THEY IS US
A cautionary horror story
Tama Janowitz

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

The Friday Project

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Tama Janowitz 2008

Tama Janowitz asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

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Source ISBN: 9781906321307

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007380954

Version: 2016-10-05

Dedication

To Fay Weldon and Nick Fox

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Walt Kelly, poster caption for World Earth Day, 1973

Epigraph

The Small Loaf of an Artist in Society

Two chihuahuas have tiny pillowcases

pulled over their heads with holes

cut out for eyes and noses.

Are they members of the Ku Klux Klan?

We do not know. Only, they must

itchy in this warm dampness,

this summer sprinkled with peppery

flies over the ash can of our lives.

What has blighted the stout cart-

puller, the homebody, the watch cur,

Beware of the Dog, a sign

leading to reticence in strangers.

All is changed, deranged and gone,

even slouches have a political

roll to fill. This is not a country

for old schnauzers or dull doubters

who muddle and fiddle and refuse

to remember the name of the street

they live on simply because they’ve

changed address once too often

and their furniture grows

molds and fungi in a warehouse

in Walla-Walla Washington. Changes!

Get used to them! Some young rabble

rouser keeps yelling in the parking

lot on Twenty-Third street, where

the organ grinder used to play

O sole Mio just beneath the windows

of our mansion and his monkey tipped

his hat in mock thanks for the penny

that we threw him, although he cavorted

on hollyhocks and crushed petunias in

our Moorish garden, but it’s too late

for giving an artist advice, who

having taken on the guise (gorge

and hackles) of a purebred dalmatian,

is polymorphous perverse now, indeed

always has been.

Phyllis Janowitz

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

7B

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

Acknowledgements

Other Books By

About the Publisher

1

Years pass. There are still thimbles and Unitarians. The world is the same as it has always been, maybe a little worse. It’s a beautiful summer day, kind of, although violent electrical storms are predicted for later – if not that day, then sometime. And the news, too, is much the same: 40 percent of people can’t sleep; a type of bustard believed to be extinct has been found; war continues.

Slawa is still out there, painting the driveway with black glop. Why did he have to wear his white high-heels? The fool, he’s going to ruin them. Now he’s using his knife to open a second gallon of the stuff. Murielle could easily run him over, but he moves out of the way. She is taking Julie to look for a summer job.

Julie wants to help at the old age home her mother manages, but Murielle says no. Her mother prefers her older sister, Tahnee. Tahnee is fourteen. Tahnee is too lazy to work. Murielle doesn’t seem to mind this, even though she is determined that Julie, who is only thirteen, should do something. First she tells Julie to look up the job listings, but there’s nothing Julie is qualified for except maybe at the Blue Booby Club as a cocktail waitress or stripper if she lies about her age.

Murielle drives Julie and tells her to go in by herself. Julie is scared. It is dark after the bright outside, the gloom of mid-afternoon in a strip club that reeks of beer with a fainter odor of bleach. At first the manager seems interested. “Show me your tits,” he says, but Julie doesn’t move. “How old are you, hon, anyway?”

Her mother has said she should lie, but Julie is nervous. She forgets. She looks away.

“What about any interesting deformities?”

“No,” says Julie. What if he wants to hire her? “I’m only thirteen.”

If she had extra breasts – or was a hermaphrodite, or at least a young boy – but these days, times are tough, who wants to watch a normal girl? “Come back in a few years,” he says. “Or, if you want, we got a wet t-shirt contest once a month, top prizes in the juvenile category.”

She is so relieved she could cry. Her life is going to go on and on, frightening her. She does not want to be frightened by her own life, but there it is, lounging ominously before her, one paw tapping its sharp claws on the pavement just ahead. She goes back to the car and tells her mother there was no work for her.

“How old did you say you were?” her mother asks.

“Um… I said I was seventeen?”

“Julie, it’s not just that you’re plain; it’s your attitude. Nobody would want to hire someone who seems sulky. You could have made some good money this summer,” says Murielle. “At least you’re not flat-chested like your sister. That’s one thing you have going for you.” She feels cruel as she says this but with a kid like Julie it’s better to be blunt.

Julie thinks she will never find work. But at last Murielle gets her a job in a lab, thanks to her friend Dyllis. “Julie, make sure you do whatever Dyllis tells you,” her mother says as she drops off Julie in front of the Bermese Pythion building. “I’ll be back at four-fifteen to pick you up.”

Her mother leaves her at the far end of the parking lot. Julie is sweltering by the time she gets to the main door. In the lobby of the vast complex the security guard sweeps an electronic brush over her before she is allowed in. Once she is scanned, her microchip will be altered and she won’t have to do this again, the guard says. Her mom’s friend Dyllis is waiting for her beyond the gates, buck-toothed, attractive. Even though she has always known Dyllis, Julie is still frightened at the idea of starting work.

“Ai, eet’s so hot today, you know what I mean?” Dyllis has a high-pitched voice and slightly buggy, wild eyes. “Sometimes, I jes’ look around and I think, what I am doing here? In Vieques, yes, it’s hot, but we have trees, palm trees, you got your coconut trees, when it’s a nice day you go to the beach… Here, you got no trees, everything dead. Tell me, when was the last time you saw a bird or any living creature?”

Dyllis grew up just around the block from Murielle, but two years on Vieques – the small island that was part of Puerto Rico where she worked for a government laboratory – has left her with a strong Puerto Rican accent.

“How is your mother doing, you tell her let’s get together this weekend, okay?” she says as they walk down the long, windowless corridor. The black granite walls and floors are flecked with embedded chips resembling glittery stars; the only light is from the artificial ones above. Murielle has told Julie that Dyllis was able to get a good job back in the States as a lab technician with Bermese Pythion only because she smuggled genetic material out of the lab when she left Puerto Rico.

There appears to be no one else around. The hall is lined on both sides with many doors of different colors. “You see, each color is for a different security level. You going to be working level three, that’s pretty important level. Later I got to make you sign a confidentiality form. And these are my labs.”

Dyllis is in charge of six or eight of the laboratories, each housing a different experiment in progress. Canary mice: they can sing like little birds, which is a problem if they escape and breed; they sing all night. Black-and-yellow striped fish hang from the ceiling on invisible threads. “These are clownfish-cross-spider, we call them spiderfish. You see, they don’t need no water, they spin a thread and they catch the flies, you want me to show you?”

She opens a box and releases four fist-sized flies, seemingly too large to get off the ground, but they hover in the air. “I call these SloMoFlies.”

“Yuck. They look like flying raisins.” The flies are creepy. And the fish, too, are somehow wrong. In formation, as a school, the fish on the threads lunge for the flies, then weave longer threads to lower themselves as the flies circle. When the flies go up, so do the fish, pulling in their threads.

“You see, I gotta do some more testing first, but if they interbred with regular flies, a lot of people going to buy them, they going to know after a while all the flies going to be real slow. Plus, they supposed to eat clothes that are out of style. But right now, nothing is going well. These flies, when you kill one, it makes a terrible mess.”

A web of words: J a N u A r y y y Y y y or J u u u uuuu u u ly linger in the room, blocking the windows and doors; there is no escape. Dyllis is a talker, the words never seem to stop. Trails of letters spin constantly through the air around her head, forming a virtual wall.

Dyllis stops to take a breath, it is almost as if she has to fight to clear a space for herself in the middle of all these words.

“What?” Julie is confused.

“Now, over here, this is something cute, right?” Dyllis points to a cage containing feathered rabbits. The feathers are downy, pink and blue. “Later on, I’ll give you one.”

What Julie doesn’t say is that she already has a feather-covered rabbit at home. Years before, she had come exploring with her sister. At that time the vast grounds where the labs are located weren’t yet fenced in. There were still trees back then. That was when they found their dog Breakfast and the rabbit; they had been tossed out with the garbage and managed to escape. Both were almost dead and had to be nursed back to health – surely that couldn’t have been stealing?

“Anyway,” she says, looking at the fluffy bunny, “won’t you get in trouble?”

“I’m jes’ gonna tell them, it die, a lot of these animals die, and they know that. But don’t tell no one, hokay? I put him in your backpack, just before you go home.”

Julie doesn’t know what to say. She can’t accept stolen property, even if it means the animal will be killed or tortured… or can she? She has never had to contend with this degree of ethics. Of course she will take the bunny home, even though her mother has said, No More Pets! She supposes she can sneak it in.

“Lemme show you something.” Dyllis takes Julie down the hall to the Women’s Room. A window – the only exterior one Julie has seen – looks out into a dumpster surrounded by a tall cinderblock wall. The refuse bin is filled with animals, either dead or dying. Even through the closed window the stench is terrible, and a few things down there are still wriggling.

“Oh, this is awful. What can we do, aren’t some of them still alive?”

“If you don’t take Mister Bunny… that’s where he gonna end up. Oh, sheet!” Dyllis lets out a shriek. “Look at this, somebody tossed out my experiment, can you believe that?” Over by the sink is a pot of dry dirt containing a plant with only two leaves covered with what appears to be human skin; beneath the skin Julie can see veins and arteries. “This plant disappeared, like, two weeks ago, I thought maybe my boss, he took it to decorate his office. I no want to say nothing. But now I am thinking someone took it to kill it. Jes’ look.”

“Is it dead?” Julie says.

“I dunno. Needs water, anyway.” Dyllis shakes her head in disgust. “I mean, who would have done this, I had the plant in my window!”

Tenderly Julie strokes the leaves of the dying common house plant and places it under the trickling tap; the veins – if that’s what they are – flush and weakly pulse. The plant is slurping up water, she can sense its gratitude. To hurt anything – some nights she can’t sleep, thinking of how wretched it must be to be an ant, with people around who actually like to crush them.

“Let’s go back in – I’ll show you the rest of the animals and their food.”

“Um… okay. Sure! Great. So, um, Dyllis, you invented all this stuff?”

“Oh, jes, and if I had my own lab I could have made a fortune. But I work for the company, which is not so bad – they give me good health insurance. So come on, let me show you the kitchen area. Here’s where you have to prepare the different kinds of food.” Dyllis opens a refrigerator. “To keep everybody happy, put the different things on each little plate. But some days you can chop everything and mix it, whatever, just so it looks attractive. Now, we gonna go feed some toads.” She puts the plates on a wheeled cart and off they go.

The room is very hot and dry, so dry that for a moment Julie’s lungs feel seared. “This room, we gotta keep it like a desert.” Dyllis points to a row of glass tanks. “Don’t ever touch the animals in them, they are puffball toad, a cross of puffball mushroom and toad. When they get scared, poof, they let out a cloud of spores, get you right in the face. I heard we going to try to get in the anthrax gene next, so when they puff out, they blow out anthrax spores. It’s interesting, no?” Dyllis opens the tops to each tank and carefully lowers the plates to the sandy floor. Julie thinks she will never be able to arrange the food so beautifully, topped with parsley and the wriggling mealworms in a circle around the edge. “They eat the compost, too, that’s because they have the mushroom gene.”

When Julie was little she helped her father in his shop on Saturdays. There was always the rich smell of leather, or leather cleaner, of glue and something fecund. Maybe he had a mushroom gene, unbeknownst to her. She has been ignoring her father for so long, years, really, maybe since she turned ten or eleven, wrinkling her nose at his beery stench and cleaning-fluid breath. Poor Daddy with his winky bald spot and big proud belly; where is he now? Anything she dislikes about him is forgotten; how she misses him. Why doesn’t she spend more time with him? She will be nicer to him from now on.

In Room 1829.wTd are animals that are sort of… pigs. But they are like no pictures of pigs Julie has ever seen, with human arms and legs, some too fat to be supported by such slender appendages who lie on their sides delicately putting biscuits in their mouths with their… Yuck, they look like big thumbs? Hands with nothing but thumbs? No, it is just that their fingers are half-trotters. The pigs have rilled snouts, small eyes fringed with pale white lashes, pink gigantic torsos; what is wrong with them? Julie doesn’t want to ask but Dyllis tells her anyway. “You see, these pigs, they got human parts, so we can transplant what we need.”

“But how many human parts do they have?”

“It’s not so much as a number, these are only first generation, so it’s fifty-fifty. In other words, we mix the pig sperm with the woman egg and implant in the sow.”

Some pigs look as if they have worked out, done sit-ups, pull-ups and developed muscular biceps, legs with toned calves, ripped thighs. Even so, human arms are not strong enough to support the weight of a full-grown boar. Supine and languorous, unable to stand, occasionally feeding themselves with those odd hands, the pigs lie in the heat, yawning, bored. “These little piggies love to get a manicure!” says Dyllis when Julie stares, slightly alarmed at a pig’s red fingernails. “If you want, when you have extra time, I got some extra polish in my desk, they so cute when they see the polish and make their little squeals!”

A boar – overweight, grayish with bristles – is gently fondling himself. He has a corkscrew-shaped penis. He looks up at Julie and starts to rub faster. Julie doesn’t like the way he looks at her with a smirking leer while he plays with himself. She averts her gaze. Julie wishes now she had lied about her age to get the job in the strip club; by comparison this is much worse.

“Hey, cut that out!” Dyllis says to the pig. “We working now on how to transplant the male organ. Some guy going to be mighty lucky, if we can figure out how to avoid rejection.”

Apart from the job, summer passes slowly. Here there isn’t much for kids to do: in her neighborhood is the petrochemical swamp, and the local nuclear plant and the waste disposal system of Bermese Pythion Technologies. Here there are building materials determined to be hazardous to one’s health, deposits (man-made) of chemicals or radioactive substances with a half-life of a hundred thousand years.

Somehow everyone who lives in this neighborhood or grew up here has something wrong. They blame the chemical swamp and the crematorium, the high-voltage power lines overhead and the airport nearby. Then there is the pollution from the highway, carbon monoxide, the hulks of cars leaking oil and gas and transmission fluid.

