An Arthur Rawlings Christmas

[Arthur Rawlings]

The video fades in from black, a sparkling Christmas tree fills the screen. Words explode onto the screen.

Tales of Awesome:
The Arthur Rawlings Story

Christmas, Age 6

As the title fades, the camera pans down, past the two drowsy men on the couch, to the little beaming face of a boy half-buried in a mountain of ribbons and colored paper. The boy bears a passing resemblance to Arthur Rawlings ten years later, if the cheek bones were a little higher, the nose a little straighter, the chin a little better defined. The shot zooms in and out rapidly a few times, much to his delight, followed by a blur of ceiling, wall, tree, window, father, and finally rug. The boy's laughter all but drowns out his Papa's admonitions about precision equipment and his Daddy's chuckling, murmured reminder that they built it to withstand the nuclear apocalypse for a reason.

"Try again, Artie," Daddy's voice says louder, still chuckling.

The camera rights itself and the angle lifts up once more into the air, steadier this time. The boy takes to the wireless controls like he was born for it. After all, he was. There's one package left, and the shot homes in on it. Artie knows what's in there. It's a talking Pikachu with light-up cheeks and posable legs and tail. He's been hinting about it with all the subtlety of a semi, even requesting a visit to Santa, despite the long talk he and his dads had the year before about fantasy and reality. Every family dinner for the past two months, every one with at least one dad present, has featured Artie's well-rehearsed Pikachu impression, reciting every phrase this marvelous toy says by heart. He even found a way to add sound effects, a crackling buzz coaxed out of one of the thingies in his chest that sounded just like a Thundershock charging up. He missed the last week of school and the class Christmas party while recovering from an emergency repair.

And now all the work is about to pay off in one last storm of shredded paper. The camera zooms in close, sizes up the prey from all sides, spies for weaknesses in the Scotch Tape defenses. There it is! The perfect opening for quickest entry. A small hand enters the picture, visibly trembling with the thrill of anticipation. The professionally wrapped paper never stood a chance; it's gone in less than five seconds. The lid of the plain brown box underneath suffers much the same fate, never again able to close properly. The camera zooms out to take in the whole scene, child, parents, and prized toy.

Daddy and Papa beam proudly. Little Artie's face shows first shock, then confusion, disappointment, and finally, looking up at his dads, abject joy.

"Wow! What is it?" he cries out, excitement plain for all to see.

Papa slides off the couch and crawls across the multicolored wasteland formerly known as his living room to the box and the boy. He reverently lifts out a long, slender, bendy tube with wires blooming out of both ends and at several points along its length.

"This little baby is going to let you control everything that's going on inside you. It'll start up under here," he said, holding one end at the base of his son's skull, "and go all the way down the inside of your back."

The camera gets a good shot of the tube tracing down the boy's spine. The picture then moves up overhead and zeroes in on the box, just to be sure there's nothing else in there.



Ar closed the window and moved the file into the folder with everything else due to be offloaded to external memory before he headed back to school in the new year. His eyes refocused on the TV in time to catch the closing number of Holiday Inn, Papa's favorite.

[Arthur Rawlings]

His thumb flicked over Pikachu's eye, tracing the familiar path around then over, around then over. The sheen had worn off the plastic button ages ago, the surrounding plush permanently flattened down and away. Around then over, around then over. He had gone two years without seeing the inside of this damn box, over a year without caring what was inside this damn box. He didn't even peek when Kai opened it in June. He didn't have to. He knew every piece, every fragment, every relic of the person he had thought - for over a year - was gone forever.

The large shoebox was carefully, though inexpertly wrapped in thick, white paper. All the creases were perfectly straight, but formed at disagreeing angles, the work of a hurried child already incapable of performing certain actions with anything less than mechanical precision. A R T I E marched across the sides in black marker. A small slit in the front was once meant to serve as the entry point for notes and cards from classmates, though it never held many of those. Its real life began almost exactly two years ago.

• "If you're this bored, I could use another trash bag." That sounds right: flippant and commanding, in control of the situation.
  
  Daddy - no, Dad - smiles a little and comes all the way in my room. It's a minor disaster zone, but rapidly improving as more and more of the clutter disappears into the bags I already have. Posters, toys, mismatched knickknacks, all jumble together in white plastic bundles. Out with the old. Dad maintains his little smile while he picks his way around the mess, peering curiously into this bag and that on his way to the bed.
  
  He doesn't say anything, so I don't say anything. That's how the game works, more or less. To project power, be content to say nothing. The one who's most comfortable in the silence, who needs the noise least, is master of both of them. Loading bags like he's not there, I am casual, unhurried, and unconcerned.
  
  "I remember this one." Or do that. Or drop four words like they're nothing and assert uncontested dominance. See the game being played and refuse to play it. I was never going to win anyway.
  
  Dad's holding a crumpled red ribbon, second-place, he plucked out of one of bags beside the bed. It should have been trashed years ago when I first got it. His thumb idly strokes the cheap satin front, eyes on the number two while he talks:
  
  "Your elementary school had some 'Field Day' thing at the end of the year, games and races and so on. We'd just finished an upgrade on the power supply, trying out a more decentralized system. We got you into the mile run for an easy field test with a cheap control group. After one lap there were maybe five kids keeping up. After two, maybe three. For the last two laps it was just you and this other boy. He was athletic, obviously - and tan as hell - but he started showing fatigue in the third lap. Funny thing was, every time he slowed down, so did the boy in front of him. Nothing major, of course. He didn't see it any more than he saw your smile when he put on a burst of speed at the very end. You made a pretty good show of being winded down on the track, but it dropped off too fast once you thought no one was looking."
  
  Jason. The boy's name was Jason. Dad looks up from the ribbon and straight at me. The small smile hasn't gotten any bigger, but the bemused glint is gone from his eyes. "You threw that race for a cute boy who had no clue what was happening. It ended the way it did because you were in complete control of the track and chose second place. We knew right then that you understood how to use the tools we built better than we did. Never had to tell you more than the basics of what they could do after that. Anyway," as he drops the ribbon back into the trash bag, "dinner is downstairs when you're hungry. We ordered Chinese."

He lifted the creased ribbon out of the box, the printed-on gold 2 flashing in the evening sun as the light poured through the bedroom window. The freshly uncovered faces of the 2006 Field Day winners beamed up at him, Jason just left of center and Artie blissfully beside him. Sitting on the plush, snowy comforter, it was clear the glaring, primary red of the ribbon didn't belong in the pristine white of the bedroom now any more than it had two years before when it quietly, secretly moved from the trash to the box. In the suitcase, and eventually in his other room a world away, it would blend right in with all the other things that 'fell into a box of crayons'. The last thought earned a real smile.

Once more around then over and Pikachu nestled back into place among the photos and rocks to blankly stare at the closing lid, perhaps for another two years, though it wasn't likely. He had gone two years without seeing the inside of this damn box, over a year without caring what was inside this damn box. Now the figurative cat had gotten out of the figurative bag, or in this case box. It was supposed to be much harder to coax back in a second time. Anyway, dinner was downstairs. It smelled like Chinese.