The Insides (7 page)

His hand hovers there, in front of her.

She opens her mouth to explain, but Unger cuts her off. “Martin,” he says. “She doesn’t.”

Martin looks at Unger, and then looks back at Maja, lowering his hand. For just a second he has the look that indicates that he’s considering whether she’s the most stupid person he’s ever met. It makes next to no impression on her: this is the exact look that you tend to get when people figure
out that you’re a person who doesn’t shake hands. He blinks it away, resets his face into something benign.

“It’s Maja, right?” he says.

“That’s right,” she says.

“Well, have a seat, Maja,” he says. “You can call me Pig.”

“Martin,” says Unger, lowering his bulk into a chair. “You know how I feel about that revolting name.”

Regardless of how Unger feels about it, Maja decides that the nickname suits him. He’s not overweight—he has a wiry frame, built out with some muscle—but in his face she can see a mix of appetites, a propensity toward indulgence. It’s not only that, though: it’s also the particular sort of intelligence in his eyes, cold, a little brutish, something unfinished and raw and wet about it.
Piggish
, yes, that exactly.

Martin shrugs at his father and cuts through a banana with the edge of his spoon.

Maja sits, and in the brief silence that follows the Archive pipes up.

Well,
it says,
these people seem totally terrible
.

She waits, and it asks the same question that it has asked her many times before:
Are you sure you want to work with these people? We don’t need the money
.

It’s important to have money
, she thinks back at it.

We have money,
it says.
We have quite a lot of money. We could just go home
.

We go home,
she replies,
when the job is done
.

Then why do we take half upfront?
the Archive asks.
We take half up front so we can walk away whenever we want to
.

And how many times have we done that?
she replies.
How many times have we left a job before it was over?

We’ve never done that,
the Archive says.
But we could
.

We could,
she admits.
If it was impossible to do our job. If we were in danger
.

If we were scared
, says the Archive.

I’m not scared,
she thinks.
Not of these people. Are you scared?

No
, admits the Archive, after a moment.

That’s right
, Maja thinks.
These people aren’t smarter than us. All we have to do is put up with them until the thing is done and then we take our money and we go and we never think about them again
.

Pig looks up from his sundae, looks her in the face, his expression suddenly all concern. “Do you want some ice cream?” he asks.

Caught momentarily off guard, Maja shrugs, realizing only a moment too late that to show indecision was a mistake.

“Get yourself some. Go ahead,
get some
. A banana split on a hot summer’s day? Not much better than that.”

The air conditioning, of course, is blasting, so the
hot summer day
is not really perceptible, not as such.
Actually, though, I wouldn’t mind some ice cream
, says the Archive. For the moment, though, Maja holds her silence.

“Martin,” Unger says, after a pause, “let’s not waste any more time.”

Pig shows both his palms in a gesture of exasperation. “Jesus, Dad, let her get some ice cream,” he says. “It’ll take
two minutes
.”

Unger draws back into a stony silence. Maja starts working on a way to defer but Pig’s already in his pocket; he pulls out a wadded ten-dollar bill.

“Go get yourself some,” he says. “On me.”

Fine. Maja takes the bill, smiles thinly, and heads up to the counter. On a whiteboard are written the names of twenty-four different flavors. She eyes them with something like wariness. Texas Pecan. Candy Bar Whirl. Jamocha Chip. Moose Tracks. Extreme Moose Tracks.

“What can I get for you?” asks the clerk, a girl with braces, wearing a transparent visor.

“Extreme Moose Tracks,” Maja says, just to hear what the words sound like coming out of her mouth.

“Cup or cone?”

“Small cone, please.”

The girl processes the answer. “We have Child, Regular, or Double.”

This data annoys her. “Double,” she says.

Smart
, says the Archive.

And in a minute she has her double cone, a terrifying amount of ice cream, and she goes and rejoins the party at the table. Pig regards her with a vague sort of respect as she tilts her head to lick around the edge of the cone: she half expects his giddy grin to return but it stays wherever he’s stored it.