Even at the lab, mostly, the work Julie is given is depressing, not only because she doesn’t know the purpose of any of the experiments (which all seem pointless) but also because of the pervasive misery. Some of her job is cleaning cages, feeding the animals, and one day, going into the pig stall with a platter of bananas (some of the pigs have been listless, not eating, and it is hoped this will tempt their appetites, which is a bit rough on Julie since she herself has never eaten a real banana, only reproductions) by accident the door to the pen swings open and the big boar, leering, comes after her. She screams and runs to the door and out into the hall but the pig is after her and gets out of the room. He is slow but has mean little tusks and gets her backed into a corner when her screams are finally overheard.

A security guard with a cattle prod scurries down the hall and jabs her a couple of times with the electrified device before he finally gets the pig subdued; the pig has both arms around her neck and whether he is about to strangle her or kiss her she never has a chance to learn.

The security guard is yelling at her in Spanish when Dyllis comes running down the hall. Julie is crying with humiliation. “I’m sorry,” she says. Frightened, embarrassed, scared at having been the subject of the pig’s sexual interest.

“What’s he saying?” she asks Dyllis when the guard, still blabbing angrily, leads away the pig.

“What?” says Dyllis.

“What’s he saying? I never learned Spanish.”

“Ah, I’m not sure. He is angry, though, I theenk!”

“I know, but…” It occurs to Julie: Dyllis doesn’t actually speak or understand Spanish. All she has is a Spanish accent.

After this incident she is told not to go into the room with the pigs anymore. Instead she is given a lot of agar plates into which she has to pipette exact quantities of substances she has been told must never get into her mouth. Sometimes she stains slides, or counts various living organisms under a microscope. Even though the organisms are infinitely small, they do not, mostly, appear very nice – most of them spend their whole lives destroying, or trying to destroy, others.

And yet there are creatures, such as the spiderfish, she loves. When she comes into the room they all swoop down to her eagerly and twirl around her head as if they are carousel animals.

What if her whole life continues this way – the animals, always hungry, for food, for light, for air – nothing could help any of them, herself included, to escape. Here are these animals, these animals that are wrong – herself as well. Just wrong, and they know it and suffer, with their extra body parts or human limbs that were never meant to blend. And she is guilty of not being able to feel compassion for them, but only disgust, despite how sorrowfully they regard her and plead with their terrible saucer eyes.

Toward the end of summer, one afternoon her dad comes to pick her up. She is surprised to see him. Somehow their paths haven’t crossed in months, he is up and out before she is awake and gets back when she is already asleep. Usually she meets her mom outside in front; she can’t figure out how her dad has gotten past security. “Dad! What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

“What you mean? I walked in, it took long time to find you.”

Then she realizes he got in because he looks like one of the workers – a janitor or electrician, whatever – and she hopes she hasn’t hurt his feelings. Even though he has lived in this country for a long long time, he still doesn’t really get it. Why couldn’t she have had the sort of father who wore a suit and did something respectable, instead of a shoe repair shop? He is so proud it’s his own, doesn’t he see how sad that is? Just thinking about it, her eyes fill with tears.

“So, Yulenka, show me around, I want to see what you have been doing all summer.”

As if things aren’t bad enough, her father is even more tenderhearted than she. The flies, the ones that Dyllis calls SloMoFlies, Julie has moved into an unused glass tank the size of a closet; it is her job to clean the tank each day without letting any of them escape. Every few days she puts rank slabs of old meat and dirty clothes into the tank. This is so disgusting, each time she thinks she is going to barf. The flies fly slowly – and they are so big! The air in the tank is stale and hot – and she hates the strange sound they make, a kind of gleeful buzzing hiss! They land all over her, it feels as if they are stinging, even though she knows they can’t, and afterwards she can’t help but scratch and scratch.

But her dad takes to them right away, and it really is peculiar how the whole swarm flies over to the side of the glass in unison and stare at him. Some have green eyes and some have blue, eyes the size of thumbnails. Her father has a puzzled expression. “What you do with these?” he asks.

“Um, not much. I’m in charge of cleaning up their tank and feeding them; it really creeps me out, Dad, the smell is so bad and they look at me kind of mean –”

“Cage is dirty. I clean for you.”

“Thanks, Daddy, but I don’t actually have to do it until tomorrow.” Her father is usually so gruff, this is all surprising.

“Is nothing. I will do it.” He opens the door and goes in. The flies land on his head and shoulders, she can’t help but think they are licking him. On second look she sees they are wiping themselves on him, cat-like, at least so it appears, and her dad has a kind of blissful look on his face, what Miss Fletsum in school calls “the find-your-bliss look”.

There are still a few on him when he comes out of the tank. He opens his jacket pocket and gestures. “Moushkas, come, my little moushkas.” More promptly than trained dogs, the flies, five or six of them, go in. “Yu-Yu, they are telling me, they want fruits and a little fish. They are not meat-eating flies but mostly fruit flies. And some of them they say are becoming wery sick.”

“Whatever, Dad. They’re just flies. And I have to do what I’m told, it’s, like, a special diet or something.”

“All living creatures –”

“I know, I know. I love animals, too, Dad, it’s just that, I dunno.”

“What?”

“Something about them – they like you, they don’t like me. Besides, I think Dyllis said they were engineered with some kind of cold virus or something, some marker so they could spread disease? I can’t remember what she says. Anyway it looks like you’re covered with snot. I mean, look!”

Her father glances down at the slimy trails that have been left by the flies, and shrugs.

“Anyway, if you say so, Daddy, I’ll try to sneak some fruit in there once in a while. But the ones in your jacket – you’re going to put them back in the tank, right?”

“No, no, don’t vorry. These flies, they say, they come with me, and tomorrow, more are born, ends up same number.” He is the only person who could treasure flies. Her poor father, who is there who treasures him?

“Oh, Daddy, I do love you so much,” says Julie, and clasps her father around his stomach, while overhead the flies circle in their stately, slow procession.

2

Murielle stands at the window staring at Slawa with hatred. How long has she been standing there? She has no idea. Sometimes, glancing at her watch, she finds ten hours have elapsed, when it seems twenty minutes; conversely, it feels like ninety minutes have passed but the reality is only a quarter of an hour has gone by. She sees now she should have been taking out her anger on Slawa, not on poor Julie, even though the kid does drive her nuts.

Tahnee switches stations from the kitchen keyboard. She has been using the computer. There is no way to switch off the big screen entirely, or they would have to call the company to be reconnected. It’s easier just to leave it on all the time. “Ma, can I go look for my dad this weekend?” she says. “I think I might have a clue.”

“You can just forget that,” Murielle says bitterly and then adds, in a gentler tone, “I don’t know why you would ever want to find your father, he’s never sent a dime for you. Anyway, I already told you, we have to go to Grandpa’s, I need your help.”

Tahnee shrugs. “But Mommy dear, you have Julie to help. Besides, this time it’s a genuine lead.”

Another time she might have been more lenient, but right now everything is irritating Murielle. “So what do you think will happen if you do find Terry? He’ll probably try and convince you to sell his Diamond-C dust to your schoolmates. I know him. He’s no good, Tahnee. I told you, forget it, you can go look maybe when you’re older.”

“I don’t want to go to Grandpa’s, Mom. It is so boring. Can I at least stay here?”

“Alone? Yeah, right. Forget it.” Now Tahnee is looking sullen, Murielle feels a bit frightened. “If you come with me to help at Grandpa’s, I’ll take you shopping after. If you stay for the day.”

A car pulls up at the end of the driveway – the mother of Julie’s rinky-dink girlfriend, who is going to take the two girls and her own kids to the public pool for the day.

“Moommm! Mom!” A shriek the pitch of which must date to early hominid: “Maaaa!” Tahnee yells, a sour Acadian howl. “Mom! I can’t find my merkin – and I need it for the pool!”

Julie comes up from the basement. She hopes her mother won’t go down while she is gone. Her mother doesn’t know just how many pets she has there. She has been fussing with her pets, trying to move them to different cages, but she is running out of space. All summer all her animals have been reproducing.

Even during her days off, all she does is clean cages and it is her own fault, kind of. The pink rabbit she brought home from work mated with the blue rabbit she already owned and now there are six feathered babies, cute, though one has three ears, only two of which are normal size.

Finally the lost merkin is found, or another substituted, and the kids depart. “Bye-bye, Mom!” says Tahnee, grabbing her towel.

“Byeeee!” says Julie, swathed head to toe in her thick ultra-protective V-ray-stopper swimming costume. “See ya later!”

“Bye!” Murielle yells back. She is just about to step on a cockroach when she realizes it has a red dot. “Oh, hi, Greg,” she says. “Sorry about that.” She doesn’t know if the roach waves one leg at her, or just in general. Either way, it’s hard to care! Murielle can’t imagine why Tahnee is still anxious to find her father. She has told her older daughter for years how miserable Terry was to her. Terry is not Julie’s father. Just after Tahnee was born, Terry left and it wasn’t long before she met Slawa.

When Slawa and Murielle first met, Slawa was a limo driver – car service, actually – exotic, kind, of a spiritual nature – who gave her a ride from Newark. It turned out that Slawa’s wife Alga, who was much older than he and suffered from reeTVO.9, was a resident of the nursing home that Murielle managed.

The coincidence seemed remarkable: fate. After Alga died, they married. But somewhere along the line Slawa had changed from a man who rescued her, a single woman with a kid, into a fat Russian slob who worked in a shoe repair shop.

Murielle slams the screen door. When she was married to Terry, Tahnee’s father, and Terry wanted to make Diamond-C dust in the bathroom to sell, she wouldn’t let him, which was one reason why they split up; now in retrospect she thinks, but at least he didn’t drink.

Of course, if Terry had been caught by the law for selling Diamond-C dust, all of their property would have been confiscated, even the things that were in her name. Tahnee would have been sent into foster care. Murielle’s struggles to survive, her desertion by Terry just after Tahnee was born; it means nothing to Tahnee. Tahnee would end up doing what she wanted. There has to be a way, some way, to keep Tahnee with her for a while longer. She loves that kid so much. Who would have thought her own daughter would have ended up being the love of her life?

Even so, Murielle knows there is something wrong with Tahnee. Her dead, pale eyes, white hair, white skin; but that isn’t it. Other people are mesmerized by her, but not really in a positive way. They become nervous, upset. Frightened? Murielle has never figured out what it is, exactly. Tahnee has a certain cat-like indifference to people and things.

Despite this, she loves Tahnee much more than Julie, whom she almost always wants to slap. It takes major control not to. Julie’s eager, earnest face, plain and scared – how is she going to get through the rest of her life unless she toughens up?

“Make sure you put on plenty of sunscreen!” she calls, hoping the girls can still hear. “Otherwise you’re going to fry!” It isn’t that the sun is particularly bright – there is a reddish haze in the sky – but Tahnee is so fair, virtually albino and at fourteen years old almost five eleven, all endless insect leg-and-arm stalks which only burn. Julie has brown hair, more normal color, but prone to prickly heat, rashes, asthma. The kids have never been all that healthy but it is probably from growing up around this polluted marshland.

From the window where she stands, Murielle can see the bald spot on Slawa’s head. He is still painting the drive. How long could it take? And, how stupid to wear a swirly yellow MUU-MUU. Yellow has never been his colour, he looks sallow.

Murielle has taken to making him sleep in a tent in the yard, the flies around him are so constant and offensive. When she goes after them with a fly swatter, he shouts at her, saying to leave them alone. That is so warped. If she ignores him, and actually smashes one, it is so huge that fly intestines – or whatever it is inside them – splatter everywhere and are almost impossible to wipe off, more like paint than guts.

Now Slawa is on his knees, facing the house and looks as if he’s about to topple over. It is a hot, airless day and the smell of car exhaust, burnt rubber, an ashiness that might be from the power plant – sour uranium? Bug poison? The crematorium? – blows over the marsh and through the screen door next to Murielle.

Beyond Slawa, across the road, is another house just like theirs: a white one and a half story ranch house with attached garage, a plate glass window next to the front door.

In this neighborhood no one ever uses their front doors, even though each house has a concrete walkway leading to two or three steps, planted on either side with plastic trees. What is the point of the front entrance, as if – someday – someone grand and important will arrive, who must enter through the main door and not the servant’s entryway?

It’s ridiculous, the development is nearly sixty years old but no one important has ever come to pay a visit, there are no front parlors, there is no life inside or out.

Two or three blocks down is the marsh, what is left of it. The chemical seepage can be smelled – more or less – round the clock. It stings the eyes. Slawa has an empty beer bottle next to the metal pail of driveway blacking, or whatever the stuff is. In a minute he will be in to get a fresh bottle. He is stout, with a big gut. He looks older than his years, although she’s not quite sure how old he is; he has never bothered with the skin treatments and injections even little kids know about from school. How could he let himself go like this? He used to be cute! He comes up the stairs holding his empty beer bottle. “Any more?” he says.

“How should I know? Look in the fridge.”

“All the time like this, Murielle. Why you so angry all the time?”

“Go,” she says. “I think you should go before the girls get back.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I’ve had it. I want you to move out.”

“But… I don’t understand.”

“What is there not to understand? I can’t stay married to you any more! We’re over! Finished! D-I-V-O-R –”

“What will you tell the girls?” he says. “Anyway, at least I want to finish the driveway first.”

“Just forget the driveway. The way this dump looks, that’s the least of it. I’ll tell them… you had to go away for a while, on business. Shoe business. You can call them tonight if you want.”

“Hey,” he says. He is breathing heavily now and for a second she thinks he is going to hit her with the bottle. The big gut swings heavily. He’s practically pregnant. His legs and arms are scrawny, though. He has an alcoholic’s jug belly, under that flowing MUU-MUU. He must think the MUU-MUU hides his tummy. “Do you mind if I shower and change first?”

