by Kelly Link
It’s not Oreo’s fault. When the donor has done something bad, it hangs its head like a guilty dog. It arches his butt so it looks like he’s sticking his tail between his legs, if it had legs and a tail. It’s only ever guilty of stealing food, pooping in the wrong place, or accidentally bumping something. It never does harm on purpose. Some people would say that’s better than Andrew, and I might agree with them. Andrew spends a lot of time in the dean’s office.
This summer, we’re going to get a kiddie pool in the back and let Oreo flop around in it. The donors don’t really have a flipper, but its arm-like appendages and mono-appendaged leg are close enough. It’ll keep cool, in the water. Washing will be easier if its already in water, too. Immie washes it every day with the hose, but it’s pricey to run that much water every day, and it’ll be hard in the winter, if things ever cool off enough like they did last winter and we had to try and wash it inside, in the tub.
Andrew wants to get baths like that, too, sometimes. We send him out there with soap and a swimsuit, and he laughs the whole time and he and Oreo will push each other around a little to get to the hose. It’s cute, I guess.
I know we’re doing it wrong. We’re doing everything wrong. We should have paid extra to keep Oreo in a stable somewhere. It’s too late, now.
It doesn’t change anything.
Andrew
The next weekend Dad came right after work. He had done the night shift for extra money, and he told Mom that he wanted to take me out for breakfast or something, and maybe go run some errands, or walk around the mall, if she didn’t mind the extra visitation. She almost didn’t go for it. I think she knows something’s up.
He took me out to this old building he heard about from a message board. It was out a ways, but it was huge. It was a junior high school before the quakes.
It was crazy. Peoples’ names were still up everywhere on corkboards and whiteboards. Kids’ names were written on the lockers. We could see the papers they left behind on the last day of school, littering the halls like leaves. I don’t think anyone bothered to clean up the place when it was abandoned. The last day of school after the quakes was it, and there probably wasn’t a hundred students in the whole, huge place. Things of value were taken, eventually and everything else was left behind.
It’s like the senior walk, in moments after it, and you can squint your eyes a little in the dark and imagine all those kids running around. They’re dad’s age or older, now. The desks are pushed around everywhere, in patterns that don’t make sense because abandoned desks should have been left in rows, right? I took pictures. It was a mystery.
We went everywhere but the hallway to the cafeteria because Dad said the roof wasn’t sound in that wing. We saw a coyote in the gym, where the doors were open. It bolted across the floor when it saw us, and out into the overgrown football fields beyond the wide, open doors. I couldn’t get a picture of it fast enough. Instead, I took a picture of the gym floor, cracked up and warped and ruined. Humidity and decades of neglect will ruin anything wooden. We couldn’t even try to walk on it. The mascot of the place was a blue knight, and the shadow of it was still painted in to the bad wood like what remains of a fallen angel in majestic armor splattered and grayed out.
We climbed up high on the metal stands to get a picture of it. The stairs groaned and crackled all the way up.
“Walk soft,” said Dad. “Actually, this is kind of dangerous.”
“This is a great shot,” I said. “I wish the coyote was out there, in the middle of the floor.”
Dad smiled beneath his facemask. I saw it in his eyes and cheeks that he was smiling. “You know how much this building cost?” he said. “There’s an angle for your project. Tax dollars were spent here, and it could have been converted into something, even with the eXurbs emptying out. It could have been salvaged for bricks and pipes and copper, turned into grain storage or something. It’s not that old of a building. It was practically new when it was abandoned. Let’s go see if we can find the library. Have you ever seen a book that wasn’t in a museum?”
I had already seen books abandoned in the halls. Textbooks, thick and heavy with pages soaked together. I had already taken pictures of them. I didn’t tell dad that.
The library was empty with cobweb all over empty shelves. Maybe the books were gone before the building was abandoned. There were computer desks instead. Ancient monitors and CPU towers, a thousand times bigger than anything useful, waited where they were abandoned for someone to come and boot them up and raid their data cache for a history project. Seriously, programming majors should go out there and check it out. Who knows what kind of records were ghosted into the hard drive? Anyway, they looked heavy. The keyboards looked brittle, and useless. I reached out and pushed down on one of the keys, just to see what it felt like, and dad slapped my hand back.
“Don’t disturb anything,” he said. “You are here to witness and document. We don’t touch anything. We just take pictures. Urban explorer rules.”
I’d seen plenty of pictures of my dad touching things. “I just wanted to see what it feels like to type on one of these old beasts,” I said.
“It won’t feel like it’s supposed to feel. See if you can get an angle on it where you can focus on the dust above a letter. Let the letter be all blurry behind the dust. A super close shot. Focus on the dust. That’s enough, right?”
That night, Mom walked in when I was uploading pictures and she asked me what they were from, and I said that Dad had started exploring again, like before they had married. I had asked if I could have some of the pictures because what we were doing together in the basement of his job was kind of like exploring. She didn’t say anything. She made a non-committal noise and closed the door.
The thing that would make her really mad isn’t that I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to with my dad. We’re supposed to have our secret things that we do.The thing that would really set her off is that my dad was encouraging me to lie to her. I was thinking about that, and pulling up Dad’s old photos, and comparing his ruins to mine. They kind of looked the same.
Immie
My husband and I are unanimous in this, and it doesn’t matter how much it costs, or if we’ll be paying it off forever. Our son, Andrew, deserves to live. He was infected at a very young age with a slow-growth virus that was originally designed to kill cabbage moths in Mexico. We don’t know where it came from. No one ever does with these sorts of things. It crossed over in some children’s formula or peanut butter or something, that hadn’t been packaged right, and it had taken root in his heart and lungs and glands. It was affecting his DNA through most of his internal organs. It was affecting him, and it would kill him, if we didn’t cut out the infected organs. He was only four when we got the diagnosis. We didn’t know why he was so tired all the time and why he seemed so sick all the time and when the tests came back we knew it would be something, we just didn’t know if we could fix it. Thank god it was something they can fix.
