“Have a look.”
I squinted in close to the nearest of the tanks. I spotted them now, realized
in fact that they’d been visible all along but that I’d mistaken them for sworls of colored shadow in the glow. Behind the glass swam hundreds upon
hundreds of tiny, translucent green-yellow crabs. Each was perhaps three-
quarters of an inch wide. They coursed over one another in a giddy chaos of
youthful agitation, like puppies, or sperm.
I moved to the next tank and found more. I was no savant, but a rough
guess suggested there might be tens of thousands of the tiny crabs in the
damp, humming basement with us there, a slushy riot of life, a throbbing
army of creatures.
“Maybe you can help me decide what to call it,” said the crab. “I keep
vacillating between Revenge of the Crab and Crab World Domination.”
“I like Crab World Domination,” I said. “It suggests more continuity with your earlier work.”
“That’s a point,” said the crab.
063
JONATHAN LETHEM
“They’re all him, you understand,” said Reg Loud.
“Sorry?”
“All him,” Loud repeated. “They’re clones.”
“I see. How soon will they be, uh, ready?”
“They won’t attain his mature size for twenty years,” said Reg Loud. “But
they’ll be ready for release in three or four.”
“Not so much of a comedy this time,” I mused.
“You could say that,” consented the crab.
“Perhaps more of a disaster movie, or a cable miniseries?”
“Do you know anything about global warming, Mr. Lehman?” said Reg Loud.
“Of course.”
“You say you do, yet do you understand that the ten warmest years in
recorded history have occurred since 1983? Seven of them since 1990. Some of us will be better adapted to the coming changes than others.”
“In other words,” said the crab, “this really has nothing at all to do with
television.”
“The evolution will not be televised,” chortled Loud. “The mocked shell inherit the earth.”
“Don’t worry, Lehman, we’ll still need historians of television comedy, or
rather we’ll need them again in a few dozen centuries, when crabs develop
television. Your work won’t be in vain.”
“Are they all comedians like their father?” I asked.
“We’ll see, won’t we?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“Let’s leave them now. Thank you, Reg.”
I took one last glance back at those rows of tanks that glowed, it seemed to
me now, much as if lit by cathode ray. I wondered if the radiant, morsel-sized
clones, who so resembled cartoons or plastic toys, would truly be fit to outlive us, to occupy some brave new world. It was hardly anything I’d mention to
the crab, but I had an intuition his progeny might share his tropism for the
human world, and be bereft without us. Perhaps this was my naive projection,
an inability to fathom a universe without myself in it. But the crab himself
had never known the sea, so far as I understood. He’d been born and raised
in a landlocked state, in custody of a solidly middle-class, if not exactly
loving, family.
064
INTERVIEW WITH THE CRAB
“Close the door,” the crab commanded. He scrabbled up the hump of grass,
and back to his tile shelf. I wondered whether he ever even so much as dipped
himself in the pool. It looked unsullied by any of the secretions I now detected in both dried and fresh traces on the tile and lawn. I followed back to the
poolside, but didn’t retake my chair. I think we both sensed the interview was
nearly at an end.
“You get what you came for, Lehman?”
“Far more, I’d have to say.”
“Well, I’ve got one question for you.”
“Certainly.”
He paused, perhaps sinking into himself again for a moment. I couldn’t
keep from thinking that the sight of the blank greenish tide of successors had
made him every bit as melancholy as it had me. Before he spoke again he
made another of his strange wheezy yawning sounds, and trickled his legs,
including the amputated stump, along the tiles, quite softly. Each of his claws stirred, too, though they didn’t open.
“I really caused you to think of Keaton or Newhart? Because I just don’t see
it.”
I was astonished it still mattered to him. “It was a stray thought, only
intended as a compliment.”
“Those figures are much milder than my character, at least after the first
season. I always felt I was more in the line of a classic slow-burn specialist, someone like Edgar Kennedy or William Frawley or Beatrice Arthur.”
“There’s validity in those comparisons,” I admitted. The fact that the
crustacean could even supply these names made nonsense of his earlier
claims not to have known Keaton’s films, and of his stiff refusal to consider
tracing the lineage of influence behind his own work. But I was hardly keen
to confront his inconsistencies.
“Listen, nobody but you and me even remembers those names,” he said,
hardening again, as if he’d allowed an instant of vanity to bare his defenses.
“You need to get yourself a life that’s free of this kind of academic horseshit.
If I can move forward without wallowing, it’s the least you can do.”
Had he eschewed wallowing? It was another claim I didn’t care to refute.
“I’m grateful for the advice.”
“Mr. Boniface can call you a cab.”
065
JONATHAN LETHEM
“That’s fine. I’ll wait in front.”
“Lehman?”
“Yes?”
“One thing I ask. I don’t want you to lie about me, you understand? I don’t
care what anyone thinks. Every word, every belch and fart, is on the goddamn
record. You got this? Tell the truth about me.”
