by Liz Grzyb
“What are you looking at, old woman?”
He’d stopped at the carefully balanced dome the girls had just finished preparing, his hand up high ready to smash it. Dark grey t-shirt that looked and smelled like it had never seen the inside of a washing machine. Filthy track pants in much the same vein. Bare feet. Hair that had been so neatly slicked into place was now a greasy pile of lank string on his head. And those eyes that had glinted sharp against the white, brightness of his first day outfit, now roared with a dark pain that was almost unbearable to look at.
But Katya made herself look steadily and hold his gaze.
That was all she had and all she’d failed at with her own boy. She’d got scared and stopped looking him in the eye. That was when she’d betrayed him, left him to fend for himself and the dark rage inside.
“I’m looking at you, Austin Jones.”
“You’re an ugly old cunt, aren’t you?”
“Yes. I am.”
“You should fuck off out of here like those scared little bitches, or I’m going to have to fuck you up.”
Katya’s heart quickened, part excitement part terror. Yes she was scared. This boy would have strength and anger on his side and he wouldn’t back away if he decided to lay into her.
“You can do whatever you want to me, Austin Jones. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Why do you keep saying my name like that bitch? It’s my fucking name all right, not yours.”
The muscles in Austin’s jaw and neck were twitching and his fists flexed like they had on that first day. A constant ripple like he was fending off or about to surrender to a furious and invisible rhythm.
“I’m going to keep saying it to remind you who you are. You’re Austin Jones. You don’t belong here. Your light shines bright.”
The boy brought his twitching fists down on the tower of fungi pods, sending them flying. He let out a roar. A howl that rose from his gut and spurted from his mouth. Katya could imagine how this fear and rage had been squashed when he was a child. Given no space and permitted no voice. How usually as he grew older it found space and voice smashing up against others. People. Walls. Cars. Maybe at times, himself. Here in this space, surrounded by the thick dark of the fungi, maybe some of the pain could be expiated. Absorbed.
“I am not light. I am darkness—you hear me? I am the dark of the world and I am here to destroy. Get out of my sight, old woman or you will be in my path. Do you hear me?”
White spit frothed in the corners of his mouth. Tears smeared his dirty cheeks. Arms raised and fists clenched, he stormed towards Katya. She trembled but something in her was also released. Her own tears felt like cool rain as they flowed down her face.
“I see you, Austin Jones, and I hear you. I’m not going anywhere.”
His blows fell fast and hard. On her head. A crack as her nose split. Blood gushed thick and sweet over her lips. Another crack as her jaw snapped. She hit the floor. His bare foot found the softness of her belly. Found also, the tight ball of the tumour inside her. He kicked and kicked. Katya gasped with the pain and then saw and felt only whiteness. As much as she could still utter words, she kept on repeating her mantra:
“I see you, Austin Jones, and I hear you.”
She heard his rasping howl crack and fall into deep sobbing as the force of his blows slackened and he collapsed, spent, beside her on the floor.
It was Austin Jones’s idea for Old Katya to try the fungi.
He still had his bad days. Absenteeisms that she should have reported him for but never did. She didn’t ask what he did on those days away from the Shroom Room. Eventually they became fewer and farther between. He never attacked Katya again.
On his good days he was full of energy and innovative ideas.
It was Austin Jones who first encouraged the gender-fluid kid to pursue the idea of cultivating the natural pesticide fungi they’d been excited about. The girls weren’t interested in experimenting with new methods. They just wanted to finish their Diversion Program time and get back to their lives. But when the pretty one brought in a blue t-shirt she’d swiped from an old client who insisted on visiting her for conjugal visits and handed it to Austin with the instruction that blue would suit him, he took it.
He even took to wearing it.
“You’ve got cancer, haven’t you?”
The sentence came out one afternoon when he and Katya were harvesting a new batch of cloud-like white fungi. Katya cursed herself. She’d been wincing, pressing the pain swelling out of her stomach, thinking nobody was watching.
She pulled herself up straight and fixed Austin’s green eyes with her toughest stare.