She guesses he is trying to sound sarcastic. “Can’t you do that when you check into a motel?”

“I’m paying the fucking mortgage on this place, I can sleep here if I want. Why don’t you get out and take Tahnee with you and I’ll stay here with Julie?”

“We’ve been through this a million times, Slawa. Let’s not have another scene. Take a shower if you must. Just don’t leave your towels on the floor.”

He goes muttering up the stairs. “I’m supposed to paint the driveway and then move out covered with tar to check into a Motel 99.” He curses in Russian. Once she might have found this sexy. Now she knows he is saying that he wants to kill her. When his murderous rages strike, Slawa is like an elephant in musth, blood-eyed, uncontrollable. Then, in English, he adds, “Stupid cow, what makes you think I have to go to a motel? There are other places I can go. You think you are the only woman out there? Many womens say to me, Slawa, you are handsome, you are so kind.”

She doesn’t bother to answer. It is true that to some he might still be attractive, if you are into tiger-eyed, slap-you-around, rough-trade, peasant-type Slavs.

There is only one bathroom in the house. Good luck to him, thinks Murielle. There hasn’t been any real water, any decent water, in months. It is all that instant sanitizer glop coming out of the showerhead these days, stuff that leaves you stickier than when you went in. Even so, it will be nice to have one less person using the bathroom. The girls’ rooms are across the hall from the bigger bedroom, one on the side of the house looking out to the neighbors and the other facing the street, neither of them large enough to hold much more than a bed: pink for Julie, pale lilac for Tahnee.

When she first moved in – Tahnee was little more than a year, Julie just about to be born – Slawa had been living alone for some time. The place was a mess. In his enthusiasm at her arrival, Slawa attempted to do some re-decorating. He bought floor-to-ceiling hologramovisions at a nearby discount supply house so each room could have hologramovisions on each wall.

But the sets were of such inferior quality that half the time the color was lousy, and then some of them stopped working; when the men came to bring in new ones, Slawa didn’t want to pay the exorbitant fees for removal of the old, so he simply had the new ones installed on top. And then when those broke, he did the same thing. Now each room, in terms of square footage, is diminished by half.

With much delight he installed new light fixtures, ceiling fans, a garbage dehydrator, MereTwelve-operated self-generating devices, top of the line Siebmosh communicators – but half the time touching the light switch gave you a shock, or caused a fuse to blow. Clapping on or off worked sometimes, but often things would go on or off in the middle of the night. And no amount of scrubbing could clean the vintage vinyl flooring, which, a realtor had once told them, could make the house more valuable to the right buyer, if they were to someday sell.

When Terry had left, right after Tahnee was born, saying he was sick of being around someone who was so cheerful all the time, she hadn’t thought of herself as cheerful, though it was true she was taking Chamionalus, but it did stop her hirsutism; that made her cheerful. Terry had grown up in the same neighborhood as she, though she hadn’t known him; he was a fireman and just about the only guy she had ever met who wasn’t working in a factory of one kind or another.

After they were married they moved in with her father. She worked at La Galleria Senior Mall and Residence Home for the Young at Heart, in Administration. It was a job with a future, especially compared to what others their age had found for jobs, working in the meat products factories; it was amazing, that two kids from their area hadn’t ended up like everyone else.

Until she got pregnant when they realized both their salaries combined weren’t going to be enough to enable them to buy their own place, or even rent; Terry was obsessed with making the Diamond-C dust in the bathroom, and she began to realize… that pervasive smell of an addict: violet soap, Brussels sprouts and bleach. He already had a dust problem, a problem big enough that they made him take an unpaid leave-of-absence at work. Then he decided he wanted to go to the West Coast and write screenplays, although as far as she could see he had shown no ability to stick to anything at all.

What skills did Terry have? He couldn’t even write, he could only use a dictation program on the computer so what came out was pages of, “Um, so Joe goes, like fuck, um what um kind of um shit is um this.” She had to admit that making Diamond-C dust was not easy, the few times he had made it before she put a stop to him the quality had been amazing, and what he didn’t do himself he was able to sell for thousands of dollars a gram; of course the ingredients were expensive, the special lights needed, the hydroponics equipment, growing the crystals, inseminating the blossoms, harvesting and so on.

She had been too stupid to know, at first, that was how innocently she had been brought up! She thought he was just growing some kind of mineralized food-product for them, gorgeously fragrant; as if Terry would ever have been the kind of guy who had a nice little hobby.

Thinking of living at home reminds her she has to call her father to let him know they are coming the next day. She dials and the phone rings and rings but there is no answer… He is such a strange old man, he refuses to move into the house with them, he insists he wants to go to a nursing home. Now that she is Managing Administrative Director, he says, she could get him a discount, and she would be able to see him every day, if she wanted! It doesn’t seem to matter that she has told him, over and over, the Senior Mall is the last place she would put him in.

If she doesn’t remind him about their visit he will booby-trap the place; once Julie knocked on the door only to have a carton of F’eggs fall on her head, or when they went up the front path and all the sprinklers came on, spewing them with that water-substitute. Each time he denies doing anything deliberately.

Why can’t he admit he’s no longer up to functioning on his own? He is so antiquated he insists on using a rotary phone. The last person on the planet who really can say he has “dialed” a number. He won’t have an answering machine – let alone voice mail, or a mobile unit to take with him, so she can’t even leave a message.

No wonder she is such a freak. Her upbringing had been like someone from a hundred and fifty years ago! Her father with his obsessive collecting of paper goods and his letter writing – letter writing when there wasn’t even a postal system any more, it all had to go Docu-Express or something!

She dials again. Where could he have gone? Maybe just out for a walk around the block, she’ll try back later.

Her father never liked Slawa; Dad griped all the time how Slawa was a foreigner, and kept muttering Slawa was an old man, older than himself. At the time she just thought he was crazy, Slawa was older than Terry, and he was foreign, but he was so different from that cocky braggart, her first husband; he was so good with Tahnee, he never treated her differently after his own, Julie, was born. She thought her father was angry, perhaps, that Slawa had a nice house for them to live in, she wasn’t dependent on Dad any more.

Now she is beginning to wonder if her father hadn’t been right. Just how old is Slawa, actually? And how could she have ever found him attractive? True he wasn’t handsome the way Terry was; Terry was gorgeous, blond, a tight firm bottom and sassy grin. But Slawa had seemed appealing in a comforting kind of way, solid. Authentic. Now Slawa smells, she guesses because he drinks. Or maybe it is just some strange biochemistry. How stupid could he have been putting all his money into buying that shoe repair business – which is a major failure.

And his stories change all the time, she has long since given up believing anything he said. Slawa claimed to have a degree in science, a Ph.D. from Russia. But he couldn’t get a science job; no one around would hire him, he said, doing the kind of work that he did, which was something – very limited, an obscure area – only in practice over there. Did that make any sense?

He couldn’t even tell the truth about his age! Sometimes he had a memory of things that had taken place when he was a kid, things that she later realized, when she checked out the details, would have had to occur a hundred and twenty years ago. Stuff that had happened in Soviet, Communist times; if she pressed him, he would say something had happened and he was sent to some kind of Moscow long-term-care facility.

And when he was finally allowed to leave, all the old people had disappeared. He came home, his grandmother was gone… Nobody noticed, nobody cared, they said, yes, the old people were taken on a vacation, they all went quite happily… No more babushkas! There were shops and restaurants and bars, which hadn’t been there before.

Why has it taken her so long to wonder if he really has a graduate degree? Now she is realizing, maybe nothing at all is the truth.

3

In the background the endless blare, no way to turn it off without shutting down the whole Homeland Home System, “It’s Maya turn – for fun!” and then Mady Hus In Autoset Meier is on the program; they have had the number one hit in the country for more than six months now, after which the President’s and First Man’s Wedding Registry and Wish List items are going to be shown.

Then Mady Hus In Autoset Meier come back for an encore and are joined by none other than the Fairy Princess, it is really the Fairy Princess herself and nobody can believe it! She has to be pushing sixty, but she still has the touch, not much in the way of singing ability, not much in the way of looks, but still, fantastic! And anybody watching has the chance to Win a Backstage Pass simply by dialing the magic number on the remote! The studio audience – or maybe it’s just a soundtrack – goes wild and even the President grabs his guitar to play along, “Got Dree? Take Harmony. Dree: it’s twice as good with Harmony.” And then Scott, the President’s fiancé, says, “President Wesley, I have to add something at this point if you don’t mind. For all you sufferers out there – and I am one of them – when your Drena won’t quit, take Dora. It comes with its own inserter!”

“That’s right, Scott,” says the President, “You know, we’ve been together a long time and I had no idea what it meant to be a Drena sufferer. Since you’ve been on Dora, tension in our relationship has been greatly eased. And I must say, I’ve enjoyed helping you by using the inserter!”

“Oh, I know, Mister President,” Scott says coyly. “But I should add, do not take Dora if you have or ever plan to have children. Be prepared to perform an emergency tracheotomy. If you are unable to keep both feet in a bowl of ice water for an hour or stand on one leg, Dora may not be right for you. Side effects may include enlarged heart, liver failure, constipation, dandruff, ortlan and pillbox. For those of you with remaining eyelashes or a significant other, Dora may not be recommended. See your doctor if…”

Could she stand on one leg, Murielle wonders, for one hour? No, definitely not. She would have to go to the bathroom, or the dog would want to go out. She’s about to make a cup of coffee when she sees she has already done so. It’s evening, how can that be? The days roil out from under her, a nest of snakes gliding quickly from beneath a rock and disappearing into… where? If only it were possible to put her foot down fast, trap one underfoot, she might be able to remember Real Time.

Lifting the mug with the tepid coffee to her lips she is startled, momentarily, to find, there on the bottom, a large eye, unblinking. Then realizing it is her own, pale green, the color of an unripe olive, staring back at her reflected off the ceramic. She dials her father again. Still no answer. “Slawa!” she shouts, hearing him get out of the shower. “I am not kidding! I want you out tonight!”

“I am a little bit tired of being constantly picked on!” says Slawa. “All the time I am working and you sit there watching that stupid President, my God how can you stand it, the man is lousy idiot!”

Murielle goes past him and slams the bedroom door. Three days, four, who knows how long she will be in there sulking, it is impossible to say; brief forays to use the toilet or take some crust of food back to their room, attracting even more bugs and the bed always with crumbs.

In the meantime he is supposed to sleep on the sofa, baffled, bewildered and then, slowly, irritated, at having to beg her forgiveness for… for what? Even she would not be able to remember. This time, Slawa thinks, it is going to be different. He actually will leave, he can live in the shoe repair shop. The only person left who is important to him here is Julie, and he can arrange to visit her. His cats are scattered all over the house and even though they are responsive, they can do tricks, he works with them daily, it still takes an age to round them up and coax them into their cages. Breakfast, the dog, stands watching by the door. “You go?” he says in a plaintive voice. Slawa nods. “When back?”

Breakfast

“I don’t know,” Slawa says. He is full of sorrow. “You want to come with me?”

The dog shakes his head. “No,” he says. Slawa knows the dog is scared of anything new. Breakfast likes his routine. “When you come back, Poppy?”

“I don’t know.” There are six cages of cats; he carries them out two at a time. They are heavier than he remembers. How much could a cat weigh, twenty pounds? They resemble small mountain lions, or bobcats. He doesn’t remember ever having cats like these before. Each trip he makes, Breakfast follows him to the car and back in again.

“Why you leave, Poppy?” Breakfast asks. “Where you going?”

“I don’t know, Breakfast. I don’t know.” But still the dog asks, “Why?” again and again.

Murielle hears Slawa’s car. Is he really gone? For the moment the house is peaceful, apart from the scream of the dysfunctional air-conditioning unit and the thump of the Patel boys next door playing Flosh Express in their driveway. She has begged them not to because the ball keeps hitting her wall; they continue.

At a distance the ceaseless surf pounds, not waves but cars on the thirty-lane highway that has recently opened alongside the abandoned twenty-lane highway.

She will go crazy if she doesn’t get out of here, she thinks. But where can she go? Anyway, the girls will be back soon, she will have to give them something for dinner and it is too hot to move. Maybe a cold shower will make her less irritable. There is always a chance the faucets will gush real water instead of Sanitizing Gelatin.

Sure enough Slawa has left three towels, wet, on the floor – who needed to use up three towels, just for one wash? – and hasn’t opened the window afterward so the whole place is still steamy, which he has been told not to do one million times. Half the tiles are coming off the walls and the plaster moldering, the floor is crooked, too. Slawa was right about the place; soon the whole foundation is going to collapse.

Last night had been the last straw, to hear him crashing around and wake up to find he had pissed again in the hall, so drunk he thought he was in the toilet. What if one of the girls saw him? And in the morning the urine stank so bad, even a dog knew better than to piss in the house!

Once she had been fond of him, he had seemed to come out of nowhere like a gentle… not a giant, he wasn’t that tall… but a gentle something, maybe one of the seven dwarves, which had always seemed a bit kinky to her, what was that virgin princess Snow White doing with the seven filthy little men – not that dwarves in general were filthy, but at least in the movie Snow White had to go in there and clean the whole place – the dwarves weren’t infants, they had beards, though that one – Sleepy? Dopey? – seemed microcephalic, with a tiny pointed head and huge ears –

Slawa had rescued her from that horrible apartment, one room with the two of them, she and Tahnee who was only one at the time – it was part of her salary as night-manager, but to live in the old-age home was relentlessly depressing, the smell of the old people and overheated, steamy smell of bland food; it had never seemed like a place to bring up a kid, and besides, how would she ever meet anybody there, everyone was sick and dying and/or a hundred and ten years old.

