A tall man next to me laughed. “You see?” He rested the fingers of one hand on my elbow. “No friendship is so strong it cannot be destroyed by ratings.”
I told him I didn’t know what he meant at all. I asked him where were the foods that allowed you to forget everything in your life before the moment of biting down.
“That will take a long time,” he said, and then he used some of his money to go talk to people more interesting than me.
At the other end of the buffet there was a table piled with whole roast chickens. Hundreds of them, bodies gleaming with crispy fat and smoke-infused salt and crackling herbs, stacked into a pyramid that towered over my head. The smell was nearly sexual.
There was an attendant nearby—who looked like every part of him was tucked into his pants—whose job was to ensure that when guests came to choose a chicken, they did not choose one from the bottom of the pyramid and cause all the rest to tumble down.
I went over to the table and the attendant helped me to select a hen from the top. “What will you name it?” he asked.
“Can I distinguish myself by refusing to give it a name?”
“No. Many people have already done that.”
I named it Voltairine.
There were various pins you could affix to your chicken to make it unique. I chose two pins that looked like long-lashed eyes and stabbed them into my chicken’s breast. People carried their chickens by inserting a fist into the body cavity and balancing it like a puppet on their arm. When they encountered another person with a chicken, they would both bobble the chickens around on their fists. They made different voices for their chickens, and had them converse about current events or philosophy or other scintillating subjects. Grease and herbs dripped from their elbows.
A woman who had been ironed flat nudged her chicken coyly against mine. She had affixed a pair of bright red lips and a rainbow flag to her chicken. “But how can we possibly be enjoying ourselves when other people elsewhere are so sad?” her chicken asked mine.
I was flooded with terror that I would be found out, but I summoned strength to quell it and forced my chicken to speak. “Impossible pleasure is the only kind I want.”
Her chicken laughed. “How of the now!”
My chicken understood then that there was nothing she could say that would distinguish her from the rich chickens. There was no belief she could espouse more extreme than the beliefs they could adopt for fashion. My breath came more quickly and I tried to remember why I had come here. The woman raised her chicken to my lips. “Would you like?”
Per etiquette, I took a big bite from the thigh. I raised my chicken up and she took a bite in kind. The flesh was perfect, juicy, redolent with flavor. I ate more, trying to submerge my fear. We stood linked together in a circle, scraping with our teeth, ravenous, altered.
Suya dresses the crone. She combs the crone’s hair into a ponytail at the back of her skull. It is a ponytail of corn silk. Suya holds it lightly in her fist. It would not be nearly strong enough to lift the crone from the ground.
Suya cleans the crone’s face. She uses a washcloth to swab white residue from the creases of the crone’s cheeks. With her fingertips she massages lotion into the crone’s jowls. She colors the face with blush—Vintage Peach Blossom—and eye shadow—Intrepid Taupe—nothing garish.
The late morning sun is bleaching the curtains. Suya tries to find her reflection in the window, but her gaze slips beyond, over the city, past the apartment towers, to the rise of a verdant hill. What is Suya thinking here? Very little. Each of her motions feels like the result of a long mechanical process originating somewhere distant and inaccessible. She tries to imagine living in accord with her own will; it is like leaping across a canyon, and every time her mind falls short.
Suya fastens a necklace around the crone’s neck. She arranges the glass gems against the crone’s breast. She tucks a shawl around the crone’s shoulders.
She trims the crone’s fingernails. The crone’s nails are like baby nails, thin and flexible, the milky-blue color of moonstone. Suya hews them mercilessly. The crone has a hangnail on her index finger. Suya seizes it with the nail clippers but jerks them too quickly. Instead of severing the hangnail, she pulls it up the old woman’s arm, the way you might pull a string to open a bag of dog food. The old woman’s papery skin is parted to her elbow. Suya gags and clamps the shawl over the crone’s forearm. Blood seeps through the open weave.
The microwave dings. It is taquitos.
