by John Klima
“Which?” said Mrs. Janokowski, with a slight lessening of her righteous pique.
“He means his cat, Mrs. Janokowski,” I said, trying to shake off the associations that swam in her eyes. “Buckles, his only companion in the world—a companion you saw fit to report to the Management.”
The old woman’s mouth moved, but no sound came out.
“Do you deny it?” I said.
“No pets of any kind are allowed in the building,” said Mrs. Janokowski, suddenly prim, “without exception.”
A murmur curled like gentle wind through the dim apartment. “And you’re the self-appointed enforcer of this regulation?” Her eyes darted, their power over me diminishing. “And of the regulation which prohibits Mr. Kurtz, a licensed plumber, from fixing his own leaky pipes? And of the regulation which proscribes Mr. Bambara’s sheltering more than three of his homeless relatives at a time?” Small noises of assent from the gathered mass lent my accusations weight.
Mrs. Janokowski wrenched her right arm free of Mr. O’Leary’s grip in a surprising show of strength. “For this you want to throw an old woman out her own window?” she demanded. She waved the blue tattoo in my face. It was the same faded color as her eyes. “You’re no better than the men who did this to me when I was young!”
Tyler Broadwell tightened his grip on her other arm, and Mr. O’Leary made as if to seize her again, but I waved them both back. Young Tyler released her, though he narrowed his eyes at her in distrust. The two men backed up against Mrs. Janokowski’s displaced furniture, clustered to either side of the yawning window.
“We are at war, Mrs. Janokowski,” I said, “a guerilla war for our own survival. If we hadn’t taken matters into our own hand, eviction notices would have a third of us out on the streets! The streets, Mrs. Janokowski. You’ve sold out our families—and for what?” I waved at the fresh green and gold walls with their repeating fleur-de-lis design, conspicuously free of peeling and water stains. “For a little new wallpaper?”
“You should be ashamed, David,” the old woman hissed, so violently that I expected her stringy jowls to pull back like the hood of a cobra. “Your grandparents came through Auschwitz, just like me. You should be above this.”
It was quiet Mr. Miłosz (7A) from across the hall, the Hampstead’s eldest citizen, who rescued the cause from the dread silence that followed. His voice was as whispery as a rapier, parting the air neatly with its soft authority. “My family and I were betrayed in the ghettos of Warsaw. They took us to Dachau. Only I returned.” He surveyed the room as if from a great remove. “I have no sympathy for informants. You, Matylda, should have known better than any of us.”
The old woman’s blue eyes flashed, as though lightning brewed in their cloudy depths. “If this is what the world has come to,” she said, the contempt in her voice like the stream from a ruptured waste canister, “then I don’t think I care to live in it any longer.” She smoothed her shawl and worn skirt. “At Auschwitz, I was never given this chance, but I was prepared had the moment presented itself.”
How she managed it with those arthritic hands, I’ll never know, but she crouched suddenly, her face twisting in a vicious snarl, and saluted us with two fiercely upthrust middle fingers. Then she turned and hurled herself at the window with a high, pathetic cry. The sill caught her at waist-level, and her upper body folded over and out the window as if she were a construct of origami. Her momentum kept her going, and before any of us could react, her legs had flipped up after her and vanished. Uptown express, next stop 72nd Street.
I moved to the window like a man in a dream, not looking down. Several moments passed. My neighbors, thawing by degrees from their shock, began to filter away in murmuring knots of two and three, but I had no ears for their disaffection, their frustration. I was looking up at the sky, the cloudy, breezy, infinite sky of my youth, and hearing the roar of a distant crowd somewhere out of sight, a sound like the ocean trapped in a nautilus shell.
We had thrown Mrs. Janokowski our best sinking curve, and she had hit it dexterously out of the park. I should have felt resentment, injustice, defeat—but as the banshee-cries of sirens began to drift up from the street all I could do was take off my cap, wipe my brow, and admire the way that ball sailed.
