Toys

Chapter 40

I put in a disc, and the TV screen came alive with grainy images that must have been shot with a camera as old as the television.

A cute little boy, about age three, was toddling along at his mother’s side, clinging to her hand. They were walking toward a pebbly beach on a lake with a house in the background.

The smiling, familiar woman was short-haired, young, and very beautiful. One of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, actually. She could have easily been a movie star.

The boy was moving along awkwardly, making happy infantile sounds as only a human baby would. Elite children of that age-raised in vitro for a full twenty-four months-were as physically coordinated as human ten-year-olds and already talking coherently. Elite children also didn’t have belly buttons, and this one had an outie as big as a grown man’s knuckle.

I kept watching with shocked fascination as the “home movie” images changed and continued to flicker gently before my eyes.

The same little boy lay peacefully asleep in bed, with his tiny hands curled beside his face. Very cute. Very tender as well.

Except, I realized suddenly, it wasn’t a bed. It was the table in an operating room.

The beautiful woman stood nearby, but this time she wasn’t smiling. She had her hands to her face, with tears flowing through her fingers. The clean-shaven father, looking serious and concerned, embraced her, patted her back repeatedly.

After a moment, she nodded against his shoulder. Then they both donned pale blue surgical gowns and masks.

The images on the screen shifted again to another scene. There was the boy, maybe a year older, running across the lawn-only now he was as swift and agile as a deer. The camera followed him as he raced through a forest obstacle course, making long swings from overhead handholds and leaping over walls.

It was the very same kind of athletic training I’d received-and excelled at-when I’d first entered Elite schools.

The next images were of the boy and his father sitting in the living room of the house, in front of a comfortable fire, playing four-dimensional chess. The boy was winning the game, and winning easily.

And then there was the same boy, age five now, swimming the butterfly stroke in the lake, really motoring. And now he was hauling himself out of the water onto the wooden planks of the dock as his father ran to him, holding a timepiece in his hand. The boy looked at the watch and began pumping his arm in the air as the father hugged him.

The camera zoomed in and the boy beamed-a smile I recognized only too well.

And now the camera panned back out, and the father reached down to pick up a towel so the boy could dry his preternaturally strong body-including his now navel-less torso.

The television screen went blank after that.

The tape was over.

I just kept sitting there, too stunned to move or even talk.

Those had been my parents. And I’d seen that boy before-in kindergarten pictures, in holiday and birthday stills… it was me, of course.

Portrait of a skunk as a young man.