Otto TV

Ryan Chuang

Sitting at John Gee’s dining table, Otto learns how to play Operation. The two boys are hunched over the board, necks elongated like a Dalí painting. Tweezers into the Funny Bone like little swords. Watch this, John Gee says, skillfully prying a plastic cell phone out of the man’s Adam’s Apple. John Gee has long, spindly fingers like spiders’ legs. The cell phone is white and oddly shaped. Otto stares at the hole where the cell phone’s screen should be, and wonders how it was possible for a cell phone to fit in someone’s throat. And who would even want to swallow a cell phone, he asks himself silently. Otto knows that sometimes people do things and he doesn’t understand them. But swallowing a cell phone? Otto rolls his throat and tries to imagine a cell phone in there, oblong and cold and irradiated. Here, John Gee says. You try.

When Otto brings the tweezers to the board, he notices that the man at the operatingtable looks to be in a great deal of pain. His nose is ruby red and protrudes from his face like a bowling ball. Sliced into twelve pieces and filled with misshapen objects, he must feel like cut fruit. Most concerning, however, is his expression. His eyes are flat circles inside of flat circles, his mouth is hanging loose and pointed downwards. He is trapped in an infinite state of terror. Gripping the tweezers tightly, Otto feels a deep and terrible shudder rattle slowly up his body. Otto considers whether the man is in pain because of the objects he has consumed or if he has consumed them because he is in pain. He wonders if this distinction matters. Even if all twelve operations are successful, the man’s expression will not change. Otto reaches for the toilet bowl lodged in the man’s Spare Ribs.

The board buzzes bright red: tsktsktsk.

According to the latest news on Otto TV, there are only around twenty hours left before the end of the world. Otto grimly announces this to his mother when she picks him up on John Gee’s front porch. Otto puts all his fingers up and flexes them twice to back up his point. His mother puts him in the passenger seat and starts driving. Sources across different channels have mentioned that they’re shutting down highways, that the power across the city is threatening to go out, Otto warns again as they pass by strip mall after strip mall. Are they now, his mother repeats back in a daze. He puts his hands to his ears to flick on his invisible headset. It hums softly. I’m still awaiting urgent updates, he relays after a few seconds. But there seems to be some sort of signal disruption at the moment, all I’m getting is static. Otto’s brows are furrowed, sending baby waves across his forehead. He turns to his mother and talks straight into her right cheekbone. But stay on the lookout–information is coming in fast, and we certainly don’t want to miss anything.

When they reach the grocery store, Otto is happy because his mother usually doesn’t allow him to sit in the shopping cart. Otto is still young enough that he can derive happiness from moving, or, more specifically, being moved, or, even more specifically, being moved when it is forbidden. The supermarket is filled with things that are begging to be eaten, but the two of them only buy items that can be diced: carrots, onions, tomatoes. Soon Otto notices that the cart is now overflowing with dice-able vegetables of all colors. He wonders how long it would take to eat them all. He wonders whether that would be something worth covering on Otto TV.

I’m getting an update, Otto says abruptly, raising his left hand back towards his ear. The Old Faithful Geyser just blew up, Otto pronounces solemnly. There’s lava spewing everywhere, dozens of people are dead and hundreds are injured. You have an incredible imagination, Otto, says his mother. Looking up at her, Otto sees a person. Her shoulders are hunched and her skin hangs gray over her cheeks and her eyes are big flat circles. Otto’s legs remain pressed to his chest, his body submerged in vegetables.

On the way home, Otto and his mother play the Color Game in the car. The objective is to list all the different colors they know. Blueredyellowgreenorangepurpleblackwhitemagenta, Otto says quickly. Otto’s mother names the colors in between Otto’s colors: indigo, aubergine, cerulean, fuchsia. Otto squeezes his eyes tight and pictures the fancy color wheel that hangs in his room above Freya’s bed. His father bought it for Freya’s fourth birthday at the antiques market, after she had won the Color Game for the first time.

What’s the color of the wind, he had asked, smiling, as he nailed the wheel to the taupe wallpaper.

Blew.

Then Otto and Freya and their mom and their dad had all laughed, hard belly laughs that curled up in their stomachs, the kind that can crawl their way out of the esophagus, begging for air. Otto remembers smiling so wide he feared the tips of his smile might touch and swallow his face whole. And then Freya started coughing.

Pink, Otto says triumphantly, thrusting his feet against the dashboard in excitement.

You win, says his mother.

For dinner, the four of them all sit on the same side of the table. They are facing a gray wall decorated with a collection of finger-painted hand turkeys of different colors and sizes. Eight are Otto’s, four are Freya’s. Otto’s turkeys are colorful and grotesque. They look as if they could tear Freya’s turkeys into little pieces. Otto’s father smiles weakly and makes a joke about the Last Supper, but his voice comes out all stringy and quiet as if he has tissues stuffed in his nose. Otto notices his mother is opening and closing her mouth but not laughing.