A Keeper
Alan DeNiro
Tonight the woman who always calls, calls. This time she asks me how to divide a beggar and an arctangent. What could I have possibly said to her? I think she is a keeper. “Stop trying to mix the humanities and the sciences. And go to bed.” I nod to the phone and the phone clicks off. Outside, a noise sounds like thunder, though it could be a stray dog rolling a garbage can for shelter. I turn off my flickering bedside light (brown-outs, again, all over central Brazil) and tell the clock, “wake me at six a.m.,” attempting to sleep. I sleep.
An hour later she calls back. “But I can’t sleep. I can’t stand the fact that all across the Americas windows are opening and closing, opening, and I’m not looking out of them, all of them, all at once.” I have the vague feeling I ought to know her well; I can’t remember a thing about her.
I imagine her panting and wearing a white tie and a black suit and a round opal bracelet that monitors her position at all times when she takes lunches away from the sanatorium.
Hey, that’s cruel, I think.
I hang up again and move to close the window. I open the storm window again, I look out, and the sky just hangs there, like it’s balanced of the top of the plum tree. Or rather, the recreation of a plum tree, in quartz. The sagging plums used to be a strong violet but vandals scraped the color alloys off and sold them awhile ago. Long before I reached this tenement as a passing stranger.
I’m rooted now.
*
Brasilia is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. But wait, I do live there. I mean, here. My job feeds the bills. I am a painter in the King Juan Juan Center for the Arts. My body of work, like every other painter’s at the Center, consists entirely of portraits of King Juan Juan, which tend to adorn every third block of Brasilia, half the billboards, and most private and shared huts.
Because of the methane corrosion, I can say it is steady work.
That next morning I don’t concern myself about the call. When I was afflicted I did much of the same. The keepers are another pet project of our King. It’s a virus that makes slavish pets out of people, makes people want to babble sex and make sex babble. After time, it passes; side effects include utter amnesia. It’s what passes for mating in Brazil since Juan Juan’s reign began. To most, all other forms of sex appear boring. Everyone needs a keeper; I’ve had about four or five. Including, allegedly, the one who calls me and asks questions that can’t be answered.
Courtship is not easy cake to eat.
As I get ready, letting the kitchen sink brush my teeth, I see Clown Man at the tenement across the street, framed in the window. I don’t know his real name, of course. Here, as on many occasions, he’s painting his face in front of the window, peering into an invisible mirror. He could stare right at me, but he never does. His eyes are glass, corneas surrounded by red and green chalky paint. Then he nods to himself and leaves the window, his ritual complete, off to entertain or hustle or kill someone, or all three. In Brasilia, it would not be out of the question.
*
The Center for the Arts used to be a mosque. My studio is usually in the northeast minaret (they liked keeping the painters in them. Virtual imprisonment in the towers?), but architects re-paint every room every six weeks by royal decree, and today’s my painting day. I work temporarily in the main wing.
All my airbrushes have been primed by an apprentice, and the canvases are warm as well. Light gleams from an open square in the roof, and I can barely hear the triple decker buses and the carriages streaming through the thoroughfare, past the locked gates of Brasilia’s Yale campus.
The piece I have been working on is a potential masterpiece. It depicts King Juan Juan, darkly tanned, shi
rtless, wearing only swimsuit and socks, peering off canvas on a rocky outcrop. Beside the rocky outcrop, two courtesans sex themselves, the man’s head buried between the woman’s legs. The woman, actually, gazes longingly at Juan Juan on the outcrop. The gaze will take a long time to perfect, but I’m already pleased at preliminary results.
I fire up the airbrushes and am about to paint when Paula walks into the studio. She’s my boss, and used to be my wife, but a wife from a long, long time ago. How much I am attracted to her I can’t say. She silently moves towards the tightly stretched canvas and nods in satisfaction.
“The King would be pleased,” she finally says. Her hair is soft and fuzzy, like a platypus. “Are you ready?”
