by T. C. Boyle
On the seventh day, a Monday, Anina came to me at my desk, the baby clasped in her arms. “This is fraud,” she informed me, her voice rigidly controlled but right at the breaking point.
I glanced up, noticing a thoroughfare of ants descending the wall before me—or no, they were ascending. Or no, descending. Descending and ascending both. I’d been lost in concentration, in another world altogether, and now I was back in the world of existence. “What is?”
“The contract. The old lady.” And here she spat out Signora Mauro’s name as if it were a ball of phlegm. “She never once mentioned the ants—and the ants negate that contract, which was made under false pretenses, fraudulent pretenses. This isn’t paradise, it’s hell, and you know it!”
I was being berated and I hardly deserved it or needed it either. I was going to throw it back at her, going to say Can’t you see I’m working? but in that moment the truth of it hit me. She was right. We’d come to the end of pretense. “Get your handbag,” I said.
She just glared at me. The baby twisted his mouth and began to cry.
“We’re going down to the village to see Signora Mauro. And demand an explanation.”
The landlady’s house, which we’d scarcely noticed the day we stepped off the bus, was a long low meandering structure with an intricate web of iron grillwork out front that must have dated from the Renaissance. It was situated in the better part of town, surrounded by imposing villas, the vegetation lush, the air so fresh it might have been newly created. My wife threw back the gate and marched up the walk to the front door, where she jabbed at the bell with a vengeful thrust of her finger. A moment passed, the two of us framed there beneath a trellis shaped like an ascending angel, the baby for once quiet in my wife’s arms. Anina drew in an angry breath, then depressed the doorbell again, this time leaving her finger in place so that the bell buzzed continuously. Finally, the heavy oaken door eased open just a crack and a maid the size of a schoolgirl stood just behind it, gaping up at us. “We’ve come to see the signora,” I said.
The maid’s face was like a wedge cut from a wheel of fontina. Her eyes were two fermented holes. “The signora is not at home to visitors today,” she said.
“Oh, but she is,” my wife countered, forcing the door open and striding into the foyer as I followed in her wake.
We found ourselves in a dark echoing space, the only light a series of faint rectangles that represented the margins of the drawn shades. Furniture loomed in the darkness. There was a smell of dust and disuse. To this point, I’d been swept up in my wife’s fervor, but now, standing there in the gloom of a stranger’s house—a house we’d forced ourselves into, uninvited—I began to have second thoughts. But not Anina. She raised her voice and called out, “Signora! Signora Mauro! We’ve come to see you—we demand to see you. Right this moment!”
There was a stirring at the far corner of the room, as if the shadows were reconstituting themselves, and then a match flared, a candle was lit, and Signora Mauro, in a widow’s colorless dress, was standing before us. “Who are you?” she demanded, squinting through the glare of the candle.
“We’ve come about the lease,” I said.
“It’s a fraud,” Anina added, her voice rising. “The conditions,” she began, and couldn’t go on.
“Vermin,” I said. “It’s infested with vermin and you never said a word about it.”
Signora Mauro’s voice was the voice of a liar and it came to us in a frequency that wasn’t much more than a liar’s rasp: “I know nothing about it.”
“Ants,” my wife put in. “The ants.” At the mention of his nemesis, though he could hardly have been expected to know the term, the baby began to squirm and gargle.
“You’ve got to keep things clean,” Signora Mauro said. “What do you expect, with your filthy ways? I’ve got a mind to double your rent for abusing my property. And don’t think I haven’t had reports—” Even as she spoke I could see that she was twitching in some way, furtively scratching, rubbing one leg against the other, flicking a hand across her hips and abdomen.
I threw it back at her. “What about you? What makes you impervious?”
“Me? I don’t have pests here. I keep a clean house. Scrupulously clean.” Again she twitched, though she tried to suppress it.
“But you do,” I said. “I know you do.”
“I don’t.”
“We want out of this contract,” Anina said. “We demand it.”
The signora was silent a moment. I could hear her drawing and releasing her harsh ragged breath. “Demand all you like, but I’ll take you to court—and you’ll never see a penny of your deposit, I guarantee it.”
“No, we’ll take you to court,” I said, surprising myself by taking a step forward—what was I going to do, attack her? Even as I said it, I knew I was bluffing. She had the power, she had the position, she had our first and last months’ rent and absent the house on the bluff we wouldn’t even have a roof over our heads.
“Go ahead,” she said, her voice jumping an octave as she squirmed in her clothes and stamped her feet on the carpet that must suddenly have come alive there in the dark. “I’d like to see that. I really would.”
