A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

And then it was time to run Jones up the flagpole and see who saluted. The hill weltered with ants, the red and the black, each capable of carrying fifty times its own bodyweight in sycophancy and outrage. One nation, two party, third fail, fourth estate, fifth column, Fad #6 sherry. Shall I continue? The value of a secret lies in how closely it’s held. But its value is only realized in the moment it’s shared. This is the paradox of secrets, which haunts the waking days and sleepless nights of all who traffic in them. No matter, there will be no secrets soon. Only dramatic ironies. Suburban Spy has taught us this. Secrets will live in full view, drowned out by nothing more than the flashes and crackles that promise never to stop breaking over our synapses and dopamine pickups, our stimulant-starved attention. Reveal enough of them and people start to see: the secret is boring; it’s the secrecy that’s interesting.

  Yes, we are grateful for the reduced hours. Work turned out to be a major impediment to keeping up with our two dozen favorite shows. But we did not expect to feel bereft of the punishing labor about which we had always complained, whose purpose had never seemed our own, nor to find that the leisure we so long coveted was a kind of torture punctuated by nothing else. We did not just want better, faster, easier, it turned out; not just more pleasing, more gratifying, more immediate, more. We wanted older, slower, harder, more annoying; we wanted withheld love and deferred joy, responsibility, anger, and pain. We wanted to tell the spies: Stop. Stop! Do you not see? You have a massaranduba deck! A backyard with a doghouse that houses an agreeable Shetland collie. You have rec-league basketball on Tuesday evenings. Go to your daughters’ soccer games, for Christ’s sake, make love to your wife. Repair your estrangements and live unbothered by the stirring carnality and happiness on the far side of your neighbor’s fence, a sound like the click of a chamber filling, the reverberant echo of your own loneliness, and the conviction that out there somewhere a plot is being hatched against you.

  Then a woman meteorologist petted the weather report on our foreheads, and we laughed because it tickled.

  It’s true, the gods lost interest.

  “I’ve totally tuned out. For a while it was pretty good. But now it’s just getting worse and worse.”

  “They keep recycling the same plots. It’s like they never studied history.”

  “It’s not on the curriculum anymore. It’s called ‘Business Precedent’ now.”

  “Well, it’s derivative is all I know. Sequel, prequel, reboot, preboot.”

  “But what do I expect of myself after a day of work? It’s like there’s this crap or—what? Go back to watching chemical reactions, animal migrations? Supernovae?”

  “We’ve become spoiled. We lost our curiosity.”

  “Our attention span isn’t— Wait, did you hear my phone?”

  “Sometimes I wish we’d never cobbled the little cretins out of clay, let the ray of light impart the soul …”

  “Hey! Your creation myth, not mine. I wash my hands.”

  And with Ganesha trumpeting for them to pipe down, and Jones standing before an empty auditorium addressing an array of sensors set to measure light frequencies and amplitudes, the vibrancies of suspended molecules, particulate matter in the air up to one part in ten million, texture, firmness of touch, and coordinates in four dimensions, he spoke. “We find ourselves in a historic moment. A crossroads. A time when we are asked to reflect, to look into our hearts, and to make a choice between our friends and our enemies. We must interrogate our conscience,” he said. “But just a little. Briefly! A first impression is plenty. Take Gabon.” Jones rubbed our shoulders in a way that expressed care and compassion but was in no sense inappropriate, or gay. “I am proud to announce that earlier this morning our Unmanned Officer Program liberated the people of Gabon from the oppression of not being our friends.” Jones grinned toothsomely. “We have also, in the process, freed Gabon from material contiguity with Africa,” he added sotto voce.

  The rubbing and tickling felt good. It tickled, and then it scratched where it tickled, and we smiled and laughed at the feeling of the tickling starting and stopping. Jasmine watched from stage right. Jones was saying such beautiful things, about friendship and happiness, that she gave in briefly to her desire to believe. “We believe in happiness,” he was saying. “We believe there is no cost too great for happiness!”