“I guess so.”
I spray out the lasered mist of paint, and she kneels down next to me, slips my pants to my ankles, and begins to service me. After about a minute, painting, I ask her to stop.
She looks up. “Why?”
“It’s beginning to hurt.”
“I’ll be gentler.”
“No, I mean, it hurts from the inside. Burning.”
Twenty minutes later I’m in a doctor’s office, on afternoon leave. My name chimes. I go in and the doctor looks calm, like he could easily be a cricket instructor.
“What seems to be the problem?”
I describe to him the exact situation.
“Hm. Drop your pants.”
I do, although for some reason this is entirely more fearful than when Paula did.
“Hm,” he repeats. “How did you find this out?”
“My boss serviced me.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Your boss?”
“Well, I was painting a sexing, and a lot of curators have been heavily influenced by Carlonian lately, who says that the erotic must be heightened in the painter as much as the painting. But this is probably boring you.”
Instead he says, “I’m afraid that you have a curse.”
“A curse?”
“Yes, a curse in your member.”
I have no idea what he means but am somehow scared of it. “How? What’s going to happen to me?”
“Left untreated, you will probably feel mild irritation, the dementia, until you die. It’s a virus—”
“I thought you said this was a curse. And besides, there are no such things as curses.”
He gives that patient, patient I’m-a-doctor smile. “Well, our new manuals have a new ergonomics towards disease disclosure for doctors—I mean, shamen. We are urged to prescribe the most superstitious names and causes possible. It’s supposed to quell tension.”
I’m not quelled. “What do I have to do then?”
He looks at me, as if not sure on how to phrase a delicate question. “Have you been sexed with your employer before?”
“No, I mean, yes. But not for a long time.” At least I thought.
“Anyone else? Have you been with a keeper?”
I look at my veined bare feet. I am prone. “Maybe. Wait,” and I remember the woman who has been calling me lately, “yes, it’s very possible. So what do I do?”
He gives another smile, this time with a tinge of pity. “First of all, pull up your pants and put on your socks. Second, you need to find her. Only she can remove the curse, give the password to heal you.”
“In other words, I have to find out why she gave me the virus, and get a blood sample from her so that you can remove the virus from my cell system without killing me.”
He puts his stethoscope in a drawer. “If you want to put it that way,” he mutters.
I walk out to pay.
“Be careful; she may be a witch,” I hear the doctor calling out after me.
*
I call in to take the rest of the afternoon off, and I sit in a cafeteria on the west end (but Brasilia has no center, really), trying to envision a plan of action. But nothing comes to mind while chewing slowly on a piece of American apple pie.
Anyways, she calls before I can take another bite. “Where are you, she asks?” she says. Someone laughs behind her.
“I’m in the, um, Dresden. Where are you? I need to talk to you.”
A pause. “You are talking to me.”
“I mean, face to face.”
“The cheery cherry trees. It’s the cool fire of the month.”
“Listen—”
“No, you listen. Did you open the windows of the Americas like I asked you to?”
This time, I’m the one who pauses. “No, but—”
She tones off. A shapely man comes in selling flowers and I buy nine dozen peonies.
*
“OK, OK,” Paula says. “It’s fine to take a couple days off if it’s a medical condition.” Evening time, and I find my way to Paula’s office in the Center for the Arts. Her office is in the third basement and smaller than that of most of her subordinates. King Juan Juan, of course, hovered behind her in paint. I think Jesse did that one. The King is giving his constituents a thumbs up.
“Though of course,” I say, wondering if Paula is snickering inside her head, “I have no idea where to begin.”
“Begin what?”
“I have to find a keeper.”
She begins to laugh through her nose and stretches back on her recliner. “Now I see what the problem is. How long has she been like this?” Paula was a keeper too, before she took up her lover and married. From what she told me (and she was never shy about these matters), she was one of the more passive I could remember. At least more passive than the ones on television.
“I don’t know. I guess I stayed with her once, maybe two weeks ago? It’s hard to say. But she diseased me.”
