Super Flat Times (8 page)
I sat there in the same fashion as, probably, my wife had when she was taking in this particular sound. And what about her life? What was she doing in this scene — how could she have stood for it, any of it? Is this what they did back then, night after night, squirming nakedly in each other’s spaced-up Western Coastal apartments?
Predictably enough, my wife showed up then, having forgotten the kid’s day-care bag. We regarded each other for some time, the silence of the room interrupted only by the inane, periodic bursts of the child’s father. She made a series of high-pitched, desultory sounds, on the pretext of making language. I had nothing to apologize for, never having promised her anything by way of personal consideration. She took a step forward. I put the machine on the bed and grabbed my jacket. She assumed, I think, that we would have something to say, but I pushed past her in the narrow hall and took the stairs all the way down.
Outside, it was bright, unforgivably so. I could hardly see to my car. And what then? Should I say that I got in and drove off, smoking one cigarette after another, lining them up end on end until I was all of the way out of that life? Because what happened was that I stayed there, with those people, for another three and a half dreadful, thoroughly forgettable years in the way that we best know how to make ourselves feel welcome wherever we’d least like to be.
D
id you pack your ointment, dear?” I called across the hood of the car.
The Child Harvesting counselor had just called to confirm our slot at 15:30. It was conception day.
Chu Su gave me a look, so I went and got the ointment myself. The drive took half a day. “The second half will be better,” I told her. She just looked straight ahead at the road, her face blank as chalk.
The building that housed the Ministry of Child Harvesting had just recently been converted from the Ministry of Adhesives and Wood. The whole place smelled like pine sap. Good, though. A fresh scent.
The counselors guided us down a long hallway to a white room with glittering, quilted walls. At the center of the room was a small vehicle for two. The seats faced each other, one with a recessed area for the man and the other with a single curved prong for the woman. Rising from the center of the vehicle was a steel post from which branched two sets of handlebars, and where the handlebars joined the post there were two monitors.
This was a conception simulator, the counselors told us. They told us to disrobe and promptly left the room.
“I didn’t think it would be quite so — I just feel a bit empty,” Chu Su said. We knew little about the procedures involved beforehand, only that a child would be legally assigned to us at the end of the third trimester.
“Let’s just get it done quickly. If the brochure is correct, the rest is much easier and more pleasant.”
We got naked. She was gorgeous when dressed, but without clothes she was like a packet of sugar with toothpicks for limbs. Thin, but in the wrong way. I wondered how the trimestral simulation vests would even fit on her. Probably they’d have to sew a custom model.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she said. “Your body is nothing exceptional, either, Mr. Fake Foot.”
Yes, the fake foot. The real one I’d lost in War 5. I’d gotten it caught between two rocks during a decisive retreat. “Either we cut off the foot or you die,” the captain said, and before I could respond they’d severed the foot at the ankle with a pair of bone-cutting shears. I went back to the spot some months later, after we’d retaken the stretch of land, but the foot was gone.
We got into the vehicle. When our genitals had warmed the receptacles sufficiently, the monitors clicked on and the vehicle started to drift across the floor on a cushion of air.
A featureless head came up on the monitor. “Welcome. Thank you for investing in the future of our great nation. We have successfully determined your racial makeup. You may now select an egg cluster from one of the following regions: Pusan, Seoul, Cheju, Pyongyang.”
I looked up. Chu Su was weeping, streaming silent tears.
“Does it hurt?” I asked, reaching out to touch her arm over the handlebars. The voice on the monitor said, “Please do not remove your hands from the handgrips at any time during this simulation.”
The vehicle did slow doughnuts in the center of the concrete floor.
“No,” she said. “I can’t feel anything at all.”
