Human Sister

You don’t have to worry about Grandma. She and Carlos are close friends. He’ll take good care of her while we’re gone.”

    Before Elio returned home the following evening, our plans were set. On the pretext that Grandpa had another engagement, the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Magnasea’s Mendocino fracture zone mining platform that had tentatively been scheduled to take place on Sunday, 26 January would be rescheduled for Sunday, 19 January.
    On Monday, 13 January, one of Magnasea’s Lefcort XL cruisers would be sent from the Mendocino mining platform to our slip at the marina in Bodega Bay, where it would be loaded with four cases of champagne, thirty new seats for the mining platform’s auditorium, and the sofa and matching chairs from our living room. The sofa and chairs would replace an older sofa in the platform’s master suite, but the secret purpose in taking them was that Michael would hide inside the sofa as we smuggled him out of the house, onto our pickup, and from there onto the cruiser.
    On Saturday, 18 January, Grandpa, Elio, and I, with Michael hidden on board, would set out to sea, ostensibly on our way to the Magnasea mining platform. Grandpa said that each of the Lefcort cruisers carried two small submersibles capable of carrying us to Anzen. As a countermeasure to spying on mining operations from the sky, each Lefcort had been designed so that the submersibles could be launched and recovered from the bottom of its hold.
    By following only a slight deviation from a reasonably efficient route to the mining platform, we would stop briefly about 10 kilometers from Anzen, and Michael would take the first submersible down to be sure that Anzen was acceptably functional. As soon as Michael’s sub was launched, the rest of us would proceed as though we were headed to the mining platform, as planned. Two hours later, we would turn around and head back for a rendezvous with Michael. If everything was a go with Anzen, Grandpa would join Michael in the first sub while Elio and I would follow in the second.
    “What if Anzen isn’t in acceptable condition?” I asked.
    “There is another, older mining module farther out that we can try.”
    “And if that one isn’t functional?”
    “I don’t know. Perhaps we could find a remote place to hide along the Canadian northwest coast.”
    There was a moment of silence while each of us tried to digest that last thought, then Grandpa explained that once at Anzen, our only means of receiving communications from the world above would be through an Andreev Underwater Acoustic Signal (AUAS) receiver and through fishoids that could be launched to the surface to receive or transmit messages. But since the fishoids might, if detected, be followed back to Anzen, and since AUAS transmissions were used exclusively for deep-sea commercial and scientific communications, we had to expect a near blackout of news all the while we remained in our hidden home.
    I feared that Elio might be upset with our planned disruption of his life—his having to leave school, our going into hiding for an indefinite time—but he responded to the news with enthusiasm, as if we were about to embark on a great adventure. I didn’t have the heart, or the courage, to tell him—not yet; I needed time for it all to sink into my own mind—that our ability to have children might have been compromised.
    Something did happen after dinner that evening that I should have recognized as being odd, though I didn’t at the time. Taking a break from his World Literature assignment, Elio got up from our study table and walked over to the scenescreen, which was displaying a recording of the prior afternoon when Lily and I had played fetch with an old tennis ball on the lawn in front of the garage. Elio sat on the sofa to rest. Michael went and sat beside him.
    “Have you read Bashō’s poem,” Elio asked, “the one about a frog jumping into a pond? I’m supposed to write a short essay on it.”
    Michael tilted his head—quizzically, a gesture that Elio had told me reminded him of how birds often cant their heads.
    “Yes,” Michael answered. “‘The old pond/A frog jumps in/Sound of water.’”
    “When I lived in Amsterdam,” Elio said, “the father of a Japanese friend of mine told me that a thing is what it is, not what it is in memory. Do you think that’s what Bashō was getting at?”
    “No things but in memory,” Michael replied. “A pond, a frog, the