They Is Us

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 (#ulink_9d6561b1-b3c5-510c-8de9-8eb3532087b3)

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 ordinarycase 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.

He puts down the crate with the cats and opens the door. Poor things will want water, food. With gassy hisses of contempt the cats come tumbling out, running in circles as if they have been over-wound. They resemble molecules bouncing off the floor and walls. He watches, amused, until one, the Siamese, Murka, finds what must be a hole in the wall, darts in and is gone.

Moments later a scream, hideous, from what sounds miles away. He goes to the hole, a wind is blowing out, as if there is an underground chamber or tomb far below. He hears Yuri Gagarin yowling, now more plaintively and then abruptly ceases… Has he broken his back, perhaps, or a leg? From the hole a strange odor wafts, musty, vaguely stale, almost familiar. He can’t get enough of an angle to see the secret room – if that is what it is. He will have to make the hole bigger so he can go in.

“Here kitty kitty,” he calls, knocking through what he sees now is only feeble fiberboard, so old it is rotten. No sound at first and then a faint meow. “Here kitty kitty.” Even if he hangs over the edge it must be more than a twelve-foot drop. A wind is blowing up from below. Something he could put down there to jump onto? The cushions from a sofa he once found on the street and hauled in so customers could sit? Though how he will get back, he doesn’t know. Anyway, for tonight, it is too late, all he can do for now is go to sleep. In the morning he heads around the corner to Chez Gagni Kota. Mornings, the restaurant is empty; Bocar is almost always there before his aunt and uncle, sometimes he even spends the night there. The two of them can sit and drink sweet tea, have a chat.

Throughout the day Slawa will be back to eat.

Health food, it isn’t that. Slawa isn’t sure how much longer he can eat the stuff, tomato-curried rancid fish and artificial potato flakes, spinach leaves that are probably something else, processed paper maybe, everything heavy on the dendé oil which is not even dendé but… strained tallow? and too salty.

The meats are halal – so they say, though it is unlikely it is halal, let alone meat – nowadays everything comes from the manufacturer’s, where piles of meat cells are coaxed into reproducing themselves until they have formed vast living slabs. Bocar says the food is authentic, because in his country the people had been starving for so many years and the famine was so dire they had long since developed national dishes based solely on donated American supplies.

He goes there, actually, just to see Bocar and make sure the kid is okay. It is no way to live, not that Slawa has to eat lunch and dinner six days a week at Chez Gagni Pota, but it is the only place where he has a friend.

What now is left? Once, on first meeting, he had even thought Bocar was a girl. If not a girl, a neuter entity, with beautiful black coils of hair decorated with feathers, ribbons, glitter. But, male or female, he was an extraordinarily beautiful creature.

Bocar was an illegal. The family had sold him to someone – some rich American – to do their military duty – and though it was frowned upon, somehow he had gotten two weeks before training camp to spend in New Jersey. He had come to stay with his aunt and uncle and cousins and his uncle had promised to send him to two-year college, after his military service was complete.