G-Child

Malon Edwards

 

As I freefall from the UH-60L Black Hawk helicopter, I point my chin to the ground and my toes to the sky. The shit is hitting the fan on Oglesby Avenue below. Homes have been reduced to splintered wood and rubble. A steady stream of small arms fire flashes from a house to my left. I smile. Finally, a true test of my abilities.

The PR people for the Institute of Psionics thought giving us code names would be a cute and easy way to gain public sentiment. They call me Bliss. That big, bald, black dude in the middle of all the carnage down there is Rayge. Looks like Ray J is living up to his code name.

Just before I hit the ground and splatter into yet another grease spot on the streets of Jeffrey Manor, I manipulate the air flows around me to slow my descent. My sleek, black and yellow carbon fiber titanium suit aids the aerodynamics and—arms outstretched, palms up—I descend to Earth like a goddess from on high.

Usually, when Ray J or I go to the South Side of Chicago, someone always bumps Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow” like it’s our theme song. But not this time. It’s quiet except for the occasional rat-tat-tat of gunfire. Folks or Vice Lords or Gangster Disciples. I should know which gang, but I never paid attention during the gang training the Institute gave us. All I care about is the social dynamics of the North Side and the north suburbs. I figure since the South Side is Ray J’s territory, he should know.

Speaking of which, he disappears into that house I saw coming in halfway down the block. Almost immediately, an explosion levels it. Nothing moves.

“Is he dead?”

I turn and see Kee-Kee. Ray J’s baby-mama. Their little boy Ray-Ray clutches her, his chubby fists trying to find good purchase on her too-tight jeans. He looks at me wide-eyed and then hides his face in her hip. I put up a telekinetic shield around the three of us and frown at Kee-Kee.

“What the hell are you doing?” I ask her. “Go home! Get out of here!”

“I ain’t got no home no more.” Kee-Kee points behind me to where her house used to be.

Shit. I rotate my wrist and speak to the inside of it. “Mother Bird, I need an evac. Two civilians. Mother and child.” I look around. I hope there are survivors in the burned out garages and under the overturned cars. “Possibly more.”

My wrist communicator crackles. “Roger that, Bliss. We’re on our way.”

Ray-Ray peeks out at me from behind Kee-Kee. I bend down and smile at him but speak to his mother. “What happened?”

“They killed Ray J’s father.” I raise an eyebrow. “It was a drug deal gone bad.” Ray-Ray presses his face into his mother’s hip again. Kee-Kee looks down at him. “Ray J hadn’t seen him since he was Ray-Ray’s age.” Tears stand in her eyes. “He told Ray J he was clean.”

Ray J is from the Manor. He grew up on Oglesby. Today is his day off, and he got a special day pass to go see Ray Sr. He was nervous. He’d told me last night that he didn’t want his father inside the Institute around all of those government people, so he was going back to his old stomping grounds to meet him. And is he ever stomping the shit out of it.

The wind picks up as the Black Hawk lands behind us. I lower my shield and motion Kee-Kee and Ray-Ray toward the helicopter.

“He’ll be all right,” I shout over the rotor blades. “I’ll make sure of it.”

Two tears roll down her cheeks. She doesn’t believe me. She sees the destruction he wrought. But she puts Ray-Ray on her hip and goes to the ‘copter because there’s nothing she can do here.

I throw up my shield again, a crackling dome of mental energy, and walk toward the inferno that was a house just moments ago. It’s up to me to stop him. I’ve never been able to in our training exercises, and that’s with him pulling his punches.

I’m almost at the burning house when an enormous streak of fire slams into me. I come to one street over in someone’s living room. Shit. My shield barely saved my life.

#

When my mother was five months pregnant with me, her obstetrician suggested she participate in clinical trials for an experimental prenatal supplement at Great Lakes Naval Hospital. She’d been having complications from pre-eclampsia. Headaches. Hypertension. Problems with her kidneys and liver. For African-American women like my mother, pre-eclampsia was more likely to result in death. But that was something my mother was willing to risk if it meant she could bring a happy, healthy, beautiful baby girl into the world.

#

I stagger to my feet and wipe away a trickle of blood from my nose. My fists glow blue with psionic energy. Fine. If Rayge wants to have a slug fest, then let’s have a slug fest.

 

#

I was her first child. Her only child. It had taken my mother and my father fifteen years to conceive. At first, my mother refused to risk her only chance at having a baby for an unproven drug that probably wouldn’t even work. She told my father that if something went wrong because of the prenatal experimental supplement—that if she lost me—she would never be able to live with herself. My father reminded my mother what she always said: She was a tough old bitch, and the Good Lord Himself didn’t have the balls to mess with her.

#

I can see Ray J’s fury before he gets to me. It manifests itself as two malevolent, violet-black probing tendrils as big around as my thigh. Ray J’s schtick is to take all of his pent-up anger and unleash it as physical rage. When we train, it always takes everything I have to hold off his blows with my telekinetic shield long enough to flip the calm switch in his brain. But never before have I seen his fury this massive.

