They Is Us

6

Intelligent Design – Short Version

Somewhere in the universe a child is crying, “Maaaa! I’m bored!”

“Well, Adam,” says his mother who is very tired and trying to get something accomplished. “Why don’t you go play with your chemistry set?”

“Look, Ma!” yells Adam, a short time later. “You gotta see what I made!”

“Not right this minute.”

“Come now!”

Adam’s mother wearily goes to look. “Oh, Adam, that’s terrific! What is it?”

“Can’t you tell? Maaa, it’s a new planet!” says the child with a satisfied smile. “And now I’m gonna give it the spark of life.”

“No, no,” shouts his mother. “Not the spark of life, honey! Remember what happened the last time! I don’t want to have to clean up another of your messes!”

6

(Regular version)

The girls are open-mouthed, watching the President’s boyfriend on HGMTV and eating biodegradable baked crunch poklets. “Gee, Scott, you look fabulous!” a reporter is saying. “Who designed your outfit?”

Scott is dressed in high black boots and jodhpurs, and carries a little crop. Under his other arm is a Cunard saddle, a birthday gift from Cunard – which, says the caption on hologramovision, has been given to Scott in return for promotional considerations. “It’s all Cunard,” Scott says. “Couture by Steve McQueen for the Cunard luxury line; do you know what the saddle alone would cost if I had to buy it retail?” He looks around. “Where is that stable boy? Manuel!”

Manuel is Argentinean, a shock of black hair, gumboots, short but blackly handsome. He takes the saddle from Scott.

The two men pose for the hologramovision cameras momentarily as they stare at the horse. “Christ, Manuel, he’s just too darn long in the back for this saddle,” Scott says at last. “You were the one who took the measurements, it’s a custom-made fuckin’ saddle, now what am I supposed to do?”

Manuel turns to the camera. “Let’s find out, after this quick break for an important commercial announcement!”

“Come on, this guy’s really starting to bug me,” Tahnee says finally. “I’m bored, what do ya wanna do?”

“I dunno, what do you wanna do?”

“I wanna go to the shack.”

“By ourselves or ya meeting someone?”

“Just us.”

Julie is happy. Just them, this is a relief, to be alone with her sister – and even better not to have to wait outside the shack, standing guard, while Tahnee and Locu did whatever it was they did inside.

“Where’s Locu?” Julie says.

“Dunno,” says Tahnee. “Don’t care.” Julie is surprised. Tahnee loves Locu so much. She can spend hours with him, doing nothing but sleeping or half-sleeping, limbs entwined. She is happy. His brown skin, soft and hairless, his amber eyes thickly fringed with long black lashes. How Tahnee loves the smell of Locu, a mix of cinnamon, cumin, cardamom, turmeric. She knows these are the names of the smells because she has gone next door, often, to watch Locu’s mother cook. Rima still does things the old-fashioned way. She opens different packets and cans and cooks them on the stove. Tahnee could almost lick him up, his warm, sweet-scented sweat. Even if he takes showers and doesn’t eat Indian food for days, it is still embedded, somehow, in his skin.

Mostly they don’t talk, they don’t need to, it is enough to simply lie this way, felines in the sun, stroking the skin on the inside of each other’s elbows or necks or gently scratching fingernails on the other’s back: when they are together they need nothing else.

“You guys have a fight or something?” Julie hurries to keep up with her sister. “Is it because he wouldn’t take that bubble bath with you when you wanted? Because I was reading how Hindu people don’t take baths, they don’t want to just sit there in their own wet dirt.”

“Nope,” says Tahnee, and Julie knows that is all Tahnee is going to say.

The heat gets to them quickly. Tahnee’s pace slows to a trudge as they walk down the block. Some days out here when the temperature approaches a hundred and twenty, the asphalt melts. The houses are close together, no grass or trees grow and many of the front yards have been concreted over – everyone knows what the development has been built upon, that is why no one can ever sell their house; though one or two have been abandoned by the occupants; these are boarded up.

There is no sidewalk in this neighborhood but at the end of the dead-end street is a large field, bigger than a football field, with short dead grass and a large sign that says, COMMUNITY PLAYING FIELD COURTESY BERMESE PYTHION TECH. The field is divided in the center by a narrow trough, pencil wide, filled with an oozing black substance that makes any organized sport impossible; sooner or later some kid always gets a foot caught in that… stuff, which can melt a sneaker in a minute and a half. It’s leakage from the swamp. Beyond the field is the marshland.

The kids have built a pathway: you leap from the door of a dishwasher to the hood from a car, to a sinking tire onto an old board. In the bubbly pitch in between, the garbage belches and viscous material, the consistency and color of melted bubblegum, rises and sinks. A quarter of a mile out beyond the field, a half a mile or less from the eight-lane highway, behind some ten-foot tall weeds, is the clubhouse-shack.

Julie doesn’t particularly like steeting. She was eight when Tahnee first commanded her to inhale from a jar of Blixsteetgluf. The battery-acid coolness of the initial inhalation, the sensation of brain-matter plunged into dry ice; the lingering taste of… fermented milk and something blue and chemical… but then there are the two or three minutes that are – if not fantastic, the way Tahnee seems to find it – at least a sort of temporary delicate explosion: gigantic butterfly wings made of glass appear from nowhere and break.

