They Is Us

In the meantime he is supposed to sleep on the sofa, baffled, bewildered and then, slowly, irritated, at having to beg her forgiveness for… for what? Even she would not be able to remember. This time, Slawa thinks, it is going to be different. He actually will leave, he can live in the shoe repair shop. The only person left who is important to him here is Julie, and he can arrange to visit her. His cats are scattered all over the house and even though they are responsive, they can do tricks, he works with them daily, it still takes an age to round them up and coax them into their cages. Breakfast, the dog, stands watching by the door. “You go?” he says in a plaintive voice. Slawa nods. “When back?”

Breakfast

“I don’t know,” Slawa says. He is full of sorrow. “You want to come with me?”

The dog shakes his head. “No,” he says. Slawa knows the dog is scared of anything new. Breakfast likes his routine. “When you come back, Poppy?”

“I don’t know.” There are six cages of cats; he carries them out two at a time. They are heavier than he remembers. How much could a cat weigh, twenty pounds? They resemble small mountain lions, or bobcats. He doesn’t remember ever having cats like these before. Each trip he makes, Breakfast follows him to the car and back in again.

“Why you leave, Poppy?” Breakfast asks. “Where you going?”

“I don’t know, Breakfast. I don’t know.” But still the dog asks, “Why?” again and again.

Murielle hears Slawa’s car. Is he really gone? For the moment the house is peaceful, apart from the scream of the dysfunctional air-conditioning unit and the thump of the Patel boys next door playing Flosh Express in their driveway. She has begged them not to because the ball keeps hitting her wall; they continue.

At a distance the ceaseless surf pounds, not waves but cars on the thirty-lane highway that has recently opened alongside the abandoned twenty-lane highway.

She will go crazy if she doesn’t get out of here, she thinks. But where can she go? Anyway, the girls will be back soon, she will have to give them something for dinner and it is too hot to move. Maybe a cold shower will make her less irritable. There is always a chance the faucets will gush real water instead of Sanitizing Gelatin.

Sure enough Slawa has left three towels, wet, on the floor – who needed to use up three towels, just for one wash? – and hasn’t opened the window afterward so the whole place is still steamy, which he has been told not to do one million times. Half the tiles are coming off the walls and the plaster moldering, the floor is crooked, too. Slawa was right about the place; soon the whole foundation is going to collapse.

Last night had been the last straw, to hear him crashing around and wake up to find he had pissed again in the hall, so drunk he thought he was in the toilet. What if one of the girls saw him? And in the morning the urine stank so bad, even a dog knew better than to piss in the house!

Once she had been fond of him, he had seemed to come out of nowhere like a gentle… not a giant, he wasn’t that tall… but a gentle something, maybe one of the seven dwarves, which had always seemed a bit kinky to her, what was that virgin princess Snow White doing with the seven filthy little men – not that dwarves in general were filthy, but at least in the movie Snow White had to go in there and clean the whole place – the dwarves weren’t infants, they had beards, though that one – Sleepy? Dopey? – seemed microcephalic, with a tiny pointed head and huge ears –

Slawa had rescued her from that horrible apartment, one room with the two of them, she and Tahnee who was only one at the time – it was part of her salary as night-manager, but to live in the old-age home was relentlessly depressing, the smell of the old people and overheated, steamy smell of bland food; it had never seemed like a place to bring up a kid, and besides, how would she ever meet anybody there, everyone was sick and dying and/or a hundred and ten years old.

Somehow, she wasn’t certain, she kept buying stuff, probably out of depression, from catalogs, or would go to the mall which you could practically walk to, when she had free time – and the debts mounting up month after month so the leased furniture was taken away; night after night of boxed macaroni and cheese dinner and canned peas and soda that wasn’t even Coca-Cola but the store brand; she would never get out from the mess, and every damn box or bottle had its own singing or talking microchip and some were light-sensitive and others were activated on vibration so that each time opening the cabinet a whole Disneyworld chorus, though atonal, would burst out in conflagration: “Yankee-Doodle went to town, riding on a pony, stuck a feather in his cap and called it Kraft-Ebbing Macaroni!” at the same time as “All around the kitchenette, come and get your Peases, we are good – and good for you! – Pop! Goes a Zippety pea!” And then the deeper bass voice, “A product of Zippety Doo-Dah Corporation, a registered trademark. Zippety – Mom’s best friend for over a generation!”

