by Aeon Authors
“Strange air, strange air,” beneath their feet an Icaro plodded by at the ready, his giant head swiveling from side to side, alert. Work parties made careful soundings lest a shivered exterior wall let in strange air and unwanted light.
The contractor jumped again. He looked wise and said, “Four-foot centers. This used to be the attic. You hear things at night?”
“Like what?” Jim readied himself for a quaint, historic tale of a sea captain’s ghost.
“Yes,” said Ginny before the man could reply. “A clicking sound. In the walls. Like somebody cracking his knuckles. But not.” Jim looked at his wife and registered exasperation.
“A clicking?” asked the contractor. “Real steady?”
Ginny nodded and glared back at her husband. “I know what I hear, Jim. Yes, even over your snoring.” Touché.
Ginny walked the man to the door. “Whippy,” he repeated his diagnosis. Ginny felt her head getting tight, a warning.
The contractor waved and called from the street. “You got ants, lady. Better call the exterminator.”
“Wha…?”
“Bugs. A potential infestation. They could be big trouble down the line. Carpenter ants,” said the contractor. “Gotta get ‘em early. You don’t want to hear an estimate.” The contractor left a card. He neglected to say when “early” was.
Ginny’s eyes were glued shut with the mucilage of sleep. She rubbed them at their corners to loosen the bond. Ouch, too much light. Her eyelids slammed shut. Slowly, slowly, Ginny Levitan, née Bujac, eased them open, squinting at a hazy morning through a paling of lashes. She tried to remember her father. They had splashed through the puddles together, puddles with their upside-down skies.
“Well, honey, that’ll bring in Chicago.”
Ginny’s dad had erected a TV mast when she was six years old. Her favorites were Buffalo Bob and his sidekick Howdy Doody, the freckle-faced puppet with, she supposed, red hair. Color TV had yet to reach Racine, Wisconsin. Dad had bought her a metal lunch pail with a color lithograph of Howdy with red hair so it must be so. She tried to remember her imaginary playmate. “How’s your little playmate today, Ginny?” Dad thought the Flim-Flam Man was an elf. Dad had named the Flim-Flam Man: “Careful Baby, the Film-Flam Man goin’ getcha!” There would be giggles and a laugh as he swung her high into the fluffy friendly clouds. Dad believed in the Flim-Flam Man, too.
“She flashed her tits at Jim, Dad, the Real Estate Vampire. Oh, I wish you were here. I wish the Flim-Flam Man was here.” Dad gave no response. Dad was dead. Her father’s face faded.
Shifting her breasts to each side, Ginny balanced over the side of the bed and allowed her head to dangle to the floor. The world was refreshingly different upside down, like the sky in a rain puddle, blue with high summer cumulus clouds that she once obliterated with her little girl yellow galoshes.
“Carry your lunch pail today?” The Flim-Flam Man had red hair, just like Howdy Doody. But he was more, well… masculine. Ginny Bujac, for that was her name then, liked his tight curly hair, the corded musculature of his shoulders and forearms. He was a comfort when the other kids picked on her.
“That was in Racine, Wisconsin, fifty years ago. I splashed the sky away,” said Ginny.
A line of ants, single file, marched across the pine flooring beside her nose.
“Hello, ants,” said Ginny. A lone ant appeared from under the baseboard. He was carrying a grain of rice and headed against the flow of traffic back down the line of marchers.
“Hello, Little Ginny,” said the Flim-Flam Man.
“You are a figment.”
“Really,” said the Flim-Flam Man.
“Of course. I am nuts. You were all well and good when I was six years old, but…”
“Ginny… we splashed the puddles and made the sky go upside down, didn’t we?”
“Well…”
“Together?”
“Always together.”
“You’ve got ants, Little Ginny. You heard what the contractor said. Better call the exterminator.”
“Dad…?”
The Flim-Flam Man smiled, a hearty manly smile. “They could mean big trouble down the line. Carpenter ants,” said the Flim-Flam Man. “Gotta get ‘em early.”
Ginny decided to kill the ants herself.
