They Is Us

by Tama Janowitz

  His cats are dying. Some are already dead. They have returned from their prowls to die at the letterbox. He knows there is nothing he can do. He is hardening, the shell of a newly molted crustacean becoming strong.

  He stays up all night making the time bomb, which he wraps in plastic, ready to take along; he writes a note explaining that what will happen will be for Bocar. Not for anyone to read. But to leave behind.

  It is odd to be so detached. He thinks of himself as a compassionate person who has been pushed to the very edge; it is the only way any changes can be made in the system. The system is designed for the rich to get richer. The system is designed to continue killing the poor and the meek. If there had been a way to target, say, those in government, those of the ruling class – those who ruled by virtue of having the most money! – he would have done so. There is no way, not one that he could see, other than what he had to do; is doing.

  “Allah’s will be done.” He scribbles on the paper as he hears the banging upstairs. Probably he will be caught very soon. He would have liked to make hajj, at least once, before he dies or is sent to prison where he will die – but there is no way now.

  “There is no god but Allah.”

  Upstairs the banging, the police? He grabs his stuff and the time bomb, goes out through the way he has come in, an underground passage through the nightclub into the subway tunnel. From there he picks his way, carefully, in the dark, staying far from the third rail. At the nearest station he pulls himself up onto the platform, just as a subway train is arriving. What luck; sometimes they don’t come for an hour, even longer, and when they do the cars are packed, and so many on the platform there have been times when hundreds have been pushed by the others onto the tracks and were electrocuted.

  How long will it take to walk home to what had once been his home? A day? Two days, sleeping somewhere on a roadside overnight? He has no food, no water – the air is sour, yeasty gray. He is weary now. After all, he was used to doing long enforced marches, he is from Russia, isn’t he? Or… Anyway, he is used to long marches somewhere. Siberia? Siege of Leningrad? Does it matter?

  In fifty billion years the sun will shrink to the size of a desk. The sun will be no bigger than a watch, then a thimble, a grain of rice. Then it will die. And on that grain of rice will be everything that ever was.

  So much, he now sees, for which there had not been time. Yet he has done so very much! He has studied Gurdjieff; he has been a boxer, not pro, but without protection, no helmet, and, briefly, a pro wrestler. He has sold illegal vodka and he has for a year had his own cat circus. He has had a child. He has loved and been loved.

  Slawa attaches the bomb with pink putty, far back under the subway seat. It looks and feels like an old wad of gum. Is that the whole device? Seems so little, something, some part, left off? He rummages in his pocket. Oh God, the fried finger stuck into the burnt ring. His daughter’s finger, he is certain. Who else’s could it be? He had given that ring to her. He thinks. From Russia. Once belonging to royalty. Let them be together, bomb and finger and time for eternity. He pushes the finger deep into the putty.

  He is sure now that Bocar is dead. Bocar has told him, somehow. He has communicated from the Great Beyond. Bocar has told him the time bomb is so big it will have, as its ground zero, the subway car. Then will spread, slowly, out further and further. The timer is set to go off in forty-eight hours, to give him time, even though he knows there he can never really get away. He slaps the bomb in place, presses the starter and then at the next stop gets off the train.

  23

  When Julie wakes she has no clue where she is, or what has happened. For a moment she thinks she is back in her own bedroom, at home. It is only then that she realizes Sue Ellen is no longer with her. The moldering dampness is gone, yippee! She is so relieved, but where is Breakfast? Her mom?

  Her mother is gone, and the dog, and Dyllis. They don’t dare return to the campsite; Cliffort will be taken somewhere – it is against the law to be homeless; Julie will be hauled off to foster care. Julie wants her daddy.

  “Cliffort,” she says. “Do you think we’re going the right way? I wish you could talk. I wish you could tell me who did this to you. Cliffort, I want to find my daddy.”