Terry’s mother lived nearby then and helped out, babysitting, though she couldn’t stand it; Lorraine smoked, even though it was illegal, and had once burned Tahnee when she was holding her, as an infant, and couldn’t even put down the cigarette for long enough to hold the baby.

So when she met Slawa – and he was so kind, seemingly, he wasn’t drinking so much then, or hardly at all, and he visited his wife, Alga, almost every day and then would come by to say hi to her, and play with Tahnee, and take her out to dinner – she was grateful, more than grateful and his house was nearby, less than a half-hour away, with a yard for Tahnee, etc. etc.

Car doors slam. Surely he isn’t coming back? But no, it’s just the kids, returning from the pool. “Didn’t LaBenyce’s mom want to come in? How was the swimming?”

“No water.”

“I thought they were going to start using that gloppy stuff, the water-substitute?”

“They did, but we were only allowed to get in for, like, twenty minutes, then all of a sudden some girl started screaming and she was having an allergic reaction and so they decided to drain the pool in case it was poisonous or something.”

They are damp and cheery, reeking of chemicals, white mulberry skin puckered from their day in the… whatever it was. Tahnee really is a beauty, with that ash-blonde hair and tippy nose, thin, wispy; Julie is chubby and will never be so pretty; her smile is pretty, though, but she has the pleading look of a beaten dog while Tahnee – there is that imperious, snotty expression, and she is always batting her eyelashes at men. You can see she is going to be a real heartbreaker. She never smiles but there is already something frightening about her. Though she is not even fifteen, totally pre-pubescent and flat-chested, there is something about her… an insect queen.

“We’re starving, Mom,” says Tahnee.

“Yeah, Mom, what’s for dinner?”

“I’m not going to tell you to go and hang up your towels.”

“Why not?”

“Because I expect you to do so without being told.” It’s six o’clock, dinner time for normal people. There is nothing in the cabinets or in the freezer that the girls will eat. Why not? Everything is the same, pads or stacks or cubes of texturized cultured processed food-product, grown hydroponically in sterilized growth medium in factories; flavored with emollients, sauces, herbs, spices as well as artificial flavorings and preservatives. The food contains no by-products, all of it is pure and organic. Next week she’ll go see a lawyer.

“Where’s Dad?” says Julie.

It was probably better to get the whole thing over with sooner rather than later.

“Listen, kids,” she says, “things didn’t work out between me and Slawa.”

Julie’s face opens in a howl.

“Why?” says Tahnee. “Slawa’s not coming back?”

“He wasn’t your daddy anyway, Tahnee, so I don’t want to hear anything from you. I don’t want anybody making a fuss, either of you!”

Julie is weeping. “I always knew that was going to happen!” Julie will never get anywhere in this world; she has low self-esteem, Murielle thinks, and is, according to Doctor Ray-Oh-Tee, whose show is on at four, overly case-sensitive.

“You’ll get used to it, now we can have lots of fun without any big beer belly grunting and bitching and slapping his way around the place.”

“Daddy was nice when he wasn’t drunk,” Julie says.

“Right, but he was almost always drunk. One husband a Diamond-C dust dope head and one alcoholic, that’s enough for anybody.”

“Nooooo –”

“You don’t know anything, he didn’t let you see but there was never a single second when he didn’t have a beer in his hand and he went through a six-pack a night easily. That is why he was always in front of the TV in a catatonic stupor and plus he kept a bottle of bourbon going on the side – look, he wasn’t the worst guy in the world and I know you’re going to miss him –”

“I’m not,” says Tahnee, “I don’t even remember him already. It was like having a stuffed pig –”

“Okay, that’s enough. Anyway, we’re all going to have to be tough and strong. I’m thinking, we’re going to get out of this dump and travel and have an interesting life.”

“But I like it here,” says Julie. “My friends are here.”

“Not me,” says Tahnee, “let’s get out of this dump. Anyway, you don’t have any friends, remember, Julie?”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s what you said, you don’t have any friends, remember? When was that, Saturday?”

“Yeah, but –”

“All right, stop it you two. Tahnee. I tell you what. As a celebration, I’m going to order us a pizza, how do you like that?”

