Breed

by Chase Novak

  “She’s fine,” Adam says.

  “It’s disgusting in here,” Alice says softly, though there is no way Chiquita can possibly hear her—Chiquita has taken a scrawny kid by the back of his neck and pushed his face down onto the crunchy sofa, with its freight of bones and other kinds of garbage.

  “Really?” Rodolfo says. “You want to go somewhere else?”

  “It stinks in here,” Alice says, defiantly.

  “Why not let’s go to your house then,” Rodolfo says.

  “We can’t,” Adam says.

  “Shut up,” Rodolfo says, rather placidly.

  Adam feels a slow cold flutter of fear that begins in the pit of his stomach and radiates like ripples in a pond up and down his body.

  “You shut up,” Alice says, glaring at Rodolfo and gripping her brother’s hand even more tightly.

  Rodolfo smiles. “You’ve got good spirit,” he says. He thumps his hand against his chest. “All right, both of you. Come with me, and just shut the fuck up and listen to what I say.”

  Rodolfo leads them to an empty room at the back of the apartment. The walls have just been painted dark gray, and the windows are open to air the place out, though it is still so full of fumes that Adam and Alice cover their mouths and noses as soon as they walk in.

  “First you got to give me a kiss,” Rodolfo says to Alice.

  “Sorry, I don’t kiss,” Alice says through her splayed fingers.

  “Come on. Please.”

  “No way.”

  “Please?”

  “Just let her alone,” Adam says.

  Rodolfo dismisses him with a wave “Okay,” he says. “Here’s the deal. There is a guy over in Europe and a lot of people went to him because they couldn’t have kids. My parents went to him fifteen years ago; they were one of the first. He’s a doctor, the Europe guy. But a fucked-up one. Really fucked up. And I think your parents went there too. A lot of people did. Hundreds. Sometimes it worked out fine. And sometimes it didn’t work out.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with us,” Adam says. He hears mayhem coming from the front of the apartment—a girl’s screams, the kind where you don’t know if she’s having fun or really upset—but he makes himself keep his eyes right on Rodolfo.

  “Maybe there is and maybe not,” Rodolfo says. “How old are you again?”

  “Ten,” Adam says with a shrug, as if he might be older but has lost track.

  “If anything’s weird, it usually shows up later. But how about your parents? How fucking weird are they?” He sees the looks in their eyes, feels some small measure of pity for them. “It’s not their fault. And it wasn’t my parents’ fault neither.”

  “Either,” says Alice.

  “You’re pissing me off,” Rodolfo says. “You two are running because you’re scared, and Rodolfo is here to tell you, you’re scared for a reason. These people get fucking weird. You know what I’m saying? They get hungry, they get thinking all crazy and shit. No matter how much they love us.”

  From the front of the apartment comes the sound of a scuffle, shouts, and breaking glass. Rodolfo’s eyes light up, and with a skater’s grace he pivots and runs toward the noise, leaving Adam and Alice alone in the cold, redolent room.

  “We should get out of here,” Adam says.

  “To where?” Alice asks. “It’s cold out.”

  “It’s cold here, and it’s dangerous.”

  “So where? Home?”

  “Would you do that?” he asks.

  “Would you?”

  He shakes his head no. “Why do they want to hurt us?” Adam asks.

  “I don’t think Dad wants to hurt anyone,” Alice says, uncertainly.

  “He’s worser than her.”

  “Worse,” Alice corrects.

  A sudden loud bang. A leaded-glass door leading to a balcony has blown open. Cold air rushes in like water through a breach in a ship’s hull, and the two children rush across the room to shut the door, their heads bent against the stiff icy wind.

  Yet at the moment they are closing the door, they hear a voice, merry, welcoming, and adult.

  “Hello there, you!” the voice says. If a voice could have an actual weight, this would be a very fat voice, a voice with a full belly.

  The twins wordlessly consult each other and venture a look out onto the balcony to see who has called to them.