Ginny found out that she was a loser at the game of life by accident. It was the running shoes. She noticed them in her husband’s gym bag and recalled the pair of shoes in Babs Casmirczak’s bag. Jim had been working out three, four nights a week at the Bangor YMCA, a good hour-plus drive away. He had said, “I’m closing in on 58 and I want to slow the process.” Reasonable enough.
Dinner was on the table. A bouquet of purple periwinkles in a jelly-glass vase sat between them. “Macaroni and cheese. Again?” The implication was that Ginny was trying to fatten him up against all the good work he was doing at the gym. Ginny noticed that Jim was putting on a spare tire despite all his workouts.
“Help yourself, enjoy,” said Ginny. Jim tucked right in.
Two nights later and Jim was a no-show. Ginny called the Bangor YMCA. A valley girl voice, sounding knowledgeable, all chirpy and preppy, assured her they were, indeed, open till 9:00 P.M. “Levitan? Jim Levitan? I’ll call down and have one of the trainers check the sign-in sheet.” Ginny was on hold. After five-plus minutes, the chirpy girl returned.
“No, he’s not signed in. But that doesn’t mean anything; it’s just suggested, not required. In case of an emergency. Do you want him paged?”
No, Ginny did definitely not want him paged. “Thank you for taking the trouble.”
“No problem. Say, why don’t you sign up? Our Seniors’ Special…” Ginny hung up on her. Later on, ten-ish, Jim arrived, hair slicked back and still wet from the shower.
“Good workout?”
“Terrific.”
“You know… I was thinking of maybe joining myself.”
Jim started to talk, then hesitated, “It’s a long drive…”
“Just over an hour…” Long enough to get your hair dry if that’s where you were. “You do it. We could get the family rate. Or I could sign up on the Seniors’ Special.”
“You’re not that out of shape.”
“Thanks for noticing.” She pulled one shoe from her husband’s gym bag. The tissue paper from the factory was still wadded into the toe. He had never laced them up. “Nice shoes. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess you were having an affair with Babs, the real estate agent.”
Jim flushed, turning the color of a boiled lobster from his neck to the part in his hair. “Uh… What?” He shuffled his feet and looked away.
Ginny slept in the guest bedroom from then on.
“Sister, sister, can you hear me?”
“Yes, I can hear you.” The voice—which Ginny feared only she could hear and at that only in her mind—quavered with the peculiar quality of an overseas radio transmission, the heterodyning phase shifts she had heard from her father’s short wave radio: “Shhhh, pumpkin, that’s London calling, the BBC World Service.” Or Moscow, or Mozambique.
“Sister, soon it will only be you and I.”
Ginny Levitan struggled to be awake, rubbing muzzy cobwebs from the edges of her consciousness. “Who are you?” She could not locate the source of the voice.
“I am the Lady Mother. Except for myself, of course. I did not know my mother but I must assume that there was one. My fecundator, the Father of Us All, died at the moment of consummation.”
“My father died twenty years ago.”
“Ah, sister, so did the Father of Us All.”
“Where are you?”
“Where I have always been. I am singing.”
“Uh, that’s nice.”
“No, it is not nice, as you say. But it is necessary.”
“If you are not just some imbalance with my endocrine system, where are you?”
“I might ask you the same question if I knew what it was. Sister, sister. I cry alone, alway
s alone. Into the emptiness, the great darkness outside the galleries, beyond the sand. I have reached out in my despair and you have answered. Where have you been?”
“Racine, Wisconsin, then Chicago mostly. Jim organized seminars for the University. Then here, to Maine. We retired early.”
“I do not know of these things. Where is early?”
Ginny rummaged in the drawer of her bedside table for the card of that therapist Jim had recommended. She deliberately tore the card apart. “There. He says I am nuts. What does that make you?” The shredded bits fell to the bedroom carpet like confetti behind a parade.
“What I have always been, the Lady Mother of the Long Walkers. Sister, I need your help,” the voice sang.
Ginny stirred the fallen confetti with a toe. “About now I’m the one who needs professional help. Just what did you have in mind?”
A wordless singing went on for several minutes.
With a burst of pre-menstrual energy, Ginny was beating the blues by cleaning out the attic when she discovered the ancient can, tucked away where the roof timbers met at the eaves.
