Читать книгу Akhmed and the Atomic Matzo Balls - Gary Buslik - Страница 13

Five

A FEW YEARS EARLIER, HURRICANE OSCAR HAD RAVAGED Haiti. It was a strange storm—obeah practitioners believed it to be not the work of Shango, god of weather, but of Damballah-Wedo, the serpent Loa enraged by man’s ecological folly. It had spawned in November, late in the hurricane season, had come out of nowhere, and had moved, oddly, from northwest to southeast. Most unsettling of all, unlike other Northern-Hemisphere storms, it spiraled clockwise. No one could recall a hurricane ever doing that, although an old houngan, consulting cowry shells, claimed there had been one on the eve of Napoleon’s betrayal of Toussaint L’Ouverture.

Also unlike most hurricanes, which skitter across the Caribbean scorpion-like, Oscar hunted like a crocodile—crawling, lunging, feasting, fattening itself in the sun. And whereas normal storms soon lose force on land, this hellish beast grew more ferocious. First ravaging Port-de-Paix, then, clawing its way past Anse-Rouge and Gonaïves and tearing into the Artibonite valley, Dessalines, Saint-Marc, and Montrouis, it grew bolder as it mutilated the Haitian hills behind Port-au-Prince and Pétionville, devouring what was left of the tropical forest, rearing demonically on the mountaintops before retracing its murderous path.

Weakened from decades of deforestation, the overplant-ing of shallow-rooted tubers, and other desperate, shortsighted agricultural practices, what remained of Haiti’s topsoil was no match for the two-hundred-mile-an-hour fiend. Muddy torrents roiled down ghauts and gullies, hurling cows and pigs and goats, snapping palm trees, heaving tamarind trunks and banyan roots over washed-out ridges and ancient volcanic folds. When, five days later, Oscar, finally sated, slithered back to the underworld, the western half of Hispaniola resembled Hiroshima in September 1945. In satellite photos it was difficult to tell where land ended and ocean began, so murky was the coastal sea.

Over millennia, in most of the Caribbean, ecology had learned to deal with hurricanes. Trees, leaves, roots, branches, and fronds had evolved to spill fierce winds, to roll up, lean away, bear down. Birds and frogs and mongooses were born knowing how to burrow and deflect, hunker down and seek out, dig in and cover up. And when the storms passed, the land blossomed greener and more fecund than before, more melodious finches plumed brighter yellow, mammals emerged from their mothers’ wombs more lustrous and stout. Nature had destroyed the weak to make room for the strong.

Even months after Oscar, though, no finch-chirring or mockingbird-guffawing or grackle-cawing filled Haiti’s bruised skies. No mongoose-scurrying skipped through underbrush. No cooing of Zenaida Dove lullabied from low branches, no crowing of rooster pealed over dawn’s first yawns. No whistling of tree frog, braying of donkey, naying of goat, buzzing of crepuscular bug, burbling of rufous-throated solitaire, warbling of forest thrush, hooing of vervet monkey. In Haiti, nature, like politics, had never been allowed to evolve fruitfully. For two hundred years it had been a sick and dying addict, so weakened from self-abuse, it hardly had the will to curl up under Oscar’s demented beating, let alone strength to restore itself. The nutrients that nature had taken millions of years to give, the desperately poor Haitians had depleted in decades. Now when farmers gazed down at their fields, what they saw were endless stretches of glistening clay, exposed volcanic boulders, pointy stumps of truncated trees—rotting teeth and pyorrheaic gums. Without a healthy immune system, now when the land mutated it did so malignantly.

Which is what happened to a certain colony of termites.

Ordinarily the most adaptable of mandibled marauders, termites are hardy little brutes who, reproducing quickly and prodigiously and displaying adaptations of natural selection within a few brief generations, have survived almost since eels grew knuckles and crawled out of primordial slime. Yet even Haitian termites had struggled mightily during the decades the Duvaliers had klepto-crated the public treasury, forcing ordinary Haitians to chop down topsoil-retaining trees for fuel. With rich dirt washed to the sea, organic and mineral nutrients vanished. Those remaining plants whose fruits, fronds, marrow, and flesh the termites had depended on to feed their queens withered and fell. Turning their mandibles’ attention to roots, the gnawing little critters found those also leached of life—for, indeed, farmers had cut mere saplings for fuel, to peddle in Port-au-Prince for pennies a pound. Millions of termites—thousands of colonies—starved to death.