  What they see is so horrible and bizarre that they both stand transfixed despite the cold and the wind that threatens to lift them up, twirl them around, and send them hurtling to the street below. There is not one adult, but two. And both of them are immensely fat, stuffed into chairs so tightly that it seems doubtful that either of them could ever get out. Checked blankets are draped over their knees, and they sit there looking out over the railing of the balcony as if on the deck of a ship sailing around the South Pole. One of them seems to be a man and the other a woman, though, really, there is not much difference in appearance between them. Both have long hair, matted and knotted. Both wear filthy overcoats, split at the seams—silky white satin lining oozes from beneath their arms. They wear rubber boots; the floor of the balcony is slick with something wet. A giant fried-chicken bucket is between them.

  “Don’t worry about us,” the bloated parent closest to the door says to Adam and Alice. “We’re armless.”

  “Harmless,” the other one corrects. Now that he has spoken, it seems he is the male of the couple. “Time was we could ramble and rumble with the best of them.”

  “Y-y-yow,” his wife says, lazily pawing at the cold gray air with her left hand while groping uselessly around the empty Popeyes chicken bucket with her right.

  The husband squints at Adam and Alice, cocks his head to one side. “Twins. Am I right?”

  Alice and Adam nod. They have an impulse to run—but to where?

  “I’m surprised more of us didn’t twin,” the husband goes on. “But as far as I can tell, most of you little ragamuffins came out one at a time. And I guess it’s a good thing too. It’s hard enough keeping you guys in check.”

  “You can say that again,” the wife concurs.

  “You know,” the husband says, sighing and rubbing his swollen belly, “I love my daughter, we both do. What parent doesn’t? But would I repeat all we went through?”

  “Don’t do that,” the wife says. “Don’t do that Donald Rumsfeld thing of asking yourself questions. That I can’t stand.”

  “Well, we’ll just agree to disagree on that, okay?” the husband says with a quick knifelike flash of his icy smile. “But if we’re making suggestions, then I suggest you just let your mind wander off somewhere while I talk to these twins, who, I believe, have never been here before. Am I right about that?” He points to Adam.

  “I never been here,” Adam says.

  “Me neither,” says Alice.

  “Well then, welcome.” He beckons them closer with eager waves.

  Automatically, Alice moves toward him, but Adam stops her with a hard squeeze of her hand, a gesture that does not escape the man’s notice; he frowns and knits his brow.

  “So I’m assuming,” the man says, “that your parents were clients of the great and wonderful and miraculous and trailblazing Dr. Kis, who probably by now is the richest shithead in all Slovenia.”

  Adam and Alice, having no idea what he’s talking about, remain silent.

  “Am I right?” the man persists. “Are you two products of Dr. Kis?” He points at Alice, who he has already decided is the more vulnerable of the two and so more likely to succumb to his pressures.

  “I don’t know,” Alice says, shrugging.

  “Really? You never heard your parents speak of the great and all-powerful Dr. Kis? No mention of Ljubljana? No private little jokes about the drug fiend who works as his assistant?”

  The children are silent.

  “Why don’t you answer?” the woman says, at last withdrawing her hand from the bucket and energetically licking her fingers.

  “We don’t go
to doctors at our house,” Adam finally says.

  Chiquita comes onto the balcony pushing a supermarket cart. The cart, as seems to be the case with so many of them, has one errant wheel in front, and it is filled with chicken—roasted, fried, and raw.

  The two bloated adults fall silent, their eyes widening with anticipation as their daughter wheels the thirty pounds of poultry toward them.

  “I do like my chicken,” the father says, his voice rich with desire and self-mockery.

  “Always did and always will,” says the mother.

  “Not like some,” the father says, as if in his own defense. “With their taste for live meat—or human beings.”

  “Was never our thing,” the mother agrees.

  “No accounting for taste,” the father says.

  “I wouldn’t mind taking me a nibble of one of these little morsels,” the mother says, laughing, gesturing toward the twins.

  Chiquita gives Adam and Alice a hard, questioning glance before turning to the business at hand, which is to put today’s haul near her parents without getting too close to them.

  “Do you guys need to be hosed down or anything?” she asks as she slides the buckets, flats, and packages of chicken over to her parents.