  He croaks something that sounds like, “Me, too,” and nods, pointing to his throat. She thinks this means yes. They set out in silence, picking their way through rusted refrigerators, heaps of tires, past mounds of heavy-duty trash bags which had been tossed from cars or trucks, years ago, never collected… And with every minute, now that the moldering wet spot is gone, the boiling inside Julie grows worse. Now she goes on boiling, faster and faster, each cell exploding in turn, and she is in constant pain, not so awful but tiny, sharp and constant. But perhaps equally as terrible her skin is peeling in sheets, layer after layer, as it is being cooked, though no one could say where the heat was coming from except that in a sense her own body is burning itself up, as eventually so do all stars.

  Dyllis is always so cheerful but now she is getting tired. And her lavender feather donkey grows weaker and weaker. Murielle has to keep removing their items from the panniers the donkey carries, but even that is no good, and emitting a sound that is a cross between a bray and a crow, it keels over – poor little thing, dead in the dirt, and the bright eyes of rats peep from dirt holes and pipes, only waiting politely for them to leave so they can begin a carrion feast.

  Dyllis is also looking sickly; she darts behind refuse every few minutes to relieve herself. “You okay?” asks Murielle.

  Dyllis shrugs. It is odd but she feels she is running out of words.

  Both Murielle and Dyllis are thinking, is it cholera? Typhus or yellow fever? Whatever it is, Dyllis can’t go on any more. She has only a few words to say. “I can’t go on.”

  “But we must go on! Just a little further, we’ll find somewhere to stop for the night.” Murielle can’t help her much, she has to carry Breakfast, it is too difficult for him to walk now on his tender, blistered pads.

  “I’m sorry. Thank you, Mama. Where we going, Mama?”

  “We’re trying to get to your daddy’s, poor doggy.” In her fatigue, loveliness has come over her, she is kind, the dog wags its tail, how gently she carries him, cradling him in her arms.

  “How far?” Breakfast asks.

  “I don’t know, I guess… it’s gotta be, what, thirty miles away? We’ll have to sleep somewhere, eventually, and keep walking in the morning, maybe we can go along the highway, don’t worry, honey, Mama’s in charge… Come, Dyllis, I think I see something.”

  In the darkness, ahead, is a fire, not too large… Rapists? Not too likely, there really aren’t any men around capable of sex, let alone those who want to have it with a woman… Murderers? Perhaps, but then one speaks to her in such a polite tone, somehow… old-fashioned, courtly. “Ma’am?”

  She coughs. “Hello… Mind if we join you?”

  The people around the campfire shift where they squat or sit, looking nervous. “Ma’am? Any chance you got any work fer us?”

  “Don’t any of you have a job?”

  The fire crackles gently. “Cain’t find no work, nowhere, ma’am.”

  Derelicts, homeless people, crazies… who knows… they must look pretty terrible by now themselves. She takes Dyllis by the elbow, the others make room. “Sorry about the dirt, ma’am.”

  One has a guitar and is strumming a few unfamiliar notes. “‘I’ve been doing some hard travelin’, this much I know…’”

  “My friend’s sick and my dog needs some water. We’re tired out and can’t go on. The government bulldozed my home and they hunted us down.” Murielle is weary, so weary, and though she hasn’t eaten in what seems like days she has shown no signs of weight loss. Is it her metabolism, then? If only she could lose even five pounds, then she would be happy. Maybe she could exercise, do crunches, Pilates, yoga – but without any strength, how can she?

  “I’m sure you’re welcome to join us.”


  “It’d be a right pleasure, ma’am.”

  She sits next to Dyllis and is given a little dish and a bottle of Nature’s Caul Morphew Valley Recycled Pure Export water. For a few minutes around the stinking rubber fire no one says anything. Then the man picks up his guitar again and another joins in, “‘…Brother can you spare a dime?’”

  “You know,” says another man after a pause, “That little lady, she’s got some kind of a ghost behind her, jes’ a-floatin’ there.”

  “Tha’s right,” says another, “mebbe we been out here too long, but I can see it too. Kinda… damp and gloomy, like.”

  Murielle knows nothing about any ghosts but at this remark a giant wet spot surrounds her and she is one with the wet spot.

  It is so vivid, so real, that she begins to wipe herself off with her skirt, then rummages in her bag for one of the fancy towels she had bought on sale at the ZWiport Discount Outlet Mall and had the sense to take with her.

