Читать книгу Pigs - Johanna Stoberock - Страница 10

The thing was, after Eddie disappeared, nothing was quite the same. The long days waiting for garbage became long days filled with dread and guilt. Four children didn’t seem enough—there always seemed now to be an absent fifth, a silent whining presence that wasn’t quite there.

One afternoon, not long after Eddie was given and then taken away, Mimi and Natasha sat together on the hill above the hut. Natasha put her head in Mimi’s lap and wriggled from side to side. Mimi, out of habit, ran her fingers through the toddler’s curls. The kid would probably fall asleep right there. She did it fairly often, sometimes twice a week—or was it twice a day? When it happened, Mimi was stuck, afraid to move now that the baby had finally fallen asleep. She wished just once Natasha would collapse on Luisa’s lap. But she never did. The youngest found the oldest, always, as if by instinct. Natasha tugged at her skirt, and reluctantly Mimi started telling a story.

“There have always been children on this island,” she said.

Natasha hummed and sucked her thumb.

“The world wouldn’t know what to do without us. The world should be holding its breath hoping we don’t find our way out of this place. It should be praying that we never grow up, that we just stay here forever cleaning up its trash. The world should be sending us giant fruit baskets to say thank you. But nobody likes to think about it. So instead of saying thank you, the world pretends we don’t exist. And sends us its trash. And ignores the first law of thermodynamics—energy within a closed system is constant. It can be transformed, but it never goes away.” Mimi had been glancing through a physics textbook recently. It was hard to throw away books without at least taking a peek inside. She’d read a little before heaving it over the fence. “What is the world if it isn’t a closed system? Pretend for a minute that garbage is the same thing as energy. The world puts its crap out in a bucket on the street for Monday’s pickup and it says that’s the same thing as making it disappear. But it never disappears. All that crap ends up on this island, and we’re nothing more than universal garbage collectors. In a way, you could think of the pigs as transformed garbage. They get bigger and bigger and bigger, but they can’t go away. Imagine what would happen if they did.”

Natasha rubbed her cheek against Mimi’s thigh and drooled just a little bit.

Luisa walked up the hill and collapsed in the grass beside them. She’d been depressed ever since they woke up in the net with Eddie gone. And she wasn’t the kind of person to talk about being depressed. Instead she kicked things, and muttered under her breath about building a boat, and pushed other people away. Look at her now—close by, but with her back turned to them like she didn’t want to be there. Mimi knew she blamed herself. They’d shifted Eddie toward the edge of the net, sure. But what were they supposed to do? Wait around for the grown-ups to come at them with knives?

She continued with her story.

“One day, a boy arrived on the island and at first the children misunderstood. They thought the rules of the system had changed. They thought there was more the world wanted to send them than garbage. They tried to make him one of them. They showed him what to eat and where to sleep and what to do with all the trash that kept washing onto shore. They explained to him about how they were saving the world from being buried under its own vast mountains of discarded junk. They thought he’d understand the nobility of their purpose, but he didn’t. He didn’t even listen to them about the basic rules of when to keep away from the sea. Eventually they realized he was garbage just like everything else. Eventually the children realized that the world was doing exactly the right thing by throwing him away.”

Luisa shaded her eyes. She picked up a stone and threw it at her bare foot. She picked up another stone and did the same thing again. Her foot would be speckled with bruises if she kept it up. Mimi couldn’t tell whether she had been listening.

“The only mistake the children made was in thinking that if you look like a child, you also act like a child,” she said. “The only mistake they made was in getting too interested in the garbage.” Mimi lifted her hand off Natasha’s head and patted Luisa’s shoulder. Luisa didn’t look at her, but she also didn’t pull away. Mimi started humming a song. Natasha smiled and sighed and hummed a little, too, and then nestled in further.

Mimi had just reached the chorus when Natasha sat up with a start and clapped her chubby hand across Mimi’s mouth.

“I hate it when he adds too much vermouth,” they heard, then.

