Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  CHAPTER SIX

  Kiwi’s Exile in the World of Darkness

  Forty miles south and west of Swamplandia! as the crow flies, beyond the grid of Army Corps levees and drainage canals, across a triangle of new highways that slide over and under one another like snakes in a warren, was the parking lot of the Loomis World of Darkness, where Kiwi Bigtree sat on the burning hood of a powder blue Datsun and watched with an anthropologist’s prudish fascination as his new friend Vijay packed and smoked a bong. “Bong” was on a list of twenty-three new mainland vocabulary words that Kiwi had acquired just that week. “Dude, do you blaze?” asked dreamy-eyed Vijay. “You want a hit?”

  Kiwi shook his head. He did not. He did not think that he did. He watched Vijay’s work shirt contract, Vijay smiling with his eyes shut.

  “Come on, Margaret Mead, get over here and do a hit with me! Seriously, bro, it trips me out when you just watch like that.”

  “No thanks … Listen, please don’t call me that.”

  He was trying very hard not to respond to Margaret, although since this was the only name by which his colleagues in the World of Darkness knew him, Kiwi worried that he might come across as a little aloof. Somebody, probably Vijay, had discovered a copy of Coming of Age in Samoa in Kiwi’s work locker and introduced the book as a break room conversation piece. It was Yvans, his Trinidadian coworker, who’d turned to the picture of a scowling Margaret Mead in her grass skirt and palm-leaf hood, kneeling between two Samoan girls with her field notes in hand, and had rechristened him as Margaret. Now everybody in the World knew him as Margaret or Margie Mead, although recently some of the girls had shortened this to M&M, a trend that Kiwi was trying to encourage. M&M was an improvement; M&M could stand for all kinds of mysterious things, much less emasculating things. Macho Macho? Maybe that was a little too on the nose, Kiwi conceded … The important thing here was that the abbreviation “M&M” didn’t automatically equate Kiwi Bigtree with the encyclopedia photograph that Yvans had taped above Kiwi’s locker of a middle-aged woman covering her breasts with jungle foliage.

  Vijay was inhaling deeply and rhythmically; he was becoming a conscious participant in his own respiratory process, he said.

  “Say what you will about our shitty jobs, Margine,” Vijay said, exhaling, “but at least the World’s got air-conditioning …”

  The World of Darkness got shortened to “the World”—as in: “Hey, Kiwi, hook me up! Clock me out of the World, yeah?” and “What do you fools want to do when we get out of the World?” Everybody did this, Kiwi included, although to Kiwi the abbreviation felt dangerous; there was something insidious about it, the way it crept into your speech and replaced the older, vaster meanings. “The World” now signified a labyrinth of depressing stucco buildings that fed into a freezing airplane hangar. Neon tubing and the vaulted roof of the Leviathan made the place feel modern, but when the lights came on after hours, Kiwi had the same melancholy feeling that used to strike him when he waded ankle-deep into the pulpy napkins and Styrofoam cups that littered the stadium floor on Swamplandia! The owners of this franchise of the World of Darkness had filled the hangar with evil rides, evil water fountains, smoke machines, and unconvincing robots. Kiwi got paid $5.75 an hour to work as part of an army of teenage janitors. Park greeters, security officers, customer service reps, costumers, janitors: all of them pimpled gum chewers, deodorized for war. There were plenty of adults, too, but the worst work seemed to be reserved for the youngest summertime employees.

  That morning Kiwi had aced his first test, the New Employee Quiz. You could use your employee manual to look up an answer if you forgot it, said the proctor, his manager, Carl. Kiwi was disconcerted to find that many of these questions were worded like unfunny knock-knock jokes:

  Q: What do you call a guest to the World of Darkness?

  A: A “Lost Soul.”

  Q: What maneuver should you perform during a Choking Incident?

  A: The Heimlich Maneuver.

  The other choices had been “A Naval Maneuver,” “The Hoover Maneuver,” or “No Maneuver.”