  But the wet spot! It is scary. It is so sticky, so… gelatinous. It is as if she is far, far outside her body, up in the air, high above the planet, looking down at the stunted swirling seas and dusty continents, pink sand and black burning rubber tires. Or even higher, nothing but stars winking whitish blue phosphorescence in a sea of black emptiness. And someone screaming. What the heck, who is it? “Capitalist roader! Landowner. You no good. You eat and eat; I hungry all time.”

  “Oh no!” Murielle suddenly gets what Julie had always been blabbering about. “Now I’ve got to sleep on the wet spot!” She could have cried: the wet spot, she sees now, is the loneliest, meanest place in the world. “It’s Sue Ellen!”

  “You no even know my name, you calla me Sue Ellen, it Xie Yao Lin.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yes, I Red Guard in Cultural Revolution, I turn in my neighbors, I turn in my teacher, I turn in my mother and when I find my father has used Little Red Book in toilet, I turn him in too! When I am student, twelve years of age, we go by train to Beijing, trip very long, train crowded, I no paying attention, I fall out window, hit head, die!” Xie Yao Lin’s voice softens a bit. “Sometime I think, maybe I no fall, maybe I pushed, some girls, they maybe jealous, I am captain of squadron. But… anyway, it my own fault, my family not so good, I find Mother’s Guoylin statues under floor, I smash and turn her in! These things of the corrupt past, we must move to future! Also she take extra food from place of work, she serving State Dinners, this wrong! I send her for re-education! ‘Why, daughter, why?’ Mother is crying, ‘I only take food for you.’ This not true, it wrong! Now your turn to learn. You know nothing! In China, first thing you say, ‘Have you eaten?’ You never ask me if I have eaten, you are land-owning family.”

  But, she’s just a little girl! Xie Yao Lin, Murielle thinks, why are you bothering us?

  “Hole through planet,” Xie Yao Lin explains, “bad idea. Fell in. Little kids, we used to dig holes in ground and say, ‘Let’s dig all the way to USA!’ Now I miss my mama, especially her dumplings.”

  Here and there as Cliffort and Julie walk hand-in-hand, bits of green are sprouting through the asphalt cracks. Rapid-growing weeds, maybe non-indigenous, or hybridized mutations. It is nice to see green things, however, even if the tendrils do claw at them, hooking into flesh, as they go by. As they get closer to the city, there are more and more homeless people at campfires. “We bin ta war with them torrorists for more n’ eighty years now,” says an old man.

  “It’s the darn President,” says another. “He made an enemy of the country when he picked Robert Emmerling as GOP leader and Suki Fossing as Secretary of State.”

  “That’s for sure,” says the first. “And whaddaya think, the Mets going to make it to the finals this year?”

  “Dyllis? Dyllis, are you okay?”

  “I… I… I…” That is the last word Dyllis has left, and it is a short one. Then she dies.

  It is too late to help. Murielle would like to bury her, but her arms are too weak to dig even if she had a shovel. She would like to cry, but her eyes have no tears in them. Dry eye syndrome. With the dog, Murielle departs, hoping to find help. So it goes. Who mourns Dyllis? It made no difference. Dyllis is dead. Dead as a doornail? Doorknob? Doorbell? Who knows.

  Murielle forgets she wanted to find assistance in burying Dyllis. Murielle by now is miles away, at a different campfire, watching HDMTV. As always someone has one rigged up, somehow, to a generator or an engine. It occurs to Murielle that if she were alone, she could never make the slightest thing work; all of history, as far back as the Iron Age, even earlier, would be lost forever. No stainless steel, no cyclosporine, no telephone. There would be no hot and cold running fluids! Nor could she rub two sticks together to make a fire, nor repair an escalator, nor hunt with bow and arrow.

  “Everything okay there, ma’am?”

  Murielle shakes her head. She is being harangued once again by Xie Yao Lin, Little Miss-Know-It-All! Little Miss Red Guard is screaming at her, over and over, “You will be re-educated!” Her voice is the torment of a million flies. “You left your friend, she is dead! Now your beautiful decadent daughter is dying right this minute!”

  “Who?” says Murielle.

  “Number One daughter. You have no sons, you no good.”

