FRANKENWITTGENSTEIN

Bonnie: The Beautiful Body-Action Doll for the Self-Body Image-Enhancement of Toddling and Preadolescent Girls at Risk.^TM

Dad conceived her gastrointestinal mini-tract a decade ago. Back then, he was employed at Useful Modules in Grayslake, designing low-valence fibrins to lubricate the motors of their robots. We lived in a part of Waukegan that was getting nastier by the hour, but we had premium channels and a VCR, we ate our snacks off paper plates in the family room and laughed at sitcoms together, our legs overlapping under the afghan. Our bikes were worthy of their combination locks and our mom was a sweetheart, packed us lunches every day before going to work, occasionally slipped notes between the folds of our paper napkins: Who’s the smartest and the handsomest? You are!; One week till your birthday, a great day!; Basketball team, shmasketball team—you don’t need them.

And then Bonnie: The Beautiful Body-Action Doll for the Self-Body Image-Enhancement of Toddling and Preadolescent Girls at Risk.^TM

We were watching an exposé on eating disorders and it made our father sad. Halfway into the opening montage—a quick-cut stream of dark eye-hollows and flesh-poor pelvic arches, thighs the width of knees and grainy close-ups of mouth-scars; the soundtrack a string of desperate self-statements spoken through echo-filters by choked-up teenage girls, I’m too fat, I hate myself, No one loves me—Dad brought his hand to his forehead, as if to shade it from the sun, and he kept it there.

By the first commercial break, the twins were sleeping soundly against his shoulders. Mom kissed and whispered them into consciousness, sent the three of us to bed. I fell straight into a nightmare about a hockey team suffocating me in a pileup. This was in the old Chicago Stadium, but it wasn’t the Blackhawks who did it. It was the Yang, a team I’d never heard of. I woke up wet and ashamed.

I stayed in my bed for a while, trying to picture good, bright things. I tried cartoons and they turned violent under my eyelids. I tried angels, but they were dead people. I wanted to lie on the couch and watch TV, fall asleep to the sound of human voices, whatever they were saying. I was sure that if I went downstairs and told my folks I’d had a nightmare, they’d let me sit with them, but I was just as sure that speaking of the nightmare would make it permanent.

I decided to go down there and tell them it was unfair how, even though I was nine, I had the same bedtime as my seven-year-old brothers. I didn’t get to tell them anything.

When I returned to the family room, a pale girl with puffed cheeks and wrecked lips was onscreen, confessing, and Mom was holding Dad’s hand. Dad was weeping. He said, “Poor girl. Poor young girl.”

I said, “Dad.”

He hid his face. I forgot my complaint and Mom sent me back to bed. I slept fine.

In the morning, Dad made us omelets and bacon. “I’m sorry you had to see that,” he told me. “No boy should have to see that. I’m gonna make you a special omelet, with extra cheddar.”

Timmy and Brian said they wanted extra cheddar, also.

Dad said, “No. Mike saw. You didn’t.”

Brian said, “What did he see?”

“He saw nothing.”

“Nothing nothing or nothing special?” said Timmy. Timmy was existential.

“Nothing nothing,” I said.

“What did it look like?”

I said, “It looked like you.”

“So then it looked like Brian, too! You’re saying we look like nothing, but you’re also saying that nothing looks like us.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Honest?”

It was the last breakfast Dad made for us. That night, he started on Bonnie’s mini-tract. Between his nine-to-five at Useful and the hours he spent in the attic laboratory, it got so we saw him only at dinner and bedtime.

After three years of weekend and evening home-lab work, Dad completed the mini-tract and, in a flush of exuberance, drove us down Lake Shore to the auto show at McCormick Place. It was a rainy day, but the sun was out, and as we passed through the Gold Coast, oohing and ahhing at the dripping high-rises and the skyscrapers behind them, Dad told us that, within a month, we’d leave slummy Waukegan and move downtown. He asked Mom which building she wanted to live in and she pointed to a clover-shaped black one next to Navy Pier. “Lakepoint Tower!” Dad said. He shot me a glance in the rearview. “You see that, Mikey? You’ll have the lake outside your bedroom window.”

At the auto show, I stood rubbing my eyes before a red Lamborghini with doors like bat wings. No one was allowed to touch it. There were ropes.

The following Monday, Dad brought the mini-tract to Good Parent Educational Toy Corporation. They fawned over it but didn’t want to buy it without being sure there was a financially feasible way to rig up the calorie-sensitive infrastructure that Dad promised was forthcoming.

