They Is Us

by Tama Janowitz

  The men return from the hunt. It is late in the afternoon, the sun is trembling into pale orange, the skies frosted with lavender and green pollution, when the choppers are heard. At first at a distance and then closer, until finally dirt begins to whirl around the camp, thick clouds containing human remains; heavy metals (including lead and arsenic); a small quantity of nuclear waste – all of which has been dumped here over the past hundred years.

  Then through the dust come men on motorcycles, are they Hells Angels? More men, these on horseback, a cavalry galloping right into the people. There are men in jackboots, Panzer men, storm troopers, bovver boys, Cossacks. What the heck is going on, is a film being shot? Guys in camouflage, dressed as Vietnam War soldiers holding archaic Kalashnikovs. Maoris, naked except for loincloths, pound their chests, chanting the Haka. Somewhere someone has a sound system blasting ancient music: “All along the watchtower…” Gurkhas, guys in kilts with bellowing bagpipes, Algonquin, Delaware and Iroquois, fiercest of The Five Nations!

  “Run! Run! It’s the undercover cops! It’s a round-up!”

  “If we get separated, we’ll meet up at Daddy’s shoe store, the same as we planned,” Murielle shouts. “You can find your way there, right, Julie?”

  The men are scrambling to pack their few things, it is time to get out! Only now, for most of them, it is already too late. In the melee Cliffort grabs Julie by the arm and they run. But if they are headed in the right direction neither is sure.

  22

  If the top of Mt. Olympus is flat, Slawa thinks, then he is going to Mt. Vesuvius. At first he assumes Bocar’s uncle and aunt have come and nabbed him, though when he checks their restaurant he finds it is boarded up, shut down, out of business. Is it because they have taken Bocar for resale? Or is it because the food was so inedible it was obvious the restaurant was never going to stay in business for long?

  He wanders the streets. The whole city is crumbling, friable bricks and sandstone, quivering glass windows, rusted metal. The mentally ill and homeless have taken over the streets, and these people, they don’t travel light! Shopping carts filled to the brim, shoeboxes, hair curlers and hula-hoops, squash racquets, dustpans and binoculars, there are more of these people and more of their stuff than ever before. Soon it will be as tall as the first story, swelling and expanding with the years until it reaches the highest roof.

  Maybe Bocar is working someplace else.

  He searches Hunt’s Point Market at dawn. It is here all the fruit and meat and fish and vegetables are delivered into the city, not that these days they are more than laboratory-grown tissues molded and dyed to resemble oranges, or strawberries, or slabs of meat. Men are at work unwrapping the fish and spritzing them with fish smell. Though it is not far from where Bocar had said he lived with his relatives, there is no sign of him. How foolish to think he can wander the streets and somehow, by accident, find him. Especially if Bocar is being kept prisoner.

  Groups of tourists and schoolchildren are now arriving, led on tours to show how food enters the city. Do they know the food isn’t real? He knows, because the manufacturing laboratories were so near his home in Jersey. Once he had even tried to get a job there but it was the wrong time; there were cutbacks. There were always cutbacks. The less human contact there was with the food the less chance there was of the particularly destructive strain of z.coli that infected everything these days.

  But surely the men in the quaint uniforms hoisting mottled legs of lamb tissue are spreading disease and contamination? Dirty hands unloading the chubby pigs, made in pig molds. Nearby fake butchers waited to cleave, slice and subdue the product into all the old familiar shapes – pork chops, loin, ribs, honeycombed tripe and crinkled brains. In fact it’s all the same stuff, meat tissue.

  A world in which so little yet so much was left. As had once been: a gray beach mottled with crab shells and strings of kelp. Only now what is left are the ancient, immutable remnants of an earlier age: strands of cassette tape, shiny brown, and foam coffee cups. And walls, posts, columns, covered with giant hologramovision screens.