“You tell anybody about this I’ll report your sorry little arse to the authorities for that bashing you gave me and every day absent since. You hear me? It’s my business and nobody else’s.”
Austin Jones shrugged. “Whatever,” he said, but she caught the pain in his eyes and it nearly stopped her heart.
That she could be a person a boy like this cared about.
“Exactly,” she said, matching his gruff tone.
“We’ve all got to go sometime, Austin Jones. Even you.”
“Not for a long fucking time, old woman.”
“Pleased to hear it. Now stop chattering and get back to work.”
When he suggested that she try eating some of the fungi that was known to break down the toughest and most virulent forms of plastic, Katya thought it was a ridiculous idea. Surely if certain kinds of fungi had the capacity to eat tumours in human bodies, medical science would have figured that out.
Surely.
She held out no hope.
She only said yes because it was Austin Jones and she was getting soft in her old age.
But when he came to her, and made her sit, and held the tiny grey pieces of mushroom to her lips and then handed her water to wash the foul-tasting stuff down, and dabbed at the spot on her chin where the water dribbled.
Well.
She had to admit, Old Katya, that maybe finally, somehow, as if by great accident or a gift from gods she didn’t believe in, she’d managed to do something right.
* * ** * ** * *
The Butterfly Whisperer
Andrew Sullivan
Fifth elevator on the right,” the reception jockey said, as though it was the most exciting thing he would utter that day.
“Thanks,” Jocelyn Kuepper replied with her best Ohioan accent, finished typing her fake name and details in the visitor’s book, took her freshly printed clip-on badge, and headed for the indicated elevator. Jocelyn had tried for the best part of nine months to get an official interview with Terrance Sharp, multi-billionaire, philanthropist and Time Magazine’s Man of the Year CEO of Sharp Industries, the world’s first fully accredited 8-star eco-friendly corporation with offices in Beijing, Sao Paulo, Chicago, London, Kinshasa, Istanbul, and Sydney.
But nine months of negative responses from Sharp’s public relations people hardly put a dent in Jocelyn’s enthusiasm. No one—not CNN, not the New York Times, not the BBC, not even Fox or the Guardian—had been able to pin Sharp down and even ask him his middle name. To be the first would not only make her career as a hard-hitting investigative journalist, it would practically guarantee her long-term fame, or notoriety—whichever, Jocelyn didn’t mind.
He was CEO of a company that had gone from literally nothing to a top 200 market cap in five short years, and he did it by essentially creating a totally new field of endeavour so embedded in humanitarianism and philanthropy that it made the Red Cross look like a money-grubbing Wall St capitalist joint venture. No one knew who he was, where he came from, or what his intentions were. Questions of how and why drove many journalists in their quest to interview Terry Sharp and Jocelyn was no different.
But she knew that deep down she was different from the run-of-the-mill police car-chasing wannabee big name journos pursuing Sharp for an interview, because where they failed, she would succeed.
The key, Jo
celyn knew from past experience, was to beg, borrow, lie, cheat and steal to get her way. And to not take ‘no’ for an answer.
The top floor of Sharp tower in Chicago was one of the most difficult places on the planet to access—harder than the Oval Office in the White House (which now hosted guided tours), harder than the Pentagon, even harder than Apple’s New Product Testing Division at Cupertino. But luckily it was not the top floor Jocelyn was trying to access.
Four floors below Terry Sharp’s penthouse suite in Sharp Tower was the operations centre for one of Sharp Industries marquee divisions—Sharp Recovery and Resilience Alliance.
It was here that Sharp, via one of his key underlings, Roger Gorton, ran the most lucrative yet most humble of businesses. It was widely reported that SRRA (often pronounced Sierra) was singlehandedly responsible for saving the lives of millions of women and children around the world and Jocelyn had managed to convince one of Gorton’s underlings that she was a young naïve undergraduate named Sally-Anne Humpeldink from Ohio, keen to start an internship with the company.
