Lame New World - Part 2

This is the second episode of our current ongoing title. The first episode was posted last Friday. Enjoy...

“How much time do we have?” John asked William. He had been sitting near the doorway to his son’s bedroom for the last twenty minutes waiting for him to return home from school.

“Two and a half hours.”

“Did you hide the nail polish remover in your room?”

William rushed past his father, into his room and produced a pink bottle from beneath his plastic covered mattress. “Just like you told me,” he smiled.

John took the nail polish remover from him and the preassembled Lego jet he’d brought home the other day and shoved them into a duffle bag. He then threw the bag on his lap and rolled his wheelchair to the back door of the house.

“Go and unlock the garage door. Then come back and help me get out there.”

William did just as he was told. After struggling a bit to get his father down the back porch stairs without spilling him onto the ground, they were alone in the garage.

John made sure the door was closed tight and locked. He looked around and out the small window like a thief. Then, finally, he tossed the duffle bag onto the bare wooden table that used to be his workbench. John paused.

“What did your mother do with all my tools?”

“Sold them,” William said.

John sighed. “I suppose she needed the money for the medical bills.”

“Plus she had to get rid of them. She didn’t have a license.”

“Unbelievable,” John muttered under his breath. He turned his attention to the bag and pulled out several items. First came the Lego jet, then the nail polish remover, then a small plastic pail, a box of cotton swabs and two sets of household cleaning gloves. They each pulled on a pair of gloves and John handed the pink bottle to William.

“I’ll hold the Lego, you pour this on it. Do it carefully.”

John held the yellow jet over the plastic pail. William held the bottle over it and began to pour. He did so very slowly.

“Okay, stop,” John instructed and dipped a cotton swab into the excess liquid in the bottom of the pail. He rubbed the moistened end against the Lego jet, focusing on the cracks between bricks.

This went on for several minutes. John stared at the jet as he scrubbed the tiny cracks. Every now and then, he would have William pour some more. Both of them leaned into their work in anticipation. Eventually, John began to try and separate the bricks.

“No good,” he said after the first try. “Pour a little more.”

They repeated this process over and over for the better part of an hour. The only communication between them was that regarding their experiment. Soon, the entire bottle of nail polish remover had been emptied over the toy. John and William looked at each other, not knowing what to do next.

“Maybe it won’t work,” William said.

“It has to,” John whispered more to himself than to his son and rubbed the swab on the bricks some more.

“Come on, baby,” he said and closed his eyes as he pulled two different parts of the jet in different directions.

When the pieces came loose from each other, William cheered. John opened his eyes and smiled. He let the whole jet fall into the puddle of remover and insisted that William give him a high five. Then, they both got back to work, scrubbing at the sides of the Lego model with enormous smiles on their faces.

They worked for a while in near silence. There was the occasional giggle as they would look up at one another. Then it was back to work.

“Um, Dad?” William said eventually.

“Yeah, buddy?”

“Mom’s gonna be home in about fifteen minutes and we’re not even halfway done. I think this is taking too long.”

John had to admit William was right. At this rate, it would take a full day’s work just to separate the pieces. John had figured they would need to be washed off after this part of the process, too. This wasn’t going quite as smoothly as he had hoped.

Plus, as he came out of his euphoric joy at having separated a few pieces, he noticed another problem. The bricks that they were able to take off took on a softer, malleable texture. It would seem that the acetone wasn’t just dissolving the super glue, but also the plastic of the bricks themselves.

“If we could dilute this, we could maybe just leave a set soaking overnight and separate it the next morning.”

“Should I get some water?” William asked.

“Do we have orange juice? Citrus would help get rid of the smell. I’m afraid your mother might notice this.”

“No, mom always has me drink soy milk in the morning.”

“Soy milk? Yuck. Are you lactose intolerant or something?”

“I don’t think so. Something about hormones.”

“What’s in that fridge,” John asked and pointed to the refrigerator where he used to keep beer and drinks in the summer months. It was behind and old dresser, but still hummed from being plugged in. Apparently, they had moved it form the old house and John wondered if they'd left it stocked. “Maybe we could use something in there.”

William slid the dresser back just enough to open the door a crack the width of his arm. He opened the door and peeked in.

“What the heck?” he said.

“What is it?” his father asked.

William squeezed his arm into the refrigerator. John watched and heard the clanging of metal as his son tried to grab hold of something within. Then, William pulled out a green aluminum can, looked down at it in his hand and said in wonder, almost gasping, “Mountain Dew.”

John thought for a minute. He thought it just might work.

“Let’s try it,” John said. “Pour one in the pail with the remover. We’ll soak it overnight and see what happens.”

But William continued to stare at the can. He rolled it in his hand and seemed amazed. “You let me try this once when I was little,” he said. He looked at the bottom of the can. “I wish it was still good. It expired four years ago.”

“Buddy, I’ll get you a whole case of Mountain Dew some other time,” John assured him.

“They don’t make it anymore, dad.”

John nodded. “I should have known that,” he said. “Just open that can and pour it in. We’ll come back to it tomorrow and see what happens.”

William combined the Mountain Dew with the nail polish remover. While the acetone smell still hung in the air, the mixture in the pail was nearly odorless.

As John set the Lego jet into the liquid, they heard a car pulling up.

“Oh crap,” William said and began to wheel his father toward the door.

“Wait, wait, wait,” John implored. “Take the gloves off. Leave them in here. She can’t know what we were doing. And make sure you turn the light off before we leave.”

William did everything his father said. He tossed the gloves onto the table, shut off the light and grabbed a hold of the handles to his father’s wheelchair. As he began to wheel him backward out the door, they heard a car door slam. William rolled his father as fast as he could across the backyard.

He heard another car door slam and pictured his mother removing her bag from the rear seat. William struggled to lift his father up step after step to the back door. Meanwhile, John attempted to help things along by pushing off the side railings.

When William reached the top step, he swung the back door of the house open and rolled his father into the kitchen. Just as he did so, he heard his mother’s keys turning the deadbolt on the front door. William’s forehead was dripping with sweat. He turned his father’s chair to the table in a natural seated position and dropped to the floor, flat on his chest.

John whispered, “What are you…” when Sara interrupted.

“I’m home,” she called as John and William heard her heels coming toward them down the hall.

As she entered the kitchen, William raised himself up off the floor with his hands and said, “Twenty-three!”

Sara looked down and smiled. “Billy, are you showing off for your father?”

“Just showing him what we do in gym now, mom,” William explained, out of breath.

“Yeah,” John said and smiled wide in appreciation of the inside joke he and his son now shared. “It’s odd not playing sports until your eighteen, but William was assuring me that he stays in pretty good shape.”

“Well get up and go wash your hands,” Sara said. “I brought home dinner.”

She held up a white plastic bag with what appeared to be Chinese food containers inside. John was excited.

By the time they were all sitting at the table, John’s excitement turned to disgust at the amount of tofu that his meal contained. He liked neither its texture nor its lack of flavor.

“Didn’t they have chicken,” he asked.

“Yes, but chicken is so expensive,” Sara answered. “With all the animal rights laws that PETA helped pass, it’s so costly to raise chickens. The same meal with tofu is less than half the cost of one with chicken. Plus it’s healthier for you.”

“And what’s with the soy milk?” he asked.

“All the hormones in the cow’s milk were determined to be dangerous,” Sara explained mater-of-factly. She had already become accustomed to John’s lack of information on the current events of the last several years.

John accepted defeat and choked his meal down with the help of some sort of fortified water that came in a glass bottle which was mandatory that you recycle.

Thinking about the Lego pieces soaking in the garage helped him cope. He couldn’t wait to see how he and William’s concoction had worked tomorrow.

It took every ounce of willpower he had, but John kept from going out to the garage before William returned home from school the next day. At one point, he was on the verge of throwing himself to the ground from his wheelchair and army crawling on his belly to check. The thought of he and William finding out together combined with the fact that his elderly neighbors would more than likely notice and call his wife at work kept him from doing so.

But, as soon as William walked in the door, off they went. John had a bag containing a strainer and a roll of paper towels already on his lap. They nearly kicked the garage door in. Once they were sure nobody was watching, they both approached the table and donned their gloves.

As John spread out a base of paper towels four layers thick, he told William, “You do the honors.”

William removed the Lego jet from the pail and set it on the towels. As it drip dried, he looked to his father. He received a single nod. So William tried to separate the wing from the body of the jet.

It came off easily.

“Yes!” John whispered.

William tried more pieces. Each piece separated from its neighbor the way they had originally been engineered to. John sat and delightedly watched his son disassemble the entire Lego jet. Every now and then, John would take a piece in his rubber gloved hand and inspect it for warping or softening. All he found was perfect Lego bricks each time.

When the entire set was broken down to its original form, John had William feed the hose into the garage and they rinsed the loose bricks in the strainer. After rinsing them thoroughly, John told William, “We’ll let them dry overnight then we’ll rebuild it tomorrow.”

“But, Dad?” William asked. “How are we going to know where the pieces go without the manual?”

John stared at his son without an answer.

“I hadn’t thought it that far through,” he said, disappointed in himself.

The two of them sat in silence for a while.

“We could just try our best from the picture on the box,” William suggested. “It’ll still be fun.”

“You’re right, it would still be fun,” John agreed. Then he smiled and laughed out loud to himself. He laughed in a way that made William know he had an idea.

“But I know how we might be able to get a hold of a manual.”

To be continued...