, because they’re just a series of 0’s and 1’s projected by a sophisticated light array.”
Mothbert grins. “Is that right?” He turns to George. “I found a book. Let’s buy it, then stop for ice cream on the way home.”
After the surge, and before Mom shut herself away for good, she cooked breakfast, cleaned the house, and got them dressed. “We’re going out,” she announced.
George couldn’t believe it. Even then, she didn’t like leaving the apartment without Dad.
“But Dad,” he said.
“So?” There was a twinkle in her eye. Whatever she’d been sick with, it hadn’t made her dribble sticky drool or speak in tongues, though the isolation and everyone going crazy hadn’t helped. “Where do you want to go?”
George couldn’t help it. “The park.” In summer, he’d run through sprinklers, and in winter he’d fly his spaceship, the cockpit below the slide.
Mom nodded. “The park it is.”
“Can Mothbert come?”
She hesitated. Typically, if Mom came down, she’d ask Mothbert to be put away. But she said, “Mothbert can come. Now go get your things.”
George hurried to the hallway bench. He tied his shoes and called the elevator. His mother wore a long white dress. Her hair glowed in the light, and as the elevator arrived at the floor, she winked.
George opened the gate, like always—and like always, he closed it again. What took him a moment twas that his shoelace was caught in the grill. He turned to tell his mother, to have her help him get it out, but she’d already pushed the mechanism.
The elevator descended, George’s leg lifted, and he fell. Mom screamed. George began to cry. Mothbert told her to bring the elevator back up, it was alright, but she was hysterical, face red and sobbing, and so was George, whose head hurt, and who was half on his back and half dangling, his shoelace caught on what moments ago was the floor but was now three and a half feet above it.
They remained like this, George’s nose so blocked he was taking big gulps of air through his mouth, Mom becoming more and more incoherent, gibbering, until finally Mothbert was able to calm her down enough to bring the elevator back up.
That was the incident.
George sits by the bus’s window with the book. An old woman is beside him. George tries to catch Mothbert’s eye. He is standing inside of another boy’s holonanny, causing them both to flicker. George can’t seem to, so he turns to the window.
Once, Dad was supposed to manually update Mothbert’s OS but kept forgetting. Mothbert would glitch in creepy ways. His voice would get too low, or his face would droop. Dad kept saying he would do it, then forget.
One day at school, Mothbert kneeled down to explain what the teacher meant by rounding to the nearest tens place. The fire alarm went off. Students got quietly to their feet, each with their blinking red watches, but no longer George. His watch was dead. They got into a single-file line at the front of the room, and Mr. Meyers switched off the lights.
It wasn’t until they were in the stairwell that George noticed.
“Mothbert?”
“Eyes forward, George,” said Mr. Meyers.
His mouth trembled. “Mothbert?” He felt an odd lightness in his chest. He turned to scan the stairwell. Big kids stood in line behind them, eyes white and pupil-less, brains off in some game or message board while their bodies filed obediently down the stairs.
“George!” shouted Mr. Meyers. “I said eyes forward!”
But George couldn’t help it. “I can’t find Mothbert!” he wailed.
Dad put in the update that night.
When they get to the building, George and Mothbert don’t take the elevator. They race up the five flights of stairs, stumbling and laughing. Near the top Mothbert pauses to catch his breath, which George knows is real and not real, but he is too excited to care. He’s going to win.
They order Thai. George eats noodles at the table while Dad reads emails. “Mom isn’t feeling well enough to come down,” he says, “but tomorrow she’d like to have some people over. Wouldn’t that be nice, George, to have company? It’s been a long time.”
Full house, George thinks, and the odd lightness returns to his chest.
She’s upstairs somewhere.
Dad is talking to the tall blond man, and Mr. and Mrs. C, their downstairs neighbors, admire the painting they’ve seen 1,000,000 times before of a country street at sunrise but always pretend is new. “Ooh, the lighting.”
“And the reds!”
“Hit,” says Mothbert.
George puts down a card. They’re sitting on the couch together.
“Hit,” says Mothbert.
He puts down another. Mothbert throws up his hands. “Bust.”