My husband made good money, back then with his Uncle’s structural design firm. He was a Network Troubleshooter and he dug through blueprints for emergency services. We could afford an organ donor, barely.
It was something to keep me company in the house, I guess. With me home since the school closed, it seemed crazy to pay someone to keep it. It was my decision to keep it in the home.
I was the one who decided that.
It looked like a walrus and a pig and a monkey pushed together. When we brought it home, it was the size of a baby, but it didn’t look like one. It looked like the grub worms that grow in the garden, that I squish between my gloves. The donor looked something horrible. We put it in the basement, and I brought it out to the yard every day so it could poop in the grass and get sun. They needed sun to grow right, and exercise. It seemed cruel and expensive to do that with a UV lamp and a treadmill when the yard was right there and it made cleaning poop easier. I had to watch it, because when it was young a hawk or a wild dog might
have gotten to it. I gardened and sat on the porch and kept an eye on it.
It grew. It grew and grew. The bulbs came in on its back. The thing’s skin was so thin and pale around the bulbs that you could see the little organs growing there. It was really gross.
He had Andrew’s eyes. That’s the worst thing. Looking in my own son’s eyes inside of its head. Seeing my son’s towhead pushing into my lap with that horrible body.
God, I hated it. Steven let it up on the couch. Steven started calling it Oreo, just like Andrew did, even though Steven could pronounce Organ Donor.
My mom said I shouldn’t worry about it. One of the things about pets is they live so quickly, and it’s a way you can teach your child about death. It’s a good thing for kids to learn with pets first.
It flopped around the yard. I have my tea and watch it. It got into the garden when I wasn’t looking, and made a mess. It got mud everywhere. When it was out there, I had to watch close in case of predatory animals.
It gets out sometimes, when I don’t watch it close enough. I have to chase it down the street, where the donor is flopping and laughing away from me like it’s a game, but it could get hit by a car out there. A wild dog could come. There’s coyotes. It’s a big, stupid, deformed child sometimes, brilliant and ingenious inside of its stupidity. It’s the human in him, I think. Maybe it’s the pig. It thinks everything’s a game. It seems to understand cartoons enough to like watching them. It laughs at physical humor with a huge belly laugh. Andrew will sit with the donor on the couch, laughing at mallets smacking into rabbits and ducks and it made me sick sometimes to see them sitting next to each other, and I knew that they’re both related to us by blood and DNA, and we had to kill one of them soon.
I gardened while the organ donor flopped around the yard after butterflies.
I see two radishes grow into each other. They’re still seedlings. They’re supposed to be two inches apart, but they’re not. If I don’t pull one, they’ll grow into each other, and push each other, and steal each other’s water and nutrients, and choke each other until they both die. So, I pick one. I choose the one that looks the healthiest of the two. In the garden, it’s the one that’s growing faster. In my house, it’s the one that’s been stymied by the virus. He’s short for his age. He can’t get enough blood in his feet and hands, and he has to wear special gloves and socks at night or gangrene could set in. He sleeps on a heating pad to keep warm. If it snowed, he could never play in it because he’d lose limbs with his terrible circulation in so much cold. We have to be careful what we feed him, because solid foods that have too much fiber might push through his weak intestinal wall, and end up in his blood stream doing who knows what kind of damage.
Andrew is fragile. I wish he wasn’t so fragile.
“I don’t want him to grow up scared.”
“You should have talked to me about this first. I’m the primary.”
“I’m an experienced structural design engineer. I wouldn’t take him somewhere if it wasn’t safe.”
“I’m the primary. I decide what is safe.”
“I don’t want him to see himself as something broken. He’s not broken, anymore. He’s a normal kid, and he should get to live like one.”
“I want him to know how fragile he is, Stephen. I need him to know how fragile he still is. No surgery is perfect. You know that.”
“We did it when we were his age. We’re fine, Immie. He’s fine, too. We wear masks and gloves. We don’t touch things. We just take pictures. It’s for a school project. It’s for his media and anthropology thesis.”
“A high school project is growing a potato in a jar and testing different water amendments. A high school project is a baking soda volcano that powers a light bulb. A high school project is interviewing his grandparents about their life when they were kids. A high school project is not out in the eXurbs, rummaging through trash that could make him sick again.”
“His shots are up to date. We take precautions. We go only safe places that I check first. He’s fine. He will be fine. He can’t live his life in a cave. He’s seventeen.”
“Do you really check first? How do you know his shots are up to date? Did he just tell you they were, because the records are here? Did you pull up the records here and look?”
“Yes!”
“Really?”
“I did!”
“Did you check with your own eyes? What color are the record sheets?”
“I’m not going to play this game with you, Immie. We’re going. Okay? We’re going to do this. I’m his father, and I wouldn’t put his life in danger. You have to trust me. Look me in the eye. I’ve been sober for ten years.”
“I say no. I’m the mom, here. I’m the primary.”
“It’s his decision. It ought to be his decision. He’s almost a man. It’s his project. He can choose for himself.”
Andrew
When I was a kid, I remember it being around. It was a big, lumpy thing. Real soft. It was like having a living, breathing pillow. It had all those pustules on its back, where it was growing the organs. They were full of saline, like water balloons. I flicked them and watched them jiggle, and sometimes leak, but mom yelled at me if I did that. I don’t know; it seemed like Oreo liked it when I did that. