They Is Us

Murielle has taken to making him sleep in a tent in the yard, the flies around him are so constant and offensive. When she goes after them with a fly swatter, he shouts at her, saying to leave them alone. That is so warped. If she ignores him, and actually smashes one, it is so huge that fly intestines – or whatever it is inside them – splatter everywhere and are almost impossible to wipe off, more like paint than guts.

Now Slawa is on his knees, facing the house and looks as if he’s about to topple over. It is a hot, airless day and the smell of car exhaust, burnt rubber, an ashiness that might be from the power plant – sour uranium? Bug poison? The crematorium? – blows over the marsh and through the screen door next to Murielle.

Beyond Slawa, across the road, is another house just like theirs: a white one and a half story ranch house with attached garage, a plate glass window next to the front door.

In this neighborhood no one ever uses their front doors, even though each house has a concrete walkway leading to two or three steps, planted on either side with plastic trees. What is the point of the front entrance, as if – someday – someone grand and important will arrive, who must enter through the main door and not the servant’s entryway?

It’s ridiculous, the development is nearly sixty years old but no one important has ever come to pay a visit, there are no front parlors, there is no life inside or out.

Two or three blocks down is the marsh, what is left of it. The chemical seepage can be smelled – more or less – round the clock. It stings the eyes. Slawa has an empty beer bottle next to the metal pail of driveway blacking, or whatever the stuff is. In a minute he will be in to get a fresh bottle. He is stout, with a big gut. He looks older than his years, although she’s not quite sure how old he is; he has never bothered with the skin treatments and injections even little kids know about from school. How could he let himself go like this? He used to be cute! He comes up the stairs holding his empty beer bottle. “Any more?” he says.

“How should I know? Look in the fridge.”

“All the time like this, Murielle. Why you so angry all the time?”

“Go,” she says. “I think you should go before the girls get back.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I’ve had it. I want you to move out.”

“But… I don’t understand.”

“What is there not to understand? I can’t stay married to you any more! We’re over! Finished! D-I-V-O-R –”

“What will you tell the girls?” he says. “Anyway, at least I want to finish the driveway first.”

“Just forget the driveway. The way this dump looks, that’s the least of it. I’ll tell them… you had to go away for a while, on business. Shoe business. You can call them tonight if you want.”

“Hey,” he says. He is breathing heavily now and for a second she thinks he is going to hit her with the bottle. The big gut swings heavily. He’s practically pregnant. His legs and arms are scrawny, though. He has an alcoholic’s jug belly, under that flowing MUU-MUU. He must think the MUU-MUU hides his tummy. “Do you mind if I shower and change first?”

She guesses he is trying to sound sarcastic. “Can’t you do that when you check into a motel?”

“I’m paying the fucking mortgage on this place, I can sleep here if I want. Why don’t you get out and take Tahnee with you and I’ll stay here with Julie?”

“We’ve been through this a million times, Slawa. Let’s not have another scene. Take a shower if you must. Just don’t leave your towels on the floor.”

He goes muttering up the stairs. “I’m supposed to paint the driveway and then move out covered with tar to check into a Motel 99.” He curses in Russian. Once she might have found this sexy. Now she knows he is saying that he wants to kill her. When his murderous rages strike, Slawa is like an elephant in musth, blood-eyed, uncontrollable. Then, in English, he adds, “Stupid cow, what makes you think I have to go to a motel? There are other places I can go. You think you are the only woman out there? Many womens say to me, Slawa, you are handsome, you are so kind.”

She doesn’t bother to answer. It is true that to some he might still be attractive, if you are into tiger-eyed, slap-you-around, rough-trade, peasant-type Slavs.

There is only one bathroom in the house. Good luck to him, thinks Murielle. There hasn’t been any real water, any decent water, in months. It is all that instant sanitizer glop coming out of the showerhead these days, stuff that leaves you stickier than when you went in. Even so, it will be nice to have one less person using the bathroom. The girls’ rooms are across the hall from the bigger bedroom, one on the side of the house looking out to the neighbors and the other facing the street, neither of them large enough to hold much more than a bed: pink for Julie, pale lilac for Tahnee.

When she first moved in – Tahnee was little more than a year, Julie just about to be born – Slawa had been living alone for some time. The place was a mess. In his enthusiasm at her arrival, Slawa attempted to do some re-decorating. He bought floor-to-ceiling hologramovisions at a nearby discount supply house so each room could have hologramovisions on each wall.

But the sets were of such inferior quality that half the time the color was lousy, and then some of them stopped working; when the men came to bring in new ones, Slawa didn’t want to pay the exorbitant fees for removal of the old, so he simply had the new ones installed on top. And then when those broke, he did the same thing. Now each room, in terms of square footage, is diminished by half.

With much delight he installed new light fixtures, ceiling fans, a garbage dehydrator, MereTwelve-operated self-generating devices, top of the line Siebmosh communicators – but half the time touching the light switch gave you a shock, or caused a fuse to blow. Clapping on or off worked sometimes, but often things would go on or off in the middle of the night. And no amount of scrubbing could clean the vintage vinyl flooring, which, a realtor had once told them, could make the house more valuable to the right buyer, if they were to someday sell.

When Terry had left, right after Tahnee was born, saying he was sick of being around someone who was so cheerful all the time, she hadn’t thought of herself as cheerful, though it was true she was taking Chamionalus, but it did stop her hirsutism; that made her cheerful. Terry had grown up in the same neighborhood as she, though she hadn’t known him; he was a fireman and just about the only guy she had ever met who wasn’t working in a factory of one kind or another.

After they were married they moved in with her father. She worked at La Galleria Senior Mall and Residence Home for the Young at Heart, in Administration. It was a job with a future, especially compared to what others their age had found for jobs, working in the meat products factories; it was amazing, that two kids from their area hadn’t ended up like everyone else.

Until she got pregnant when they realized both their salaries combined weren’t going to be enough to enable them to buy their own place, or even rent; Terry was obsessed with making the Diamond-C dust in the bathroom, and she began to realize… that pervasive smell of an addict: violet soap, Brussels sprouts and bleach. He already had a dust problem, a problem big enough that they made him take an unpaid leave-of-absence at work. Then he decided he wanted to go to the West Coast and write screenplays, although as far as she could see he had shown no ability to stick to anything at all.

What skills did Terry have? He couldn’t even write, he could only use a dictation program on the computer so what came out was pages of, “Um, so Joe goes, like fuck, um what um kind of um shit is um this.” She had to admit that making Diamond-C dust was not easy, the few times he had made it before she put a stop to him the quality had been amazing, and what he didn’t do himself he was able to sell for thousands of dollars a gram; of course the ingredients were expensive, the special lights needed, the hydroponics equipment, growing the crystals, inseminating the blossoms, harvesting and so on.

She had been too stupid to know, at first, that was how innocently she had been brought up! She thought he was just growing some kind of mineralized food-product for them, gorgeously fragrant; as if Terry would ever have been the kind of guy who had a nice little hobby.

Thinking of living at home reminds her she has to call her father to let him know they are coming the next day. She dials and the phone rings and rings but there is no answer… He is such a strange old man, he refuses to move into the house with them, he insists he wants to go to a nursing home. Now that she is Managing Administrative Director, he says, she could get him a discount, and she would be able to see him every day, if she wanted! It doesn’t seem to matter that she has told him, over and over, the Senior Mall is the last place she would put him in.

If she doesn’t remind him about their visit he will booby-trap the place; once Julie knocked on the door only to have a carton of F’eggs fall on her head, or when they went up the front path and all the sprinklers came on, spewing them with that water-substitute. Each time he denies doing anything deliberately.

Why can’t he admit he’s no longer up to functioning on his own? He is so antiquated he insists on using a rotary phone. The last person on the planet who really can say he has “dialed” a number. He won’t have an answering machine – let alone voice mail, or a mobile unit to take with him, so she can’t even leave a message.

No wonder she is such a freak. Her upbringing had been like someone from a hundred and fifty years ago! Her father with his obsessive collecting of paper goods and his letter writing – letter writing when there wasn’t even a postal system any more, it all had to go Docu-Express or something!

She dials again. Where could he have gone? Maybe just out for a walk around the block, she’ll try back later.

Her father never liked Slawa; Dad griped all the time how Slawa was a foreigner, and kept muttering Slawa was an old man, older than himself. At the time she just thought he was crazy, Slawa was older than Terry, and he was foreign, but he was so different from that cocky braggart, her first husband; he was so good with Tahnee, he never treated her differently after his own, Julie, was born. She thought her father was angry, perhaps, that Slawa had a nice house for them to live in, she wasn’t dependent on Dad any more.

