Big Machine

by Victor Lavalle

  “Yo!” But that boy wasn’t horrified at the sight. He was smiling.

  Swamp Angels. That’s what he saw.

  The kids kept diligent watch until their bus reached a corner. When it turned, the young faces moved to the right side of the bus. They remained there, rapt, until the bus disappeared.

  Is this how Jacob felt when he met the angel? Or Mohammed as he witnessed Gabriel?

  I turned back around and found the Swamp Angels still waiting on the asphalt. Two greenish silhouettes rippling in the road.

  They turned and moved farther down Adeline Streeet.

  “Part of me just wants to kill them,” Ms. Henry said, gesturing ahead with her chin.

  But I didn’t answer her, I couldn’t. Suddenly my face burned and my shoulders tensed. To my surprise I’d taken what she’d just said personally. It felt like she’d threatened a member of my family.

  70

  IT WAS THE FOURTH DAY.

  I never took so long to move so little, but when you want to avoid the truth, a walk across the room can take a thousand years. As I inched my right hand toward the gray lump in Murder’s basement, the bobtail by my neck never moved. It stayed so still I thought it wasn’t breathing anymore. Murder’s basement took on the damp smell of a coming storm, and I wondered if the room would flood during a heavy rain. Imagine, after all this, if I drowned instead of starved. At least I’d finally get some water.

  Then it really did begin to shower out there. I didn’t hear any thunder, only the first few spats of rain against the outside walls. The sound grew into a dull roar, which filled my head and only added to my confusion.

  Listening to the rain distracted me so much that I didn’t even realize I’d touched the little gray bundle on my right, until it purred. And a moment after that one began, the other bobtail, the same bobtail, purred into my left ear. The hum of the cats mingled with the drumming rain until the storm seemed to enter the basement and those old cats became as elemental as the weather.

  I didn’t have the power to pull away. I couldn’t move, couldn’t stand, and while my weary hand rested against the second cat, the first cat finally moved, uncurling itself from against my neck and shaking when it stretched. It looked past me to its double, still lying under my fingers.

  That one woke too.

  It stretched and shook and looked across my body.

  And I lay there listening to both cats purr, to the steady rattle of the rain, focusing on these sounds rather than the four yellow bobtail eyes.

  My neck tickled as the first cat paced along the left side of my body, bumping against my shoulder, my wrist, my knee. It reached the bottom of my left foot and stopped, bumped me there one more time and perched. Then looked at the other.

  The second followed, bumping my right thigh, knee, and shin until it sat beside the first. They posted together, dispelling any doubt they were the same. Even their movements were synchronized. How could this be real? I hoped I was insane. That would only mean my mind had broken, not that the world was uncanny, unfathomable.

  Squeezing their eyes in unison, breathing the same heavy sigh, the cats denied me the comfort of delirium. They were there.

  Together they sniffed the bottom of my left foot, and even though I wore sneakers, I felt their wet noses against my skin. But when they pulled back, I felt my cold sock again, pointed my toes and heard the canvas of my sneaker stretch. It was like they’d passed through my clothing.

  They pressed their noses to my right foot now, and instantly I felt their breath again. Even worse, when they licked their lips, the tongues tickled my skin. I even felt a charge in my bones.

  The bobtails favored my right foot, put their noses up against it again, and stayed there, prodding. It was like having someone pressing a knuckle against your arch, sharp that way. I felt them against my foot, and soon the pain increased. It became so bad I swore they broke the skin. And still they pressed harder.

  My body moved for me, sort of flopping backward, away from them. Was it shock? Do people bounce around in shock? Either way, my body knew the command: flee! But there wasn’t far to go. My head bumped against the basement wall. The bobtails didn’t seem bothered by this. They just crept forward and closed the distance.

  They continued devouring me.