#

Eventually, my father convinced my mother to participate in the clinical trial with tears. He had grown up with Dr. Shimada and told my mother he trusted her with his life. When my mother asked him if he trusted Dr. Shimada with the life of their unborn child, the only child they would probably ever conceive, my father, who had taken a few performing arts classes during undergrad at Sophia University in Tokyo—where he met my mother—answered her with tears on his cheeks.

#

I can sense the two purple-black tendrils probing the half-destroyed house, looking for me or someone that Ray J can lay the smack down on. The tendrils search down the hall and go into the bedrooms, hesitant, careful, and sneaky. They move slowly. They search thoroughly. They peek around corners. I close my eyes and take a deep breath to clear my mind. Send out my own tendrils. They’re slender. They’re bright blue. And they’re badass.

#

It was a big deal for my father to show emotion. He was raised Japanese old school. Not like these sensitive Japanese boys today. My father was taught that Japanese men weren’t supposed to cry, and they damn sure weren’t supposed to cry in front of their wives. But that was exactly what my mother needed. She showed up at Great Lakes Naval Hospital with ninety-nine other pregnant women happy and smiling. But two months later, when twenty women miscarried and another twenty women bore odd, squalling, premature babies, my mother told my father she wasn’t going back to the hospital.

#

But not badass enough. Ray J’s tendrils seize mine. My eyes snap open. Roll back into my head. The pain is excruciating. Like nothing I’ve felt before. My tendrils turn black. Begin to rot. Decay creeps down their length. Toward my mind. I’m awash with intimidation. Fear. I can’t pull away. I can’t shake free. I can’t order my mind. So I do the only thing I can. I open my mouth and scream.

 

#

My mother went back to Great Lakes Naval Hospital though. How could she not? Her headaches were gone. Her kidneys and liver were stable. Her blood pressure was down. But she wasn’t happy. Every night, she woke to the screams of misshapen, grotesque babies. My mother dreamed about them so much that she was surprised she carried me to full term and I came out normal. And that’s how I stayed. For twelve years. And then I turned thirteen and linked my mind to my fifty-eight-year-old mother while she was having sex with my sixty-year-old father.

#

My fight-or-flight psionic response allows me to break free of Ray J’s rage and intimidation. I need to get out of these people’s house before it’s destroyed any further. When I step out the front door, Ray J is standing there. He smacks me three blocks over to Luella Avenue. My psionic shield takes the full brunt of the impact. But something is wrong with me. I should have known he was there. I should have sensed him. And then I do. I look up and see Ray J coming in feet first, hard and fast, ready to get his stomp on some more.

#

My mother told me I couldn’t live at home after that. It was just too weird for her. I knew my mother’s orgasms. I knew her every thought, emotion, and experience. She sent me to the Institute of Psionics in Hyde Park with the other eighty prenatal supplement children who freaked out their mothers. I didn’t want to go even though knowing her so intimately was weird as hell for me too. I kicked and screamed and bit and cried. My mother told me it was for my own good. My father just looked away. That was five years ago, and I haven’t forgiven either of them since.

#

Dazed, I manage to drag myself out of the way as three hundred fifty pounds of Ray J smash through the street where I just lay. My fists blaze blue again. I try to stand, to pick myself up off the ground, but Ray J does it for me instead. The street beneath me erupts, and we arc toward blue sky and sun, human rockets launched high. Ray J snatches me to him in a wicked embrace amongst the chunks of flying concrete. As we begin to level out, he crushes me against his sixty-two-inch-chest with his thirty-five inch arms. The breath is forced from my lungs. I see bright spots. My vision fades. Stupid me. I didn’t put up a shield.

#

I don’t call the North Shore home anymore. But I can’t bring myself to call the Institute home either. What bothers me is I’m starting to like the Institute and its rigor. Scientists from Great Lakes Naval Hospital train and teach us from a curriculum sanctioned by Homeland Security. We’re separated into four classes. They call the preemies beta children. Us drama kings and queens are gamma children. The smelly kids are delta children. And the normal kids are epsilon children. (The dead babies—God rest their souls—are alpha children.) I met Ray J the first day at the Institute. He told me his mother died of breast cancer. I told him my mother could go fuck herself.

#

Two ribs break, and my spleen lacerates before I can put a buffer of psionic energy between me and Ray J. The makeshift shield won’t hold long though and starts to buckle under his strength. I can’t tell if the coolness on my face is the wind rushing past or blood Ray J has squeezed from my ears, eyes, and nose. I need to end this before he kills me, so I do the one thing I’ve wanted to do since the day I first met Ray J. I kiss those wonderful, full lips of his.

#

I can’t bring myself to hate my father as much as I hate my mother. He didn’t carry me for nine months, love me from the inside, and then cast me aside thirteen years later ashamed, embarrassed, and horrified. He just abandoned me, his baby girl, when I needed him the most. But I have enough hate to go around. My mother’s cervical cancer is now stage two. And the tumor in my father’s prostate won’t be getting smaller any time soon.

#

I throw all of my psionic energy into the kiss, and for a few moments, it’s just me and him. No rage. No hatred. No fear. No intimidation. Ray J relaxes his bear hug. One humongous hand goes to the small of my back. The other goes to my ass. His mouth opens. It’s warm and moist. I press into him: mouth, breasts, crotch. I tell myself it’s to sink my tendrils deeper into his mind. Our tongues touch.

