They Is Us

by Tama Janowitz

  “And, um, on the ice cream, gimme the sprinkles, okay? The ones that look like little bugs? Julie, ya want sprinkles?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “What’s a matter, you don’t like sprinkles?”

  “They don’t have any taste!” she says.

  “Oh ho ho ho,” Cliffort says. “They have a taste to me, kind of, you know, peppery. That’s very funny, that you say they don’t have a taste!”

  She can’t figure out why he thinks this is amusing. But then, so often people laugh at things she says that aren’t funny. He asks Julie to hold his ice cream while he tips the nuggets out into his hand and somehow, Julie doesn’t quite see how, pops them into his mouth even though his hand is green ectoplasm. One green hand on the wheel, the other feeding his face, Cliffort makes a turn a few miles away into Wilfredo Rosado Memorial Fun Park. Some years earlier the State Homeland Conservationism Partnership required all the NJ schoolchildren to collect money to fund the construction of a mountain built with New Jersey garbage. The mountain, close to half the height of Everest, and a quarter the length of the Himalayas, is covered with a simple layer of rubber from recycled tires. There will, some day, be bicycle trails, hiking and climbing areas, spelunking caves, rubber luge runs and so forth.

  The dumping ground is already a quarter of its predicted future height. A vast mountain visible for a hundred miles, swarming with the only birds tough enough to survive, bio-adapted seagulls, some of which have four or five legs; beaks resembling needle-nosed pliers. Others are a mixture, some of which were someone’s stupid genetic muddling of seagull-chicken-hawks. These are basically the only birds left since the bird ’flu of 2018 wiped out one billion people. These birds will attack like hawks, and eat anything. They have dandruff, which is white; along with their white droppings, the whole black rubber surface is speckled.

  Cliffort is slurping on his vanilla cellulose ice cream, oblivious, apparently, to the fact that the inside of the van smells and feels like a damp tropical swamp. She unrolls the window but the odor is so hideous she quickly rolls it up again. “Come on, let’s go out for a little walk,” he says. “Ya better not wear your sister’s shoes, they’ll get filthy.”

  “I can’t walk out there barefoot, what if I step in something?”

  Julie’s nervous, the Wilfredo Rosado Park has a bad reputation. People leave bodies here. The gases continuously produced, the oils and unguents that form the slurry, the plastic bags and shredded papers, sections made of rotting clothes… cans, plastic pop bottles, pikes, peaks, faux karst, cairns, ridges, alluvial deposits. A dry river of glittering glass shards, white and green and brown. A volcanic outcropping emits a greenish snot-like material that boils up and oozes down one side.

  “Don’t worry about it, I’ll make sure where you walk.”

  The peculiar smell, the burnt sourness, brings back all the horrors of the plane crash. Her nose begins to prickle, her eyes sting. Beneath her feet, the tops of soup cans, rusted bedspreads, rotten compost, piles of green meats. From the top of a pile of stuff in thick black trash bags he looks around and calls to her, “Damn, there’s some good stuff down there. Look at that sofa, looks like it might be vintage Sears.”

  “Cliffort,” she says, “Everything’s looking so odd to me, I think I can tell what’s wrong with you, you sort of have, I dunno, extra nostrils on the side of your nose. Or, is that like because you once had piercings there?”

  “What? Piercings? How ancient do you think I am?”

  It takes all of her strength but she blurts it out, he is so cool, “I really have a crush on you, Cliffort, please don’t let anything happen to you, I think I might be in love with you.”

  He scowls. “Right. Let’s get something straight. I likes my women tough and independent, not whinging and needy and lovey-dovey. I have a crush on you, too, but I think it will be better if we call things quits now, okay? ’Cause you’re just too soft for me.”

  He has a crush on her too! Only… she has screwed things up, big time, by being needy. Panicked, she changes tack and asks, “Can I ask you something? Do you think I should have my labia done?”

  “What, the labia minora stretching?”

  “Mmmm. Like, a lot of my friends have done it at Shrimp Chips?”

  “Wouldn’t know about that. I’m a toe man, myself. More on the receiving end, if you know what I mean.”

  “Ouch!” Something sharp jabs her foot.

