Babylon and Other Stories

by Alix Ohlin

  Within days, life settled into a routine. I rarely saw Mr. Dejun, and then only when he was striding out the front door to meet a client for lunch, wearing small, beautiful gray suits. I wondered if he had to get them custom-made, since he was so short. Or maybe they were hemmed for him by the Queen of Kohlrabi. I punched a time clock and ate my lunch in the smoky employee lounge with the lab techs and accounting clerks and got paid every second Friday. I wore hose. It was like a game of real life. At five I'd head home and collapse on the couch, refusing to speak to my mother except in nods and hand gestures.

  “I talk all day,” I'd whisper exhaustedly, hand to my forehead. “Please, no more.”

  “Oh, you poor working stiff,” my mother would say. “Get changed and let's watch the game.”

  Lucy and Karen were working nights during the week, so Mom and I spent the evenings slumped on the couch, watching TV and drinking beer. I'd never drunk beer in front of my mom before, but it didn't seem like a big deal. After all the stuff that had gone wrong, who could worry about a minor issue like the legal drinking age? We didn't hear anything from my father or Margaret. Apparently they were still sorting out whatever needed to be sorted. Mom and I didn't talk about him much. Mostly we talked about the Dodgers.

  My father tried to get me to follow baseball the whole time I was growing up, and I was never interested until the summer he went away. There was something about the games that was perfect for those nights, the lazy pace of long games, the commentators' voices hushed and reverent and excited at the same time. By the middle of July I could trade statistics with the guys in the employee lounge. They treated me like some kind of child prodigy just for knowing division standings in the National League. They'd come up front just to ask me what I thought of the game.

  “The whole bullpen is pathetic! We'd have won it if that guy hadn't blown it in the bottom of the fifth. Dejun Enterprises, good morning.”

  Then one morning in July I woke up in so much pain I couldn't breathe or speak. I just lay there in bed until my mother came to tell me I was late for work. She'd taken to wearing her housecoat most of the day and night, with anything she might ever need stuffed into its pockets: nail polish, a deck of cards, rubber bands, gardening tools. She was starting to look like some kind of crazy building superintendent.

  “What's the matter with you, sailor?” she said, fishing a bottle of Tylenol out of her pocket and offering it to me. “Too much fun on the town last night?”

  “Guh,” I said.

  “Aggie, you know what? I think your whole face is swollen.”

  “Guh.”

  “Is that the only word you can say, or just some new kind of teenage slang?”

  “Guh.”

  She drove me to the emergency room, where they told us that my wisdom teeth were impacted, causing an infection in my mouth, and would have to be removed immediately. I was in no condition to argue.

  “You're going to be fine, honey,” said my mom. “Here, drink some water.”

  “Has it been tested?” I mumbled.

  When I regained consciousness, I had four fewer teeth and no memory at all of their extraction. I didn't even know what day it was. I woke up in my own bed, with a bowl of red Jell-O sparkling on the bedside table. I was starving and dug right in.

  “The princess awakes,” said my mother, striding into the room. She fluffed my pillows and stood back. She was wearing a suit and lipstick and looked like a million dollars. For a couple of seconds I wasn't even sure it was really her.

  “Guh?” I said, not from pain but shock. Some Jell-O worked itself out of my mouth and dribbled down my chin.

  “Not this again,” Mom said. “Is that all you can say after being unconscious for two days? Can't you find the will to add just a few more consonants?”

  “You wook nice,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said, pulling the curtains open to let in the sun. I winced. “I've been filling in for you at work. You don't get sick days, you know. So when I told them you wouldn't be in for the rest of the week, they asked me to substitute. Or I offered. Whatever, we agreed.”

  I leaned up on my elbows in bed. My head felt like a hot-air balloon, something large and heavy floating over the rest of my body. “No way,” I said.

  “There's no need to be rude,” she said primly. “I am a substitute, you know.”

  “Teacher.”

  She shrugged. I hadn't seen her this alert in ages.

