They Is Us

by Tama Janowitz

  No, he won’t go to a hospital, utterly worthless, he had been to hospitals with his kids, emergency room: four, five, six hours of waiting to be taken into a curtained cubicle room by some doctor who acts as if you are bothering him.

  Bocar would look after him. Bocar, he has to find Bocar. Aboud has probably already been to the shoe repair shop, he hopes Bocar hadn’t bothered to open the place. But how much time has passed, exactly?

  Again he tries to get up, again slumps back. The rain is so soft, so warm. The pink pipeworms, freshly hatched, coil over him, devilish things are so quick, up his nostrils! If the rain stops the worms will dry up but there is no sign that the rain will stop. Nevertheless, he realizes he can’t lie here. He will have to get back, somehow. Then, thank God, he manages to get to his feet and just then Bocar arrives.

  And, as always, when the kid takes him by the arm, this time picking him up in a half-embrace, practically sobbing, he has that peculiar swooning sensation.

  “My fry-end, Slawa, Slawa – are you all right?” Tears are curling down Bocar’s face, are they really tears or is it rain? “Who has doney this thing to you?”

  All his attempts to correct the kid’s English haven’t helped.

  “Oh, I am all right. Slawa is strong man. Only just… Your uncle, he is very angry, he is looking for you.”

  “My uncle did this? He might have killed you, we must take you to the hospital.”

  “No, no. No hospitals. Now I want to go back to the shop.”

  The kid half-carries him down the street. “I was looking for you, you have been gone all day! I am thinking, what has happened?”

  “I told you not to go out!”

  “Only, just, I am thinking something has happened, I came out to look but the wrong way. Finally, I was just about to go back when I es-pied you. My friend, you are badly wounded, you are bleeding from many or-ifices…”

  “Just a head wound.” But he is limping and whether or not a rib had been cracked or broken he doesn’t know. And then he is no longer there.

  It is almost twenty-four hours later before he regains conscious. And when he wakes his first idea is that he is on a beach, the tide has gone out, leaving behind the dying interior of a mollusk – the words conch or precious wentletrap or sixteen-chambered nautilus come to mind – only he now realizes, breaching sleep into wakefulness it is his tongue, hung over, stuck to the roof of his mouth. My God, what is going to become of him, he is stiff and sweaty from sleeping on the floor and far away he can hear the faint yowl of his cats and the rush of the subway train cascading, an underground cataract of metal bones. Coral. Various shells. Variegated shells in shades of taupe and tortoise. Abalone. Spiny urchin. Gooeyduck, gooeyduck, gooey…

  Somehow, Bocar has gotten him to the hospital where now, twenty-four hours later, they are still waiting to be seen. It’s an entire next day! Bocar has covered him with some sort of hospital sheet, even so he is stiff from having lain so long on the floor. He manages, finally, to get up, drag himself to the filthy toilet, approach a nurse. “Yes. I told your little friend, you don’t have insurance. We need your insurance information or cash upfront.”

  “How much cash?”

  “We can keep the money in escrow but we’ll need two hundred fifty thousand as a deposit to proceed. I’m sorry, but by law I’m not allowed to touch you unless we know someone will be paying for the treatment. I gave your pal some antiseptic ’cause I felt sorry for him… and you, but… I was about to call the police. You see all these people?”

  Through bleary eyes he looks around. There are hundreds of people with stab wounds, bullet wounds, he guesses, moaning, crying, little kids clutching their ears and even one holding an arm in a position as if it is broken. There are old folks with what had to have been Chuntey Bolls or even Derwent Scrubs, faces covered with virulent pussy warts. My God, he is just another in this hideous place. There are mouse droppings. And overflowing baskets of garbage, newspapers, fast food wrappers; he sees his pet SloMoFlies are having a field day. There are people plugged in to their music boxes wearing the video glasses, eating pitha, Yabba Bits; there are children’s shows blaring on the walls from the few hologramovisions that still work.

  “But I don’t understand.” He puts his hand up to his head, it is scabbing over but he feels a chunk of something fingernail sized, holy-moley, his own brain?

  “When we get one of these hot rains, a lot of people always seem to get hurt and they pour in here. I always feel too bad to throw them out until the rain stops, most of them have nowhere to go. But I have to get the place cleared out.”

  He drags himself back to Bocar and manages to explain the situation. “Anyway, my friend, I am fine now, come.”

  Yet on the street he realizes he is weaker than he had thought. Crowds are flowing up from the subways, this means they aren’t working; this always happens after a flood. Buses, no, they stopped those long ago when traffic got too jammed. They might be able to take a mini-motor rickshaw, the city imported them from India years ago and they can get around, though slowly, up on the sidewalk, back down in the street – but between the two of them they don’t have enough cash and his credit chip is dead… With his arm around Bocar’s frail shoulder he manages to slowly hobble back to the shoe shop.

  After the attack, Slawa’s teeth hurt all the time. A cheap dentist who advertised in the paper only laughs and says it is going to cost at least a hundred and fifty grand, maybe more. Root canal, crowns, caps, bridges… the whole system is rotted, infected. He is a head rotting on top of a rotting body. A rotting head on a rotting body in a rotting country on a rotting world!

  And in addition to his teeth hurting, he is furious, with a kind of permanent fury inside him that he can mostly control but then spews out. Almost anything can set him off, a car blocking the intersection after the light has changed, someone cutting ahead of him on a line, it didn’t matter. He rarely has a drink, it makes his head hurt even more, his temper is so bad, he is so labile he beats up Bocar and not even for any reason.

  He comes in from someplace, finds Bocar with the cash register till open. “What are you doing! You little thief!” He grabs Bocar by the ear, smacks him in the face, knee to the stomach. The kid is sobbing, on the ground, when Slawa emerges from his trance, a trance of rage, because of course now he remembers, there is no money in the till! The cash register is just for looks, because nobody has paid for anything in cash for years! He himself has said it was okay for Bocar to play with the register, the poor guy is just a kid after all! And in the moment of revelation he tries to obfuscate any reason for having struck Bocar. Then seeing the kid on the floor like a whupped dog, he bursts into tears. “Oh, my friend, I am sorry, forgive me.”

  Now the kid is crying too, “You were the on-LY one I trust, now see, you are like the others! I have been sold as a slave, almost, so that the rich people do not have to fight… and when Uncle took me in I did not know he would be no better – now you. Don’t you see how wrong that is?”

  Both of them are bawling. He hasn’t understood until now that Bocar is almost completely deaf. Why or how has he not figured that out? The kid has said, from time to time, what, or excuse me, I cannot hear, but he never took him seriously. “Yes I know this is wrong,” Slawa says. “What they have done to you, enslavement – is wrong, and what they have done to me, Slawa, taking away everything – is also wrong. What do you want me to do, I will do anything you ask of me.”

  For a long time the kid says nothing, merely shows him.

  Now for the first time he learns about the boy and some of what he knows. Bocar is an expert, and he demonstrates to Slawa how ordinary products can be turned into weapons, and how weapons can be used for mass destruction.

  There are simple things: how to booby trap a place with trip wires and nails that can be propelled at top speed into a man’s head at the opening of a door; bombs using gasoline and soda bottles; bigger bombs made from ordinary chemical fertilizer.

  How to r
eplace the safety seal on a bottle from the pharmacy so that it appears never to have been opened. How to do the same with milk, or juice from the supermarket after adding botulism.

  You can make your own botulism at home from ordinary food in Mason jars! Ordinary farm fertilizer makes a bomb. You can purchase ricin and sarin from some Japanese people on the Internet, if you join their cult! New friends in Africa can scrape anthrax spores from hides, put it in a sealed envelope so it looks like a letter, it can be mailed right here to Bocar’s shop for distribution in free hand-outs of sticks of gum!

  It dawns on Slawa little by little. Bocar hopes to produce some sort of disaster that may maim, wound, kill hundreds. Or more. How will he feel, innocent people dead or dying?