“You’re right, he makes terrible drinks.”

“You wouldn’t believe the hangovers they give me. It’s like someone’s stomping on my head with steel-toed boots.”

“Poor thing.”

“I know. I certainly am a poor thing today.”

The girls jumped off the rock and scrambled into the bushes.

“The new one will rub your head.”

“Do you think so? I hope he will. He’s got beautiful hands. So smooth.”

They came along the path, two of them in high heels, smoking cigarettes out of long, black holders. Their perfume spread out ahead of them, sweet and complicated and unlike anything that came from the earth. One had red hair that looked as though it had been lacquered, and the other wore a hat with a veil. They had their arms linked, and walked with strong, confident steps. They looked almost innocent, like they’d be happy if they could spend all their days at a garden party. Mimi shook her head—there she was making that same mistake again. Innocence shouldn’t ever be assumed. Who knew what they’d done to Eddie? They’d probably laughed and watched him bleed. Mimi tried hard to keep from thinking about it.

What did the grown-ups really want? And how many of them were there, anyway?

Luisa’s theory was that there was an endless amount. She said that if she had the courage and the endurance, she’d kick them endlessly in the shins.

Andrew thought it didn’t matter how many grown-ups there were, that the only thing that mattered was that they could do whatever they wanted.

Mimi’s theory was that it was just six, but that they kept changing clothes—and privately, to herself, she thought she could look at each of their outfits forever. She loved their clothes. She loved the way they could put anything together and make it seem effortlessly stylish. She would die before she told anyone else that, though, before she told anyone that she’d love to see her reflection in a mirror, draped in a satin sheath, her shoulders hung with fur.

Natasha just batted her eyes and hummed whenever they tried to figure it out.

The two grown-ups stopped now in front of the bushes where the children hid.

“Do you smell them?” the veiled one said.

“Children?” The other said. She sniffed the air; then let out a mouthful of smoke.

“Even after a bath they smell like animals.”

“They might as well be animals. The new one says they cry at night.”

“Isn’t that sweet!”

“I know. So sweet.”

They started walking again. Their dresses were tight, but they had slits in the back and they took long steps. Their heels clacked on the stones. Their laughter and perfume trailed behind them even after they disappeared over a hill.

Mimi sniffed her armpits. Did she smell? She washed as best she could, but maybe they were right. She poked Natasha to see if she would make a sound. The kid surprised her all the time—how was it that her hearing was better than anyone else’s? She wanted badly to know what Natasha’s voice sounded like, to get an explanation, but the kid just shook her head and kept her lips pushed tight together.

Andrew sat cross-legged in the grass at the bottom of the hill and stared at the sleeping pigs. They lay with their legs splayed front and back, sacked out on the soft dirt under the shade of an olive tree. They murmured in their sleep, and shifted, sometimes, and murmured again. Their sides heaved as they dreamed. Andrew, staring at the pigs, thought he could see traces of a time before the island—not their time, but his. Sometimes, for even less than a moment, he thought their bristly skin grew clear. Beneath its surface everything that had ever disappeared inside them became visible again. Why shouldn’t his life become visible as well?

The children didn’t spend much time talking about the pigs, but when they did, they speculated about who might have put them there. Someone strong, they thought. Someone unafraid of sharp teeth. Someone who didn’t mind the hard work of getting gigantic pigs onto an island in the middle of the ocean, and someone confident enough to leave them there to do their work. Once, the children had played at making an altar. They’d collected smooth-edged stones and piled them into a little tower in the hollow of a hill. They’d bowed down in front of the stones and touched their foreheads to the earth, and Mimi had chanted something in a monotone about thanking a god for building a fence between them and the pigs, but it had all seemed too serious and, even to them, a little pretentious. They’d knocked the tower down and thrown the stones at a target instead. Andrew had won that game, of course. He was more coordinated than any of the girls.

