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Murielle drives Julie and tells her to go in by herself. Julie is scared. It is dark after the bright outside, the gloom of mid-afternoon in a strip club that reeks of beer with a fainter odor of bleach. At first the manager seems interested. “Show me your tits,” he says, but Julie doesn’t move. “How old are you, hon, anyway?”
Her mother has said she should lie, but Julie is nervous. She forgets. She looks away.
“What about any interesting deformities?”
“No,” says Julie. What if he wants to hire her? “I’m only thirteen.”
If she had extra breasts – or was a hermaphrodite, or at least a young boy – but these days, times are tough, who wants to watch a normal girl? “Come back in a few years,” he says. “Or, if you want, we got a wet t-shirt contest once a month, top prizes in the juvenile category.”
She is so relieved she could cry. Her life is going to go on and on, frightening her. She does not want to be frightened by her own life, but there it is, lounging ominously before her, one paw tapping its sharp claws on the pavement just ahead. She goes back to the car and tells her mother there was no work for her.
“How old did you say you were?” her mother asks.
“Um… I said I was seventeen?”
“Julie, it’s not just that you’re plain; it’s your attitude. Nobody would want to hire someone who seems sulky. You could have made some good money this summer,” says Murielle. “At least you’re not flat-chested like your sister. That’s one thing you have going for you.” She feels cruel as she says this but with a kid like Julie it’s better to be blunt.
Julie thinks she will never find work. But at last Murielle gets her a job in a lab, thanks to her friend Dyllis. “Julie, make sure you do whatever Dyllis tells you,” her mother says as she drops off Julie in front of the Bermese Pythion building. “I’ll be back at four-fifteen to pick you up.”
Her mother leaves her at the far end of the parking lot. Julie is sweltering by the time she gets to the main door. In the lobby of the vast complex the security guard sweeps an electronic brush over her before she is allowed in. Once she is scanned, her microchip will be altered and she won’t have to do this again, the guard says. Her mom’s friend Dyllis is waiting for her beyond the gates, buck-toothed, attractive. Even though she has always known Dyllis, Julie is still frightened at the idea of starting work.
“Ai, eet’s so hot today, you know what I mean?” Dyllis has a high-pitched voice and slightly buggy, wild eyes. “Sometimes, I jes’ look around and I think, what I am doing here? In Vieques, yes, it’s hot, but we have trees, palm trees, you got your coconut trees, when it’s a nice day you go to the beach… Here, you got no trees, everything dead. Tell me, when was the last time you saw a bird or any living creature?”
Dyllis grew up just around the block from Murielle, but two years on Vieques – the small island that was part of Puerto Rico where she worked for a government laboratory – has left her with a strong Puerto Rican accent.
“How is your mother doing, you tell her let’s get together this weekend, okay?” she says as they walk down the long, windowless corridor. The black granite walls and floors are flecked with embedded chips resembling glittery stars; the only light is from the artificial ones above. Murielle has told Julie that Dyllis was able to get a good job back in the States as a lab technician with Bermese Pythion only because she smuggled genetic material out of the lab when she left Puerto Rico.
There appears to be no one else around. The hall is lined on both sides with many doors of different colors. “You see, each color is for a different security level. You going to be working level three, that’s pretty important level. Later I got to make you sign a confidentiality form. And these are my labs.”
Dyllis is in charge of six or eight of the laboratories, each housing a different experiment in progress. Canary mice: they can sing like little birds, which is a problem if they escape and breed; they sing all night. Black-and-yellow striped fish hang from the ceiling on invisible threads. “These are clownfish-cross-spider, we call them spiderfish. You see, they don’t need no water, they spin a thread and they catch the flies, you want me to show you?”
She opens a box and releases four fist-sized flies, seemingly too large to get off the ground, but they hover in the air. “I call these SloMoFlies.”
“Yuck. They look like flying raisins.” The flies are creepy. And the fish, too, are somehow wrong. In formation, as a school, the fish on the threads lunge for the flies, then weave longer threads to lower themselves as the flies circle. When the flies go up, so do the fish, pulling in their threads.
“You see, I gotta do some more testing first, but if they interbred with regular flies, a lot of people going to buy them, they going to know after a while all the flies going to be real slow. Plus, they supposed to eat clothes that are out of style. But right now, nothing is going well. These flies, when you kill one, it makes a terrible mess.”
A web of words: J a N u A r y y y Y y y or J u u u uuuu u u ly linger in the room, blocking the windows and doors; there is no escape. Dyllis is a talker, the words never seem to stop. Trails of letters spin constantly through the air around her head, forming a virtual wall.