Once inside the elevator Jocelyn realised that she didn’t ask to what floor she was meant to go. There were no buttons to press anyway—it knew where she was going and there was no way to accidentally go, say, to the top floor and stumble in on Terry Sharp cutting deals with the Mafia or Swiss Guard or whoever.
“Ms Humpledink?” a cute young guy in a nice suit said as soon as the elevator doors opened on the 83rd floor.
“Humpeldink,” Jocelyn corrected graciously. “Are you Mr. Gorton?”
The cute guy laughed. “Ah, no. I’m Ben. Ben Jamaal with two A’s. This way. We’re about to start a meeting to discuss the latest recovery mission. We thought you might enjoy the opportunity to meet everyone in the one room.”
“Will Mr Gorton be there?” she asked in a voice as gooey as she could muster. “Or Mr Sharp?”
Ben laughed again and Jocelyn found herself warming to him. “Oh, no. Just us lowly worker bees.”
Jocelyn smiled at his humbleness. “Do you ever get to meet senior management?”
“Oh, yes. Just yesterday I bumped into Francine McMahon in the cafeteria.”
Jocelyn could hardly contain her glee. “Francine . . . ?”
“Francine McMahon, the CFO—chief finance officer. All senior management are so friendly. Here we are.”
Ben opened a glass door and ushered Jocelyn into a meeting room and toward a seat at a very large rectangular table, around which a dozen faces as bright and energetic as Ben’s sat smiling at her.
“Guys, this is Sally-Anne Humpeldink,” he said, pronouncing her name slowly while looking at her to make sure he said it correctly. “She’s commencing a three month internship with us. Sally-Anne, this is—” and he then pointed out and named all twelve people, none of whom she had any intention of talking to or writing about, let alone remembering.
An older gentleman with a beard sitting at one corner of the table leaned forward and cleared his throat. “Now, down to this morning’s business.” He looked up at the ceiling as a very neat three-dimensional, glowing, spinning image of the world appeared, floating above the table. The image stopped and zoomed in on the Horn of Africa. “All indicators suggest that our forecasts for the Somali civil war are looking to be spot on. We will continue advanced planning for Phase 1 operations out of Sana’a with Gillian, Helen and Kevin. The situation in Angola appears to be deteriorating and has been added to the simulation agenda, as have the Northern Marianas, Tajikistan and Ecuador. The recovery phase is nearing completion in Bhutan. We will soon wind down operations there and focus our attention in the region to the resilience work in Uruguay. Closer to home we have some serious apprehensions developing in Missouri in relation to the activities of the Homeland Defence Guard, but nothing that you need be concerned with. Yet.”
A middle-aged woman opposite Jocelyn leaned forward. “Michael, in regard to Sana’a, when do you think we’ll move?”
The bearded man turned to the woman. “That is uncertain, Maud. The expectation is that Phase 1 will commence in the next 10 days.”
“Six days.”
Everyone at the table turned to look at the man who had just entered the meeting room without anyone noticing. Jocelyn knew who it was from the file photos her editor had given her—the one, the only, Terry Sharp. Her scalp tingled as the realisation dawned that perhaps her plan was working better than she could have hoped.
He was shorter than she had imagined. His hair was darker and thicker; he wore a fine designer stubble that gave him an appearance of urbanity that for Jocelyn screamed ‘personal groomer’. He sat in a vacant seat and swung his legs up onto the table. His piercing blue eyes quickly scanned everyone, nodding in a very friendly and agreeable manner to those who made eye contact with him. When his gaze came her way, Jocelyn pretended to write some pearls of wisdom in her notebook. His suit was clearly expensive but he wore no tie and his collar was undone, even though it was not yet ten in the morning. It all seemed too manufactured, too anxious to look cool and cultured—like a poorly performing politician eager to improve his standing by throwing decorum out the window and listening to the ponytailed public relations expert.
Michael raised an eyebrow at his boss’s boss. “Are you sure, Terry? Six days? The latest report still has significant fighting in the mountains around Mogadishu.”
Terry smiled. “Absolutely certain. Well, as certain as we can be about the weather.” He laughed and Jocelyn watched in horror as everyone else around the table laughed with him like well-trained sycophants.