Somehow, she wasn’t certain, she kept buying stuff, probably out of depression, from catalogs, or would go to the mall which you could practically walk to, when she had free time – and the debts mounting up month after month so the leased furniture was taken away; night after night of boxed macaroni and cheese dinner and canned peas and soda that wasn’t even Coca-Cola but the store brand; she would never get out from the mess, and every damn box or bottle had its own singing or talking microchip and some were light-sensitive and others were activated on vibration so that each time opening the cabinet a whole Disneyworld chorus, though atonal, would burst out in conflagration: “Yankee-Doodle went to town, riding on a pony, stuck a feather in his cap and called it Kraft-Ebbing Macaroni!” at the same time as “All around the kitchenette, come and get your Peases, we are good – and good for you! – Pop! Goes a Zippety pea!” And then the deeper bass voice, “A product of Zippety Doo-Dah Corporation, a registered trademark. Zippety – Mom’s best friend for over a generation!”

Terry’s mother lived nearby then and helped out, babysitting, though she couldn’t stand it; Lorraine smoked, even though it was illegal, and had once burned Tahnee when she was holding her, as an infant, and couldn’t even put down the cigarette for long enough to hold the baby.

So when she met Slawa – and he was so kind, seemingly, he wasn’t drinking so much then, or hardly at all, and he visited his wife, Alga, almost every day and then would come by to say hi to her, and play with Tahnee, and take her out to dinner – she was grateful, more than grateful and his house was nearby, less than a half-hour away, with a yard for Tahnee, etc. etc.

Car doors slam. Surely he isn’t coming back? But no, it’s just the kids, returning from the pool. “Didn’t LaBenyce’s mom want to come in? How was the swimming?”

“No water.”

“I thought they were going to start using that gloppy stuff, the water-substitute?”

“They did, but we were only allowed to get in for, like, twenty minutes, then all of a sudden some girl started screaming and she was having an allergic reaction and so they decided to drain the pool in case it was poisonous or something.”

They are damp and cheery, reeking of chemicals, white mulberry skin puckered from their day in the… whatever it was. Tahnee really is a beauty, with that ash-blonde hair and tippy nose, thin, wispy; Julie is chubby and will never be so pretty; her smile is pretty, though, but she has the pleading look of a beaten dog while Tahnee – there is that imperious, snotty expression, and she is always batting her eyelashes at men. You can see she is going to be a real heartbreaker. She never smiles but there is already something frightening about her. Though she is not even fifteen, totally pre-pubescent and flat-chested, there is something about her… an insect queen.

“We’re starving, Mom,” says Tahnee.

“Yeah, Mom, what’s for dinner?”

“I’m not going to tell you to go and hang up your towels.”

“Why not?”

“Because I expect you to do so without being told.” It’s six o’clock, dinner time for normal people. There is nothing in the cabinets or in the freezer that the girls will eat. Why not? Everything is the same, pads or stacks or cubes of texturized cultured processed food-product, grown hydroponically in sterilized growth medium in factories; flavored with emollients, sauces, herbs, spices as well as artificial flavorings and preservatives. The food contains no by-products, all of it is pure and organic. Next week she’ll go see a lawyer.

“Where’s Dad?” says Julie.

It was probably better to get the whole thing over with sooner rather than later.

“Listen, kids,” she says, “things didn’t work out between me and Slawa.”

Julie’s face opens in a howl.

“Why?” says Tahnee. “Slawa’s not coming back?”

“He wasn’t your daddy anyway, Tahnee, so I don’t want to hear anything from you. I don’t want anybody making a fuss, either of you!”

Julie is weeping. “I always knew that was going to happen!” Julie will never get anywhere in this world; she has low self-esteem, Murielle thinks, and is, according to Doctor Ray-Oh-Tee, whose show is on at four, overly case-sensitive.

“You’ll get used to it, now we can have lots of fun without any big beer belly grunting and bitching and slapping his way around the place.”

“Daddy was nice when he wasn’t drunk,” Julie says.

“Right, but he was almost always drunk. One husband a Diamond-C dust dope head and one alcoholic, that’s enough for anybody.”

“Nooooo –”

“You don’t know anything, he didn’t let you see but there was never a single second when he didn’t have a beer in his hand and he went through a six-pack a night easily. That is why he was always in front of the TV in a catatonic stupor and plus he kept a bottle of bourbon going on the side – look, he wasn’t the worst guy in the world and I know you’re going to miss him –”

“I’m not,” says Tahnee, “I don’t even remember him already. It was like having a stuffed pig –”

“Okay, that’s enough. Anyway, we’re all going to have to be tough and strong. I’m thinking, we’re going to get out of this dump and travel and have an interesting life.”

“But I like it here,” says Julie. “My friends are here.”

“Not me,” says Tahnee, “let’s get out of this dump. Anyway, you don’t have any friends, remember, Julie?”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s what you said, you don’t have any friends, remember? When was that, Saturday?”

“Yeah, but –”

“All right, stop it you two. Tahnee. I tell you what. As a celebration, I’m going to order us a pizza, how do you like that?”

“Yeah, yeah! Pizza. I want mrango,” says Julie.

“I’m gonna have to borrow some credit from you kids. Who has money left on their micro-chips? I’ll pay you back, I’ll have cred tomorrow. My chip is over the limit.”

“I hate mrango,” says Tahnee. The two girls begin to squabble. Apparently they have already forgotten about Slawa’s absence. But whether that is due to indifference, or some type of brain damage, Murielle can’t determine.

Around midnight Murielle wakes with a start. Someone has come into the house. “Slawa,” Murielle says, “Is that you?”

There is no answer. She doesn’t even have the money to have the locks changed, with twenty-four credit chips maxed out and she can’t keep up with the monthly interest as it is, even if they let her have more credit. In the morning she will have to figure out how to get another chip, people do that all the time. They can’t go without groceries, can they? She should have asked Slawa for his set of keys, but that would have been awkward, he was in a rage when he drove off.

Murielle looks out the window, maybe it’s someone outside? But there’s no one there. All she can see is the almost full moon, with its sneering face – a Happy Face gone wrong. Long ago a conceptual artist had a grant from a non-profit arts foundation to go up there to make a face out of richly hued pigments (influenced by Anish Kapoor); only, after dumping two mile-wide circles to form the eyes, and almost completing the mouth, an explosion blew up the shuttle – and the artist – and turned that happy smile into the snarl of today’s moon.

She remembers Slawa keeps a baseball bat under the bed and now she fumbles around and, holding it in one hand, a flashlight in the other, goes down the stairs. Her hands are sweating, so slippery she can barely hold the bat. If a burglar has broken in, she really doesn’t see herself hitting him over the head. What can a burglar take, anyway? Nothing that would be missed.

She flicks on the light in the living room. Tahnee is lying on the couch, without panties, her legs spread and with the Patel boy from next door – the older one, Locu – and then Tahnee stares at her, with those cat-eyes, dilated, not even startled. For a second Murielle is about to say, “Oh, excuse me,” and turn off the light.

Her daughter has an expression on her face of pure… contempt, irritation, that someone is disturbing her and the boy. How old is that little punk Locu, anyway? He is kneeling on the couch in front of Tahnee’s parted legs, he turns and looks at Murielle with a sopping face like a dog feeding on a carcass, about to have rocks flung at him. “Pontius fucking Pilatés,” she says, dropping the bat, “what are you doing, get the hell out of here, Locu, I’m going to call your parents –”

Eyes without guilt

Tahnee sits, her eyes huge, sleepy but cold, without guilt. “Oh, don’t call his parents, Mom.”

“You’re only fourteen years old, you filthy little bitch,” she says. “I’m going to call the police!”

Locu, in his pajamas, bolts out the door.

Lazily Tahnee pulls up her panties. It is hot and her thin nighty, printed with a pixyish, mop-headed cartoon tot, only comes to the top of her legs, baby-doll style. Murielle grabs her daughter by the arm and slaps her across the face. Tahnee barely winces. “I’m almost fifteen, Ma. Don’t do dat shit.”

There is a reek of aerosol, or spray paint, in the air, sickly as glue. Something was knocked over? Or more of the weird polluted marsh fumes. “I’m going to puke,” Tahnee says and runs to the toilet.

“What am I supposed to do with you, how long has this been going on?” Murielle shouts at the bathroom door.

On the other side Tahnee is gagging, then vomiting, so loudly she can’t imagine what it is her daughter has taken. Or done.

4

Shoe repair is something he knows from childhood, he had worked in a shop – his mother’s brother? He can’t remember. Maybe it was because he had joined the Tsar’s Club Kids Party and they had gotten him the job? Has he even been telling the truth, about his PhD in physics? More and more is coming back to him, but it is fragmented and torn.

He had been so happy to have his own stupid business – shoe repair, for crying out loud! – and totally surprised when, a short time later, the PADTHAI-NY train entrance closed for repairs and the casual pedestrian traffic he was counting on utterly vanished. There has never been any sign of work about to commence and years have passed.

His head smells: stale dander, scurf; beer comes out of his pores, sour yeast and hops, like the floor of a bar after closing. God, what a loser; is it something genetic? His fault? But no, it had been his first wife’s family who owned the swampy marsh – two, three hundred years ago, maybe, back then it was apple trees, or potatoes – and let it be used for chemical dumping.

After this the property was sold for this cheap-o housing estate, and his wife’s family were then promptly sued for clean-up costs, and stripped to nothing. All he had ended up with was the tiny house. And now he didn’t even have that, only kept the hybrid petro-sucremalt fuel car. He punches in his destination and sits back to watch TV while he waits for traffic to move.

“The Amazing Hair-A-Ticks! This breakthrough in medical science is a genetically engineered hair grown by a tiny tick. The tick attaches easily to your head, it burrows under the scalp while numbing and sucking teeny amounts of blood. Totally natural, these hairs will grow more profusely than that which with you were born! Never fear, these tiny ticks are more the size of mites! Side effects may include a slight itching no worse than an ordinary case of dandruff. If side effects intensify, see your doctor at once. A product of Bermese Pythion.”

Slawa scratches his head. There is something familiar about this, maybe Julie had mentioned it over the summer. He changes channels. “This week learn about the lives of some of the most important figures in American history: Delta Burke, Merv Griffin, John Denver, John Ritter, Dinah Shore! Larry Gagosian and Tiffany-Amber Thyssen!”

Yes, yes, that would be something he should watch, he needed to learn about the people who had made this country America. He must try to hang on to the here and now. His cats – two Persians stippled red and white; one shorthair tortoiseshell; the fourth a Russian Blue; a Japanese bobtail; and the last a lilac-point Siamese, yowl in their crates. Kapiton, Barsik, Murka, Nureyev, Rasputin and Yuri Gagarin.

He had wanted to take Breakfast with him, but Breakfast was scared and didn’t want to go, not even when Slawa told him he could sleep in the same bed with him when they got there.

After a few hours he’s gotten nowhere. By some piece of luck, a neon sign is flashing that there’s a space available in the parking lot! Expensive, yes, but what the heck. He shoves the cats into a couple of crates and carries the whole yowling unhappy tribe to the PADTHAI-NY subway, only a few blocks away. The cats are heavy and there’s virtually no room to stand; thousands continue to swarm onto the platform to wait for a city-bound train that never keeps to any schedule. When it arrives it is so packed with people he has to barrel his way on, something he hates to do but… Whatever.

As usual, people move out of his way with that odd look, noses wrinkled; flies circle around him or ride his shoulders, but is it his fault? He has already been traveling for nearly four hours, to what should have been a destination perhaps twenty minutes away. Of that he is certain.

He’ll sleep in the shoe store, just for a few nights; soon Murielle will see, it is not so easy living without a man! He is sick of not being appreciated.

He can’t even tell if the train is moving; if it is, it is going more slowly than a person could walk. It’s awful being trapped this way, the hologramovisions are broken, stray arms and parts of an elephant move at random, and the sound garbled. He has nothing to do but think, something he doesn’t want to do. Fourteen years of marriage and then, just like that, get out.

It makes no sense. He was willing to work things out; he was ready to do whatever it took. If Murielle had said to him, Slawa, fix this or our marriage is over, he would have. He fixed everything anyway. He resoled the children’s shoes, when anybody else would have thrown them out – the kids, they were American, they wanted new shoes every few weeks anyway. None of them knew what it was like to grow up rummaging in garbage pails and eating food that was literally rotten.

Slimy cabbage leaves, spoiled fish. Nobody here even knew what it was like to finally get money and go into the store, the only one that was located in the area of bleak concrete towers a good hour outside the downtown streets and inhale the screech of rotten food, the frozen fish that even frozen was obviously putrid. And what good did a frozen fish do him, unless he could wheedle or borrow cooking oil, a frying pan, a stove?

Most of the time the elevators didn’t work, up nineteen flights, his father passed out on the sofa. His mother, his aunt, his sisters, all at some slave labor position in factories that made media diodes for arm implantation or organ labs, and waiting on line for hours after work to get some bread. Five kopeks to take the subway into the city. Drinking vodka at age ten just to keep warm on the Moscow streets.

You had to have a Tsarist Party Club Card or at least the Tsar’s Club Kids Party Card to buy anything halfway decent. And even then, what would he have done with a raw beet? Once he had found in the rubble of a building, an old ring. Cabuchon, ruby, gold, valuable. He could have sold it, but he had not. Years later there it appeared in a drawer and he had given it to Julie. Did she even appreciate it? No!

He could live in his shoe repair store. That did not trouble him. He paid his rent, how could the landlord prove he was living there? All he had to do at night was pull the metal gates down over the doors. Or maybe he would stay open and become the only all-night twenty-four-hour shoe repair in New York.

A gray sucking descent through the long wind tunnel and the arrival, into a sort of sack; hot ash, dust, an intricate network of old hairs, half-crumbled vitamins, toast, flakes of paint. Darkness, mostly, except for a few holes in the grating overhead. No, no, he can make no sense, not of what is happening to him nor what has happened in the past. A general shredding of some space-time continuum, perhaps.