What she hates is the way her tongue gets fat – this happens to everybody – and so she has to say “da” instead of “the”, you can’t say “th” which means that everybody knows what you’ve been doing – and the after, that horrible stench that lingers for hours on her skin and in her mouth, and the sense that she can’t hear. Also, she almost always gets the skeeves, real bad.

If she had a choice, Julie wouldn’t do it at all.

Oh boy, though, it is fun for Tahnee! She can just feel that icy stuff hit the brain and la-di-da-di-dim, that big gray ball of scrambled eggs up there just starting to… curdle around the edges; think of Little Miss Muffet screaming and pissing on that tuffet, think of eggs hitting the sidewalk, think of wham! A cleaver cutting right through the top of the head, everything kinda tumbling: who needs brains anyway, who was going to put them to any use?

Tahnee can always look up whatever she wants on the computer: let’s say she has to know about a pop star having sex with, say, a movie star, how they went about it, doggy fashion or… she can look it up online and see it there, right in front of her!

And it is more fun to watch if her cortex is a little bit frazzled, blast the mushy stuff right out of existence, life is short! Tahnee knows she is going places, she is going right to the top, though she doesn’t know yet exactly how; and later, perhaps – if she hasn’t outgrown him – she’ll collect Locu and have him as her little slave, that is, if she hasn’t gotten tired of him. For the moment, he has to be punished; it was his idea to come by the other night and now not only is she in trouble with Mom, Locu is grounded.

While Tahnee inhales, Julie is just coming out of that initial polar land into a place that is even nastier, with her edges thawing like a plate of frozen cottage cheese in the microwave. She hears something behind the shack. Someone is out there.

Over the years the shack (or shak) has gotten more tilted; it’s listing on its own petard, askew. The place is jammed with discarded mattresses, a greasy grill atop a charred hibachi where sometimes a kid will barbecue a Tundertube Pop made from that extruded tasty paste that is never so good as when it is cooked outdoors. “Did you hear dat?” says Julie who is now in the state they call trapped-in-ice. “I’m scared, get a stick, Tahnee!”

“I don’t know,” Tahnee says. “I didn’t hear anyding, Julie.”

“You didn’t hear dat?”

“Maybe. You getting da skeeves again, Julie.” More noise. Now she’s got the skeeves coming on, too. “Locu, is dat you? Cut it out, you’ve pulled dat stupid trick too many times. It’s not funny.”

Locu has a way of hiding in some cubbyhole or up on the platform where there is another mattress and jumping out to scare them. “Please Tahnee. I’m scared.”

“Whatever.” Red-eyed, frozen-custard head, Tahnee goes out to look. Around the back someone (it had to have been Mason, the local Daply’s Urge kid) has wiped his ass with an old t-shirt and left the used rag next to the piled coil. “Watch where you step,” someone says. “What a dump!”

Weird man, Tahnee thinks; he has the most peculiar skin, translucent, almost greenish beads of sweat on an oddly flat nose yet all in all not unattractive – those slightly bulging eyes, luminous and darkly pellucid. Too bad about the stupid hair, kind of greenish algae-colored – what the heck had he been thinking? He has a strange ominous presence, kind of cool, even cold. Maybe he’d been in jail? It’s only when she’s high that Tahnee has such complicated thoughts. “Who you?” Tahnee says, bleary-eyed.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you, nackets,” he says. “I’m not dangerous.” He grins.

Tahnee grins back – he’s mesmerizing! – then curls her lip. Nackets? Who talks that way any more? This guy must be ancient, forty years old or something! “What are you, some kind a poncidee?”

“I came out to do a little target practice.” He has some kind of gun, she doesn’t know anything about guns; a big plastic gun.

“Keko desu,” says Tahnee to Julie as she peeks out from the shack. “Ck, as bu?”

“Who’s that?”

“Aw, dat’s Sissy.”

“Yeah? Sissy want to try it?”

Julie is scared. Julie has been warned against rapists, serial killers, pimps and strangers. But when she looks at him and he looks back at her she is overcome with a shyness unlike any other she has experienced. Oh! The air starts to vibrate. She can’t stop staring at him. He doesn’t move. Tahnee starts to giggle loudly. They resemble cartoon characters complete with lights and bells going off all around them. Julie is still frightened but she says, “Yes, I would like to try!” surprising herself. At school that is the one physical activity she is good at, in Homeland Security Defense, Self-Defense, WEM and Product Testing, she has amazing aim, it is practically the only thing that had saved her from flunking out of gym. She has never seen this type of weapon before, but Julie bets she will surprise the hell out of him, like a character in a movie, bam bam bam.

“Neat,” Julie says, trembling slightly. “What do we shoot at?”

“Come outside and I’ll show you. What’s your name, sister?”

“Julie.”

“I’m Cliffort Manwaring-Troutwig. Old baseball family. Unfortunately, I wasn’t cut out for the game, not with these hands. Worse than a foghorn for reminding me.”

