by Mark Doten
In his car, or limo, in the back of his limo, as he drove us to school, or had us driven, the morning after he’d flown in and got in under the sheets with us.
Who was our father.
Trump, we think it was Trump, it must have been Trump.
Wasn’t it Trump.
It was a man who came. Why wouldn’t it have been Trump.
He would say, You know what the chicken hawk does when it sees a chicken.
Then the hand would swoop down, and the fingers would dig like lightning into our thigh or stomach or our neck.
He strikes.
The chicken hawk.
We would be laughing, we couldn’t help laughing, our whole body lit up and tensed with it, but we laughed.
Who was our father, who was he.
And his hand would be moving, digging in, exploring the texture of the muscle beneath our skin, and he’d just be watching, watching the work of his hand, of our body, as our body shook.
We’d clench our muscles, all of the muscles of our body, and hold so still.
And still we shook.
We were so shook.
Don’t they understand for everything there is a cost, there is a debt that accrues. To them and to the ones they’ve touched. They understand. Don’t they understand.
Maybe they don’t understand it, but there is.
Maybe they don’t understand because they don’t have to.
Maybe they just do their thing—they work their need—and then they’re gone, and the debt is what they’ve left us.
Totalizing fathers, they give way, they glitch out.
Hum hum hum.
They’ve left us a debt.
Do you remember the emperor in Star Wars. How energy shot from his hands, how much pain it made in Luke.
And how his father saved him after a struggle. But where was our father to save us, where was our father, he was the one hurting us, watching with a mystified look as his hands did their work.
And where was our mother.
There was a billboard outside the San Francisco airport that said Write Code. Save Lives.
It was for Taser, trying to entice programmers to Scottsdale, Arizona, to code for them.
Write code. Save lives.
We were driving Sebastian from the airport when we saw it.
Have we told you about Sebastian.
Have we told you about the birds. Have we told you how we’re building an internet of birds, we mean, for the birds, for whatever they want from their internet.
Look at all the birds.
We don’t think they’ll be okay.
Hum hum hum.
The birds on the floor who won’t get up might not be okay.
Once we had birds in our pockets.
The day we drove out and showed him the holes. Have we mentioned the holes.
We showed Sebastian the holes we dug out there in that remote public land.
He was puzzled but he was going with it, he had a bemused interest, he was going with it. He said it’s okay, it’s okay.
He said You know, those could be dangerous. Some hiker or a child could fall in and get hurt. You may not want to leave big holes in a public park indefinitely.
We were glad we were out in the dark, we didn’t say anything, but we felt a rage at him, and he stopped talking, and we knew he could feel it too. We walked back to the car in silence. And we said, You know, the cocaine you love very much, the cocaine, that’s what’s causing the pressure on the loneliest man. The narcos are literally killing the indigenous people so you can have that stuff.
We said, You talk politics, and yet you fear it.
Think of the fear of politics, think of the Gates Foundation, we said. They stay away from politics and shame on them. That’s why we have Trump. The political can’t be quantified and measured directly, can’t break down human beings to numbers, so the Gates Foundation stays away from it.
Hum hum hum.
Trump, we think it was Trump, he would come down to our basement room, in his suit and tie, he would take his shoes off and climb into our little bed, it was some sort of man, that was our father, and he would just hold us, and stroke our hair, or he would goof around, he would touch our thighs, our stomach, kiss us, I’m just goofing around, he would say.
People say it wasn’t Trump, but maybe it was Trump.
We were digging and we fell in a hole and that was the end of Sebastian with us.
That hole, it’s getting crusted, the one in you, let’s open it back up and get a droppy droppy.
When the bit stopped, my whole body shook, and the silence screamed as loud as the drill. I didn’t know if I was screaming or if I was just screaming in my skull—trying to scream through my nose, my mouth taped over, the blood running down my face and getting sucked into my nose so I thought I would choke on my own blood. I was desperately sucking air and bubbles of blood.
I was bound in tape, but it was looser now at my wrists behind my back, my skin so slick with sweat. I focused on the wrists, turning them slowly but insistently, trying to find some give in the tape before I blacked out again.