Suya swears and flies to the bedroom to find the crone a new shawl. The crone’s closet is a tropical rain forest. Hibiscus-toned polyester. Tangerine viscose trimmed with bromeliad bows. Palm-frond prints, and leopard, and sequined parrots. Suya tears dresses from their hangers, hurls them across the floor, flings them over herself. She empties the closet until she collapses in a puddle of chemical fabrics. Get it together, Suya. Suya! Remember, even when you have nothing, you still have kindness.
The baby has been wailing this whole time. Its wails merge with the throbbing mechanical systems of the apartment complex. The walls are made of wailing, the ceiling, the floor. Suya stands in the kitchen and munches a soggy taquito. She licks grease from the web of her thumb. She sets the empty plate in the sink. She grips the edge of the counter very tightly with both hands, then she lets go.
I don’t know how people knew it was time to go outside. They swept me with them, down the grand staircase set with luminaries, out into the back garden. The fountain rippled in the moonlight. People thronged on the lawn. I swanned among them. Every part of me felt sated, dazed, and not only because I had eaten.
One of the things they enjoyed the most was slicing open the carcasses of animals and sliding inside them as though they were sleeping bags. On this beautiful half-moon of lawn, everybody was finally getting what they wanted. The man with the knife knelt in the grass and brought his blade through the belly of a dead tiger. His knife was a foot long and made of bone and it opened the tiger from throat to groin. His audience watched with eyes round enough to finally understand how good they had it. Her white belly fur looked so soft and deep, like you could sink into it, like maybe the knife had not punctured her flesh but only sunk into her fur. Of course there was all the blood, too.
There was a woman in a creamy dress with pearls seeded across her shoulders. It was her turn. She sat down in the grass next to the tiger and bent her knees. First she inserted her feet into the tiger. Then her calves, then her thighs. Then she lifted her butt so she could wiggle it inside. Someone near me made a small oh of either longing or grief. The lower part of the tiger carcass flipped around and you could tell the woman’s feet were kind of cramped. Now she was entirely inside except for one arm, her shoulders, and her head. Based on her expression you couldn’t tell what was happening to her. Something liquid and yellow-green was seeping through the pearls on her dress.
Now only her head was outside of the tiger. The knife man dropped the sheet of flesh he had been holding and made a joke motion as though he were zipping her up. Her face protruded right from the hollow of the tiger’s throat, like a beautiful jewel or a second face.
From the side of the lawn people started pulling out the other animals they had already done. There was a walrus and a buffalo. There was a heartbreaking palomino horse. There was a reddish-gold bear big enough for two. People arranged them so they could be next to their friends. It became clear that everyone had buddies to sleep next to, while I had no one. I shrank back toward the aromatic trees.
“Wait!” A young woman with eyes like my own caught my wrist. “Please don’t go.”
By the afternoon Suya has to pee so badly that she can no longer avoid the bathroom. On the floor, the baby turns itself purple and blotchy with shrieking. They are both dunked in the noise. Suya would like to smack the baby in order to shut it up, but she knows if she does it will become hers, irrevocably. She will
bear its broken weight for the rest of her life.
She releases her urine in a resentful flood. The baby arches upward in its bouncy chair like a fish caught on a line. It opens its mouth and unleashes an unbroken column of sound. Pink-tinged flecks fly from its mouth and land on the white cabinets, the shower curtain.
The toilet flush does nothing to inhibit its cries. Suya walks back into the bedroom. Closing her eyes she finds she can still picture the door half ajar, the darkness beyond. A cool breeze blows through the doorway and she shudders. She lifts one of the crone’s sequin dresses from the floor and puts it on. It fits perfectly. The jeweled fabric has the slither of elegance and the heaviness of consequence. Her shoulders straighten.