  Kiwi had been pushing brooms in the World for weeks now, and the only other employee besides Vijay with whom he’d become friendly was Yvans Parmasad, a Trinidadian man with Tabasco-red veins in his eyes and so many young children that he often got their names confused. (“Bum me some money, Kiwi, today it is … Tam’s birthday.”) Their friendship commenced when Yvans pointed out to Kiwi a particular Lost Soul—a stunning woman on crutches in a red sundress, Kiwi’s age—and then very casually proceeded to detail the things he would like to do to her in bed, in a Jacuzzi, after a lobster dinner, on his Camaro’s hood …

  “Wouldn’t that be extremely hot, Yvans?” Kiwi was thinking about the thermal conductivity of metal, the insulation of her crutches …

  “Yes!” Yvans clapped his hands, the first person on the mainland to acknowledge Kiwi’s genius. “Hot, that it would be! Kiwi, I’m saying it but you’re thinking it, am I right?!”

  “N-h-h.” Kiwi made a clicky sound in the back of his throat. (Growing up with the Chief, Kiwi had become the master of the lukewarm assent.)

  On their first day on duty together, Yvans announced that he would handle “the hard stuff”—tasks rated as difficult by Yvans included counting the cash drawer and “improving the retail experience” of the female customers. Kiwi could do “the easy stuff,” defined by Yvans as plunging the toilets and running the gleaming armadillo-beveled nozzle of a futuristic vacuum over the carpeted walkway that constituted the Tongue of the Leviathan. Yeah, thought Kiwi, tugging at a fat knot in the vacuum cord with his incisors, the easy stuff, real simple …

  Kiwi looked over with a spurt of envy to the Devil’s Oven, the baked-goods stand where Yvans worked, ostensibly selling baked goods, although at this particular moment Yvans appeared to be making some kind of lewd visual analogy for a female customer using a container of pretzels and hot cheese. How has he not been fired? Kiwi wondered, but then the short Italian woman Yvans was talking to began giggling and scribbling something on a paper fished out of her purse. She let Yvans feed her a pretzel. Kiwi resisted the urge to document this baffling progression on his notepad—his note-taking seemed to make his fellow workers uncomfortable, and Carla García-Founier, a black girl with a smattering of beautiful acne on her nose, had asked Kiwi very seriously if he was some kind of serial killer.

  Inside the World of Darkness, Time happened in a circle. Shifts were nine hours, and the hours contracted or accordioned outward depending on several variables that Kiwi had cataloged: difficulty of task, boredom of task, degree to which task humiliates me personally. For a while all Kiwi had to do was vacuum in the anonymous many-peopled solitude of the front hall, but then he screwed up that sweet gig. Kiwi made wide orbits with the industrial vacuum cleaner, which trembled and belched in repose like a rodeo bull; on the first day of his third week he ran over his own shoelaces with it and broke it in a way that he couldn’t ignore, hide, or repair. Fuck-fuck-fuck, Kiwi thought—his fluency in mainland expletives had made huge leaps in just two weeks. Kiwi glanced around the World and considered ditching the vacuum in a different hallway to distance himself from the truly alarming sound it was making, a g-r-r-r like the prelude to fire or explosion. A group of Catholic schoolgirls in mauve-and-navy-blue checkerboard skirts froze in front of the Vesuvius Blast Off, just outside the mock-up of a charred Italian village; they began to scream, one after the other like bells tolling, their braids and faces bright spots of fever among the waxy Pompeian mannequins.

  “Sorry, children!” Kiwi Bigtree waved at them from inside a cloud of smoke. “It’s my first day!” He’d used this “first day” excuse at least three times hourly since his actual start date two and a half weeks before.

  Vijay didn’t know how to fix the vacuum either. He knelt and touched the vacuum cleaner’s bag sorrowfully, as if it were the belly of a crippled horse, and Kiwi felt that in a different epoch he and Vijay could have been El Pa
so ranch hands together: Vijay shoots the horse and romances all the saloon prostitutes, and I am the wussy sidekick. Yes—in the movie I am the ranch hand slated for death in a midnight raid; I jump into a barrel of rattlesnakes or small cactuses or something, trying to escape, a bullet makes a hole in my hat, the crowd loves it …

  “Hey, did you hear me, Margie?” Vijay was staring up at him. “I said, just tell Carl. He’s not going to fire you.”