  Right down to the bones. When their mouths snapped, I felt the stabs in my skeleton. It felt like they’d reached inside me. They ground my shinbone between their teeth and I heard the rod cracking. It sounded like the limb of a tree being torn off in a storm. Wild sensations sparked across my body, a flickering light behind my right eye, an ache in the wrist I’d broken as a boy a cool warm explosion above my left ear.

  And then they chewed through the bone, down to the sticky middle. They reached the interior. My body trembled and my lungs tickled. I felt them bumping heads down there—in there I should say. In me. Smacking their skulls against each other in the tight glove of my skin.

  My right foot looked so swollen the shoe could barely stay on. Below my foot I only saw the bottom halves of their bodies. Their tails rose and slapped against the ground firmly. Rose again and waved in a semicircle, then whipped back against the dirt again. They’d gone through my shoe, squeezed into my flesh, popped past the bone, and got down to the marrow. I figured that was as deep as they could get.

  How forgetful of me.

  Many bodies will be buried, but not so many do their dying in the dirt. By ending up with these cats in Murder’s basement it was like I’d cut a few steps out of the process already. So why not simply shut my eyes and let the bobtails finish their business? By now my foot burned because they’d dug so far in there. It felt like my bones, my skin, had already turned to smoke and cinders, and the beasts would keep going up and up until my whole body returned to dust.

  So just let it, I thought.

  I was tired after all, almost ninety-six hours of starvation and thirst will drain you. My body would’ve run out of power even if the cats hadn’t come along.

  Let it go, Ricky. Let it go.

  But it turned out I was wrong about the cats. They weren’t gobbling their way through my entire body, because it wasn’t my body that interested them. Instead they reached a certain point, just below my right knee, and then they hunkered down, raising their rears while tucking their back legs. And then they started to pull.

  I lay there in the darkness listening to the rain and talking myself into oblivion. The best way to avoid massive pain was to just go limp. But when I felt them tugging, it seemed like they were pulling my skeleton out of me. I opened my eyes and saw the basement wall above me get farther away as I was pulled toward the center of the room. Were they going to thrash and tear me into smaller pieces and eat those pieces one at a time? How do you relax yourself through that?

  But as the wall got farther away, an inch or so with each pull, I saw that my left arm had flipped up over me, reaching for the receding wall. And yet even as the wall moved farther from view, my hand stayed as close to the wall as it had been a moment before. And again, after another pull took me farther down, my arm remained in the same place. After a few more tugs I noticed the sides of my own face getting farther from me. What I mean is, my eye sockets seemed like two well holes and I was falling deeper into the earth. I was being pulled down inside my own body, and when they finished eating, there’d only be this husk left behind. That’s what the cats were after. Not my flesh. My soul.

  The surprise was that I even had a soul to eat.

  I don’t mean this in the self-congratulatory way that people with tough lives usually do, where we talk about all our terrible exploits and how we acted so badly, but underneath it you can hear us bragging.

  What I mean is, even though I’d been raised as a Christian, I’d never actually believed in the idea of a soul. People hear that you grew up religious, and they can’t imagine you’d have a complex relationship with faith. If you believe one part, you must believe it all. But who gets more chances to see the absurdities t
han the devout? An answer that’s satisfying on Sunday becomes contradictory by Wednesday night. Belief is a wrestling match that lasts a lifetime. So I’d certainly been taught about the soul, cautioned to protect it, read relevant verses in various versions of Scripture, including the Washerwomen’s own. And for all that, I must admit, it remained more an idea than a conviction.

  But now, in Murder’s basement, it wasn’t my body and it wasn’t my mind. So what else could these creatures consume?

  I only found out I had a soul when I was losing it.

  That’s when I thought of my father.

  71

  THE SWAMP ANGELS USED THE WIND to move. They didn’t fly, they glided. Sticking their chests out until their upper bodies took on the shape of a sail and trapped breezes against their backs. This lifted them so high they almost floated off, but before this happened, they’d anchor themselves to the ground by digging the tips of their thin feet into cracks in the concrete. They leapt forward from one groove to the next, moving five feet with each step.