  But he can no longer claim connection with the rest of mankind, he doesn’t care, he can’t sleep or he sleeps too heavily, that nightly running of the bulls trampling the Pamplona streets, wakes in a hot sweat with the lingering fragrance of blood, manure, oranges, but why? He has never been to Spain. He must not look back.

  “Okay,” says Slawa at last, “so I see you are really an expert in what you’re doing. But what do you want to do? What do you want me to do?”

  “In the name of the people everywhere, who are enslaved to this country, this country who has done such things to me and to you, for their sake and your sake and mine, I want you to help me kill them all.”

  13

  And again no answer at her father’s house; Murielle is drowning, the last thing she wants to do is go to see him, but, what the heck, she rounds up the kids, tries to dress herself, but no outfits seem to work. For one thing, she is beyond hairy – maybe she got this from her dad, maybe it is some kind of virus going around. Even though she has had it lasered off, her legs are still hairy, her arms, and my gosh, whiskers, the pubic hair coils mercilessly in ropey knee-length splendor.

  Her closets are full of clothes, things that don’t fit – okay, well, she has put on weight – or just plain out of style, like the trousers with the colorful codpiece, the dress with puffed sleeves and buttock padding that last year had looked so… chic. Only now seem dowdy, provincial, old-fashioned, or the expensive shirt made from laboratory-grown skin-and-polyester makes her itch. Things that had looked so beautiful in the shop have turned real ugly.

  The stuff could, she supposes, be hauled off to the Salvation Army, only it’s impossible to get into the parking lot filled with bags and boxes of the cast-offs of hundreds of others. Broken flower pots; donut machines; electric underpants with saggy elastic; stained sheets; hand-crocheted blankets of acrylic burnt-orange yarn, a particular hue bringing back nostalgic memories. A frilled clown to cover a roll of toilet paper behind the toilet seat. Chipped crockery; greasy pie pans; fleece hats; resin garden gnomes. Broken or out-of-date computers; old hologramovision phones; tricycles; jigsaw puzzles missing pieces. Wrappers from gum carefully folded to form colorful chains. A nightmare of human waste, filth, consumption.

  She isn’t really that much different than her father. She is always happy to throw his things away. It’s getting rid of her own stuff that seems impossible. How is it possible to have come from a man who speaks so little and seems to have nothing in the way of feelings? He is an obsessive collector and hoarder – before she forced him to give up driving he would go around the neighborhood to collect old magazines, or to search for discarded yet still viable manufacturers’ coupons. On foot he can still fill a shopping cart. His hobby is writing to local chambers of commerce and state tourism boards for information; asking for free catalogs, samples; complaining or complimenting. “Dear Sir,” (to the President of a syrup company), “I wanted to tell you of my delight in your product, Uncle Mosley’s pure cane syrup. I have been using your syrup for nearly…” Blah. Or: “Recently I had the opportunity to use a coupon valued at forty cents to try your new dishwashing liquid. I found Purity Anti Bacterial Citrus Spring to be inferior in every way to the more reasonable priced Martin’s Summer Fresh…”

  When she was growing up, these letters had to be read, each evening, to the assembled family – except that she was the only one there.

  Often replies would come which enclosed a coupon for a dollar-off some product, or even a free case. God help the company who didn’t respond or from whom he had bought some truly defective product, stale or useless.

  All of these letters were typed on carbon: he refused to use a printer, a computer, he refused to go to a public copy shop, insisted on keeping his antique manual typewriter, which gradually produced more and more suspicious entries as both he and the typewriter aged, so that at the end his dementia, combined with the bumpy carriage and the difficulty of obtaining a new ribbon, added to that the wearing-away of the letters themselves, (the T no longer had a pronounced top, those letters with dangles – lowercase g, p and q – gradually lost their tails) and the letters, even the positive ones, took on the quality of a terrorist threat: “DeaR sir or mADman: I WOULD LIKE to inform you of the WoRTHiness of your molasses. You may know the old joke ‘Mo lasses? How can I have Mo lasses when I ain’t had ANY lasses…” And rambled off into a diatribe so ferocious that once a duo of FBI agents came by carrying a letter he had sent – containing a white powder – and hauled him off for questioning. For three days as a kid she was alone in the house, having hidden in the back of a closet, before they believed his story that he had been writing to a flour company, having submitted a sample of Uncle Bubba Purified and Bleached Superfine to inquire what the black specks in the stuff were.