  “No hurry, sweetie,” her father says.

  “Come over here and give me a kiss,” says her mother.

  “Yeah, right, I’ll be doing a lot of that,” Chiquita says.

  “Come on,” her mother insists. “Give me some sugar.”

  “Don’t,” her husband advises. “You’re only going to make things worse.”

  “You’re lucky I don’t kill you both,” Chiquita says without much passion, as if she is simply pointing something out.

  “What do you call this?” her mother says, indicating her gargantuan girth and her husband’s.

  “No one forced you to eat,” Chiquita says. As she backs up, she steps on Alice’s foot, then turns around and glares at her.

  “You know we can’t help it,” the mother says, taking one of the raw cutlets in hand, sniffing it for a moment, and then tearing into it.

  “You were always fat,” Chiquita says, turning back and jabbing her finger toward her mother.

  “That is completely untrue, and totally rude,” her father says. He has chosen one of the roasted chickens, which he has dropped onto his enormous lap.

  “You would have eaten me, if you could.”

  “But we didn’t,” her father reminds her. “Ask your little friends here, ask them if they feel safe around their parents. The temptation. The terrible temptation.”

  “Lead us not into temptation,” her mother intones, attempting to lift her hand.

  “At night,” the father continues, “especially at night, when the will is weakest. To have a delectable thing right there in your house, sleeping, half naked. We resisted that temptation. Most cannot. It overwhelms, it cripples, it humiliates. Yet we resisted. You don’t know how lucky you had it. Oh, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!”

  When the father mentions teeth, the mother, in a sort of involuntary reflex, curls her lips, revealing to Adam and Alice her own teeth, which are deeply discolored, of normal size in the center but enormous and dagger-sharp on either side.

  Early the next morning, Cynthia, who took a taxi from JFK, stands in front of her sister’s town house looking up at its dark windows, each one filled with reflections of bare trees, the empty branches looking like desolation itself. She is furious with herself for failing to dress for the cold New York weather; every gust of wind feels like punishment for her haste. She places her small suitcase on the sidewalk and blows on her hands to warm them. A postman walks past in a hat with fur flaps, looking like a Russian soldier. He glances at Cynthia, stops, and shifts his bag from one shoulder to the other.

  “You visiting there?” he asks Cynthia.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You can tell them I stopped delivering. Mail just piles up—it’s a hazard. So if they want their mail they can go over to the branch and pick it up. You tell them that, all right?”

  “I didn’t say I was going to be visiting anyone,” Cynthia says, but the mailman has already passed her by and she is not sure he heard her.

  She tries Leslie’s phone for the sixth time this morning and is bounced over to voicemail yet again. I didn’t come all this way to stand on the street, she thinks, and, after picking up her suitcase, she mounts the five-step staircase to the front door. An air of dereliction is over everything. Unswept leaves have been frozen onto the porch landing. The glass that borders the front door has been papered over from the inside, so no one can peek in, not even for a glimpse of the foyer. A whiff of something dank and possibly even rotten wafts from the house. When Cynthia rings the doorbell, the button wobbles in its casing, and when she pushes it again and again and presses her ear against the door, she hears nothing but the thump of her own heartbeat. The bell is surely not working, and so she knocks, casually at first, with a light rap of her knuckles, and then vigorously—yet still there is no answer.

  Oh! Cynthia remembers something, and it’s too bad for her, because it would have been better forgotten—more than ten years ago, when Cynthia often traveled to New York to buy stock for Gilty Pleasures and used her sister’s beautiful home as her headquarters, Leslie and Alex had graciously given her a set of keys so she could come and go at will and feel that the place was truly her own. Had she ever gotten around to throwing those keys away?

  Cynthia opens her handbag and finds her key ring, a tarnished silver circle three inches in diameter holding at least twenty keys: for her car, her bicycle lock, her health-club locker, her summer rental at Stinson Beach, her mother’s apartment, her mother’s and her safe-deposit box, and four keys for her own apartment. She can’t really tell one from the other, but the third one she tries in Leslie’s door slips right in. Cynthia’s breath catches in her throat, and the lock is satisfied with a deep, resonant click.

