by Ben Marcus
“Both children, both boys?” he asked, finally.
“Both of them.”
“For how long?”
“It wasn’t discussed.”
“Which means forever.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But you didn’t ask.”
“You’re not here. You don’t understand.”
“I could say the exact same thing about you.”
“Okay, no one is anywhere. No one understands. No one, no one, no one. Is your answer no?” I asked him.
“Why would you say that? That’s not even remotely fair.”
“Oh I guess it just reflects the joy and openness and enthusiasm you’re showing about the idea.”
* * *
—
I Skyped with the girls. They’d colored their hair. They were so lovely, so grown-up, so gone from me in every way. I told them what was going on, the idea that had come up. The boys might come back with me, live with us for a while. Go to school. Be their little brothers.
“Bring them here, bring them here!” they shrieked. “We will, like, totally put their diapers on!”
“They don’t wear diapers anymore. They are pretty grown-up for their age.”
They wanted this, they wanted this, they were sure that it would be fantastic. I couldn’t help thinking that they thought they’d be getting a couple of pets. For a little while, maybe, or for certain hours of the day, that might almost be true. To a small degree. It was just those other hours, when the pet was a person, and the person needed things, and the person wanted things, and the person couldn’t sleep, or the person was sad no matter what, just sad as a long-term unfixable way to be. That was what concerned me. The larger side effects of adding a human being to a situation. Any human being, of any age, blood relative or not.
“Talk to your father,” I told them. “If this is something you want, and if you understand what this really means, really, without assuming that this will all be fun, and knowing that I am going to need a lot of help from both of you. Talk to your father.”
“Dad?” They laughed. “Dad has never said no to us ever once in all of our lives. Has he?” They looked at each other in genuine puzzlement. Soon they were blowing kisses and begging to talk to the boys, or to just see them. But the boys, I said, were busy. They couldn’t come to the phone right now. Maybe next time.
* * *
—
I started to show up in Drew’s room before I went to bed. He’d pretend to be asleep, but he’d make the assignment easy for me, sometimes releasing himself from his underwear. Usually he was, if not hard, swollen enough for me to begin. It was like I was just taking over a craft project he’d already started. I sat at the edge of the bed and it never took very long. He wilted fast in my hand afterward. I wiped my hand on the sheet. Then I left. Cleanup wasn’t part of the deal. That was his problem. He could pay his own sister for that, or some street whore, for all I cared.
In the morning there’d be money, and I’d tuck it into my bag. Soon my flight had been paid for and the missed days of work felt less impactful. I was getting into zero-sum territory, financially, and I had much more free time.
* * *
—
At the bus stop one morning, I mentioned to the boys that their dad would be bringing home their favorite pizza for dinner. The deep-dish kind, and, who knows, maybe there would be a surprise for dessert. This I didn’t know, but I’d be going shopping, so I could take care of it.
“Our dad doesn’t want us,” said the big one.
“Oh that’s not true.”
“It’s okay. He told us that.” They both nodded up at me, as if they’d discussed this together and decided that it was fine.
“No, he did not. You are a big fibber.” I smacked him lightly on his helmet.
“I know. But someone at school said that to us when we said we were leaving.”
“Your dad loves you. My gosh. Are you kidding me?”
“We know.”
The boys were holding hands.
“He really loves you,” I went on. “And right now your dad and I think it might be better for you to come live with me, and your uncle and your cousins.”
“Will our mom be there?” asked the little one.
“No, honey, she won’t.”
“Someone at the funeral tried to tell me where she is, but it was hard to picture.”
“I know. I can’t picture it either.”
“Does it have a name?”
“It might. Should we make up a name for it?”
He made a face. “I don’t like to make up things. I’m not a baby.”
“Okay.”
“I want to know the real name.”
I found myself telling them that I would try to find out. I would look into it. I promised that I would do my best but that it might be very difficult.
“There is no real name,” the big one told the little one. “She’s gone forever.” And the little one whispered that he knew that, he wasn’t stupid.
I kissed them both and they ran off to the bus, and when they got on, they rushed to the back and pressed their faces against the glass, waving at me.
* * *
—
When I thought about how I was spending my time, I realized that I was masturbating two people. Myself and Drew. For the sheer sake of efficiency, just following the logic, I could reduce this workload by 100 percent, saving time and effort, without forfeiting our mutual outcomes, simply by having intercourse with Drew. Suddenly I wouldn’t have to masturbate anybody. I’d go from masturbating two separate people to masturbating nobody. A drastic reduction. But, in theory anyway, the amount of rendered orgasms would be the same, one for each of us, one per day. I was proud of this revelation but the shame was that I had no one to share it with. For some reason I thought of Sarah. This would have been something I could have shared with her. She of all people would have appreciated how efficient I was being. I would no longer have to masturbate her husband. I would no longer have to masturbate myself. It seemed like a clear win.