Dad chose to understand Good Parent’s enthusiasm as a kind of pledge and, long since sick of manipulating gluten, anyway, he quit his job at Useful to focus all his energy on Bonnie. He cashed out his 401(k) to fund a better home-laboratory. Let his beard go wild and took lunch in the lab. On weekends, we’d put it on a wheely-cart by the door. Knock three times and walk away. Once, I went up there with Brian, and we stayed after knocking. Dad came out.

I said, “Dad.”

He said, “No.” Then he ducked back inside.

Brian said Dad was a fuckface and I told him to shut up. Then Brian punched me in the stomach and I slapped the side of his head. It toppled him. He was smaller than me. When he sat up, his eyes narrow and wet, he said we were no longer brothers and vowed not to speak to me ever again.

Two years later, I got caught with a hard-on in the shower after gym. I wasn’t even looking at anybody, my eyes were closed, but Bill Rasmussen announced the news to the locker room. I could’ve taken him, easy, and I didn’t. It was mostly true what he said about me and I froze up.

When I came home from school, Dad was singing to the twins in the kitchen. Old Beatles songs. I went in there. He crooned at the three of us, clapped beats out on the counter. At first, we held back our laughter because we liked it and didn’t want to give him any kind of victory, but he kept going so long, and he won. We had to laugh to stop him. He’d finished Bonnie’s infrastructure. “Tomorrow’s payday,” he told us. He sliced up some apples and made us triple-decker grilled cheeses in a pan.

Timmy, newly vegan, gave his sandwich to Brian. Brian said, “No way this means you get Claudia.”

Claudia Berman was a high-haired, flat-chested baton-twirler who lived across the street. Sometimes she called and asked for Timmy. Sometimes Brian.

“I think she likes me,” Timmy said.

Brian said, “No one likes you.”

“Well, I definitely like her, even if she doesn’t like me. She has kind eyes, I think.”

“She thinks you’re an asshole, Timmy.”

When Dad brought the new Bonnie to Good Parent, they slapped him on the back and called him a visionary. Then they said they needed something much simpler: Dad had designed the mini-tract to take any type of food you could jam into the doll’s mouth—he figured that little girls would thrill to feed Bonnie the same food that they themselves were eating—but Good Parent figured they would do better with a Bonnie who was only able to digest a perishable, vitamin-enriched protein paste that required refrigeration and could be sold for five dollars a tube. So they told him to dumb down the mini-tract and create a paste. “Something that smells good,” they told him.

That night at dinner, Dad gave us the lowdown. “Spilled milk,” he said. “Another year. No big thing.”

Mom rolled her eyes.

After another couple years, Timmy’s studying the Gnostics, Brian’s a hand-to-hand weapons geek, possibly dealing, and Mom’s on a semester’s suspension from Lincoln Elementary for saying “Hispanic” instead of “Latino” at an assembly during Diversity Week. No one in Waukegan is gay and I’ve lost all vestigial interest in the bodies of women, even movie stars.

And Dad’s done just what Good Parent asked him to do, but now they have a problem with the quality of the paste: it’s too good. Good Parent needs to be able to count on Bonnie’s obsolescence. They want a paste that will slowly destroy Bonnie’s insides so that after eleven months Bonnie will break and the little girls will have to buy a new Bonnie, maybe a new and improved Bonnie, maybe even a Bonnie that can digest real food.

Dad gets back to work and, six cloistered months of labor later, he’s invented a nontoxic, corrosive molecule with which he augments the paste. With each successive paste-feeding, the plastic gaskets in Bonnie’s mini-tract dissolve a little. It’s doubly brilliant because the more Bonnie’s gaskets dissolve, the less she can “digest,” which means not only that she needs to consume increasingly larger volumes of paste to stay out of the caloric red zone, but that her gaskets wear away at a higher rate as time marches on. When Dad graphs “Paste Consumption over Time” and superimposes it on “Mass of Gaskets over Time,” the effect is gorgeous: a lopsided X.

In the week between his completion of the paste and its presentation to Good Parent, he prints out hundreds of these graphs and papers the walls of the house with them. For the hell of it, he adds a speculative z axis titled “Geometric Escalation of Concern” to the graphs he hangs in the family room. It’s the most promising gesture he’s made since singing “Please, Please Me” in the kitchen, and we all fall under the spell of it. Even Mom. That Saturday, she breaks into her savings to take us shopping for jeans at the outlet mall and we share food-court Chinese off styrofoam platters.