He holds up his hands. It is true, there are webs between each finger, connecting thumb to index finger, index to middle and so on. Julie winces. “You kids live around here?” he asks.

“Yeah, down de block. Dis is our clubhouse.”

Manwaring-Troutwig

“I was wondering. I stayed here last night. I’m trying to get to New York City, I ran out of food and money. Fell asleep in my van at a rest stop and was robbed. Ran out of sugar-petromalt, can’t find any for sale because of the shortages and I haven’t eaten for two days.”

“Oh, dat’s terrible. I guess. Tahnee, do we have some food we could bring him from de house?” It may not be love at first sight, but at least it is an Awakening of Desire. Or something. Indeed their love may date back to a previous incarnation, judging from the shy stares and nervous trembling shimmering the air. Perhaps one was once Gertrude Stein and the other Alice B. Toklas; Clark Gable and Carol Lombard; Wallace Simpson and the Duke of Windsor, a binding love so strong it endures through many lifetimes, until the two involved are sick of the whole thing.

“I don’t know.” Tahnee shrugs. “I guess. Here, you wanna steet?” She throws the jar in Cliffort’s direction. Julie winces again. Tahnee knows the stuff can explode if it hits the ground the wrong way. “It definitely takes away your appetite.”

“Naw, I don’t like that stuff. I’m going out to shoot this thing with your little friend –”

“My sister –”

“Your sister? You two don’t look alike –”

“We have different dads.”

“Is that right? And what’s your name?”

“Tahnee.”

“Tahnee, come out when you’re ready to try out this Michiko Kamikaze. You gals ever shoot a Kamikaze before? It’s not very accurate and it’s pretty stupid but that’s what makes it entertaining. Julie, think you can handle it?”

“How loud?”

“For a minute you can’t hear anything. And it’s not like what you see in movies, you know. This Kamikaze is made of extrudo, not metal, but even so there’s a kickback on it. I want you to hold it with both hands – you want to watch me first?”

“I guess so.”

On the far side of the dead grass, a football field length away, Cliffort has set up a paper target. When he shoots the Kamikaze it is so loud Julie nearly has a change of heart. “It sounds like a bomb or a rocket launcher or something!” Cliffort misses the paper target completely; he shoots too low and the bullet explodes into the marsh, spewing a twelve-foot high cloud of grass, dirt and marshland muck.

“You see, it’s not so easy. Now you gonna try?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, you gotta try or you’ll never be good at it.”

Tahnee shrugs and winks at Julie; she knows how good she is. “Come on, Julie, like Dad always says, It’ll be like throwing loaves to the fishes!” Julie is surprised that Tahnee is calling Slawa “Dad”, something she has rarely done.

A huge plane is almost overhead. The planes fly over in the morning, and in the afternoon and into the night. All the time, planes are coming in overhead or taking off. The housing development is directly under the flight path to the airport. Cliffort stands behind her and puts his arms around her from behind to show her how to hold the Kamikaze. His hands are moist. “Right. Remember what I said, use both hands because when you pull the trigger it’s going to come back at you so don’t be scared.”

Julie isn’t prepared for Cliffort to actually push her fingers down on the trigger. Or does he? Certainly it seems like something is squeezing her hand and pulling the weapon up at the same time. Maybe there’s a gyroscope inside. The force of the explosion propels her backward and the noise is so loud for a minute she thinks she is not just deafened but blinded.

When she looks up, about to chastise Cliffort, she sees he is nowhere near. High above, a glinting light coming off the airplane catches her eye. “Holy Shi’ite!” says Cliffort. “You got a hit!” It is true. What she thinks at first is merely sunlight glancing on the plane is actually a fire, spreading rapidly.

Within seconds there is another explosion as the fuel tanks go up, and then a vast black cloud, followed by things falling out of the sky: sheets of metal and twisting bits of melting plastic, glass and foam and trays and electrical wiring; suitcases are hitting the ground now and exploding as they hit into flowers of underwear and umbrellas, shoes like seed pods, clouds of talcum powder pollen.

It’s all happening slowly – or perhaps quickly – a rain of hot blood and mucous; teeth and iceberg lettuce; plastic trays of hot creamy chicken and green beans mixed with entrails and chocolate-vanilla ice cream, the kind that comes in little paper tubes with an attached imbibing device. The fire is huge. Not as much falls as Julie might have thought – had she ever thought of such a thing happening – black handkerchiefs are waving everywhere until Julie realizes these are charred… things on fire, or just burning out, maybe newspaper, safety instructions, foam seat cushions or plastic toilet seats.

Drifts of blackened skin still attached to hairs waft across the sky, dander reduced to pepper falling from a grinder. They are immobile, paralyzed by the sight. Something wallops Julie on the head. “Hey, look!” Tahnee yells, darting down to pick it up. Something glints, gold and ruby-red. “A finger! Wid de ring still attached!”

“Are you crazy?” shouts Cliffort Manwaring-Troutwig, “Run! Get out of here! Run for your lives!”