  He remembers Bocar telling him how when he had first gotten to New York and his uncle had been a bit nicer, he’d given him a bit of cash, and he spent five dollars on an apple, a huge red-and-yellow globe, but, what a disappointment! The hard waxy skin, and bite of mealy flesh, flavorless.

  He knows he will not find Bocar but still he goes on, watching crates pried open, the shouting negotiations, all the chefs from restaurants of Manhattan! One fingers a dainty ladyfish; another leers at the silvery mackerel. Here’s an artificially pink arctic char, here are moony green wedges of crescent bananas, wheels of golden parmesan; but it all comes from the same manufacturer.

  The huckstering, boisterous market air is a complete fake. Of course, Bocar would not have been able to hear it anyway. Sound is only a ripple in the airwaves to him; his hearing, Bocar said, was getting worse and worse. Bullets had gone off next to his ears. The damage could never be repaired. How could he have been so stupid as to have forgotten to tell Bocar that most of the people in this country were deaf, only from plugs in their ears playing loud music all the time?

  He hasn’t been paying attention. Now something on one of the hologramovision screens makes him stop short. It’s the President, President Wesley and Scott, standing on the tarmac as hundreds of young men and women are being escorted by military police on to a gigantic plane.

  “You see, these are all mercenaries, hired by American citizens,” the President is saying. “This has cost the American public a great deal, every single one of these folk has pocketed the money and then gone AWOL from the service, where they had signed papers agreeing to fight in place of the young person whose money they had so willingly absconded with. Of course there is no hope of getting any of that back, and for many of you it could have been used for retirement funds or medical purposes. We would have liked to charge these people for their guns and food supplies, the uniforms and fine boots we provide each of them with, which it would now appear they have traded for brand-name sneakers and fast-food coupons… Many of you will say to me, what is the good to send them back to their homeland? Scott, would you like to respond to that?”

  The teenage soldiers, boys and girls, are crossing the airfield naked (in order that no one attempt to blow up the plane, though why any of these kids would do that now, on their way home, seems unlikely), no carry-on luggage except each is bearing a small cage of gerbils, which they have been given in order to repopulate the desert, where gerbils have long been extinct, so that the people can once again become self-sustaining.

  In a year’s time, Scott explains, each female gerbil can produce up to forty offspring who themselves will begin to reproduce, and not only can gerbils provide a tasty morsel of protein-rich food, their skins can be sewn together for warm clothing and their droppings are a rich fertilizer for crops.

  “Boys in the front, girls in the back,” says the flight attendant briskly, with a clap of the hands. “Those of you in the process of gender reassignment, middle four rows.”

  The nubile bodies troop across the tarmac and there, up toward the front of the line, Slawa is almost certain, is Bocar.

  “Mr President, our feeling at the White House is, yes, it is a shame that many of these young people will not be tried in the Democratic system, but it is their own government’s responsibility to punish them as they see fit, according to the rules of their lands… Naturally most of these countries are overseen by UN Peacekeeping Missions, and though where necessary we have placed our own Democratic leaders in place of a corrupt regime, we must allow these young Democracies to learn and grow unimpeded; we can observe, but it is not our responsibility, nor our duty, to take action.”

  The camera cuts to the anchor people. “After this commercial break,” one is saying, “we’re going to take a look at just what those kids were allowed to bring with them out of the country, and what kind of situation they can expect to return to in homelands they have
n’t seen in many years…”

  “That’s right, Bonwit,” says the other newsperson, “we have Wolf Goebbels on the scene and I think he’s going to be permitted by the militia to stop and chat with some of the kids boarding the plane. We’ll be right back after this important announcement.”

  The announcement is a public service instructing Americans how to get a reward based on information leading to the capture of an absent-without-leave mercenary soldier.