  Kiwi’s manager was a baby-faced young man named Carl Jenks. Carl Jenks was thirty-seven years old, his oldest sister taught astronomy to undergraduates at Dartmouth College, he himself had a master’s degree in some undisclosed discipline—he’d offer these facts to anyone who approached him, like a caterer with a tray of bitter hors d’oeuvres. He was always reading fantasy books with orcs and orc princesses on the cover. (Why did these orc princesses have breasts like human women? Kiwi wanted to ask someone. Was that really likely?) In short, Carl was the sort of mainland nerd with whom even Kiwi, with a rare social intuition, knew better than to ally himself. Carl listened to Kiwi’s apologies with an expression of mild distaste; one thick finger was folded in his paperback book. He was wearing his high school ring, a Florida ring, an ugly garnet stone with a turd shape engraved on it—a manatee, the high school mascot—which caused Kiwi to look down at his own naked, knucklesome fingers in alarm. That’s the kind of wedding I want, Kiwi thought: to a school. No, to a mainland academy.

  “Has anybody ever told you, you have a beautiful smile?” Carl Jenks’s tone made Kiwi think of iridescent acids. “What’s so funny? You think it’s hilarious to break World equipment that costs more than your weekly salary?”

  “No, I’m sorry. I was just thinking of something.”

  “How exciting. Let’s hear it.”

  “I was thinking that I’d like to enroll in high school here. To go to college.”

  “School. Right. How old are you, fifteen? Sixteen?”

  Kiwi straightened to his full height of six one. “I’ll be eighteen on September fifth, sir.”

  “Ah. You’re a dropout and we hired you?”

  Kiwi shook his head. “Homeschooled. But not really officially … I mean, we didn’t keep in the best touch with the LCPS Board. I assume I will have to take some, you know, some tests before they let me sign up …”

  Kiwi was really hoping that Carl Jenks might clue him in as to who “they” might be.

  “Well, gosh, I never would have guessed. You seem like an absolutely brilliant scholar. You speak like an orator. Look at that hair. I thought you were a professor emeritus. Ohkaaay, so let’s review—you broke the vacuum. What is this, your first week? Your third week. Terrific. Keep up the good work, Bigtree.”

  Kiwi could feel his intelligence leap like an anchored flame inside him. His whole body ached at the terrible gulf between what he knew himself to be capable of (neuroscience, complicated ophthalmological surgeries, air-traffic control) and what he was actually doing.

  “Why don’t you take a crack at the family bathroom, Bigtree. It’s disgusting.”

  At the World of Darkness, there was a dignity gulf between staff and management. Carl Jenks, for example, got to wear a plain black polo shirt, which made him seem like a pope compared with everybody else. Kiwi had gotten off relatively easy—at least his janitor’s uniform had cap sleeves and a zipper fly. He’d seen a tall kid walking around in a red spandex jumpsuit and death hood. And this in Florida, in deep summer!

  Kiwi’s penance was to work overtime picking up the wetter, less decipherable pieces of trash with his gloved hands. The World’s lasers moved in green helixes all around him, a lonely geometry that traveled up and down the entrance to the Whale’s Gullet. Cleaning the family toilet was, by his inexact estimate, one million times more degrading than any of his Bigtree duties on Swamplandia! Worse than putting out popcorn fires, worse even than the buckskin costumes and the jewelry. He was trying to flip the clown-nose plunger inside out with his shoe.

  “Gah!” he cried, successful.

  Success, in this instance, meant an outpouring of terrible yellow bile from the plunger cap.

  The good news: Kiwi had a place to live. Employees at the World of Darkness could apply to live in a block of staff dormitories in the basement of the complex. Originally these were built to house foreign workers, but the recruitment program had been suspended owing to some “legal snag,” a bit of “red tape with Immigration.” All the Turkish and Bulgarian teenage guest workers had been sent home, and now any employee could pay to live here. Kiwi’s dorm, a linoleum cave, came furnished. His room had a bunk, a metal chair, and a desk bolted to the ground, and a dresser with a single, enigmatic tube sock in it—the only evidence of his foreign predecessor. A wonky mirror over the dresser gave his features a funhouse wave. The room was a single occupancy. “A luxury!” he was told by several different women in HR, none of whom lived in these dorms. It was just wide enough for Kiwi to turn a full circle without touching anything, and the windowless fluorescence made him feel like a submariner. Kiwi had figured out that the dorms were located two levels below the central room of the Leviathan, and sometimes he had nightmares of being crushed to death in his bunk. After shifts he’d stare at the ceiling and take a gloomy pleasure in imagining the Chief reading his obituary in the Loomis Register. EMPLOYEE BURIED IN AVALANCHE OF TOURISTS! Ossie would spot it. She’d try to locate Kiwi’s ghost with her “powers” … Kiwi groaned and pushed his cheek against the metal coils inside his mattress, waited for the thought to float away. “Really, it’s unproductive to ruminate on that particular problem of our sister’s,” he’d told Ava on the night before he left home, by which he’d meant “It hurts.” Ossie’s need was like a fire that ate all the oxygen in a room. Her “lovesickness.”

