Alien Virus Love Disaster

by Abbey Mei Otis

  No, Offie keeps her eyes glazed in front and a little down, as though she can see through the conveyor belt to something hidden beneath. After this many years she could do the job with empty sockets. All on their own her hands dart out to snag a metal muffin tin, a coil of AV cable.

  Across the conveyor belt, another canary squints at Offie. “Something keeps you up last night?” This canary is called Silene (though the facility is too cheap-o to embroider such letters on her jumpsuit) and her arms fly around the belt like she’s moshing old-school hardcore. Bit of an Initial Quality Control-Freak, is Silene. She is hands down number-one hall-of-fame garbage-snatcher, except for once every two weeks, the day before her next paycheck comes in, when she runs out of the labor enhancers she injects into her armpits. Then she sways on her feet like a goon.

  Offie drags her eyes up to Silene’s face. Offie hasn’t run out of labor shooters. Offie is just tired, genuine all-natural tired. She raises her eyebrows and sucks in her lower lip and hopes that her face gives Silene all the answer she needs. Silene does a shrug with her eyeballs. “Sure-kay, then. Whatever.”

  Their arms never stop moving.

  “Maybe cause her daughter runs off and gets knocked up.” This squawked from somewhere upstream. Who knows which canary; it’s not important.

  Offie swings her head sideways like the preparatory arc of a wrecking ball. “What?”

  Every canary on the line goes silent. They are very busy fishing out nonrecyclables, oh yes, look there, is that some Styrofoam, oh no, just crumpled paper, well you never know, doesn’t hurt to check, it’s what we’re here for after all. Et et et cetera.

  Offie turns from the conveyor belt. She steps off the line. Trudges upstream toward the other canaries. “You are asking. About. My family?”

  Hard to tell here if Offie is issuing a first warning or calling down a blight from the angels of despair. Her children would know, but they have not yet made their entrance. The workers decide as a matter of workplace safety that her question must have been rhetorical. From under a pile of computer parts they wrest out an enormous plush tiger spouting fiberfill from his jugular. Offie huffs again. Her exhalation dislodges the earwax from everybody’s ears.

  And their supervisor rounds the corner: “Everybody doing good here? Ofelie? Mikram? Hmm . . . ?”

  What good timing this dude has. He claps Offie on the back. Nods to another canary and glances vaguely at the rest of them (hoping to skip over the fact that he has forgotten/never learned their names). They understand this trailing off as a small courtesy and avert their eyes.

  Offie spins around to avoid his hand. “You are not touching me, Navid, mm-no.”

  “Ofelie. You’re completely out of station.”

  “One of them steps on her family, Mr. N,” Silene contributes. (What is this, kindness, from Silene? Has her midday shot of HotProle flooded her with temporary solidarity?)

  Supervisor Navid looks torn. “I get that, but . . . At the end of the day . . .” He probes his hairline with two fingers. “You have to stay in your station, Ofelie. What am I supposed to do?”

  Offie meets the man’s eyes. She will never admit it, but this Navid is not bad, as supervisors go. She knows how it could be. Oh sure, he is mopped with self-importance. Sure, his pores ooze productivity-seminar jargon. Sure, his meat is soaked in slow disenchantment with his role that manifests in erratic bouts of cruelty. And yet, and yet. At the center of all that, Offie can see it: a desiccated clot of kindness. It pulses bloodlessly within him.

  He shifts his fingers to massage back and forth between his eyebrows.

  Offie does one full-body sigh to end all sighs. “Kay, Navid. All you gotta say.”

  She walks back to her place on the belt. Supervisor blinks like he can’t believe his victory came so easily. “Oh, well. Well thanks, Ofelie. Ms. Ferdinand. Thank you. I don’t mean to . . . It’s just . . . the pressure we’re under. Election coming up. Winds shifting . . . you know what I mean. They repeal the law, those guys come back down . . .” He gestures vaguely up at the claws. (No one ever points directly at the claws; they grow stronger when named.) “Won’t be anything I can do for you then . . .”