In the bathroom the baby spits out yellow things and red things and brown things. Sometimes it chokes, and in those clogged seconds the air becomes completely still. Suya returns. She looks unstoppable in that dress. The single thought in her mind has birthed another, and another. Swollen purple clusters of thoughts, jostling and bursting and multiplying. There is wrenching silence as the baby gags on its own sounds. Suya trembles but does not slip. She bends down and plucks up the string of colorful wooden teething beads from the bouncy chair. She is careful not to touch the baby. She winds the beads around her neck like pearls.
Now she goes to the living room. She plucks the bloodied shawl from the crone’s lap and drapes it over her own shoulders like a magnificent stole. The crone’s hands tremble. Who knows what could be reacting within that inert flesh? Perhaps something remarkable. We’ll never find out now.
The door slams. Suya! Follow her. Down five flights of stairs, out of the tower, onto the parched sidewalk. The street is silent except for her footsteps. Where is she walking? She’s walking toward freedom. Or, rather, she’s walking toward money. Oh, yes, that’s it. She knows exactly where to go.
The young woman pulled me across the lawn. “We can share!”
We spooned each other inside her elk. Every part of my body was swaddled with either elk flesh or the woman’s body. Slick clumps slid between my fingers. Stringy bits dried on my neck.
“I made something for you.” The young woman extracted one arm from the carcass and dangled a charm bracelet in front of my face. I couldn’t grasp it and so it fell into my mouth. It tasted cool and coated with putrefaction.
I spat it out. “I can’t take that.”
“But I’ve never met anyone like you before.”
She tried to pull my wrist up to fasten the bracelet around it and I elbowed her away. In struggling I rotated so I faced the young woman. She wiped blood from her eyes and mouth and then my eyes and mouth. Her face brimmed with true kindness. “I think we could be friends.”
The way she said it I knew it was true. We would never be bound by necessity, only inclination. I had never been given such a gift before. I could go home with her if I wanted. I could tell her what I had done and we could eat wild mushrooms fried in butter and absolve each other with friendship.
Either the notion or the stench of raw flesh was heady and I thought I would rupture.
“That’s not what I want!”
I tried to push myself out of the sleeping bag, but I was so slippery I could not get purchase on anything. As I flailed it occurred to me that whether I accepted her or refused her, I could not hold myself apart. Why had I feared discovery? There was nothing to discover. Simply by reaching for power, I attained it. Simply by walking in, I became one of them.
She began to reminisce about our long acquaintance, how as children we rode a polo pony into the pool and it drowned. She was so rich the stories came true as she spoke them. My tears mingled with the viscera that pillowed my head. But I had thought I was choosing; just once, I had wanted to be a person who could choose.
The young woman hummed a familiar lullaby in my ear. The elk flesh held me as tightly as it had held the insides of the elk. Eventually I stopped shuddering. All around me people murmured to each other and wriggled reverently in their sleeping bags. Light fell down from the sky and brushed our faces with silver. Tomorrow we would rise from these skins and do everything we wanted. The sleepover had begun.
If You Lived Here, You’d Be Evicted by Now
They all came home to kill Mama Erasmo and feed her heart to the foundations of the house. Casey and Stacy and Lorcom and Colin and Slug. Hadn’t all been home together in years. It felt weird. Slug, seized by the fear of not recognizing anyone, considered bringing a sign to the airport, then rejected the idea in shame.
Like most reunions, this one was necessitated by zoning laws. Until they secured the house they might lose it at any moment to the predations of commercial adjustors. On the “Business or Personal” section of his flight reservation Casey delicately selected “Both.”
Let’s say there’s no money in this world. Let’s say if you want to obtain something, like rice or photocopies, you have to give somebody a handjob. Only nobody wants to give a handjob in the grocery store or the copy shop, so instead at each register, in a clear glass tank, they have one of those giant clams from the Pacific Northwest, which is a symbol for genitalia. In lieu of payment you dip your hand into the cold salt water and caress the clam: once, twice.
Just kidding; of course there’s money. Casey and Stacy both work in finance.