At last, his stop. He is shoved, up and out, into a massive crossroads of skyscrapers covered with blinking signs, endless streamers of electronic text proclaiming the latest news (“Dee Jay Mark Ronstad-Ronson to Wed Lionel-John Barrymore!”, “Sixty thousand Dead in Maltagascar”, “NEW OUTBREAK OF PRAIZLY-WEERS IN POSH HAMPTON”, “Polish Mike Hammer Killed in Plane Crash!”, “Humphrey Bogart and Peter Sellers in THE MALTESE PANTHER is a hit!” – this last due of course to new computer innovations that made it possible to reconstitute the deceased stars on the screen).

Advertisements everywhere: “No more suffering with the Britny Chumbles… Arpeggio at last!” And a picture of a naked woman on the beach, her row of extra breasts shrinking miraculously, and then the words “Side effects may include constipation, diarrhea, anxiety, nausea, Formantera fungus, vradnoid spits…” digital screens displaying acres of youthful flesh, poreless, perfect, clad in string bikinis which served as marginal containers for pert breasts and styptopygic buttocks. “When your Drena won’t Quit, take Dora! Comes with its own Inserter!”

The largest display features eight three-dimensional holographic, disembodied, dancing penises dressed in cute historic costumes – Elvis Presley, Margot Fonteyn, Richard Branson, and everybody’s favorite – the little guy, Napoleon. They are each enlarged to be ten stories high on the screen, though the real men are much shorter; the actors unzip their flies so they can emerge to perform on the quarter-hour from a giant cuckoo clock emblazoned with the Bermese Pythion corporate logo, though it’s hard to discern what product is being advertised. “It’s Maya turn – For Fun! Now Available with Individual sub-cutaneous Poppers!”

The streets are full of workers in dresses and skirts – not kilts, but the pleated knee-length wear that is the latest city street trend of men. Meanwhile a man shoves a talking pamphlet chip into his free hand, the one that isn’t holding the crate of cats. “GOT A HEADACHE?” it says in a shrill high chirp, “TAKE NEW HARMONY! NOW AVAILABLE AT DISCOUNT PRICES. ASK YOUR PHARMACIST. SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE PSYCHOTIC BREAK, UNCONTROLLABLE BLEEDING AND LIVER DAMAGE…”

He crushes the chip in his hand. A banner, words floating in space, is strung out over the avenue: “UNTIED WE STAND. Join the Marines Today!” From all sides the distributors press in, handing out chips there’s one with a deep booming voice, “Lose one hundred pounds in thirty days. That’s right, only thirty days!” Not a bad idea, actually, he’d be down to what, a hundred and fifty? A hundred twenty?

But Slawa has heard it isn’t safe. A lot of people kept losing weight until they just disappeared and there is nothing you could do to stop it.

There’s a man handing out samples – it’s a copy of the President’s fiancé’s memoirs – it’s called a book, a present to the American people. Scott has had it privately printed, enough copies for each and every citizen, free, a wee square of papers, with a red and gold cover. And it’s free! Slawa shoves it in his pocket.

To get into his shoe store he now has a circuitous underground route for nearly two blocks, and finally exits into the area that says EXIT CLOSED. This is worse than on his last visit. He pulls up the heavy gates that covered the front. It’s untouched, no break-ins. Everything as he left it. He is relieved, relieved and happy; this is his home, his office, after all.

He puts down the crate with the cats and opens the door. Poor things will want water, food. With gassy hisses of contempt the cats come tumbling out, running in circles as if they have been over-wound. They resemble molecules bouncing off the floor and walls. He watches, amused, until one, the Siamese, Murka, finds what must be a hole in the wall, darts in and is gone.

Moments later a scream, hideous, from what sounds miles away. He goes to the hole, a wind is blowing out, as if there is an underground chamber or tomb far below. He hears Yuri Gagarin yowling, now more plaintively and then abruptly ceases… Has he broken his back, perhaps, or a leg? From the hole a strange odor wafts, musty, vaguely stale, almost familiar. He can’t get enough of an angle to see the secret room – if that is what it is. He will have to make the hole bigger so he can go in.

“Here kitty kitty,” he calls, knocking through what he sees now is only feeble fiberboard, so old it is rotten. No sound at first and then a faint meow. “Here kitty kitty.” Even if he hangs over the edge it must be more than a twelve-foot drop. A wind is blowing up from below. Something he could put down there to jump onto? The cushions from a sofa he once found on the street and hauled in so customers could sit? Though how he will get back, he doesn’t know. Anyway, for tonight, it is too late, all he can do for now is go to sleep. In the morning he heads around the corner to Chez Gagni Kota. Mornings, the restaurant is empty; Bocar is almost always there before his aunt and uncle, sometimes he even spends the night there. The two of them can sit and drink sweet tea, have a chat.

Throughout the day Slawa will be back to eat.

Health food, it isn’t that. Slawa isn’t sure how much longer he can eat the stuff, tomato-curried rancid fish and artificial potato flakes, spinach leaves that are probably something else, processed paper maybe, everything heavy on the dendé oil which is not even dendé but… strained tallow? and too salty.

The meats are halal – so they say, though it is unlikely it is halal, let alone meat – nowadays everything comes from the manufacturer’s, where piles of meat cells are coaxed into reproducing themselves until they have formed vast living slabs. Bocar says the food is authentic, because in his country the people had been starving for so many years and the famine was so dire they had long since developed national dishes based solely on donated American supplies.

He goes there, actually, just to see Bocar and make sure the kid is okay. It is no way to live, not that Slawa has to eat lunch and dinner six days a week at Chez Gagni Pota, but it is the only place where he has a friend.

What now is left? Once, on first meeting, he had even thought Bocar was a girl. If not a girl, a neuter entity, with beautiful black coils of hair decorated with feathers, ribbons, glitter. But, male or female, he was an extraordinarily beautiful creature.

Bocar was an illegal. The family had sold him to someone – some rich American – to do their military duty – and though it was frowned upon, somehow he had gotten two weeks before training camp to spend in New Jersey. He had come to stay with his aunt and uncle and cousins and his uncle had promised to send him to two-year college, after his military service was complete.

Even Slawa could have told him this was a complete lie; after military service – in the unlikely event he was still alive – he would be sent back immediately; somebody, probably the uncle, must have made so much money off of him they felt guilty – but then the uncle’s partner in the business had run away with the money and at first Bocar’s uncle said the vacation was over, he was needed at the restaurant, off the books.

Of course all this took a while to learn: the kid could speak English but he had learned it from books, he put emphasis on the wrong syllable of each sentence, which was how English looked on the page to one who hadn’t heard it – and the truth was, Bocar was practically deaf.

He had fought with the rebels, back home, making bombs and one had gone off when he was ten or twelve, he wasn’t exactly certain of his age. It had not been by choice, his village of tin and cardboard was raided by the rebels, he was taken away to join them. This year’s rebels had been in power ten years before.

Now Bocar’s country was ruled by an evil despot. It took Slawa a while to figure out what this meant, Bocar kept saying the words ‘ev-ill de-spot’ though finally he figured it out. The children – Bocar and the other kids – were told that the ruler, who had previously been a rebel and a good guy, had become one of the bad guys, and it was up to the children to assassinate the evil despot and restore the country. Restore it to what, Bocar often wondered; his country had never been any different than the way it was now. But maybe there could be change. Then he still had optimism.

On the other hand there were the various factions at war even among the rebels, and then the tribes – the Lala Veuves Clickot, who wanted to see the Rolo Greys eradicated. It didn’t matter who took him to fight with them: Bocar’s parents had died of Hepatitis P. or Srednoi gas, or slow Ebola X; he no longer knew what had happened to his brother, his older sister had been killed in front of his eyes.

When there had been food it had been flung from the sky by the airplanes: macaroni-and-cheese (there was no water with which to cook), ketchup, pigeon peas, Frosted Flakes. Anchovy filets in tins without keys, for those in a country where everyone was thirsty all the time. Jars of cocktail olives. Gummy worms, Cremora, Nutela and jars of peanut butter pre-mixed – and inseparable from – grape jelly. Bags of crispy pork rinds for a Moslem country.

It was a country where it rained every other year, if they were lucky; but it had not rained since before Bocar was born. Dry, parched, the lands continuously churned up by heavy machinery searching for… oil, or diamonds, no one was quite sure what… and when it did rain, it was no relief, it only meant that thousands drowned; the tin and cardboard villages were washed away.

The weather had not always been this way, it was said, but no one remembered if the past had been better – or worse.

Bocar hoped that his uncle, who promised to send him to school, would let him train in the field of Massage Therapy Techniques using External Devices.

But Uncle, he is slowly realizing, has no intention of ever doing so. Only when Bocar’s high heels had holes in their soles did he finally manage to get a few bucks out of auntie, who sent him to Slawa’s shop.

For the first time in years Slawa tidies the store. There are so few customers though, since the entrance subway has been closed, whether he is open or shut scarcely makes a difference. And the cats hate being here. At first he is so busy, cleaning, painting, he keeps thinking his cats will reappear but after a day he realizes he will have to go after them, down in the windy spot. But surely there is an easier way to get down there?

Against the wall in a back corner, behind some boxes, he finds a place where the paper is peeling; behind it is a little door.

He pulls it loose and puts his head through. Inside is blackness and cool air and a musty smell. “What?” he mumbles to himself. The flies that circle him are growing agitated. “Something back here… Cannot see… Is maybe –”

Grunting, he stands and fetches his flashlight. Then he stoops once again and waves the light. Steps lead down to pink squares, turquoise diamonds, beige and gold rectangles. Tiles of some sort. A mound of… some kind of stuffing. From an old sofa? He really can’t tell. The stairs descend, curving steeply, maybe twenty feet. One of the missing cats might be down there. Then from the depths – fifty, eighty feet below? – a faint mewling, a thin yowling, and a gurgling rush, perhaps of water, perhaps a million electronic devices receiving only static and mottled signals.

5

Each night Murielle drifts off but wakes at three or four in the morning and can’t go back to sleep. And she is hungry. It seems to her that she never eats, at least she can’t remember doing so. She is always hungry and she never eats and yet she grows and grows.

Refrigerator

Sometimes, late at night, she wakes to find herself in front of the refrigerator. Staring blankly at first then… lo and behold, a slice of Swiss cheese in one hand, a bottle of soda in the other! Breakfast at her feet prodding her ankle with a paw until she tosses him bits of the food. Only his whimpers of “More! Please, more,” rouse her from her comatose state. Does the damn dog have to have a Russky accent too?

“No more.”

“But why? Why, Mama?” says the dog.

She wants to say she’s not the dog’s mother but she knows the dog would cry. “Because in this lifetime I’m the person and you’re the dog! And, for your own health, I say so.” This doesn’t sound quite right. “So, if you don’t like it, come back in your next life as a human being! And my recommendation is, preferably male.” Lip curled, Breakfast slinks out of the kitchen with an expression simultaneously hurt and contemptuous.

How has she gotten here? Where has the food come from? She has no memory of buying the Swiss cheese, or the ham, or the puffy white flavorless Parker House Rolls.

Or whatever it is she finds in her hand, almost in her mouth. The combination lox-and-cream-cheese on a garlic-bagel, the Benny-Goodman-and-Jerry-Lee-Lewis-Nuts-Bolts-and-Berries-ice cream – let alone how or when she ever got out of bed and made her way to the refrigerator.

Murielle wonders what is wrong with her, that she can’t keep the place even remotely clean? She looks around the kitchen: implements – spatulas, knives, spoons, a blender, crumbs, dirty sponges, almost empty milk cartons – cover the green vintage Dormica counter. It gives her the skeeves, the sheen of gray grease rimming each area around the cabinet doors. In the sink strainer is a hummock of partially rotten food – bits of pasta, carrot cubes from canned soup, coffee grinds.

Bugs are in the walls, roaches and ants, a number of different varieties, fire, grease and sugar ants, the big black wood-eating ants, a strange mutated variety of leaf-cutter ants, or rather linoleum-cutter ants, at least, that is what they like to chew.

There are moths – the kind that live in food; hair-eating moths (attracted by the odor of urine), earwigs and flies. Tiny white flies that live on the children’s house plants (some plants in particular have bad infestations); fruit flies, houseflies, ichneumon flies as big as a chihuahua. The news has said that soon there will be a new kind of fly, beneficial, to eat old fibers and fabric, but slow enough to be killed easily.

The scene is one of chaos from which no order is possible. Tipping out the refuse from the sink strainer does not completely empty it, bits are still enmeshed in the trap; now Mister Garbage Dehydrator with grease dripping down the sides of the plastic trash bag liner should be cleaned! The disembodied voice says, “Who’s doing the dishes!” with a nasty, perky giggle, it’s part of the hologramovision system or the computer, then a man comes over the speakers, “Sey Vramos!” he yells, some kind of Spanish?

The forks and whisks lying around are rinsed, stuffed into drawers, counters wiped with paper towel – nevertheless nothing about the kitchen looks cleaner. It’s a kind of mental imbalance on her part, Murielle thinks. Other people have come into the room, gotten out the dustpan and broom, sprayed spritzer, wiped and tidied and polished and within minutes the place has appeared clean if not new.

But no matter how or what she does, objects seem only to be shuffled from one area to another; her attempts at cleaning only stir up more crumbs, grease, dust that emerges shyly, gaily, from secret nests and now expands in its own kind of reproductive frenzy.

From chaos it is not possible for her to create order, only an alternate chaos. Even with the friendly robototron whirling on its endless round of vacuuming and steam and plugging itself back in if it needs a charge, she is not lucky – all it does is strew dirt. Sometimes she finds it banging endlessly against the wall – which it is not supposed to – shouting, “Will somebody please help me. Help me. Time to change my bag!” and then, with greater panic, “Help me! Please! I’m gonna bust my bag!”

