Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  Back at the Desert Inn Hotel in Vegas, Hughes whipped up a set of blueprints for a gigantic cargo submarine and engaged a Detroit shipwright to build it. The sub’s hull was to be composed of a mixture of titanium and germanium, an ultrastrong alloy patented simply as “anium”: hence the name of the completed vessel. On November 30, 1969, the Anium Otter was launched into Lake Erie with a bellyful of kangaroo and Hughes at the conn.

  On the 8th of December (there’d been a delay sneaking the sub through the New York State Barge Canal) a Finger Lakes marijuana farmer named Thomas Pinch was awakened in the night by sounds of stampede. Thinking, much as Hughes had, that the government had got wise to his business, he grabbed a shotgun and a terrycloth bathrobe and headed for the door of his cabin, only to discover that some forty-odd kangaroos had broken into his camouflaged greenhouses and were chowing down on his cash crop. When a particularly large and woozy ’roo began to make boxer-like gestures in Thomas Pinch’s direction, the farmer bolted back inside the cabin, but not before a cackling Hughes managed to snap a single flash Polaroid.

  By dawn’s first light the herd—along with half an acre of winter cannabis—was gone, though not without a trace. Thomas Pinch followed the profusion of kanga-prints down to the edge of the lake. The tracks came out of the water; the tracks went back into the water.

  Shit, Pinch thought, no one’s ever going to believe this. Drifting in the deeps off Taughannock Point, Howard Hughes chuckled and lit himself a joint.

  The I.R.S. had the last laugh. The fate of the forty kangaroos is unknown, but after Hughes’s death in 1976, the Anium Otter was auctioned off to help pay the seventy-seven percent inheritance tax on his estate. The Otter was purchased by one Dobi Khashoggi, the black sheep expatriate third cousin of Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, for resale in the Middle East. A number of desert sheiks expressed interest in owning a submarine, but Adnan, acting in a fit of pique, managed to sabotage every prospective deal until Dobi was completely humiliated in the eyes of the family. And so Hughes’s last brainchild—now more albatross than otter—spent the next thirty-eight years sitting in a huge vat of preservative grease on the Motown docks, until Morris Kazenstein came by to take a look at it. By this point Dobi’s disgraced descendants were only too happy to unload the cursed thing, especially on a Jew, and they let him have it for a song.

  The Polaroid snapshot Hughes had taken was left aboard the sub and remained there throughout the decades of cold storage. During the lengthy process of transforming the Anium Otter into the still larger and less probable Yabba-Dabba-Doo, Morris found the faded photo tucked away in the periscope housing. He gave it to his chief engineer, Irma Rajamutti, a graduate of Bombay University with a double major in applied mechanics and eccentric literati. After the submarine refit was completed Irma taped the Polaroid up on the wall of the engine room. If asked who the guy in the terrycloth robe was she would reply: “J.D. Salinger.”

  Having already been misidentified once in a big way, Thomas Pinch probably wouldn’t have minded this.

  When Richard Berry and the Kingsmen Played Bethlehem

  “Surface contacts?”

  “Staten Island Ferry bearing two-nine-zero, range three-quarters of a mile. Various other small craft . . . there’s a police launch, but it’s steering for the East River. We’re clear to Liberty Island.”

  “Ahead one-third,” Philo ordered. “Keep an ear out for giant squid.”

  The sonar bay smelled like a throat lozenge. Asta Wills kept a dwarf eucalyptus to remind her of home; Philo had offered to find her an orphan koala bear as well, but she wouldn’t hear of it. “Disgusting creatures,” she told him. “They sweat urine and tear holes in all the furniture, I’ve seen it.” She got a wombat instead and called it Basil. A huggable Down Under cross between a badger and a prairie dog, Basil had the IQ of wallpaper, and his single goal in life was to curl up in Asta’s lap and sleep. Stroking Basil with one hand and adjusting her listening gear with the other, Asta remained calm under the most trying of circumstances.

  “No squid or kraken on my scope,” Asta said. “Nothing big enough to be a bother. But hull sensors are picking up a lovely assortment of biotoxins in the water, along with what looks to be a snowstorm of used toilet paper bits.” She wiggled her eyebrows and tapped ashes from an imaginary cigar. “So if we spring a leak, nobody swallow.”

