For him, Slawa, with anvil and hammer, a lifetime or many lives spent as a serf, a peon, kulak, coolie, slave. The blood of the lowly has run in his veins for a thousand years. What do they know of Beriya and the KGB and his one hundred years of cabbage and rotten fish in the loony bin?
In his youth he memorized great chunks of poetry: Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pushkin. Samizdat-style he could recite hundreds of pages at a time. Now he remembers none of it. How can that be? It is as if a file up there has been deleted. It will soothe him, he thinks, to find something familiar. He tries now to find something on the computer, types in Akhmatova, under a variety of spellings, under a number of search engines, but the only things that come up: BUY AKHMATOVA ON EBAY; EGYPTIAN ANKHS; TOVA FELDSHUH.
It is almost dawn before he drifts to sleep in the hot chemical air of the shoe repair shop; momentarily the cats have stopped their mewling; he dreams of Alga, his first wife. Alga had been young when the first signs of reeTVO.9 began. He would come home and find her standing in the kitchen, staring into space and even after three or four “hellos”, she still remained in that kind of trance.
Meanwhile on the stove the butter in the fry pan long since melted, first the honey-gold picking up to a sizzle, browning, browning, growing dark and then, zzzzz! That moment from brown to burnt, nothing remaining but an acrid smell and the dull hissing of the furious pan, such a long trip from cow udder, even to get to cow udder, four stomachs, the cud regurgitated, green and fetid, you could go through each single step, no, it was impossible.
Before they left the house, she couldn’t find her pocketbook, her glasses, in the house her glasses disappear, there are sunglasses and there are glasses for reading and there are bifocals, nobody will get any laser treatment any more, not since two million people who had had the lasik went blind overnight! The house keys, she puts them down and the next time she tries to go out they are gone; the frozen TV dinners are underneath the bed, the hologramovision controls are in the refrigerator; the scissors, her left shoe, the steel wool, the list of – where could they possibly have gone?
It is in this sense that inanimate objects are animate. She is convinced objects have lives, thoughts and feelings of their own. And she is convinced, too, they are out to get her. What if she is right? He has noticed tiny quartz crystals appearing here and there all over the house, as if someone had cried and the tears froze; or flaming pieces of toast leaping out of the toaster across the room, flames made solid; knobs spontaneously falling from doors, leaving in their wake a trail of tiny wires, screws, door-knob innards of springs and pink rubber.
For Alga things rapidly got worse – admittedly she was quite young but in a sense this was a relief, whatever is wrong with her isn’t his fault. All this time his irritation with her had progressed as well. He could not help himself. “Alga, what the hell’s the matter with you! How many times do I have to tell you:
Pick up your dirty laundry from the floor
Bring your dirty dishes to the kitchen
Separate plastic, glass and metal
Turn off the lights when you leave a room
Don’t leave the water running
After you take a shower
open the window in the bathroom
Close the refrigerator door
Don’t mix coloreds with the whites
Lower the volume or you’ll go deaf
Did you hear me?
Are you listening?
Close the cap tightly
Write it down.
Write it
Down.”
It did no good to tell her these things. Whimpering, sobbing, she told him he was mean. Also she had become oversexed, lascivious; she followed him around leering, rubbing up against him, trying to get him, humpity, humpity, twitching bunny.
It did her no good.
They had never had what you might call a passionate sex life; now she was mentally the age of ten, mind going backward, only body headed the other way, rapidly.
One day he opened the front door and a flood of water – which even in those days was gray, though at least it did run when you turned on the tap – flowed out over his feet. Alga had put the stopper in the bath and left the water on, before going out… “Slawa!” she yelled in horror when she arrived home some time later and found him mopping, mopping. “What has happened, what did you do?”
“What did I do? Me? You’re the one who is a danger, you turn everything around you into some kind of weapon! What were you thinking of?”
He starts listing her crimes only she starts talking at the same time; the two of them are involved in some kind of weird ancient poetry slam, Keats versus Grandmaster Flash:
“Of? Of? Don’t dangle your participles at me young man! Of what were you thinking?” “What was I thinking of?”
