September Mourn

by Jess Lourey

  “Welcome. Can I help you?”

  “I have an appointment with Lars Gunder.” I shifted from one foot to the other, feeling like bacterium in a Petri dish in my sweaty, sleeveless sundress and flip-flops. My hands were clenched as I waited for some sanitation system to detect and then eject me. Red lights would flare, sirens would wail, and long metal pincers would emerge from behind a secret panel, snag me by the back of my dress, and lift me off the ground while a leather boot on a stick appeared to kick me out.

  “Of course.” She spoke softly into a phone and then suggested I have a seat, holding her brittle smile all the while.

  No sirens.

  Two white leather chairs flanked a glass table in the waiting room. I sunk silently into one, or at least tried to, but my wet thighs bleated loudly against the surface. It was in everyone’s best interest to pretend my body hadn’t just made that noise, and so I didn’t bother glancing apologetically at the receptionist.

  Instead, I leaned forward, rifling through both of my magazine options: Farm Journal and Dairy Farming Now. Fortunately, Lars’ arrival saved me from learning more about teat salve and the hoof-split crisis. I shook the hand he held out to me, glancing quickly back to make sure I hadn’t left a stain on the chair.

  “Thank you for coming, Mira. I wasn’t sure if you would.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “Quite an operation you have here.”

  “Thank you. This main building is where we do some of our testing as well as house our corporate employees. Wait until you see the lab.”

  I followed as he slid a card into an electronic lock, opening two automatic metal doors that led off the foyer. A whoosh of air greeted us. It smelled like rubbing alcohol, dry dog food, and something that caused an instinctual fear reaction in me. At first I thought it was the smell of the doctor’s office when you’re about to get a shot, or that weird tang someone who has intense stage fright gives off, but neither was it exactly.

  I couldn’t put my finger on it, so I ignored it. I found that by the time we had taken four different turns and were in the bowels of the faceless, white-halled building, it was hardly noticeable, and my heartbeat returned to normal.

  “Ever get lost in this place?”

  He chuckled, but like the receptionist there was something robotic about his attempt at good humor. “You get used to it. You see those guys in white coats?” He stopped, pointing at the glassed-in lab to our right, the first windowed room we’d passed. Inside, three men worked over a series of massive microscopes arranged on a stainless steel table. They wore protective goggles and face masks and thick rubber gloves. They were surrounded by whirring machines, delicate-looking computer equipment, and stacks of testing materials. In one particularly intricate operation, a blue liquid bubbled from one end of a glass piping unit to another, trying to escape the flames poised below.

  “They’re about to make history.”

  “What’re they doing?” I asked.

  “Updating ME. That’s Milk Enhancer, our best-selling product. In its current form, it doubles milk output on an average cow. These scientists are days away from changing the formula to quadruple output.”

  I unconsciously adjusted my boobs under my still-damp sundress. “Doesn’t that hurt the cows?”

  “Not at all. And think of all the hungry people in the world who could be fed if your average cow produced four times as much milk. This project is my baby. I’m currently negotiating to get the newest version of ME sent overseas.”

  “Do you test it on real cows first?”

  His reflection in the glass raised an eyebrow. “Of course. We have a full testing lab on our facilities.”

  “This isn’t the testing lab?”

  “Different kind of testing. You are the curious one, aren’t you? I like an intelligent woman.” He rested his hand on my shoulder and massaged lightly. When I glanced over, uncomfortable at the physical contact, he smiled flirtatiously, giving me the full charm treatment.

  The tightness at the corners of his lips indicated another emotion all together, but only because I was watching for it. I could see how another person, like an eighteen-year-old, attention-hungry farm girl, would only hear the flattering words. “This lab isn’t set up to accommodate animals, but we have a building on the grounds that is. By running the product on high-quality dairy cows before releasing it to the public, we ensure farmers the best results, no worries.”