The transition to the new situation was not especially complicated. I certainly did not need to consult Drew. His opinion did not interest me. I readied myself before entering his room, so I could sit astride him and begin the procedure. Intercourse itself, if you dispense with various ceremonies, along with human speech, can be remarkably efficient. Probably, a long time ago, creatures had to perform intercourse in absolute silence, in the woods, in caves, or else they’d be detected and killed. We still have these skills, they are not entirely dormant in us, even if the threat is gone. Excess noise during intercourse is the sign of a decadent society. Drew still pretended to be asleep, although sometimes he put his hands on my hips, but even that seemed to broach an intimacy that I felt was not warranted. He cried sometimes afterward, and didn’t try to hide it from me. But I wasn’t there for that. I had the boys to think of, and I liked sleeping alone, where no one could touch me.
* * *
—
The plans were rolling into place. My husband texted me a picture, and it looked like he’d squeezed a bunk bed into the spare room and started to paint it. There were toys on the floor, old ones from when the girls were little. “Thank you,” I wrote back. I sent him a red heart emoji, and I held down the button, so there’d be more of them than he could handle. He always came around. Even when he was far away, I could see his body pitching and turning, starting to bank, and then he would come around, back to me.
There was so much to do. Schools and doctors to call, appointments to make. Paperwork to sort out with Drew. He was very organized. He had a binder. He’d given it all a lot of thought. There was a bank account, and he gave me the card and the PIN. There was a caregiver’s contract that conferred authority on me in an emergency. We would be in constant contact
, he explained. He would Skype the boys every night. He wanted updates on every little thing. Pictures and videos and the whole deal.
“I don’t know what to say,” Drew said. And I knew that. I knew he didn’t, and I expected nothing to be said. It was strange to see him in the daylight. At night he was just a shape, hardly even that. He cried out and he wept and he came, and he hid his face in the sheets. He did not speak and I never saw his eyes. He’d bought this palace and it was already haunted, he was already spooked. I wondered if he was always like that. Sarah had never said. But when I thought about it, I couldn’t remember her mentioning Drew even once. It was always the boys, and what they were up to. The boys the boys the boys.
* * *
—
The trip was upon us, and the boys needed gear, so I took them shopping. I told them that they could pick out shirts and shoes and pants, even caps, along with socks and undies, but when I saw what they chose, I quietly put everything back and picked out a few things myself. They would never know the difference, and I’m sure they would have just as soon gone around naked. In the store they ran wild, their little helmets jiggling on their heads. When other shoppers glared at them in exaggerated shock I stared them down, ready for anything. Go ahead, I thought. Say something. Do something. Think something.
We went for french fries and milkshakes for lunch. I told them they were being so grown-up. So brave. They were such good young men. My little young men. We were all going to be okay, just great. We had a big adventure waiting for us in their new town.
“Daddy said he will visit,” the big one said, and the little one nodded.
“Daddy will absolutely visit,” I said. “He can visit whenever he wants to. And we will visit him, too. Everyone will visit everyone.”
“Are there schools there? Are there other kids?”
“Yes and yes. And did I say yes?”
“What about those things you told us about. Teenagers. Do they have those there?”
“Your cousins are teenagers. They can’t wait to see you. It will be like having two great big sisters. A big sister is the best thing in the world. They will always protect you. Your mom was my big sister. Just like you”—I pointed to the big one—“are a big brother to you”—and I pointed at the little one.
“Why?” asked the little one.
“Because your mom was born first. She came out into the world before me, and she looked around, she checked everything out, and then she whispered to me, wherever I was, that it was all clear. Everything was fine. I could come out.”
“And did you? Did you come out?”
“I did. One year after your mom.”
“Why did it take so long? Did you forget the way?”
“I was kind of slow. I was still sort of scared. But the whole time I was headed her way. I knew she was waiting for me and I was excited to see her. I just couldn’t wait to see her face.”
The boys looked at me and we all decided that it was probably time to go, because we still had to pack, and we had a plane trip tomorrow, and wasn’t that going to be fun, but we’d better get ready and we’d better get a really really good night’s sleep. At the curb to the parking lot the little one grabbed our hands and cried out for us to wait. No feet in the street, he said. Never, we all yelled. Never ever. He wanted to be the one to say all clear, so he held us back and looked one way, then the other. He took his time, and we waited for him to give the sign that it was okay to go, we could walk, it would be safe.
The Grow-Light Blues
Carl Hirsch didn’t do holiday parties. At least, not correctly. All the so-called people, wind streaming from their faces. Fleshy machines spewing pollution, fucking up the environment. If he squinted, the celebrating bodies of his coworkers very nearly blistered into molecules, shining with color. Too often the whole of it—people, places, and things—looked to scatter. Everyone on the verge of turning to soup. So what if there was no precedent for a full-scale human melt, bodies reduced to liquid pouring from a window? You could still worry about it. Sometimes you had to.
Tonight’s party was in one of those long, skinny city apartments you’re supposed to verbally fellate with praise. It was like walking into a tiny, dismal doghouse, a real doghouse, and then kissing the furred ass of the dog who lived there, who was super annoyed to have you clogging up his tiny room. You were allowed to stay as long as you kept using your tongue.