The blond man goes to the piano and plays. Mom comes in with a board of cheese and crackers. Her hair shines, and her face is full of color. George is startled. Maybe dad was right, maybe she just needed time. Either that or an update.
“That’s so nice,” she says to the blond man.
Mr. and Mrs. C wander to the cheese board, which Mom has put down on the coffee table beside the cards. She smiles. “You’ll like that one, Georgie,” she says and points. She has never called him Georgie before. A glitch, maybe?
“How’s school?” asks Mr. C, lathering up a cracker.
George deals the next hand. “Ok.”
“Learning anything interesting?” asks Mrs. C. She and Mr. C have the same face and the same mannerisms, and even though George knows they’re not related, he’s suspicious.
“Beats me” says George. Mothbert gives him a look. “You want to hit?” George asks. Mothbert folds up his cards. “Well, do you?”
“How are the renovations coming?” Mothbert says, redirecting the conversation.
Mrs. C rolls her eyes. “They were supposed to be done a week ago. Why, can you hear them?”
“Sometimes,” says Mothbert. “It’s not bad.”
George hates when Mothbert talks like an adult. It’s so phony. “Hey, do you want to hit or not?” he says, louder.
“Are you using that same architect?” asks Dad.
“No,” says Mr. C. He picks a seed from his teeth. “We went with someone Anne knows.”
Mom has not spoken since she brought in the cheese board. She’s beside the coffee table and smiling like she’s there, but George knows she isn’t. He does this sometimes, too, goes into a room in the back of his brain. Any moment, she’ll burst into tears.
“You’re feeling better?” Mrs. C asks.
Mom touches her hair. “Who, me?” She laughs. “Oh, yes. Just a mild case of the blues, I think.”
Mothbert isn’t allowed at dinner. George must sit between Mr. and Mrs. C, who even smell the same, too, like powdery detergent. Mom spoons out noodles. Everyone loves it. George eats his plain. Around dessert, Dad winks at him. “Pretty fun party, huh?”
George nods. “Pretty fun.” And it’s true. He thought it might feel lonely to have so many people in the apartment again, but it doesn’t. It feels normal.
Mr. C wipes his mouth. “I have a question, George.” Mr. C is a professor and often likes to pose questions to the group. “Something I’ve been wondering for a while. Does Mothbert count as an imaginary friend?”
Everyone looks up, a bit startled.
“That’s an odd question,” says Dad.
“I mean, he plays with George, he talks with George,” says Mr. C, “and most of the time can only be seen by George. Aren’t those all markers of an imaginary friend?”
George watches everyone’s faces, unsure if the question is making them uncomfortable.
“Maybe,” says Dad. “But he’s real. He isn’t imaginary.”
Mr. C nods. “Alright. So, if a child like George has a holonanny, can they also have an imaginary friend? Or is it one or the other?”
Dad purses his lips. “I don’t know. I never had an imaginary friend.”
Mom smiles. “My simple husband,” she says, and everyone laughs.
“George,” says Mr. C. “How do you think of Mothbert? Is he real like your Mom and your Dad are, or is he kind of made-up, like someone in a book?”
If Mothbert were there, he’d know the answer. Everyone is looking at him, including Mom, whose eyes look oddly clear. He wants to get this right. “He’s not made-up,” George offers. That much is true. George has seen him talk to all kinds of people.
“Ok. So, he’s real?”
“Well,” says George. “You can’t touch him.”
“Ok,” says Mr. C. “So if he’s not real, and he’s not made-up, what is he?”
George can’t say beats me because everyone will get mad, and Mom is looking at him with a small, proud smile he hasn’t seen since he won bronze at the geography bee, and everything for a moment is as if the night is ordinary; as if they, too, are all ordinary. But he doesn’t have an answer. He can see the smiles fading.
Which is when he remembers. “Mothbert is a way for the 1% to avoid spending time with their children,” he recites loudly. “Not only that, but he’s a series of 0’s and 1’s projected by a sophisticated light array, so he actually can’t care about anything or anybody.”
There’s a silence. Dad glances at Mom. Mom suddenly looks ill.
George has made a terrible mistake. His eyes begin to itch. He has ruined everything.
