Doing the robot

"Did Nadine like the movie?" I asked my brother last Saturday. His girlfriend went to see The Secret Life of Bees the night after I did. I had told her it was good but that I teared up in the theater a few times the night before while she and my brother watched our boys so Kenny and I could take in a movie on our date night.

"Yeah. But she said you must be a robot because she bawled all the way through it."

I hear muffled conversation in the background, then Jamie (my brother) comes back on the phone. A big sigh. "She said not to make up stuff she said. But she did cry a lot and she can't believe you didn't."

Well, I would have cried more but I feel really stupid when I do that in the theater, even when the rest of the audience is sobbing (which it was) so I just hunkered down, and I think like, two tears escaped. But I didn't bother explaining. I just said, "I'm not a robot," and thanked him again for babysitting the boys.

Fast forward to Sunday, a week ago. Kenny and James have lost their minds. They insist they hear a mysterious beeping every ten minutes or so. They walk around with various electronic devices pressed against their ear, waiting to see what's making the noise.

A noise that I can't hear and become convinced doesn't exist.

They insist it's been going on all day. I think that once, I might have heard it. But then I decide I didn't and that they're crazy.

James comes home from school on Monday and insists that he hears it again, but it's only when he's with me. Never any other time.

And I think about my brother's robot comment and I begin to wonder...

Could it be that I'm getting some weird radio signal through a tooth filling and they hear it? I've seen it in movies.

But I don't hear it.

James is really bugged by this noise. It irritates him all Tuesday afternoon.

Finally, I suggest a theory that's been percolating in my slightly unstable imagination. "What if I was really a robot, James? And I never knew it. And there's something screwed up in my wiring and so it's beeping but I'm programmed not to hear stuff like that?"

I think he'll dismiss this with the nine-year-old skepticism that killed Santa and the tooth fairy.

Instead, he eyes me speculatively. It goes on too long. Finally, he says, "I don't think you could be a robot."

"Yeah, me either."

But we both sound uncertain.

Fast forward a last time to that night when we're eating at a barbecue joint for my brother's birthday. He and I have had a conversation in the car where I ask if he can hear the beeping.

"Yeah. Isn't it your phone?"

Nope. And he suggests maybe I can't hear it because as you get older, some people lose their hearing in higher frequencies and I have some scar tissue on my eardrums, so this kind of makes sense.

But as I come out of the restroom to rejoin the table an hour later, James is looking at him with deep admiration and Kenny is looking at him with a mixture of disgust and amusement.

When he was babysitting, Jamie had hidden a little prank gadget in the lining of the baby's carrier designed to beep mysteriously, and let it go on for four days.

Just to clarify: I am not a robot. I only thought I might be for about five minutes.