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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.
Even Slawa could have told him this was a complete lie; after military service – in the unlikely event he was still alive – he would be sent back immediately; somebody, probably the uncle, must have made so much money off of him they felt guilty – but then the uncle’s partner in the business had run away with the money and at first Bocar’s uncle said the vacation was over, he was needed at the restaurant, off the books.
Of course all this took a while to learn: the kid could speak English but he had learned it from books, he put emphasis on the wrong syllable of each sentence, which was how English looked on the page to one who hadn’t heard it – and the truth was, Bocar was practically deaf.
He had fought with the rebels, back home, making bombs and one had gone off when he was ten or twelve, he wasn’t exactly certain of his age. It had not been by choice, his village of tin and cardboard was raided by the rebels, he was taken away to join them. This year’s rebels had been in power ten years before.
Now Bocar’s country was ruled by an evil despot. It took Slawa a while to figure out what this meant, Bocar kept saying the words ‘ev-ill de-spot’ though finally he figured it out. The children – Bocar and the other kids – were told that the ruler, who had previously been a rebel and a good guy, had become one of the bad guys, and it was up to the children to assassinate the evil despot and restore the country. Restore it to what, Bocar often wondered; his country had never been any different than the way it was now. But maybe there could be change. Then he still had optimism.
On the other hand there were the various factions at war even among the rebels, and then the tribes – the Lala Veuves Clickot, who wanted to see the Rolo Greys eradicated. It didn’t matter who took him to fight with them: Bocar’s parents had died of Hepatitis P. or Srednoi gas, or slow Ebola X; he no longer knew what had happened to his brother, his older sister had been killed in front of his eyes.
When there had been food it had been flung from the sky by the airplanes: macaroni-and-cheese (there was no water with which to cook), ketchup, pigeon peas, Frosted Flakes. Anchovy filets in tins without keys, for those in a country where everyone was thirsty all the time. Jars of cocktail olives. Gummy worms, Cremora, Nutela and jars of peanut butter pre-mixed – and inseparable from – grape jelly. Bags of crispy pork rinds for a Moslem country.
It was a country where it rained every other year, if they were lucky; but it had not rained since before Bocar was born. Dry, parched, the lands continuously churned up by heavy machinery searching for… oil, or diamonds, no one was quite sure what… and when it did rain, it was no relief, it only meant that thousands drowned; the tin and cardboard villages were washed away.
The weather had not always been this way, it was said, but no one remembered if the past had been better – or worse.
Bocar hoped that his uncle, who promised to send him to school, would let him train in the field of Massage Therapy Techniques using External Devices.
But Uncle, he is slowly realizing, has no intention of ever doing so. Only when Bocar’s high heels had holes in their soles did he finally manage to get a few bucks out of auntie, who sent him to Slawa’s shop.
For the first time in years Slawa tidies the store. There are so few customers though, since the entrance subway has been closed, whether he is open or shut scarcely makes a difference. And the cats hate being here. At first he is so busy, cleaning, painting, he keeps thinking his cats will reappear but after a day he realizes he will have to go after them, down in the windy spot. But surely there is an easier way to get down there?
Against the wall in a back corner, behind some boxes, he finds a place where the paper is peeling; behind it is a little door.
He pulls it loose and puts his head through. Inside is blackness and cool air and a musty smell. “What?” he mumbles to himself. The flies that circle him are growing agitated. “Something back here… Cannot see… Is maybe –”
Grunting, he stands and fetches his flashlight. Then he stoops once again and waves the light. Steps lead down to pink squares, turquoise diamonds, beige and gold rectangles. Tiles of some sort. A mound of… some kind of stuffing. From an old sofa? He really can’t tell. The stairs descend, curving steeply, maybe twenty feet. One of the missing cats might be down there. Then from the depths – fifty, eighty feet below? – a faint mewling, a thin yowling, and a gurgling rush, perhaps of water, perhaps a million electronic devices receiving only static and mottled signals.
5 (#ulink_00863d24-8cba-5aeb-b032-cac2c3d0ff50)
Each night Murielle drifts off but wakes at three or four in the morning and can’t go back to sleep. And she is hungry. It seems to her that she never eats, at least she can’t remember doing so. She is always hungry and she never eats and yet she grows and grows.
Refrigerator
Sometimes, late at night, she wakes to find herself in front of the refrigerator. Staring blankly at first then… lo and behold, a slice of Swiss cheese in one hand, a bottle of soda in the other! Breakfast at her feet prodding her ankle with a paw until she tosses him bits of the food. Only his whimpers of “More! Please, more,” rouse her from her comatose state. Does the damn dog have to have a Russky accent too?
“No more.”
“But why? Why, Mama?” says the dog.
