Omnivores

by Lydia Millet

  “See you can’t take shit from these guys, you set your price you keep callin, keep with it and it’s gonna take awhile then bingo! you’re home free. There’s museums that would cut off their dicks for this thing, pardon my French, Esty, but it’s true. They’d kill for one of these little heads. Can’t blame them, it’s an actual human head! This is the head of an actual person. Gives ya chills, huh?”

  “An actual person,” she repeated, nodding as she swallowed, tracing a listless finger along the label Appellation Bordeaux Contrôlée. Behind her shoulder the wizened head was making its mutilated presence felt. It was blind, it was dead, but it was staring.

  “I own it! I own it!” burst out Pete Magnus, and strutted crowing and preening into the kitchen, whence he bore another bottle of wine. He uncorked it saying, “Toast to the head, gotta get a name for it Esty. People come over, freak ’em out. Introduce it, go, This is my grandfather, Peter Magnus the First! Or like, This is the head of George Washington. Be hilarious.” He poured the wine.

  “Very funny,” she concurred.

  “To the head,” said Pete Magnus, and drank.

  Lounging on the sofa, they gazed at the TV screen. Soldiers shot farmers with rifles as they ran from their burning straw huts. Pete channel-surfed. Rwanda, MTV. Correct male pattern baldness. The bottle was half empty; she went to her room and put on her pyjamas. When she got back to the living room, Pete had removed his shirt.

  “I’m tense, could you rub my neck Esty?”

  He laid his head in her lap while she massaged his shoulders. It was unstrenuous. Objects were not separate, every piece was contiguous, and the wine had made her teeth grainy. These grainy teeth, connected to her spine and to the bony digits of her fingers, connected thereby also to the fatty sinews of Pete Magnus flesh. His carpet led seamlessly into the wall, chairs coalesced, her sock feet resting on the coffee table blended into a coaster and crumpled napkin. Thatched roofs caved in, men tumbled under rifle fire. A greeting card from elsewhere, but in code, like everything. There were no borders between the false time of the television and the time in the living room. The screen touched the air and its emissions entered her lungs and her brain through her retina. Particles from the shrunken head, invisible to the naked eye, spun like dust motes in the space she occupied. They drifted onto the 2-D bodies of slain tribal children, thin arms splayed on jungle foliage. Time used itself up, spun itself out.

  The lips of Pete attached themselves to the crook of her arm, where a vein sprang to prominence. He applied suction, a drooling vacuum. She tried to ignore it: something unnamed was holding her attention. An old man, held in cradling arms like a baby. She had seen it somewhere. Hoisting himself up from her lap, gaining leverage, Pete Magnus osmosed into her shoulders and neck, his head bent. His mouth scoured the surfaces. He investigated new terrain with the sole sensory organ of his face, the mouth that ate, tactile and instinctive. His ancestors had foraged for kill on the plains before their cellular phones were installed, but he would deny it to the hilt. History was too bad. He could have stayed carefree, foraging for termites with long blades of grass, picking fleas from his brothers, and then, as the sun set over Tanzania, retiring to his leafy nest to sleep.

  It was ludicrous, but she relaxed and sank into inertia. Pete Magnus burrowed past her garments, hair falling over his eyes. She couldn’t reach her wine glass, but no sooner regretted this than abandoned the effort. He was muttering something, the words were dispensable. Intent on his labor, he wasn’t looking at her face. This was a relief; the details of his features in sweating urgency were ugly like an insult. Instead she encountered his hair, a blurry silver sheen that smelled of Pert.

  Over the crest of the hair, an indistinct foreground, the shrunken head stood out in vibrant sharp outlines against the wall. She focused on the head and then unfocused, and could discern separate strands in the Magnus coiffure. She was increasingly sick to her stomach, and Pete Magnus’s activity, the strain and impact, weighed heavy. “You’re so hot, I always wanted to do it since I met you,” breathed Pete Magnus. “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt.”

  “It’s not good,” she whispered, absent. Her teeth were soft against her tongue.

  “You got your period, am I right? Put a rubber on anyway. Got one right here. Come prepared, like a Boy Scout, wait a second, sometimes you put these things on, it goes down. There.” She had seen the Trojans, the Stimula Vibra Ribbed and LifeStyles, in the drugstore, beside spermicidal jelly and Today sponges in boxes decorated with pink blooming flowers. If only Betty had known! She, Estée, would have been contracepted. Betty might be walking even now, walking, running, dancing through fields of flowering pink Today sponges, her legs mobile and lithe, her arms strong. He fumbled with it, rolled it down over the familiar protrusion, and was back, panting. She felt disoriented, sick, and closed her eyes to quell the dizziness.

  “My turn,” said Larry the bodybuilder, his thick fist churning next to her face. She pulled away and was crawling, Pete Magnus behind her on all fours with lipstick in the shape of a face on his stomach. “My turn,” said Larry, beating on her neck as she tried to escape across the carpet.

  “No,” she whispered, kicking at him and losing balance, scraping her chin on the floor. She saw the window up ahead, but Larry was fast, fast and heavy. His polished biceps clutched her around the stomach. “It’s not my fault, go away,” she squeaked, but he was riding her back. She was a beast of burden. Her knees burned as she dragged them both to the window, put her hands up on the sill, and looked out. Instead of the lights of Hollywood she was met by the old man’s grinning face. Specimen 7 breathed tapioca and chocolate into her nostrils and pushed his hoary gray tongue down her throat. She fell back into the room, where Larry’s bulk melted beneath her back and the old man, his blue hospital robe gaping open, was astride her from the front.

  “Don’t, you thief,” she said as he mauled her chest. “Get off!” Applause from the cheap seats: Larry was clapping on the other side of the room. The old man tried to pry her legs apart with liver-spotted hands, but she slipped out of his grasp. He ran around in circles cackling, a toy winding down, and then tottered back to the window and climbed out. She lay gasping for relief, but the room was still populated; on the sidelines swam blurred faces. In surged Jesus freaks, swooping down on her with rod and staff. They pinned her arms back. “Ugly b-bbug,” said Ron. Behind them mothmen battled with guns, and guinea pig soldiers played patty-cake in their bunkers. She was legless, bedridden, cocooned. The Jesus freaks were pushed off her, protesting as they went, but she hummed “Ave Maria” in her head to ward them off, falling back on old custom, and the crowds dissipated.

  Instead of Pete Magnus it was the head. Water rushed in her ears, the ocean sound of a shell. “You are a seed pod,” said the head, and grinned toothless, its mouth spreading and splitting. “Betty, a man needs a son.” The head and the demon with his spear and tufted anklets were on her, they were fathers and sons and dead ghosts and they had her now. She remembered Helen and was gripped with panic, cold, a ball of hard ice in her stomach.

  “Yes! Yes!” said Pete Magnus, but she pushed him off. “What, Esty, what the hell?” he whinnied, his organ dangling in the air in a yellow tube sock.

  She struggled to her feet, holding her stomach, and ran naked into the bathroom, where she shut herself in, breathing fast and hard. She ran water in the tub and swallowed aspirin. When she settled down in the hot water a flower of blood blossomed, crimson against the white porcelain beneath her, and faded. She had guarded against it, but then forgotten. Now it was set in stone. Somewhere someone was laughing.

  Pete Magnus had invited them in. He had made an expatriate of the shrunken head, shipped it over forests and oceans. He had adopted it for his private zoo, but it did not wish to be kept. They were locked in together. It would hurt her more than it hurt him. Such was the law of fathers.

  THREE

  “THEY HAVE A POLICE RECORD OF THE FIRE,” PETE MAGNUS told her
, “but there’s no bones. No bones and no teeth.”

  He had been contacted by Bill’s attorney, who told him no one knew where Bill and Betty were. Apparently, however, Bill had empowered the lawyer to set up a fund. “It’s a trust fund,” reported Pete Magnus. “The thing is Esty, what your crazy father did was, he made me your guardian.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked. Sitting across from the shrunken head, whose crumpled eye sockets held her mesmerized, she was motionless. She had taken two Valiums from the medicine cabinet to distract from her stomach pains. She knew the source of the pains; ibuprofen, aspirin, Tylenol were no defense against them.

  “This trustee, he disburses funds to me and I funnel ’em down to you,” said Pete Magnus. “I don’t know why he did it. Maybe it’s how young you are.”

  “So if I need money,” she said, “I have to get it from you?”

