Norman showed up on a Tuesday, but the lucky monkey didn’t have to go to school on Wednesday or Thursday or Friday. Dad kept Norman home so he could do some updates and modifications, like adding padding so you couldn’t hear it when Norman’s pinwheels were turning or when his fans kicked on. He also cut Norman’s hair a little unevenly and put a tiny dink in the skin over one of his cheekbones so he wouldn’t look too perfect to be a real kid.
When the weekend arrived, it was time for field-testing. Dad and I took Norman to several famous sights of the city. There were always big crowds at those places, so they made great testing grounds, even though it was almost like my dad was expecting that at any moment someone would point to Norman and say, “Eek! A robot!” But that never happened.
Our first stop was the American Museum of Natural History, where we saw the usual dinosaur skeletons. That’s always the most crowded part of the museum, but everyone was too busy looking at dinosaurs to pay even a nanosecond of attention to Norman as he stared for the longest time at a Tyrannosaurus rex.
“If this creature were alive,” the robot said to me, “he would wish to eat us, yes?”
“We’d already be eaten,” I said, wondering why God made dinosaurs so big. Probably the smaller animals that lived back then wondered the same thing!
Norman thought for a moment and looked kind of disturbed. “But I do not believe that would be quite fair,” he said, “being eaten in our prime by a beast of such limited intelligence, and us having no say in the matter.”
Agreed!
Next we stopped at a majorly cool display on how spiders weave their webs (scary!), and then one about how gemstones are formed over millions of years (almost interesting!). After that we went into the planetarium and saw a show called Journey to the Stars. The animations were really cool, and it did seem like we were right in the middle of where stars and all that other space junk hang out.
And I learned a few things, like that the first stars were born thirteen billion years ago. Man is that old. And Whoopi Goldberg, the show’s narrator, has a really nice voice. Not sure why I mentioned that . . .
Norman seemed to be even more woggled out by the star show than I was, like he was overwhelmed by what he was seeing and was trying to process it all. Me too, buddy!
After the show, Norman looked at Dad and me and said, “The universe is so very large, and expanding, and yet there are microorganisms so small you need a powerful electron microscope to see them.” One of his nylon eyebrows rose up. “I’m not sure that the universe is . . . logical.”
“That’s pretty much my take,” Dad said, smiling.
Our next stop was Central Park, where we walked around the park, climbed around Belvedere Castle, and played with other people’s dogs (that’s the best kind of dog, my parents like to say). While I was tossing a stick to a big, happy collie in a game of fetch, Norman came up to me.
“Pardonne-moi, Matt,” he said, “but I do not understand the merits of this activity. The animal expends all that energy retrieving the stick and returning it to you, and his only reward is that he is allowed to chase the stick again?”
“Yep, that’s how it works,” I said. Norman clearly was not satisfied by my answer. The collie had returned the stick, so I picked it up and gave it a good toss. This time Norman outraced the dog to the stick, bent and snatched it up in his mouth, and dashed back to me, dropping the stick at my feet. No lie! It was hilarious!
“Non, I still do not get it,” Norman said, wiping a piece of bark from his mouth. While I was cracking up, Dad scuttled Norman and me away from the dogs and their owners and other park-goers, mumbling something about how he hoped that what just happened with Norman and the stick didn’t end up on YouTube.
That made one of us!
Next we hit the Central Park Zoo. My favorite part was the polar bears, even though they were actually yellow instead of white, like they needed a good bath. Norman’s favorite part seemed to be the penguin house, though at one point he looked puzzled.
“These birds are exquisite,” he said. “But having wings yet being unable to fly is just—”
“Illogical?” I asked.
“Correct,” Norman said, still looking perplexed. Hey, I’ve also wondered about the flightless bird thing. It almost seems cruel, like giving a kid a really great toy that doesn’t work and never will work. Cruel!
Dad and I were pooped from all the walking, but Norman still had a full tank of gas. Instead of going straight home, I bugged my dad into stopping at a diner, the one with all the girls who’d won the Miss Subway contest since, well, forever ago. It’s kind of a corny place, but they make the best chocolate shakes.
I was sucking down the last drops of chocolate goodness, and my dad was giving me the “Stop making disgusting sounds” evil eye, when Norman said something that freaked out both Dad and me.
“I believe I would like to be a museum curator when I grow up,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say. It hadn’t dawned on me until then that even if he survived getting scrapped, Norman would always look like a kid. He’d never grow taller, without major surgery. He’d never age. And that just seemed . . . tragic, to be forever stuck like that. It really shook me up.
