They Is Us

In the lab it is cold and, with no windows, always illuminated by artificial yet natural means, lighting that replaces and provides the same wavelengths as the sun. The animals are never going to be able to see anything more than the metal cage walls that surround them. It isn’t right. She wishes she could save them all, even the horrid ones.

There are plenty of animals she can’t deal with. The pigs continue to frighten her, though she tries to look on them with compassion. It is something in their expression, a look both human and malevolent, and the big boar is still there, more lascivious, more craven. He has masturbated himself until he is bleeding. Fortunately the pigs are too large for her to even think about taking, and how could she possibly have kept one? Each, daily, produces hundreds of pounds of steaming excrement.

Insects: Hair-A-Ticks, which are ticks engineered to lay their eggs in a person’s scalp. And each egg hatches into a tick that grows a hair. The hair pushes its way up through the scalp. The tick lives its life beneath. When the tick dies, so does the hair that it has grown; then the females emerge to lay more eggs. The problems thus far, though, apart from the unpredictability of what color the hairs would be – red, blond, black, white or often a combination of all of them – is that some of the head ticks begin to migrate beneath the skin, so that over the years hairs can grow on the nose, arms, the palms of hands, the chest, the neck, the back and buttocks.

A person just interested in getting hair on their head might end up completely hairy, like a gorilla. According to Dyllis, a topical hair-removal ointment could be applied, though rather unsuccessfully. And if a tick came from under the person’s skin while it was still alive and growing the hairs, it could implant on someone else if, say, that person was the next to sit in the same seat on a bus or a couch.

Naturally she wouldn’t want these: but, as the weeks pass, though she knows it is wrong, she smuggles out more animals, small ones, caterpillars that will become moths with a five-foot wingspan, or a galaxy-nosed mole.

One of the lab technicians must have begun to notice: a sign went up on the wall, saying that whoever is taking things out of the lab is going to be caught and punished unless he or she returns the various creatures that had been taken.

Is she going to have to go to prison? This isn’t out of the question. She hasn’t seen another human being, apart from Dyllis; even when she cuts down on smuggling out the animals, new signs are posted each morning, with more threats.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Dyllis. “You got a lot of thiefs around here. Somebody took my skin-plant, ju remember?” Dyllis has covered her tracks. It’s awful, the animals mewing or crying, in a state of permanent bewilderment, unable to reconcile having, say, the temperament and body design of a duck – but without a beak and webbed feet.

Marsupials without pouches that spit venom, blood-sucking lamprey-puppies – she is always getting in trouble for giving them the wrong food. Or she gets bitten. Each day Julie is more profoundly depressed. Nothing she does turns out right.

“You know, Julie,” Tahnee tells her, “I could really use a recommendation from the lab where you work.”

“What?” says Julie, who has bicycled home, though it is really too hot, and now as usual is preparing dinner. “But… you don’t work there.”

“So what?” says Tahnee. “I’ll come in for a couple of days while you’re there, then I can write up whatever you do and submit it for credit and get Mom’s friend to give me a report.”

Julie would do anything for her sister, she always has, and says, “Of course, if you think it will be fair.”

“Aw, give me a break. It’s not fair that you blew up a hundred and eighty-nine people, is it?”

“It was an accident. It was Cliffort.”

“By the way,” says Tahnee, “I’ve been spending some time with Cliffort trying to convince him he should keep his mouth shut for your sake. I mean, I explained, even though you’re a minor, they would still put you in jail. Reform school first, then prison. I mean, if you listen to the news, the President is looking for somebody to punish. I mean, like, his ratings are going down, you know what I mean?”

Julie can’t speak. Wet feathers jam her throat or perhaps tufts of rabbit fur and lard. Whatever it is, she is choked up. For weeks she has been trying to convince herself the plane crash didn’t really happen; she hasn’t watched the news. High from steet, the plane dropping from the sky, the stench of jet fuel, the body parts, did not seem so different from a video arcade game or a program on HGMTV. Only shreds of that afternoon occasionally tear loose, then she shoves them back into her head, where what’s left of her brain, a gray pillow, has a hole that keeps letting out the stuffing.

“You’re a good little sis,” says Tahnee. “If I can get the credit, that’ll be one less course I have to take before I graduate. Maybe you can even write up the report, and I’ll just tag along for a few days, like I said, so in case I’m questioned I’ll have some idea.”

Tahnee spends the afternoon perched on a lab chair watching Julie work. “Come on, Tahnee, don’t you want to help me? These animals really crave human touch, and they need the cages cleaned! There are so many, I usually can’t get to everyone.”

Tahnee shrugs. Just then the door to the lab opens. There is a tiny man, perhaps not abnormally small, but shrimp-like. He is very pink and his motions are darting, somehow backward, as if self-propelled in the wrong direction.

He’s got a rumpled look: he’s wearing very shabby clothing of a style so old-fashioned it must date from, gosh, the 1970s? Something like a patchwork quilt jacket – madras, maybe – and white pumps. Tahnee and Julie have almost never seen a man in a suit, not in this area, not in their world. Next to him is a taller man normally dressed in a gown, who by comparison, almost blends into the walls.

“So,” the pink man is saying, “in this lab we can see some of the newer projects and how they’re coming a…” Then he notices Tahnee and Julie. “Hi there, girls,” he says. “You must be the school interns! I bet you’re surprised the company president knows about you, but I make it my habit to know everything. Although, I didn’t realize there were two of you now! How are you enjoying everything so far? I’m A. Jesse March Bishrop, president and CEO of Bermese Pythion. And this is Mr Salamonder, from the Stuyvesant Technics, who has come to look at what we’re –”

Mr Bishrop is sort of… too eager. Or maybe it’s not eagerness, exactly; it’s as if he’s translucent, or the rest of the world doesn’t exist to him. Maybe it’s just the way zillionaire geniuses are, almost slightly saudiautistic. He’s just a little… off, with his daffy glasses, his enthusiasm and flappy arms; he’s walking on tippy toes, the man is intense.

“Oh my gosh, Mr Bishrop! C.k., as bu?” says Julie. “I am so happy to see you, I never thought you’d actually be here in person, you know all those suggestions in the suggestion box? I’m the one who –”

Julie realizes A. Jesse March Bishrop isn’t listening. He looks stymied. Stymied, is that the right word? It is as if all of his energy has been expelled at once. He can’t seem to stop staring at Tahnee. And Tahnee is kind of smirking. What the heck is going on? Not much, as far as Julie is concerned: whenever Tahnee goes anywhere, this is what happens. Julie has watched drivers get into accidents when she walks alongside her sister. Once there was even an eighteen-car pile-up. In supermarkets men have knocked down stands of fruit with their carts. Even on the hottest days, wearing nothing but tiny shorts and a little halter-top, Tahnee does not attract jeers or hoots or whistles. Rather, something odd happens to any man she is near, and quite often women: an expression comes over them like they have been punched in the stomach. Now A. Jesse March too.

“I should have stopped in before, to see how you girls were getting along this summer. Summer, and now fall.” He is half-muttering but doesn’t take his eyes off Tahnee. “Are you planning to keep working over the winter? You’re high school girls?”