In the ice cream she can taste an extensive network of refrigerated storage and, as a back-note, the near-flatline of cow consciousness. But despite that it remains, in its way, enjoyable. She uses her tongue to shape the tip of it into a point.

“May we begin
now
?” Unger says.

“Sure,” Pig says. “I want to begin with a question.”

Unger looks at Maja. Maja pauses in her ice-cream sculpting and says, “Ask.”

“My dad thinks it’s in Boston,” Pig says. “Is he right?”

“It’s not in Boston,” she says.

Pig taps the end of his spoon against the hard tabletop, once. Its
clack
coincides with a lull in the noise of the room.

“Three
years
we’ve been here,” he says, quietly, sullenly. He looks at her. He does not look at his father.

“Martin,” Unger says.

Pig ignores him, keeps his eyes on her. Absently, he takes both ends of the spoon in his hands and begins to apply pressure.

“You can tell us where it is,” he says. “That’s what you do.”

“That’s correct,” she says.

“Where is it?”

“New York,” she says. “New York City.”

“OK,” he says. “So we go there.”

The spoon’s metal bends at its weakest point.

Ollie breaks down a beef hindquarter, reduces it to its primal sections. Five major cuts. Remove the flank. Remove the sirloin tip. Remove the loin. Seam out the shank. Separate the round and the rump. This is a sequence she performs daily; several times daily. Sometimes she performs it in her dreams. The steps are ingrained, literally memorized in her body, like a sort of dance. Which means that her attention is free to wander, even though one thing kitchen life has taught her is that you should never really let your attention wander too much, not when you’re working with knives.

And yet: her mind is not where it should be, not attending to the task, to the blade in her hand. Instead, she’s watching the blade in Guychardson’s hand, watching it move. He cuts along a femur, cuts perpendicular to the bottom knuckle. A basic cut, but there’s something
off
about the way he does it. It looks fake, like a movie. A movie where, for some reason, they needed to fake the act of butchery,
render it in photo-realistic but unconvincing CGI. All the textures are right, but all the physics are wrong.
Why would they do it that way
, she thinks, losing herself in the idea.
When they could just have gotten a real butcher
.

She knows it’s not a movie. Guychardson is real. He’s right there, standing across from her. She can smell his sweat. She can hear him humming idly even over the choppy black sea of noise she has pouring out of the SoundDock. He’s too annoying to not be real.

Still, though, she watches him until she sinks into a light sort of trance. Her hands stop working. She sets her own knife down on the table.

“Guychardson,” she says. Or tries to say. Her voice catches, her throat unexpectedly dry. She coughs.

“Guychardson,” she says again. He pauses in his work, looks up.

“Let me see your knife,” she says.

Guychardson blinks, and then gives a sly smile and pulls the knife out of the knuckle he’s cutting through. He holds it out toward her, twists it in the air. The fluorescents glint off its weird double edges, creating some subtle optical effervescence, like something that would manifest at the onset of a drug trip.

“Let me
see
it,” she insists, reaching out for it.

“
Non!
” says Guychardson, pulling it back. “See with your eyes, not with your hands.”

The tilting plane of the blade sends a splinter of light into her eye. It catches there, dancing in her optical field.

She frowns, blinks: one, two, three times. The glimmer doesn’t clear. If anything, it widens slightly.

She looks down. Looks at the cow carcass rendered beneath her.
This is your job
, she thinks, as she looks at spread-open tissue.
This is work. It’s normal
. But the light wandering across the webbed mess makes it go weird. Abstracts it into pattern. The gleaming of meat takes on shape, each point of wet light gaining dimensionality, texture, like a set of radiolarians.

“Jesus Christ,” she says, blinking fiercely. A fog of pain begins to coalesce around the edges of her perception. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t—” she can hear Guychardson say, an uncharacteristic concern creeping into his voice, “—I didn’t do
anything
.”

The meat surges in her vision, threatening to take on the status of landscape. She pulls away from it.

