They Is Us

by Tama Janowitz

  Off to one side of the stage is the bar where the waiters must have served drinks. A few smashed bottles on the floor, a cigarette girl’s case of cigarettes that could be harnessed around her neck and displayed in front. The Smoke-Easy must date to the mid twenty-first century before smokers started dying off after the poisoned cigarettes scandal or whatever it was, he can’t remember.

  It seems as if the mewing is coming from inside a cabinet and when he opens it two cats emerge, dusty and glaring, as if he is somehow responsible. Within, unopened (though no doubt stale), arranged on dark green baize as if precious gems: packs of Marlboros, True’s, Camels, Virginia Slims. Vantage, Viceroy, American Spirit, Chesterfields, Newport, Parliament. Soubranie, Rothman, Carlton, Tarleton. Kent, Winston, Silk Cut, Old Gold, Pall Mall, Gauloise.

  Kools.

  So many different kinds, how did people ever know back then what type best suited them? If these cigarettes weren’t stale they would be worth millions on the black market!

  It’s a mystery why or how the place has been boarded up, alcohol bottles intact but contents mostly evaporated.

  There’s a button on the wall and he presses it then jumps, startled, as large slabs of cinderblocks that looked immobile slide open and right onto… the subway platform. Quickly he pushes the button again. This must have once been the secret entrance. Fortunately it doesn’t seem as if anyone on the platform has noticed, all intent on looking down the tracks.

  He rests for a moment on the couch. It is more comfortable than going back upstairs, though a bit chilly; maybe the kitties will come to him in the night for warmth. Something lumpy in his pocket; oh, the little book. He turns on his flashlight to read for a minute; the whole country is reading the President’s fiancé’s memoirs; it’s required reading! Most people – well, lots, anyway, have never read a book, not in the sense of a physical object with pages. But this book is tastefully done with a red cover and collaged images (torn photos, documents, ticket stubs. Sleepily he begins to leaf through the pages.

  “I was born in the Caucasus. My father, an American-Negro, was traveling on holiday in the Caucasian mountains, when he met my mother. To this day I am uncertain whether she was a hundred percent Caucasian; I have been told she might have had some Circassian blood. In any event, it matters not: when I was but four months of age I was adopted by Big M’bell Glorious Mohammed Taneesqua, the pop singer. At that time she weighed four hundred pounds. She had already adopted eight other children by the time I came along, but alas would not live to see most of us grown up.

  But believe me the other kids were extraordinarily beautiful! The most beautiful girls from Somalidan, Rajapakisthan, Afuzbekistan. The boys from the Sudan, Senegal! Praise be to the Intelligent Designer, is all I can say, that Mr President, our very own National Dinge Queen (no dissin’ intended, just a little joke!) didn’t get a look at one of my bros! He never would have taken a second glance at me!

  ButAs for Momma: diabetes and heart attack led to her demise at age fifty. Originally I wanted to call my autobiography Whites in Hot Water, because Momma always made us kids do a lot of chores. Even though she was rich, we did not get a free ride.

  ButMost of you will remember me from my years on the global news network, where I moved up from weatherman to chief correspondent and then nightly prime time anchor.

  Slawa nods off over the book and jolts awake with a start. He is having such an odd sensation. It is some kind of memory, of how as a kid, when he was homeless, the cops? What were they called? The KGB. The KGB had taken him away to some kind of institution, where he was injected. No, surely this couldn’t be possible. And there… Who did he have a chat with, Beriya, yes, once there was Beriya the great, and the mental institution, electric shocks and insulin comas; oh, how many years went by, sitting day after day in a room of the sick, the sweating, the unwashed, the room full of smoke and vitriol.

