They Is Us

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 –”