  “What? Tahnee? What happened?”

  “She dead, she no good. She go with men for money. She have baby in belly, no married. Had to be punished! You will be sent for re-education. You cow-demon!”

  What is a cow-demon, anyway, Murielle wonders, watching the screen. A healthy blonde, fertile in appearance, announces in a superior tone, “Look around you. Doesn’t this look so green? We are working to save the environment from Homeland ecO2-terrorism. We are working to keep it green. This is thanks to Bermese Pythion and Great Divide Petroleum Coconut edible jelly products. You can contribute by sending your money to PO Box 1128…”

  “I don’t know what this thing is but it sure is something,” says one man.

  “What are you talking about?” says Murielle.

  “Ma’am? The big screen? We never seen nothing like it outside a motion pitcher house, and this one’s got the craziest pitchers on it I ever did see.”

  She squints in disbelief. “Where are you fellows from, anyway?”

  “Most of us… we lost our farms, dust bowl came and blew away our crops, an so the banks foreclosed –”

  “What? Farms? Where?”

  “Oklahoma, them parts.”

  “We thought we was heading for Californie,” says another. “They say the oranges just fall from the trees.”

  “They say there’s plenty of work out there,” said the first. “But, I don’t think this is the right place.”

  “What?” Murielle shakes her head. “You guys are nuts. California fell into the ocean years ago. You’re in New Jersey.”

  “New Jersey! I don’t understand. How’d we get in New Jersey?”

  “That’s east, ain’t it?” says the first, taking out his guitar and beginning to strum. “We been traveling a long time. What year is it, anyway?”

  “What year do you think it is?” says Murielle suspiciously.

  “Nineteen hundred and thirty-three, thereabouts, I reckon,” he says, and begins to sing while he plays, “‘This land is your land, this land is my land –’”

  The hologramovision blares in the background. “Looking at the five-day forecast, Monday there’s a chance of snow, temperatures in the mid-twenties to low thirties, according to the Doppler radar. Tuesday, a beautiful day, folks, we’re looking at ninety-degree temperatures, no humidity, get out your golf clubs and tennis racquets!”

  Over the voice of the weatherman, the others join in, their voices cracking, out-of-practice, “‘From California, to the New York Island, from the Gulf Stream waters, to the redwood forest – this land was made for you and me.’”

  “Hey, ma’am, would you get your damn dawg offen me?” At the campfire the dog, normally very shy in public, begins to talk. Perhaps it is the fir
e, surrounded by glowing eyes; there is something left in him of the wild, after all. Who knows what genes have been incorporated in the lab to create him, there are still the genes of some distant ancestor who lurks just outside the outskirts of warmth, hoping for a bone or bit of fat and not a kick.

  “Teecher. Bruther,” he pleads with the man. “Please let me fock you. Please let me fock leg.”

  “Get away from me, peckerhound.”

  “Aw, Mike, let the little feller get some action.”

  “Aw, awwright. What the.”

  But it has taken all the dog’s energy to produce such complex sentences and, feeling a possible bowel movement coming on, he goes off in the darkness to hunch.

  He misses Slawa desperately, more than he would ever have guessed. It was Slawa who had the patience to train him to speak; he had tried for so hard and so long, when the girls first got him, but they laughed at his moans and dull squeals, it was Slawa who stroked his throat to show him how to push out air to form language, who placed a pencil in his mouth to press his tongue into place; it was because of Slawa’s patience that when at last the first few words burst out they had a faint Russian accent. In Breakfast’s head is a warm yellow circle. And though Breakfast thinks only in shapes, he knows that Slawa, eventually, will find him.

  It seems days later that Julie and Cliffort arrive at the tunnel. They have to rent oxygen masks and canisters at one end, to be returned at the other – if they make it. The tunnel is lined with cars, moving so slowly it takes days to get through; the drivers bring along extra liters of sugaroline so they can refuel, the windows are cranked up and the air-conditioning is on, it is a passage only for the very wealthy; those traveling by foot will die if they can’t move quickly enough, oxygen used up, but it is sometimes difficult to move at all, with the crush of other pedestrians attempting to squeeze by.