“Yeah, yeah! Pizza. I want mrango,” says Julie.

“I’m gonna have to borrow some credit from you kids. Who has money left on their micro-chips? I’ll pay you back, I’ll have cred tomorrow. My chip is over the limit.”

“I hate mrango,” says Tahnee. The two girls begin to squabble. Apparently they have already forgotten about Slawa’s absence. But whether that is due to indifference, or some type of brain damage, Murielle can’t determine.

Around midnight Murielle wakes with a start. Someone has come into the house. “Slawa,” Murielle says, “Is that you?”

There is no answer. She doesn’t even have the money to have the locks changed, with twenty-four credit chips maxed out and she can’t keep up with the monthly interest as it is, even if they let her have more credit. In the morning she will have to figure out how to get another chip, people do that all the time. They can’t go without groceries, can they? She should have asked Slawa for his set of keys, but that would have been awkward, he was in a rage when he drove off.

Murielle looks out the window, maybe it’s someone outside? But there’s no one there. All she can see is the almost full moon, with its sneering face – a Happy Face gone wrong. Long ago a conceptual artist had a grant from a non-profit arts foundation to go up there to make a face out of richly hued pigments (influenced by Anish Kapoor); only, after dumping two mile-wide circles to form the eyes, and almost completing the mouth, an explosion blew up the shuttle – and the artist – and turned that happy smile into the snarl of today’s moon.

She remembers Slawa keeps a baseball bat under the bed and now she fumbles around and, holding it in one hand, a flashlight in the other, goes down the stairs. Her hands are sweating, so slippery she can barely hold the bat. If a burglar has broken in, she really doesn’t see herself hitting him over the head. What can a burglar take, anyway? Nothing that would be missed.

She flicks on the light in the living room. Tahnee is lying on the couch, without panties, her legs spread and with the Patel boy from next door – the older one, Locu – and then Tahnee stares at her, with those cat-eyes, dilated, not even startled. For a second Murielle is about to say, “Oh, excuse me,” and turn off the light.

Her daughter has an expression on her face of pure… contempt, irritation, that someone is disturbing her and the boy. How old is that little punk Locu, anyway? He is kneeling on the couch in front of Tahnee’s parted legs, he turns and looks at Murielle with a sopping face like a dog feeding on a carcass, about to have rocks flung at him. “Pontius fucking Pilatés,” she says, dropping the bat, “what are you doing, get the hell out of here, Locu, I’m going to call your parents –”

Eyes without guilt

Tahnee sits, her eyes huge, sleepy but cold, without guilt. “Oh, don’t call his parents, Mom.”

“You’re only fourteen years old, you filthy little bitch,” she says. “I’m going to call the police!”

Locu, in his pajamas, bolts out the door.

Lazily Tahnee pulls up her panties. It is hot and her thin nighty, printed with a pixyish, mop-headed cartoon tot, only comes to the top of her legs, baby-doll style. Murielle grabs her daughter by the arm and slaps her across the face. Tahnee barely winces. “I’m almost fifteen, Ma. Don’t do dat shit.”

There is a reek of aerosol, or spray paint, in the air, sickly as glue. Something was knocked over? Or more of the weird polluted marsh fumes. “I’m going to puke,” Tahnee says and runs to the toilet.

“What am I supposed to do with you, how long has this been going on?” Murielle shouts at the bathroom door.

On the other side Tahnee is gagging, then vomiting, so loudly she can’t imagine what it is her daughter has taken. Or done.

4

Shoe repair is something he knows from childhood, he had worked in a shop – his mother’s brother? He can’t remember. Maybe it was because he had joined the Tsar’s Club Kids Party and they had gotten him the job? Has he even been telling the truth, about his PhD in physics? More and more is coming back to him, but it is fragmented and torn.

He had been so happy to have his own stupid business – shoe repair, for crying out loud! – and totally surprised when, a short time later, the PADTHAI-NY train entrance closed for repairs and the casual pedestrian traffic he was counting on utterly vanished. There has never been any sign of work about to commence and years have passed.