“I need—” she says. “I need to sit down.”

She stumbles away from the worktable, through the front kitchen, out to the floor, eventually coming to rest at the bar, mercifully dark, closed at this hour, although she half-wishes the bartender—Sophia or Tunde or whoever is on tonight—was on duty now to quickly pour her a shot of something, anything.

The roaming bead of light, still not dispelled, settles into the edge of her field of vision and then quivers, once, violently, abruptly expanding, tearing a vertical band through her perception of the world. She grunts and clamps her left hand over her eye, but it doesn’t help: the light persists in the darkness, a twisting ribbon of magnesium flare.

She sucks air through her nose: the world smells like ground-up batteries.

I know what this is
, she thinks.

What she says is: “Fuck.”

She doesn’t want to have a seizure at work. The floor in here is polished concrete: it’s going to hurt if she bounces her head off it. She considers lying down on the floor but before she gets a chance to do anything, the light gives way to an aperture, a view into something.

She’s not inside this time; she’s outside. She’s standing in the center of the field where they grew cabbages, squash, and beans. The farmhouse is visible over the crest of the slope. She looks down, wondering if she’ll spot something that’s hers, something like the sketchbook, something that links her to this particular spot. A thing she left behind. And sure enough, half-embedded in the dirt is a cheap LED flashlight that she used to hook to her belt loop, unknowingly dropped here when its clip broke, must have been early last summer, in her final days at the farm. She remembers its orange plastic casing, a tangerine color she admired for its cheerfulness, gone dull now from the sequence of seasons that has passed over it, baked beyond pumpkin, down to a dead beige.

Something troubles her about it. It’s wrong that it should be here. If Donald were tending the field properly he should have found it, removed it as part of the process of raking the soil. And the soil around it looks bad: dry and cracked, choked with weeds and stones. A feeling of dread opens in the depths of her gut.

She looks around and the dread turns into a jab of anguish: things are worse than she thought. The entire field is dry, caked. There are a few stunted cabbages pushing up between
the thistles, but their leaves are sallow, worm-ravaged. The PVC irrigation tubes that she installed appear to still be in place, but as she looks closer she notes that some have decoupled and some have splintered, suggesting that Donald didn’t take the steps, months ago, that would have been necessary to winterize the system.

You don’t do this
, she thinks.
You don’t neglect a healthy field. You don’t let it die just because you’re a lazy fuck
. It’s as if he let a dog starve to death in a locked room because he was too stupid or too stubborn to feed it.

Her mood tilts for a moment, teeters towards guilt.
It’s not Donald who’s to blame,
she thinks.
It’s you. You did this. You stepped away and everything broke
.

Except no. Fuck that. She’ll take the blame for stepping outside of the happy little circle of Ollie and Jesse and Donald. She will. But she won’t take the blame for this. Just because Donald was
sad
or
depressed
or
whatever
when she left him doesn’t give him license to let this die.

This thought leads directly into the next:
Jesse
.

How is Jesse?

How bad is it, without her?

She makes herself stop there, think about it differently. It’s not
without her
but rather
with Donald
. How much has her fuckup of a partner fucked up her son? How much
exactly
?

Some cold and rational part of her recognizes that she’s engaged in a calculated maneuver here, avoiding feeling guilty by opting to feel angry. The more the guilt threatens to rise, the angrier she has to get.

She recognizes this, but it doesn’t stop her from doing
it. She lets the anger rise. She moves across the field like an avenging ghost; she floats over the ridge and descends toward the house, imagining flames streaming out of her hair.

She passes into the house through a window. The ground floor of the house—what in this moment she still thinks of as
her house
—is a vile disorder, appalling. The dining room table is taken up with one of Donald’s bows, its string off, halfway through the process of being rewrapped. The kitchen floor is strewn with empty Amazon boxes and air-pillow packing bags. She’s almost grateful that it looks so shitty: every out-of-place item is fuel for the anger that she needs.