  No need to tell that to the canaries. Like they could ever forget. The claws were faster and stronger and to deprive them of water breaks or sufficient ventilation was no problem-o. Choke Silene full of enhancers like a foie-gras duck and she still would not control quality at one-tenth the rate of a freshly lubricated all-digital waste auto-sorting unit. Go ahead, rasp the claws. Try to become us. Try as hard as you like. Rip away every piece of yourself; we will still be here.

  Offie makes a noise like please could we move on now. Upstream another canary overturns a yogurt tub and shrieks. Out has tumbled a bolus of rotting meat, leaking green juice, writhing with maggots. (That’s what those blue gloves are for, ladies!) The conveyor belt chugs on, its motor-song so deep and pervading it stopped being sound long ago. It is feeling now. It is the vibration in the background of their bones. When Offie leaves work at night, she notices not silence but stillness.

  Supervisor thumps his fist against a panel on the support column behind Offie. It re-lights. White letters on a blue background: Reclamation Center 3301—Celebrating 40 Years of Waste-Free Society!

  Offie doesn’t need to turn to know what it says. What, you think she hasn’t stood before this panel every day for the last thirteen years? You think those letters aren’t burned into the back of her brain? Her hands never stop burrowing, flipping, sorting. Blue light from the screen glistens on the layer of meat slime that coats her wrists, her knuckles, the webs of her thumbs.

  The end of the day. The bus ride home. Breathe, finally. The bus skims twenty stories above the ground, red sunset light cuts in horizontally. Offie shades her face with one tepid hand. Maybe the clatter of the bus is supposed to massage but it only draws her aches deeper. Never took an anatomy class but this lady here can name each individual muscle by how it cries to her in the evenings. Cramps zipper up her calves, crowbar the base of her skull.

  The bus heaves forward through sun-thickened air. Empty big-box stores and self-storage parks roll away underneath. There on the left, housing subdivisions creep into view. From above they make patterns like paisley screened on cheap cotton. Soured houses and cul-de-sacs rubbled by weeds.

  Burb-burb-ba-durb. The official line for this place is that no one lives here anymore. Get it? The bus is full of slumped and cranky no ones. The vacant lots host no one, trading gossip with no one else. No one scuffs the eroding sidewalks, no one buys fakecakes from the cart on the corner. And in the handicapped seat of the bus, one flagrantly unhandicapped no one—her legs stretched out, her hand to her face—tries to peer out the window without looking like she’s looking. Thinks: My daughter is down there somewhere. Celado. Cece. Number-one baby girl. Perhaps at this very moment I am gliding over her head.

  The bus spirals down to the station and she turns inward, zones her eyes again on the blank in-between.

  Psst. Here. Let’s go somewhere different for a moment. Don’t worry. It’s only a game.

  There is a cream-colored house with a steeply gabled roof and a porch that wraps around three sides. She stands on the sidewalk in front of it; it is her house. It is not spotless; the paint peels in places and the kitchen window has a spiderweb, but she does not mind. The shutters are new anyways, painted a deep Greek blue with little star-shaped holes cut into them. Multiple sets of wind chimes hang in the porch, including the lumpy clay ones made by one of her daughters in a fifth-grade pottery unit. There is a new rocking chair on the porch also, which the game refers to as “Mission-style.” She will sit there later; it is a good seat from which to husk some corn.

  She readjusts the grocery bag on her hip. A breeze shifts the leaves overhead. The street behind her is freshly paved and the fall bite in the air is cut by the chemical tang of tar. Her vegetabl
es are damp from the mister; she should get inside before the bag tears. It is only that she likes to stop and look at it sometimes. The house. The garden with the witch hazel erupting in yellow lace. It brings to her a feeling broader than joy, more like fullness; a better use for the word fullness than anything she has felt from consuming a meal. She imagines the fish who build their nests on the seafloor, shifting sand back and forth with their bellies. Slowly they create a wallow deep enough to submerge themselves. She is like that, very gently nudging herself into the earth. It is a safe place she has made, safe for everyone. She is warm enough from her own fullness that the cool edge to the breeze does not bother her. With one hand she fishes her keys from her purse and starts up the front walk.