Looking at the pigs, he remembered being bounced on someone’s shoulder. He remembered someone playing with his feet. He remembered someone stroking his hair at night while he curled up in bed, and the sound of cars outside, sirens, the whirring of a city. He liked to think about that while he watched the pigs. He liked to sing the pigs scraps of songs he remembered from those days. He liked to tell the pigs stories about the city. They chewed on them in their sleep.

“Once,” he said, “my mother took me on the subway and the stroller nearly got caught in a closing door. A homeless man jumped up to help her, and she pulled me through. She was secretly relieved when the door slammed shut and he was left on the platform looking in.

“Once,” he said, “we rode the ferry and a man in a suit gave her a silver dollar. ‘Give it to him when he grows up,’ he said. ‘Tell him he’ll save the world.’ She kept the coin locked in a drawer. She said I was too young to keep it safe.

“Once,” he said, “my mother and father had a fight. They were fighting about my mother being pregnant. They thought I was too young to understand. Neither of them wanted another child, but they couldn’t agree on what to do. All they could do was blame each other. I wanted to tell them that whatever they decided would be all right with me. I wanted to tell them that I liked being alone, that I didn’t need a sister or a brother. They thought I was crying for no reason, and it made them even angrier. It was awful. My mother ended up sleeping in bed next to me, crying all night, turning her back to me when I cried too.

“Once,” he said, “I lived in a city. The buildings were so tall you’d think they reached the sky. It was unbelievable that anyone thought to build them that high. You’d think they were trying to climb all the way up to God.”

Andrew could go on and on once he got started. The pigs listened to him with their eyes shut. They might have been asleep, but they smiled and sighed when he fell silent, as if they were patiently waiting for him to continue.

Up on the hill, Natasha collapsed again on Mimi’s lap, and Mimi shook her head and whispered that she would never wear velvet on a day like this.

“That one with the red hair?” she said. “She should stick to silk. The velvet just makes her look fat.”

Luisa was willing to talk now. She scrunched her eyes shut like she was trying to picture the grown-ups in front of her. She picked a blade of grass and chewed on it and then took it out of her mouth and said, “I like velvet better. It’s weird to see it on such a hot day, but I think it goes a long way toward hiding the flaws in the female form.”

“I disagree,” Mimi said. Luisa was just repeating something that she’d said to her once. She tried to remember which magazine she’d read it in before she’d thrown it to the pigs. Mimi was the only one who really paid attention to what the grown-ups wore. She wished just once she could try on one of their outfits. Not even one of the really fancy ones, just something nicely tailored. Even just a pencil skirt.

“But velvet’s so soft,” Luisa said. “I touched it once. Old curtains. I once tossed velvet curtains to the pigs.”

“You don’t know anything about fashion,” Mimi said. “Don’t even try.”

Luisa’s face hardened, and she turned away. She picked up a rock and tossed it as far as she could. It didn’t go that far, but it hit the tree she was aiming at. She looked surprised, and picked another rock up and threw it, too. This one missed.

Mimi never knew why sometimes she said the things she did, why occasionally words came out with no purpose other than to be mean, but she couldn’t help herself. And anyway, it was true. Luisa was twelve years old and barely even knew how to braid her own hair. What had she been doing with her time? If Mimi had hair that could grow as long as Luisa’s, she’d take care of it. She sniffed herself again. Maybe she did smell.

She pressed her finger into Natasha’s cheek. The kid didn’t move. She was asleep. Mimi turned and looked at Andrew, sitting below them on the grass beside the pen. Probably telling stories to the pigs again. Mimi had no interest in his stories. She was much more interested in the situation among the grown-ups. The new one? There was never anyone new on the island. But that wasn’t right. Eddie had been new, and that was just days ago. Or maybe weeks. It was so hard to keep track of time. Stop thinking about him, she whispered to herself. Just stop. She thought instead about how the grown-ups came and went from the island. Maybe there was a dock somewhere, a private landing for a yacht, or a seaplane, or even a rowboat. Maybe there was a magic door in their villa that opened to Paris, or Rome, or Bombay. Maybe the rules were entirely different for the grown-ups. She said this out loud and Luisa, jarred out of her sulk, laughed: of course the rules were different. If there was anything they could be sure of, it was that the grownups’ world was entirely different from their own. Maybe the island wasn’t an island at all, and only the grown-ups could see land where the ocean was. Maybe the grown-ups could walk on water. Maybe the grown-ups turned into birds at night and flew away.