Dyllis stops to take a breath, it is almost as if she has to fight to clear a space for herself in the middle of all these words.
“What?” Julie is confused.
“Now, over here, this is something cute, right?” Dyllis points to a cage containing feathered rabbits. The feathers are downy, pink and blue. “Later on, I’ll give you one.”
What Julie doesn’t say is that she already has a feather-covered rabbit at home. Years before, she had come exploring with her sister. At that time the vast grounds where the labs are located weren’t yet fenced in. There were still trees back then. That was when they found their dog Breakfast and the rabbit; they had been tossed out with the garbage and managed to escape. Both were almost dead and had to be nursed back to health – surely that couldn’t have been stealing?
“Anyway,” she says, looking at the fluffy bunny, “won’t you get in trouble?”
“I’m jes’ gonna tell them, it die, a lot of these animals die, and they know that. But don’t tell no one, hokay? I put him in your backpack, just before you go home.”
Julie doesn’t know what to say. She can’t accept stolen property, even if it means the animal will be killed or tortured… or can she? She has never had to contend with this degree of ethics. Of course she will take the bunny home, even though her mother has said, No More Pets! She supposes she can sneak it in.
“Lemme show you something.” Dyllis takes Julie down the hall to the Women’s Room. A window – the only exterior one Julie has seen – looks out into a dumpster surrounded by a tall cinderblock wall. The refuse bin is filled with animals, either dead or dying. Even through the closed window the stench is terrible, and a few things down there are still wriggling.
“Oh, this is awful. What can we do, aren’t some of them still alive?”
“If you don’t take Mister Bunny… that’s where he gonna end up. Oh, sheet!” Dyllis lets out a shriek. “Look at this, somebody tossed out my experiment, can you believe that?” Over by the sink is a pot of dry dirt containing a plant with only two leaves covered with what appears to be human skin; beneath the skin Julie can see veins and arteries. “This plant disappeared, like, two weeks ago, I thought maybe my boss, he took it to decorate his office. I no want to say nothing. But now I am thinking someone took it to kill it. Jes’ look.”
“Is it dead?” Julie says.
“I dunno. Needs water, anyway.” Dyllis shakes her head in disgust. “I mean, who would have done this, I had the plant in my window!”
Tenderly Julie strokes the leaves of the dying common house plant and places it under the trickling tap; the veins – if that’s what they are – flush and weakly pulse. The plant is slurping up water, she can sense its gratitude. To hurt anything – some nights she can’t sleep, thinking of how wretched it must be to be an ant, with people around who actually like to crush them.
“Let’s go back in – I’ll show you the rest of the animals and their food.”
“Um… okay. Sure! Great. So, um, Dyllis, you invented all this stuff?”
“Oh, jes, and if I had my own lab I could have made a fortune. But I work for the company, which is not so bad – they give me good health insurance. So come on, let me show you the kitchen area. Here’s where you have to prepare the different kinds of food.” Dyllis opens a refrigerator. “To keep everybody happy, put the different things on each little plate. But some days you can chop everything and mix it, whatever, just so it looks attractive. Now, we gonna go feed some toads.” She puts the plates on a wheeled cart and off they go.
The room is very hot and dry, so dry that for a moment Julie’s lungs feel seared. “This room, we gotta keep it like a desert.” Dyllis points to a row of glass tanks. “Don’t ever touch the animals in them, they are puffball toad, a cross of puffball mushroom and toad. When they get scared, poof, they let out a cloud of spores, get you right in the face. I heard we going to try to get in the anthrax gene next, so when they puff out, they blow out anthrax spores. It’s interesting, no?” Dyllis opens the tops to each tank and carefully lowers the plates to the sandy floor. Julie thinks she will never be able to arrange the food so beautifully, topped with parsley and the wriggling mealworms in a circle around the edge. “They eat the compost, too, that’s because they have the mushroom gene.”
When Julie was little she helped her father in his shop on Saturdays. There was always the rich smell of leather, or leather cleaner, of glue and something fecund. Maybe he had a mushroom gene, unbeknownst to her. She has been ignoring her father for so long, years, really, maybe since she turned ten or eleven, wrinkling her nose at his beery stench and cleaning-fluid breath. Poor Daddy with his winky bald spot and big proud belly; where is he now? Anything she dislikes about him is forgotten; how she misses him. Why doesn’t she spend more time with him? She will be nicer to him from now on.