  She pushes the door open, though something within her tells her not to—something frightened and wise and insistent. She steps in, calling out for her sister as she walks with utmost trepidation into the foyer.

  “Leslie?” she says, stepping into the first room to her left, what was once a sitting room graced with lovely old pieces and presided over by the stern gazes of various extinct Twisdens: admirals and bankers, with their ruffles, their flushed cheeks, their bright, avaricious eyes. Now the room is used only for the storage of things that there seems to be no earthly reason for storing—boxes of oversize plastic bags, piles of sheets and towels, broken cutlery.

  Cynthia senses that someone has crept close behind her, and she whirls around, but there is no one there, just the faint trace of her own breath in the cold watery air.

  As so often happens, fear lops over into anger and she is suddenly furious with her sister for breaking the long silence between them. And where in the hell is she? Cynthia stops, breathes, reminds herself that she is being unreasonable. Leslie called in the first place because she was frantic that the twins had gone missing. And Leslie is not here probably because she is out somewhere in the city searching for them. It doesn’t matter how many people are on the hunt—no mother is going to sit home and wait for a call when she could be out looking herself.

  “Leslie!” Cynthia calls. Her voice echoes through the house, up and down the empty stairways. She gropes for the light switch, turns it on. Weak, anemic light drifts from the overhead lamps.

  “Alex?” Again she waits, and again all she hears is her own voice, bouncing around the house like the lonely cry of a ghost.

  Cynthia crosses the foyer, this time going right rather than left, and enters what had once been a library, a temperature-controlled home for first editions, most of them bound in leather, many of them hundreds of years old. The dark cherry shelves are still there, but they are empty now, and the old leather chair placed near the shelves, where once you could curl up and read, has s
prouted a spring from its seat cushion, and the arms are ragged, as if cat-clawed. It smells like cats. It smells like cats, best-case scenario.…

  Her heart is pounding harder and harder. She can feel it in her throat, even behind her eyes. Something is wrong.

  “Leslie!” she calls out, and she can detect the fear in her own voice. She puts down her suitcase, clears her throat, calls again, but the fear is still there. It will not go away. It grows like spores, like cancer, choking her. She lowers her head, tries to clear her throat more forcefully, and wonders: Am I going to puke?

  No, she’s not going to get sick, not just yet: She’s going to scream. She’s going to scream because something has touched her from behind, something cold and a little bit slimy, and it has touched her on the bare skin on the back of her leg, just above the line of her boot. She whirls to see a rat, dashing from one side of the room to the other, glancing at Cynthia over its shoulder as it makes its way to its escape route in the tile-lined fireplace. As it disappears into a crevice, she hears a chorus of twitters and cheeps, the colony of kith and kin awaiting it in the dankness of the inner walls, where the vermin conduct their parallel lives.

  Cynthia’s legs wobble, as if fear exerted a weight upon her that is more than she can bear. She staggers forward and is about to steady herself by grabbing hold of the mantel, but the commotion of the rats freezes her. She backs up without remembering she placed her suitcase on the floor, and she trips on it and must wave her hands frantically to stop herself from falling flat on her back.

  “Leslie!” she cries, as much out of fury as fear.

  Yet the fury has a cauterizing effect. It scorches the terror and kills it at its root. The next thing Cynthia knows, she is heading up the narrow staircase leading to the second floor, where, back in the time when she was a regular visitor here, most of the socializing took place. How happy everyone was! How comfortable and beautiful and full of style and ideas! The tinkle of cocktail glasses, the sexy whisper of silk, always the smell of fresh roses, their dark red petals beaded with mist… Why oh why oh why did they not remain satisfied with what they had? Why the mania to have a child, the very thing (of this Cynthia is convinced) that ruined everyone’s life? Why did Leslie go along with Alex’s mania for an heir? For surely it was Alex’s doing, surely his vanity and stubborn old-school values were behind the project. Why was someone who would never think of having a reproduction on his wall so mad to reproduce?