Which is when Mr. C explodes into laughter. It travels around the table, Mrs. C first, then Dad, then the blond man, and finally Mom, until tears stream from everyone’s eyes, and fists pound the table. George can’t figure out what he’s said, but it doesn’t matter, he’s laughing, too, now, and crying, and he can’t wait to tell Mothbert how well he did.
Dad washes dishes. Mom says goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. C and the blond man. They each hug, commenting how weird it is to touch again like this, and Mom closes the grill with a bang. She apologizes, laughs, and waves one more time. When the elevator is gone, she smooths her dress and walks to the kitchen.
“Anyway,” she says. Dad turns off the faucet. “I’m going to call it a night.”
Dad tosses the towel over his shoulder. “Ok.”
“You sure you got everything?”
“Go,” he says. “You’re the birthday girl.”
She walks to George, a bit unsteadily, and kisses him on the head. “Goodnight, Georgie.”
George watches her, wishing he had some way to make her laugh or stay longer. Halfway down the hall, she removes one high-heeled shoe, then the other. He can hear her hum the piano song, but Dad turns on the faucet which drowns it out.
“Are you going to give her her present?” whispers Mothbert. He must have come out from the office.
“What?”
“The book. Her present.”
George’s eyes widen. He rushes down the hall to his room.
“We have to wrap it,” he says.
“I don’t think she’ll mind,” Mothbert says from the door.
“No, no, we have to.”
Mothbert helps him find wrapping paper in the closet, scissors and tape, and talks George through it. When he’s finished, it looks terrible. “Yeah?”
“Perfect.”
George is at the door when he realizes something is wrong. “Aren’t you coming?”
“No, I think I’m going to stay here,” replies Mothbert. “Keep Dad company.”
The stairs to his parents’ bedroom never creak. George can hear the kitchen faucet somewhere. The sound of plates. At the top of the stairs, George sees the TV through the frosted glass. It’s the news on mute. George knows this without having to see it.
George gathers his courage at the door, he is a spaceman, he is a knight, and he knocks.
If Mom were in her bed, he’d hear it groan, and the door would open. Slowly, George slides open the door. The lights are off, but he can see clothes scattered about in the television glow. Plates of food, too. A dark fruity smell strikes him.
He hears a faucet, not from the kitchen but from the bathroom attached to the bedroom. Through the door, he sees Mom over the sink splashing water onto her face. Her hands are trembling.
He has the sense he shouldn’t be here, like he’s breaking some essential rule.
He sits on the bed and smooths the wrinkles on the wrapping paper like mom did with her dress. He hopes she likes the book. He doesn’t know what it’s about and wishes now he’d asked.
The bathroom faucet turns off. On the TV, the newsperson is about to enter a Flu-2 warren, places where one-by-one, family members went in, and no one ever came out. It happens for different reasons, but one thing is certain: they did not have holonannies to call an ambulance once everyone got sick.
“Georgie?” says his mother.
She stands at the bathroom door, and George suddenly feels ill. He lifts the wrapped book without speaking. His mother wipes her hands on her nighty.
“What’s this?” she says. “A present?”
She sits beside him on the bed. She does not smell fruity. She smells clean. On the TV, bodies are wheeled out under sheets. One has specks of blood. He imagines Kevin Lonaghan under it, alive but frozen, like he’s under some spell.
Mom shakes the present. “Not a toy.”
George shakes his head.
She pulls off the paper. “A book?” She turns it over. Her breath catches. She puts a hand on her chest. Her skin is so pale he can see her bones. Are bones always there, or only when you think of them?
“Oh my God, I—” Mom’s eyes are suddenly wet. She’s about to cry. He’s ruined everything again. He wants to run to his room, hug his stuffies and yell, “Mothbert picked it out. It’s his fault, not mine,” but Dad is coming up the stairs, and all the bodies are out of the warren now, six in total, and the newsperson is shaking their head.
No one ever comes to this side of the river, the closed captions say.
Mom touches his arm. “George,” she whispers. “This is my favorite book.”
And everything falls away.
“George?” says Dad. “Hey, George? I was wondering where you were.”
It’s as if they are nowhere, or on a stage in a large dark room.
