Ten
The solid clouds have moved on, briefly. Rather, they were carried off, toted at the end of long ropes by the nighttime dirigibles. It may be the way our eyes have adjusted to such things, but it looks very much as though a part of the sky had been removed as well.
I am looking for work, assuming, each morning, that somewhere there is work waiting to be found.
Karen has been learning to play the piano ever since the disappearance. “It’s the only thing that will make my fingers quiet enough,” she says, filling the room with the soft, hesitant tones of a consummate beginner, the notes engorged with enthusiasm and shame. Over the months, she’s gotten quite good.
When I told her about Ruth, she went straight to the piano. Now Ruth is gone, too, off somewhere in another city, taking on someone else’s slippery desperation. Karen and I sit together on the hard piano bench in the afternoon. I have learned the high parts, and she has learned the low parts. Most of the time, what we are playing is only barely discernible as music. When we know what we are doing, though, we smile quietly and briefly at the resultant song, stuffing the expression back down into our chests before it has exposed us for the people we always had a feeling we’d turn out to be.
D
own along the river, cars were houses. It was a beautiful thing to see, especially at night, with all the headlights like jewels in the darkness — some cars even had tin chimneys, which glowed red in counterpoint. It was the area I’d grown up in, although it might be more appropriate to say simply that I grew there, as no aspirant motion was possible. I simply took up more and more space with each passing year, until my body had enough.
Some cops were standing by the window of Donna’s car, shining their Bucha lights at her. They were looking for someone, a black male who was selling illegal eggs. He’d been seen in this area, they said, driving a car much like the one Donna owned. “That black guy in that car — I don’t know even who this black guy was. I ain’t out to do that,” she said, trembling in the passenger seat, nauseated by the light, her face converging at odd, unpredictable angles, like complex origami. Even without the sickening lights shining on her, Donna had problems. She had lost some of the front of her head in the last war, but could afford to replace only one tooth, and even this the head salesmen messed up when they fit it into her mouth. She had to talk sideways and rest her face a lot, so often that the cops usually left out of frustration and boredom before getting what they wanted. Sometimes she’d have to give her whole head a slight nap after a long sentence.
“What the hell?” one of the officers said.
The lead cop, an Orange Jacket whose head was thick and oily like a brick of meatloaf, leaned in closer to the window. “Could you please repeat what you just said, ma’am. In English, please?” The other officers snickered faintly, cupping their mouths.
“That black type in that car — I do, does not know, still, who was that black type.” Donna had a drool cup around her neck, and the drool cup was full. Mr. Sensible tried to tip the cup out onto the road in order to empty it, but when the Orange Jacket saw the skinny hand creep out around Donna’s neck from the pitch-black backseat he backed away, brandishing a Very Pistol. The cops also got nervous and put their hands on their holsters.
Wes carefully took hold of my arm. Wes and I were stuck to the wall of The Factories, wearing our giraffe suits, dangling just over the cops’ heads. We were supposed to alert Mr. Sensible whenever cops came around. That was half of our job. The other half was bringing illegal eggs around to expecting families. We were supposed to be in stork costumes, but those were hard to come by. Anyway, Mr. Sensible was not going to be happy with our performance.
“What the hell is that hand doing in there, lady?” the Orange Jacket said, backing slowly away, aiming the pistol directly at Sensible.
“I can’t barely say.”
Mr. Sensible stuck his head out of the window. He was wearing the silver helmet of a Family Getter, and it shone like a mirror ball in the light the police made.
“This woman here,” he said. “Why are you bothering her?” “You should know why. Now get out of the car.”
“Listen, you gentlemen are looking for someone black?” The police nodded.
“A genuine black, no tints, no masks?”
They nodded again.
“You’re in the wrong part of the neighborhood, sirs,” said Mr. Sensible. “We’ve sprayed for blacks here. The blacks are at the river, performing a baptism.”
The police bought it.
“The police bought it,” Wes whispered.
Sensible stuck us to walls, different walls each night, and told us to watch over things, and in return he gave us fish eggs and fish tarts, bags of tiny fish fins. We were thick in the waist from rich fish oil.