  When they reached the low fencing around a parking lot, they hopped up and wrapped their feet loosely around the horizontal poles, then curved their bodies forward, puffing their chests to let the wind push them. Sliding along the rail until they reached the end and hopped off, were sucked backward while in midair, and then floated toward the ground. Here they caught at more cracks in the sidewalk and did the same grip-toed tiptoe again. Their tails swayed from one side to the other, keeping their bodies balanced as they soared. It felt natural to be awed.

  In the air their bodies fluttered slowly, their tails stiff behind them.

  “They look like stingrays,” I told Adele.

  “Isn’t that something to see?” she said.

  72

  I WAS THREE YEARS OLD when my mother, Carolyn, didn’t return from her missionary assignment in the field as expected. She’d been in an accident on Route 2 in Michigan, but we didn’t know it at the time. It wasn’t unheard of for a parent to be a day or two late. It might be something as simple as road weariness that slowed a person down if she was driving back to Queens from Colorado.

  But Sargent Rice felt eager to go on his assignment and wasn’t willing to wait. For years afterward he justified leaving by saying the Washerwomen were strict about their missionary schedules. We called them commissions. But they’d have given him a little time if he’d asked.

  My dad believed in the Washerwomen’s teachings, I know he did, but he also just wanted his full hundred and fifty days away from us. He wasn’t so different from lots of married people. For instance, our mother never lingered when her travel date arrived. Lots of good-bye kisses, all the hugs me and Daphne pleased, but her eyes stayed focused on the front door.

  Our parents weren’t getting vacations. They worked hard as they crossed the country, and endured levels of dismissal and anger that I can never imagine. But the other seats in their rented cars were vacant. The motel bed only had to accommodate one. No children demanding. Time alone is pornography for people with families.

  So at this time I was three and Daphne eight, Mom still getting a splint put on her arm in Michigan, but Dad’s discharge date arrived, and Sargent Rice had to serve. Other parents did the same thing occasionally, watching one another’s tykes. They even had a buddy system to help one another out. My father left each of us with a family in the community and asked them not to tell the Washerwomen, who would’ve objected. This wasn’t as impossible to hide as you’d think. People keep terrific secrets from one another even in a one-room shack. You think they couldn’t hide a couple of kids for seventy-two hours? The Dhumals watched Daphne and Ms. Rush took me.

  And off our father went.

  But by the sixth day, my mother hadn’t returned, and I became too much for Ms. Rush. Forty-eight hours she could handle, but not a week. She’d already been plenty generous to me. But never let me pretend that a religious cult attracts the stablest people. By week’s end Ms. Rush left me and the Washerwomen altogether.

  I didn’t remember any of this, by the way. Daphne only told me about it years later. It came up right after I told my father about her hidden plastic yellow ring. An hour after my father made Daphne melt it on a frying pan, she was kind enough to explain this family history. Ah, siblings.

  Ms. Rush left me in a Burger King on Main Street in Flushing, and the manager fed me fries until Social Services arrived. They weren’t going to return me to three women who were rewriting the Bible in their own image, bet on that. Daphne escaped my fate because the Dhumals kept their doors shut. Sargent Rice, only six days into his assignment, had to come back from West Virginia.

  The term orphanage sounds melodramatic, so let’s say I was kept in the back of an office instead. Some space in midtown Manhattan, with a large sleeping area for the kids in back and a small room up front where a caseworker explained the circumstances to my dad.

  Apparently, if you abandoned your kid in 1968, the Child Welfare Agency only gave you a verbal warning and asked you to sign two forms. That’s it. Soon as he did this, my father was free to take me back. He received a date for a hearing in Queens County family court, but the caseworker told him it was pure formality. The city had respect for all religious communities. Just go to court and the record would be closed. The only way my dad could mess it up was if he didn’t show. Then they’d leave the file open. And even if it took years, they’d find their way back to him and me and the Washerwomen again. Child endangerment. The city wouldn’t forget.