  His head, Slawa puts his hands on his head, that terrible tightness above the eyes, in the back, the head could be breached in so many manly ways! Up the nose, through the mouth, just above the eyes; there are tender spots, too, at the back of the neck and in all of them ice picks, he thinks, are being driven with great force. Why is a head so unprotected? Surely the head shouldn’t harbor the soft, fleshy parts; wouldn’t it make more sense? Evolutionary-wise the eyes should be on the back of the hands, ears on knees, and mouth near the stomach. That way the brain could stay safe, inside an impenetrable, virtually impenetrable, skull. But the Intelligent Designer must have known what he was doing, because when push comes to shove, one chooses another neural circuit. Or rather, one’s head does it for one. And that is totally cool!

  Oh, he almost forgot. Now he no longer believes in the Intelligent Designer unless his name is Allah, his name be praised! He touches the Koran in his pocket. Not sad, no, not even lonely. He has his cloud of friendly flies, after all, since Bocar is gone he no longer wears the sandalwood cologne. Something Bocar had said comes back to him. If Bocar disappears, Slawa can find the answer in Bocar’s box. He goes back.

  Inside the box is a note.

  my friend, if you are opening this box it is because I am gone I am feeling it is enough for your country, if you agree with me I will ask you to do this in my name, as it is my tribute. by the time of this I am not here… in the phial is the substance if you can find method of disbursement if you are willing, must be air-borne, additionall, to firstly inject yourself with antidote vaccination for your safety, my friend. and to follow, is the recipe and instruction manual to manufacture the time bomb, if you will be willing to make this and place in subway beneath seat, as the subway moves so does the contents of the time bomb upon detonation make sure you are far away in another state or continent if possible. I love you my friend, praised be the name of Allah.

  A vial of some kind of deadly powder and the instructions for how to make a time bomb. Poor kid, Slawa thinks, does he really think this stuff would work?

  Bocar was right: there were boys like him all over the planet who were being bought and sold, cannon fodder for a war being fought in countries where people did not have the same beliefs – did not have any political beliefs, only religious ones – did not want a war, so that the nimble fat men with their sheen of expensive butters and pomades, the businessmen of the USA, would get rich. How many years have gone by, could these men not understand nor see how much they – and their country – is hated?

  The pale pink tips of his fingers… the color of his skin. Slawa tries to recreate Bocar in his head, it is no use. The kid vanishes into time, swallowed up by the days.

  All the things Bocar had told him, these things had never mattered to him, he had listened, sure, but not really paid attention and now he wished he had recorded them. Bocar’s life.

  There had been a time – but how long, three years? – when Bocar lived in a village with his mother and father, there were other children, brothers and sisters, his parents loved him. And there was the sand and the water hole and the tasty goat milk.

  And then one day they were gone, all dead. They told Bocar, “It was the government,” and others said, “It was the rebels,” and then, later, they said it was merely gangster robbers, but one thing was certain, whoever had done it had guns, weapons, made by the US and sold by the US, and they knew that because that was where all three sides got their weapons. Finally he went with the rebels. They taught him how to make bombs: it was easy enough, they said, there were instructions on the computer and the ingredients: US plastics, US fertilizer, US switches – could be found everywhere, even when there was nothing to eat.

  He had learned to make bombs as a kid – all types of arsenals – which was how he had gone deaf… Learned to understand English through reading but because he couldn’t hear it he had appalling pronunciation… so bad because he put the emphasis on the wrong syllable. In other words, syllable was sil-LAB-ul.

  Then the Rebels mysteriously became the Government.

  But once the rebels were the government, they no longer seemed to care that he – and his friends, or all the other young people who were poor, desperately poor and without any real family – were put onto the slave planes. Some were going to be workers in Nature’s Caul where the rich people lived, in order to make beds or iron underpants.

  But mostly they were going off to serve as soldiers in the army, paid for by rich people who did not want their American sons to have to serve. He had read, over the years, some political theory. And the rebels had taught him that Communism was bad. But no one had said Capitalism was good. How much worse could Communism have been for him than Capitalism? He would have been screwed under any system.

  Shouldn’t Slawa do what Bocar had asked? At least in this fashion he would bring attention to Bocar’s plight and that of so many others. He has to do what Bocar said, so that Bocar will never be forgotten.