We we were at a party, some start-up, some venture capital party, lights and glass and DJs and the dark, and we sat at the bottle service and sucked it down. We sat by a billionaire, knowing his money. This was years before the Aviary, and yet, we owe it to him, in a sense. The billionaire was talking about life and death, how to sustain life, how to keep it going forever, we said no. He spoke of minds living on, how his mind might somehow, in a box, we said no. We said a mind in a box, it would not have continuity of consciousness. It would be like how in Star Trek the transporter annihilates its human animal and that human animal is dead, and it rebuilds another, one who believes he is the one who is dead.
But the one who is dead is dead.
The billionaire said he understood the problem.
A boy came with the bottle service, and offered the billionaire his blood, and the billionaire’s head swung back, and his mouth went wide, and he brought his mouth down to the boy’s neck and drank of his blood.
The billionaire said: Mortal corruption, to live on anyway, to live on as the one destroyed, or to know someone was. Or the chance to simply live in a box in the internet.
We listened and tried to understand.
A rich man, a powerful man, he could do such things, he could drink a boy’s blood.
We said: If we had to choose between death and imprisonment forever in the box of the internet …
We said: To live anyhow is better than not at all.
The billionaire said: I’ll bet you twenty million you won’t stay in solitary confinement for ten years, with nothing but the internet.
We told him we didn’t have twenty million to bet.
He said that was fine, if we lost, he’d take our blood, he’d drain us.
And we said Good. We had been working then in the valley for a while, doing this and that. We didn’t want our blood so much then anyway. We said It’s a deal.
It’s not our fault.
We took the bet. We lived in a cell deep in one of the billionaire’s homes, for almost ten years we did, with the internet, and a toilet, and the food we were brought.
And we learned such things, and saw such things, and we read Sebastian’s book, and we had our bank heist before it was over.
And we were free, and we started the Aviary, in the real world we did it.
We shook the tree, and what fell down wasn’t juicy peaches, but nuclear devices.
A huge botnet, IoT, plus devices, computers and phones.
It started with BIND, with the back door Sebastian gave us, and from there it spread.
The largest botnet ever activated, harness them, give them the malware, and it all falls down.
And what fell down was bombs.
We did not make them fall, but they fell.
We remember terrible things done to children, children who were used and wrecked without a thought, they would one
day join the Aviary, some of them would.
You are trying to scream, Rachel. You should not try to scream.
You’re in the Aviary now. You might be. If you say you want to be, that’s all it takes.
We’ll take the tape off soon, and you can tell us you’re in the Aviary, if that’s what you feel.
Another drop of aqua regia, nitric acid and hydrochloric acid, in a molar ratio of 1:3.
It is eating through brain tissue, yes, but it is causing damage to set you free from damage, and neuroplasticity is a real thing, so remarkable.
And there are always trade-offs.
No ethical consumption, they say, no ethical consumption—it’s really true—under capitalism.
Trump, what is a Trump. A vast ungainly hog who has scalped a lion somehow. And staggers around in it. The rotting mane and pelt. Day after day, and year after year, eyes clenched, chin jutting, squealing and snorting and wheezing, daring you to say it, to tell him what he is.
You’re not a lion. You’re a dumb bad pig. A mentally ill pig, and no one likes you, you’re the worst, the worst one ever.
He was such a bad dumb little shit pig wasn’t he.
You are bound up and suspended and beautiful.
Here comes a droppy.
Hum hum hum.
But we all are bound up and suspended. You know that don’t you. We’re all just what you are now, we all are, all the time. The universe has strapped us all into the most elaborate Rube Goldberg death machine. Do you remember the poor monkey.
The density parameter, the cosmological constant.
Um, um, the Hoyle state.
The poor monkey.
Everything ever, all of history, all of the systems, millennia of piss and shit and betrayal, science and greed and the wars for standards, all of this to heave the monkey up out of our atmosphere into space to die.
Hum hum hum.
Midcentury spaceflight was a slaughterhouse, from the point of view of the monkeys. Alberts II and IV, Bonny the pig-tailed monkey, Gordo the squirrel monkey, Able the rhesus monkey, death from explosions and splashdowns and the sheer stress of it all.