  He was lounging on the couch, legs up on the coffee table, suit jacket thrown over the back of a chair. He had loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, calling for a cold one as he came through the door. He took a swig and shot her a sidelong look. “In the legal sense I guess that’s the deal,” said Pete. “But you know me, I won’t be hard to handle. You wanted Esty, you could have me in the palm of your hand.”

  She was queasy. She went to the bathroom and threw up in the toilet bowl.

  “I should get a job,” she said when she returned. He was watching basketball.

  “Problem is, with that is,” said Pete, “you don’t have a high school diploma. Plus you got no work experience, not even waiting tables. Plus you’re under the weather. Don’t worry babe. You’re set. It’s a generous allowance. You stick with me. Slam dunk!”

  She was momentarily stunned, but the arrangement matched Bill’s profile. She knew what she had to do. She was alone in her knowledge of the future and therefore the sole responsible party. When the time came she had to have the facts at her fingertips. Pete Magnus’s doctor had diagnosed her with an ulcer, but he was wrong. She had no faith in medical professionals. They were machinists in a country of animals. The pangs they ascribed to an ulcer were in fact clear indications that the embryonic monster was attempting a jailbreak. It was trying to eat its way out, gnawing and scratching. Its dead godfather had proved unforthcoming. Frequently she asked him what she had done to deserve it, but his vocal cords had been severed long since and he refused to sing. He was unrepentant. Anyway, she blamed the middleman.

  She learned about New Caledonia, about headhunters in South Massim, about the warriors of nineteenth-century Melanesia who believed that the meat of their enemies contained the vitality of the deceased—a vitality that, if ingested, was transferred through gastric juices and bloodstream to its new host, the conquering hero. Heroes who ate the vanquished, by dint of their consumption, safeguarded themselves against their victims’ posthumous vengeance. Thigh meat, breast meat, arms or flanks, white or dark it made no difference.

  It was not only the Papua New Guineans. There were others: domestic subspecies. She conducted hagiographical research, but on a pantheon of criminals instead of saints. Their accomplishments were a matter of public record. Daniel Rakowitz had made Manhattan dancers into soup, Arthur Shawcross had eaten eleven women after their demise, and Jeffrey Dahmer pickled genitalia and painted skulls. Then there was Chikatilo, a gourmand of tongues and private parts who liked his food still breathing. They appeared in sufficient numbers to convince her that geography was not the key. Man-eating was pandemic.

  When her homunculus was born, if she survived, she would have to raise it. On the sly, with money raised by pilfering from Pete’s petty cash, she enrolled in a week-long seminar she saw advertised in Family Circle, on a rack beside the cash register in a grocery store. Titled “Prenatal Lessons in Happy Child Rearing,” it was hosted by an antediluvian Junior League chapter in association with Mothers Against Drunk Driving and held in a conference room at a Sheraton.

  The other attendees were bulging with expectancy, distended bellies sheathed in floral cottons. Between pro forma lectures they mingled over a buffet lunch, included in the price of admission, and shared confidences on the subject of morning sickness and discharge. A woman named Pammie said she and her husband, Ray, an urban planner, were going to have at least five children. “My sister’s into Zero Population Growth, but it’s mostly for welfare mothers on crack and that,” she revealed. “I figure Ray and I would be great parents, so we should go the whole hog. There’re no bad kids, just bad parents. Maybe there should be a test or something, like a minimum annual income for people who want to have kids, or like an IQ test, and you fail the test they should give you one of those Norplants or like a vasectomy,” and she scooped up a helping of ambrosia salad and trundled back to her chair.

  “I don’t believe that,” confided a freckled eight-monther to Estée. “There’s plenty of room. I saw on TV how they could melt the polar ice caps on Mars with nuclear bombs and then it would be warm enough to live on.”

  In the afternoon, small-group discussions were held. Novice mothers sat around tables and deferred to a presiding moderator. They were required to write down child care dilemmas on scraps of paper, anonymously, and hand them up to her. She read out the questions one at a time. In Estée’s group, the first question was an obvious plant. “Your child and the president of the United States are trapped in a burning building. Which one do you save?”

  “Wouldn’t the Secret Service get the president out?” asked Pammie.