  I thought of Aeon and his claims that the products weren’t safe. “Run into any hitches testing ME?”

  “None.” He abruptly dropped his hand from my shoulder. “Let’s go look at the manufacturing facility and the packing warehouse.”

  He led me through a maze of corridors to the rear of the main building, where we stepped outdoors and through another security gate before entering the blue collar area of the plant.

  The BPM operation was much larger than I had first thought. In the rear, out of sight from the street, were several warehouses, a behemoth of a manufacturing plant, and a distribution center. Lars stopped at a small building to grab us bright yellow hard hats before showing me around the other buildings, smiling and waving at the hundreds of workers busily producing, boxing, and transporting cow products.

  As we stepped in and out of buildings, I realized that from the air, the BPM operation would look like a giant “T,” with the main offices the base of the letter and the ancillary buildings above and then to the right and left, forming the crossbar of the “T.”

  All the rear buildings we had entered had sturdy, reinforced doors but were not walled-in like the main structure. The only exception was a small building surrounded with razor wire that stood at the far-left corner of the “T.”

  “What’s in there?”

  Lars smiled his oily smile, but it was beginning to wear at the seams. “That’s our product testing lab I spoke about earlier. Can’t go in there. We’d interrupt important stuff.”

  I motioned toward an out-of-place piece of equipment. “Why does a testing lab need a bulldozer?”

  “They’ve got to park them somewhere.” Before I could point out that there were much more sensible places to rest it other than inside the razor wire fence—say, in the giant warehouse marked “Garage” across from us—he grabbed me by the elbow and steered me into the next warehouse, the fourth one we had entered on our tour. It was packed floor-to-ceiling with boxes, male workers in blue shirts swarming around like busy bugs, driving forklifts and moving product. They treated us as if we were invisible, and I wondered how many visitors they got.

  We stood off to the side, out of the way of most of the traffic, and Lars numbed my brain with sleepy facts about how many boxes were packaged each day, how many pounds of stock moved through the place, and what innovations they’d made in the shipping of their products. Soon, all his words ran together like a buzzing drone, oddly soothing in its banality. “… to 122 countries … cows six times more productive than they were 20 years ago… by stimulating the mammary glands and hormone level, which then produces … harmless… thoroughly tested… progress.”

  He insisted I take notes in case I wanted to write an article about BPM. I obliged, surreptitiously scribbling the layout of the place and particularly the location of the testing lab. That took all of five minutes, but his lecture continued interminably. When I was about to bleed from my eyes from boredom, his pocket began buzzing. He smiled apologetically before pulling out the phone, but his face turned gray as the person on the other end of the line spoke.

  “I see. When?” He grimaced. “Yes. I understand.” He snapped the phone shut, his posture rigid. “I’m afraid something unexpected just popped up. I have to cut this short.”

  “You’ll help me find the exit first, right?” I thought I was joking. Of course he’d walk me out of this maze.

  “Of course.” His light tone from earlier was entirely absent. He walked briskly ahead, much more quickly than he’d moved on the entire tour.

  I wondered
what terrible news he’d just gotten.

  He tromped out of the warehouse, across the open courtyard, and to the gate surrounding the byzantine main offices. There was a commotion to my right, at the testing lab, but I couldn’t do more than glance over or I would have missed my chance to slip inside the gate he had unlocked and then charged through.

  All I saw was a second bulldozer coming out of the side of the lab and behind it, a blurry pile of brown. I ran to catch up with Lars as he stalked into the main offices. Once inside, the antiseptic white of the halls smothered me like cotton. I couldn’t imagine having to work in this lonely, sanitary building every day, particularly after the bustle and brightness of the warehouses and manufacturing centers out back.

  “Lars, could you slow down some?”

  “Sure. Sorry.” He pulled back a little, but not much, and the sucking clop of my flip-flops was the only sound as we hurried along the fluorescent hallways.