“Rodenticide, kills ants and other household pests,” she read. “Arsenic trioxide.” The label was printed on parchment colored paper in red ink. There was a picture of a rat, looking feral and healthy. A skull and crossbones adorned one corner. She carried the can to the kitchen where she spread some newspapers and prised off the lid. The can was full of a dense, white powder.
And the phone was ringing.
Yeah?” Ginny was trying to read the label on the can of ant poison. She balanced the phone against her ear while she rummaged in a drawer for her spare glasses.
“Shit,” said Ginny.
“What?”
“I just spilled my poison. Who is this?” Ginny decided there was not enough poison spilled to do any real damage and squeegeed up loose powder with a wet paper towel.
“Spilled your what?”
“Forget it.”
“Ginny?”
“Yes.”
“Ginny, it’s Linda.”
“Linda.” Who the hell was Linda?
“Linda Throckmorton. I haven’t seen you since high school.”
“Oh, God. Linda.”
“I wanted to call and tell you how sorry I am about your father. His death?”
“Linda, that was twenty years ago. Have you just heard?”
“I didn’t know what to say at the time. I couldn’t call. And now…”
“Better late than never.” A pause. “Linda, is that why you haven’t talked to me for twenty years, because you didn’t call when my dad died?”
“Yes.”
“Linda, where are you?”
“California. Bob teaches at San Jose State.”
“Jesus Christ, Linda. We were friends.”
“Ginny, I’m so miserable. We, I, am in counseling, A.A. My marriage is a mess; I’ve been going to Weight-Watchers, Jenny Craig…”
“You’re fat, you’re seeing a shrink, you’re drying out and Bob is fucking the cheerleaders and you’re sorry my dad is dead. That about right so far?”
“Oh…” There was silence, then a quiet sobbing.
Ginny watched a line of ants struggle with the task of transporting rice from a bag of basmati down from the kitchen counter back to their nest. Her rice from her cabinet. She reached for the can of arsenic trioxide and slammed it down on the counter, hard. The lid popped loose, sending a cloud of gray-white dust into the air. Ginny dived for the paper towels and moistening one placed it against her nose. She juggled the telephone. She had twisted the cord into an electrical macramé.
“Get a grip on yourself. Linda. We’re fifty-six years old, for Chrissakes—terminal ennui, the death of marriage, blah, blah, blah. And forget passion. I started high impact aerobics to tighten up my ass. Now Jim is fucking Babs Casmirczak.”
“Babs What-zack?
“Casmirczak, the Real Estate Vampire. She’s the agent who sold us our dream house. Jim is fucking her and I’m suing to get some equity back.”
“And you’re suing for divorce?”
“Or something, anything. Or I will be.”
There was snuffle at Linda’s end of the conversation. “Ginny, this took a lot of courage for me.”
“Pick up the phone Linda—just once in twenty years—it’s not heavy. A little penitence goes a long way. Fuck you. I am one royally pissed-off screaming termagant.”
“I called you every day, in my mind. I’ve been in therapy. I was there for you, Ginny.”
A reedy skirling of tiny bagpipes, “Sister, sister, help me…” The bagpipers ceased but the song continued, a song with no content.
Trailing the telephone cord behind her, Ginny went to the refrigerator and pulled out a container of yogurt, full of fat and with sugary fruit syrup on the bottom.
Linda said something, stopped, waited for a reply. Ginny hummed tunelessly. “What’s that?” Linda was still on the line.
“Oh, you’re still there; I thought I heard someone breathing. That’s The Song of the Rice Barge Coolie. I was watching ants walk cross the kitchen counter just now. Bertolt Brecht. I learned it in college. A theater course.”
“We did Showboat in high school, remember?”
Ginny peeled the seal from the yogurt container. Elbows on the kitchen counter, her fingers traced idle swirls in leftover poison dust. “The ants are emptying a five-pound bag of rice. Grain by grain. I thought the ants’ achievement deserved some recognition.”
Linda sang, “It’s just my Bill, an ordinary guy…”
“They work all day for a chance to work the following day, the coolies. They get to eat whatever spills. They sleep under a bridge if they are lucky. Then they die.”