  Once, he remembers, somehow someone had something called a mail order catalog. How had it made its way not only into Soviet Russia during the… he guesses it was the cold war – how and not only into Soviet Union but from there to the hospital, institution, what have you. No one could believe it, it was better than pornography, it was unbelievable, what was it called, something like Stalinberry Farms, said one guy who could read a couple words in English, though then they all realized it must be Stalin and Beriya’s farm, page after page of cakes, salamis, dried fruits, petits fours, cheeses and hams…

  Was it even possible such a world existed? To them it was science fiction, even outside the prison walls they would never have had such things, and here the diet, the burnt groats, the grits, some rank cabbage or rarely a gristly bit of fat. The bread alone was occasionally authentic, though only rarely, mostly it was a cinderblock of gray, textureless and tasteless foam. When it wasn’t stale.

  He shivers. Better not to think. What’s going on, the temperature must be close to freezing, his breath is visible in front of him, the weather is insane! He hasn’t brought any warm things with him… Should he make a fire out of whatever wood he can find? He paces, restlessly, rubbing his hands together.

  So his wife has thrown him out – of his own house! His daughter whom he loves so much, she feels sorry for him, a bald fat old man! What will he do, living here? He will definitely have to get a hologramovision, having those new HDHC sets, it’s like having real people around, maybe even better, but of course the hologramovision won’t work without cable.

  In the electronic store the President is having a press conference, which means that all one thousand channels, all are receiving the same thing: the President, saying, “And these are the countries we’ve helped to become Safe Democratic Homelands and these –” he points to the board on the right “– are the countries who are still waiting for us to liberate them. And now I am going to ask the American people to call in on our hotline, at ten dollars a call, to help decide: which country do you think we should pick next? The money we as Americans spend will be used to repair the chosen land after we have fought and liberated them.”

  Slawa finally gets some kid wearing a name tag that reads ‘Deen’ to help him and he picks out the five-foot screen, not totally up to date: it will only receive a few channels in the Hologram-Definition mode, but at the moment he is going to try not to spend so much.

  “That’s the floor model, I can give you a discount,” the kid says, and when Slawa nods he unclips the screen and rolls it up. “Let me see if I can find the container for it, and I’ll meet you by the checkout. Give me five minutes.” It’s only a month or so before the equipment becomes obsolete.

  Slawa wanders around the store. Here are the latest things, those flying saucers that elevate a few feet off the pavement; rare-earth boots that let you climb partway up the sides of buildings; the computer brain you can buy for your car so you can tell it where to go; the virtual reality holographic shopping game where you can also fight bad guys!

  He heads for the register. Deen is busy scratching his rear end with the register gun. Slawa waits and waits; Deen is obviously high on something, but who can blame him? He clicks the register gun at the credit stud in Slawa’s right ear-lobe and then he looks at the read-out, disbelieving. “You almost don’t have enough credit left, you can barely get this model… You better get your credit refinanced soon. Ya want me to check again? Some times these chips get, kind of infected or something, it can help if you use an alcohol swab, you should keep them in your pockets.”

  “No. How am I supposed to pay –?”

  “Gee, I don’t know,” Deen says. He has an oily nervous energy. It occurs to Slawa that Deen might be a girl, or at least one of those neuters, so many kids are born that way these days and psychological testing shows it is better not to make gender assignation until the person is old enough to decide for him, her or itself – if that is what it chooses.

  Deen lowers his voice to a whisper. “I tell you what, if you want, I can come by when I get out of work and hook ya up.”

&n
bsp; Suddenly Slawa is desperate to talk. If he goes home he will be alone. “Yes, yes,” he mutters. “You see, my chip is empty on purpose. If they steal my identity then with it is going my self-esteem. I do not have much self-esteem to begin, you know. I am not caring much about who I am, it is how I am feeling about myself, you know?”

  Dean shakes his head. “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  Unbelievably, he finds the last remaining public phone. It must be an accident, really, that it works; it’s just outside the men’s room in the Smoke-Easy. He is lucky: he has hundreds of quarters to feed into the coin slot, funny how he was once entertained by collecting coins; the operator, a mechanized voice, keeps explaining, “If you’d like to make a call, please deposit thirty-five dollars.”

  “Daddy?” Julie, thank goodness, the only one he wants to speak to, but she sounds despairing.