In Room 1829.wTd are animals that are sort of… pigs. But they are like no pictures of pigs Julie has ever seen, with human arms and legs, some too fat to be supported by such slender appendages who lie on their sides delicately putting biscuits in their mouths with their… Yuck, they look like big thumbs? Hands with nothing but thumbs? No, it is just that their fingers are half-trotters. The pigs have rilled snouts, small eyes fringed with pale white lashes, pink gigantic torsos; what is wrong with them? Julie doesn’t want to ask but Dyllis tells her anyway. “You see, these pigs, they got human parts, so we can transplant what we need.”
“But how many human parts do they have?”
“It’s not so much as a number, these are only first generation, so it’s fifty-fifty. In other words, we mix the pig sperm with the woman egg and implant in the sow.”
Some pigs look as if they have worked out, done sit-ups, pull-ups and developed muscular biceps, legs with toned calves, ripped thighs. Even so, human arms are not strong enough to support the weight of a full-grown boar. Supine and languorous, unable to stand, occasionally feeding themselves with those odd hands, the pigs lie in the heat, yawning, bored. “These little piggies love to get a manicure!” says Dyllis when Julie stares, slightly alarmed at a pig’s red fingernails. “If you want, when you have extra time, I got some extra polish in my desk, they so cute when they see the polish and make their little squeals!”
A boar – overweight, grayish with bristles – is gently fondling himself. He has a corkscrew-shaped penis. He looks up at Julie and starts to rub faster. Julie doesn’t like the way he looks at her with a smirking leer while he plays with himself. She averts her gaze. Julie wishes now she had lied about her age to get the job in the strip club; by comparison this is much worse.
“Hey, cut that out!” Dyllis says to the pig. “We working now on how to transplant the male organ. Some guy going to be mighty lucky, if we can figure out how to avoid rejection.”
Apart from the job, summer passes slowly. Here there isn’t much for kids to do: in her neighborhood is the petrochemical swamp, and the local nuclear plant and the waste disposal system of Bermese Pythion Technologies. Here there are building materials determined to be hazardous to one’s health, deposits (man-made) of chemicals or radioactive substances with a half-life of a hundred thousand years.
Somehow everyone who lives in this neighborhood or grew up here has something wrong. They blame the chemical swamp and the crematorium, the high-voltage power lines overhead and the airport nearby. Then there is the pollution from the highway, carbon monoxide, the hulks of cars leaking oil and gas and transmission fluid.
Even at the lab, mostly, the work Julie is given is depressing, not only because she doesn’t know the purpose of any of the experiments (which all seem pointless) but also because of the pervasive misery. Some of her job is cleaning cages, feeding the animals, and one day, going into the pig stall with a platter of bananas (some of the pigs have been listless, not eating, and it is hoped this will tempt their appetites, which is a bit rough on Julie since she herself has never eaten a real banana, only reproductions) by accident the door to the pen swings open and the big boar, leering, comes after her. She screams and runs to the door and out into the hall but the pig is after her and gets out of the room. He is slow but has mean little tusks and gets her backed into a corner when her screams are finally overheard.
A security guard with a cattle prod scurries down the hall and jabs her a couple of times with the electrified device before he finally gets the pig subdued; the pig has both arms around her neck and whether he is about to strangle her or kiss her she never has a chance to learn.
The security guard is yelling at her in Spanish when Dyllis comes running down the hall. Julie is crying with humiliation. “I’m sorry,” she says. Frightened, embarrassed, scared at having been the subject of the pig’s sexual interest.
“What’s he saying?” she asks Dyllis when the guard, still blabbing angrily, leads away the pig.
“What?” says Dyllis.
“What’s he saying? I never learned Spanish.”
“Ah, I’m not sure. He is angry, though, I theenk!”
“I know, but…” It occurs to Julie: Dyllis doesn’t actually speak or understand Spanish. All she has is a Spanish accent.
After this incident she is told not to go into the room with the pigs anymore. Instead she is given a lot of agar plates into which she has to pipette exact quantities of substances she has been told must never get into her mouth. Sometimes she stains slides, or counts various living organisms under a microscope. Even though the organisms are infinitely small, they do not, mostly, appear very nice – most of them spend their whole lives destroying, or trying to destroy, others.
And yet there are creatures, such as the spiderfish, she loves. When she comes into the room they all swoop down to her eagerly and twirl around her head as if they are carousel animals.
What if her whole life continues this way – the animals, always hungry, for food, for light, for air – nothing could help any of them, herself included, to escape. Here are these animals, these animals that are wrong – herself as well. Just wrong, and they know it and suffer, with their extra body parts or human limbs that were never meant to blend. And she is guilty of not being able to feel compassion for them, but only disgust, despite how sorrowfully they regard her and plead with their terrible saucer eyes.