The four of them all drink their soup which is brown and full of green chopped vegetables and Otto wonders how many colors exist in the universe and what it would feel like to eat them all. He thinks about what it would feel like to have all the colors tussling in your tummy like little boxers. He imagines these little boxers clambering up his gallbladder, shimmying down his intestines. The angry little boxers push each other into his stomach lining, slip over each other running, always moving in a line–Otto’s body not a body but a collection of traversable organs strung together by power lines and wiring and scotch tape.

Otto looks at his empty bowl and sees his face with no angles. There is a painted blue star where his nose should be.

His mother’s bowl has a gray squiggle pattern running along its edges.

Freya’s bowl is pink and decorated with tiny green frogs.

When Otto glances at his father’s bowl, he screams. In the soup, Otto sees the man from the operatingtable. The features are obscured yet unmistakable. The flat circle eyes, the mouth drooping and pointing downwards, the haggard face, the blanched expression of terror.

What’s wrong, Otto’s mother asks.

Otto doesn’t respond. He looks back at the bowl, which is half-full of cold soup and contains only onions, no reflection.

Nothing, replies Otto.

When Freya starts coughing, Otto’s father takes her to her room. Otto’s father puts her to bed and then puts himself to bed upstairs so then it’s just Otto and his mother sitting at the dining table. And four bowls of soup. And twelve handturkeys. Otto and his mother and four bowls of soup and twelve handturkeys and Freya’s coughing.

Neither of them have spoken in fifteen minutes when Otto sits up straight. There’s an update from the Southeast, Otto reports in a husky voice amalgamated from Channel 6 telly news anchors. The skies above Florida are black and a cloud of toxic gas has moved in from across the Atlantic Ocean. If you haven’t evacuated your home yet, we recommend you do so as soon as possible. T-12 hours until the world goes kablooey, Otto remarks, shaking his head.

Do you really have to do this now, Otto’s mother sighs. Otto doesn’t say anything. He stares into his bowl, lets the blue star swallow his face slowly. He wants to tell his mother he doesn’t have a choice when Otto TV broadcasts–it’s the same as when his mother grips the ends of her hair in a fist when she’s angry or the way Freya’s lungs narrow when she gets too excited or moves around too fast. But Otto stays silent.

Eventually, Otto’s mother starts to cry again so he sits quietly. His hands in his lap, pressed hard against his thighs until they are white. His mother recoiling like a gunshot, her back arching, unarching, arching again.

The next morning, Otto and his mother sit on a vinyl bench across from a poster of the male anatomy. The bench is green and it’s eleven o’clock in the morning and the two of them are at the end of a long hallway in which everything else is white: white walls, white coats, white fluorescent hospital lights. Otto thinks he has never seen this much white before in his life. Looking at all this whiteness, Otto considers briefly the possibility he might puke onto the floor, all of his organs spilling out until he is hollow. Then his organs would be sitting on the hospital floor in a squishy pile–a pulsating, rainbow glob. A body estate sale. How convenient, Otto thinks, that they designed the hospital this way.

Here is where we will make the cut on your husband, the widemouthed doctor had explained a few hours ago to Otto and his mother, tracing an invisible line across the lower third of the model lung. The widemouthed doctor kept smiling, showing off how wide his mouth could be. And this is where we’ll attach the lung to your daughter. It’s a procedure we’re very familiar with, and it should only take a few hours. Best case scenario, you folks could be out of here by nighttime.

Otto had not been able to stop staring at the model lung, which was filled with red and blue snakes. The snakes were intertwined around each other like spaghetti strings. Suddenly, Otto had felt a sudden fear rise up from inside his belly that the snakes could at any instant unravel, or strangle each other. What would happen then? Something bad, certainly. It was undoubtedly a possibility, and the doctor hadn’t seemed to consider it in the slightest. There seemed to be an infinity of things that could go wrong. Otto found himself wishing John Gee were here, with his long, slick spider fingers and his tweezers and his regular-sized mouth.

Trust me, the doctor had assured as he laughed again, you’re in safe hands.

Otto is not allowed to turn around and look through the two glass window panes behind him. Whenever he shifts his body to catch a glimpse of his sister and father, his mother holds him taut against the bench, pinning him to the vinyl. The tendons in her forearms grow visible, briefly, and her hands clamp around Otto’s wrists. Just imagine Pa and Freya are taking a long nap together, Otto’s mother says to him quietly, loosening her grasp. And we’ll be back home before you even realize it.

On Otto TV, there’s been another update. The entire United States is underwater, and people across the country are in panic. Mothers are looking for daughters, fathers are looking for sons. People are fighting over the floatation device, fistfuls of water clutched in their hands. Radio lines are down. Nobody is finding anyone or anything they want to.

Otto and his family, however, are perched atop a piece of driftwood, somewhere over Kansas. The sun is peachy yellow, and the peak of a large grassy hill is visible in the distance. It happened quickly, the rush of water up from the Eastern Seaboard, but they were prepared. They’ve got provisions and first aid and Otto’s father is telling jokes again. What is a turkey’s favorite dessert, he asks slowly, his words rolling in anticipation.

Peach gobbler.

Otto giggles, his organs sloshing up and down inside of him like weighted balls, falling with the rhythm of the waves.

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