The Tins
They have taken the joy of eating from us, and so we sit at table, hands folded in prayer, each in personal cardboard food booths. At the beginning of our meal, the signal is given. Elaine inserts the corn cob. William, with half-palsied face, picks at his beefsteak. “No more of that,” cries Mother. “No more — we will have no more of that,” she calls from her booth. Father, having come to us by means of a remote-control device, slouches in his chair, head in hands. Perhaps he does not belong to us. The twins feed each other dense gray portions of mashed potato, pasting the material to each other’s face and forehead. “No more of that — children.” Mother will use the wooden spoon, she warns them. The portions, delicately and lovingly arranged on every plate, will taste no different than on other nights. Meals arrive at our doorstep in heavy tins. Instructions are that each family member assist in the meal. William will help stir. Elaine needs a phone book to stand on. I will sift flour from a metal can with a trigger. Look, a tasty dip can be made with sour cream and onion soup. Mother tucks the meat, garnishing it with cherries and pineapple rings.
Novelty of Heat
The joy of eating taken from us, we are allowed to play in the yard. William, this time, is the German. We each break into a rapid, awkward gait, scattering across the lawn. Elaine crouches behind the hedge. The twins have not learned the rules. William is gaining on them. I have climbed into the high branches of the sycamore tree, where the animal qualities of children are most apparent. This section of the yard is made up entirely of smells. William falls ass-backwards, wheezing, the wind knocked out of him. A truck rolls down the street, selling cupped ice. Summer will pass in this way, each night progressively longer, more dissonant, objects lurching in the sky overhead.
The Hard Candies
The joy of eating is gone. Mother, having taken the Germans for a walk, washes her face and hair in the kitchen sink. We are not to look. Father works alone in the forbidden room. It is conjectured that he has been to war. Elaine shows me her secret, a cache of brightly colored hard candies she hides behind the porch steps. She sucks on one and begins to cry. Everything is about as useful as water now.
Into Her Mouth
Eating, that joy in which we have taken part for as long as we can remember, has been revoked. Father is outside, wielding the lawn mower in concentric squares. William, who has been punished, sits alone in his room in a chair by the window, diagramming the behavior of birds. Elaine is out with friends. I am sitting down to a bowl of ice and a fresh comic book. It is cool here in the dark kitchen. Summer, as reported, has been the worst season for food. Dirt has a taste, it is reported. The suggestion is that one mix small amounts of dirt into one’s meal. Mother, in her garden, gingerly inserts a finger into her mouth.
Joust
Each of us, in turn, recalls the joy of eating, now lost to us. William has been fighting with the other boys. They wear cloth helmets and carry long wooden poles for jousting. The goal is emasculation. They can be heard in the streets before dark, charging at one another fiercely. An ice cone truck passes. Mother sets her magazine down, neck craned in the direction of the window. On television, hands hold up black holes where food was once inserted. Elaine has locked herself in an upstairs closet, where she says there is “another kind of air.”
Joy of Sleep, Interrupted
Because the joy of eating has been lost, we are huddlers. We are loitering in our own lives. William’s bed-wetting incidents have increased in number and intensity. Father finds tiny holes bored into the mattress and inserts a diode into the head of William’s penis to shock him awake next time.
The Back of Abraham
Eating, the joy of which has been wrested from us, becomes difficult. Out behind the pond Peter has found a can with something in it. Half of us are wearing ornate Indian headgear. Jill shakes the can, putting it to her ear. “I can hear the heart of it moving.” There is a box with mason jars filled with dark, pulpy objects soaking in their own fluids. Abraham opens a jar and picks out a wedge of something that looks like a small lung. “It is softer than you would expect,” he says. “Less substantial. Messy, like a wet genital.” He holds it to his mouth. For a long moment nobody says anything. “No,” he says, lips slick and red from handling, “I’m afraid not.” Some pioneer from the other side of town shoots an arrow from over the hill, which pierces Abraham’s shoulder. Those of us who do not run don’t know what to do, either. Abraham hunches over, the arrow quivering in his back.
Joy of Eating, v. 2
Hot fresh-baked corn cakes! Spoonfuls of homemade apple-sauce!