  “Thanks, Asta,” Philo said. “You always make me glad to be back in port.”

  “Relax, mate. We saved a continent today, didn’t we? Besides, this is still heaps better than the water off Bondi Beach back home.”

  “That’s not something to be cheerful about.”

  “Istanbul!” said Osman Hamid, and Morris translated: “Ten minutes to Pirate’s Cove, Philo.”

  “OK. What are we scheduled for, two days’ shore leave?”

  “Three days.” Norma Eckland said. “We agreed on three.”

  “Right, three. Morris, you swing by my cabin and pick up the envelopes for the engine-room crew. They haven’t been paid yet.”

  “Me?” Morris said. “Isn’t it Norma’s turn to handle payroll?”

  “No,” said Norma. “It’s Norma’s turn to get dressed for dinner. Late reservations at the Price of Salt.” She glanced at Asta. “Meet you on deck in fifteen?”

  “Fair dinkum,” Asta said, and shut down her gear. At the helm, Osman steered the Yabba-Dabba-Doo towards the base of Liberty Island, where a hidden pressure lock opened to receive it. The sub would undergo a brief rinse cycle to clean off the worst of the Bay slime and then surface in Pirate’s Cove, a secret dock located directly underneath Lady Liberty’s pedestal.

  Morris slunk out of the control room like a condemned man. It wasn’t that he actually minded handling payroll, it was just that any visit to the engine room was a journey into Jewish liberal guilt. Other than Irma Rajamutti, the engine room’s crew was made up entirely of Palestinians: Oliver, Heathcliff, Mowgli, Galahad, and Little Nell Kazenstein, Morris’s adopted siblings. The adoption had most likely been an act of atonement on his parents’ part—they had rescued the orphaned quintuplets from a burning mosque on the West Bank, quit the Shin Bet, and fled the state of Israel all on one crazy Yom Kippur weekend—but they’d never actually bothered to explain their motives to him. They had divorced less than a year after leaving Tel Aviv: Morris and his mother ended up in New York, while his father took the quints and settled in London, where the adopted Kazensteins chose their own names from a Norton Compendium of English Literature. They lived well and peacefully there, growing up in a huge house on the Thames and eventually all attending Oxford; but young Morris in Manhattan watched CNN footage of Israeli soldiers gunning down children in the streets of East Jerusalem, and came of age believing that his brothers and his sister must hate him.

  Not so: they didn’t have much opinion of him at all, actually, being busy with the pursuit of their doctorates. But none of them was above trading on his misplaced desire to make amends, especially if it would help fund their research. So when Morris gathered them all for a secret meeting in a Cambridge pub to offer them employment on the Yabba-Dabba-Doo, Heathcliff stuck the knife in.

  “Let me be certain I understand you,” Heathcliff said. “You say if we do this we’ll be helping ‘our people’ live a better life. Does that mean you plan to use this submarine to help establish a fully independent Palestinian state?”

  “Oh no no no,” Morris replied, startled. “The overall mission is strictly environmental, strictly nonviolent. Or, well, sort of nonviolent. But about helping the Palestinians, I just meant that a cleaner planet is a cleaner planet for everyone, Jews and Arabs alike.”

  “But the Arabs,” noted Heathcliff, “get banished to the engine room. Hard labor. Even though they have as much university credit as any Jew on the ship.”

  “Banished? Is that what you think, that I want to banish you? Hey guys . . . hey. Mistake. Misunderstanding. This is not a hard labor job, in fact that’s part of the beauty of the
submarine design, it—”

  “It’s all right,” said Little Nell, putting on a tragic face that would have moved the most hawkish member of the Israeli Knesset to tears. “We’re used to extreme hardship. And being grossly undervalued.”

  “Wait, wait, did I . . . I didn’t mean . . . sorry. Sorry. Look . . .”

  They all signed on to the crew, but only after giving Morris such a complex that he turned around and automated the engine room, automated it so completely that barely a finger needed to be lifted to keep it operating. He also installed so many creature comforts that few people would have wanted to lift more than a finger. Instead, the Palestinian Kazensteins spent their time at sea doing what they would have done as Oxford professors, only at greater leisure and with better pay: sipping fine wine, reading, and occasionally penning an erudite paper or two.