  “Same difference. Look, I have to go, I'm late. There's more Jell-O in the fridge if you want it, and some soup.”

  “You can't really be doing this,” I said.

  She put her hands on her hips and said, “Oh, be quiet. You sound just like your father.”

  I sat up and started struggling with the bedcovers. In my weakened state it was like wrestling a bunch of monkeys. My own mother stood there and laughed at me.

  “Honey, come look at yourself,” she said. She led me by the hand to the bathroom mirror, and I gasped in horror. My face was about three feet wide.

  “Now, you just relax today. Frank says to take it easy and get healthy, which is the most important thing.”

  “Okay.” I was back under the covers before I remembered to ask who Frank was.

  “I mean, Mr. Dejun,” she said. And that probably would've worried me had I not immediately lost consciousness again. When I woke up throughout the day, it was only to eat more Jell-O and leaf through the sports section my mother had left by the bed. The Dodgers were still having a lot of trouble in the bullpen, which was really depressing.

  I was out for a week. After a couple of days I was well enough to get out of bed, but I didn't. My face was still swollen and I was afraid that by venturing outside I'd frighten young children and dogs. Karen and Lucy came by between waitressing shifts to keep me company. Lucy had some rum she'd gotten from the pirate restaurant, and she and Karen used it to make some alcoholic Jell-O. We sat around in my room eating it with our fingers. None of us was having the summer we'd thought we would.

  “So where's your mom, anyway, Ag?”

  “She's doing my job.”

  “At Dejun Enterprises, good morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your own mother replaced you in the workforce? Man,” said Karen, “that is just so typical of our generation. We have no control over anything.”

  “Yeah, man, you're not a person, you're a statistic,” said Lucy.

  “Thanks a lot, Peg Leg,” I said.

  “Oh, I'm sorry,” she said. “Here, you can wear my eye patch if you want.”

  “Cool,” I said, putting it on. Karen and Lucy burst out laughing. “Ahoy, mateys,” I told them from between my puffy lips.

  After the swelling had mostly gone down, I went back to work and my mother stayed home, but nothing was quite the same at Dejun; it was just too weird that Mom and I had done the same job and everyone there had met her. The textile-testing guys came up front and said, “Hey, Ag, your mom's cool. And now we know how come you know so much about baseball.”

  Now, this was unfair. Everything she knew about baseball she'd learned from me just that summer. “Actually, no,” I started to say, but then I had to answer the phone.

  “Dejun Enterprises, good morning.” I was a little out of practice, and my mouth felt sore and dry. The hours dragged past until I went home and sank into the couch to watch the news. This was when I realized that disaster had struck yet again.

  What happened was this: a truck carrying chemical material tested by Dejun Enterprises overturned on the interstate in Tijeras Canyon and spilled. Dejun had tested the stuff, inspected the storage containers, and declared it safe to transport, but environmentalists at the scene were saying it wasn't safe at all, and the truck should never have been allowed on the road. Police sealed off the entire area with a roadblock, causing massive delays. The road was contaminated, the soil was contaminated, everything was contaminated. I had never heard of the chemical and I didn't know what it looked like,
but I pictured it as a fluorescent green ooze spreading like a living thing across the ground. The reporter, her stiff black hair barely flapping in the canyon wind, said there was some question whether Dejun had even looked at this material before issuing its report. Camera crews shot Mr. Dejun going into his house, saying “no comment,” over and over again, his scowl barely visible under a sport coat he draped over his head. “Allegedly” was a word the reporter on the scene used a lot. In the darkness of the canyon behind her, groggy families evacuated their homes, children asleep in their parents' arms.

  From the moment I punched my time card the next morning, everything was chaos. All the techs were gathered in the hallways outside the labs, whispering chemical terms like crazy. I got to the front desk and all fifteen lines were blinking. I took a deep breath and dug in. “Dejun Enterprises, good morning. I'm sorry, Mr. Dejun is not in, would you like to leave a message? I'm sorry, I don't know anything about that. Dejun Enterprises, good morning.”