  “So how much does it cost to be a sponsor of the Milkfed Mary pageant?” I asked. I had let him do his P.R. patter, and now I was hoping he’d answer the questions I’d really come about.

  “I’m not sure of exact figures.”

  “And what does BPM get in return?”

  “Positive publicity, certainly, but it’s important for us to give back to the community, and that’s priceless.” His answer was rote, a sound bite he was used to handing out.

  “I see. And did you spend time alone with any of the candidates?”

  I had crossed a line. He stopped dead in his tracks, facing away from me. He didn’t immediately turn, and I was afraid of what his face would look like when he did. When he finally swiveled, however, he was the picture of composure. “I think your tour is done.”

  “I don’t know how to get out of here.” He’d taken a left and then a right when we’d entered the main offices, which put us in a white hallway that looked like every other white hallway in this massive building.

  “You strike me as the type who can find her way.” He smirked and strode off, disappearing behind a door marked “Private.”

  I glanced up and down the endless, ominous hallway, and suddenly, my chest felt like someone was sitting on it. Don’t be crazy, I told myself. You’re in a public company, and there’s people here, even if you can’t see them. I tried not to let other thoughts pollute that mantra as I flip-flopped quickly away, but it was hard not to notice that the interior of the main building looked as much like a mental institution as a modern business.

  I tried the door Lars had disappeared into. It was locked and no one answered when I knocked. Rather than stand still and let my burbling panic boil over, I chose to keep moving. I’d find an exit door or a person sooner or later.

  I took a right, then a left, and another right, finding myself in a hall exactly like every other hall in this structure. The doors were numbered, but they didn’t follow a pattern I could understand. I spotted a change in lighting ahead, indicating an outside window, and my confidence level rose. It occurred to me to wonder where all the BPM employees were. The warehouse had been humming with activity, but these halls were like underground tombs. Far off, I thought I heard a sad moo followed by the agonized squeal of a monkey, but I wrote it off to my imagination.

  Still, this place made me undeniably nervous, and I started to get the suffocating feeling that I remembered from the haunted house so many years ago. In light and layout, they had nothing in common, but the trapped feeling they imparted was the same.

  I picked up my pace, nearly running, only to be greeted by a peculiarly inset door. The change in light I thought I had seen was just a trick of my eyes, shadows from the door playing off the white walls. I leaned against the door, breathing deeply and trying to calm my heart. I considered yelling until someone came to find me when I heard voices coming around the corner and down the hall to my left. My heart leapt with joy. I was about to attach myself to whomever was approaching when I caught their words.

  “… it’s fucking disgusting, is what you should have told him. We’re scientists, not butchers. Maybe the USDA should find out about it.”

  “And maybe you want to spend the next decade in jail, reading about your kids graduating from college or getting married instead of being there to watch it.”

  “You think it’s that bad?”

  “I think if anybody finds out about it, we’re as dead as the…”

  That’s all I needed to hear. The only thing worse than possibly going to jail was having a stranger accidentally overhear you talking about the bad things you did that might get you sent to jail. I needed to make myself scarce. I swiveled in place and jiggled furiously at the doorknob I’d been leaning against, crazy relieved when it opened.

  I stumbled in, off balance, and fell forward as the automatic hinge on the door closed it behind me, taking all light with it. But as I fell, I whimpered in blind terror because before the door had swung shut, I’d seen the terrible secret it hid: freshly dead animal carcasses piled five feet high.

  The stench was overwhelming. I thrust out my hands to catch myself, and they plunged into soft fur pulled tight over cold, atrophied flesh. I swallowed a scream and jumped up and back, wiping my hands on my dress, trying to rid them of the traces of death.

  The room was so dark I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or closed. The dominant color before the door had closed had been black, white, and red, the soft hides of cows matted with grime, their eyes staring glassily at nothing. I thought I had seen an exploded stomach, a gory mess where a cow’s udders should be.