He never dangled his participles again. He gave up, what was the point? There is no choice. He waits months for a place and finally is allowed her admission into La Galleria Senior Mall and Residence Home for the Young at Heart.
In much the same way as the inhabitants are falling apart, so is this place.
It is a nightmare.
Most of the escalators are permanently defunct, the glass elevators often break halfway up or down, leaving ten or fifteen sick and old people – who usually crowd in beyond the maximum number – hanging in mid-air, unable to surmise what has happened. Though sometimes, forces combined, they’ve been known to gather enough
The Dangling of
Of
Alga, of what you are thinking?
Eggs. egglike, ovoid and yet
Always before you know my clothes:
that milk tooth – is that what it is called?
Whites in hot water. Whites in hot water!
Poking out; a kind of pecking at the universe
Not cold. This is not you. But it is you.
trying to hatch or maybe already broken
You put the eggs on the edge
In hot water albumen turns white –
of shelf! Eggs hit me on head!
I do not laugh. There is no yolk.
And crack. Why you laugh at this?.
What is this? Why it’s an F – for fish!
But worse, even: you boil six
There is an O for oval, and there is an F
Eggs. Saucepan you leave on the lit
O,f! O,f! O,f, O!O-F-O-F-O-F-O-F-OF
burner boils away. And the stench
OF OF OF OF Of, Of, Of, Of, Of, Egg
Of burnt eggs, the ceiling black
and Chicken. Chicken and Egg
Why? Alga, Why? How can you forget.
They are both at the same time
When real eggs are so rare, expensive,
Cluck cluck
Eggs today like caviar in days of old, but those eggs
cluck
Were from a fish.
strength to crash out the glass elevator walls and occasionally tumble several stories to the ground floor of the atrium below in what could be mistaken for a group suicide.
In addition to working all day for his uncle, Slawa puts in hours on the weekends and at night as well, driving the “limo”, a town car, in order to pay the monthly fees at the home. He has little time to sleep, even less time to visit Alga in the home, though he goes whenever he can.
One day at the Senior Mall he found himself chatting with a guy who also had a wife in there. “They’re saying within a few years three-quarters of the population is going to come down with this kind of reeTVO.9 thing, brains slowly turning to spider webs, cotton bolls, ectoplasm, gelatin, candy floss, kapok, what have you, fluffy nebulous stuff; thousands upon thousands are coming down with this disease, this virus, whatever it is, hey, I have inside information they don’t want the rest of you to know, pretty soon millions will walk the streets gibbering, still human but without a brain.”
Finally he escapes by saying he has to go find his wife; at last he spies her in the Music Room, which had once, in a previo
us incarnation, housed a Food Court. Today’s activity: Sing-A-Long. Generally these days Alga is past being able to participate but this day, as he sat down beside the boarded-up Wok On (where once Chinese food and Japanese sushi sat in their sad world of stainless steel trays), he sees her singing, mouthing, at least, the words to Like A Virgin, an old song, perhaps played to her in her childhood, and he finds that tears well in his eyes as he listens to the words: “Like a virgin, touched for the very first time. Like a virgin, when your heart beats next to mine,” sung so sweetly and badly out of tune by listless shufflers, the dazed and mentally confused staring off into space, some of whom wear helmets for their own protection, others in wheelchairs, or rolled in on wheeled beds, only able to weakly flail arms and grimace from time to time, either to the music or as indication that sheets are in need of a change.
“Right!” exclaims the sprightly instructor LaVitra. “How many of you remember Gwen Stefani and her number one hit, Hollaback Girl!”
