Cam slumps in his chair, a twisted rag of directionless anger.
Roberta puts down her napkin to help blot the tea, a task beyond the abilities of the tablecloth. Cam wonders if the tablecloth would resent the napkin’s absorbency were it legally granted personhood.
“There’s something you need to see,” Roberta says. “Something you need to understand that might give you some perspective on this.”
She gets up, goes into the kitchen, and returns with a pen and a blank piece of paper. She sits down beside him, folds back the tablecloth, and puts the paper down on a dry patch of wood.
“I want you to sign your name.”
“What for?”
“You’ll see.”
Too disgusted to argue, he takes the pen, looks down at the paper, and writes as neatly as he can “Camus Comprix.”
“Good. Now turn the paper over and sign it again.”
“Your point?”
“Humor me.”
He flips the paper, but before he signs, Roberta stops him. “Don’t look,” she says. “This time look at me while you’re signing. And talk to me too.”
“About what?”
“Whatever is in your heart to say.”
Looking at Roberta, he signs his name while delivering an appropriate quote from his namesake: “The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.” Then he hands the page to Roberta. “There. Are you happy?”
“Why don’t you look at the signature, Cam?”
He looks down. At first he thinks he sees his signature as it should be. But a switch seems to flick in his head, and the signature he sees is not his at all. “What is this? This isn’t what I wrote.”
“It is, Cam. Read it.”
The letters are a bit scrawled. Wil Tash . . . Tashi . . .”
“Wil Tashi’ne,” Roberta says. “You have his hands, and his corresponding neuro-motor centers in your cerebellum, as well as crucial cortical material as well. You see. It’s his neural connections and muscle memory that allow you to play guitar and accomplish a whole host of fine-motor skills.”
Cam cannot look away from the signature. The switch in his head keeps flicking on and off. My signature. Not my signature. Mine. Not mine.
Roberta regards him with infinite sympathy. “How can you sign a document, Cam, when not even your signature belongs to you?”
• • •
Roberta hates when Cam goes out alone, especially at night, but on this night, there’s nothing she can say or do that will stop him.
He strides fast, down a street still wet with the day’s rain, but feels like he’s getting nowhere. He doesn’t even know where he wants to go—only away from whatever spot he occupies at the moment, unable to feel right in his own skin. What is it the advertisements call it? That’s right—Biosystemic Disunification Disorder. A bogus condition that conveniently can be cured only by unwinding.
All his scheming, all his daydreams of bringing down Proactive Citizenry—of being the kind of hero Risa requires—it all amounts to nothing if he is just a piece of military property. And Roberta’s wrong. It’s more than just a legal definition. How can she not see that when you are defined, you lose the ability to define yourself? In the end he will become that definition. He will become a thing.
What he needs is some sort of proclamation of existence that trumps anything legal. Something he can hold on to in his heart in the face of anything they have on paper. Risa could give that to him. He knows she can, but she’s not here, is she?
But there might be other places he could find it.
He begins to scour his memory, seeking out moments that ring with a spiritual connection. He had First Communion, a Bar Mitzvah, and a Bismillah ceremony. He saw a brother baptized in a Greek Orthodox church and a grandmother cremated in a traditional Buddhist funeral. Just about every faith is represented in his memories, and he wonders if this was intentional. He wouldn’t put it past Roberta to have, as part of her criteria for his parts, that all major religions be represented. She’s just that anal.
But which one will give him what he needs? He knows if he speaks to a rabbi or a Buddhist priest, he’ll get very wise responses that point to more questions instead of an answer. “Do we exist because others perceive our existence, or is, indeed, our own affirmation enough?”