His head smells: stale dander, scurf; beer comes out of his pores, sour yeast and hops, like the floor of a bar after closing. God, what a loser; is it something genetic? His fault? But no, it had been his first wife’s family who owned the swampy marsh – two, three hundred years ago, maybe, back then it was apple trees, or potatoes – and let it be used for chemical dumping.

After this the property was sold for this cheap-o housing estate, and his wife’s family were then promptly sued for clean-up costs, and stripped to nothing. All he had ended up with was the tiny house. And now he didn’t even have that, only kept the hybrid petro-sucremalt fuel car. He punches in his destination and sits back to watch TV while he waits for traffic to move.

“The Amazing Hair-A-Ticks! This breakthrough in medical science is a genetically engineered hair grown by a tiny tick. The tick attaches easily to your head, it burrows under the scalp while numbing and sucking teeny amounts of blood. Totally natural, these hairs will grow more profusely than that which with you were born! Never fear, these tiny ticks are more the size of mites! Side effects may include a slight itching no worse than an ordinary case of dandruff. If side effects intensify, see your doctor at once. A product of Bermese Pythion.”

Slawa scratches his head. There is something familiar about this, maybe Julie had mentioned it over the summer. He changes channels. “This week learn about the lives of some of the most important figures in American history: Delta Burke, Merv Griffin, John Denver, John Ritter, Dinah Shore! Larry Gagosian and Tiffany-Amber Thyssen!”

Yes, yes, that would be something he should watch, he needed to learn about the people who had made this country America. He must try to hang on to the here and now. His cats – two Persians stippled red and white; one shorthair tortoiseshell; the fourth a Russian Blue; a Japanese bobtail; and the last a lilac-point Siamese, yowl in their crates. Kapiton, Barsik, Murka, Nureyev, Rasputin and Yuri Gagarin.

He had wanted to take Breakfast with him, but Breakfast was scared and didn’t want to go, not even when Slawa told him he could sleep in the same bed with him when they got there.

After a few hours he’s gotten nowhere. By some piece of luck, a neon sign is flashing that there’s a space available in the parking lot! Expensive, yes, but what the heck. He shoves the cats into a couple of crates and carries the whole yowling unhappy tribe to the PADTHAI-NY subway, only a few blocks away. The cats are heavy and there’s virtually no room to stand; thousands continue to swarm onto the platform to wait for a city-bound train that never keeps to any schedule. When it arrives it is so packed with people he has to barrel his way on, something he hates to do but… Whatever.

As usual, people move out of his way with that odd look, noses wrinkled; flies circle around him or ride his shoulders, but is it his fault? He has already been traveling for nearly four hours, to what should have been a destination perhaps twenty minutes away. Of that he is certain.

He’ll sleep in the shoe store, just for a few nights; soon Murielle will see, it is not so easy living without a man! He is sick of not being appreciated.

He can’t even tell if the train is moving; if it is, it is going more slowly than a person could walk. It’s awful being trapped this way, the hologramovisions are broken, stray arms and parts of an elephant move at random, and the sound garbled. He has nothing to do but think, something he doesn’t want to do. Fourteen years of marriage and then, just like that, get out.

It makes no sense. He was willing to work things out; he was ready to do whatever it took. If Murielle had said to him, Slawa, fix this or our marriage is over, he would have. He fixed everything anyway. He resoled the children’s shoes, when anybody else would have thrown them out – the kids, they were American, they wanted new shoes every few weeks anyway. None of them knew what it was like to grow up rummaging in garbage pails and eating food that was literally rotten.

Slimy cabbage leaves, spoiled fish. Nobody here even knew what it was like to finally get money and go into the store, the only one that was located in the area of bleak concrete towers a good hour outside the downtown streets and inhale the screech of rotten food, the frozen fish that even frozen was obviously putrid. And what good did a frozen fish do him, unless he could wheedle or borrow cooking oil, a frying pan, a stove?

Most of the time the elevators didn’t work, up nineteen flights, his father passed out on the sofa. His mother, his aunt, his sisters, all at some slave labor position in factories that made media diodes for arm implantation or organ labs, and waiting on line for hours after work to get some bread. Five kopeks to take the subway into the city. Drinking vodka at age ten just to keep warm on the Moscow streets.

