5 March 2005 | Vol. 5, No. 1

Latter-Day Geniuses

by ANDREW LUX

"Would you still love me if I were frozen?" my brother asks from beneath his covers.

"I would still love you even if you were an electric dog," I murmur from across the room; the room I hate to describe. My brother said he saw a ghost on the ceiling. He said it resembled our father. That must have been years ago when we were still young enough to recognize the shoe sizes of ghosts, and our father for that matter.

I think we have become too bored sitting in front of the TV watching shows. My brother says that the people on TV are real, their names the names spoken that we hear. I try to get us to go outside and build a fort. The zenith of our efforts is pretending the enemy is in the fort after we have built it. Our strategy is to storm through the enemy's defense and ransack the fort, leaving nothing alive.

I am having trouble thinking my brother and I are going to be accepted by society. Our questions are too penetrating. Every night he asks me what the names of my two feet are. I named them once, but now I have forgotten. I obviously told him once when we were younger. This mattered to him. It mattered more to him than the time spent together building and dismantling things. I ask him if he would love my feet if they were frozen. He said he would love them if they were electric dogs—electric dogs that obeyed his every command.