  The next time I looked up it was ten o'clock. Mr. Dejun came thundering in, wearing a dark blue double-breasted suit with gold buttons.

  “Don't talk to the press, young Aggie!” he said, grabbing a fistful of While You Were Out slips. “Don't let anyone here talk to the press, either. Just don't talk to them, whatever you do!”

  “But I'm the receptionist,” I said. “I have to talk.”

  “This is no time for secretarial humor,” said Mr. Dejun sternly. “Now listen, I'm out to everybody except my lawyer.”

  “Dejun Enterprises, good morning,” I answered. All fifteen lines rang constantly. All the newspapers and radio stations and TV stations in town called. It was weird to talk to people I usually watched on TV at night. It wasn't just the press on the phone, though, it was people who'd driven through the area around the time the spill had taken place. I took down all their names and numbers. Pink messages piled up around me like leaves. My voice cracked and went dry. No one came to the front to see me, or talk ball, or tell me what was going on. For all I knew, I was the only one there.

  “Listen,” a man on the phone said. “I have a young child who was exposed to this stuff. He's four years old, my son. Please, isn't there anything you can tell me?”

  “Hold on, please,” I said. I picked up another line and hung up on the person to free it up, then called Sophia's extension and asked her what I should say to people with young children who'd been exposed.

  “Take a message, for chrissake,” said Sophia.

  I could hear her exhaling smoke. “But what about his kid?”

  “Take a message,” she said, and I did.

  “Is someone really going to call me back?” he asked.

  “Of course they will,” I told him convincingly, knowing it was a lie. Then I took off the headset and walked outside and caught the bus home. There was no one at the house. I walked around the living room. I looked at the pictures on the mantel—my grandparents, my parents' wedding picture, me on vacation in L.A., me graduating from junior high school, me and Mom and Dad sitting on the living room couch. There were more pictures of me than of anything else. I picked up the phone and called work. Sophia answered, and I hung up. I went upstairs and crawled into bed.

  I woke up at night and lay there for a while, trying to decide whether to just keep on sleeping. I could hear the rhythmic sounds of the ball game. I was hungry, so I went downstairs. Mr. Dejun was sitting on the couch in the TV room, watching the game with Mom. He was still wearing his navy blue suit, minus the tie and the jacket, which were folded neatly over one of the armchairs. He'd taken his shoes off and had his feet up on the table.

  “Hi, Frank,” I said.

  “Aggie,” said my mom. Sitting on the couch, Mr. Dejun came up to her shoulder, which was bare and pale. Ordinarily, by this time in the summer she'd have freckles there, from mornings spent outside gardening. But not this year. She was wearing a sundress and her eyes were shiny.

  “I was worried about you, young Aggie,” said Mr. Dejun. “I thought I'd come by and see how you're doing.”

  “Fantastic,” I said. I didn't think he was a very good liar, or would be a decent receptionist. I went into the kitchen and got a beer. I was sort of expecting someone to follow me in there, but nobody did. I went out the back door and sat on the steps, sipping my beer and looking at the stars. It was a nice, clear night. The phone rang, three times, so I sighed and got up. If there was one thing I couldn't stand hearing that summer, it was the sound of a ringing phone.

  “Dejun Enterprises. I mean, hello. Shit.”

  “Aggie, it's me,” said my dad.

  I couldn't think of anything to say and so I didn't. Instead, I carried the phone back outside with me. “Ahoy, matey,” I finally said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. How's Margaret?”

  “How are you, Ag? Are you all right?”

  “Who wants to know?” I said.

  “I understand you're upset,” Dad said. “I understand you're mad. I'm sorry I haven't called. I've had some things to work out, do you know what I mean?”

  There was silence on the line. I was listening for the game, trying to get the score and the inning, but couldn't hear it anymore. I drank some of my beer, gulping it noisily down my throat.

  “Ag, sometimes adults and kids get the same sorts of feelings about their lives—you know, um, powerlessness, feeling trapped and that kind of thing.”