Toward the end of summer, one afternoon her dad comes to pick her up. She is surprised to see him. Somehow their paths haven’t crossed in months, he is up and out before she is awake and gets back when she is already asleep. Usually she meets her mom outside in front; she can’t figure out how her dad has gotten past security. “Dad! What are you doing here? How did you get in?”
“What you mean? I walked in, it took long time to find you.”
Then she realizes he got in because he looks like one of the workers – a janitor or electrician, whatever – and she hopes she hasn’t hurt his feelings. Even though he has lived in this country for a long long time, he still doesn’t really get it. Why couldn’t she have had the sort of father who wore a suit and did something respectable, instead of a shoe repair shop? He is so proud it’s his own, doesn’t he see how sad that is? Just thinking about it, her eyes fill with tears.
“So, Yulenka, show me around, I want to see what you have been doing all summer.”
As if things aren’t bad enough, her father is even more tenderhearted than she. The flies, the ones that Dyllis calls SloMoFlies, Julie has moved into an unused glass tank the size of a closet; it is her job to clean the tank each day without letting any of them escape. Every few days she puts rank slabs of old meat and dirty clothes into the tank. This is so disgusting, each time she thinks she is going to barf. The flies fly slowly – and they are so big! The air in the tank is stale and hot – and she hates the strange sound they make, a kind of gleeful buzzing hiss! They land all over her, it feels as if they are stinging, even though she knows they can’t, and afterwards she can’t help but scratch and scratch.
But her dad takes to them right away, and it really is peculiar how the whole swarm flies over to the side of the glass in unison and stare at him. Some have green eyes and some have blue, eyes the size of thumbnails. Her father has a puzzled expression. “What you do with these?” he asks.
“Um, not much. I’m in charge of cleaning up their tank and feeding them; it really creeps me out, Dad, the smell is so bad and they look at me kind of mean –”
“Cage is dirty. I clean for you.”
“Thanks, Daddy, but I don’t actually have to do it until tomorrow.” Her father is usually so gruff, this is all surprising.
“Is nothing. I will do it.” He opens the door and goes in. The flies land on his head and shoulders, she can’t help but think they are licking him. On second look she sees they are wiping themselves on him, cat-like, at least so it appears, and her dad has a kind of blissful look on his face, what Miss Fletsum in school calls “the find-your-bliss look”.
There are still a few on him when he comes out of the tank. He opens his jacket pocket and gestures. “Moushkas, come, my little moushkas.” More promptly than trained dogs, the flies, five or six of them, go in. “Yu-Yu, they are telling me, they want fruits and a little fish. They are not meat-eating flies but mostly fruit flies. And some of them they say are becoming wery sick.”
“Whatever, Dad. They’re just flies. And I have to do what I’m told, it’s, like, a special diet or something.”
“All living creatures –”
“I know, I know. I love animals, too, Dad, it’s just that, I dunno.”
“What?”
“Something about them – they like you, they don’t like me. Besides, I think Dyllis said they were engineered with some kind of cold virus or something, some marker so they could spread disease? I can’t remember what she says. Anyway it looks like you’re covered with snot. I mean, look!”
Her father glances down at the slimy trails that have been left by the flies, and shrugs.
“Anyway, if you say so, Daddy, I’ll try to sneak some fruit in there once in a while. But the ones in your jacket – you’re going to put them back in the tank, right?”
“No, no, don’t vorry. These flies, they say, they come with me, and tomorrow, more are born, ends up same number.” He is the only person who could treasure flies. Her poor father, who is there who treasures him?
“Oh, Daddy, I do love you so much,” says Julie, and clasps her father around his stomach, while overhead the flies circle in their stately, slow procession.
2 (#ulink_77d68194-095d-56e1-959c-3a0bb2816af2)
Murielle stands at the window staring at Slawa with hatred. How long has she been standing there? She has no idea. Sometimes, glancing at her watch, she finds ten hours have elapsed, when it seems twenty minutes; conversely, it feels like ninety minutes have passed but the reality is only a quarter of an hour has gone by. She sees now she should have been taking out her anger on Slawa, not on poor Julie, even though the kid does drive her nuts.
Tahnee switches stations from the kitchen keyboard. She has been using the computer. There is no way to switch off the big screen entirely, or they would have to call the company to be reconnected. It’s easier just to leave it on all the time. “Ma, can I go look for my dad this weekend?” she says. “I think I might have a clue.”
“You can just forget that,” Murielle says bitterly and then adds, in a gentler tone, “I don’t know why you would ever want to find your father, he’s never sent a dime for you. Anyway, I already told you, we have to go to Grandpa’s, I need your help.”