  In a wood-paneled study after the speech McCrery handed Jones a snifter of brandy and a cigar the size of an airship, and soon the room was filled with the fragrant, reminiscent smoke. McCrery said he had done good, Damn fine, and the old man’s eyes glistened in a way that told Jones that even in the depths of convenience and venality there were shades and shimmers of pride that referenced the affective biology of procreation. “How do the numbers look?” Jones said, the brandy-borne emotion threatening to slip the banks of his more politic restraint. “Oh,” McCrery shooed him away, “who cares? We make up the numbers, right?” And as the grizzled pol began thumbing through his favorite stories from a long career in these same trenches, Jones let his imagination wander to his own favorite story, the one where he escaped with Jasmine to a far-off land where life was simpler. In this far-off land Mazzy was out of a job. She had missed three days’ work due to complications in her pregnancy, and meantime the lines outside the factory had only lengthened, and the robots, back-propagating the lessons of experience through their complexifying brains, had only gotten smarter. Jones knew nothing of Mazzy, but if he ever made it to this land where he thought life was simpler, he might nudge Jasmine and say, Look at that woman and her girl, look how happy they are together, conjecturing about the resemblances of the clouds above. Look at the very simple things one needs for happiness and how horribly and needlessly we have complicated our lives. Then Jones and Jasmine would have couples’ massages, face masks made of China clay, ang dtray-meuk, jackfruit daiquiris, air-conditioning, silk nightgowns, running water, hot water, indoor plumbing, electricity, Wi-Fi, bottled water, imported cigarettes and liquor, lace underwear, oral contraceptives, federally insured bank deposits, credit cards, responsive embassy and consular services, international calling plans, reliable civic institutions, savings and retirement accounts whose managers made healthy 7 and 8 percent annualized returns thanks to investment in the now-automated factory where Mazzy once worked and the resale of its gutted parent company after a leveraged buyout by P.E.

  But this was only Jones’s dream of “getting away from it all.”

  And because he had lost track of what McCrery was saying and a silence had settled in the room Jones asked, What about the whole Suburban Spy thing, how was he supposed to pick a side when they didn’t know who would win? The party chief looked at him, puzzled. As Jones was of course aware, he said, Suburban Spy was a 501(c)(4) established to acculturate the public to the postprivacy era. It’s like a commercial, he explained, only more confusing. You never knew who might be watching you, what small misstep, inadvertent utterance, or misjudged email might be your undoing. Better to get used to it. Soon the only privacy left would be the lonely, unuttered secrets of the mind, and even those would go one day. McCrery winked.

  The news crawled ant-like across the bottom of the screen.

  “Gabon is sinking,” Jones reported.

  McCrery nodded. “The algorithm turned out to be a war crime.”

  “What do we do now?”

  The chief wriggled his fingers in a tickling motion in the air and the two men broke into extravagant laughter.

  The night wore on. They got drunker and drunker and Jones felt safer and safer, although who knew whether this was not one more test? Who knew whether the wood-paneled room was not bugged, whether McCrery’s brandy was not apple juice, or amobarbital, and his cigar an advanced polygraph device? Who knew when McCrery said, “Remember what it was like to toss the ball in the park with your old pop?,” tears lighting the old man’s eyes, whether this was not a crucible to gauge Jones’s own susceptibility to sentiment, nostalgia, the softness of the body, the impermanence of the
flesh? Remember Aerobies, we might have said, Polaroids, kites, spy scopes that peek around corners, Van de Graaff generators, fondue, crystal radio sets, punch cards, American Girl dolls, Speak & Spell, Patriot Missiles, Tang and tape decks, Fat Elvis, glasnost, Mothra and postpunk, Bo Jackson, analog everything, lossy data transmission, Tiananmen Square, Rainforest Crunch, the first Dream Team, the ozone, Eritrean independence, the Académie française, deconstruction, dynamos, tree houses?