“We’re fine,” she says. She buys herself new lipstick and gets it all over our faces, our necks.

Good Parent tells Dad that the paste smells too good, that their initial idea of an entirely good-smelling paste lacked foresight, that since the gist of the Bonnie doll is that she’ll help prevent girls from acquiring eating disorders, Bonnie’s food should definitely smell good at the outset (though not so good that Bonnie would want to binge on it), but when the food is processed and turned into “excrement” or “vomit,” it should smell bad—or at least not like strawberries—lest the Bonnie product send a mixed message to its at-risk consumers, which could mean lawsuits. They tell him that as long as he’s going to take the time to fix the paste-smell situation, he might as well also figure out a way to cause an excess of hair to form on the bodies of Bonnies who refuse to eat and won’t cut back on their overzealous exercise routines.

By now, it’s been four years since Dad finished the mini-tract. Our savings are gone and our family is living off my mother’s teaching salary. Mom’s well on her way to a blackboard-related repetitive-motion injury, the twins are about to turn fourteen, and I’m at the peak of my adolescence and I need Zoloft and better Levi’s and I can’t stop thinking about cars and how all the other kids get cars when they graduate high school, which isn’t true at all but feels true. I’ve never kissed anyone with tongue and I doubt I ever will.

Dad seems fine, maybe a little sleepless, but otherwise fine, and then he goes out for smokes one day and forgets to wear pants. The bulls haul him back to us. Timmy and I meet them out front.

“This poor, sick man your father?” says one of them.

“Get some fricken slacks on him or we charge his ass,” says the other one.

Timmy runs inside.

“Leave our property,” I tell them.

“Listen to this pillow-biter! Doesn’t know when he’s getting a kindness done to him.”

“Have a little mercy. He’s the son of an indecent exposer: apple and the tree.”

“Fruit and the tree’s more like it. Stay off the streets of Waukegan.”

The cops drive away. Dad goes straight to the attic.

Despite the brush with public indecency, he finishes designing his revolutionary Mustache & Happy Trail SkinStrips the very next day. For his edification, and to show our allegedly continuing support for the Bonnie project, Mom uses her discount to buy him a new hardcover bestseller called Beyond Fat and Thin: Dispelling the Myths Surrounding Eating Disorders by eating-disorder specialist Russell Randbert, PhD.

This turns out to be a mistake.

In his book, Randbert argues that girls acquire eating disorders when they feel out of control. He explains that binging, purging, starving, and reckless exercise are not symptoms of a negative self-body image but means by which girls can gain a temporary sense of autonomy over their bodies. The negative self-body image, Randbert says, comes after the dysfunctional eating behavior manifests: “I’m too fat” is the easiest explanation a girl has to offer herself for why she is engaging in behavior that only happens to make her thin. “I’m too fat” is not only a “delusion,” Randbert quips, but a “delusional motive,” as can be inferred by observing that psychotherapies that address body-image issues invariably fail, whereas those that focus on control tend to succeed.

Once Dad’s finished with the book, I read it. His marginalia are crackpot for the most part: frowny faces and hanging stick-men, short-fused sticks of dynamite, mathematical equations containing exclamation points. On the inside covers are 3-D diagrams of alien digestive systems, their labels done in block letters: A NINE-CHAMBER YOU-LOSE STOMACH, THIS STUPID ESOPHAGUS, THE WHEREFORE ART MY BOWEL. But then, at the end of the book, fountain-penned in the half page of white space under the acknowledgements, I find this: “Although a given toddling-to-preadolescent girl will, to a certain degree, control her Bonnie, the manner in which Bonnie obsolesces will undermine any sense of control the girl could have otherwise acquired through the exercise of Bonnie as self-metaphor. I fail I fail I fail them all.” The handwriting is deceptively neat.

I pass the book on to Mom. She skims it. Then she throws it in the fire.

My father—like Nobel, I’d like to think—becomes fatalistic. His creativity gets blocked.

He locks himself in the attic laboratory and bleats, and sometimes there are smashing sounds. He can’t figure out how to make a paste that starts out smelling good, ends up smelling bad, and corrodes the mini-tract all the while. He drinks, fights with Mom. He becomes impotent. Mom, in her loneliness, has made of me a reluctant confidant is how I know that. She and I start scarfing pints of ice cream together at midnight. I get cavities, she gets heavy. All of us dread dinner. Dad comes to the table and refuses to eat, saying, “I don’t deserve it, I don’t deserve your food,” while Mom looks to me for shrugs of allied contempt. Our father gets so skinny, the neighbors start talking cancer. We let them talk, fearful that any sympathy they might have for us will lessen if they find out he’s insane. We despise him and we don’t even fear him.