  “That’s right,” said the moderator fondly, “your child should always be your first concern.” There followed conversations about breast pumps, sudden infant death syndrome, and potty training. “My, we have a comedian with us today!” said the moderator, and read out Estée’s question. “Your baby is eating people. What do you do?” This was greeted with a round of titters. Estée excused herself. Evidently the professional mothers were unwilling to help.

  In the library she found no reference to cannibal embryos, although some toddlers in far-off tribes were routinely trained to run with their spears. Advice on care and grooming was not forthcoming. She would have to approach Pete Magnus with the problem. After all, he was her guardian and might have to be solicited to release monies for the cause of upbringing. Over take-out Mexican, he grumbled about business problems. “Goddamn midwestern housewives waving bills in my face, threatening litigation, do I need this Esty? Senile fathers drooling on their pillowcases and their menopausal daughters come screaming at me, old guys probably don’t give a shit, practically corpses, hooked up to life support, persistent vegetative state, you can bet your ass they don’t even know their own names anymore, what do they care if their windows look out on panoramas of the Sonora Mountains? Could be some back alley in Jersey City for all they care, they don’t know the difference. Plane trip’s gonna kill ’em?”

  “I’m going to have a baby,” said Estée.

  He choked on a chip doused in chunky-style salsa.

  “That’s impossible Esty, the doctor would’ve told me. Plus which we, I mean that one time—you been going out on your own?”

  “I don’t know anyone but you.”

  “Then you’re not pregnant,” said Pete Magnus, wiping his eyes with a Taco Bell napkin. “I know it for a fact. Just because you’re late, it doesn’t mean you got a bun in the oven. Jesus Esty, scared me half to death.”

  “It’s not a normal baby,” she said. “It’s trying to eat its way out. That’s why I have the stomach pains. The shrunken head is the father. You’re like Joseph.”

  Pete Magnus stared at her and then folded his napkin into a small square.

  “Esty,” he said with unaccustomed gentleness, “the stomach pains are from your ulcer. We gotta get you some help. You ever been to a therapist?”

  “If I have a baby, will you help me with it? That’s all I want to know. That’s the only reason I told you.”

  “Listen Esty,” he said, leaning forward and circling her wrist with thic
k fingers, “I’m here for you. But drop the baby shit. It’s a fantasy. Maybe you didn’t have sex ed. For babies you need your balls, Esty. Testes. You need your spermatozoa. That shrunken head has no sperms Esty. That shrunken head couldn’t fuck its way out of a paper bag.”

  “I read in a magazine at the doctor’s that the males of a species are the ones that pass down the most bad genes,” said Estée. “It also said: The male typically makes a swift postcoital exit, leaving the female to rear her offspring alone. And anyway the head used your sperms to do it. You have testes. I saw them.”

  “Listen Esty, I’m not going to sit here teaching you the facts of life,” said Pete Magnus. “Let’s just drop the subject. You’re not having a baby, okay?”

  “You have no idea,” said Estée stiffly, and stalked into her bedroom. She locked her door, found a discarded lighter in a desk drawer, and burned the notebook, long hidden in a drawer. Pete Magnus rapped on the door when the smoke alarm went off and poured Evian on the blaze.

  Next morning, with the ersatz Joseph off to work, she held a vigil in front of the head. She imagined the end of his life. He had lain dying in the black soil, beneath foliage so thick he gazed upward to the sky, flat on his back, and saw only a glimmer from the pale nut of the sun. Sliced open from throat to crotch, heart still fluttering, viscera spilled over an anthill, he had abandoned his carcass. He had joined the numberless ranks of the forgotten. He was inconsolable. His bones were restless; he was at a loss in the land of opportunity. The purple mountain majesties were not for him, nor yet the amber waves of grain. He had been trained in the customs of his forebears. Nothing had equipped him for a realtor. She pitied him, no matter what he had done.

  “I was talking to this woman Leola, at the office,” said Pete Magnus from his car phone. “She goes, what Esty needs are female friends, like other women she can relate to. Sisterhood and shit. So I asked this woman Marsha, more your age. She goes yeah, she’s into it. Fuck you! Asshole tailgater, I should brake and collect his insurance, send his premiums sky-high. Lunch at a Thai place. Take the corporate AmEx. Just you two girls. I figure it’s cheaper than an analyst. You should go Esty. Gotta get out more. Don’t eat a spicy dish. With that ulcer and all.”