“Like Ol’ Man River. In Showboat.” Linda’s small, snot-filled voice rose and fell in the earpiece. “‘He jes’ keeps rollin’ along…’“
“Not really. The coolies will never get there. They will all die. Their children will finish the trip. Then their children will die.” Ginny’s hands played with the old poison can, prising off the lid, squeezing it shut. The lid became jammed. A large ring of keys, Jim’s keys, with Babs’s Century 21 advertising bauble, lay on the table. Ginny bent a key getting the lid off. “Ouch.” A bright spot of blood shimmered on the white powder, her blood. Ginny cursed Linda Throckmorton. In far California Linda took a snot-filled gulp, a warning that she was taking on air for an extended conversation. Ginny hung up the phone.
That song again, the Armenian music from a distant radio.
“Hello. Are you there?” said Ginny.
“I cry alone, always alone,” said the Lady Mother of the Long Walkers. “I remember the sun,” the singer trilled, “the great light. And the blessed wind with white blossoms falling upward. They promised much but I was betrayed.”
“That’s true love for you, once in a lifetime. Jim is fucking the Real Estate Vampire.”
The Lady Mother did not ask the meaning of vampire or even fucking a vampire. Ginny figured the concepts were a given. After all, the voice was her hallucination.
“Kill your husband, sister, as I killed mine. He has betrayed you after all…” The Lady Mother became hushed and insinuating. “Sister,” she said, “I ripped out his organs of generation. He was so beautiful.” Her song rose and fell. “The eggs, my eggs, my larvae, my pupae, the hatchlings, are dying, my sister queens are dead and lying in a row…”
“I have my own problems.” Pictures of tunnels, shafts and galleries, brood chambers and a purposeful thronging skittered across Ginny’s mind. Large white bodies lay dead. “Jesus Christ. You’re an ant.”
“If you say it, sister, then it is so.” The Lady Mother of the Long Walkers was sure and composed.
Ginny felt an early tingle of migraine, a hometown nova about to bloom in her head. Where was the Dilantin? The first time this music played she had had a seizure. She could kill the ants and stop the singing in her head. And, so it followed with ineluctable logic, wh
y not Jim, too. The idea was not unpleasing. Virginia Levitan, née Bujac, was not sure that her husband deserved killing just for having an affair—or really bad taste in women, meaning Babs. He had said she was fat. Fat and fits. And he had criticized her right in front of the Real Estate Vampire. Death happens for reasons. She trusted that the ants would appreciate this.
“I have seizures. Prozac wasn’t invented yet. I got Dilantin. I got the anticonvulsants. Try Dilantin for twenty years. I have hair on my tits. I hear voices; I am dizzy. I foam at the mouth and fall down. Boom. Like that. Right on my hairy tits.”
“Sister.”
“Yes?”
“There is one I can trust, a messenger. You will help him.”
Ginny Levitan, cuckolded wife, awakened to the reasonableness that her rear end was cold. Coffee-making odors and subdued businesses filtered in from the kitchen. Motion was not on the menu until she got sufficiently coordinated to figure a way through the overnight tangle of knotted bedclothes. Her foot was caught.
Too early. This was as early as days got. One extravagant fling got all the covers over back on top of her and Ginny was in the secret garden of her own woman smells. A click from the kitchen, low radio morning sounds. The refrigerator lunked shut, more coffee aroma. Her wandering husband had come home.
“Yoo-hoo, Ginny, coffee’s on and the bathroom’s clear.”
Reveille. Considerate Jim.
Jim came into the bedroom, tousled Ginny’s hair and gave a desultory peck on the nose. He ran a hand up the inside of her thigh.
“Don’t.”
“Indil Thirty-seven, Master of Messengers, I would have you visit my sister.”
“Your sister is dead, Lady.”
“This is another sister. A woman.”
“Lady? I am sincerely sorry for the deaths of your sisters.”
“Master of Messengers, you are a fool.”
“Yes, Lady.”
“I have talked with my sister and now she is going to kill us all. Then there will be no more Long Walkers. This I cannot allow. It is my duty. And her husband, too,” the Lady Mother added as an afterthought. “My sister, the new, the living sister has revealed to me that I am an ant. You too are an ant, as are the workers, the Icaros and even Housekeeping and the nannies. She believes that we are insignificant.”
