Eating Memories by Patricia Anthony Page A

understand?”
    The tears overbalanced and spilled down his cheeks as he nodded. I motioned to Moss to begin the questions. “Where are you?” Moss asked.
    Bobby squirmed in his chair, sending the brain wave monitor into spasms.
    “Are you in Manaus?’” Moss went on when Bobby didn’t reply.
    ‘Ah . . .” Bobby spoke from a slack mouth.
    “What’s happening in Manaus, Gilberto? Can you tell us?”
    Bobby’s back stiffened as he became more agitated. I checked the pump control uselessly, wondering if I should stop the questioning. “Ah . . .”
    “Tell us, please.”
    “Ah . . .” Bobby said. “Ah-mericano?”
    “Yes,” Moss said. “I’m an American.”
    The move was so sudden it caught Stengler and Moss off-guard. Bobby leaped across the table at them, hands out, snarling. The voice stress analyzer dropped from Stengler’s hand and shattered with a Ioud finality on the floor.
    “ Assassinos!’ Bobby screamed. He caught the front of Moss’s lab coat in his hands and clawed at the researcher’ s face. “Filho da puta! Assassinos!”
    “ Jesus!” Moss cried. “Get him off me!” His face was scored in a dozen places and blood welled angrily from the wounds. His hands were in front of him, shoving at, not beating, the boy. His defense was that of a civilized man to an uncivilized small animal.
    I punched the control button so hard I drove it permanently into its housing.
    Grabbing Bobby around his thick waist, I pulled him from Moss. Bobby was sobbing, “Mataran a gente,” he said as he pushed his face into a hiding place at my shoulder. The Thanapeline was wearing off, and I wasn’t certain whether it was Gilberto who was crying or Bobby. “Os Americanos. Mataran a gente,” he said.
    Moss was shaken. He wiped blood from his face. But it was Stengler, oddly enough, who was angry. “It wouldn’t be the Americans. It’d be the Russians. He doesn’t know.”
    I cradled the boy, my hand moving across the back of his head, plucking away the wire leads angrily. “He knows. He lived through it.”
    “Bullshit,” Stengler spat. “He was a peasant living on the edge of the Amazon jungle. He couldn’t know anything.”
    I pried the tape from the pump and tugged it out. A drop of blood came with it. “Sorry,” I whispered to Bobby. “I’m sorry.” I was sorry for everything, for the bead of red on the shaved ankle, for the way the day had gone, for the extinction we faced.
    When he was quiet, when he was Bobby again, I took him down the hall to his room and gave him a Snickers and a Valium, two single-strand safety lines for a small falling boy.
    * * *
    In the room was the vibration of a prior argument. Stengler was fitting the black plastic shards of his voice stress analyzer together as if it were a jigsaw puzzle of doom. Moss, stained handkerchief in hand, was dabbing aimlessly at his cheeks. They both looked up at me when I entered.
    “I should get you some antiseptic for that,” I told Moss.
    “We don’t have time,” Stengler said.
    I glanced at Moss. Moss had an odd grin. Apparently he knew Stengler well enough to find his rudeness amusing. “I’m all right,” he told me softly. “It’s nothing, really. How is the boy?”
    There is a moment in relationships when love or hate comes in a flash of emotional knowledge. Such feelings are common to me. But not so common that their fury doesn’t leave me shaken. I had twin shocks then, one after the other: liking for Moss; hatred for Stengler.
    Because I felt that sudden kinship with Moss, I lied. “He’s fine.”
    “Finding his parents complicates things,” Stengler said as he fit a piece of plastic that looked like ant onto a piece that looked like a bird.
    “Tonya’s pregnant. What happens when Gilberto’s born?” Even though I knew the inevitable, I asked anyway, wanting to get the truth out. The question had the same pain-pleasure syndrome as a Ianced boil.
    “Maybe nothing,” Stengler said. “It’s my theory that