Page 27 of Chaos Theory
I rack my brain but come up empty. ‘What exactly are drying agents?’
‘It has a picture here… Silica gel. It comes in these tiny little pillows. Where have I seen these before?’ He holds up the phone so I can study the picture.
We both think for a moment, then simultaneously say, ‘Shoes!’
‘I’ll be right back.’ He scrambles to his feet again, almost tripping over the hair dryer wire on his way to the door. He soon returns with four shoeboxes.
‘Thank God for my Nike obsession, eh? Bet you think it’s money well spent now.’
He stacks the boxes and opens the one on top. It yields two small bags of silica gel. He repeats the process until a small pile is formed. I grab some sticky tape and get to work. Each tiny assemblage is like a cotton ball on a plaster for a patient who’s just had an injection. I tape them to various parts of Kobi.
‘It’s not enough,’ I sigh. ‘We’d need, like, hundreds of these.’
‘You know what I used?’ His voice is suddenly loud. ‘I’ll be right back! And you can call me a genius then.’
I examine Kobi when Shane has left the room. He looks somewhat pathetic. This is my fault. I didn’t do enough for Kobi. I failed him. All he wanted was to be accepted, and to be useful. That’s all many people want, deep down. Is this to be the end of him? And what a way to go, too – suddenly and in a strange place. I know he’s just a machine, but it doesn’t seem right. I make a decision and a promise.Kobi, if you make it through tonight, I’m going to do my best for you. We can make this work, together.
‘Hang in there, buddy,’ I say gently.
‘I will, thanks!’ Shane says as he bursts into the room, holdingwhat appears to be a paper coffee cup with no lid. ‘Stand back! You’ll thank me later.’
Before I can move, he strides across the room and with one wild gesture jerks the cup into the air. A hail of uncooked rice rains down on Kobi and me.
‘Ow! What are youdoing?’ I yell, covering my face. ‘It’s not a wedding!’
‘Rice!’
‘Ow! I know.’
‘I put my phone in rice!’
The rice skitters across the floor, outlining my feet like chalk around a corpse. I gesture at the whole nonsensical scene. My tone turns to ice. ‘And what part ofthisresembles putting your phone into rice?’
‘Sorry,’ he falters, his confidence evaporating. ‘Uh – I might have gotten a bit carried away there. There’s more in the kitchen though – bags of the stuff. Maybe we can, I don’t know, tape it to him somehow?’
He picks up the tape, but I swat it from his hand. It hits the floor with a dull bounce and rolls away to hide under a shelving unit. He means well, but Shane’s help isn’t what I need right now. I need a grown-up.
‘I think you’ve done enough. I can take it from here.’ My phone buzzes. ‘That’s probably Josh now. I told him to message me when he was outside. Can you let him in on your way out?’
SEVENTEEN
9:15pm
The relief I feel when I see Josh enter the Liffey Room just about outweighs all my other feelings: dread, guilt, general life-regret. I fully expect him to be angry, but he calmly puts down his tool bag and says, ‘Okay, so what are we looking at here?’ Sometimes you could just kiss an engineer for their unflappability.
He gets to work on Kobi’s parts with a canister of compressed air – relentlessly spraying the aerosol in short bursts, like a hairdresser with an overzealous approach to hairspray. I hold up the pink hairdryer with a small smile. He up-nods his chin, turns his full attention back to Kobi.
‘I didn’t know what to do,’ I say, redundantly. I don’t know what to say either.
He stops his work, straightens up. ‘It’s okay.’ He looks at me properly for the first time. ‘You got the battery out – that was good,’ he says softly.
‘Do… do you think he’s going to be okay?’ I’m afraid to ask but also afraid of not knowing.
‘Too early to tell.’ He doesn’t seem angry. Just highly focused.
‘Well, let’s not give up yet, then?’ I sound more hopeful than I feel.
The briefest of smiles flickers across his face.