But a third of the way up the south slope of the mountains behind Plaine de Cul-de-Sac, one desperate termite population found salvation in the poop of runaway pink pigs. A unique alchemy of unusual waste matter—decaying non-indigenous pink-pig excrement, dead-root detritus, ultra-violet-bombarded prehistoric diluvial clay—the sudden disappearance of natural predators, and whatever supernatural forces the mysterious Oscar had brought to bear, visited a fortuitous mutation on this colony’s queen. Many worker termites died from the unholy enzymes and unique deprivations, as did their queen herself, but not before she had spawned a voracious, bloodthirsty brood of genetically altered offspring.

The first thing the brood did was eat alive those of the previous generation. They bypassed the carcasses of the already dead workers and went right for the living, separating individuals from the colony like skilled lionesses, hunting them down, ripping them limb from limb—not only to kill but kill with cruelty. These were infants hardwired in hell. Only Damballah-Wedo knew what a collective monster this unholy tribe would soon become.

Holy crap, Professor Leslie Fenwich thought as he sat on his toilet, thesaurus on lap, insufflating a joint and gazing out the window at South Loop rooftops. How was it possible? Diane seemed like a decent, if stupidly credulous, example of contemporary muliebrity. Sensitive, loving, committed to society and the planet. Member of PETA and the ACLU. Supported unions and Michael Moore and Greenpeace. Detested big business. Believed in taxing corporations to the hilt but denying them the vote. Protested against Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, identity stops of Hispanic-looking drivers. Wanted full amnesty for undocumented workers, open borders, automatic citizenship for babies born in the U.S.

He took an airy drag, held his breath, ingurgitated, exhaled a limp thread of happy smoke. Not that he was happy.

He strained and strained but only managed a baby-size poop. He was seldom at a loss for either brilliant ideas or words (although getting stoned did tend to degrade his otherwise prodigious and astucious vocabulary), but this Karma beast had him mentally constipated to full blockage. Diane was a reasonably lucid woman. Not in his league of lucidity, of course, but not altogether obtuse. How could she not have seen the patently obvious? How could she possibly think her daughter was in the same cosmos as “basically good”? How could even a mother be so myopic, even if Karma was her only offspring and apparently raised under the burden of pathological guilt?

The sun was setting, and the rooftops were the color of tomato juice. They gave Leslie appetence for a bloody Mary. He assumed it was the broccoli he’d had for dinner at the Seasons that was binding him. A bit of vodka might help. Couldn’t a reasonably intelligent progenitor tell that she had given birth to the Antichrist? That her daughter was the most self-centered, loathsome, bullying, condescending, arrogant, narcissistic, piggish, materialistic, solipsistic, acquisitive, shallow, callous, and, in general, miserable wretch on the face of the earth?

He shivered thinking about his meeting last night with Diane, Karma, and the future Mr. Karma. He winced with the recollection of having pretended to be enjoying their company. His viscera knotted at the prospect of having to continue the charade—though persist he would (having often assured Chancellor Beebe, while massaging her feet, that when it comes to raising funds to perpetuate their progressive curriculum, as the great Lenin said, “the end always justifies the means”).

How was it possible that he, and even Diane for that matter, could have spawned that ogress, Charon, Chimera, satyr, Minotaur, griffon, gargoyle, flying monkey? In his bathroom overlooking Mr. & Mrs. T-colored roofs, as he tried to squeeze out another broccoli-bound poop while lighting a fresh kiff (unlike most English Ph.D.s, he could actually do more than one task at the same time), Professor Fenwich pondered this terrifying question. It was not a rhetorical question, for Diane had assured him that—strictly to test for any latent genetic diseases—after Karma’s birth she had lab-tested the baby’s spit relative to Les’s own drool, a dried sample of which Diane had kept solely as a wistful memento of their love affair (unlike Monica Lewinsky, who had kept that crusty dress spooge as legal evidence), and Les believed her. If he was anything, it was a judge of character, and Diane was simply too idealistic, flower-childish, and simple-minded to be disingenuous, devious, and deceitful. Although he did suggest having a look-see at that lab report.