Read Online Andromeda Klein by Frank Portman - Free Book Online Page B

or losing it before Andromeda had come in.
    Refrigeration hadn’t seemed to hurt the iPod; there it was, buzzing away through the slightly nasty earbuds now hanging around the mom’s neck. Andromeda immediately thought of Daisy and whether it might be possible for her in her current state to dematerialize objects and rematerialize them inside boxes like refrigerators.
    “Things are always disappearing around here,” the mom repeated, with an accusing look in Andromeda’s direction, and another in the direction of the dad.
    “Jesus, will you leave the kid alone?” said Andromeda’s father. “Hello, cupcake.” She wasn’t sure how he did it, but he managed to make “cupcake” sound sarcastic and affectionate at the same time. There was no person in this world who resembled a cupcake less than Andromeda Klein. It was nicer than Fence Post and no more inapt than her own name, which meant “Little Crystal Ruler of Men” in a variety of mismatched languages.
    “Here’s what happened: the earth revolved, the rain fell on the fields, and the Little Crystal Ruler of Men earned thirty dollars before taxes working in the public sector.” That was Alternative Universe Andromeda. Regular Universe Andromeda simply left the room. As the mom continued the bone-picking she had mentioned earlier, remaining at the computer and shouting out rapid-fire complaints about insufficient this and excessive that, Andromeda settled down in the living room to study her Teach Yourself Hebrew book and tuned her out as best she could. There was a phrase from the most recent Language Arts handout that seemed to sum up the mom’s philosophy on parenting and domestic organization. The wizard Merlin has turned the boy King Arthur into an ant, and the sign on the gate of the ant colony reads: EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY . Andromeda was an ant, crushed by a heavy maternal boot of iron. The mom had presumably absorbed these methods in her childhood in Australia under the Nazis.
    Downstairs, the Champlain baby was screaming and the Champlains were screaming and it sounded like there was someone on the television screaming too. Andromeda’s defective ears tended to screen out important information like syllables while still managing to pick up the irritating background noise. It didn’t help that certain low tones from the sound track of whatever the Champlains were watching made the whole building vibrate abrasively. She could feel it in her back teeth. Andromeda’s dad insisted that the cable be disconnected and the TV unplugged when not in use, so she had to stoop and reconnect everything before settling back on the couch. She picked up the remote and found the channel they were watching downstairs, not because she wanted to watch TV, which she didn’t often like, but just in order to create a slightly less chaotic atmosphere where the sounds all matched. It was a movie in which a puzzle man was drugging people and sewing their mouths shut.
    Soon the dad emerged carrying a circuit board and some other bits extracted from the now-destroyed appliance, a “See, what did I tell you?” look on his face.
    Andromeda’s father suspected the government of spying on American citizens by implanting surveillance devices in electronic products. All the manufacturers and the governments and the corporations that control them were in on it. He had several boxes of extracted circuit boards and other electronic parts, collected over a lifetime, carefully dated and labeled, evidence for the book he claimed he was planning to write on Surveillance and the State; accordingly, the carport in the back was filled with appliances that no longer worked, alongside all the recording and music equipment he collected from yard sales and pawnshops and never seemed to use for anything.
    The dad frowned at the TV. It is well known, he often said, that the FBI keeps files on everything you watch, and that the cable could transmit information to them even as it