  “My love, how are you, my little shapka?”

  “Dad, some men were here, they wanted to know if some guy was with you, Bocar?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The President was on HGMTV, on the news, saying how anybody harboring a fugitive conscript is going to be prosecuted. The men said you have some kid from someplace who signed the papers to serve in the military, he was replacing some rich kid from Minneapolis? And then he escaped, or he didn’t go to boot camp when he was supposed to… Daddy, are you really okay?”

  “What?” He isn’t paying attention. How clever they had been. After all, you can do nothing, make no transaction on credit, no phone call, without being immediately identifiable or at least traceable via microchip; the citizens give away their own identities, down to the last item, hemorrhoid ointment, toothpaste brand, dialing up Gone With the Wind at three a.m. If he leaves there are cameras everywhere. They could see him, at the bank, in the markets, in the subways. Even if he could take out all his money from the bank in cash without being seen, what good would it do – gas, food, clothes, you can’t buy anything, not even stay in a cheap motel, without a credit chip. It is too difficult to think through. Everyone always gets caught. They can broadcast your face all over the country, everyone has long ago provided samples of DNA, hoping to receive an inheritance or family tree DATING BACK UP TO EIGHT THOUSAND YEARS! FIND OUT WHO YOUR ANCESTORS WERE!!!! ORDER NOW! AS SEEN ONLY ON HGMTV!!!! He will have to get Bocar and stay trapped below ground in the old Smoke-Easy.

  “Dad, are you still there? I miss you. My feet really hurt, they feel like they’re burning up, and my head, too, kind of like on my scalp? It feels really hot? Daddy, I wish you were here –”

  “Yes, my love. I will try to come to see you soon.” Abruptly he hangs up.

  9

  This semester is the most difficult: twentieth century literature, why did Julie have to take the academic college track? What could she have been thinking? The reading list: Pat the Bunny, Hop on Pop, One Fish Two Fish, Curious George and The Velveteen Rabbit, but these are like, for a PhD student or something, they are way too difficult. Classical Song Lyrics as Poetry: Busta Rhymes, Jackson Browne, Tony Orlando, Missy Elliott – she doesn’t have a clue what they are about and she has never liked classical music!

  “Yes it is work, but I believe you will find the texts to be worth it,” says Miss Fletsum, “You may recollect from political history a President of long ago got the nation to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar by recommending it as his favorite book. In this course we will discuss co-sign as physical commodity as well as parallel instigation; and the non-existence of the text except as validified by the critic of historical neutrality and revisionism. I do understand that many of you find the written word extremely difficult, but I believe I have made allowances in that you will find a great deal of supportive material, both in song and film. Let’s get back to business at hand, shall we? Tonto!”

  “Miss Fletsum?” A student raises her hand. “When we talk about One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, in what way are we able to reassess context according to the interpretation of the concrete, in a non-revisionist assessment?”

  “Anyone want to respond to that? Sprue?”

  “In my opinion,” Sprue says, “any particular ideology is nearly impossible to extricate from the body of the work. To look at the Object in a sustainable, revisionist way, without negating sign, let alone the obliteration of demerit is, gosh; I don’t think it’s possible.”

  “Wrong!” says Miss Fletsum. “A bird in the hand can peck you a lot easier than two in the bush. I would have thought by now you would certainly know how to paradeduct from what we have studied so far. In viewing obtuse comprehensive equations, we can see that –”

  Julie’s mind wanders. The school offers a lot of vocational courses; is it to late to change? Until the plane crash, she always thought of herself as not only an expert marksman, plus she got all As in Munitions Tech. The teacher even said she should maybe think about going into Military Marketing.

  She is surprised to find Cliffort and Tahnee waiting outside the school for her. She hasn’t seen Cliffort since the day of the airplane crash. The only way she can not think about the crash is by taking larger and larger doses of Clear Wipe, which you can only get from a doctor but which she was able to buy from one of the kids at school. “What are you doing here?” she says.