I promised the crab I would try.
066
EL PEPENADOR
By Benjamin Parzybok
Pico sat on a child’s dirty dollhouse and drew from the end of a bottle of
Marzo’s self-made sweetwine, which tasted a little of plastic residue and car
oil and, like everything else, contained the fetid smell of the dump. The tin
shed rattled and shook around him, hitting a harmonic and popping a nail
from a tired hole at the roof’s edge.
The rattling meant the trucks had arrived and the nackers would be
gathering at the new spoils. He thought he could hear their hydraulic
skittering over the din.
Pico downed the last of the wine and stashed it deep in one of the dollhouse
bedrooms. Then he grabbed his tharpoon and tool belt from the wall.
Outside the shack, he whacked his chest once with his tharpoon shaft and
said Aha! The pepenadores were gathered at the fringes of the settlement. He joined them, weaving slightly, making sure to keep a distance from his parents
and whatever commentary they may have for him. Used to be, when the
trucks came everybody sprinted for the new stuff. But since the nackers came,
they were second-tier dumpdwellers now, and had to rely on old buried finds.
Just trash themselves, looking for more trash to sell or use.
At one end of the lineup he saw Mouse and he tried to move inconspicuously
toward her, ignoring
the names jeered at him as he went down the line;
kekker, nackanigmo, pajero. He kept his head down as he passed. Mouse wore a cowboy hat and an orange mechanic’s jumpsuit with a missing arm. She
liked to stand out, he thought, la chica is all full of herself. All the same, he admired the way her hair spilled from her hat, the cocky angle of her stance.
He’d follow her to harvest when they all set out. Tag along quietly. Follow his late best friend’s older sister, as he always had. He stood fifteen paces away so as not to draw her notice.
Pico took out the shard of whetstone he kept in his pocket and worked at
the tip of his tharpoon. Marzo’s sweetwine gave him a happy boldness, a
desire to knock someone off their feet, though he usually ended at the bottom
of such a scuffle. He looked at the pepenadores around him. Some were old, buried beneath layers of clothes, little mole people who owned what they
BENJAMIN PARZYBOK
could wear. Some were young, kids his age. Most ignored him, sweat lines
cutting the dirt on their faces. All of them were tense and focused, watching
the trucks on the horizon of trash.
Waiting was hard, and Pico had the hiccups. He leaned heavily on his
tharpoon and stared at his mismatched boots. They waited another ten minutes
for the main dump to clear of nackers, then they trickled into its expanse.
Mouse headed for the great wall and he followed at a distance. He wasn’t
sure what she’d find there, so far out. Crazy chica always did stuff her own way, he said to himself, trying it out dismissively, but his throat ached with
longing. She probably knew he was following along, but he kept hidden all
the same. She’d probably shoo him off.
They were maybe a couple kilometers out when a nacker picked up Mouse’s
trail. It skittered along behind her, stalking her, waiting for her to make some find. Pico swore. This nacker looked different from the others. Some kind of
new model with carbon or plastic joints that didn’t make noise. Why was it
so far from the trucks? Pico crouched low and ran behind as quietly as he
could, taking cover in the uneven trash heaps.
Mouse stopped and dug at a swell with her tharpoon. She took her cowboy
hat off and worked at the mound and he could tell it was something good by
the way she dug. Loosed by one of the recent earthquakes maybe. She had
the luck. The nacker paused at a distance to see what she would find, and he
paused too. When the nacker sat on its haunches, it was hard to distinguish
from the trash around it. The way she dug was something to watch, a perfect
sort of movement. If only he hadn’t messed it all up between them. He would
have liked to watch for a while but he had no time.
Pico crouched down out of sight and breathed hard in fear. Maybe her find
was crap and the nacker would move on. He’d kamikaze the pinche waste bot, he would! He psyched himself up and began to shiver uncontrollably.
After a few minutes, Mouse pulled up a full-on car door from the ground,
worth plenty at the market with its metal and embedded electronics. The
nacker would want it. Pico gripped his tharpoon and ran toward them. The
smog heat was getting to him and he sweated, the sweetwine buzz now a
disorienting spin. The nacker was too far ahead of him and much faster. Its
six legs traversed the dump obstacles, the tentacle gripper raised in front,
assisting when it needed to, poised to strike.
070
EL PEPENADOR
It got her at 10 meters—a charged electric bolt that knocked her flat out.
She only just saw it, and the look on her face before it got her crushed him.
Pico stopped where he was. He couldn’t see where Mouse had fallen, she was
downed behind trash.
For a moment, breathing ragged and hot like some ancient machine, he
considered what to do. He wanted to run away but he couldn’t leave her.
Rumor was nackers lifted organs off fallen pepenadores. An indignant rage filled him and he pounded his thigh with his fist. Why was a nacker out here
and not at the trucks anyway? Why did pinche nacker trouble always find him. If it weren’t for them, Suto might be alive. And Mouse might—no it was
too much to hope for.