  We remember. Étienne, the Order of Saint Louis pendant on his neck, is so besotted with yesterday he has fallen off his stool. Jacques-Charles suffocates beneath the rotting tides of the past, a tattoo the Miami gave him for courage glistening with sweat in the weak light. Antoine de la Motte cries out for the phantom girls and boys who pass, who may be our sons and daughters but whom we have estranged in holding on to things that have no meaning for them, values that no longer obtain, worlds that are dead and dying, in holding on to them in moments when love may be letting go. It has grown dark. At this late hour we are past the help of theurgy or Antabuse. We signal for another round and say tomorrow we will start anew. Agnotology promises not just confusion but relief in the form of our assured ignorance. If we squint, we see the gleaming things we used to make roll majestically off the line. A mere glimmer in the heat haze of the past. We reach out a hand for them, remembering …

  But we can only remember for so long because the show is back on, the Spy in Plaid slipping the surgical mask over his face, running the drill, the water syringe, the high-volume oral evacuation system in a preoperative test. The Spy in Yellow’s estranged teenage daughter has disguised herself as his assistant in a blond wig, cosmetic contacts, a thin latex mask. She is not his daughter, it seems, not estranged. She is a cutout, an asset. Everyone is an asset. The Spy in Plaid may know this; he may not. But we are too smart to miss the cameras in the ceiling fixtures, disguised as pine cones in the trees, the boom men and grips posed as civilians. We see all of it. And still the layers may go deeper. They may be decoy cameramen, grips, and assistant DPs. The layers may go deeper still. So deep that when we pull every last one back there is finally nothing left, the whole of it a system of no more than internal and self-consistent logic, which is to say of madness, or both. The spies, one recumbent, one poised to do him oral harm, regard each other. Music strains for the bittersweet horizon of everything we lose just going about the day … “To think,” says Barry, “that I have wasted years of my life on a spy who was not even my enemy.” He had wanted to study literature once, Proust, before the agency, Tehran, before Beirut, East Berlin, Somalia, Loudoun County, before desk work, reorgs., thirty-five pounds in Panera Bread pastries, his dwindling friends, before the night sweats, Tina’s menopause, nervous disorders, fear of loud noises, large spaces, people, aloneness, house cats, photographs, quiet—

  Plastics

  Julianna Baggott

  POST-AMERICAN EMPIRE, PANAMA CITY, FLORIDA

  We harvest blue. This is our lot. The penned yard, straight up to our trailer. It’s mostly caps that were once screwed onto bottles.

  Red is our neighbor’s lot. They’re richer than we are. The man and woman who live there had enough money to buy a low-end fake baby. It has a blurred face and its fingers are all attached to each other, and they can’t move as individuals on a single unit. Its cry is very real, so real it sometimes wails in the middle of the night, and the man will carry it and pace along his lot outside, in the near dark, and shush it.

  Green is on the other side. There’s only an old man in that trailer. He doesn’t speak to anyone and no one speaks to him.

  But what I want to get at is this: my mother and Luck and what the storm kicked up.

  I knew the storm was coming. The sky was stirred up and the caps were rattling in the breeze, ticking against each other like death beetles. Our blue was knee-deep, which was good for that time of the season. I knew the storm would set us back, but it might also kick up something good from the gulf’s pit-stomach, if we could survive it.

  I walked down to the shore as fast as I could that morning. I wasn’t the only one nervous about the sky. The shore was full of pickers, each of us dipping and bobbing as we sorted through plastics, then stopped to look up while the clouds got sooty and dark. Then we’d put our heads down again to scan and dip and bob.

  That morning, I found red lipstick on the lip of a bottle and I held it for a moment and I imagined the mouth, the lipstick, the world this bottle came from. This would happen from time to time—these traces of where it all came from—and it made my head feel airy with curiosity. It’s a job, picking up all the blue bottle caps, but it was these rare finds—ones that I was only allowed to hold for a moment—that kept me going. You never know what you might find out there, my mother would always say.

  I was holding this bottle with its lipstick mark when I felt it—the shiver that tells me: this is the moment before. Just before. I felt this kind of shiver just before my father left us. He’d gotten called up to be a barter man and started heading in for the sale of our goods. He wasn’t allowed in the cab of the truck, but he could cling to the wire cage on the truck bed that kept all of our harvests sorted into mesh bags. There were six men, clinging to the truck. And when they came back at night, they sat inside the empty wire cage on the truck bed. And when he walked into the trailer, he smelled like the refinery—burnt and chemically sweet.