Still, that is not what is really the matter at all.

She has let the kids take over the living room with their house plants. It had seemed harmless enough, even positive, their hobby. They acquired clippings from neighbors – Christmas cactus stubs, rubbery succulents, the offspring of spider plants; dead and dying discards.

There isn’t a single thing that perishes after the kids acquire it, no matter that it appeared completely dead it is now growing at a frightening speed, Caladium and kumquat, Dieffenbachia and Norfolk pine needing to be moved practically weekly into bigger and bigger pots. When it’s time to water them, the two kids fight: “You’re over-watering! It doesn’t need that much!” – “Yes it does, can’t you see how dry it is?” – water overflowing, spilling onto the floor, making rings under each pot.

A moist jungle humidity permeates the house: the living room windows can’t be opened and roots have begun to crawl, fingerlike, into floorboards or along the walls, the tendrils of ivy and a kind of Philodendron that had air-roots waving white, obscene stumps that several times a year gave birth to a single, phallic-shaped stinking flower which was able to move to a new pot, slowly and painfully, by air-roots.

Two dwarf banana trees eight feet tall with great stalks of ripening bananas – that neither child would permit the other to pick – are so tall they hit the ceiling, the flies have merrily swarmed on the rotting fruit. Apart from the sofa, the plants – the jungle – take up the entire living room and the floor is buckled and rotted from the moisture.

The kids collect animals, too. She is passive in the face of their gargantuan demands, two giantesses – or so they appear to her – two giant daughters with gaping maws waiting to be filled with worms that she has no energy to collect. Long before Julie’s internship at Bermese Pythion the kids had managed to acquire a number of animals – post-experimentation – others had actually been thrown out, scarcely alive – and Murielle couldn’t help but believe these animals were products of genetic tampering of some sort – anyway, she has never seen creatures like these.

The girls, or at least Julie, keep a lot of them in cages in the basement. Mice with hair so long it can be braided. Guinea pigs with incredibly long legs, little tusks, and nasty dispositions. And the family pet? Something the kids said was a type of dog called a Muskwith who wanted – according to them and Slawa – to be called Breakfast.

Only, if it is a dog, what kind of dog jumps on the table to eat apples and using its claws climbs the curtains to the point that they are completely shredded? The kids say that a Muskwith is a modern canine combined with some genetic material from an aardwolf – who knows, though. She has to admit she is fond of the animal, though she had totally objected to it at first, a fluffy little thing with tufts of white fur and great bald patches, runny black eyes, short-legged and a long pink snout lined with sharp, pointy teeth more feline than canine.

The dog (it is apparently a hermaphrodite; at least that’s what the vet says) feels alone and isolated. Breakfast often disappears for days on end down some hiding hole, or at the neighbors’; it knows everyone in the vicinity and, digging its way under the fence in the back when in a sulky mood, has other homes to visit.

All the neighbors are fond of it, fortunately, and report new words it can speak or how it affectionately likes to rest its sharp, pointed chin on whoever is around. It loves bananas, chopped liver and the glue on the backs of stamps or envelopes. When at home, it has a terrible habit of taking hold of one end of the toilet paper roll and running through the house; or will think of ways to deliberately hurt her, if she doesn’t pay it enough attention – climbs on her lap and smacks her, forcefully, with its paw, or lifts things from her pockets, so stealthily she doesn’t know until hours later that the dog has taken a whole packet of chewing gum, peeled each stick and eaten it.

Breakfast isn’t like any dog she has ever known. It is cute, in its own way, and can even say a few words – “Mama” and “Breakfast” and “I’m hungry”; occasionally says “out” or “cold” – not in a human voice, but painfully, sounds coaxed under duress not dissimilar to that of a child being tortured.

Sometimes it will talk when promised a treat of chicken liver; other times in its sleep, a bad dream, she hears whimpers and “no, no,” or, more astonishingly, “no hurt, no hurt.” But ultimately, in time, it doesn’t seem all that odd – it isn’t like the dog is putting together whole sentences or anything.

Still, it isn’t what a dog is supposed to be. Nothing in Murielle’s life is the way it is supposed to be. Not her marriage, not even her own kids – willful, uncontrollable, sexed-up –! Even being alive wasn’t what she had thought it was going to be. But then she actually had no clue as to what it should have been like, either.

In the morning she has a Health-Nut muffin, the type that heats itself in a little bag if you pull the string, containing ZERO CALORIES and One Hundred Percent of Daily Requirements of Vitamin C, sugar and salt. The kids don’t eat breakfast. When Slawa had still lived here he ate various health foods, yogurt with fresh fruit and nuts, wholewheat cereal with bran or thin slices of heavy dark stuff gritty with sunflower seeds that was supposed to be bread but was a closer relative of paper, hand-made from newsprint or dryer lint.

Her baking. If she had time she would have made regular meals, but why bother? The kids prefer pre-made growth products in different textures and flavors: frozen burritos heated in the microwave, pizza, everything nowadays comes from one of the factories. Slawa is a vegetarian – if you want to call it that, vegetables are expensive but probably also made out of the same stuff – and he usually ate before he came home.

Even when she tried to bake muffins with wholegrain-enriched flour, he said that anything she cooked had hairs in it, or wasn’t sanitary – and it was true, the flour, no matter how recently purchased, was swarming with meal worms, moths flew out of the cabinets, jars of spices swarmed with heaving larvae of one sort or another and even the refrigerator had roaches which thrived on the cold and darkness and the spills of syrup and ketchup or ancient crusts that oozed from the walls. “It’s probably healthy, to eat bugs,” Murielle says. “Protein. I never get sick. Look at you, you have a cold all the time.”

“It’s not a cold, I am having reaction to the shoe repair chemicals,” he says. “And I am telling you – you kids!” he shouts upstairs as the girls scramble, perpetually late, to get dressed. “The best thing you can do for yourself is to eat a healthy breakfast and have a regular bowel movement!”

“Ew, gross!” Their groans of contempt could be heard up the narrow six-step flight of stairs.

“Yeah, you kids with the laughing, to sneer, wait until you are in a place of work wishing you didn’t have to take a big crap in the middle of the day with all your co-workers wanting to kill you for stinking up the toilet, or like me, gotta find a public toilet and getting some filthy on your shoes! You gonna be sorry you didn’t listen to me then.”

“Wow,” yells Tahnee, “you really give me a lot to look forward to, why don’t I just kill myself now?”

It is true everyone but Slawa is constipated, even the dog, Breakfast, who squats, a tortured U-shape in the backyard, slowly stumbling around for hours until finally one hard pellet drops. You might as well throw loaves to the fishes, Slawa thinks, what’s the point, how could they not be constipated when they never eat vegetables nor fiber, and besides, as soon as you poop, those things, whatever they are, no one is ever quite sure, come scrambling up the pipeline to eat the… shit. These nasty primordial-looking little creatures will, with nothing but a mouthful of teeth, leave you with a buttock full of pinholes if you don’t jump off the pot immediately. Whatever they are, you could pour bleach down the drains and it would kill the ones who are there but afterwards their brethren would be back, more furious than ever and could even on occasion hop out onto the floor, surfaced all the way up from the sewers.

A sourness permeated Slawa’s existence that hadn’t been vanquished by Volthrapeâ. Now that he was coming off the stuff he was like a rutting elephant seal swimming back up to the surface. How had he been able to live this long in such a mess? He ran around shouting until finally she had no choice but to throw him out. “It was the Dora mixed with Volthrapeâ that made me… not apathetic, but indifferent. Accepting. It was only thanks to the Dora that I have been able to accept my entire existence. I see that now!”

“Who cares, Slawa! Come home once in a while and help me clean up if you don’t like to live this way! You were the one who wanted a shoe repair place, now you have it!”

“It was something I did for you! You and the children! The dark shoe repair shop, reeking of leather cleaning fluids! What can I care about the kids steeting gluf and pait when basically I have been stoned out of my mind for the past years?”

“So? And you think everyone else isn’t?”

Anyway at least now he is gone. But… every morning – although he is not there stumping around, in his black sulk – it is still always the same thing, one thing substituted by another almost the same. “Kids! Are you up and dressed? You’re gonna miss the bus!”

“Tahnee’s already left, Ma! She went running!”

“Great.” That meant she hadn’t eaten; the child seemed to live on slivers of watermylon, baskets of those strange hairy sprouts. She would jog to school in her tiny shorts and track shoes and get a bagel at the convenience store nearby, from which she would pick out the center dough and consume only the crust. Anorexia, bulimia, Tahnee swore it wasn’t true; anyway, what could Murielle do about it at this minute? “Julie, did you see a stack of bills I left on the table?”

“No. Ma, can you do something about Sue Ellen? She is getting worse and worse, she’s really bothering me.”

Sue Ellen is Julie’s imaginary friend, a sort of unpleasant companion who Julie uses as an excuse for when things go wrong. “No, I have not seen her.” Murielle turns on the HGMTV. Some kind of infectious kidney virus… the anchorwoman is saying it’s an epidemic. There aren’t enough dialysis machines in the country.

Now the weatherman comes on. “Excuse me for interrupting,” he announces gleefully, and goes on, thrilled beyond belief, to announce “a hailstorm is coming, the hailstones will possibly be the size of tennis balls! Tennis balls, great destruction, no electricity for the dialysis, limited though the quantities may be!” What the heck is going on? Where has she been?

Bills. Vaguely a memory of a bill. Eight thousand and ninety-five dollars? From who? And where is it? There is no use in looking, she knows that by now. It was due, when, a couple of days ago? She had meant to search for it the night before, now she had to get to work and make sure the kids got on the bus, there is no time to look; nevertheless she begins rummaging through a heap.

“Everybody at school has them, Ma. Jommy Wakowski had one last week that started coming out of his nose and he got the whole thing but the teacher actually threw up! What the hell are they, Ma?”

She hasn’t been paying attention. “I don’t know. Some kind of worm, a tapeworm, I guess, that’s vermicide-resistant. If you’d wash your hands… Is this something of yours, Julie?”

Julie grabs the paper. “Oh, great! My homework! I was looking for that. See, I told you – Sue Ellen takes stuff, all the time, and hides it!”

Draw a map of the United States

– Name the relevant details

– Outline the former landmasses in a different color.

“Why can’t you get organized the night before?” Murielle looks at the homework.

“Julie, did you do this?”

“Yeah, why, what’s wrong?”

“Um, nothing… What’s the wall of burning clothes?”

“Oh, that’s to keep out the Mexicans, you know, where all the clothes get sent and formed into a wall that they soak in dirty oil and stuff, it’s on fire?”

“I didn’t even know about that! You really did this all by yourself? You didn’t copy?”

“No.”

“I’m surprised, that’s all.”

Her mother always thinks she is stupid! But Julie doesn’t say this, she knows it would only make her mother mad. “Can I have fifty dollars for lunch? Hurry up, Ma.”

“Oh God. Hang on just a second,” Murielle says.

“Ma, I’m gonna miss the bus. What?”

“It’s, you know, the worm thing. What the hell is it with these things, why can’t the doctor give you some kind of medicine that works?”

“The bus is coming! Are you going to drive me?” Julie involuntarily sticks her little finger in her nostril.

“No, don’t, don’t touch or it’ll retreat.” Murielle takes some tweezers and grabs the worm head. The face with dark eyes and no chin is unpleasant. Then with the head of the worm in the tweezers she begins to pull, slowly winding the thin white body around the nearest thing to hand, a broomstick, which she twirls. When she has wound almost twelve feet of worm, the end breaks off and falls to the floor where, though missing the head, twitches across the room toward the gap under the cabinets. Being snapped in two doesn’t seem to have killed the worm.

“I’ve definitely missed the bus.”

“That’s all I could get,” Murielle says. She carries the broomstick and the tweezers over to the sink. The two of them look at the partial worm. As soon as Murielle releases the tweezers the other half of the worm uncoils itself from the broomstick and slithers down the drain, turning around once to look at them – or so it seems – with a contemptuous sneer. “Come on, I’ll give you a lift.”

“Gross,” says Julie. “Turn the hot water on or something. Boil it. You should have flushed it down the toilet. I’m now officially late! How could it live when I could feel it snapped in two?” She sticks her finger in her nose. “I can’t feel any of it in there, but I know you didn’t get the whole thing.”

6
Intelligent Design – Short Version

Somewhere in the universe a child is crying, “Maaaa! I’m bored!”

“Well, Adam,” says his mother who is very tired and trying to get something accomplished. “Why don’t you go play with your chemistry set?”

“Look, Ma!” yells Adam, a short time later. “You gotta see what I made!”

“Not right this minute.”

“Come now!”

Adam’s mother wearily goes to look. “Oh, Adam, that’s terrific! What is it?”

“Can’t you tell? Maaa, it’s a new planet!” says the child with a satisfied smile. “And now I’m gonna give it the spark of life.”

“No, no,” shouts his mother. “Not the spark of life, honey! Remember what happened the last time! I don’t want to have to clean up another of your messes!”

6

(Regular version)

The girls are open-mouthed, watching the President’s boyfriend on HGMTV and eating biodegradable baked crunch poklets. “Gee, Scott, you look fabulous!” a reporter is saying. “Who designed your outfit?”

Scott is dressed in high black boots and jodhpurs, and carries a little crop. Under his other arm is a Cunard saddle, a birthday gift from Cunard – which, says the caption on hologramovision, has been given to Scott in return for promotional considerations. “It’s all Cunard,” Scott says. “Couture by Steve McQueen for the Cunard luxury line; do you know what the saddle alone would cost if I had to buy it retail?” He looks around. “Where is that stable boy? Manuel!”

Manuel is Argentinean, a shock of black hair, gumboots, short but blackly handsome. He takes the saddle from Scott.