What does one need to kill one’s mother? They basically cleaned out the hardware store. Surrounded by aisles of sharpening tools and different strengths of rope, Stacy worried she would run into someone from high school. Not that she had any reason to be ashamed. A standing desk exclusively for her use and a supportive partner: both of these awaited her return. Plus everyone came home on this errand sooner or later. She buried her anxiety in a shallow hole and walked away from it.
Colin and Lorcom stood close but not touching, contemplating a dusty display of candy bars discontinued before they had completed puberty. “If the world weren’t so goddamn twisted, this could be kind of a celebration,” one of them said.
“What about these?” Casey held up a pair of pruners with ergonomic hand grips to his siblings for approval. They glanced over and nodded. “They’re on sale.”
It’s not that they had become inured to cruelty. Not at all. They took the shopping bags straight down to the basement and Mama didn’t ask to see. The hometown weather was colder than had been forecast when they were packing and by evening everybody had augmented their outfits with last-resort layers dug out of childhood closets. Articles neither fashionable enough to have been borne with them nor cherished enough to be packed away in memory chests. Casey wore an I FINISHED THE AIRFORCE 5K sweatshirt, though he memorably hadn’t. Stacy’s wrists poked out of a sweater entirely too fuzzy, an entirely too girlish shade of purple. Just looking at her called into question her ability to reconcile herself with the world. Colin and Lorcom wore matching free giveaway tees from a local credit union. Slug, who had never moved out of the basement, sat cross-legged on the window seat, watching the rest of them from deep within the folds of a mothy fur coat.
Mama had failed to re-create their favorite dinner foods, but she had tried. There was cauliflower, steamed not roasted. There was chicken, though the skin puckered limply. The garlic had gone blue. They had expected eating to be more fraught, or imbued with poignant ritual, but it tasted just how it looked. They chewed with their mouths and swallowed with their throats. “I just feel like we aren’t making the most of things!” You’d think that was Stacy but it was Casey. Everybody heard, nobody rose to do anything different. Really, transcendence never arrives at the moments you burden with meaning.
“Look, I’m not going to act like I’m glad this is happening,” Mama said. “I’m not. I enjoy being alive. I go to sip-and-paint on Thursdays. My friend Jody’s running for school board. I think she has a real shot. My avocado pit just grew a little shoot at the top, see it there? But also I’m not going to act like I don’t know how the world work
s. I knew how it would be when I got into all this.” With a forkful of mashed florets she indicated that “all this” meant rearing five children. “It’s not like I think you’re enjoying it any more than me.”
Except for Lorcom they all agreed they weren’t enjoying it. Lorcom hoped his lack of enjoyment could be taken for granted. It felt somehow cheapening to assert your own detestation for murdering your mother.
A june bug battered the kitchen window screen. In the silence between blows, they each reached their own conclusions.
Somewhere, within one of their brains, a little thought shook itself off. I wonder how I will behave when the moment comes, it asked. I wonder if I will acquit myself nobly.
When they were children she referred to them all as “trooper.” Come on, trooper, can’t start the car until you’re buckled. Chips or Oreos, trooper, not both. No, peroxide doesn’t sting, trooper, no it doesn’t.
Their childhood memories revealed a recurring theme of being admonished for impeding forward motion.
The house had been poorly constructed even before it became old. The basement flooded every spring when the snow melted. The big concrete porch on the front had been covered with toys and was still covered with toys, faded plastic configurations whose desirability they could no longer bring themselves to see. Rough patches on the floorboards where the cat had vomited before it died. Still they loved it the way you have to love the vessel of your childhood, without balance, all your pleasure yoked to an anchor point far behind you.
There were their bedrooms, one for girls where the ones who were girls slept, one for boys where the ones who were boys slept. Hard to remember who went where these days. On this night they ended up all in the same room, sleeping bags strewn about the floor. In their too-small clothes they looked like children feigning sleep. They looked incapable of grasping the task that lay before them.
Alien Virus Love Disaster Page 14