Tahnee shrugs. “But Mommy dear, you have Julie to help. Besides, this time it’s a genuine lead.”
Another time she might have been more lenient, but right now everything is irritating Murielle. “So what do you think will happen if you do find Terry? He’ll probably try and convince you to sell his Diamond-C dust to your schoolmates. I know him. He’s no good, Tahnee. I told you, forget it, you can go look maybe when you’re older.”
“I don’t want to go to Grandpa’s, Mom. It is so boring. Can I at least stay here?”
“Alone? Yeah, right. Forget it.” Now Tahnee is looking sullen, Murielle feels a bit frightened. “If you come with me to help at Grandpa’s, I’ll take you shopping after. If you stay for the day.”
A car pulls up at the end of the driveway – the mother of Julie’s rinky-dink girlfriend, who is going to take the two girls and her own kids to the public pool for the day.
“Moommm! Mom!” A shriek the pitch of which must date to early hominid: “Maaaa!” Tahnee yells, a sour Acadian howl. “Mom! I can’t find my merkin – and I need it for the pool!”
Julie comes up from the basement. She hopes her mother won’t go down while she is gone. Her mother doesn’t know just how many pets she has there. She has been fussing with her pets, trying to move them to different cages, but she is running out of space. All summer all her animals have been reproducing.
Even during her days off, all she does is clean cages and it is her own fault, kind of. The pink rabbit she brought home from work mated with the blue rabbit she already owned and now there are six feathered babies, cute, though one has three ears, only two of which are normal size.
Finally the lost merkin is found, or another substituted, and the kids depart. “Bye-bye, Mom!” says Tahnee, grabbing her towel.
“Byeeee!” says Julie, swathed head to toe in her thick ultra-protective V-ray-stopper swimming costume. “See ya later!”
“Bye!” Murielle yells back. She is just about to step on a cockroach when she realizes it has a red dot. “Oh, hi, Greg,” she says. “Sorry about that.” She doesn’t know if the roach waves one leg at her, or just in general. Either way, it’s hard to care! Murielle can’t imagine why Tahnee is still anxious to find her father. She has told her older daughter for years how miserable Terry was to her. Terry is not Julie’s father. Just after Tahnee was born, Terry left and it wasn’t long before she met Slawa.
When Slawa and Murielle first met, Slawa was a limo driver – car service, actually – exotic, kind, of a spiritual nature – who gave her a ride from Newark. It turned out that Slawa’s wife Alga, who was much older than he and suffered from reeTVO.9, was a resident of the nursing home that Murielle managed.
The coincidence seemed remarkable: fate. After Alga died, they married. But somewhere along the line Slawa had changed from a man who rescued her, a single woman with a kid, into a fat Russian slob who worked in a shoe repair shop.
Murielle slams the screen door. When she was married to Terry, Tahnee’s father, and Terry wanted to make Diamond-C dust in the bathroom to sell, she wouldn’t let him, which was one reason why they split up; now in retrospect she thinks, but at least he didn’t drink.
Of course, if Terry had been caught by the law for selling Diamond-C dust, all of their property would have been confiscated, even the things that were in her name. Tahnee would have been sent into foster care. Murielle’s struggles to survive, her desertion by Terry just after Tahnee was born; it means nothing to Tahnee. Tahnee would end up doing what she wanted. There has to be a way, some way, to keep Tahnee with her for a while longer. She loves that kid so much. Who would have thought her own daughter would have ended up being the love of her life?
Even so, Murielle knows there is something wrong with Tahnee. Her dead, pale eyes, white hair, white skin; but that isn’t it. Other people are mesmerized by her, but not really in a positive way. They become nervous, upset. Frightened? Murielle has never figured out what it is, exactly. Tahnee has a certain cat-like indifference to people and things.
Despite this, she loves Tahnee much more than Julie, whom she almost always wants to slap. It takes major control not to. Julie’s eager, earnest face, plain and scared – how is she going to get through the rest of her life unless she toughens up?
“Make sure you put on plenty of sunscreen!” she calls, hoping the girls can still hear. “Otherwise you’re going to fry!” It isn’t that the sun is particularly bright – there is a reddish haze in the sky – but Tahnee is so fair, virtually albino and at fourteen years old almost five eleven, all endless insect leg-and-arm stalks which only burn. Julie has brown hair, more normal color, but prone to prickly heat, rashes, asthma. The kids have never been all that healthy but it is probably from growing up around this polluted marshland.
From the window where she stands, Murielle can see the bald spot on Slawa’s head. He is still painting the drive. How long could it take? And, how stupid to wear a swirly yellow MUU-MUU. Yellow has never been his colour, he looks sallow.