  Regarding fire and oxygen: whatever minor administrative deity in the World of Darkness’s pantheon controlled the central AC, he or she liked to keep this basement at a freezing temperature. You could hear the whir of the air conditioner deep in your sleep. Kiwi had dreams in which he crawled along the World’s hallways and subterranean pipelines until he discovered a CONTROL PANEL, labeled in buzzing gold letters; each night he reached out for it and shut off the air to the dormitory vents. Then he’d wake up under four blankets with a sense of relief, thinking that he’d switched off the indoor winter.

  This is not forever, Kiwi would think as he held his breath and plunged one of the World of Darkness latrines with the clown-nose suction cup. You are still a genius. You are just a temporary worker. That was the rank that Kiwi had been hired at—full-time staffers all had their high school diplomas. The HR lady had flicked her dry eyeballs over Kiwi’s body and shouted (Why so loud, madam?), “Women’s size medium!” into an intercom. “And get me a temporary ID badge.” Temporary workers, as opposed to staffers, got paid a dollar less and clocked out to take their lunch hour. Temporary workers were uninsured. This meant that if something fell on you, a flaming pretzel or one of the tinted panes from the Leviathan’s intestinal slides, you were shit out of luck.

  “Why do I have to be a peon in this system?” Kiwi grumbled.

  “Aww, when you get your high school diploma they’ll make you staff, Margine,” Vijay said, trying to cheer him.

  “Please do not call me that.” Why were other dudes his age so averse to calling him M&M? “When I get my high school diploma I’m going to Harvard.”

  “Ooh, sorry, Mrs. Mead. Goddamn. Bring me back a sweatshirt.”

  But in the staff cafeteria, Kiwi’s colleagues taught him that it was unwise to self-describe as a genius here in the World. It was unwise to mention colleges, or hopes. Telling your fellow workers that you were going to Harvard was a request to have your testicles compared to honey-roasted peanuts and your status as a virgin confirmed, your virginity suddenly as radiant and evident to all as a wad of toilet paper that was stuck to your shoe, something embarrassing that you trailed through the World. The other guys went after him with such vim (another pointless
word from Kiwi’s SAT box) that afterward he never mentioned college to anyone besides Vijay and Carl Jenks, whom he figured he’d need later as a reference. Three people had to recommend you, apparently. Yvans had already offered to write Kiwi “a two-thumbs-up letter” if Kiwi continued to cover for him, and to call his wife on Adultery Fridays and say that Yvans was going to be “in an after-hours conference” with Carl Jenks until the moon rose. Vijay said that he would sign any letter that Margaret put in front of him. That left Carl himself. Kiwi was more deferential to Carl Jenks than he’d ever been to the Chief. He tried to scrub children’s vomit from the webbing of the Tongue in a way that suggested deep reservoirs of genius. When a three-year-old Lost Soul came howling around the corner and knocked over a garbage can of Dante’s Tamales—which looked like masticated rubies and burned your bare skin—Kiwi righted it. He was monastic, scrupulous. He really hoped that Carl Jenks was keeping track of this.

  Vijay Montañez, Kiwi realized, was actually an angel disguised in smelly A-necks and skunk-striped Adidas breakaway pants. Vijay was a wonderful aberration in the World of Darkness’s social universe—he seemed to feel a sincere fraternal affection for Kiwi, and he defended Kiwi’s dorkiness to the other workers as if Kiwi Bigtree were a country under his protectorate. Vijay was an only child, he lived with his mother and his grandmother and what Kiwi judged to be eighty Chihuahuas, if you based your estimate on the terrible noises they produced through a door, in a closet-size apartment on Regal Avenue—and he’d mentioned right away to Kiwi that he’d always wanted a brother. His father had remarried a white woman, Susannah. Technically he did have a brother, Vijay said, Ste-phen, breaking the name hard as karate on the syllable. Vijay had never met him; Vijay’s father had relocated that family to Grand Rapids, Michigan. For reasons that Kiwi didn’t fully understand, he felt certain that this infant in Michigan was the reason Vijay was so kind to him, and so unreasonably loyal.