  In the fullness of time Morris came to understand that he was being taken advantage of, but this only added to his sense of guilt. After all, if he really believed his Arab siblings were the same as everyone else, he should have had no trouble telling them to go to hell; his very servility was proof of his prejudice. He knew he ought to put his foot down, yet the fear that he might go too far the other way and become a genuine oppressor paralyzed him. His brothers and his sister, of course, did everything they could to encourage this mental deadlock.

  “Hey family,” Morris said now, hovering outside the engine-room hatchway like a shy butler. “It’s payday, isn’t that great?”

  The quints sat around a plain card table, playing cribbage and pretending to be bored, oppressed by boredom; they’d heard him coming. Only Heathcliff looked up, Heathcliff who in recent months had been cultivating a resemblance to the late Yasir Arafat. He stroked his three days’ growth of beard and purred: “Morris. Come in and have coffee with us, Morris.”

  Morris blanched. They never let him out of here without giving him a hard time, but an invitation to coffee was an especially bad omen. He approached the card table warily, holding out the pay envelopes, and tried to make a polite refusal: “We’re five minutes from the Cove. . . . I really can’t hang around.”

  “Well,” said Mowgli, staring at his cards, “don’t let us force you.”

  “Really,” added Little Nell, “there’s no obligation to share our hospitality. It’s not as if we were blood relatives.”

  “Though of course,” Oliver said, “your father always treated us with respect.”

  A moment later, when Morris was seated at the table with a steaming cup in front of him, Heathcliff said: “Do you know what we were just talking about?”

  It wasn’t a tough guess. “Palestine?”

  Heathcliff nodded. “We’ve been reminiscing. Old times good and bad, our childhoods on the West Bank . . .”

  “Heathcliff, you weren’t even a year old when Dad took you to London.”

  “Yes, the West Bank,” Heathcliff continued, as if Morris had not spoken. “We used to sneak out after curfew and climb a hill near our house, dodging Israeli soldiers and tanks. There was a man who lived on the hill, the oldest man in our village, and we liked to visit him. His name was, um . . .”

  “Mohammed . . . Brown,” Galahad said.

  “Yes, yes, splendid Mohammed Brown. It’s been so long . . .”

  “Heathcliff,” said Morris, “you weren’t even a year old. How could you climb a hill and visit someone if you couldn’t even walk?”

  Heathcliff frowned and looked sad, as if to say: You can of course call me a liar anytime you wish. Morris was shamed into silence. Heathcliff went on: “Mohammed owned a radio. He’d been a wealthy man before the occupation, but now the radio was his only luxury. We would listen to the BBC . . . that is to say, Radio Bethlehem. They played rock and roll after midnight.”

  “Rock and roll?” Morris tensed; they were all looking at him now. “You aren’t going to sing, are you, guys? You know you get a little out of control when you sing . . .”

  Heathcliff stirred his coffee. “We couldn’t always hear the words, what with the dogs barking outside and the constant tramp of army boots. We invented our own lyrics. Irma, you know the tune I’m thinking of. . .”

  Morris looked where Heathcliff nodded, and for the first time saw Irma Rajamutti sitting at the engine room’s antique harpsichord. She cracked her knuckles and plonked out a familiar intro: Dump-dump-dump, dump-dump, dump-dump-dump, dump-dump. . . . Galahad and Oliver joined in with hand claps and moans, while Mowgli snapped his fingers.

  “Douie, Douie,” Heathcliff sang, as Yasir Arafat might have if he’d been a Sixties rocker, “Pee El Oh, we want a homeland . . .”

  Little Nell wailed: “Hi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi—”

  “Douie, Douie, we never go, we want a homeland . . .”

  “Hi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi—”

  They began to gyrate in their seats. Morris tried to flee but tripped over a Persian carpet and fell flat. The four corners of the carpet were seized and lifted, and he was bounced up and down, trampoline style.

  Mowgli took the main verse: “We make, a deal, with Syr-i-a. . . Vanessa Redgrave . . . something something . . .”

  “Guys!” Morris pleaded. “Guys, for heaven’s sake, the Palestinian question was settled years ago! If you hadn’t gone to London with Dad you’d be eligible for Israeli citizenship by now! They might even let you vote! Guys . . .”