  Like a zombie, I backed up to the door until I felt the smooth, cool handle in my back. My heart was in my mouth, and all I wanted to do was flee.

  Unfortunately, I felt the doorknob turn under my hand. I cowered behind the door as it opened and the same two voices I’d heard in the hall spoke.

  “Jesus. You were telling the truth.”

  “You think I’d lie about this?”

  “You know what the USDA’ll do if they find out we’ve been testing animals in this building? You know how many codes that violates?”

  The man grunted. “Got no choice. Olafsen said we gotta speed up the experiments, both the type and number of animals, and the testing lab just isn’t big enough.”

  My heart was splitting my chest open with its beats. I knew the name. Per Olafsen, BPM laboratory director. The men were standing in the doorway, the light from the hallway shining over the grisly display in the center of the room. It was a small space, no more than twenty feet by twenty, and looked to be a storage room for cleaning supplies.

  “And so what the hell are we supposed to do with these?”

  “Get ’em out of here. Move ’em to the grinder.”

  “I went to six years of college so I could drag dead cows down a hall?”

  “No, you went to six years of college so you’d know that a wheelbarrow’d work much better. Let’s go out to the warehouse and see what we can find.”

  “Damn USDA …”

  The door swung shut. I was again immersed in darkness, the only live animal in the room. I counted to twenty, my brain floating above my body so fear didn’t overwhelm me. When I reached twenty-one, I cracked the door and peeked out cautiously. Empty. I stepped into the bright, horribly white hallway and let the door sigh closed behind me.

  Swallowing my bile, I looked down to assure myself that my hands and knees were not covered in blood from where I had fallen into the pile of animal corpses. My extremities looked normal. Cold, but normal.

  I had to get the hell out of here. I forced one foot after the other and kept taking rights until I arrived at the viewing window of the lab Lars had taken me by on the outset of the tour. Sucking in a deep breath, I noticed for the first time the white cameras discreetly nestled near the ceiling. Surely, somebody had viewed me enter and exit the dead room, but I couldn’t turn back time.

  In the lab, nothing had changed. The three scientists still leaned over their microscopes on the stainless s
teel tables. They could have been building a nuclear death ray for all I cared. I just needed to escape before the scream percolating in my belly reached my lips. I took the next two rights and found myself at the door that led to the antiseptic lobby, which was the picture of warmth compared to the grisly graveyard I had just left.

  “How was your tour?”

  I jumped at the voice, then smiled wanly at the receptionist, trying for normalcy in the off chance my gruesome detour had not been witnessed. “Fine. Don’t these white walls make you a little crazy?”

  “I like them. Everything feels clean and safe here.”

  “That works out well for you, then. Thanks.” As I stepped into the healing sun of a wonderfully unsanitary day, I realized what that unidentifiable odor I had first detected beyond the automatic doors had been: the scent of terrified animals.

  I yanked out my phone as I stumbled toward the bus stop. It took two hours and various dead ends, but I finally got to the correct person at the USDA and reported what I’d seen. They said they’d look into it.

  The dead animals at BPM were probably not an anomaly at a plant that tested drugs on living creatures, but stumbling onto them had unsettled me deeply. I returned to the protective arms of the State Fair: the bustle, the smiling families on vacation, the air redolent with the smell of fry oil and the burnt-sugar smell of cotton candy, the warmth of the sun. It was past lunchtime but I was pretty far south of hungry.

  I stopped at the trailer to get a change of clothes before heading to the showers for a full-body scour. I tossed the purple sundress, one of my favorites. I couldn’t scrub the smell of death off of it. When I was as clean as I could get without an exorcism, I traveled toward the Cattle Barn, the path becoming as familiar as my driveway.

  My plan was to pet some cows and visit with the Otter Tail County people who were exhibiting their animals to get a story for the paper but also find out what they knew about Ashley and Bovine Productivity Management. The second goal was a long shot, but if nothing else, I found myself looking forward to hanging out with happy, live cows.