No response. But LaVitra is determined, she’s got the microphone in her hand and goes from person to person; still no response. “Can you believe this, Keith?” She’s talking to the keyboard player; neither of them can believe that this is where they ended up, both of them had such plans and dreams, they were even once on a TV program! Now, in order to pay the rent they have to travel one day here, one day at another place, all the time singing these senior ancient songs, maybe they could even have their own show on TV, like, the Lawrence Whelk Show or something? Singing, I Can’t Get No Satisfaction or…
“Oh, I don’t believe this! Nobody here remembers Hollaback Girl? Let me try and refresh you all – Oooh, ooh, this is my shit, oooh ooh, this is my shit – come on, everybody join in – oooh, ooh…”
Keith on the electric keyboard tries to energize the crowd, he claps his hands over his head, “Let me hear you put your hands together!” until finally, some dull glimmer of recognition and one or two join in.
“Okay then!” says LaVitra enthusiastically, “How about some requests! Anybody?”
An old lady in the front pipes up, “Do you know Too Drunk to Fuck by The Dead Kennedys?” Nervously the music therapist looks over at the keyboard player, “Keith? Ever hear of that one?”
Keith shakes his head, “Oh boy! Nope! My goodness that must be a real Oldie-but-Goody, huh? And to think I thought I knew them all! You got me stumped!”
“How about anybody else?”
“Um… I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For?”
“Yeah, who doesn’t know that one, from that famous Nobel Prize two-time winning pop star who founded Shop to Help the Poor! Okay, this time I want to hear everybody sing, at least on the chorus, a-one and a two – ‘I have kissed honey lips, felt the healing in her fingertips it burned like fire, this burning desire. But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for’.”
The old people are pierced and tattooed, they have rings through their noses and lips; this is useful because when they wander off they can be chained to their beds or hooks screwed into the corridor walls; the tattoos on the flabby drooping skin have warped, melted, silly-putty shapes of what was once a rose or a faux-Maori symbol, eagles with saggy beaks, skulls with bared teeth that now need dental work from moles and skin tags and warts that look like chips and cavities.
The old ladies have huge breasts, so old they date back to the days when women had them implanted before tiny breasts became the fashion – all the women have them. It’s not even their fault. It dates back to some kind of medical/drug company scandal. At one time virtually all women were diagnosed – falsely, as it turned out – with breast cancer. They had all gotten the big boobies. The men are so wrinkly it is clear they date back to the days before men had face-lifts.
And their clothing! It is so last year! What could they have been thinking, that styles remain unchanged since their youth when they wore blue jeans and stiletto heels? Or had silky straight hair and plucked eyebrows?
Slawa can’t help but fume. He is going to strangle someone! It is boiling up in him, it is all so pathetic. How could they have let a man win a Nobel Prize who doesn’t know he has written C- lyrics that include a sentence ending with a preposition!! It should be… I still haven’t found the object for which I was looking! English isn’t even his first language but he knows better than that! Talk about a cliché! “Honey lips/burning desire”. But those old people – well, some of them aren’t that old, they are just brainless, missing dendrites, neurons, synapses, glucose – they are all singing along in a funereal dirge, it’s not even a song!! It’s a dirge! If Bononobo – whatever his name – was here he would personally strangle him!! Long since dead, go on, award the Famous Celebrities all the money and prizes, why?
All that was a long time ago…
And it rains. It rains. Snows, and rains; this is followed by tornado and then one hundred twenty degrees. But mostly, now, the rain. And when it rains the water never goes anywhere, it stays in the troughs of the street that turn into canals. The whole damn place a temporary Venice of spittle, soot, papers, oysters of phlegm, dog poop, the rain water combines with chemical waste and tranny fluid, bilious acid green, luminous, iridescent. Chemical salts, left over from winter, strange rubbery clusters blossom in damp doorways, and the New Yorkers spend all their time scratching their heads, the stuff goes on the sidewalk, dander, flakes, the fingernail parings, bits of old dental floss, earwax scraped out with a fingernail and rubbed off to the pavement. You can put the stuff on an agar plate and blistering forms of life hitherto unknown to man will blossom, not that anybody ever does this but… still, there it is, all getting washed down and mixed together, the drops from an almost empty can of soda pop, dregs from paper coffee cups, bird droppings, swollen crumbs from bagels and pizza rinds.