And then the shit really hits the fan.

Ray J stiffens. His face contorts with pain. He lets go of me and plummets back to Earth with frightening speed. I try to reach for him with my mind to stop him, to slow him, to catch him, but I can’t. I’m too fatigued. I don’t have the mental power to heal my injuries, ravage my mother’s cervix and my father’s prostate, slow my fall, and save Ray J. Besides, at this height, falling with this velocity, he’s more likely to survive.

But everyone on the Black Hawk helicopter won’t. Ray J is lined up just right, and they don’t see him coming down. I try to direct some of the swift air flows around me, slowing my descent to Ray J as a last ditch to save Ray-Ray and Kee-Kee and the others on board, but they’re just too far in my weakened state. Ray J smashes right through the Black Hawk as it takes off for Great Lakes Naval Hospital. Bodies and medical equipment are flung end over end by the impact.

I quickly scan the mental signatures within the hurtling debris and fireball for Kee-Kee and Ray-Ray. But there’s nothing I can do for them. They are already dead. And then the concussive wave from the explosion hits me, and the world goes black.

#

My bedroom is exactly as I left it five years ago: Rihanna poster to the left of my white Ikea dressing table. Nelly Furtado poster to the right. Clothes hamper overflowing next to the closet. Pajamas crumpled on the floor.

I sit on the bed in the three a.m. darkness. I had been wrapped in a blanket cocoon of warmth and laziness the day I mind linked my mother as she was having sex with my father. Outside, my window had looked like a Christmas postcard. Everything was pristine and white. I had been drifting in and out of wakefulness while big, fat snowflakes hushed the world as they fell.

At the time, I didn’t know what was happening. My mind had grown wide as if a small hatch in my head opened. It spread throughout the house, expanding, roving, and—

My mother knocks on the door. Her knock hasn’t changed in the five years I’ve been gone either. It’s still tentative, cautious, apologetic.

“I thought I heard you come in.”

She looks old and frail in her nightgown. There are new wrinkles at her throat and scored into her face. The ones around her eyes and mouth are the pain wrinkles.

“Hi.” I don’t know what else to say.

“Did they kick you out?” She hovers in the doorway, hands clasped before her, not sure if she should stand there, sit at my desk, or next to me on the bed.

“They’ve decommissioned us.”

“For how long?”

“Indefinitely.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“But I sent you there.”

I pause half a heartbeat. “It’s a good place for us.”

“TMZ said the Institute wants you and Ray J to give your performance bonuses back.”

I frown. When did my mother start watching TMZ? “Loss of innocent life clause,” I explain.

“They also said that you spent your bonus money on a 10,000-square-foot French Provincial home here in Lake Forest with eight bedrooms, eight baths, a tennis court, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, and eleven-foot ceilings.”

I give a sullen shrug with one shoulder, feeling like I’m thirteen again. “They pay us well.”

“And Stella said in her column that Ray J’s father was a crackhead, but Ray J is a good boy. He’d been paying his father’s rent and car note all of these years.”

I nod. “He’s the nicest, angriest boy I know if that makes sense. He’s just misunderstood. Stella is the only one in the media who has tried to look past his rage and my psionic abilities and understand us for who we are.”

We fall silent and look at each other. My mother wants to say something to me, but I make a conscious effort not to read her mind. It’s more of a strain than anything I’ve ever done with my abilities.

Finally, she says, “I saw coverage of the funeral on Channel 5.”

I don’t trust my voice not to hitch and crack, so I don’t say anything. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Ray-Ray’s coffin as the cemetery groundskeepers shoveled dirt onto it. It was so small and perfect and white down there in the grave next to Kee-Kee.

My mother sits next to me on the bed, puts a hand on my knee—still hesitant, still tentative—and then gathers me in her embrace.

“Oh, my Aieesha,” she whispers, and I lose it. I sob and heave and snot on her bony shoulder until I’m too tired to cry anymore.

I never liked my real name. It seemed so stupid to me. I know it represents the duality of my multiculturalism—a combination of the Japanese word for “love” and a ghetto suffix my mother thought I needed just in case people couldn’t tell I was half-black from my skin color—but I hated it because I hated my mother and father.

And now, to hear my mother say my name with such love and sorrow and hurt after not being able to sleep for a week because I keep dreaming of Ray-Ray’s little broken body cartwheeling through the air has utterly destroyed me in a way no psionic strike could.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper to her.

“For what?”

I’m too much of a coward to say, “For hating you and giving you and Daddy cancer.” So instead, I say, “For everything.”

But I’m not too spiteful anymore. I can’t continue to allow their cancer cells to run rampant, so I release my mother’s cervix and my father’s prostate. My mother gasps, and her eyes go wide. The two slender, pointed tendrils that retract from their bodies back to my mind are black and viscous.

My mother looks at me for a long moment. Again, she wants to say something to me. But again, she takes me into her arms, guiding my head to her shoulder, stroking my curly-curly hair.

I guess you can go home again.