The two men pose for the hologramovision cameras momentarily as they stare at the horse. “Christ, Manuel, he’s just too darn long in the back for this saddle,” Scott says at last. “You were the one who took the measurements, it’s a custom-made fuckin’ saddle, now what am I supposed to do?”

Manuel turns to the camera. “Let’s find out, after this quick break for an important commercial announcement!”

“Come on, this guy’s really starting to bug me,” Tahnee says finally. “I’m bored, what do ya wanna do?”

“I dunno, what do you wanna do?”

“I wanna go to the shack.”

“By ourselves or ya meeting someone?”

“Just us.”

Julie is happy. Just them, this is a relief, to be alone with her sister – and even better not to have to wait outside the shack, standing guard, while Tahnee and Locu did whatever it was they did inside.

“Where’s Locu?” Julie says.

“Dunno,” says Tahnee. “Don’t care.” Julie is surprised. Tahnee loves Locu so much. She can spend hours with him, doing nothing but sleeping or half-sleeping, limbs entwined. She is happy. His brown skin, soft and hairless, his amber eyes thickly fringed with long black lashes. How Tahnee loves the smell of Locu, a mix of cinnamon, cumin, cardamom, turmeric. She knows these are the names of the smells because she has gone next door, often, to watch Locu’s mother cook. Rima still does things the old-fashioned way. She opens different packets and cans and cooks them on the stove. Tahnee could almost lick him up, his warm, sweet-scented sweat. Even if he takes showers and doesn’t eat Indian food for days, it is still embedded, somehow, in his skin.

Mostly they don’t talk, they don’t need to, it is enough to simply lie this way, felines in the sun, stroking the skin on the inside of each other’s elbows or necks or gently scratching fingernails on the other’s back: when they are together they need nothing else.

“You guys have a fight or something?” Julie hurries to keep up with her sister. “Is it because he wouldn’t take that bubble bath with you when you wanted? Because I was reading how Hindu people don’t take baths, they don’t want to just sit there in their own wet dirt.”

“Nope,” says Tahnee, and Julie knows that is all Tahnee is going to say.

The heat gets to them quickly. Tahnee’s pace slows to a trudge as they walk down the block. Some days out here when the temperature approaches a hundred and twenty, the asphalt melts. The houses are close together, no grass or trees grow and many of the front yards have been concreted over – everyone knows what the development has been built upon, that is why no one can ever sell their house; though one or two have been abandoned by the occupants; these are boarded up.

There is no sidewalk in this neighborhood but at the end of the dead-end street is a large field, bigger than a football field, with short dead grass and a large sign that says, COMMUNITY PLAYING FIELD COURTESY BERMESE PYTHION TECH. The field is divided in the center by a narrow trough, pencil wide, filled with an oozing black substance that makes any organized sport impossible; sooner or later some kid always gets a foot caught in that… stuff, which can melt a sneaker in a minute and a half. It’s leakage from the swamp. Beyond the field is the marshland.

The kids have built a pathway: you leap from the door of a dishwasher to the hood from a car, to a sinking tire onto an old board. In the bubbly pitch in between, the garbage belches and viscous material, the consistency and color of melted bubblegum, rises and sinks. A quarter of a mile out beyond the field, a half a mile or less from the eight-lane highway, behind some ten-foot tall weeds, is the clubhouse-shack.

Julie doesn’t particularly like steeting. She was eight when Tahnee first commanded her to inhale from a jar of Blixsteetgluf. The battery-acid coolness of the initial inhalation, the sensation of brain-matter plunged into dry ice; the lingering taste of… fermented milk and something blue and chemical… but then there are the two or three minutes that are – if not fantastic, the way Tahnee seems to find it – at least a sort of temporary delicate explosion: gigantic butterfly wings made of glass appear from nowhere and break.

What she hates is the way her tongue gets fat – this happens to everybody – and so she has to say “da” instead of “the”, you can’t say “th” which means that everybody knows what you’ve been doing – and the after, that horrible stench that lingers for hours on her skin and in her mouth, and the sense that she can’t hear. Also, she almost always gets the skeeves, real bad.

If she had a choice, Julie wouldn’t do it at all.

Oh boy, though, it is fun for Tahnee! She can just feel that icy stuff hit the brain and la-di-da-di-dim, that big gray ball of scrambled eggs up there just starting to… curdle around the edges; think of Little Miss Muffet screaming and pissing on that tuffet, think of eggs hitting the sidewalk, think of wham! A cleaver cutting right through the top of the head, everything kinda tumbling: who needs brains anyway, who was going to put them to any use?

Tahnee can always look up whatever she wants on the computer: let’s say she has to know about a pop star having sex with, say, a movie star, how they went about it, doggy fashion or… she can look it up online and see it there, right in front of her!

And it is more fun to watch if her cortex is a little bit frazzled, blast the mushy stuff right out of existence, life is short! Tahnee knows she is going places, she is going right to the top, though she doesn’t know yet exactly how; and later, perhaps – if she hasn’t outgrown him – she’ll collect Locu and have him as her little slave, that is, if she hasn’t gotten tired of him. For the moment, he has to be punished; it was his idea to come by the other night and now not only is she in trouble with Mom, Locu is grounded.

While Tahnee inhales, Julie is just coming out of that initial polar land into a place that is even nastier, with her edges thawing like a plate of frozen cottage cheese in the microwave. She hears something behind the shack. Someone is out there.

Over the years the shack (or shak) has gotten more tilted; it’s listing on its own petard, askew. The place is jammed with discarded mattresses, a greasy grill atop a charred hibachi where sometimes a kid will barbecue a Tundertube Pop made from that extruded tasty paste that is never so good as when it is cooked outdoors. “Did you hear dat?” says Julie who is now in the state they call trapped-in-ice. “I’m scared, get a stick, Tahnee!”

“I don’t know,” Tahnee says. “I didn’t hear anyding, Julie.”

“You didn’t hear dat?”

“Maybe. You getting da skeeves again, Julie.” More noise. Now she’s got the skeeves coming on, too. “Locu, is dat you? Cut it out, you’ve pulled dat stupid trick too many times. It’s not funny.”

Locu has a way of hiding in some cubbyhole or up on the platform where there is another mattress and jumping out to scare them. “Please Tahnee. I’m scared.”

“Whatever.” Red-eyed, frozen-custard head, Tahnee goes out to look. Around the back someone (it had to have been Mason, the local Daply’s Urge kid) has wiped his ass with an old t-shirt and left the used rag next to the piled coil. “Watch where you step,” someone says. “What a dump!”

Weird man, Tahnee thinks; he has the most peculiar skin, translucent, almost greenish beads of sweat on an oddly flat nose yet all in all not unattractive – those slightly bulging eyes, luminous and darkly pellucid. Too bad about the stupid hair, kind of greenish algae-colored – what the heck had he been thinking? He has a strange ominous presence, kind of cool, even cold. Maybe he’d been in jail? It’s only when she’s high that Tahnee has such complicated thoughts. “Who you?” Tahnee says, bleary-eyed.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you, nackets,” he says. “I’m not dangerous.” He grins.

Tahnee grins back – he’s mesmerizing! – then curls her lip. Nackets? Who talks that way any more? This guy must be ancient, forty years old or something! “What are you, some kind a poncidee?”

“I came out to do a little target practice.” He has some kind of gun, she doesn’t know anything about guns; a big plastic gun.

“Keko desu,” says Tahnee to Julie as she peeks out from the shack. “Ck, as bu?”

“Who’s that?”

“Aw, dat’s Sissy.”

“Yeah? Sissy want to try it?”

Julie is scared. Julie has been warned against rapists, serial killers, pimps and strangers. But when she looks at him and he looks back at her she is overcome with a shyness unlike any other she has experienced. Oh! The air starts to vibrate. She can’t stop staring at him. He doesn’t move. Tahnee starts to giggle loudly. They resemble cartoon characters complete with lights and bells going off all around them. Julie is still frightened but she says, “Yes, I would like to try!” surprising herself. At school that is the one physical activity she is good at, in Homeland Security Defense, Self-Defense, WEM and Product Testing, she has amazing aim, it is practically the only thing that had saved her from flunking out of gym. She has never seen this type of weapon before, but Julie bets she will surprise the hell out of him, like a character in a movie, bam bam bam.

“Neat,” Julie says, trembling slightly. “What do we shoot at?”

“Come outside and I’ll show you. What’s your name, sister?”

“Julie.”

“I’m Cliffort Manwaring-Troutwig. Old baseball family. Unfortunately, I wasn’t cut out for the game, not with these hands. Worse than a foghorn for reminding me.”

He holds up his hands. It is true, there are webs between each finger, connecting thumb to index finger, index to middle and so on. Julie winces. “You kids live around here?” he asks.

“Yeah, down de block. Dis is our clubhouse.”

Manwaring-Troutwig

“I was wondering. I stayed here last night. I’m trying to get to New York City, I ran out of food and money. Fell asleep in my van at a rest stop and was robbed. Ran out of sugar-petromalt, can’t find any for sale because of the shortages and I haven’t eaten for two days.”

“Oh, dat’s terrible. I guess. Tahnee, do we have some food we could bring him from de house?” It may not be love at first sight, but at least it is an Awakening of Desire. Or something. Indeed their love may date back to a previous incarnation, judging from the shy stares and nervous trembling shimmering the air. Perhaps one was once Gertrude Stein and the other Alice B. Toklas; Clark Gable and Carol Lombard; Wallace Simpson and the Duke of Windsor, a binding love so strong it endures through many lifetimes, until the two involved are sick of the whole thing.

“I don’t know.” Tahnee shrugs. “I guess. Here, you wanna steet?” She throws the jar in Cliffort’s direction. Julie winces again. Tahnee knows the stuff can explode if it hits the ground the wrong way. “It definitely takes away your appetite.”

“Naw, I don’t like that stuff. I’m going out to shoot this thing with your little friend –”

“My sister –”

“Your sister? You two don’t look alike –”

“We have different dads.”

“Is that right? And what’s your name?”

“Tahnee.”

“Tahnee, come out when you’re ready to try out this Michiko Kamikaze. You gals ever shoot a Kamikaze before? It’s not very accurate and it’s pretty stupid but that’s what makes it entertaining. Julie, think you can handle it?”

“How loud?”

“For a minute you can’t hear anything. And it’s not like what you see in movies, you know. This Kamikaze is made of extrudo, not metal, but even so there’s a kickback on it. I want you to hold it with both hands – you want to watch me first?”

“I guess so.”

On the far side of the dead grass, a football field length away, Cliffort has set up a paper target. When he shoots the Kamikaze it is so loud Julie nearly has a change of heart. “It sounds like a bomb or a rocket launcher or something!” Cliffort misses the paper target completely; he shoots too low and the bullet explodes into the marsh, spewing a twelve-foot high cloud of grass, dirt and marshland muck.

“You see, it’s not so easy. Now you gonna try?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, you gotta try or you’ll never be good at it.”

Tahnee shrugs and winks at Julie; she knows how good she is. “Come on, Julie, like Dad always says, It’ll be like throwing loaves to the fishes!” Julie is surprised that Tahnee is calling Slawa “Dad”, something she has rarely done.

A huge plane is almost overhead. The planes fly over in the morning, and in the afternoon and into the night. All the time, planes are coming in overhead or taking off. The housing development is directly under the flight path to the airport. Cliffort stands behind her and puts his arms around her from behind to show her how to hold the Kamikaze. His hands are moist. “Right. Remember what I said, use both hands because when you pull the trigger it’s going to come back at you so don’t be scared.”

Julie isn’t prepared for Cliffort to actually push her fingers down on the trigger. Or does he? Certainly it seems like something is squeezing her hand and pulling the weapon up at the same time. Maybe there’s a gyroscope inside. The force of the explosion propels her backward and the noise is so loud for a minute she thinks she is not just deafened but blinded.

When she looks up, about to chastise Cliffort, she sees he is nowhere near. High above, a glinting light coming off the airplane catches her eye. “Holy Shi’ite!” says Cliffort. “You got a hit!” It is true. What she thinks at first is merely sunlight glancing on the plane is actually a fire, spreading rapidly.

Within seconds there is another explosion as the fuel tanks go up, and then a vast black cloud, followed by things falling out of the sky: sheets of metal and twisting bits of melting plastic, glass and foam and trays and electrical wiring; suitcases are hitting the ground now and exploding as they hit into flowers of underwear and umbrellas, shoes like seed pods, clouds of talcum powder pollen.

It’s all happening slowly – or perhaps quickly – a rain of hot blood and mucous; teeth and iceberg lettuce; plastic trays of hot creamy chicken and green beans mixed with entrails and chocolate-vanilla ice cream, the kind that comes in little paper tubes with an attached imbibing device. The fire is huge. Not as much falls as Julie might have thought – had she ever thought of such a thing happening – black handkerchiefs are waving everywhere until Julie realizes these are charred… things on fire, or just burning out, maybe newspaper, safety instructions, foam seat cushions or plastic toilet seats.

Drifts of blackened skin still attached to hairs waft across the sky, dander reduced to pepper falling from a grinder. They are immobile, paralyzed by the sight. Something wallops Julie on the head. “Hey, look!” Tahnee yells, darting down to pick it up. Something glints, gold and ruby-red. “A finger! Wid de ring still attached!”

“Are you crazy?” shouts Cliffort Manwaring-Troutwig, “Run! Get out of here! Run for your lives!”

7

By the time school starts, Julie is quite ill. She may have made herself sick with worry; or it may be physical. Her hands have swollen to twice their normal size, blistering from within as if they have been in a microwave oven. She still works in the lab after school; at least this way there is no time to brood about the tragic accident and how she has only herself to blame. But how can she not think about it? My gosh, hundreds of people died, nine houses were destroyed, should she confess and tell the police? She can’t believe it: she alone is responsible for the tragedy, children now without parents, parents without children, insurance companies who were supposed to provide for the widows and orphans going under.