She wants to say she’s not the dog’s mother but she knows the dog would cry. “Because in this lifetime I’m the person and you’re the dog! And, for your own health, I say so.” This doesn’t sound quite right. “So, if you don’t like it, come back in your next life as a human being! And my recommendation is, preferably male.” Lip curled, Breakfast slinks out of the kitchen with an expression simultaneously hurt and contemptuous.
How has she gotten here? Where has the food come from? She has no memory of buying the Swiss cheese, or the ham, or the puffy white flavorless Parker House Rolls.
Or whatever it is she finds in her hand, almost in her mouth. The combination lox-and-cream-cheese on a garlic-bagel, the Benny-Goodman-and-Jerry-Lee-Lewis-Nuts-Bolts-and-Berries-ice cream – let alone how or when she ever got out of bed and made her way to the refrigerator.
Murielle wonders what is wrong with her, that she can’t keep the place even remotely clean? She looks around the kitchen: implements – spatulas, knives, spoons, a blender, crumbs, dirty sponges, almost empty milk cartons – cover the green vintage Dormica counter. It gives her the skeeves, the sheen of gray grease rimming each area around the cabinet doors. In the sink strainer is a hummock of partially rotten food – bits of pasta, carrot cubes from canned soup, coffee grinds.
Bugs are in the walls, roaches and ants, a number of different varieties, fire, grease and sugar ants, the big black wood-eating ants, a strange mutated variety of leaf-cutter ants, or rather linoleum-cutter ants, at least, that is what they like to chew.
There are moths – the kind that live in food; hair-eating moths (attracted by the odor of urine), earwigs and flies. Tiny white flies that live on the children’s house plants (some plants in particular have bad infestations); fruit flies, houseflies, ichneumon flies as big as a chihuahua. The news has said that soon there will be a new kind of fly, beneficial, to eat old fibers and fabric, but slow enough to be killed easily.
The scene is one of chaos from which no order is possible. Tipping out the refuse from the sink strainer does not completely empty it, bits are still enmeshed in the trap; now Mister Garbage Dehydrator with grease dripping down the sides of the plastic trash bag liner should be cleaned! The disembodied voice says, “Who’s doing the dishes!” with a nasty, perky giggle, it’s part of the hologramovision system or the computer, then a man comes over the speakers, “Sey Vramos!” he yells, some kind of Spanish?
The forks and whisks lying around are rinsed, stuffed into drawers, counters wiped with paper towel – nevertheless nothing about the kitchen looks cleaner. It’s a kind of mental imbalance on her part, Murielle thinks. Other people have come into the room, gotten out the dustpan and broom, sprayed spritzer, wiped and tidied and polished and within minutes the place has appeared clean if not new.
But no matter how or what she does, objects seem only to be shuffled from one area to another; her attempts at cleaning only stir up more crumbs, grease, dust that emerges shyly, gaily, from secret nests and now expands in its own kind of reproductive frenzy.
From chaos it is not possible for her to create order, only an alternate chaos. Even with the friendly robototron whirling on its endless round of vacuuming and steam and plugging itself back in if it needs a charge, she is not lucky – all it does is strew dirt. Sometimes she finds it banging endlessly against the wall – which it is not supposed to – shouting, “Will somebody please help me. Help me. Time to change my bag!” and then, with greater panic, “Help me! Please! I’m gonna bust my bag!”
Still, that is not what is really the matter at all.
She has let the kids take over the living room with their house plants. It had seemed harmless enough, even positive, their hobby. They acquired clippings from neighbors – Christmas cactus stubs, rubbery succulents, the offspring of spider plants; dead and dying discards.
There isn’t a single thing that perishes after the kids acquire it, no matter that it appeared completely dead it is now growing at a frightening speed, Caladium and kumquat, Dieffenbachia and Norfolk pine needing to be moved practically weekly into bigger and bigger pots. When it’s time to water them, the two kids fight: “You’re over-watering! It doesn’t need that much!” – “Yes it does, can’t you see how dry it is?” – water overflowing, spilling onto the floor, making rings under each pot.
A moist jungle humidity permeates the house: the living room windows can’t be opened and roots have begun to crawl, fingerlike, into floorboards or along the walls, the tendrils of ivy and a kind of Philodendron that had air-roots waving white, obscene stumps that several times a year gave birth to a single, phallic-shaped stinking flower which was able to move to a new pot, slowly and painfully, by air-roots.
Two dwarf banana trees eight feet tall with great stalks of ripening bananas – that neither child would permit the other to pick – are so tall they hit the ceiling, the flies have merrily swarmed on the rotting fruit. Apart from the sofa, the plants – the jungle – take up the entire living room and the floor is buckled and rotted from the moisture.
The kids collect animals, too. She is passive in the face of their gargantuan demands, two giantesses – or so they appear to her – two giant daughters with gaping maws waiting to be filled with worms that she has no energy to collect. Long before Julie’s internship at Bermese Pythion the kids had managed to acquire a number of animals – post-experimentation – others had actually been thrown out, scarcely alive – and Murielle couldn’t help but believe these animals were products of genetic tampering of some sort – anyway, she has never seen creatures like these.
