Whispers in the Dark

6

No one believed the lie about a fall at work that left Chill Bent paralyzed, blind, and rich from the insurance he got. They all knew that poor men and women often sold pieces of themselves to the rich in order to give their children a chance. Hazel Bernard tried to get the marriage between Chill and Kai annulled but failed. At the age of nine, in 2023, Ptolemy Bent joined the Jesse Jackson Gymnasium for Advanced Learners so he would have a social life among other children. But his education came from tutors and texts provided by the Prime Com Link. He worked hard on his radio receiver, which he never discussed outside his home, and one day he convinced Kai to buy him a three-hundred-thousand-dollar transmitter, the state of the art in amateur radio communications.

“Chilly, you awake?”

“Is that you, Popo?” The ex-convict put out a hand to gently caress his nephew’s face.

“Uh-huh.”

“You got peach fuzz on your chin.”

“You always say that. When you gonna call it a beard?”

“Peach fuzz,” Chill said behind a chuckle.

“I made contact, Chilly.”

“You did?”

“Uh-huh. An’ I told ’im ’bout you.”

“You think the big man’d have somethin’ better t’ do than worry ’bout a blind an’ crippled thief.”

“You the best man in the world, Uncle Chilly. He said he wanna meet you, you’n Gramma Misty.”

“Really? He said that? Damn. Well I guess it won’t be too much longer anyways. Kai said that the doctor said that my kidneys wouldn’t get a nickel down in Panama.”

“You don’t have to die, Chilly,” Ptolemy said, his voice wavering between high and low adolescent tones. “I’m’a just put some wires on your head. You and grandma.”

“You there, Mama?” Chill called out.

“Yeth, baby. Popo gonna make uth out a ethperiment. He thure look fine.” Misty’s ancient voice was weaker. Chill knew that time was short for both of them.

“I bet he do, Mama.”

After what seemed like hours of preparation, Ptolemy said, “Ready?” Then came a white hot flash at Chill’s temples and then the feeling of electric fingers going up under his skull and into the brain.

Suddenly he could see again. Ptolemy was sitting there looking at another Chill laying on the bed. The boy, almost a man, wearing a lavender andro-suit with no shirt, had hair that made him look like the king of lions. Still skinny though and darker than he had been. From brown to black, Chill thought and then he was gone forever from the Earth. First his thoughts were elsewhere and then slowly, electron by electron, the matter of his soul was transported. Somewhere there were bursts of stars and lines of reality that connected uncounted voices.

God, Chill thought. But there was no answer to his assertion. A halo of winking lights radiated next to him, mingled with him, and he knew in some new language that this was his mother. The word freedom occurred to Chill but the meaning faded with the clarity of his light. So much he knew that he was unaware of. So much beyond him even then.

It’s like I’m a breath, he wanted to say.

Yes, Misty’s new form replied.

Ptolemy Bent was arrested and tried for the euthanasia killing of his uncle and grandmother. He was sentenced to twelve years in a private prison run by the Randac Corporation of Madagascar.

At the trial God was ruled an improbability.

“He is aware that he disintegrated their brain tissues,” claimed Morton Tremble, the prosecution’s expert psychiatrist, “by using feedback from a powerful radio transmitter. Maybe he thought, consciously, that he was sending their souls to God or whatever. But in truth he only did this because both were so close to death already, as he himself has testified. He admitted that their bodies, including their nervous systems, would die. This is a classic case of mercy killing. And Ptolemy Bent was completely aware that euthanasia is against the law.”

Kai Lin, who was by Ptolemy’s side every day of the trial, stored his radio equipment in her basement and never visited her husband’s grave.