In the next moment, Anina, my sweet Anina, transformed now in her rage and grief beyond all recognition, shoved me roughly aside, stormed out the door and slammed the iron gate behind her so furiously the entire house seemed to shake. I was left there in the gloom to make an awkward bow and bid the old woman a good afternoon before awkwardly hurrying after my wife. When I reached the street, I jerked my head right and left, in a panic over what she might do next—I’d never seen her like this, violence erupting from her like a lava flow, and I was afraid for her and the baby too. The street was busy enough, pedestrians and vehicles alike making their way from one end to the other, and at first I couldn’t find her in that shifting chaotic scene, but finally I made out the unmistakable rotating motion of her hips as she veered left down a side street at the end of the block. I ran to catch up.
By the time I turned into that block, she was already at the next, swinging right now, descending toward the section of town where the fishermen lived in their ancient stone houses amidst a petrol station and a few tumbledown canneries that once processed the sardines that had become rarer and rarer over the course of the years. “Anina, what are you doing?” I called, but she ignored me, her shoulders dipping over the burden of the baby in her arms, her legs in their faded blue jeans beating double-time along the walk. Then I was beside her, pleading with her—“Let’s go home and talk this over, there’s got to be a solution, calm yourself, please, if not for me, then for the baby”—but she just kept on going, her mouth a tight unyielding slash in a jaw clenched with rage.
We went down another street, then another, until finally I saw where she was headed—a warehouse just a block from the sea, a place of concrete block and corrugated iron that had seen better days. As I followed her up the walk to the front door, still pleading, I spotted the hand-lettered sign over the lintel—The Argentine Ant Control Corporation—and at the same time became aware of the smell. And the ants. The smell was of rot, of the spoiled fish heads and lumps of offal the Captain might have used for bait, and the ants were swarming over the walls in such legions they must have been six inches deep. Anina tried the front door—locked—and then began pounding on the metal panels, dislodging ants in great peeling strips like skin. “Come out of there, you son of a bitch!” she shouted. “I know you’re in there!”
I snatched at her arm, shook her, and now the baby had gotten into the act, bellowing till he was red in the face. “What are you doing?” I demanded.
There were tears in her eyes. The baby howled. “It’s true what they say, don’t you see? He claims to be doing a governmental service, this Ant Man, but in fact he’s breeding them. Don’t you get it?”
“No,” I said, “frankly, I don’t. Why would he do a thing like that?”
She gave me a look of contempt and pity,
a look for the fool blind to the realities of life. “If the ants are eliminated, so is his job. It’s as clear as day. He’s not baiting the insects, he’s feeding them!”
Of course, that couldn’t be. I saw that distinctly. And I saw that through no fault of our own we’d been distracted from our path in life, that we’d become disoriented and at odds with each other. And all for what? For ants? I still held on to her, my grip firm at her elbow, and even as the idea came into my head I swung her around, the baby still mewling, and began guiding her down the street to where the sea crashed rhythmically against the shore. We made our way amongst the rocks to the pale bleached sand of the beach and I just held her for a long moment, the baby calming around the deceleration of his miniature heartbeat, the sun a blessing on our upturned faces.
In that moment, the solution to Hodge’s conjecture came to me, or the hint of a solution that would require pencil and paper, of course, but the intuition was there, a sudden flashing spark in my brain that made everything come clear. It was an abstraction, yes, but math was the purest thing I knew, a matter of logic, of progression, of control. The ants were nothing in the face of this. We could learn to live with them. We would. I took a deep breath and looked out to sea, Anina and the baby pressed to me as the surf broke and receded and broke again. Here was a gathering force that predated everything that moved on this earth, the waves beating at the shore until even the solidest stone was reduced to grains, each a fraction of the size of an ant and each lying there inert on the seabed, stretching on, clean and austere, to infinity.
SURTSEY
All he could think about was bailing, one bucket after the other, as if the house he’d lived in all his life was a boat out on the open sea. The front door was sandbagged, inside and out, but the waves kept rolling across the yard, already as high as the seat on the swingset he used to play on as a kid, and there was no stopping them. The ridiculous thing was, where was he supposed to put the water? He just opened the window and flung it out, but since the whole yard was the lagoon now it would have taken the sorcerer’s apprentice—or no, the sorcerer himself—to put an end to it. Every bucket he tossed was one more bucket leaking in around the doorframe. His father had the mop, really going crazy with it, and his sister, Corinne, was bailing too, but they had the same problem he did, just dumping the water out the window as if the window was on top of a mountain somewhere, and the wind blowing half of it back in again anyway. As for his mother, she did what she did anytime they had a crisis, like when the stovepipe overheated and burned a hole in the roof so for two weeks it was as cold inside as it was outdoors or when his father had an accident on his ATV and broke his collarbone in two places: she just got in bed with one of her books and started reading.
