The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (4 page)

The robber’s knife went all the way through his head; its point poked out from his palate like a shark tooth. It’s a miracle he didn’t die instantly. It’s a miracle he didn’t die during the operation to remove it. It’s a miracle his eyes are open and saccading.

The arc of skull they removed during the operation is 110 mm long
by 40 mm wide by 25 mm deep. Where once was skull there is now a cream-colored computer. It bulges like a Mohawk from his head.

An eneural, it’s called. Angela has heard of them, passingly. There was a report on
60 Minutes
a few months back: on the one hand, real people, who would otherwise be heads of cauliflower, leading normal lives thanks to eneurals; on the other, reports that crooked governments—including, allegedly, the U.S.!—are using them to control people’s minds. So are eneurals good or bad? You decide.

The eneural is now Greg’s corpus callosum. It will perform thalamic functions, will take over for damaged parts of his diencephalon. Without the eneural, he will never fall asleep again. Were it removed while he was asleep, he would not wake.

Everyone loves Chase because he has big eyes. Those eyes are locked onto his mother. He says “Mommy?” every once in a while, yanks on Angela’s sleeve. To no avail. After today, he will trust the word “Mommy” a little less.

Greg’s eyes had locked onto Angela’s an hour ago. She put her hand on his cheek in response and nodded and raised her eyebrows as if to say, “Go ahead, Greg. Tell me.” Then, twenty minutes ago, his bottom jaw started moving, like a dummy’s. She watched him and cried as quietly as she could. She cried so quietly Lucy could hear her tears strike the bedsheet.

And now Greg, hoarse and dehydrated, blinks and says, “Hey you.”

“Hey,” says Angela.

Greg’s knees and elbows don’t work. He has to kick his whole leg forward when he walks. He can operate his fingers only in unison. Physical therapy is helping, but it’s slow going. The other day the staff applauded him for picking up a pencil.

One night at dinner—he must eat with a bib now—he pushes himself free of the table and moans and stands and sticks out his arms and starts making his stumbling way toward Chase.

He and Chase used to love to play Frankenstein. Greg thinks it’s one thing he can still do. Hell, maybe his condition will even improve his impersonation.

Greg Jr. instantly understands what his dad is doing and feels humiliated. He hates that bib more than anything. Lucy, who’d been stirring her food rather than eating it, starts barking out fake, forced laughter. Angela launches herself out of the chair and follows Greg with mincing steps. “Are you okay?” she subvocalizes in his ear. She doesn’t know what is happening. She has read all the conspiracy theories surrounding eneurals she could Google and is only 99% convinced there’s nothing to them.

Chase used to run howling from the table and hide, giggling loudly, behind the sofa. But now, with big, inscrutable eyes, he just licks mashed potatoes off his spoon and watches Greg approach. Greg pauses in front of him, arms outstretched. Chase’s eyes don’t meet
his. Instead, they are looking at his head. At the eneural.

Four months, and Greg completes physical therapy. Everyone is amazed by his progress.

A month more, and he is back to work. Real estate, a profession he loves like a lover: a rich lover who is scared Greg will leave it, so it showers him with money and expensive delights. His manager tells him as long as he can smile and look handsome, he’ll always have a job with them. Greg tells him about the new casing for his eneural: it’s covered with a wig made from his own hair, fits his skull seamlessly. Clients won’t even know it’s there.

Two months later, Greg is employee of the month. Not only is he among the office’s top three performers, but the new improved Greg can spool out thirty years of amortization in his head, figure continuously-compounded interest over a decade without a calculator. Uses those tricks to impress buyers.

Three months after that, Greg slides into third during a company softball game. It’s a close call. They give it to him because nobody can believe he can play softball at all. But it is a legitimate close call. Even if he hadn’t been stabbed in the head and now needed a computer to keep him alive, it could have gone either way.

Now Greg always eats with a bib. He doesn’t have to anymore. He
just likes to.

“It makes sense,” he says to Angela. “Remember what my ties used to look like?”

He found a good deal online for wholesale lobster bibs. The bibs have a picture of a lobster in a chef hat holding up a platter with a cooked lobster on it. “Aren’t they funny?” says Greg. “Though in truth, the bib-makers are playing off of a lobster stereotype. Lobsters probably don’t go out of their way to eat other lobsters in the wild. It’s just when they’re jammed together in tanks and traps that they start cannibalizing each other.”

Angela squints at him. It’s not a nice squint. “How do you know that?”

Greg doesn’t know what he’s done wrong. “I don’t know. I read it somewhere.”

Somehow she squints even more. “That’s not the sort of thing you used to know.”

Best to make a joke of it. “That was then, my dear. Now”—and he taps the eneural for emphasis—“I remember everything. Did you know lobsters don’t have a centralized brain? And lobsters can be right- or left-handed. The dominant claw is called a ‘crusher.’ And do you know how to tell a male lobster from a female? Males have these things called gonopeds … hey! Where are you going?”

Greg Jr. is doing worse in school; Lucy’s about even; Chase draws
nothing but mummies now. But Bobby Entin draws pictures with headlines like “I like to kill Mommy” so nobody at preschool is worried about Chase.

After reviewing the report cards, Greg says “Let me talk to Junior.”

It is the last thing Angela wants. But the best she can do is ask “Are you sure?”

“You know he only opens up when he’s pitching. And no offense, honey, but you can’t catch.” He kisses her on the head—she flinches, he ignores it—then heads out the screen door to the back yard.

Junior’s arm is shockingly better since Greg last caught for him. Every time the ball lands in Greg’s mitt it buzzes like an alarm clock. Sometime during his absence, someone taught Junior to throw a split-finger.

“D in math?” asks Greg.

“So?” says Junior.

“So Ds are for stupid people. And you’re not stupid.”

The ball thuds into Greg’s meaty mitt. “I don’t need math.”

Greg throws a grounder; Junior fields it gracefully. “I do math every day at my job.”

“No you don’t.”

“What?”

“You don’t. Your eneural does it for you.”

“Ah,” says Greg. “So what does that mean? Instead of learning algebra, you’re going to get an eneural like your old man?”

“Beats studying.” A little too much action on that split-finger, but
Greg backhands it, saves the wild pitch. “Nice one, Dad.”

“Thanks. Well, we’d better get an eneural in your head soon, or you’ll never pass math. Angela!” Greg yells. “Bring out the big chef knife. I’m going to stab Junior in the head.”

Junior cracks up. “Nuh-uh!”

“Uh-huh!”

“Mom won’t let you.”

“Yeah,” Greg concedes, “you’re probably right. Tell you what. Why don’t I help you with math tonight? It was always my favorite subject.”

“Can’t.”

“Why?”

Greg Jr. taps his head right where an eneural would sit. “Mr. Lopez says we’re not allowed to use calculators.”

Greg stands up, flips up the catcher’s mask. Junior is laughing the honest, merciless laugh of a fifth-grader.

Just a joke thinks Greg. He pulls down the mask, crouches, punches his mitt. “You just tell Mr. Lopez that your dad
is
a calculator, and if he has a problem with me helping you with your homework, he can come talk to me. One more pitch, then we go inside to do some math, okay?”

“Okay,” says Junior, still laughing. Then he gets suddenly serious, sets, checks first base.

Greg keeps calling for heat, but Junior keeps shaking him off. He likes his new split-finger better.

Angela reads online that, while some fundamentalist religions accuse eneural developers of playing God, the International Theological Commission of the Catholic Church has come out in support of eneurals. The Commission finds that “As the brain is no more the soul of a person than any other of the body’s organs, prolonging or enhancing its function does no more to ‘create life’ than any other prosthetic.”