Now she is beginning to wonder if her father hadn’t been right. Just how old is Slawa, actually? And how could she have ever found him attractive? True he wasn’t handsome the way Terry was; Terry was gorgeous, blond, a tight firm bottom and sassy grin. But Slawa had seemed appealing in a comforting kind of way, solid. Authentic. Now Slawa smells, she guesses because he drinks. Or maybe it is just some strange biochemistry. How stupid could he have been putting all his money into buying that shoe repair business – which is a major failure.

And his stories change all the time, she has long since given up believing anything he said. Slawa claimed to have a degree in science, a Ph.D. from Russia. But he couldn’t get a science job; no one around would hire him, he said, doing the kind of work that he did, which was something – very limited, an obscure area – only in practice over there. Did that make any sense?

He couldn’t even tell the truth about his age! Sometimes he had a memory of things that had taken place when he was a kid, things that she later realized, when she checked out the details, would have had to occur a hundred and twenty years ago. Stuff that had happened in Soviet, Communist times; if she pressed him, he would say something had happened and he was sent to some kind of Moscow long-term-care facility.

And when he was finally allowed to leave, all the old people had disappeared. He came home, his grandmother was gone… Nobody noticed, nobody cared, they said, yes, the old people were taken on a vacation, they all went quite happily… No more babushkas! There were shops and restaurants and bars, which hadn’t been there before.

Why has it taken her so long to wonder if he really has a graduate degree? Now she is realizing, maybe nothing at all is the truth.

3 (#ulink_1a7957ce-d2f7-528c-88ab-f9fe1881a605)

In the background the endless blare, no way to turn it off without shutting down the whole Homeland Home System, “It’s Maya turn – for fun!” and then Mady Hus In Autoset Meier is on the program; they have had the number one hit in the country for more than six months now, after which the President’s and First Man’s Wedding Registry and Wish List items are going to be shown.

Then Mady Hus In Autoset Meier come back for an encore and are joined by none other than the Fairy Princess, it is really the Fairy Princess herself and nobody can believe it! She has to be pushing sixty, but she still has the touch, not much in the way of singing ability, not much in the way of looks, but still, fantastic! And anybody watching has the chance to Win a Backstage Pass simply by dialing the magic number on the remote! The studio audience – or maybe it’s just a soundtrack – goes wild and even the President grabs his guitar to play along, “Got Dree? Take Harmony. Dree: it’s twice as good with Harmony.” And then Scott, the President’s fiancé, says, “President Wesley, I have to add something at this point if you don’t mind. For all you sufferers out there – and I am one of them – when your Drena won’t quit, take Dora. It comes with its own inserter!”

“That’s right, Scott,” says the President, “You know, we’ve been together a long time and I had no idea what it meant to be a Drena sufferer. Since you’ve been on Dora, tension in our relationship has been greatly eased. And I must say, I’ve enjoyed helping you by using the inserter!”

“Oh, I know, Mister President,” Scott says coyly. “But I should add, do not take Dora if you have or ever plan to have children. Be prepared to perform an emergency tracheotomy. If you are unable to keep both feet in a bowl of ice water for an hour or stand on one leg, Dora may not be right for you. Side effects may include enlarged heart, liver failure, constipation, dandruff, ortlan and pillbox. For those of you with remaining eyelashes or a significant other, Dora may not be recommended. See your doctor if…”

Could she stand on one leg, Murielle wonders, for one hour? No, definitely not. She would have to go to the bathroom, or the dog would want to go out. She’s about to make a cup of coffee when she sees she has already done so. It’s evening, how can that be? The days roil out from under her, a nest of snakes gliding quickly from beneath a rock and disappearing into… where? If only it were possible to put her foot down fast, trap one underfoot, she might be able to remember Real Time.

Lifting the mug with the tepid coffee to her lips she is startled, momentarily, to find, there on the bottom, a large eye, unblinking. Then realizing it is her own, pale green, the color of an unripe olive, staring back at her reflected off the ceramic. She dials her father again. Still no answer. “Slawa!” she shouts, hearing him get out of the shower. “I am not kidding! I want you out tonight!”

“I am a little bit tired of being constantly picked on!” says Slawa. “All the time I am working and you sit there watching that stupid President, my God how can you stand it, the man is lousy idiot!”

Murielle goes past him and slams the bedroom door. Three days, four, who knows how long she will be in there sulking, it is impossible to say; brief forays to use the toilet or take some crust of food back to their room, attracting even more bugs and the bed always with crumbs.