It was right then, though I didn’t say anything at the time because it didn’t seem like the right time, that I decided I couldn’t live in a world where Penny would go on being as unhappy as she had been made to be.
First thing the next morning I went down to Lexington again and went to the place where we had taken Danny to get scanned when he was six years old. It was gone, boarded up, the part of town where it had been now all but forgotten by people in business to make money. The only place in the storefront where the lights were still on was the WIC food stamp place, and I went inside and was told where to go on the Loop, to a part of town I remembered as Lexington Green but which was now called Stonewall.
The business had changed its name too, was now called Livelong, and occupied a building the size of a city block. The woman at the front desk said my number was A83, gave me a smartpad to fill in and told me to take a seat.
By time they called my name I had run my fingerprint and verified all my information and watched the screen that said the scan we had got was old technology, and while the guarantee we had bought was still good, the Danny we would get would eventually wear out, but would not age the way the ones they could make now could. We’d get him six years old, and six years old he would stay.
They made me meet with a kid in a suit and tie, and all he said was the same thing I had heard from the smartpad. He was looking at me funny, and I said, “All I want to get is the service I paid for eleven years ago, near to the day,” and he lowered his head for just a moment, like he was ashamed, and then he said, “You’re entitled to it, and we’ll give it to you if you want, but what you need to know is sometimes what you want isn’t the same as the thing we can give you.”
Even though he was a kid, what he was saying was true, and I knew it then, and it made me want to pound the sense out of him, and even so I wanted what I wanted.
I walked out of that Stonewall storefront that afternoon holding the warm flesh hand of a thing that moved and talked and looked for the life of me just like Danny did at six years old, and it was nearly unbearable, at first, to touch him or hear him say, “Now we’re going for ice cream, Daddy?” and to remember the bargain we had made with Danny the day we took him to get him scanned. You be good through this, we’d told him, we’ll take you to get whatever kind of ice cream you want.
So I said, “Sure, buddy bear,” and I took him up the road to the Baskin Robbins, and he ordered what Danny always ordered, which was Rocky Road with green and only green M&M’s sprinkled over top, and we got a high table for two, and I sat and watched him chew exactly the way he used to chew, and lick the spoon exactly the way he used to lick the spoon. He said, “Can we split a Coke, Dad?” and I said sure, and went up to the counter and ordered a large Coke, and when I forgot to get an extra straw, I regretted it the way I used to regret it, because he chewed the straw down to where you could hardly get any Coke out of it.
After that he wanted to go walk the old stone wall like we always did when we came to Lexington, so I took him down there and parked the car and got him out and hoisted him up on the wall, and held his hand to steady him as he walked on top of it, and he said, “Tell me about the slaves, Daddy,” so I did what I used to do and told him about how all the black people in Kentucky used to belong to the white people, and how this very wall he was walking on had been made by their hands, one stone at a time, and the mortar mixed with probably some of their sweat and maybe some of their blood, too, still in it, and how even with all that Kentucky fought for the Union and could well have been the difference in that war. While I was saying it, I was remembering how I used to believe things like that, and the feelings that used to rise up in my chest when I said them, feelings of pride and certainty, and warm feelings toward my people I had come from. These were stories my own dad and granddad used to tell me and which I was now passing along to my own son, and this little Danny, walking along that wall, holding my hand, said the same thing the other little Danny had said in a moment a whole lot like this one but which couldn’t have been, if you think about it, any more different if it was happening on the other side of the world. He said, “It wasn’t right, was it, for people to keep other people to do their work for them? How did anybody ever think it was right?”
And I said the same thing I said then, which was, “People don’t always do what’s right, son, but you and me get the privilege of making our own choices, and we have to make good choices. That’s what makes a person good, is the choices you make.”
Right then is when we went off the script. Could be that something was wrong with his making, or could be that I wasn’t leading him right, but right at that moment, he took a wrong step and fell. He didn’t fall off the wall altogether, but he caught his shoe on a stone that was sticking up at a bad angle, and when he fell, he caught his arm on another stone, and it cut deep into his skin, and when he tried to stand up, he pulled away and didn’t seem aware that his skin was caught on that rock. I guess they don’t build those things in such a way that they feel pain the same way you and me do, because as he stood up, the skin of his arm began to pull away from what was underneath, which wasn’t bone or sinew, but cold lightweight metal, what I now know they call the endoskeleton, and what began to drain from him warm wasn’t his own blood, but somebody else’s, and the reason it was in there wasn’t to keep him alive, but just to keep his skin warm and pink, just to make him look and feel like someone alive.
“Danny,” I said. He must have heard the alarm in my voice, and I could tell it scared him. He looked down and saw his metal arm, the skin hanging off it, and the blood pouring out in a way that wasn’t natural, and then he gave me a look that sank my soul, and I realized what I should have realized before I signed what I signed, which was that I had got them to make a boy out of something that wasn’t a boy. All that was in his head was all that was in Danny’s head a long time ago, back when Danny was himself someone different than who he became later, and it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know what he was, and the sight of it was more than he could handle.
His lip began, then, to tremble, in the way Danny’s did when he needed comforting, and I lifted him down off that stone wall and took him in my arms and held him and comforted him, and then, in the car, I stretched the skin back to where it had been, and took Penny’s old emergency button-sewing kit out of the glove compartment and took needle and thread to it and got him to where none of the metal was showing. I didn’t take him to Penny’s like I had planned.
He was real quiet all the way home. He just stared straight ahead and didn’t look at his arm and didn’t look at me. Near Winchester I asked him if he wanted to hear some music, and he said all right, but we couldn’t find anything good on the radio. “How about the football game?” I said, and he said all right again, and we found the Tennessee Titans and the Dallas Cowboys, and I made a show of cheering for the Titans the way we always had, but when he said, “How come all their names are different?” I didn’t have a good answer, and after that I asked if he wouldn’t mind just a little quiet, and he said he wouldn’t mind, and I leaned back his seat and said, “Why don’t you just close your eyes and rest awhile? It’s been a long day and I bet you’re tired.”