  Then, one time when he was gone, I felt this shiver inside of me all day long, and when the truck came back, there were only five men. He was gone.

  And my mother told me he’d come back. “He’s just trying to make a better life for us. When it’s ready, he’ll let us know.”

  I’m now fifteen and my father hasn’t come back. It’s been just Teardrop, my mother, and me for three years. And my mother is sick—fever, headache, a gnawing in the bones of her foot. She is a small woman and she has gotten very puny, thin and frail.

  The morning before the storm, I dropped the bottle with its lipstick mark. I felt the shiver, and it felt Lucky. My bag was almost full and I stood up straight and tall. Then I saw it—a fresh-dead gull. I knew it was fresh-dead because the shoreline was swarming with pickers and no one else was on it yet. To make sure, I put my fingers to the downy feathers on its chest and it was still warm. I was worried about the Luck. It might be too much too soon, wasted on a gull and none left for my sick mother, none left for us to survive the storm.

  Or I thought it might be a Mark of Luck—one that would be lasting, that might save us all.

  Either way, I couldn’t turn away from Luck. That would be disrespectful and damning.

  I fitted the gull under my shirt and walked straight home, hunched over it so no one would know.

  When I got to our lot—bag on my back and a fresh-dead gull under my shirt—the old man from the Green Lot was staring blankly out of his door, the busted screen rippling. He didn’t ever look at me at all and this was no different, which was good. I ran up the path between blues and greens to our trailer door.

  The gull’s feathers were soft against my stomach’s skin.

  Inside the trailer, my mother was twisted in her sheet. A child’s sheet decorated with fire engines. And she’d gotten nearly as small as a child. I seemed big and lumbering beside her. The fire-engine sheet wasn’t ours. We found it here when we arrived. See, this wasn’t always our trailer. My father had to request our lot from the plant, and, after a few years of casting around, this was granted. My mother was pregnant with me so we were Lucky.

  See, plastics and what swarmed among it all weren’t good for any of us, it turned out. The Sperms went sluggish as if the plastics settled into their casings and made them stiff and aged. Their tails were heavy and they flicked slowly with little propulsion. Sometimes instead of shooting forward, they rolled in lazy circles.

  And the Eggs were no better off. They thickened and wobbled. They didn’t seem to know what to do anymore. They lost all sense of timing and forgot to embed.

 
This is how my mother explained it to me.

  And the DNA was agitated—stuttering then skipping ahead. If a baby was Lucky enough to be born, it was lacking in other things. One of the legs of an X chromosome might not exist at all. “Imagine a one-legged table, toppling over,” my mother said, and I tried but I never quite understood.

  I’m good. I’m OK. I don’t know what I would have been, but I wonder.

  That’s how the fake babies came about. They’re made of the babies that don’t make it and of plastics—they’re recycled babies. They don’t grow exactly—not quite right. But you also don’t need to feed them regularly either. They stay babies for longer than real babies would. And they likely won’t fully grow into adults. But that’s OK because we’re not all going to survive anyway, at any point. Nothing’s got a warranty.

  When we moved in, the trailer was full of things that weren’t ours. My mother told me that she decided that a child or two had lived here before and a few women. No men. We don’t know what happened to any of them. There was no blue in their lot when my parents arrived. None at all.

  I put the gull in the small sink and knelt next to my mother, who was on the built-in sofa. She was hot and suffering. I had a few pills for pain, but both of us decided that we should be spare with them. Hold them in case of a painful death. I helped her sit up, and I put a water cup to her lips. She sipped a little.

  “Where’s Teardrop?” I asked, but she was too tired to answer. I spotted him pulled up into his shell, not far from his water dish. Teardrop is called Teardrop because, when I found him, his shell was caught in a plastic six-pack ring. He’d continued growing around it and so his shell will never be perfectly oval. His is teardrop shaped.

  “I found a gull,” I told my mother and Teardrop. “I’ll cook it. It’ll taste good, I promise.” My mother hadn’t had an appetite for many days, but still I thought she’d perk up for a fresh-dead gull. And she did make this small little noise in her throat—a sweet hum.