Читать книгу They Is Us - Tama Janowitz - Страница 10

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 ordinary case 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.