Trembling With Fear 12/15/2019

2031: The Toys, They’re Bleeding by Patrick Hueller

Red geysers shoot from arm sockets and decapitated necks. Bat-Man® has a weeping wound on his torso. G.I. Joe’s® leg, snapped and dangling, drips and drains. 

What had been scratched plastic are now abrasions, scabbing over. What had been nicks are now welts.

“Take that!” the three-year-old boy—his name’s Tom—says. “And that!” 

He slams the figurines into each other. They spurt red ooze like they’re ketchup packets.

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“I think you should take those toys away,” Jennifer says.
Not this again, Doug thinks. “I’m not taking away his Christmas present on Christmas day.”

They’re in the kitchen, watching Tom play on a seventy-inch monitor. Similar monitors are fastened to a wall in every room. Each of them is connected to a camera in the playroom. 

“That’s your son, Doug. Aren’t you even a little worried?”

 For God’s sake, why did she think he’d had the monitors installed? Now they could give Tom the illusion of independence while still monitoring his every blink and twitch in vivid hi-def.

They watch Tom whip Bat-Man® across the room.

“He’s going to stain the walls,” Jennifer says.

“No he’s not,” Doug says. “The blood washes right out.”

It’s remarkable stuff, this “blood.” In many ways it looks and even acts like the real deal. Dries and congeals. Crusts over. Even cracks and leaks anew. But unlike real blood, you can remove it with one swipe of a damp paper towel.

“Well then why did you put the plastic on the carpet?” 

“Why clean the carpet every time he plays if we don’t have to?”

The plastic had come in the box with the toys.

“It’s just—all that blood . . . ” Jennifer says.

“For the last time, it’s not real blood.”

Earlier, he’d fished the box out of the trash and showed her the ingredients. The blood was more akin to Kool-Aid® than plasma.

Anyway, that’s what he’d told Jennifer a few minutes ago, when Tom started drinking right from an arm socket. 

“Does he know it’s not real?” Jennifer says.

“Of course,” Doug says. 

“There’s no part of you that thinks this is unhealthy?” Jennifer asks.

He watches Tom make explosion sounds as he hammers Bat-Man® against the plastic-covered floor. Blood splatters the boy’s arms.

“Of course not,” he says.

It wasn’t as though Tom was the only kid in the country slurping up Kool-Aid® blood at this very moment. Doug had had to camp out in line hours before the store even opened. He’d scratched and clawed and wrestled another parent for one of the last boxes. 

This morning, Tom had been so excited about the gift that he’d begun hyperventilating. “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” he’d said.

“Die! Die! Die!” he says now. 

He’s still chanting as he gets up and begins spinning. He whirls around, giggling at his own lightheadedness. He’s holding the decapitated G.I. Joe®, whose blood splashes concentrically around the room.

“Just a phase?” Jennifer says.

“Of course,” Doug says, but there’s uncertainty in his voice, and Jennifer picks up on it.

“Real things bleed to death,” she reminds him, as if he of all people needed to be reminded of that.

“G.I. Joe® isn’t real . . .”

“Does he know that?” Jennifer repeats.

For the first time, Doug turns from the monitor and looks at Jennifer. At her button-looking eyes and her fuzzy body.

“You’re not real, either,” he says.

 “Do you think I don’t know that?”

“I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“I’m just a teddy bear. I don’t get offended.”

But Doug can tell that she’s exactly that. “You’re not just a teddy bear,” he says.

Which is true. Jennifer’s a Sleeping Bear®, which means she is blessed with artificial intelligence and carefully calibrated emotionality. Sleeping Bears® were all the rage when Doug’s wife did the Christmas shopping last year.

“Don’t do that, Tom,” Jennifer whispers.

The boy has collected blood in his cupped hands. He sticks his nose in the puddle and blows. The blood bubbles and sloshes, much to Tom’s delight.

“Maybe I should go in there and talk to him,” Jennifer says. 

She sounds just like his wife. Always trying to explain everything to a three-year-old. Actions and consequences. Those were the only methods that worked with a little boy. Frankly, they were the only methods that worked with adults, too. It wasn’t until his wife stormed out of the house this morning that she truly got his attention.

“We didn’t get you so you could talk to Tom,” Doug says to Jennifer.

They got her to bond with the boy. And they got her to leave him. “No one needs to die,” the Sleeping Bears® ad had said, “to teach your child about death.” So far, he and his wife had followed the instructions on the box exactly. Doug hadn’t even rolled his eyes much. After all, that was one thing Doug innately trusted: protocol, orders. 

Slowly, incrementally, after many soothing talks, Jennifer’s hibernation periods were programmed to get longer and longer. A few years from now, the bear would close her eyes and never open them again. “Teach your child to think of death as a permanent hibernation!” the box said. 

It was sissified nonsense, of course, but Doug had done his best to keep his objections to himself and his eye rolls to a bare minimum. He couldn’t endure losing Ellen, too.  

But now he realizes he was kidding himself all along. One way or the other, everyone leaves. The more blood, the better. There’s no finality to a bloodless departure.  

As he watches Tom yank off yet another limb, he considers the possibility that something really is wrong. What if his boy truly is messed up? What if he’s responsible?

Actions, consequences. It was the only way.

“What are you doing?” Jennifer says.

“Your job,” Doug says. 

It’s the same tone he took a few hours ago with his wife, after Tom opened his present, after she went ballistic, before she deserted him like everyone else. 

“This isn’t the plan,” Jennifer gasps.

Doug has her fuzzy neck in the crook of his arm.

“He needs to see,” he says. 

Doug squeezes, clenches, jerks his arm. He looks at the monitor, at his giggling, bloodied boy, and waits for the heaving to stop.

“He’s a normal boy,” Doug says, as though someone might be watching him on a monitor, as though they might want an explanation for his actions. “He’s going to be a normal boy.”