  In his way she supposed he had been a good-enough father; he loved her but had in no way helped to prepare her for the modern world. He taught her the Palmer method of handwriting; insisted she take short hand. He made the purchase of an encyclopedia some sixty years old, saying that all the important information could be found in these pages; he was almost sixty when she was born, so it might have been that in his estimation such news was up to date. As for her mother, she never really could get an answer out of him, for all she knew Mom’s body was sealed in concrete in the basement.

  The house was vast, many rooms, but all of them filled with stuff and dark, facing a gas station on one side and the walls of another building on the other… It wasn’t the sort of place she would ever have wanted to bring a girlfriend to and in any event she wasn’t allowed.

  Pretty early on Murielle learned if she didn’t want to starve it was up to her to cook: tuna noodle casserole; chicken divan; mock-apple-pie made out of Blitz crackers (recipe on back of box); Visquit crusted ground-meats crumble; anything that could be made out of a couple of ingredients with one of them preferably being a can and the other a box. TV dinners: Wolverine Mench fried chicken, with a side of corn and another of apple; frozen pizza – there were all kinds of take out in the neighborhood which over the years changed, from Chinese to Korean to Indian – but her father couldn’t abide that foreign stuff, though once in a while he would take her to a local diner.

  It was her father who had insisted on the validity of Western scientific experiment and research. He thought that unless an event was provable, with sufficient data to back it up, you might as well go around saying the earth was flat! And of course this got her into all sorts of trouble at school, where there were Morning Prayer sessions to the Intelligent Designer. Because the ID was scientific and not religious, they could pray to him in the schools and every morning in homeroom the teacher led the sessions. She liked to call on the class and write the prayers down on the big Wish List. “Okay, O’Jibway, what’s the Number One item to pray for today?”

  “World peace!” O’Jibway in her blue smocked dress, blonde curls and blue eyes, piped brightly, goodie two-shoes!

  “Very good. L’Reign?”

  “Um, could we pray I get a new XT174L for Christmas?”

  “Yup,” said teacher, writing down the request. “JaWohl? Kamal? Mahendra? Zheng-Lee? How about you, Hadassah? Can I see a hand? Hurry up if you want the power of prayer!” As if Murielle was batt
ling her own hand – and lost – hand rose. “Yes, Murielle?”

  “But teacher, what kind of Intelligent Designer would have the time to sit around listening to what a bunch of kids want? Wouldn’t he have, like, better things to do? I mean, he might have designed us, but that doesn’t make him an Involved Father.”

  The other kids giggling, the teacher irritably shushing them and telling Murielle to be quiet, this was neither the time nor place.

  She hadn’t wanted to be like her father, but open her pocketbook and there he was in the guise of a moraine of crumbs, hairs, bits of chewing gum and leftovers to feed the kids, the receipt stubs and orange lipsticks missing caps…

  In any event her father wouldn’t let her go away to school. The local college was nearby. She could live at home. She started with some psychology classes and decided on social work, but before she could get a graduate degree she had met Terry, had Tahnee and found the job as associate administrator for the ombudsman of La Galleria Senior Mall and Residence Home for the Young at Heart, which is how things had ended up.

  By the time she met Slawa she was worn out and fed up. Now, it wasn’t that she missed Slawa, apart from his fixing things, but on the other hand, half the things he fixed didn’t work anyway.

  She tries to call her father once again before heading over. There is no response. A company recording says his line is out of order. Now that he is old he doesn’t have any friends left with whom she could get in touch. Not that he had ever cultivated many friends, though he had belonged for a long time to various clubs: the Philanderer’s Club, the Mono-orchid Society, Emotions Anonymous and so forth.