Natasha’s breathing evened out and turned into a kind of purring sound, and she kneaded her thumb inside her fist like a kitten kneads its paws.

Mimi sighed. Her legs were cramping. She decided to risk it and pick up the sleeping child. Natasha’s curly head collapsed against Mimi’s shoulder. Her breath was wet on Mimi’s skin, her whole body silky with sleep. Mimi carried her down to the hut, pried the door open with her foot, and laid her down on a mat. She pushed the curls off the kid’s forehead and pulled a blanket up to her chin. Then she went back outside, and climbed back up the hill, and flopped down again next to Luisa. She could see that Luisa had been crying while she was gone, but she seemed to have gotten over it. Mimi poked her. Luisa shrugged and poked her back.

Mimi could hear Andrew humming, and she could see him sitting with his back to a tree. She saw a single cloud in the sky, drifting toward the sun in a lazy way. And she saw a ship edging its way along the horizon.

“I don’t know how many grown-ups there are,” Luisa said. “The most I ever count is five, maybe six, but the ones I count are always different. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them all together. Sometimes it’s hard for me to see things.”

“When they had us in that net, I tried to count but it was hard to keep track of them. They all pretty much look the same. Or anyway they act the same. I don’t know.” Mimi was shading her eyes to watch the ship. It was far away, but even far away they could see that it was beaten up, a rusting cargo ship probably. It belched dark smoke that pointed to oil burning. “What do you think it’s going to drop?” she said.

“Broken mirrors?” Luisa said. “DVDs? Old furniture? Could be anything.”

“I wish sometimes they narrowed the possibilities,” Mimi said. “I’d like to have a sense of what’s ahead.”

“It’ll never happen,” Luisa said. “There’s too much stuff to throw away.”

Down below, Andrew stood up from where he was sitting by the pigs. He stretched and walked to the hut. They watched him yawn as he ducked down to enter through the door. When he stepped inside, the island looked so perfect in his absence that they could easily imagine he had never existed at all.

What came, came in a net. It was pretty ordinary stuff, actually, if you can call a net glowing with nuclear waste ordinary. They tried to wake Andrew up, but once he fell asleep he stayed asleep for hours. It was always that way with him. Mimi and Luisa ended up hauling the entire load up onto the grass on their own. The bricks were made of blue glass and were heavy, and neither girl wanted to touch them. They wrapped their hands around the net’s soggy cords and dragged the load across the ground instead of even trying to pick it up.

The glow faded on each brick as it emerged from the water. The lone cloud wandered across the sky like a sleepwalking sheep and then snapped suddenly across the sun. The pigs woke up. The girls felt suddenly nauseous and each hoisted a corner of the net onto her shoulder and together they pulled it up the path. They hated Andrew for taking a nap when they obviously could have used his help. “Isn’t it interesting how he’s always asleep when we need him most,” Mimi murmured under her breath, and Luisa nodded.

Even with the sun behind a cloud and the whole earth in shadow, the island radiated heat. It was a dry place. It hardly ever rained there. The landscape was entirely Mediterranean, rocky and scrubby and filled with flowers that miraculously grew out of unwatered soil and rock.