The police went down to the river, and everything got quiet. Donna fell asleep, slumped at the open window. Mr. Sensible sat in the backseat, smoking a long, slow-burning cigarette. It started to rain so hard that when the police attacked, we saw only the flash of the guns in the distance. Mr. Sensible put the seat back so Donna could rest. He rolled up the window, rain pelting his shiny helmet as he did so.
The next morning Sensible took us down from the wall, unhooking us with a long metal pole.
“Are you going to kill us?” Wes asked.
“I should kill you,” Sensible said, sighing. “I should bury you both alive in hot sand.” He handed us each a brick-sized parcel of freeze-dried eel. The scent of the package was so overwhelming that I took a tiny, dime-sized crap in the giraffe suit.
I forgot to mention the worst part of our job, which was to carry Mr. Sensible and Donna around from family to family in a rickshaw he’d found behind the corporate park. He’d fetch the eggs from a distributor or sometimes from his own sources and seal them in the egg basket, and then Wes and I would drag the rickshaw around the neighborhoods until we found the right house. We would show up at the family’s door, lugging the unwieldy, temperature-controlled container behind us. The hardest part was that we had to keep the suits on at all times. If we left them somewhere or lost them, or if they were stolen, we would be fired on the spot. Keeping a job here is like clinging to a thread on a rapidly unraveling garment. The more you look at it, the less there is to see. So we always wore the suits. Even during naps.
“Hey, Sensible,” Wes said, trudging next to me, draped in shabby, clotted fur. “Weren’t those cops looking for you last night?”
“Yes.”
“How did you get them to go away?”
“Cops do love to go to baptisms.”
Mr. Sensible was Wes’s father. They had always been in business together. Before the Child Harvest they sold bolts of fabric to military officials looking to spruce up their uniforms. They were making forty times that money in the egg trade. My own father died in the last war. He wasn’t actually in the last war, just close enough to the fighting to get killed. He died while folding a piece of paper into thirds to put in an envelope. It was a letter he wrote to my mother, who was living on the moon platform. He had not seen or heard from her in seven years. I never found out why she left and did not come back. One day she was simply gone, the house still crowded with her rich perfume. “Words fly up” was how his letter to her started and ended. In the middle were a bunch of phrases no one is allowed to use anymore. He hadn’t even gotten the letter into the envelope when he was sprayed down with Ending Gel. I know what the letter said because I was the one who sprayed him down. I tore the letter from his gnarled, dead grasp. It was an honest mistake, killing him — he was naked at the time, just lounging around in his car without a stitch of clothing on, the spitting image of an enemy soldier. Maybe it was less of an honest mistake than I am making it out to be, but I don’t like to think about it just the same.
Wes is pure black, Mr. Sensible is pure black, but I am something else. A mixture that seems haphazard and desperate, wholly unlike my mother, whose flawless skin was two-toned, like camouflage, each lovely patch a part of the magnificent tonal map of her body. I am just sort of gray. Donna is white, see-through white, like a plastic fork.
We all went down to the river to see if we could gather any eggs from the corpses — Wes and me in front, slogging through the bushes, Donna and Mr. Sensible in the rickshaw.
The only tape we had to listen to on the tape player was one we’d recorded over by accident one night at Sensible’s house, which is where I’ve lived since I was eight. Instead of music there was only the sound of us doing the things we did when we did not know we were being taped, like noisily washing dishes or having an argument about coated cereals or how many legs an ant had. We blasted the thing all the way down the trail to the river, almost blowing out the speakers with the volume on ten, just
trembling
there, taped to the bench seat. Nobody else cared much for the tape, but it has always stirred some unfinished, primal component deep inside me. It sounds remarkably like a family edging its way around a stuffy, indistinguishable evening at home. At one point on the tape, near the end, Sensible yells at me for dropping his lucky spoon. As he shouted he pointed at me with a long, trembling hand, and I swear that on tape you can hear the finger quake violently in the air. To this day, it is the only record I have that anyone ever took more than a passing interest in my development.