She hmms. “Why don’t you try the dog market?”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
*
The next morning, smoggy, I am in the dog market. I really hate the dog market, and hate dogs, in fact. Luckily, the name is deceiving—there are more than just dogs here. It’s situated halfway between old Brasilia and what I like to call Brasilia Brasilia, or Brasilia squared, the Guyanese English section that I call home and work. The dog market is in a wide alleyway since it is, technically, illegal to traffic in smart animals. But no one enforces. The policia, I’m sure, are always looking for good dogs too.
So I put my credit card (light amber, which isn’t too bad, I guess) lightly against my belt, on the right side. The sigil of a serious buyer. I meander through the cages, many of them brown with rust, sift through the animals and their sellers with about a dozen others. A dachshund catches my eye because it has three. The seller peers at me, his entire forearm winking in aquamarine, less excited than his dog. I move on.
“Psst. Hey.” A woman about half my height motions towards me. She is in a sari but her skin is whiter than mine. “Yeah, you.” Talking isn’t really allowed, by house rules, but furtive whispering usually didn’t bring imprisonment. I look over to her, nod, hoping that will do the trick.
She motions me with a crooked finger to peek underneath a curtain covering a shape on the table. She pulls it up. Shapes, rather. Goldfish bowls.
With goldfish inside.
I almost, almost laugh, which would have gotten me thrown out at least. I stifle the chuckle and look at the seller with a grimace meant to show bewilderment. She gives an I-know-what-you’re-thinking look, and offers me a chip, which I reluctantly swallow. She pulls a wand from underneath her sari and touches the rim of one of the bowls. The goldfish inside squiggles up to the top, sinks down, and spins its tail a little.
Yeah, I’m talking to you. The augmentation, it seems, has finally trickled down to carnival fish. So are you going to buy me or what? At first, the goldfish all look exactly the same (well, gold), but upon second glance this one looks a little healthier, the scales a little brighter. The seller’s prize fish, then.
Well, are you? Impatient fish.
I’ll need you to find a keeper. In days.
The fish makes a blooping noise, which—I guess—is a laugh. You expect a p
roblem? I’m the best. Let me show you. Come on. Keepers are god-damn trancy-dancy shifty whatevers anyways.
I meander back in the Dresden, with a coffee and cherry pie and a goldfish bowl on the lacquered table. I come here often enough, and tip well enough, that the cashier doesn’t ask about the pet, which is probably a health violation. I am a health violator.
Incredulous, here, with a goldfish worth two weeks pay.
“All right,” I whisper out loud. Even though I don’t have to speak, it is bizarrely reassuring to speak. “What do you need from me at this point? How are you going to find her?”
No problem at all. You infected from her? I nod. I’m not sure if it would pick up human body language but it does. Ouch. She must be needing you real bad, then.
“Then why did she ignore me the last time I called?” I hiss, a little louder than I wanted. A family of three from a booth across the restaurant looks up at me from their pancakes, in unison.
She’s playing a game. It’s all a game. That’s why she infected you. To make sure you come back. But she wants you to work at it too. There is no pleasure without pain.
“How long does someone stay a keeper?”
Who can say? It’s hard to tell. The goldfish—whose name I don’t even ask for, which would be ridiculous—swims in a tiny circle in the bowl. Usually after they mate, at which time they go normal. I think of Paula, cold in my flat’s bed and babbling. But not always. Never exactly works out the way people want. I don’t know. Are you ready then? I’ll find her, don’t worry.
“I guess,” I mutter. “What do you need from me?”
First, I need a sample of her virus, the little bit of titanium that’s itching your member. So, if you will . . .
“What?”
You know . . . The goldfish possesses subtleties unknown in the fish world.
I sigh, a little embarrassed despite myself; I get a little cup from the water dispenser and enter the bathroom. The family, probably enjoying a day off from work rationing, stares at me. I don’t blame them.