  Sargent signed and agreed but didn’t listen. In his mind he was already back on U.S.-119.

  Afterward, he didn’t bring me straight home. Instead, my dad took me to lunch.

  What happened at that meal? This is the question I always asked him, but his answer never helped. We ate. That’s all he’d say as he sank deeper into the cheetah-print couch. But I wasn’t asking for a menu, I wanted a diagram of his thoughts.

  I could imagine him with a napkin tucked into his shirt collar, just the way I’d always known him to eat in public. How long did that hour feel? When did he make his choice? What did he say to himself as he returned to that midtown office and gave me back to the orphanage?

  As the feral cats in Murder’s basement chewed through me, I didn’t think of struggle or escape anymore, only that lunch with Sargent Rice. And the question he never answered: how could my father leave me like that?

  I asked myself this even as the cats ground their teeth deeper into my bones. The foundations of Murder’s home soaked in the rainstorm, and a thick, moldy air entered my throat. I coughed and choked.

  I got a lot of mileage from that story about my dad. Leverage against him, I mean. It was a pretty selfish act, after all. And, like children do, I punished my father with it whenever he asked too much of me. Whenever he annoyed me. By the age of ten I’d bring the story up if he just told me to wash the dishes. I even reminded him of it on that morning when the police surrounded our building. Rose had whispered in my ear, and he’d barged in, and I’d felt angry for the interruption. So when he asked me to leave with him, I said, You’re going to leave me behind.

  That shut him down every time.

  But now, in Murder’s basement, I’d reached the dying time, and that old game of manipulation seemed pointless. Self-pity was even worse. Sargent Rice died in 1998, and in 2002, at thirty-seven, I was following him. Did I really want to spend the last moments of my life throwing one more tantrum?

  And there in Murder’s basement I realized the real question. The one I should’ve asked my father when I had the chance: at a moment like that, when someone needs you, why does a man hide his heart?

  WHEN I WAS TWENTY-NINE, I took my girlfriend Gayle to a women’s clinic in Jackson Heights. We went in together. We’d argued a lot, but now we agreed. Then, soon after checking in with the front desk, Gayle begged me to take her out of there. We sat on a blue Arlington sofa. We were waiting for an older woman to call us in for Gayle’s abortion.

  Ga
yle worked in a cooking school at that time, helping affluent kids file their class schedules. Holding their hands through the paperwork process as if they were in grade school rather than college. They weren’t nice to her at all. She was only an office temp to them. They sniped at her suggestions and mistrusted her kindness. At night I’d find her half-asleep in bed, still wearing her work clothes. I’d pull her pants and panties off, and while she lay on her stomach, I’d rub her butt.

  She had such a sweet little butt. When I caressed her, our bedroom would get so quiet I’d think she’d fallen asleep, but then, very faintly, she’d groan. Not sexual. More like the contact reassured her, relieved her. At least one person cared. Everyone wants to believe that. Gayle was an office temp, and, at that time, I worked for a moving company. We scored dope on the daily. But at night Gayle was my woman and I was her man.

  When Gayle and I sat in that women’s clinic, she rested against my right shoulder and cried. She squeezed my arm tight, but pretty soon that charge wore out and she was left with nothing but those familiar groans. She did that as we sat right in the women’s clinic. In front of three other couples going through their own private debates. Gayle called to me for relief, but this time I wouldn’t give it.

  Although she wanted that baby, I relied on one thing about Gayle: she was terrified to do it alone. Didn’t feel she could manage the enormous work of a child, not with making a living and, of course, heroin. So I didn’t have to threaten or force her to have the abortion. I only had to become intangible, invisible, hardly there. Hide my heart. Her own fears did the rest.

  Gayle pressed her forehead against me, but I only studied my big dumb hands.

  A woman stepped out from the back rooms, and she called Gayle’s name.