The Oral History of Impractical Devices, 2

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Walter Andrews

The boy was weird, that's all there was to it. Don't get me wrong, you know, I had a fondness for him, we were flesh and blood and all that. But there was something always off about him. Didn't seem to like his brothers much.

Q. And you didn’t attend the science fair during his fifth grade. Is that correct?

No, I didn't go to the science fair that time — wish I had now. I heard it was quite the spectacle, been telling people the story ever since. We had to live by candle for days afterwards. He was pretty upset, I guess, but I would have gone no questions asked if it was a soccer or baseball game, anything like his brothers. But he never played sports or games with the rest of ‘em.

Q. What did he spend most of his time on?

Once he could read he mostly did that. I don't know where he got all the books from. Either his mother was buying them for him secretly or he was stealing ‘em from the library. Even before that, the kid was a destructive force in my house, you know?

Maybe ‘destructive’ is wrong. I’m trying to be even-handed here, don’t want to come off like some bitter old man in your interview. But he would take things apart — the phone, our old hi-fi, one time the whole goddamn TV. Soon as we turned our backs, something that used to work was suddenly in pieces across the living room. And no, he could never put ‘em back together again. Not the way they had been. After he'd finally rebuilt the TV, the colors were all psychedelic and blurred, the thing only picked up stations from Mexico. His mother was worried. Thought he would electrocute himself one day. Meanwhile, I come home from work and can’t watch anything on the tube except telenovellas. He'd use the parts on something else sometimes. Robots.

Q. What do you mean when you say robots?

Not real robots, they never worked — this was still before the kid could even read. He'd take apart his brother's Gameboy. A few days later we’d see pieces of it taped to a cardboard box filled with circuit boards and wires glued to everything, with a — what do you call, a Lite-Brite? — one of those on top as the head, bulbs all arranged to look like a face. He got savvier. Started putting tape-recorders inside, so it would seem like the thing was talking. But they never did anything and there'd be the missing belt from my old turntable, strapped right to the front.

No wonder he didn't have a lot to do with other kids.

The Oral History of Impractical Devices, 1

Read part 2

Samantha Waters

The machine took up half the room, and seemed to throb with energy—a whirl of motion and sound held together by wires, gears, shivering tubes, and pistons. The sound of it was unreal, like an automobile factory inside a submarine, but still I could just barely hear its creator shouting over the din: “This machine will end world suffering.” He was 10 years old.

It was the fifth grade science fair where I first met Percy Andrews. The auditorium was just stuffed full of this machine, I wasn’t even sure how they got it in the door, there was hardly any room for the rest of the presentations. It just sat there, hulking, and seemed to shiver with rage that anything else was even included.

Q. And what exactly was it? What did it do?

It was a, uh, perpetual energy machine if I remember right. The idea—well, Percy’s idea—was that this machine would generate more energy than it would consume, that the results would increase exponentially. A little bit of electricity was needed to get the thing moving but after that, it fed, or was supposed to, off the power it generated itself, forever.

It wound up blowing a hole in the power grid instead. The whole town was blacked out for nearly two days while they tried to fix the damage. One of the gears blew off and almost decapitated a teacher. You should have seen her face; she wasn’t even mad or scared, just kind of confused and awestruck.

Q. So who wound up winning that science fair, in the end?

Oh, I won. My hydroponic tomatoes won the science fair. My mom was quite pleased but Percy had already left, his parents weren’t even there I guess, and he just fled the embarrassment of failing. There was a canal behind the school with a small bridge over it, behind the transformers and past the hedges and the fence, entirely hidden but only a few feet from the school grounds—it was a place where kids used to fight or kiss after class without worrying about getting in trouble. I found Percy sitting there in the darkness of the blackout, his body small and trembling like some kind of baby animal. His legs hung over the railing of the bridge. I couldn’t tell if he was weeping or not, it was too dark—but I still remember watching him and thinking about his tears, how they might be falling into the canal and mixing with the water. How I could grow tomatoes from them, he was so beautiful.

It was the last thing he ever built. Until recently.