You had to have a Tsarist Party Club Card or at least the Tsar’s Club Kids Party Card to buy anything halfway decent. And even then, what would he have done with a raw beet? Once he had found in the rubble of a building, an old ring. Cabuchon, ruby, gold, valuable. He could have sold it, but he had not. Years later there it appeared in a drawer and he had given it to Julie. Did she even appreciate it? No!

He could live in his shoe repair store. That did not trouble him. He paid his rent, how could the landlord prove he was living there? All he had to do at night was pull the metal gates down over the doors. Or maybe he would stay open and become the only all-night twenty-four-hour shoe repair in New York.

A gray sucking descent through the long wind tunnel and the arrival, into a sort of sack; hot ash, dust, an intricate network of old hairs, half-crumbled vitamins, toast, flakes of paint. Darkness, mostly, except for a few holes in the grating overhead. No, no, he can make no sense, not of what is happening to him nor what has happened in the past. A general shredding of some space-time continuum, perhaps.

At last, his stop. He is shoved, up and out, into a massive crossroads of skyscrapers covered with blinking signs, endless streamers of electronic text proclaiming the latest news (“Dee Jay Mark Ronstad-Ronson to Wed Lionel-John Barrymore!”, “Sixty thousand Dead in Maltagascar”, “NEW OUTBREAK OF PRAIZLY-WEERS IN POSH HAMPTON”, “Polish Mike Hammer Killed in Plane Crash!”, “Humphrey Bogart and Peter Sellers in THE MALTESE PANTHER is a hit!” – this last due of course to new computer innovations that made it possible to reconstitute the deceased stars on the screen).

Advertisements everywhere: “No more suffering with the Britny Chumbles… Arpeggio at last!” And a picture of a naked woman on the beach, her row of extra breasts shrinking miraculously, and then the words “Side effects may include constipation, diarrhea, anxiety, nausea, Formantera fungus, vradnoid spits…” digital screens displaying acres of youthful flesh, poreless, perfect, clad in string bikinis which served as marginal containers for pert breasts and styptopygic buttocks. “When your Drena won’t Quit, take Dora! Comes with its own Inserter!”

The largest display features eight three-dimensional holographic, disembodied, dancing penises dressed in cute historic costumes – Elvis Presley, Margot Fonteyn, Richard Branson, and everybody’s favorite – the little guy, Napoleon. They are each enlarged to be ten stories high on the screen, though the real men are much shorter; the actors unzip their flies so they can emerge to perform on the quarter-hour from a giant cuckoo clock emblazoned with the Bermese Pythion corporate logo, though it’s hard to discern what product is being advertised. “It’s Maya turn – For Fun! Now Available with Individual sub-cutaneous Poppers!”

The streets are full of workers in dresses and skirts – not kilts, but the pleated knee-length wear that is the latest city street trend of men. Meanwhile a man shoves a talking pamphlet chip into his free hand, the one that isn’t holding the crate of cats. “GOT A HEADACHE?” it says in a shrill high chirp, “TAKE NEW HARMONY! NOW AVAILABLE AT DISCOUNT PRICES. ASK YOUR PHARMACIST. SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE PSYCHOTIC BREAK, UNCONTROLLABLE BLEEDING AND LIVER DAMAGE…”

He crushes the chip in his hand. A banner, words floating in space, is strung out over the avenue: “UNTIED WE STAND. Join the Marines Today!” From all sides the distributors press in, handing out chips there’s one with a deep booming voice, “Lose one hundred pounds in thirty days. That’s right, only thirty days!” Not a bad idea, actually, he’d be down to what, a hundred and fifty? A hundred twenty?

But Slawa has heard it isn’t safe. A lot of people kept losing weight until they just disappeared and there is nothing you could do to stop it.

There’s a man handing out samples – it’s a copy of the President’s fiancé’s memoirs – it’s called a book, a present to the American people. Scott has had it privately printed, enough copies for each and every citizen, free, a wee square of papers, with a red and gold cover. And it’s free! Slawa shoves it in his pocket.

To get into his shoe store he now has a circuitous underground route for nearly two blocks, and finally exits into the area that says EXIT CLOSED. This is worse than on his last visit. He pulls up the heavy gates that covered the front. It’s untouched, no break-ins. Everything as he left it. He is relieved, relieved and happy; this is his home, his office, after all.