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 co
mmercial 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 l
ooks 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.
They Is Us Page 6