At the fence, there was the whole question of how to get the waste over it to the pigs. Would they have to touch it? Each girl turned away and vomited discreetly. Mimi reached up and pulled a small chunk of hair from her head. Should they throw each brick one by one, or should they hoist the entire net up and over? Luisa said one by one, and she loosened the net and shut her eyes and grabbed a brick but it was hot to the touch and she screamed and dropped it and it landed on her foot. The pigs were pushing more than eagerly against the fence. Mimi wrapped her hands in fabric and bent down low and placed them on either side of a brick, and lifted it by straightening her legs. She threw it high into the air. The spotted pig jumped. It opened its mouth and the brick disappeared. It was like a seal at the zoo, if Mimi had ever been to a zoo. She didn’t think she had. But she knew what she was looking at. She grabbed another, and tossed it high as well. Now two pigs jumped together. They knocked heads mid air, but they kept their mouths open, and the one with the lopped off ear slurped the brick down whole.

There was a frenzy now among the pigs. The girls couldn’t throw the bricks fast enough. The air was silvery with shattered glass, but the mass in the net seemed to stay the same size. A single brick leaving made no difference at all. The girls slung brick after glowing brick. Their arms were getting tired and their hands, missing fingers, were not as dexterous as they might have been. The pigs were practically screaming.

“We’re going to have to lift them all,” Mimi said.

“Should we try to wake up Andrew?” Luisa said. “I don’t think we can do this alone.” A chunk of her hair fell out, too.

Mimi looked over her shoulder. It seemed crazy that he could still be asleep, but where else would he be? Even Natasha should be awake by now. They were supposed to work together. That was how they were supposed to get through all this. Small body next to small body could add up to strength. It always had. What were they if they couldn’t count on each other? Was it possible that Andrew and Natasha were awake inside and just too lazy to get up and help? She shook her head. You couldn’t trust those smelly children, she thought, those lazy children—all they wanted to do was sleep. And then she caught herself. In her mind she sounded just like the grown-ups.

“We’ll have to get underneath it,” Luisa said. “We’ll push it up, and then we’ll tip it in.”

They shoved the net as close to the fence as they dared, then started heaving the bricks from the bottom up toward the top of the posts. But every time they pushed one spot up, the mass turned liquid, and the bricks tumbled to the ground in the spot they’d left vacant. The pigs were panting and squealing and rushing back and forth. Mimi’s shoulders ached and her hands throbbed and she could barely breathe from the fear of inhaling radiation deep inside her body. She pushed and pushed and pushed, and then she felt wood.

She was right up next to the fence. Her foot was pressed against the post. Her foot. No shoes. The lop-eared pig approached like lightning, teeth bared. She jumped back. She stood up straight; her feet scooted behind her, her body balanced by her head in the net. And that was the tipping point. The net fell, bricks cascading like blue water, over the fence, into the pen, right into the jaws of the frenzied pigs.

Later, sitting on the hill, picking shards of glass out of their hair, the girls tried not to think about how long some garbage lasted. Mimi held her foot in her hand and counted her five whole toes over and over.

“I was dreaming,” Andrew said, climbing sleepily out of the hut. “I couldn’t wake up.”

“Couldn’t, or didn’t want to?” Mimi said.

“Couldn’t,” Andrew said. “It was the kind of dream where you’re swimming, and you can’t get to the surface of the water. Or where you’re eating, but you can’t get the fork to your mouth. I was trying to wake up, but I just couldn’t do it.”

It was dark, then. The sun had finally set beyond the water. The whole sky had glowed orange, and then pink, and then soft purple with the red sun at the center, an eye dropping below its lid. It was the same boring beautiful sunset that happened every night. Music drifted from the grownups’ place. Dance music, with clarinets and an occasional trumpet. They could hear laughter. They could hear the whoops and cries of spinning on the dance floor. When the children lay down, they fell asleep to the sounds of a party. They dreamed that they were lying in bed upstairs in an old fashioned house while their parents had friends over below, and that, if they could just climb out of bed to sit on the stairs, they would be positioned to sneak their heads around the corner and see them, the grown-ups in all their glamour—dancing, laughing, drinking, flirting, beautiful in the living room. But the sheets were soft and the pillows softer, and even in their dreams, they couldn’t rise to see what it was they most desired to see.