She is evil, and probably evil incarnate, evil personified, even though she had no intention of ever doing anything wrong. Her head hurts all the time, she has inhaled the terrible fumes and now her hands are blistered and getting blacker almost like she has frostbite or gangrene. She has cried so much her eyes are permanently swollen.

On the other hand this year is the big Eighth Grade Test and she should be spending her after-school hours studying. She likes her English teacher, Miss Fletsum, but Miss Fletsum isn’t the easiest teacher; she’s had her before, she’s one of the tough ones. “Pay attention class! We must do more preparation before the day of the big test! Name three hits by Rogers and Hammerstein and two by Rogers and Hart.” No one raises a hand. “This test can affect your entire life! So, think children, think!” Miss Fletsum strikes herself dramatically on the side of her head. “Ow, sorry, head!” The children laugh and no one pays any attention for the rest of the period.

Miss Fletsum is funny. Of course Miss Fletsum is also a little strange and sometimes, often, actually, she announces to the kids that her head isn’t really hers. Once, during a minor breakdown (she had to take a couple weeks off, afterward) she had actually gone over to Mystique and tried to pull off Mystique’s head, insisting that somehow Mystique had taken what was rightfully hers.

At least now she is on different meds. “Children! The United States is lagging far behind the rest of the globe and that is no small laughing matter! Who starred in Now Voyager? Name five rules for owning a successful fast-food franchise! You’re going to have to know these things to pass the test! Essay: what it must be like to live in Nature’s Caul. Who are the sort of people who get to live there? Compare and contrast.”

The class sighs and whines.

“Remember your topic sentence, guys!”

All the kids are drugged because they are hyperactive with saudiautistic tendencies and/or saudiautism. And if not openly saudiautistic then they have Sasporger’s Motif, Wharf Planchette, Florie’s Palsy, ADDA or vitamin deficiency caused by petrochemical solvents causing depression.

A depressed child is not a happy child. A depressed child cannot focus. “Focus, children. Fluorescent lighting,” Miss Fletsum says. “Spelled f-l-u-o-r-e-s-c-e-n-t.”

“Miss Fletsum, that’s not what our spell check says.”

“What?”

“It spells it flourescent.”

“But – but –” Miss Fletsum is spluttering. “That’s absurd! That’s wrong!”

Miss Fletsum likes to make sure the kids know and can use clichés and idioms, as well as famous quotations. She has told the children more than once that she is an accident. She is given to statements such as, “If the shoe fits, wear it – but it will be uncomfortable outside the store,” and “Still waters run deep, unless it’s a puddle.”

Julie knows she is lucky to have Miss Fletsum as her teacher. All the kids like her, apart from her wacko thing about her head not being the right one. Those lapses can be dangerous. But then, she is old, and something might have started to go wrong for a long time.

Miss Fletsum is so old she started teaching in the days before there was mandatory retirement; Miss Fletsum is one of the last members of the Teachers Union; Miss Fletsum lost all of her savings in the Walbuck’s scandal. Miss Fletsum says, when she was growing up, people could actually read, whereas nowadays they are all spoiled because the computers are able to put everything – books, articles, whatever was formerly printed – into wide-screen high-definition hologram format.

“I will never be able to stop teaching!” Miss Fletsum says dramatically, and once more she tries to get Julie’s class to learn to read. “‘In the great green room,’” begins Miss Fletsum once again, “‘there was a telephone, and a red balloon, and a –’”

The class groans. “We can’t do it, Miss Fletsum,” says Daqoyt, “our eyes don’t work that way! How many times do we have to tell you?”

“And besides,” mutters Cryhten, who sits next to Julie, “why should we, there are no books any more.”

At least Julie is going to get extra school credit for working as an intern. It is still lonely, though. Dyllis is nice, but she is mostly working in a different lab these days, and when she is around, Dyllis spends most of her time trying to find dates on the computer.

She likes women who are muscular, with large clitori, an interest in restoring antique yachts and an appreciation of classical music such as Bartók, Aaron Copland and Stevie Nicks.

How will Dyllis ever meet anyone? She is so so lonely. She misses her friends in Vieques so much. There, in the cool evenings, everyone gathers in the central square; they can never go far because of all the undetonated shells that litter the whole island, but it is enough to walk, hand in hand, with a friend, around the zocala, or sit at a café and eat a dish of fried plantains or roasted pepnuts. Here, during the day, she is alone in an air-conditioned mausoleum, and at night she drives three hours back to her grim apartment, where she has to keep the doors locked and the windows shut at all times.

Dyllis knows she talks too much, but there is no way to stop herself. Even when she tells herself, most firmly, to be quiet, still the words pour out in a never-ending river until she is trapped, helpless, behind the waterfall, unable to emerge. Even when she is alone the words keep coming, though, fortunately, if she is walking down the street, everyone assumes she is plugged in to her site.

Julie never sees anyone else in the building.

For security reasons, Bermese Pythion has some kind of policy about employees never interacting. If Julie stays late, dinner is delivered into the lab through a slot in the door, on a tray with a menu to describe the contents. It might be poached quail eggs with strawberries and edamame, served with a haunch of civet cat in a nut crust. Or chilled candy-corn soup with blue aji dulce peppers and quinoa grits. Once there was a glacé encompassing uni, eel and snake, accompanied by multi-textured tofu strands with a sauce of mirin and raw squid-ink foam. The labs at Bermese Pythion are known for serving fine cuisine. Other people come in at night, or in the evenings – at least three shifts per experiment, people whose paths never cross.

Sometimes animals, like the adorable kitten with eyes so huge they took up most of its face, mysteriously vanish. Or in the morning things are dead in their cage. Or worse, hooked up to electrodes or blossoming with strange growths.

The fall passes slowly. Each day Julie listens to the news, wondering if today will be the day the authorities discover it is she who killed all those people on Flight 21894. Now she is at the mercy of her sister, who has got her doing all her chores, her homework, and threatens to blab if she doesn’t obey her. Her dad is gone; her mother hates her.

Anything is better than being at home. Why wouldn’t she prefer to spend all her time at the lab? The lab is kept cold and she takes a sweater with her, though outside it’s usually blistering by six in the morning. It’s hard to believe that when she leaves for the day she will not be able to breath in the searing heat. The temperature has been between a hundred and a hundred-and-twenty farenheit for months.

According to scientific records there has never been such a long, hot Indian summer since record-keeping began. The newscasters say previous estimates regarding global warming are incorrect: unless there is a sudden ice age, the warming of the planet will be far faster than the rate of seven degrees a century. Home air-conditioning isn’t really possible. Nobody around these parts can afford current electrical rates. Anyway, there are power blackouts almost every day, for hours at a time.

In the lab it is cold and, with no windows, always illuminated by artificial yet natural means, lighting that replaces and provides the same wavelengths as the sun. The animals are never going to be able to see anything more than the metal cage walls that surround them. It isn’t right. She wishes she could save them all, even the horrid ones.

There are plenty of animals she can’t deal with. The pigs continue to frighten her, though she tries to look on them with compassion. It is something in their expression, a look both human and malevolent, and the big boar is still there, more lascivious, more craven. He has masturbated himself until he is bleeding. Fortunately the pigs are too large for her to even think about taking, and how could she possibly have kept one? Each, daily, produces hundreds of pounds of steaming excrement.

Insects: Hair-A-Ticks, which are ticks engineered to lay their eggs in a person’s scalp. And each egg hatches into a tick that grows a hair. The hair pushes its way up through the scalp. The tick lives its life beneath. When the tick dies, so does the hair that it has grown; then the females emerge to lay more eggs. The problems thus far, though, apart from the unpredictability of what color the hairs would be – red, blond, black, white or often a combination of all of them – is that some of the head ticks begin to migrate beneath the skin, so that over the years hairs can grow on the nose, arms, the palms of hands, the chest, the neck, the back and buttocks.

A person just interested in getting hair on their head might end up completely hairy, like a gorilla. According to Dyllis, a topical hair-removal ointment could be applied, though rather unsuccessfully. And if a tick came from under the person’s skin while it was still alive and growing the hairs, it could implant on someone else if, say, that person was the next to sit in the same seat on a bus or a couch.

Naturally she wouldn’t want these: but, as the weeks pass, though she knows it is wrong, she smuggles out more animals, small ones, caterpillars that will become moths with a five-foot wingspan, or a galaxy-nosed mole.

One of the lab technicians must have begun to notice: a sign went up on the wall, saying that whoever is taking things out of the lab is going to be caught and punished unless he or she returns the various creatures that had been taken.

Is she going to have to go to prison? This isn’t out of the question. She hasn’t seen another human being, apart from Dyllis; even when she cuts down on smuggling out the animals, new signs are posted each morning, with more threats.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Dyllis. “You got a lot of thiefs around here. Somebody took my skin-plant, ju remember?” Dyllis has covered her tracks. It’s awful, the animals mewing or crying, in a state of permanent bewilderment, unable to reconcile having, say, the temperament and body design of a duck – but without a beak and webbed feet.

Marsupials without pouches that spit venom, blood-sucking lamprey-puppies – she is always getting in trouble for giving them the wrong food. Or she gets bitten. Each day Julie is more profoundly depressed. Nothing she does turns out right.

“You know, Julie,” Tahnee tells her, “I could really use a recommendation from the lab where you work.”

“What?” says Julie, who has bicycled home, though it is really too hot, and now as usual is preparing dinner. “But… you don’t work there.”

“So what?” says Tahnee. “I’ll come in for a couple of days while you’re there, then I can write up whatever you do and submit it for credit and get Mom’s friend to give me a report.”

Julie would do anything for her sister, she always has, and says, “Of course, if you think it will be fair.”

“Aw, give me a break. It’s not fair that you blew up a hundred and eighty-nine people, is it?”

“It was an accident. It was Cliffort.”

“By the way,” says Tahnee, “I’ve been spending some time with Cliffort trying to convince him he should keep his mouth shut for your sake. I mean, I explained, even though you’re a minor, they would still put you in jail. Reform school first, then prison. I mean, if you listen to the news, the President is looking for somebody to punish. I mean, like, his ratings are going down, you know what I mean?”

Julie can’t speak. Wet feathers jam her throat or perhaps tufts of rabbit fur and lard. Whatever it is, she is choked up. For weeks she has been trying to convince herself the plane crash didn’t really happen; she hasn’t watched the news. High from steet, the plane dropping from the sky, the stench of jet fuel, the body parts, did not seem so different from a video arcade game or a program on HGMTV. Only shreds of that afternoon occasionally tear loose, then she shoves them back into her head, where what’s left of her brain, a gray pillow, has a hole that keeps letting out the stuffing.

“You’re a good little sis,” says Tahnee. “If I can get the credit, that’ll be one less course I have to take before I graduate. Maybe you can even write up the report, and I’ll just tag along for a few days, like I said, so in case I’m questioned I’ll have some idea.”

Tahnee spends the afternoon perched on a lab chair watching Julie work. “Come on, Tahnee, don’t you want to help me? These animals really crave human touch, and they need the cages cleaned! There are so many, I usually can’t get to everyone.”

Tahnee shrugs. Just then the door to the lab opens. There is a tiny man, perhaps not abnormally small, but shrimp-like. He is very pink and his motions are darting, somehow backward, as if self-propelled in the wrong direction.

He’s got a rumpled look: he’s wearing very shabby clothing of a style so old-fashioned it must date from, gosh, the 1970s? Something like a patchwork quilt jacket – madras, maybe – and white pumps. Tahnee and Julie have almost never seen a man in a suit, not in this area, not in their world. Next to him is a taller man normally dressed in a gown, who by comparison, almost blends into the walls.

“So,” the pink man is saying, “in this lab we can see some of the newer projects and how they’re coming a…” Then he notices Tahnee and Julie. “Hi there, girls,” he says. “You must be the school interns! I bet you’re surprised the company president knows about you, but I make it my habit to know everything. Although, I didn’t realize there were two of you now! How are you enjoying everything so far? I’m A. Jesse March Bishrop, president and CEO of Bermese Pythion. And this is Mr Salamonder, from the Stuyvesant Technics, who has come to look at what we’re –”

Mr Bishrop is sort of… too eager. Or maybe it’s not eagerness, exactly; it’s as if he’s translucent, or the rest of the world doesn’t exist to him. Maybe it’s just the way zillionaire geniuses are, almost slightly saudiautistic. He’s just a little… off, with his daffy glasses, his enthusiasm and flappy arms; he’s walking on tippy toes, the man is intense.

“Oh my gosh, Mr Bishrop! C.k., as bu?” says Julie. “I am so happy to see you, I never thought you’d actually be here in person, you know all those suggestions in the suggestion box? I’m the one who –”

Julie realizes A. Jesse March Bishrop isn’t listening. He looks stymied. Stymied, is that the right word? It is as if all of his energy has been expelled at once. He can’t seem to stop staring at Tahnee. And Tahnee is kind of smirking. What the heck is going on? Not much, as far as Julie is concerned: whenever Tahnee goes anywhere, this is what happens. Julie has watched drivers get into accidents when she walks alongside her sister. Once there was even an eighteen-car pile-up. In supermarkets men have knocked down stands of fruit with their carts. Even on the hottest days, wearing nothing but tiny shorts and a little halter-top, Tahnee does not attract jeers or hoots or whistles. Rather, something odd happens to any man she is near, and quite often women: an expression comes over them like they have been punched in the stomach. Now A. Jesse March too.

“I should have stopped in before, to see how you girls were getting along this summer. Summer, and now fall.” He is half-muttering but doesn’t take his eyes off Tahnee. “Are you planning to keep working over the winter? You’re high school girls?”

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