First we saw the smoke, still rising from the campfire that had been doused with water, probably by the worshipers right before they died. Then we saw the dead worshipers themselves, all laid out in a circle. Some of them had robes on, white or blue robes, filthy with blood. Their skin was dry and blistered, most likely from the Crazing Rifle that one of the officers was carrying. Everything was all rained on.
Sensible got out of the rickshaw to investigate. He knelt by a woman who had died in a fetal position, hands covering her face. As gently and respectfully as he could, he drew up the woman’s robe and unbuttoned her uterine flaps. He fished around in the holes with a gloved hand.
“This place has been picked clean,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “Should have known.”
A sky tent passed in front of the sun, making everything dark for a minute. The faces of the dead worshipers went sullen, like the ashes of the campfire. We took pictures of the bodies before they got erased. Sometimes a family member would pay for a photo of the deceased to bury when no body was available.
“Next cop I see, I’m’on eat.” Mr. Sensible climbed back into the rickshaw. He lifted Donna’s slack arm, the one that didn’t work, one that she kept around simply to show off that she had been born just the same as us, and wrapped himself in it as if it were a silk scarf.
I thought about eating the cops, which part I’d have to start on. The ass, probably, which had the sweetest meat. Didn’t it? Anyway, I would eat the ass and like it. I got real hungry for cop ass.
“Let’s get a move on out of this,” Mr. Sensible said, waving his free hand out over the dead. “I’ve got a client at two-thirty.”
“It’s only nine-fourteen,” I said. “What are we supposed to do until then?”
“Good question,” said Sensible, rubbing his upper lip with a slender forefinger.
We decided to cut through the park to see the living phone. Some scientists had been displaying it in the square for some time, but then they forgot about it, primarily because the building they worked in got smashed in the war. So the phone was left out in the square, locked in an intricate, bell-shaped iron cage. People fed it when they had food. They’d pass small crumbs of beef or corn bread between the bars. This was not the kind of food the phone was used to, so it never ate everything, but it didn’t seem upset when beggars carefully swept up the remains into their waiting food sacks with long whisks.
The phone could not make calls anymore, but it could talk, and if you asked it the right kind of question, it would answer you and was always right. Mostly, though, it just sulked, cowering at the opposite end of the cage.
When we reached the square we cleared the small crowd that had gathered around the phone by shouting and swinging wooden bats. One man in the retreating group mistook Wes and me for rabbits, muttering something under his breath as we ushered them away. I smashed him in the shoulder with my bat, and it stuck there because of the rusty nail I’d pounded into it a week before. The man fell to the ground like a frail paper kite, taking the club with him. Some friends of his dragged him away. Everyone else cleared out of the square quickly.
“Look at the size of it,” Wes said. It was big, about the size of a gorilla. I’d imagined something smaller. Even while I was actually looking at the thing, I was thinking to myself that it should have been a lot smaller than it was.
“Son,” said Sensible, “go ahead and ask the phone a question.”
Wes looked at his father. “What sort of thing should I ask?” “Just ask it something you truly want to know. It can tell when you’re being sincere and when you’re just taking it for a ride. Go ahead — ask it something good.”
Wes approached the cage, touching the tarnished bars with his fingertips. “How long until we run into the moon?” Wes asked.
The phone did not respond. It was barely moving at all. “Okay. Okay. I’ve got a question,” said Mr. Sensible. “If I were a woman and this lady were a woman, and we had a child, what would the gender of that child be?”
The phone only heaved, scooting backward as far as it could go toward the other end of the cage.
“Damn,” said Sensible, rubbing his chin. “Donna, baby, stump this motherfucking phone, would you?” But Donna was asleep in his lap. A cold pool of mouth juice was forming on his thigh.
“I don’t have anything to ask,” I told Sensible, who was looking at me hard.
“Ask the phone a question,” he said.
“I told you, Sensible, I don’t have any questions.”
“Come on, think. What’s something you’ve always wanted to know?”
“I don’t want to know anything. I don’t ever want to know things. If I put too much into my head, it might stop working.”