What makes it worse is how so much of his falling apart gets realized through the attempts he makes to put himself back together. Like some pop-eyed Manson Family ascetic, he invents rules about watching television. For example: he must change the channel once and only once every ten minutes, whether or not a commercial is on. Next it’s his bowels: he has to sit on the toilet from 9:30 a.m. to 9:50 a.m. and cannot sit on the toilet at any other time of day, regardless of his needs. Every morning at eleven, he plugs the bathroom sink and fills it with near-scalding water, then plunges the first joint of his pinkie in, holds it there for thirty seconds, and doesn’t breathe. He’s no fool, my dad. He knows he’s making self-destructive gestures and, worse than that, he knows that nearly scalding your pinkie is a half-assed way to go about self-destruction. One morning, I come across him in the hallway outside the bathroom and he puts his arm around me, says, “Mike, your dad’s a pussy. A real pussy.”

Brian, at the bottom of the stairs, overhears this. “Yeah!” he yells up. “And a fuckface, too. You want to slap me, now, Mike, you scrawny bitch? I don’t forget.”

Dad says, “Son.”

Brian says, “What? You’re gonna protect him?” Then he skims a ninja star at the ceiling and tears the stair carpet with a bowie knife.

By the third year of his inventor’s block, Dad can’t find the deep end he’d otherwise go off of and he becomes obsessed with the origin of the phrase, convinced that deep end refers to the deep end of a pool, which is not a thing he can reconcile with off-ness or on-ness. It’s all he talks about, if he talks at all. He doesn’t show up at the dinner table anymore. He plucks a rusted chain-mail blouse from a dumpster by the theater and wears it all day without an undershirt, eye-droppers lemon juice onto his chest before bed. One afternoon, he bites a small chunk of flesh off the back of his left hand and, every succeeding afternoon, rips the scab off with his teeth, then breaks out the dropper and does the raw red derm like it was his nipples.

On the eve of my brothers’ last day as sophomores, Claudia Berman rings the bell. They barrel down the stairs and Brian trips on the way and says Timmy tripped him. Timmy makes for the front lawn and Brian puts a tackle to Timmy’s knees, flips him over, and starts whaling on his face. I run outside to pull the skull-sapper out of Brian’s calf-sheath while Timmy, spouting purple from the nose and mouth, Brian’s forearm pressed against his trachea, flails his arms around, trying to get hold of something. He gets Brian’s ear. The left one. It comes off. Brian falls backward, on top of me, holding his earhole, bleeding less than I’d expect. Claudia screams Timmy’s name and runs inside for towels.

It’s the end of Brian’s alpha. It’s the end of Timmy’s optimism. It’s the end of a lot of things.

Dad takes bedding to the attic and sleeps on a slab.

Mom hits the local singles bars on Fridays.

Months pass.

Brian’s prosthetic ear—which the insurance company covers only half the cost of, thus engendering the misappropriation of tuition for my first year of college and destroying, once and for all, any false hopes I might have had of getting even a used Kia—starts coming loose on cold days and finally falls plum off after the Winter Formal Dance, while he’s walking to an Inspiration Point–bound Chevy with Claudia, for whom he knows he’s consolation meat. I graduate high school, turn eighteen years old, and when I try to enlist in the Coast Guard, they won’t have me. As I walk out of the recruiting office, the guy who’d been queued up behind me calls me a homo and I pretend not to hear because no one cares what I do anyway. Timmy wears all black all the time and, with hot irons and scalpels stolen from Dad’s lab, he mutilates his thighs and lower abdomen to absolve his guilt about Brian’s ear, which Brian keeps milking, the guilt. Mom starts dating a rhubarb farmer from Kenosha, telling me about it. She says he’s gentle, and clubfooted, but he loves her.

Our life, by this time, has become a cartoon. Maybe it’s an X-rated cartoon, and maybe it would seem more real if, in my bumbling, fleshy way, I weren’t trying so hard to make a prime-time morality play of it, but still: if on a certain moonlit evening in Arizona, I’d seen my mother drop off a cliff and go SPLAT, I doubt I’d be very surprised to find her cooking eggs in our kitchen the following morning. Rather, I’d be surprised to find her cooking, but if she were standing beside the stove, chewing her nails or talking to herself, I’d only squint a little before I believed it. And yes, it’s true that The Catcher in the Rye took ten years to write and no one’s cured cancer yet, but a Barbie with a working digestive system? We let him turn us into Looney Tunes for a high-concept doll?