  Nice thoughts aren’t they, honey child? Ha, Offie’s real home is no such thing. From the bus station she crosses the cracked remains of a highway and enters the burbs. The mouth of her street marked by a faux-rock sign embossed with huge curlicue letters: Colt’s Brook Estates. Many subsequent strata of genitalia spray-painted over the words. Some of the houses here were completed and have begun the long slow slide into decrepitude, but most never got the chance to begin. Abandoned mid-construction, looming up like weathered whale skeletons from the barren earth.

  People are out on their dirt lawns, sucking down the evening. They perch on stoops or sprawl in dismantled wheelie cars. Someone heys, “Miss Ofelie!” but Offie can’t tell where the voice comes from. “Miss Ofelie, you need an expansion pack?” A lady about her age hustles on the curb. Holds out a clear bag with three blue marbles inside. “I get it from my sister-in-law. Perfect, mm, perfect. Makes you go, why do I ever play without this one?” Offie pauses, squints at it for two seconds, waves lady hustler away. “Mm-mm, I’m happy with what I got. Can’t get greedy, you know?”

  Lady shrugs and retreats. Deal won’t last long. Offie plods on. On a plume of breeze comes the smell of grilling patties.

  Offie’s actual house is so identical to every other house it doesn’t matter what it looks like. No garden (ha-ha), no house numbers, no nothing. Only uniqueness is the pattern of seams that water leaks have opened up in the vinyl siding. The prefab panels buckle and slip into a network of brown lines like an angry face. To clarify: it is not Offie’s house to own. Every month, payment flows to the account of a dried-apple-faced landlady who brews grey-market organs in the scuffed remains of a stainless-steel kitchen. How can it be like that, you wonder? What supply and demand jacks up the rents of the badland burbs? None, obvs. It is nothing but the way it’s always been. From the taste-makers’ quarter, demand for Offie’s existence is you don’t even know how low. All while the supply of Offies remains sky, sky high.

  Offie steps into what was once a foyer. Once people knew the word foyer. Once the floor boards were some cheerful economical wood, oak or maple or whatever. Now they warp like driftwood. Once there was a chandelier dangling from the two-story ceiling. Now there is only an ugly black pimple and some singed eels of wire.

  Offie turns right and starts up the stairs. The banister hangs by two screws. Along the hallway are two other rented rooms, an over-shared bathroom, and a doorless area their landlord refers to as “la biblioteca” without any evident acknowledgment of irony.

  There’s light behind the door at the end of the hall. What was once the door to the master bedroom. What is now the door to the entire abode of the entire Ferdinand family. She keys the makeshift deadbolt and heaves her shoulder against the sticky wood once, twice, before it sproings open.

  The room is big for a room, but for a five-person home? Tiny, yo. In one corner the standard subsistence setup, round table with a crack down the middle, white plastic shelves stacked with commodity boxes, fry pan, hot plate, water tank. In the opposite corner two futons covered by faded safari-print sheets. (Don’t need to sit on those futons to know the motherlode of crumbs hidden in their creases.) In the alcove that overlooks the front yard, a black vinyl armchair. Its arms are shiny with grime, the clutches of a bazillion hands over years polishing smooth their own scum.

  On the futon closest to the door—what’s this? Someone’s genmod project, pre-assembly? The brutal welding of Angus steer + ape helices? No, no. Only (ostensibly) a young man. His head rests on a stuffed pink hippopotamus. With one hand he swipes games on a screen. He has traces of Offie in the tilt of his chin, the way his feet angle out. Siphon off all of Offie’s exhaustion, replace it with spring-loaded ire, you might be able to guess this honcho here is her oldest child.

  She named him Floro; when he was born, the whole world seemed about to bloom.

  Nineteen years later she does not glance his way as she comes home.

  Floro’s only motion as his mother enters is to lazily extract his other hand from his pants. Announces the gesture by snapping his waistband against his stomach. Offie heads for the water jug.

  Floro drops the screen, tracks her with suddenly sharp eyes. “I see Cece this morning.”

  Offie fills a cup and keeps her lips zipped. She plants her hands onto the table and just leans for a moment. All the pressure of the day percolates down through her body. She takes one deliberate breath. In-two-three. Out-two-three.

  Floro swings his legs off the futon. “She’s staying over in Fox Dales. Mom? She looks not so good. All big in the gut and thin in the eyes, you know?”