  “Didn’t you know?” Tahnee says snidely, “Cliffort’s applying for a job here as a teaching assistant aide now at Downey.”

  “In what subject?”

  “Hair. He’s going to drive us home.”

  Tahnee spoke snidely

  to her sister

  Julie is not so happy to see Cliffort. In silence they walk to his van; Cliffort stops to pick up things from time to time and he’s putting them in his mouth, yuck, stones or… whatever, maybe it’s just sunflower seeds and he’s picking up litter. Once again the plane crash replays through her head, except that it is now all happening in slow

  motion. The front end

  of the plane begins

  going down, at first far

  away, then closer.

  What type of plane is it?

  Now, picturing it, she thinks it was a Cronan-Boeting 894 Air Luxury Liner, with extra-wide seats and a history of bad disasters in Kazakachina.

  She remembers how she kept waiting, somehow, for the plane to get back on course but it continued to descend and then, still unexpectedly, hit the swamp, and burst into flames. Maybe the chemical products in the water made it burn faster? And didn’t she inhale a cloud of ash, maybe it was human remains; since that time she has never felt very good. The intense blast of heat and the hail of objects around them; a volcanic eruption turned wrongly around, so that the opposite of magma was spewing down.

  Things blowing so high and fast, stuff goes all the way to the playing field, burning jet fuel, boomeranging bits of metal. The flimsy boards of the shack falling into splintery pieces and a plastic tray table had struck nearby on which partially read:

  UPRI HT POSIT DURI G AKE-OFF A D LA DING

  And then being hit by that finger, she didn’t know what had hit her until she saw it, on the ground, a finger with a large gold ring set with a cabochon ruby. The ring has gouged a dent in the side of her temple that, at first, she thought was her own blood but in fact later revealed itself to be nothing more than a sodden mess of tissue from the severed digit. Now she remembers, Tahnee ran over and picked it up. What has happened to it since then? Does she even want to know? The firey corpse of the plane, what’s left, blazes a half a football field away; most of the explosion occurred in the air, a variety of wreckage had cascaded down either before or just after, so the field was littered with objects. In the distance people yelling, screaming, but who?

  “Everything okay there?” says Cliffort. “You seem awfully quiet. What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How about a return to the scene of the crime,” says Cliffort, pulling up beside the field where the crash took place. “As the actress said to the bisho
p!” Julie doesn’t know where Cliffort has been since the day he handed her the Kamikaze, but he has some super gluf, extra styff that he says even Julie will like.

  “No thanks,” she says. “I don’t like steet any more, all it does is give me the skeeves.”

  “This is different,” Cliffort insists.

  She stares at her feet.

  “Come on, Julie,” says Tahnee.

  “Come on, just have a bit, you steet with me and maybe I won’t remember who pulled the trigger.”

  “What?” says Julie. When Cliffort passes it to her, she inhales. He is frightening as he takes her hand to walk through the field. “No one has returned to clean up,” Julie says. “It’s been weeks!”

  “What?” Tahnee and Cliffort both burst out laughing, that kind of laugh that teenage boys make when they want to sound sardonic. “What are you talking about! It was, like, yesterday, simp!”

  “It was weeks ago! Remember de initial covert rescue operation? With all dose people? In de white outfits and stuff?”

  Cliffort and Tahnee shake their heads. Clearly Julie is unwell.

  The high from the fumes doesn’t last long and Julie realizes her sister is clutching the ring, still attached to the finger that had hit her on the head. “Ew, dat’s a scunner,” she says.

  “What?” says Tahnee.

  “Dat you’re still carrying dat finger around, wid de ring.”

  “What?” When Julie looks again, she realizes there is nothing in Tahnee’s hand at all. They tramp through the field. Almost everything they pass is charred lumps. Here and there are recognizable objects: the back of a seat cushion, a handle from a suitcase, a shoe. Coins litter the ground, stuck between blades of dull brown grass, some of which, in sections, is engulfed in cheerful gassy little flames that appear to be everlasting, like those on some cemetery memorial.