For the Memory of Food
They fly over us in great planes and drop pamphlets: “For the Memory of Food.” Some people in the town have fled over the hill and off into another town. The houses where they lived stick out like buck teeth along the street, busted into and painted over in red. Peter has left with his family, all of them taking only what they could carry. Those of us who remain have satisfied ourselves with the carving of immense, ornate ice sculptures, displayed in our front yards for the children to come and lick. One morning, by cosmic fluke, everyone makes swans.
The Hands
What a joy, to eat. We find ourselves in the kitchen, wandering, fingering cardboard cartons stacked away in high cabinets and filled with cornstarch and water. Whatever it is we did not want to become, we have become. I meet Father one night in the hallway, his face riddled with pasty crumbs from a paper sandwich. Shamefully, we hold our places there in the cold, blue light, regarding each other. His father was a Methodist preacher — he has the same tendency to turn red. “There, there, now, off to bed with you,” he says, holding out large, paddle-like hands, the kind that might get you ready for a smack. He hooks them under my arms and lifts. I can feel how heavy I must be, slouched there over his shoulder. On my pajamas cloned cowboys rope pastel steers in unison, the way you seem to stay a certain age forever.
P
embroke got a box in the mail. A big box, wrapped in brown paper, about twice the size of a human head.
“What’s that?” said Clay, rising halfway from the couch, as if a lady had entered the room.
“Nothing.”
“Come on.”
Pembroke hugged the box sheepishly in the open doorway. He seemed to disappear behind it. “It’s nothing.”
They had been sitting in front of the entertainment center before the box had come. There was a program on about how horses make love. Clay had brewed up some egg salad for Pembroke in the food-o-rator and poured some hard puffs for himself. The food lay strewn out on the coffee table, half eaten.
Clay stood there, hesitating over the couch, looking at Pembroke’s box.
“Come on.”
“Dude, it’s nothing.”
Pembroke took the box into his bedroom and shut the door.
Clay followed a few steps behind, lingering in the empty hallway.
There were two ways the pill could be taken — as a regular pill or as a suppository, and Pembroke did not like the taste of these things, though they made him feel as if he were a soldier in one of the great armies. He and a few of the other boys crowded into the tiny rest-room stalls of the abandoned comedy club and squatted. The pills fizzed pleasantly, like Alka-Seltzer, only bigger — an armada of Alka-Seltzer. Pembroke had brought a rubber bib to wear beneath his underwear, only because sometimes the stuff would run out of you before it got a chance to take effect, making both a stain there on the worst place to have a stain and also all of the, like, drugness leaking away into your pants.
Pembroke’s father owned the comedy club. The club was abandoned primarily because Pembroke’s father was dead.
They started down the steps to the basement, where there were more boys and a few girls.
“I can’t believe this is where you were conceived,” said Thorpe, pointing to a portrait of a group of dogs playing billiards. “This place is funny as hell.”
“I got one of those helmets,” said Pembroke.
“What kind of helmet?” Thorpe replied, leading the way down the narrow stairs.
“That kind where you can talk to your past.”
“I would not want to talk to my past. No one is even doing that anymore.”
“Well, I am,” he said, more to himself than to Thorpe, who was far ahead by now, bounding down the rickety stairwell.
They opened the door to the men’s dressing room. Everyone was laid out on couches, barely conscious. The room was cluttered with broken stage props — a purple throne, a stuffed dog, two giant plastic asses. A group of thin, pasty girls looked up as Thorpe, Pembroke, and the rest entered. “I’m going to get in that,” said Thorpe, and Pembroke thought he was talking about Joy Pfeiss or at least Crystal Carpenter. But Thorpe started to climb into the clothes dryer instead. He was the kind of thin where you could see his bones moving around underneath the skin as if he were concealing another person, and you wondered what it would take for that person to tear right through.
Thorpe was trying to get himself inside the machine, legs first. The suppositories had made him unsteady — his limbs banged against the corrugated steel drum of the dryer, but before anyone could dissuade him he was all the way in, curled up like one of those Russian space monkeys they shot off in the olden days.
“Shut it,” he called from the chamber. “Shut the door to this thing and let it go.”