All that evolution, all those millions or billions of dollars sucked out of the system, just to kill a monkey or a dog in the most elaborate possible way.
The abattoir of capital, the abattoir of science, the need for an addressing system for all things, so that we might make the whole earth, the whole universe, our abattoir, or reveal it for the death house it already was.
What we did with the Aviary is we yanked away a sheet and revealed what had always already been there, the clouds of radiation, the poison, the vast spinning wheels of excrescence that was our world.
Fathers want everything, they think they can just have everything.
Some soldiers just reached the knife room. Ooh, the front guy is getting all cut up. Ooh, the others are retreating.
But they are in the knife hallway and there is no retreat. And they are not even in the right branch.
They are dying quite awkwardly. It’s gross and we don’t like it. The blades that flew out of the wall didn’t do their job well enough, there’s too much human squirming in the blood that’s opening beneath them. How long will this last. How long will this last. Shut it off.
The other two groups are safe for now. There are more soldiers at the door.
What were we saying. Fathers. Fathers want everything.
The man is gone and then there’s your mother again, it’s just you and your mother again.
And you are left with wiring all askew, going to the bathroom wrong, digestion wrong, everything all activated, all the muscles tensed.
For months or years, for a whole life it will be like that.
You wet the bed, you touch yourself in class, you faint in a bathroom stall, and no one sees it as a sign of anything.
We had a mother, of course we had a mother, but where was our mother.
Enveloped in some screams I felt a gasp building. The drillings were past, but the reaction kept cascading through, pain and electricity and constriction and a slight sense of movement, and rattling chains, a sense of … cantilever? I heard that word, cantilever, in my head, it echoed there, my body held up at three points, bands at hips and feet and chest that hooked to chains.
I surfaced and it was the wave pool at the water park. I was in the water with Verena. She liked to swim underwater. Dominique was sitting on the edge. Verena said: Tell me I’m a fish. I told her. She was back underwater. She’d swim a few strokes and surface. Sometimes she had me go with her, sometimes I was supposed to watch. Tell me the password. Tell me my fish name. She broke the surface and sun twisted itself through water chaotically all around her. Dominique wasn’t playing with us. Tell me I’m a dolphin. Tell her she’s a dolphin, I said. She wants you to. Dominique had the look of someone who wanted to be somewhere else. She had the look of someone thinking about a cigarette. But her hands were squeezing the sandpaper edge of the pool. I was having a conversation with her and another one with Verena. Dominique’s and mine happened when Verena was underwater. Tell me I’m a sea turtle. Dominique said: She has more fun with you, but she loves me more. Kids love the primary caregiver more. This was an old conversation, but we were into it sometimes. I said: It’s not a contest. I didn’t say it’s a contest. I’m just saying how it is. And our girl: Tell me I’m a dolphin. My name is Finslip and you’re Flapper. We’re dolphins. I pushed off and went under with Verena. Underwater I was tuned in to the screams of children, which above I didn’t really hear, or I heard but filtered into the background. Down here it was different: they screamed slowly inside a bass drum—the water was a big whale heart that we were in, and the vibrations pushed Verena into me. I held my dolphin daughter to my chest and stood. I lifted her over my head, breaking the water into golden parts. We were at the water park and everything was fine. Tell me I’m a seal. You’re a seal. She was under again. Dominique said: She wants me when she’s sick. She wants you to tell her she’s a seal. She wants us both to, I said. I wanted to say: Real play is pure and beautiful and makes everything else worthwhile. Play is the best thing Verena gave me. I knew I should say this. But I didn’t. Dominique did a cough laugh. She said, What do you want me to say. I said a line I’d said many times to my wife, a laugh line, it relieved the tension a little, usually. Let’s get a divorce, I said. Dominique: Let’s. We laughed at the laugh line. I ran my finger from her knee two-thirds of the way up her inner thigh. It was slippery under my finger—I saw my white finger on her light brown skin. I saw the wrinkles on the skin of my finger, and the oiled smoothness of hers, and the tension of her posture, the hands gripping the sandpaper edge, and black hair falling over the lime green swimsuit. You’re Flapper, you’re