This nacker had better range than the last model.
He inspected his tool belt for something that would help. He plugged his
GPS jammer into the battery pack at his belt—28 percent charge. It was
janky, but it should keep the thing from tattling its location. Among the
other tools: a light, a few circuit boards he carried hoping to find parts to
make something whole, a mirror. There wasn’t much else.
He ran in a crouch, maneuvered along the ground with his hands and feet
like one of them, his ratty cloth gloves tearing on the ground. The bot was in
the process of laser-sawing the metal and other recyclables off the door—
processing in place. Once its middle compartment was full it would go back
to Basucorp and empty. Mouse was face-down next to it.
The terrain allowed him to get within range. An awful smell of rot pervaded
the air. His grip on the tharpoon kept slipping. He knew he couldn’t hope for
much. He crawled quietly toward the nacker and then let the tharpoon fly. It
was a bad, glancing blow. The tharpoon ricocheted off the top of the nacker’s
dome where its vulture eye was encased in hardglass, but a bit of plastic the
size of a nose jounced off. That was the lousy best he could do. He shrugged
his shoulders to his ears, bracing for shock, and turned and ran hard, hating
himself, tripping over debris. His foot caught in the carcass of some animal
and he went down hard to the ground. He paused there, the breath knocked
out of him, and listened for its approach. When his breath came back he
stood and saw it was still where he’d left it.
071
BENJAMIN PARZYBOK
The thing was all schizo, swinging its arms and tilting strangely to the side.
He crouched low and watched it, trying to figure out what it was doing. It
wasn’t right. It was freaking out. He made a wide circle around it and then
dashed in. He got a hold of Mouse’s collar and dragged her out of range. The
nacker’s tentacle sent a few charged bolts at the ground around it in a
spasmodic circle.
He sat next to her and watched it go. Mouse, he said, but she didn’t stir.
Mouse, come on güey, please get up.
It was weird to see her this close. There was a line of blood down her
forehead from her scalp that cut the dirt on her face, and it startled him with how perfect and pure it was. Even her deformed ear had an angelic shapeliness
to it. Mouse, he said again. He had imagined her countless nights, as he lay
awake in his cot, and here she was in the flesh. This close. He wanted to cup
her cheek with his hand, to stream energy from his body into hers, he wanted
to cradle her, to say he was sorry, to make everything right. He couldn’t
believe he’d hit the pinche maricón.
The nacker would be trying to radio home and he felt a panic rising in him.
Others would come. At least he’d jammed its location. He laid Mouse down
and made his way around the nacker so that the vulture eye faced away from
him, and the tentacle gripper was out of reach. With the tip of his tharpoon
he hooked a bowl-shaped plastic piece of tr
ash—the broken skin of a crashed
cycle helmet, the rider long dead—and slowly lowered it over the top of the
nacker’s eyes, the digital and the meat. At least they wouldn’t be recorded.
The ground was scorched.
He jumped with each charge the nacker fired. There were dim outlines on
the horizon, but so far this quadrant of the dump was dead. He stayed low
and just out of sight all the same.
With the old model nackers, a bolt could put a pepenadora down for an
hour or more. He lay down beside her and whispered in her good ear. It’s
okay, Mousita, I got it for you. Wake up now, pretty girl. He wondered if she
liked to be called pretty girl.
The nacker had four pinchers on its tentacle arm and not five. They were
always trying to save money, to make shit cheaper. Well, he thought, a pride
rising in him for the first time. I got you this time, maricón. He was tiring of the thing’s antics and spasms, and the itch to tease it started to overpower his 072
EL PEPENADOR
fear. Seemed like the new nackers were more fragile than the old. He reached
his tharpoon in and gave it a sharp jab to the middle. It jerked and turned,
and then resumed its spasms. Completely roto, he thought, just like his nephew Sparto. Perhaps it’s dying. He reached in with the claw hand of the
tharpoon, got a grip on one leg and gave it a hard flip, then ducked. On its
back it shot one last charge into the air and then went silent. The dump was
eerily quiet then. Suddenly he saw himself as a hero, a nacker killer, and he
looked about for some way to tie the bot up. He couldn’t wait to take it back,
though he knew the trouble this would cause. He found the plastic chunk
he’d broken off with his tharpoon and pocketed it.
Mouse, he whispered, his mouth now a centimeter from her ear. Please. I’m
so sorry, he said, meaning how she got hurt, that he couldn’t stop it, but
knowing when he apologized she’d think only of her little brother Suto. I
didn’t mean to, he added. He lay on the ground next to her in the dirt, the
decomposition of generations of trash: toys and TV sets and bioware, gas jets
and hair dryers, window shades and sweaty couches, yellow toys and pigs’
hooves, and everywhere plastic.
It was late afternoon and soon the sun would go down and the nackers
would crawl back to Basucorp, and the dogs and who knew what else would
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