  Offie takes another breath. She squinches her eyes closed, savors the feeling of her eyeballs trapped inside her head. “One-son. Do not. Bring up that trashdaughter before I even have a second to rest. How about?”

  Floro does a big deal of rubbing his mouth and rolling his eyes. “Mom.”

  Offie does the thing she’s best at; she shuts him out. High-density number-one son, all rhomboids and deltoids and trapezii and biceps. Might be a half-inch shorter than his mama but he’s gonna use every bit of body he’s got. Been thrashing his own muscles since before he had a deep voice. He is sinewed and corded and streamlined as a dolphin—yet still, perched atop the taut mass of his torso: a face like an unkissed debutant. Dreamy long eyelashes. Cut strawberry mouth.

  Offie blurs him as easily as she blurs conveyor belts, bus tableaus, the black puckery mildew on the ceiling. Within her circle of focus she allows: the table, the cup.

  Floro stalks across the room, pushes into her field of vision. Pale fairyking eyes welling with frustration. Believe it, boy has gotten people to do terrible things with those eyes. “You’re icing out a fourteen-year-old girl?” Their noses almost touch. “Aren’t you the adult, huh? Aren’t you the all-grown-up woman.”

  WHACK, she slaps him. Like slapping marble. His head doesn’t turn even a little but a bloom rises in his flawless skin. Her palm sings. She wants to grit her teeth but he will see. “I’m icing out nothing. I’m asking for respect. Girl doesn’t like the rules. Doesn’t have to follow them.”

  She rounds the table to get right up against Floro. Only got a half inch on him but she can make it a mile. “Lazy son. You like the roof over your head? You like a dry place to come scratch your balls after a long hard day of doing zero? I can change the locks on you too, how about? Nothing easier.”

  Floro’s mouth cinches up in a bitter knot. His body stays perfectly still and then his fist slams into the table. The cup jumps, tips over. Liquid unfurls across the tabletop. Floro spins away from her, puts as much space between the two of them as the room will allow (which, ha, is not much at all). In front of the far window he stills, leaning against the splintered molding. When he straightens there will be paint flakes on his shoulder. “It’s all wrong, Mom.”

  Offie watches him, the single braid that hangs down his back, the arcs of muscle that breach his neck like the backs of whales. The spilled water creeps cool between her fingers.

  Hey everybody, gather round. Put that away, come in, shut the door. Ofelie’s going to teach us how to play a game. She takes a black plastic case down from a high shelf by the water tank
and walks to the recliner. Back on the futon, Floro sees what she’s doing and goes, Of course, but doesn’t try to stop her.

  What’s inside the case is three black balls, marble-size. Lighter than you’d expect, polka-dotted all over with little gold connector pins. Where they go is the three tiny wells sunk in Offie’s body. Two in the tendony insides of her wrists, one in the back of her neck, just above the first knob of her spine. Crusty little punch-holes that she swabs with rubbing alcohol less often than she should.

  Here’s the thing about games: they are not an addiction. No, really. You yearn to enter the game world only as much as you yearn to escape this one. It’s not that planet calling you. It’s this one pushing you away. And hold up there, one more thing: it is not freedom. No matter what you’ve heard. You take your body with you. Whatever scars you bear, you bear them everywhere.

  Leafy shadows sway against the yellow walls of the entry. Offie steps out of her clogs and bears the groceries down the hall to the kitchen.

  The kitchen counters are dark granite flecked with mica; the glazed tile backsplash matches the blue of the shutters. She places the vegetables on the countertop by the sink. Asparagus, brussels sprouts, green-and-yellow-streaked tomatoes sitting fat and tender in her hands. String beans, a bouquet of basil. She crushes a leaf and the kitchen air sharpens and clarifies. The sack of corn she leaves bundled on the table. There are three bags of food now, though she only carried one.

  Cereal is scattered on the floor by the pantry. Milk puddles make amoeba-like shapes on the floorboards. Someone has been experimenting with snack composition. She rolls her eyes and calls down the hallway. “Hailo.” The voice she uses is dredged deliberately from her belly, honed and funneled up until she can aim it precisely as a garden hose toward the ears of her younger daughter.