Adam Johnson - Emporium

Then our new ROMS arrives. I’m chitchatting in the gift shop when the maintenance guys drag a big crate into the station. They tear it open right there in the lobby, cardboard going everywhere, and I figure I could use a new sidekick — I know it would be dissing the memory of ROMS to chill with a new robot, but I’ve been feeling pretty low, and then there’s this dream that won’t let up. Cruising over for a closer look, I decide that I won’t teach this ROMS to talk cool, that I’ll just accept him for who he is.

When the shrink-wrapping comes off, this robot’s the spitting image of ROMS, though it looks pretty pathetic all covered in foam peanuts. The bar code says it’s a Virgo, which means it’s finicky and needs to be needed. The guys boot up the operating system and wet the sniffer reservoir. Suddenly everything comes online. Arms lift and hover.

“Hi, I’m ROMS,” it says to a maintenance guy. “Let’s eat and make friends.”

It turns to me. “I’m ROMS. Let’s make some small talk.”

I kind of back up, and the robot advances. “Food is the first step in peaceful resolutions,” it says. “Pizza, burger, baba ghanoush?”

But I keep moving, across the marble floor, and out the glass doors of the station. In the parking lot, it’s raining lightly. There is a chill in the air, the magnolias looking a darker green against a sky that’s roof-sealant gray. Hearing that robot say the exact things as ROMS makes me feel duped, like I’ve been best homies with a parrot.

I shoulder my rifle and wander the wet streets of Palo Alto. I’m like, who cares if my gun gets wet? The Kruger saw a dozen hard years in Angola before it ever met me, so I suppose it can take a little rain. I follow the CalTrans tracks, tromping through gray shale. Rows of eucalyptus trees hem the rails, which alternate between silence and the shock of commuter cars. The smile-faced engines have taken a beating. The yellow paint’s chipped and dingy, and the insistent smile on these bruised faces makes me philosophical, gets me thinking about the big sniper in the sky and what he has in mind for us.

I stand among trees whose leaves shiver green for the northbound trains and silver for the south. Did ROMS know the real me? Was he my friend, or just a machine programmed to say whatever I wanted to hear? To find out, I decide I will believe in him and try his advice.

I detach my scope from the old Kruger. I notice how scuffed the stock is, touch the spots where my fingers have worn away the varnish. Then I hang my rifle in a tree, where it slowly turns with the wind, and start the long walk toward the foothills of Stanford to Seema’s house.

When I knock on her door, my hair is wet on my face.

Seema answers in baggy sweats. She’s holding a can of Sass.

“Hey, it’s freak boy” she says, but she doesn’t slam the door.

I hold up my hand. “Please.”

“You’re a freak. You know that?” She puts a fist on her hip, and leaning against the door, considers me.

“Please, I only wanna say three things.”

“Number one?”

That fizzy scent of Sass is on her breath, but I don’t let it intimidate me.

“I would like, when it’s cool with your dad, to take you out for some pizza.”

“How about, I’m sorry I went freako whack-out on you. ”

“Here’s the second,” I say and hand her the scope.

She looks at me like I’m an idiot.

“It’s a Raytheon,” I tell her. “Top of the line, unavailable to civilians.”

“A rifle scope. Just what I’ve been needing.”

“Well, it’s also a telephone and a radio, so you can reach me anytime, at work or home. If you ever want to talk. Or maybe if you just need someone to listen.”

Seema looks at me skeptically, then walks out in the driveway with me.

“Hold my Sass,” she says and lifts the scope. Suddenly, her iris is amplified in the lens, a ring of iridescent chocolate with green rifts and pits of oily gold. When she blinks, it stuns me. She roams the neighborhood with a slow scan.

“Here’s the rangefinder,” I say. “And this switches it to thermal. Thermal’s so sensitive you can see the heat signature of a pumping heart. If someone looks normal, but you can’t see the strobe of their heart, then you know they’re concealing body armor.”

“Cool,” she says. “Thermal.” A smile, greedy with amazement, crosses her face.

Real quick, she lowers the scope to look at me, like this is some kind of trick.

“What’s the third thing?” she asks.

“If you ever need a friend, I offer myself.”

She squints one eye, staring at me, like she’s trying to figure me out.

“So you just came over here to give me this, as a friend?”

“Look, I think you’re cool, and if you wanna hang out sometime, call me.”

She keeps looking at me like that, and it makes me nervous.

“Dad says that robot on the news was your little friend, the one from the band.”

“His name was ROMS,” I tell her. “We lost one of the good guys.”

Seema doesn’t say anything to this, which is one of Lt. Kim’s tricks to get me to talk more. I take a step backward, toward the street. “ROMS was a friend, and I’m not sure I’m ready to debrief yet. But I’m ready to listen, if you want to talk. Cool?”

Seema sort of shrugs and smiles. There’s possibility in the gesture, which means I haven’t been totally shot down, and I don’t want to push my luck.

That’s when I turn and start walking. I make my way down the middle of the street so Seema has a perfect line of sight — if she decides to lift the scope and watch me go. Maybe I look like a dork to people driving by, a kid walking all slow down the yellow line, but if you’re looking at someone through a scope, they become large, filling the whole field of view, and there’s nothing in the world but them.

I don’t puff up my shoulders or anything. I want her to see the real me. If she trains her lens on me, she’ll know me, and she’ll call. If she calls, that means the LAPD is wrong, that empathy is real. Even if Seema uses thermal, she’ll see a kid who looks pretty skinny, but is glowing red as he walks into the blue-green of a relatively cold world.

It is the oily tang of tiger fur that startles me awake, and the first thing I do is look for my son, whom I dreamed of at top speed. The scent is gone before I even open my eyes, but a quick pulse still pants in my wrists as I sit up to see my boy watching CHiPs reruns with the sound off. Ponch and John ride their motorcycles on the beach while wearing mirrored sunglasses.

I have taken to sleeping on the couch because it is summer, and Mac is a boy with too much time on his hands and a day sleeper for a father. Last week I woke to find his hands on my belt, lightly twisting off the key to handcuffs I hadn’t even noticed were missing. We looked at each other. “I have the right to remain silent,” he volunteered, for the record, and I watched him roll out into our south Phoenix neighborhood, headed toward wherever my handcuffs might be. But today, he seems satisfied with CHiPs . I pull off my khaki security guard shirt from the zoo last night and rub my eyes against the midday sun through the windows. Today he’s just a normal boy again, a little Indian on shag carpeting, legs crossed, shoulders hunched, reading Ponch’s lips.

Sue says he’s been telling kids in the neighborhood his father’s a police officer again, that they better look out, which only adds to her theory that my quitting the force made things even worse for him. It’s hard to know what to do about this. She is at the end of her rope with the board exams and a boy like Mac. She is reduced these days to studying with a stopwatch and speaking in two-word sentences: Room, now. Toys, away.