On my nineteenth birthday, Dad hands me the card-stock receipt for a six-month subscription to Hustler, a block of two-by-four, and a tube of vitamin-enriched protein paste. He invites me into the lab and sits me down before a lathe-drill, props the two-by-four under the bit. Hand on the grip, eyes engoggled, he tells me, “You’re eighteen now. It’s about time you and your dad had a talk about girls and technology.”

“Okay,” I say.

“They don’t go together,” he says. “Look at me, Mike. Do you see?”

I look at him. He looks sick. He looks embarrassed. A pearl of saliva is drying whitely in the cleft of his chin. He smells like Mad Dog and burned plastic.

“I hate you,” I tell him.

“I hate me, too,” he says.

I start crying, which is pretty typical.

“It’s nothing to cry about, kiddo. Well, maybe it is. But wouldn’t it be a whole lot worse if I thought I was a good man? It would be irresponsible. It would lack rigor.”

He aligns the drill. When he moves, the chainmail against his chest-skin makes a noise like velcro. He picks at his scabs, forgets I’m there with him.

“What do you want, Dad?”

He snaps to, coughs something up and swallows it.

“Manage a restaurant,” he says. “Sell insurance. Harvest rhubarb like that Swedish guy. For chrissakes, though, don’t try to battle eating disorders with new technologies. Don’t create systems. Describe systems. The ideal doll is a girl, so don’t bother making dolls or trying to improve girls. I’ll tell you what. I’m not God. I’m not even any kind of Frankenstein. When you were born I bawled my eyes out because I knew I couldn’t do better. And then the twins. Them, too. But not a daughter. Never had one. How can I describe a girl if I’ve never had a daughter?”

“I’m gay.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“It’s got nothing to do with sense.”

“Well, either way, I got you the wrong subscription. And I’ve fastened the wrong drill bit. Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Yes,” I lie.

“Is he nice to you? I mean, does he treat you well?”

“He’s okay.”

“I suppose I’ve never met him because you’re embarrassed to bring anyone to the house… Listen. Don’t settle for a bunch of nonsense. You’re better than that. I don’t deserve to have you as a son. You’re a shining example of goodness and tolerance and I’m this crazy piece of shit over here. I’m trouble. It’s a privilege to even be despised by you—”

“Dad.”

“Ditch that boyfriend and find yourself a good one. Adopt a baby girl. Teach kindergarten. Don’t worry about humanity. Love humans, boy-o, be close to them. Let humanity work things out for itself. You’ll be a happy man. You know you enliven me? You’re an endless well of hope!”

He drapes his arm over my shoulders, squeezes. “Do you think you were born gay, or was it the way you were raised?”

“Born,” I say.

Then, as suddenly as Kekule’s snake became a benzene ring, Dad theoretically solves the problem of the smell of paste. His face twitches.

“Son of mine!” he says. “My son!”

He figures out that changing the makeup of the paste isn’t the answer, but that copper-coating small portions of the plastic joints in the mini-tract will cause the digested paste—in its present form—to stink up real bad upon its regurgitation or elimination, and now all he has to work out is (1) how to push forth the hairs in the follicles in the Mustache & Happy Trail SkinStrips that he’s embedded in the rubber over Bonnie’s upper lip and below her navel, and (2) how to trigger them at the appropriate time, i.e., when Bonnie becomes “anorexic.”

To actually sprout the hairs, it’s a simple matter of activating microgram weights and polymer pulleys not dissimilar to those used in the mini-tract system. As for the situation-appropriate triggering of the sprouting activation, Dad decides to plant a function on a microchip, the workings of which are a little bit beyond me, but entail the delicate balancing of a paste-intake equation with a limb-movement equation. A large enough imbalance translates to “anorexia” and, depending on the degree of the imbalance, commands certain weights to shift and certain pulleys to pull so that one or both of the embedded Mustache & Happy Trail SkinStrips can do what they were made to do.

Now it’s only a matter of time.

