Whispers in the Dark

2

“M Bill Bent?” the white man asked. He was standing at the front door, tam in hand.

Chill had been doing push-ups and wore only a pair of sweatpants. His muscular chest was heaving and sweat poured down his face.

“No,” Chill said.

“Oh.” The white man hesitated. “Then is M Misty Bent here?”

“She in the bed.”

“Oh, I see,” the small white man said. There was a hint of Mississippi in his voice but in spite of that he spoke like a Northerner. “Well, you see, I’m Andrew Russell from the state board of education. I’ve come to speak to someone about Ptolemy Bent.”

In the background Chill could hear the radio receiver that Popo was experimenting with in his grandmother’s room. The high-pitched, wavering sound was like the sound effects from the old science fiction movies that they showed on Saturdays at the juvenile delinquent detention center.

“What you want wit’ Popo?”

“Popo. Is that what you call Ptolemy? We have been informed by various interested parties that the child is exceptional, bright. There’s a state law that we must test exceptionally bright children to make sure that they’re getting the proper education. You know that IQ is our greatest resource.” Andrew Russell smiled and nodded a little. He wore the popular andro-suit, green jacket and pants with a loose tan blouse and a brown tam.

“State law is you cain’t touch ’im till he sixty-one mont’s,” Chill said.

“But with his guardian’s approval we can test as early as twenty-foah,” Russell said in what was probably his friendliest tone.

Chill closed the door slowly, controlling his rage. He knew that he couldn’t lose his temper, not while Popo was his responsibility.

“Popo,” Chill called.

“Wit’ gramma,” the child shouted.

She was surrounded by colored lights that Ptolemy had wired around the room. Yellow and blue and green and pink paper shades that had been colored with food dyes, lit by forty-watt bulbs. The four-year-old Ptolemy sat at his grandmother’s vanity working on six disemboweled old radios that he had dismantled and rewired. He turned the various knobs, roaming the electronic sighs, momentarily chancing upon talking or music now and then. Six bright green wires connected the radios to an archaic laptop computer on the floor. Waves of color crossed the old-fashioned backlit screen. Now and then an image would rise out of the haze of pixels.

His hair had never been cut but Popo brushed it out as well as he could every morning. In the afternoon Kai Lin would come over and comb out the tangles that Popo missed at the back of his neck.

Misty had cranked her Craftmatic bed to the full seated position. She smiled at her little mad scientist while he searched for something, a secret that he wanted to surprise her with.

“Popo,” Chill said.

The boy glanced over at the screen and giggled.

“...former Soviet Union today gave up its last vestige of sovereignty, much less socialism, when it entered into a partnership with Macrosoft Management International in a joint venture to return order to Russian society ...”

A long pure note wailed between stations.

“...born to be wi-i-i-ld...”

Static came after the song, and the volume rose.

“Popo!” Chill called again, but the static drowned out his words.

An almost imperceptible clicking blended in with the white noise. The volume dropped. The clicking became clearer. Popo brought his hands to the side of his head and pulled both ears.

“Popo,” Misty Bent said as loud as she could.

“Yea, Gramma?”

“Thill ith talkin’ to you.”

The boy turned around and stood on the white satin vanity chair. He was naked and smiling.

“Chilly.”

“They wanna take you to get tested an’ sen’ you to Houston, Po,” Chill said.

Ptolemy automatically put his hands in the air when the man came near. The child loved the feel of his skin against the muscular man’s bare chest.

“No,” Popo said. “I don’ wanna go.”

“I don’t want you to go neither. But we got to figger sumpin’ out.”

“We could run,” the boy suggested. “We could go in the swamps like them slave men you said about.”

Almost every night Chill told Popo stories of runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. He said that it was because he wanted Popo to know African-American history, “like white kids know their history. From stories at home.” But escape was the real story he wanted to tell. He had been obsessed with escape ever since the day he was convicted of armed robbery. The only way he could fall asleep in his cell at night was by imagining himself a slave who had slipped his chains, pried open the bars, and outrun the dogs. Even after his release Chill needed this fantasy to drop off.

For a moment he considered his nephew’s innocent suggestion.

The desire for flight burned perpetually in his chest. He owned an illegal ember gun. With that he never needed a reload, and one LX battery could last a year.

But then his eyes fell upon his mother, Misty. She only walked for exercise now — fifteen minutes in the morning and five at night. Ptolemy loved his grandmother more than anything.

“No, baby boy,” Chill said. “No.”

“Then what?”

“If we had money we could prove to the state that we could afford to get you hooked up to the EEG’s Prime Com Link. If they could give you tests and we could get you into that Jesse Jackson Gymnasium that they got for city kids then maybe you could stay.”

“I could get money,” Ptolemy said.

“It’s gonna take more than your nickel allowance, honey.”

“How much then?”

“Just to pay for the computer link is a hundred fi’ty thousand a year. And then there’s forty thousand for the JJ Gym ’cause you not in the city limits. Three million prob’ly do it with costs goin’ up like they do.”

“I could get that,” Ptolemy said.

“Where at?”

“On the computer.”

“Naw, man,” Chill said. “Computer’s all linked up. They got identity cards along with your PBC on every computer.”

“Nuh-uh,” Ptolemy said shaking his head and grinning. “My Personal Bar Code ain’t on my computer.”

“That thing? That’s just a toy. It ain’t connected up.”

“I can wit’ my radios. I can too.”

“Show me.”

The child jumped around in the chair and started turning dials. The computer’s gaseous-looking screen went black. Letters and numbers appeared and reappeared in rapid succession on a line in the center of the screen.

Ptolemy hummed and sang while the computer spoke French and Chinese through the various radio speakers. Chill sat down on his mother’s bed and watched.

“Don’t let my boy get in trouble, Thill,” Misty said.

“He was born in trouble, Mama. Born in trouble.”

“But that don’t make him no thief.”

“If we cain’t get the money then the government gonna take him. I’ma just get ’im to show me, Mama. Ain’t nobody gonna steal nuthin’ but even if they do it’s gonna be me. I’ll push the button. But don’t worry, I’m just lookin’.”

As they spoke, words appeared and remained on the screen:

Below the words were a series of codes and blank lines.

“See,” Popo exclaimed. “They gots lotsa money.”

“An’ they don’t know your bar code?” Chill asked.

“They get the bar code from your eyes,” Ptolemy said. “When you buy your computer they make you give ’em a eyescan. But they didn’t do that way back when they made these laptops. I just borrow somebody else’s bar-c from one’a the Jacker DBs and then I put it back when I’m through.”

While Ptolemy spoke the blanks were being filled in one at a time by an automatic code-breaking program that Ptolemy had adapted from the illegal Jacker Data Base. After all of the blanks had been filled in, a flurry of screens passed in quick succession ending finally on a screen whose header read PROJECT MAINTENANCE FUNDS.

“This ain’t nobody’s money,” the child said. “It’s what they got for extra.”

There were sixteen place numbers on each coded entry of the file.

Chill’s upper lip began to sweat.

“Turn it off, Popo.”

“But—”

“Turn it off!”