That was where she was when the storm surge hit, and though the house was four feet up off the ground on pilings, that wasn’t really going to help all that much because this was a storm surge riding in on a supertide, the sun and moon in alignment on the autumn equinox and the bad luck of a major storm on top of it. A.J. didn’t like seeing her there in the bed with the water already rippling across the floorboards in little wavelets and the bedposts dark with wet, but that was her way—what was going to happen was going to happen and there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it. Try arguing with her. Try telling her they needed to bail and mop and save what they could, stack the best things on top of the not-so-good things and the not-so-good things on top of the throwaway things, make do until they had no choice but to go over to the school, which sat on the highest ground of the island—all of eight feet above sea level, but that was better than where they were—and she would just say, We’ll go when we go, and, What do I look like, Noah?
He tried hard, he did. Everybody knew what was coming because this wasn’t the first time and the science teacher at school, Mr. Adams, took them through the global warming thing like it was the Bible or something, nobody arguing about it now, the shore ice that used to protect the island forming later in the season and melting earlier, ocean levels rising all around the world, carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere, the loss of the albedo effect with the loss of the ice and all the rest. When they’d seen the eclipse the night before, that was the giveaway, the sun and moon on the same line and pulling together, tug of war against the earth, and he put his best clothes in a knapsack along with his video games and his basketball trophy and got ready to evacuate to the school. His father—he was a genius, he really was—got the idea of anchoring hooks in the ceiling beams so they could pulley his and Corinne’s beds up off the floor by a couple of feet and so they did that, but their parents’ bed was too heavy so they just put cement blocks under the bedposts and hoped for the best. And yes, he was hopeful, of course he was, sixteen years old and full of his own strength, thinking if they just kept at it everything would be all right—they could live with an inch or two in the house, no problem, and the storm would stop and the water recede, like always—but this was different, this was the supertide, and there was his mother, wrapped up in bed, her eyes tracking across the page while the edge of the one blanket, the one that was slipping off the end and she didn’t even seem to notice, was turning dark where it was soaking up water like a sponge, and he didn’t know what to do except keep on bailing.
By the time they finally gave up and made for the school, most people were already there, and the only way they could get to it at that point was in the boat, which wouldn’t start, so his father had to row and his mother sat in back, in the stern, but she was so heavy it was like a seesaw up front, where he and Corinne were trying to balance out the weight. His mother was the heaviest woman on the island, fat actually, obese, though he didn’t like to think of her like that or use that term either. She always said she was big-boned, that was all, and laughed when she said it. Still, no matter what you wanted to call her—and the kids at school never stopped ragging him about it, as if any of them were any better or their mothers either—just getting her into the boat was a trick, the water at the level of the front porch now and bubbling up through the floorboards and the waves beating at the windows and sending jets of foam right up to the roof, but Corinne helped her put on her boots and her rain slicker and the two of them got her down the hallway to the porch while his father held the boat as steady as he could. Himself, he could have walked, the water up to his waist and the wind screaming and flapping the hood of his parka, no problem, the school only five blocks away at the end of town, but his father needed him there in the boat to help balance out the weight. They didn’t bring much with them because they didn’t think they’d be gone more than maybe overnight, just a couple black garbage bags of emergency things, flashlights, sleeping bags, cereal, underwear and socks, his mother’s nightgowns that were like army tents in the movies and an armload of her books too. The house, if it didn’t get wrecked, would stink till summer with that rot smell, and the thought of that depressed him—he really didn’t want to go anywhere, least of all back to school, but when they finally did make it up the flooded steps and through the front door, everybody was there and it felt like a holiday.
The first thing, the first order of business, as Mr. Adams would say after he got done checking the roll each morning, was to get his mother out of her wet clothes and into something warm, blankets, spare blankets, and did anybody have any spare blankets? The problem was, just when they’d got the boat there on the beach that just yesterday afternoon was the playground, and his mother, with him on one side and Corinne on the other, stepped out of the boat, a wave came shooting in and the thing surged forward and took her legs out from under her and she went down hard. It wasn’t that cold, low forties maybe, but the water was always freezing and even if you were used to it (and she wasn’t) you didn’t want to be sitting in it up to your neck. In a storm. With sixty mph gusts riding in across the Chukchi probably all the way from Siberia. That wasn’t fun for anybody, and he was shivering himself, pretty much wet to the crotch, and so once they got inside he’d had to
go around to everybody and see if they could borrow a couple of blankets because theirs were wet, or damp anyway, and the sleeping bags wouldn’t fit her. And no, he wasn’t one of these kids who’s ashamed of his parents, he was bigger than that, but still people were making jokes and that would have got to him except the whole situation was so weird, like Christmas and a basketball game and the community monthly movie all rolled in one.
Corinne took their mother into the girls’ room to help her out of the wet clothes and he and his father went down to the gymnasium, where people had already staked out the best spots and had their sleeping bags laid out and all their stuff scattered around them as if it had crashed through the ceiling, radios tuned to a whisper, a rustle of potato chip bags, crackers, whatever, and the men were all squatting in little groups, talking in low voices and drinking coffee out of stained mugs. And smoking. Everybody was smoking so it was like they were drying sheefish inside except the smell was totally different, not appetizing, not at all.