Hopefully, this doghouse had sick drinks. And free money. And those soft bones in sauce they sometimes served at company parties. Even if he was only permitted to sniff them, because of his, uh, dietary regimen.
“The light, the space, my god!” Carl found himself saying to the small, perfectly dressed host, who stood on the landing.
The host greeted Carl with alarm.
Carl reached up, too late, to cover his face. He didn’t want to be a burden—at least, not to just anyone. And yet, fuck this guy. Didn’t Emily Post have a whole chapter on hiding all reaction to astonishing creatures who appeared at your door? Shutting your little face down so as not to reveal the horror and disgust you might really feel?
To the host, Carl said, grinning far too hard, “Just show me to my rooms and I’ll get out of everyone’s way. Jones is on his way up with my luggage. This is going to be such a fun year, roommate!”
The host didn’t hear him, missed the joke. He was already looking over Carl’s shoulder to where people were crowding up the narrow staircase, trying to push their way inside. Because heaven. Because drinks. Because loneliness and flesh pleasure. Because the invite said, “Levitate, my friends! Let us see the soles of your feet!” Because Mayflower, where they all worked, was pure shithouse. The future was ripe for sexual conquest, and they were busy greasing up their parts.
Carl knew he wasn’t the type to get fondled when he passed out. Mostly it was because of his face, thanks to his job. Rough on the eyes, tough to the touch. Scratchproof, though, which was a bonus. Particularly if some long-shot apocalypse reared up and he had to go face-first into the bramble or some such. For now, partygoers pressing in behind him, he could do nothing but raise his arms and surf forward into the mob, hoping with all his might that the wave would carry him, safe and sound, back home to his bed.
In some ways, it was inevitable that Carl, a few nights later, would take a picture of his balls and send it to the Mayflower email list. After a hot bath, he propped up his phone in the dank zone and captured the crag and the woof, the topographical crimson scorch. He got the shot, pressed “share,” and released the picture into the ether. It felt all right. A certain unburdening. Maybe even like postcoital clarity, chaste and lonely as it was. Afterward, he was tempted to stand at his apartment window and listen through the glass, into the pulse of the evening, as his message landed at key email terminals throughout the metropolis.
* * *
—
If you counted from the beginning, going back to the supposedly sunny morning when Carl was born, this was day ten thousand seven hundred and something of his tremendously joyful stretch of time, his project aboveground.
To hear his mother tell it, because certain mothers break into story when you enter their homes, the birds were in ecstasy the day he was born, squawking over the hospital. The air was so crisp and cool that day, his mother would add, that you felt hugged by the wind. Her phrase. When little Carl was born, the whole neighborhood, per his mother, held its breath. Someone new is among us. Someone special. It was a revisionist birth narrative, likely concocted when it struck Carl’s mother, poor thing, that her son was just another piercingly boring need machine, underperforming and overwhelming, programmed to crave so much from her that she would soon forget her interests and reengineer her whole self in order to supply the mothering that would keep her child, at the very least, out of jail, out of a coffin, and out of the sex-change doctor’s office. At which point she would subtly punish him
with nearly imperceptible indifference and ambivalence. Parenting! As far as motives go, his mother had a pretty good one for her wholesale, self-serving fictionalization of Carl’s birth, and he forgave her, not that she ever asked him to, for glorifying his unremarkable debut.
In his twenties, just before his mother died, when she was listless and storied out, staring through a different hospital window as if surveying the land for her own burial, Carl finally Googled the weather on the day of his birth. And, well, lookee there: rain, rain, rain, ash, fire, murder, murder, rain. A godless Tuesday. Unprecedented torrents flooding down from the north. Dirt and mud and broken trees and houses split in half. Sunshine, maybe, but not in his part of the world.
And birds? The Internet had little to say on the matter.
* * *
—
As it turned out, Carl’s photo backfired. The folks at work who opened his attachment—the upper-level creatives at Mayflower as well as the engineers holed up in the silo in Albuquerque—mistook it for an image of Carl’s pitiful neck. Or maybe a scalded bit of acreage under his arm. In other words, no one seemed to see anything uniquely scrotal in the photo. Just grim, if understandable, symptom documentation from a man who was perhaps Mayflower’s most martyred employee. Slash medical subject. Slash guinea pig. Slash hero. Slash fool. Carl the Boiled, as he had started to think of himself. Taking one for the team.
At work the next day, expecting to be shunned and sort of figuratively barfed on, maybe swept into the farewell room, where underachievers got hand-stabbed by Kipler, the CEO, Carl instead collected a few drive-by hugs. He was heavily touched, right on the body, by people he’d hardly even met. A kind of unprecedented love was brought to bear all over his person.
“Oh, my gosh,” Kora, from Nutrients, said, holding him at arm’s length and staring wildly just above his head. She was always the one putting the needle in and sometimes forgetting to take it out.