“I don’t get it,” she said before she knew what she was doing. Suddenly intimately aware of the attention of everyone around the table, she wished she could take her words back.
Terry Sharp turned to look at her and she was struck almost physically by the intensity of his gaze. He raised his eyebrows. “And you are . . . ?”
Ben sat forward nervously. “Uhh, Terry, this is, ah, Sal—Sally-Anne Humpeldink. She’s our new intern.”
Terry considered her for a long moment. “Ms Sally-Anne Humpeldink,” he said as though tasting her name on his tongue. “Ms Sally-Anne. What, exactly, is it that you do not get?”
Jocelyn looked awkwardly around the table, hoping to find some support, but no one would meet her eye. Even Ben found something of interest on the ceiling to look at. “I, uh, I’m sorry, Mr Sharp, but you made some reference to the weather in regard to the civil war in Somalia and I didn’t get the significance.” She looked sheepishly around the table. “And everyone laughed as though they were in on the joke.”
This last was calculated to draw people’s sympathy and from the smiles of compassion on a number of faces, it worked.
But then she saw Sharp’s countenance as he considered her and Jocelyn knew she would need to work a lot harder to convince him of her undercover role. She felt as though he could see right through her, naked and exposed. “I see,” he said finally. He tilted his head to one side as he continued to contemplate her. “Yes, Ms Humpeldink, there is a very savage civil war being fought in Somalia right now. Yes, millions of people have been displaced and are currently dying of starvation and poor sanitary conditions. And, yes, there is an extremely fierce out-of-season cyclone currently strengthening in the mid-latitudes of the Indian Ocean. And, finally, yes, the current forecast of the cyclone’s path is that it will make landfall about fifty kilometres north of Mogadishu. In five days. So, in six days, given the uncertainty inherent in the cyclone forecasts, Phase 1 recovery operations will commence out of Sana’a in Yemen. The joke, if there was one, was about the uncertainty in the weather.”
“Oh, thank you for the clarification, Mr Sharp.” She felt properly censured and could not meet his eye, but figured that most of what she felt was her own mortification at almost blowing her cover—this undercover gig was something she would need to practise. It was clear that she would need to be very careful around Sharp.
The meeting continued on around Joce
lyn but she took no notice. Her attention was, obliquely, on Terry Sharp. She took notes about his appearance, his interactions with his subordinates, the way he absently picked at his cuticles. All the little details and idiosyncrasies that would help her write the story of the man.
Finally the bearded man called the meeting to an end and the attendees slowly began to file out. Jocelyn gathered her handbag and notebook and was about to follow Ben when Sharp spoke her name. She stopped dead. Slowly, she turned to him. “Yes, Mr Sharp?” Jocelyn put on her most bovinely innocent expression.
“My eleven o’clock has cancelled. If Ben doesn’t have anything else planned for you,” he glanced at Ben, who was hovering behind Jocelyn, “would you like to join me for morning tea? I’m sure that as an intern you would benefit from the CEO’s perspective of the organisation.”
Jocelyn managed to make herself blush in gratitude. “Oh, Mr Sharp, that would be so . . . cool. I would be so honoured.” By the time she finished speaking, Terry Sharp was no longer in the room. “Yes, sir,” she said.
Ben did not seem to notice her sarcasm. Instead, he eagerly showed her out of the room and proceeded to take her on a whirlwind tour of the six floors dedicated to SRRA. At two minutes to eleven, Ben led the way into an elevator and without touching a button, had the doors open at the top floor.
“That’s just freaky,” Jocelyn said.
Ben shrugged. “You get used to things in this building knowing what you want to do and where you want to go.” He indicated for her to alight. “Take the elevator down to 82 when you’re done and I’ll set you up with a desk with a nice view of the plains to the west.”
The elevator doors closed and Jocelyn found herself standing in a foyer with a very pretty executive assistant standing to one side smiling at her.
“Hello, Sally-Anne,” the EA said. “Terry has been delayed momentarily. Please, come this way. He won’t be long.”