Flapper. I held my daughter and fell back with her. We crashed into a new kind of hearing. I heard her forcing out her air for the effect of the bubbles we could see in the blue, the too blue water, in the whale’s heart with the bass-drum screams. My feet were slipping and I couldn’t get us up—my daughter was in my arms and I slipped a second—a panicked crash—and then my legs were under me, thrusting us up, too hard, and I was holding her too tight, my nails in her chest, digging under the line of the top of her swimsuit, in the air. Flapper, I said. Flapper has Flippy. Finslip, she shrieked. I’m Finslip. But she was testing something—if there was still fun in it. And there wasn’t—she could feel that there was no more fun in it, that something had changed. That something had happened that she had to evaluate, and that she should probably feel bad about. She kicked away from me, she pushed off my right femur and my right index finger hung for a second in her left swimsuit string, and I had a horror I would pull it off, somehow, embarrass her, expose her, but it snapped back, without pain I think—she took no notice. She was underwater again. Dominique: A divorce for me would mean I have my life back. Kids have bottomless want and need, but no one will ever love you like a kid. But I would have my life back. I love you, I said. Bottomlessly. No, you love m
e superficially because you want to fuck me. You’re compromised. She needs me 100 percent of the time. So, I said. I ran my finger up her thigh again. Only partway, and pressed it in, and watched the skin change. Let’s get a divorce. Let’s have some peace. At least half the time some peace. You know you’re wrong. You know that’s not how it works, Dominique said. Now I’m Flapper, Verena said. Dominique leaned in close to me. She said: A divorce is a good deal for me, and a bad one for you. Why would you want to spend 50 percent of your time focusing on her 100 percent, when you can now spend 20 percent focusing 80 percent? I’m Flapper, Verena said. She said, Who are you? Then we were in the car. Verena slept and Dominique and I listened to the audiobook of “The Sign of the Four,” narrated by Stephen Fry. We listened and we heard We earned a living at this time by my exhibiting poor Tonga at fairs and other such places as the black cannibal. He would eat raw meat and dance his war-dance: so we always had a hatful of pennies after a day’s work, and Dominique said she hoped her daughter was really asleep because that shit was racist. And I said it was, but it was still important. And Dominique said, How is that important for her to hear? And I felt a panic because I didn’t know, or couldn’t remember then, why it was important, I knew in some part of me that it was, but I couldn’t explain it, “The Sign of the Four,” the racism there, whether it was important because the author knew it was racist, and was commenting on it, or because he didn’t know, and that’s why it was important, I just didn’t know, it was swirling inside, but I couldn’t explain. Then we were home. I made dinner while they sat together up on the roof. I came up with a bowl of watermelon salad with mint and feta and I saw through the door to the roof the two of them side by side watching the sun go down over the uneven roofs and the new glass towers of Greenpoint and Long Island City. I came up with a big yellow plastic mixing bowl with pink watermelon and bits of green and white, and I watched them, facing away from me, bodies aligned, sitting on the outer bench, looking out at the roofs, across the boroughs and to Manhattan, very still, Verena far more still than she would ever be with me—or so I thought. And I looked at their shoulders, Dominique’s dark skin, Verena’s less dark, closer to mine, but not mine either, both so different from me, from what my skin was, or what it looked like, what it did for me, holding things in, and what it did, presenting things, and how those were uses that no longer had a real distinction, I thought, in that moment, but I looked at them, those girls, both a part, I believed, somehow, I thought, a part of my skin, my wife and daughter, but I couldn’t have explained that any more than Holmes and what was said in that. But I felt it. I went back down treading so quietly. The recipe didn’t call for sugar, it didn’t need sugar—Dominique might be annoyed by it, but Verena would love it, and her happiness would increase Dominique’s net happiness, too, even if she was annoyed with me, and I felt more than anything that I wanted to increase our net happiness—I shook sugar all over the salad and brought it back up, and when I came out my girls were still looking out at the horizon, but there was something new now, a keypad on the door, and I rapped the window, and I held out the big yellow bowl and said Hey.