Dad and I shared a What should we say? look. Even though I was feeling totally weirded out, I forced a smile and said to Norman, “Sounds like the perfect job for you.” Dad turned away, his face probably showing something he didn’t want Norman and me to see.
For the first time I was beginning to doubt whether creating kid robots was such a hot idea. Not that Norman isn’t fun to have around, but . . . I mean . . . what about his feelings about a being robot instead of a real kid? Did my dad and uncle ever consider that?
Man. Just when you think it’s going to be smooth sailing for a while, life gets all complicated again. I definitely prefer smooth sailing.
On Sunday, Norman, Dad, and I hit the Museum of Modern Art, where we joined a tour and saw several seriously weird sculptures, a display of some of the first photographs ever taken—kind of fuzzy—and an exhibit where all the art was made from those wax lips you can buy during Halloween season: partly gross and plenty weird! During a quiet moment, Norman asked the guide if the museum owned any art from “the great French masters.” He rattled off a long list of names, none of which I remember.
“Please be patient,” the guide said, and soon enough we were in a room dedicated to the life and works of a French guy named Henri Matisse. The paintings were pretty cool—though some of the people looked a little bent and floppy—and Norman was happy, but by then I was bored, bored, bored. Now, a display of art created by monkeys . . . that might have been interesting.
As we left the museum, Norman lectured Dad and me about the life of that Matisse guy, information that the museum had neglected to include in their display. “That’s completely fascinating, Norman,” Dad said, not looking very fascinated.
Then my dad suggested, because it was such a nice day, going downtown for a quick trip to Liberty Park so Norman could see the Statue of Liberty. There was no danger of climbing around inside the statue, since it was closed for “routine maintenance.” Good. I’ve been inside the statue twice, and both times it felt beyond freaky, walking around inside of a person, even if it was a gigantic person made out of concrete and steel.
The secret’s out. I’m weird.
Norman was quite impressed by the statue. “How grand, how magnificent,” he said, gazing at Lady Liberty. He then told Dad and me that the statue was designed by some guy named Frédéric Bartholdi and was a gift to America from “the great people of France,” which I already knew, except for the Bartholdi part.
The robot, as usual, had more to say. “The inspiring neoclassical design—a tribute to Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty—the ever-burning torch and the tabula ansata . . . Well, I think that perhaps we should have kept the statue and sent you something a bit smaller.” Sure, Norman. You French snooty snoot!
That was about it as far as our weekend adventures went. . . . Oh, we did have one “mission failure,” as Dad put it. He had wanted us to take a double-decker bus back uptown so Norman could see even more sights. But we’d only gotten twenty or thirty blocks when the bus we were riding on conked out, and the driver had to call for a tow truck so the battery could be jumped. The funny part happened when Dad explained to Norman what was going on. The robot asked if he had enough spare voltage to recharge the bus’s battery. Dad smirked and said we probably shouldn’t risk it.
Well, I thought it was funny.
So we got off the bus, hopped inside a taxi, and did our own tour, seeing Madison Square Garden—“Where the Knicks like to lose,” Dad said to Norman—the Empire State Building, and other places I’ve seen a hundred times. But Norman was excited, which was all that mattered. And you know, that was the best part of the weekend. No matter if we were at a park or a museum or were hoofing it down a sidewalk, Norman looked at his surroundings with the big, hungry eyes of a kid being let out into the world for the first time.
And that was pretty cool. It’s not every day you get a chance to introduce someone to the world.
As we were riding the elevator to the tenth floor of our building, Dad said to me, “If anyone had been suspicious about Norman being a robot, I think we would have heard something by now. I consider the field-testing to be a major success!” He looked totally psyched. Norman was treated like a human kid by sightseers, ticket takers, bus drivers, and so on, no questions asked. That was huge. I hadn’t seen Dad this happy in a very long time. We high-fived, and then, after we explained to Norman what high-fiving was all about, he got a hand slap from Dad and me, too.
“Such an odd, primitive, socially awkward ritual,” the robot said, shaking his hand as we stepped out of the elevator. Party pooper!
When we slipped inside our apartment, Mom shouted a hi to us from the home office and said she’d be out in a minute. That was the one sucky thing hanging over the weekend like a dark cloud. We’d invited Mom along for the trips, but both days she said she had too much work to do. If it was just Dad and me, I’m sure she would have come: My mom loves going places on the weekend, in and beyond the city. But since Norman was with us . . . Well, it was kind of sad. And I just didn’t know how to fix it.