  He removes the hypodermic needle, takes off the cap of the tube marked antidote-vaccine, sucks most of it up through the needle and injects it near his hip, as suggested. This way he will have enough time to do his job; it will last as long as it takes, although he knows then he will be out of time. The stuff, oily, burns and stings as it enters, then he is hot and prickly, nothing matters to him much any more.

  But how is he to spread the powder? It’s supposed to be transmitted through air. What will disseminate the powder through the air? How can a powder become airborne?

  His flies. Yes. A drop of honey added to the white stuff and he goes out, carrying the sandalwood cologne. Then on the street he opens the lid. The first fly joyfully leaves his shoulder to have a taste.

  Poor fly, they all trust him, there is only room for one at a time. Now the first emerges, white powder on black oversized legs. Slawa gives the air a spritz of sandalwood and the fly angrily buzzes off, puzzled and betrayed. Thus the first fly flies away:

  “Like a long-legged fly upon the water, he moves swiftly and is gone.”

  —William Butler Yeats

  The others, though, are still on him. He walks quickly through the city. He stops in hospital lobbies, in movie theaters, in shops. Every few blocks lets another fly dip and feed and then, with feet nicely dusted he drives it away.

  (9:11) His flies are dying like flies. As it is said, some die stuck to fly paper, some die under the swatter, some die happily feasting on garbage and – hoomph! – get sucked into sanitation truck and crushed, yet not before spreading and contaminating. For it had been decided, who shall live and who shall fly, and who shall die by hanging, poison or being snapped up by a dog all the days of THY life.

  So it should be enough, he thinks, when all the powder and all the flies are gone. We shall see. Then on with the second part. At least, having taken the antidote, he is supposed to have enough time.

  The results are so instantaneous and dramatic it is a shock. He has not even had time to contact the Press explaining the purpose of this; as he returns he can hear the ambulances and sees people doubled over on the sidewalks. More people, kind of… staggering, not many, no big deal but then as he walks he sees more and more: some have blood coming out of their eyes and mouths, some have fallen or sit with visible pustules beginning to bubble up on the faces and arms and legs, others now hunched in pools of excrement, bloodless, teeth chattering, some rip off clothing. A taxi veers out of control. The doors to buildings are being locked, some people trying to get in, others, out.

  By evening reports ar
e coming in on the hologramovision, though of course the hologramovision anchor-people do not wish to alarm the American people, the hospitals are filling with people, perhaps some sort of epidemic.

  And by the following morning it is already too late. What the hell is the stuff? There are no more ambulances left – did the drivers become sick? But there are still sirens and overhead the roar of helicopters. A massive traffic jam, apparently people were trying to flee the city.

  And already it is time for Part Two. He goes back to the Shoe Repair. Perhaps he can find at least one cat, to tell it goodbye. There are certain things there as well that he values, pictures and objects, he would like to smell and touch. But most of all there is the other thing Bocar has asked him to do.

  The landlord has fixed a lock on the door: an eviction notice.

  It doesn’t matter, he knows the secret way to crawl in underground. He knows how to booby-trap the place. He bolts the door from the inside and piles up anything available against it.

  Is that Bocar’s hand holding his? He must be hallucinating, it is all so odd and he is getting more and more nervous; oh it is so wonderful to hold hands, no one could ever want more, or less; it is the same feeling he had when he put his forehead to Breakfast’s, the dog would press his head against his and together they entered the yellow ring of light… He stands.

  There is no Bocar. He is gone. He is dead or the equivalent. Perhaps there never was a Bocar, but he can’t believe that. And yet he can’t be certain. He had once told the boy, “Like you, one day I come home, my mother is gone. Father dead. By year two thousand and five, all old people in Moscow, they disappear. I don’t know what happen. Once, a lot of old babushkas. My mother, after fifty-five, sixty, I never find her again. Who knows? But… that is my country.” Everything has disappeared, is disappearing: mother, Julie, Bocar, Breakfast, even his own memory.