  “Now what’s wrong?” he says irritably.

  “Nothing. I mean, I cut my foot, like, no big deal.”

  “You cut your foot? Oh, Julie, ya didn’t get hurt did you? Is there blood? Oh dear oh dear, let me have a look.”

  She doesn’t know what any of this is about, why is he acting so nice to her? He carries her back to the car. “Curp!” he says, “Just look at them tootsies, absolutely filthy, aren’t they!”

  Julie loves being carried.

  “You’d better let me have a look, make sure they’re not hurt, clean ’em off a bit.”

  To her surprise, horror even, he positions her left foot in the middle of his lap, then picks up the other with his webbed fingers and begins to lick. His tongue is sticky between her toes; from time to time she sees it, fried-bologna pink, a slender tubular shape. Having her toes suckled doesn’t feel particularly pleasant and she is nervous that, since they are so dirty, he might get a disease.

  After a while she tries to get free. All she had been hoping for, really, was that they would kiss. Surely this is not what lovemaking is supposed to be?

  “Oh fuck, Julie,” he says, eyes glassy, “Julie, don’t pull away now, you’ve gotten me all aroused, don’t do this to me. I want you to stick one in my hearse.”

  “What?” she says. “Your hearse?”

  “My arse, Julie, my arse. You’ve got the fattest toes I’ve ever seen and from the moment I met you I knew how funky they were going to be. Plump little bugs! Julie, I’ll do anything for you, you gotta help me out.”

  She is nauseous. “I want to go home,” she says in a peeved tone.

  “Just help me out then, Julie, I swear, I’ll do whatever you want,” he whines, unzipping his fly. “Look, nothing down there,” he says, cheerfully fierce, as he tugs down his pants.

  “Oh, Cliffort.” A queasy sorrow sweeps over her. She doesn’t know what to say, really, the dry crumbling of dead beetle wings, a crackling of tired stars.

  “See? I gotta tongue, though, and I still got a prostate! That’s why a good toe fuck is fun, right up my little pink cloaca, see it winking at you? Otherwise, there’s nothing down there. Let poor old Cliff have a little pleasurable frottage, if you’re so unkind you won’t do the other. I’ll just rub along your backside, save you the worry of premature deflowering.”

  She’s too embarrassed to ask him what deflowering means. Something to do with waxing, she thinks, trying to distract herself. It’s kind of horrifying: he is completely smooth between his legs. Before she can stop him he’s got her doggy style and pulling her shirt up and her pants down he grabs her arms with his, holds her down and begins to rub up and down on her. His skin against hers feels so soft, hairless and moist. He rubs and grinds and something hot and fetid spills out across her backside, the area between where he has yanked her shirt higher and her pants lower. He takes her hand and he twists it behind her back, rubs it into some hot sticky stuff.

  “Crapaud!” he says. “Excuse my French, but behold! My spawn. There’s quite a bit of it, too, going to waste, alas.” Turning business-like: “There’s a paper towel in the back, or maybe some tissue in the glove compartment. Give me a little tidy, my special lady, and you probably need to clean up, too.” She wipes his smooth pale skin, so sticky the tissue clings to it. “Tomorrow if I can get some quosh I’ll take you for a pedicure. Maybe you can lend me?” He sits up. Then an odd expression comes over his face and he begins to cough, again and again, a desperate sound. “Damn,” he says. “That stupid mucormycosis amphibiarum. It’s back. I thoug
ht I was through with it. They say the climate’s too dry for me, I should live where it’s moist. That’s why I settled by the swamp but it doesn’t seem to be doing the trick, does it?” He coughs again and with a pained expression begins to search around for a drink.

  A pleased young man

  But on the drive back to her house, Cliffort starts to seem pleased with himself. “Didn’t think I could get aroused any more without taking Erector,” he says. “You must be quite good for me, haven’t heard of any landsmen not needing Erector or something else, not in years. Don’t think I could fuck a pussy, though, not the way I’m built. You won’t mention it to anyone, will you Julie, about my being microcephallic? I can still gratify a woman, I’ve got quite a tongue, after all, compensates a bit. But I tell you what: if you can get yourself some birth control, I’ll get myself a strap-on prosthesis, we’ll have a go at it, shall we?”