“Honey, look what George got me.” Mom lifts the book.
Dad reads the title out loud. “Huh, I don’t know it.”
“You don’t?” says Mom. Dad shakes his head, undoing his tie and hanging it up from the closet door. “About Frankie? Honey, we almost named George Frankie.”
This thought makes no sense. If George were Frankie, he wouldn’t be George. He was Georgie for a little while, though.
Mom looks at him, puzzled. She is about to speak, then shakes her head. “Thank you,” she says. “I can’t wait to reread it.” She kisses him on his forehead, for one second, two, and George feels a melting inside him, like up until that moment, all his insides have been a little off, and now they’ve been set right again.
“What do you think, old man?” says Dad. “Should we get into our PJs?”
There is a box on George’s bed.
“Your gift,” says Dad. Inside it, there is a pair of shoes. They are black with yellow flames. George thinks it’s a mean joke, then he sees there are no laces. They’re slip-ons. “Give them a try,” Dad says. “Well? Do they fit?”
George flexes his toes. “Think so.”
“Do you like them?”
“Yeah.”
“Phew. Save us some time getting out in the morning, huh?”
George nods.
A crash comes from upstairs, like a drawer being slammed. Dad’s smile falters. “I better go see what that is.”
“Ok,” says George.
“It’s not because of the present, George. It’s because… well, tonight was a lot, I think. You can’t make or destroy matter, you know.”
George nods.
He listens to Dad’s heels up the stairs, then to the sound of the sliding glass door. It’s strange, when Mom or Dad isn’t around, George can’t picture them. There’s another crash. Dad says, “Sweetheart, please,” and the sliding glass door muffles them. George looks at the ceiling. They’re both still up there, he tells himself, they both still exist.
“Did she like it?” asks Mothbert. He switches off the light.
George gets into bed. “I think so.”
In certain lights, Mothbert looks transparent. It happens now in George’s nightlight, a red and blue rocket ship. Mothbert sits. “Want to hear a story?”
George shakes his head. He feels the lightness creep into his stomach again.
“What about a joke? What’d the robot say to the computer?”
George shakes his head.
“Should we just do highs and lows, then?”
George stares at the ceiling.
“Quit crashing, you’re making us look bad!” Mothbert grins. Then, he sighs and stands. He is nearly in the hall when George says, “Maybe you stay home tomorrow.”
Mothbert freezes. “What?”
George’s heart is beating faster than at dinner. “Maybe, tomorrow, when I go to school, you stay home?”
Mothbert doesn’t move. His face is dark and difficult to see. “Who will walk you to school?”
“I will.”
“Who will help you copy down your homework?”
“I’ll remember.”
“Who will remind you to stay quiet in line?”
“Me, I guess.”
“Who will… it’s a Ms. Marcy day.”
George’s stomach twists, but he is determined. “I’ll talk. I promise. I won’t say beats me. And when I get home, I’ll tell you everything I said.”
Mothbert nods. “Alright, George, but… did I do something wrong?”
It’s George’s turn to freeze. “What? No. I just… you always help me, make me laugh and say nice things, and I think tomorrow, well, you could stay home and maybe do those things for Mom. If she needs it.” It’s the greatest sacrifice he can make.
In the nightlight, Mothbert’s eyes widen. They look like two tiny moons. “Oh, George. Yes, I’ll stay.”
It doesn’t matter that Mom will probably just turn him off. She’ll have the option, and who knows, maybe she’ll come downstairs.
George sinks into his bed. He is so relieved. “Thank you.”
Mothbert nods. “That’s very good of you, George.”
“Love you, Mothbert,” says George.
“I love you, too, George.” He steps into the hall.
And George knows he’ll sit out there the whole night, hands lightly clasped, staring down the hall. Unlike his parents, he can see him easily, his playful eyes, his kind grin, a companion who in six years will be deactivated by the Deanimation Act, not imaginary but not made up, either, bought so the 1% could avoid spending time with their children.
Michael’s fiction has appeared in Drabblecast, Three Crows Magazine, and Not One of Us. He is a middle and high school history teacher working and living in Brooklyn, NY with his wife and two cats, Butch and Sundance.