  “Are you speaking hypothetically?” I said.

  He took a deep breath and let it out. I imagined Margaret in the background, giving him big, encouraging nods with her big, wide head.

  “What I mean is, sometimes adults don't know what to do, like kids don't always know what to do. Do you understand what I mean?”

  I looked up. The stars blurred in my vision and I shook my head a little bit to clear it. “Sure I do,” I said. “I just have one question—who's the kid in this scenario, you or me?”

  “You're so sarcastic,” he said in a soft voice. “You sound just like your mother.”

  “It's not my fault,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “I know. Okay, listen.” Suddenly he was all business. “I hear you had a bad day at work. Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Your mother called and told me.”

  “Oh,” I said. I didn't even know she knew how to get in touch with him. Tears slid down the receiver and collected in the base of it, cool against my cheek, sliding into the little holes.

  “Ag, your mother knows, and I hope you know too, that I love you more than anything. That's one thing we see eye-to-eye on, and that'll never change, no matter what else happens.”

  I felt like this was the worst thing I'd ever heard. The King of Kohlrabi was in my living room drinking a beer in his socks, and I had to talk to my dad on the phone with a lesbian who wasn't a lesbian listening in the background. Somewhere in the desert, green slime was oozing toward families as they slept. What else was happening all around me, all the time, and I couldn't do anything to stop it or even slow it down.

  “Dad,” I told him, “Mom's inside watching baseball with Mr. Dejun.”

  He said, “Oh? So how's the game?”

  I sighed, and then the sigh turned into a hiccup.

  “You like the Dodgers this year?” he asked.

  “Their bullpen's a disaster,” I said.

  “You've really been following? Aggie, there might be hope for you yet.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Are you coming back?”

  “I don't know,” my dad said. “I just don't know.”

  “Okay.” I stood up and looked at the night sky, the sound of cicadas throbbing around me. “I have to go now,” I said.

  “Listen, Aggie, take down my number, okay? Take it down so you can call me whenever you want. Do you have a pen?”

  “Sure,” I said. I didn't. But I closed my eyes and listened carefully to his voice in my ear, as if I were taking the most urgent message. As
he told me the numbers I traced them, small and invisible, in the air in front of me, then let them go out into the night.

  Transcription

  This is a preliminary report for a 65-year-old Caucasian man who entered complaining of shortness of breath.

  Walter was coughing again. He sat up in bed, his red face hanging over his chest like a heavy bloom, coughing. He didn't try to speak or even wheeze, instead dedicating himself to the fit with single-minded concentration. Carl watched the oxygen threads quiver across his cheeks. The cough ran down like an engine, slowing to sputters, then ended. Carl handed his uncle a glass of water, and he drank.

  “Thanks,” Walter said. He pressed one of his large hands against his sunken chest, passed the glass back and took a few breaths.

  “How do you feel?”

  “I feel fine.” He grabbed his handkerchief from the bedside table, hacked up some phlegm, looked at it, and then put the cloth back on the table, folded.

  “Do you want something to eat?”

  “No. “ Walter looked at his watch and his features brightened. “Time for my beauty routine.”

  Carl fetched the towel and the electric razor. Walter took off the oxygen and offered his face, eyes closed. He didn't have much facial hair, but he always insisted on being shaved before a visit from his girlfriend, Marguerite. His skin was cool and pale and evenly colored, like clay or a smooth beach stone. While shaving him, Carl thought about how Walter's face had looked when he was a kid—swarthy and stubbled, deeply tanned by cigarette smoke—and how different it was now, the skin so papery and light, as if in transition to becoming some entirely different substance. The bedroom was quiet except for the mosquito buzz of the razor and the hiss and pump of the oxygen machine. Every once in a while Walter drew a labored breath. When he was done, Carl dabbed Aqua Velva on his face; Walter was, and always would be, an Aqua Velva man.

  Walter ran his right hand over his cheeks and down under his chin, then frowned. “You missed a spot,” he said.