  Julie’s not sure what this means but she doesn’t like the sound of it.

  A few hours later they pull up in the drive. Murielle hasn’t been worried, exactly, but if Dad is going to stay in her home she realizes she now needs Cliffort more than she previously thought. She can’t get into Dad’s bedroom and Dad won’t come out; he is either smoking crait in there or has set fire to something. “Oh, where were you?” she says. “What took you so long?” Then she sees Cliffort’s expression, that of a cat who has stolen a particularly savory bit of sausage from the kitchen counter. Julie is looking queasy.

  “Cliffort, see what you can do about Almuncle. I’m afraid the whole house is going to go up in flames. He’s smoking crait, I don’t know where he got it, but it sure makes him nasty.”

  “Dear oh dear oh dear,” says Cliffort. “Can’t imagine where he got it, that stuff’s dangerous. I’m just going to brush my teeth and then I’ll go and have a word with him.”

  On the top step Julie leans over and throws up into the dirt at the bottom of the steps on top of the plastic rhododendron.

  16

  Out the window of the plane a wall can be seen, made of old cars, hundreds of stories high. Then, beyond this, a terrible boiled area, fissured oozing primordial stuff, black and tarry, steam rising here and there. “What’s that?” Tahnee says.

  “What?” says A. Jesse. He is surprised Tahnee has not been squealing with excitement: her first airplane ride, the private plane (which even A. Jesse has to admit is pretty splendid, lined as it is in rare and exotic reclaimed tropical woods allegedly found in old barns and railways and hand-knotted Oriental carpets, where each square inch takes an eleven-year-old girl up to a month to knot, eventually permanently crippling her hands, etc.). But this has had little or no effect on her; only now does she express even vague interest.

  “All that stuff… the black glop… what is it, how long does it go on?”

  The plane has risen now through the clouds. “Don’t they teach you kids anything in school these days? That’s from when the USA lost the war.”

  “The USA never lost any war!” Tahnee says. “They taught us that much, at least.”

  “You’re kidding? Well, that’s not true, we did lose a war, after we turned over what they were calling Israel to the Palestinian peoples and then the Palestinians joined up with Syria and…” He can see she’s tuning out already. “I did tell the President at that time, all we needed to do was give every Palestinian a house and hologramovision and computer with unlimited free wireless access and a halal McDonald’s, that would have been an end to the fighting.”

  “That’s not something they ever told us in school. You’re just making it up. The land between New Jersey and Nature’s Caul is Our National Forest for the Preservation of the Snail Darter.”

  It is remarkable, watching an empty mind struggling to think. A clock casing without any mechanism inside, so you had to push the hands to make them go around. Either that, or wait until it was correct – twice a day. A. Jesse gives a snort.

  “Anyway,” says Tahnee, “you’re boring. All I wanted to know is what is that glop down there?”

  “If you’d listen to me…” She is so beautiful, he can’t bear it. Milky pearls, oh Lady Guineviere, is she the same as the Lady of the Lake, blue and cold, eyes the color of crushed moonstone? All that and her little rump, sassy as a filly. He sighs with appreciation. “As I was saying, we lost that war and we had to agree to take their garbage and radioactive waste for twenty years and unfortunately it kind of filled up the middle of the USA because we didn’t have anywhere else to put it. What a mess, I told them not to but they insisted and covered it over with used tires that were melted down; they said, ‘Oh, this will be great, the whole Midwest will be drivable surface.’ Well, look what happened! The rubber stayed liquid, which I told them it would when the nuclear waste heated up the garbage. But did they listen?”

  “Oh, yeah,” says Tahnee, “That’s exactly what they’re doing in New Jersey, not too far away, a garbage mountain covered with rubber. It’s really cool, it’s going to have mountain climbing and…”

  “Covered with rubber tires?”

  “Yeah, they liquefy the tires, and pour it over the whole place and –”

  “Great.” A. Jesse sighs. “Same old, same old, eh?”

  Tahnee sneers, a barely imperceptible curl of the lip upon which he surfs, higher and higher before being abruptly tossed, face down into the cold sand. “Don’t you listen to anybody?” she says.