The girls, or at least Julie, keep a lot of them in cages in the basement. Mice with hair so long it can be braided. Guinea pigs with incredibly long legs, little tusks, and nasty dispositions. And the family pet? Something the kids said was a type of dog called a Muskwith who wanted – according to them and Slawa – to be called Breakfast.
Only, if it is a dog, what kind of dog jumps on the table to eat apples and using its claws climbs the curtains to the point that they are completely shredded? The kids say that a Muskwith is a modern canine combined with some genetic material from an aardwolf – who knows, though. She has to admit she is fond of the animal, though she had totally objected to it at first, a fluffy little thing with tufts of white fur and great bald patches, runny black eyes, short-legged and a long pink snout lined with sharp, pointy teeth more feline than canine.
The dog (it is apparently a hermaphrodite; at least that’s what the vet says) feels alone and isolated. Breakfast often disappears for days on end down some hiding hole, or at the neighbors’; it knows everyone in the vicinity and, digging its way under the fence in the back when in a sulky mood, has other homes to visit.
All the neighbors are fond of it, fortunately, and report new words it can speak or how it affectionately likes to rest its sharp, pointed chin on whoever is around. It loves bananas, chopped liver and the glue on the backs of stamps or envelopes. When at home, it has a terrible habit of taking hold of one end of the toilet paper roll and running through the house; or will think of ways to deliberately hurt her, if she doesn’t pay it enough attention – climbs on her lap and smacks her, forcefully, with its paw, or lifts things from her pockets, so stealthily she doesn’t know until hours later that the dog has taken a whole packet of chewing gum, peeled each stick and eaten it.
Breakfast isn’t like any dog she has ever known. It is cute, in its own way, and can even say a few words – “Mama” and “Breakfast” and “I’m hungry”; occasionally says “out” or “cold” – not in a human voice, but painfully, sounds coaxed under duress not dissimilar to that of a child being tortured.
Sometimes it will talk when promised a treat of chicken liver; other times in its sleep, a bad dream, she hears whimpers and “no, no,” or, more astonishingly, “no hurt, no hurt.” But ultimately, in time, it doesn’t seem all that odd – it isn’t like the dog is putting together whole sentences or anything.
Still, it isn’t what a dog is supposed to be. Nothing in Murielle’s life is the way it is supposed to be. Not her marriage, not even her own kids – willful, uncontrollable, sexed-up –! Even being alive wasn’t what she had thought it was going to be. But then she actually had no clue as to what it should have been like, either.
In the morning she has a Health-Nut muffin, the type that heats itself in a little bag if you pull the string, containing ZERO CALORIES and One Hundred Percent of Daily Requirements of Vitamin C, sugar and salt. The kids don’t eat breakfast. When Slawa had still lived here he ate various health foods, yogurt with fresh fruit and nuts, wholewheat cereal with bran or thin slices of heavy dark stuff gritty with sunflower seeds that was supposed to be bread but was a closer relative of paper, hand-made from newsprint or dryer lint.
Her baking. If she had time she would have made regular meals, but why bother? The kids prefer pre-made growth products in different textures and flavors: frozen burritos heated in the microwave, pizza, everything nowadays comes from one of the factories. Slawa is a vegetarian – if you want to call it that, vegetables are expensive but probably also made out of the same stuff – and he usually ate before he came home.
Even when she tried to bake muffins with wholegrain-enriched flour, he said that anything she cooked had hairs in it, or wasn’t sanitary – and it was true, the flour, no matter how recently purchased, was swarming with meal worms, moths flew out of the cabinets, jars of spices swarmed with heaving larvae of one sort or another and even the refrigerator had roaches which thrived on the cold and darkness and the spills of syrup and ketchup or ancient crusts that oozed from the walls. “It’s probably healthy, to eat bugs,” Murielle says. “Protein. I never get sick. Look at you, you have a cold all the time.”
“It’s not a cold, I am having reaction to the shoe repair chemicals,” he says. “And I am telling you – you kids!” he shouts upstairs as the girls scramble, perpetually late, to get dressed. “The best thing you can do for yourself is to eat a healthy breakfast and have a regular bowel movement!”
“Ew, gross!” Their groans of contempt could be heard up the narrow six-step flight of stairs.
“Yeah, you kids with the laughing, to sneer, wait until you are in a place of work wishing you didn’t have to take a big crap in the middle of the day with all your co-workers wanting to kill you for stinking up the toilet, or like me, gotta find a public toilet and getting some filthy on your shoes! You gonna be sorry you didn’t listen to me then.”
“Wow,” yells Tahnee, “you really give me a lot to look forward to, why don’t I just kill myself now?”