The original primordial ooze only supercharged and ready to pop even if the entire rest of the planet and all mankind and animal life finds itself nuked! This stuff is so highly ionized – positive and negative – it could burst into life in a day, if given the chance, and a day – or more – is what it took for the soup to drain, even when the sun comes out.
Which in a way is what happens. The grates, the cesspools, the swamp at the corner of each block is… how deep? A foot, two feet, deep with run-off because somehow the city had been designed in such a way that no water ever could run off. Maybe the drains are clogged, or simply higher than the rest of the sidewalk, and meanwhile you have to be extra careful, the battery acid in the water simply corrodes the insulation on the electrics, every other day someone is quite randomly… electrocuted! And on the first sunny day, when the temperature rockets to a hundred and twenty, the water doesn’t drain but begins to grow. It has turned powdery yet eggy, like that trick sand under water that stays dry, the lemon eggy color, only a bit lighter, and swells so rapidly it takes over the sidewalks and begins to seep down the steps leading into the subways, swelling and heaving; and if you touch it it burns your skin, just the top layer, but doesn’t hurt – but then, at least according to what’s on the news, you are prone to infections and this swollen dry yellow… spongiform feeds off the skin, stuff stinks like sulfur and can’t be washed off the street by water. Water only makes it sizzle and puff up! It’s an ecological disaster! However, a couple days later the temperature always drops, it goes below freezing and the dry mold cracks, splits, crumbles and disappears and within a day or two no one remembers anything.
There is something Slawa is supposed to buy. He has written it down but where is the paper, what is the object? A switch-cable-timer? A quart of milk? And in this filth he heads out once again. Fortunately the freeze seems to have gotten rid of the hard-boiled yolky substance, now once again it is hot and raining; the hot soup pours out of the sky. Hot! Today the rain coming down is so hot they say it is killing the birds – not that many are left – and it is practically raining chicken noodle soup.
You have to wear a self-cooling polyvinyl raincoat and hat in order not to be scalded. Who’s ever
heard of rain with bits and pieces in it, my God, the worst days he had spent as a kid in Russia when the smoke rose from the factories black and tactile hadn’t been as bad as this. Only on the ground the pipe-worms came up, pink and coily. He makes his way gently, picking across the ponds that have gathered in every corner; the puddles are four feet deep in some spots when… all of a sudden, wham! He goes down, flat on his back.
At first he thinks, I must have slipped? Though, how odd, he hadn’t felt himself to be slipping, and, my God, his head, which, when he puts a hand to it, he realizes is dripping with something sticky. As if he has landed in melted ice cream? He hit the curb?
But no, someone is standing over him, yelling, pointing, smashing, it’s Bocar’s uncle, what is he doing here, holding something… What’s the old fellow’s name, Assam? Kamal? Ibrahim? “Oh, hello…” he says weakly, and holds out his arm, assuming that Aboud would recognize him and help him up but no, all too late he realizes it is Aboud who has brought him down and the guy is holding a bat in his hands, an all-American Louisville slugger, the name of which he can now see as Aboud slams the bat down over his chest. “Ooouuugh!” he yelps, and hears something crunch.
“Listen to me. Where is Bocar? You send him back to me, you understand? I know he is with you. Because of you I am in trouble, I have vouched for this youth and accepted the money. I am not going to jail for no reason, you send him back to me or…” And with one final blow of the bat, this time across the upraised right knee, Aboud disappears into the salty rain, leaving Slawa in the gutter while the traffic lights change from red to green and back again.
He doesn’t move. The hot rain stings where he is not covered with the raingear. And when he tries to rise at last, curiously, finds he cannot move. Now the pain replays, fast forward, slow motion, slight variations on a theme. Finally, crawling, a limp invertebrate creature dragging itself through the murk, he becomes aware that people are looking at him oddly. He puts his hand up to his head and finds it is covered with blood. It’s hard to breathe, something crackles in his chest, a bowl of rice crisps unsoftened by milk or popcorn, the sharp kernels scraping his throat.
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