  Even as she glares, he is smitten, he will ride her every emotion. He can’t bear her ignorance, the dichotomy between her looks and brains is too vast. He shifts, trying to balance. He will teach her what she needs to know! “Then, right after that, we lost the West Coast states. They were aware of what might happen if we kept setting off those underwater explosions, but they expected the other countries would break apart, not ours.”

  “I’m going to sleep.” She looks at him with disdain, a dainty twitch of the nostrils, and shuts her eyes. He can’t believe he is finally alone with her, and will be, for as long as he wants. But he needs time to think. Perhaps she is clever, far cleverer than he had imagined. The gaping ignorance is an act, the bird pretending to be the hungriest in the nest to get the worm. She cannot be forced into anything, he sees that now, even if she is, for all intents and purposes, his property.

  The evening fades from ochre to umber, or perhaps from pale-violet to foamy-blue with vestigial wisps of cumulonimbus clouds and in the distance the sun, a risible bloody eye, glares balefully on its descent to the horizon. “Wow, now what do you think that is?” says A. Jesse, hoping to get Tahnee’s attention somehow. In the distance a plume of brilliant red and yellow fire spews straight up into the sky and spits out chunks brighter than the mournful sun. “Do you see that?”

  “Yeah, so?” Tahnee is uninterested. “What is it, like, an amusement park?”

  “That’s the volcano!” says A. Jesse, using a tone of voice he might use in addressing a three-year-old and one he instantly regrets when he sees her even more disgusted expression.

  “If you knew what it was, why did you ask me?”

  But he is unable to stop himself. “Watch, oh, look look! Thar she blows, good old faithful, Mt. Dallas-Ft. Worth Volcano! Isn’t it exciting?”

  “You got any steet?”

  “No.” Should he tell her she’s not allowed to use any while she’s around him? But then, no doubt, she’ll just go out to do it someplace else. “Anyway, in a few minutes we are going to make a stop to allow someone very special onto the plane, would you like to know who?”

  “No. So, then, got any crait?”

  He shakes his head. “Not with the Special Someone about to board! But, before I tell you who, there’s just one other thing I think you’ll be interested to learn. Now, in the Nature’s Caul Morphew Valley, many years before California was destroyed by the earthquake and volcano and tidal waves, the new Idaho coast formed; the wealthiest, most forward thinkers bought property and secured protection for themselves by building a canal to the East! A
nd here all was lush and verdant. Admittedly the coastline was rocky except where they had put artificial sand beaches and the water not what it once was in terms of cleanliness. Still, the best people, our kind, had the coastline and they were only minutes away from the Grand Tetons, just a short distance for excellent ski conditions. It was a natural reserve for wildlife even though it was not open to the other side on the east. The West Coast tragedy left a huge spit of land, Nature’s Caul peninsula, inland from Boise, and up through the mountains where a narrow spit ends before the rest of the New West Coast. So, the garbage and radioactive material in the long run proved for the best for the American people, since it ends exactly where the Happy Nature’s Caul region begins and therefore it remains a private and secluded enclave for those who can appreciate it!”

  Mt. Dallas, Ft. Worth volcano erupts

  “Whatever.” She is watching the President on HGMTV, who is asking the audience to select A, B, or C on their remote to choose their favorite spot where the wedding will take place. For security purposes all three locations are within the Nature’s Caul, but terrain is so varied inside the perimeter that the choices are breathtaking, be it the pink sands and palm trees of the turquoise ocean; the magnificent snow-capped mountain range; the open skies and vast prairie of the plains.

  “I pick the turquoise ocean,” says Tahnee to the HGMTV.

  “Good choice!” says the little 3-D hologram guy who pops out of the corner of the screen when Tahnee presses A. “Why did you pick that, Tahnee?”

  The President is still babbling in the background.

  “I guess… I don’t know. I guess, even though I burn really easily, I like to swim?”

  The plane has now descended in the darkness onto an illuminated runway strip. The doors open and a foul smell blows in, that of things burning that were never meant to be burned, plastic and polychlorides, batteries and aerosol canisters; but it is only for a minute, long enough to let the US President in and the doors are shut once again.