One summer evening three months later, our family, minus Dad, plus the limping rhubarb farmer, is eating barbecue at the picnic table in the backyard. Brian sits to the right of Timmy, and whenever Timmy speaks Brian says, “Who’s talking? I know I heard a voice, but for some reason I can’t tell where that voice is coming from. Funny,” he says, “I can’t seem to tell where just about any sound I hear comes from.”

It’s cooling down outside. A rabbit chases another rabbit until he catches her on the cement patio and they have sex until they become distracted, at which point they stop and stare at the sky and become distracted and start having sex. Moths bang their heads on lamps. Squirrels chew. Mosquitoes wobble. Fireflies incandesce.

The farmer’s wearing a checked bow tie. He’s had his shoes and socks off since he lit the grill, and Mom keeps admiring how “brave” and “open” he is for showing off the naked lump. Cutting into some sausage, he asks me if I’m interested in doing man’s work, and Mom, bouncing in his lap so her jowls sway, leans toward me, karate-chop hand at the side of her mouth. She chokes down potato salad and stage-whispers, “Olaf has big plans for you. He’s a man of ideas.” The farmer’s eyebrows rise and fall, rise and fall.

“I’m a homosexual,” I tell the table.

The farmer says, “Why do you want to go and say something like that at dinner?”

Timmy raises his fork over his head and jams it into the soft side of his own elbow. Misses the arteries. He twists the fork, then pulls it out of his arm and reaches across the table, directing the thing at the farmer. Tines drip blood onto Olaf’s sausage. Timmy says, “Don’t threaten my brother, Olaf.”

“Who said that?” Brian says.

Olaf says, “I wasn’t threatening no one, young man.”

Timmy drops the fork. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I misunderstood.” Sucking on his arm, he steps out of his sandals. He goes to the patio and starts kicking it hard, toes first. The rabbits keep pumping.

“Oh, Timmy,” Mom says.

“That’s the kind of thing,” Olaf says. “That temper of yours. Your boy’s temper,” he says to Mom. “That’s the kind of thing lost your other boy his ear, now isn’t it.” Olaf establishes eye contact with Brian in what seems to be a gesture of solidarity.

Brian says, “Don’t pity me, you milky fucken lame.”

We’re quiet for a minute, plate-gazing. It’s on me to break the silence.

I tell them, “I’m okay with myself.” I tell them, “I believe the world is mostly good, a self-repairing blemish on the face of God, an open system moving away from chaos, toward organization. I believe that each of its many seemingly awful components are essential to its betterment and will, in distant, perfect retrospect, be understood as wholly functional.” I’m in the middle of telling them, “To hate him requires us to hate ourselves and we don’t need to hate ourselves, we can have a little faith,” when there is a cracking sound and Olaf’s head smacks the table and Mom screams and Brian stands and Timmy crawls back to us and I look up to see Dad, free of stage armor, holding a blood-covered Bonnie by the waist. The blood is Olaf’s. The victory is Dad’s. He raises the doll, high, over his head.

It’s the first time we’ve seen her with all her skin on. Dad tosses her to me, and when I catch her against my chest, she nearly undoes the scoop of my arms.

“She feels heavy,” I say.

“She feels very heavy,” Dad says, “but boy is she beautiful!”

I pass Bonnie to Brian, who passes her to Timmy, who says thank you, and Brian doesn’t ask who said thank you, and Mom gets smelling salts from the first-aid kit and Olaf snaps awake and asks what happened to my noggin and Mom tells him that he banged it on the patio after tripping on his foot and Dad winks at her and that’s when we know they’ll patch it up.

Negotiations take seventeen days. Good Parent offers Dad a touch over half a million for the patents. In the end, he goes with Hasbro for something in the low seven-figure range.

Bonnies line the shelves of all the major chains by Thanksgiving. They cost ninety-nine dollars a pop and come with a free tube of paste. By mid-December, parents across the country take to camping out in toy-store parking lots the night before doll shipments come in. A couple predawn fistfights are reported in Lubbock. A Hasbro truck hijacked at gunpoint en route to St. Louis. A Christmas Eve riot in Denver.

Mom is liposuctioned, chin-tucked, retires early. Brian gets an ear with a built-in phone. Timmy is pierced, tattooed, has velvet-tipped fiberglass Pan’s horns implanted in his forehead. I can’t decide what I want, so I’m given a red Volkswagen and a condo where I lose my virginity to a skinny fatman who’s gone by sunrise. Dad builds a private kindergarten in Evanston, pays me to hang out and tell stories to the kids before naptime. I keep fucking up the happy endings, but they fall asleep anyway.