  “We want a homeland!”

  “Hi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi—”

  “Intifada!” Heathcliff cried, and as Little Nell jammed solo on an Electric Sitar, the Persian carpet was snapped taut. From one of the plastic tunnels that criss-crossed the engine-room ceiling, a blue hamster gazed curiously at the featherless bird floating up towards it; Morris, folding his arms in resignation, couldn’t help thinking that Golda Meir would never have put up with this sort of treatment.

  Then again, her parents didn’t adopt.

  More Old Music

  “God, I’d like to fuck Janis Joplin!” Betsy Ross said.

  Lexa had the Bug’s radio tuned to the WKRK Classic station. As part of the Monday night Old Oldies line-up, the DJ had dusted off a digital audiotape copy of “Me and Bobby McGee.”

  “I’ll bet there are some senior citizens who still feel the same way,” Lexa said, shifting into third. “But I can see some obstacles to the event, especially in your case, Bets.”

  “Well,” Betsy said, and ground her gears, “I’m speaking figuratively, of course . . .”

  Toshiro Goodhead twisted in the passenger’s seat. Having just gotten out of work, he was bare from the waist up except for white cuffs and a black bow tie and was trying to wrestle his way into one of Lexa’s Harvard sweatshirts. Claustrophobic from birth—nine months in the womb had proven traumatic for a congenital exhibitionist—Toshiro got edgy just sitting in a small car, let alone sitting in one with a sweatshirt pulled over his face, so this operation was accomplished with much thrashing about. Lexa’s daughter Rabi dodged an elbow as she leaned forward from the back seat to ask: “Did Janis Joplin die in the plague?”

  “Long before that,” Betsy said. “Janis had a little too much fun in the Sixties.”

  “No,” said Lexa. “Janis didn’t have nearly enough fun in the Sixties. That’s what killed her.”

  Toshiro finally found the neckhole in the sweatshirt and popped his head through. “You’re both wrong,” he said, gulping air. “She never died. She and John Harrison got married in secret and went to live in southern France.”

  “That’s Jim Morrison, you cultural illiterate,” Betsy said, “and everyone who didn’t fall off a truck yesterday knows he was killed when the U.S. bombed Baghdad in ’91.”

  The homing device that Special Agent Ernest G. Vogelsang had planted under the Beetle’s bumper now sat on the dashboard, sending out a steady signal as Lexa wove a not-too-hard-to-follow path of evasion through the West Village streets. Betsy had long since singled out the blue Plymouth sedan (license plate QR-2942, registered to the Un-Un-American Activities Division of t
he Federal Bureau of Investigation, and, in Betsy’s humble opinion, “a shitty make of automobile”) that trailed them at a not too discreet distance. As she turned north on Broadway, Lexa asked: “How close is he, Bets?”

  “Three car lengths. There’s a taxi and a moving van in between us.”

  “Good. Roll down my window.”

  They stopped for a red light. Lexa reached out and stuck the homing device on the side of the taxi, which had pulled around beside them. When the light changed to green, Lexa turned right. The blue Plymouth kept on straight, following the cab.

  “Jee-zus!” Betsy said. “Give a blind man a driver’s license and a gun permit!”

  “Where’s that cab headed?” Lexa asked. “Checker Transport, car number 5186.”

  “Just a sec . . . according to Checker dispatch it’s en route to Newark International Airport.”

  “Good,” said Lexa. “Is anyone else interested in us?”

  “Nah. I’ll let you know if I see anything.”

  Lexa took two more rights and drove straight for the west side docks. At a secluded spot on the wharf, a plain wooden ramp sloped down into the water; the Hudson had ceased smoldering around nightfall, but the air along the shore was still thick, dark particulate matter swirling in the headlights. Lexa stopped the car, and Betsy honked once.

  “Here she is,” Toshiro said, as Seraphina appeared from the shadows and ran up to the car. Betsy opened her passenger door and Seraphina crammed herself into the back beside her half sister, saying a quick hello to everyone.

  “Hi,” said Rabi, fingering the hooded djellaba that Seraphina had cloaked herself in for the trip to the docks. “Did you do anything sneaky this week?”

  Lexa studied them in the rear-view mirror. “She stole the Mona Lisa,” she said.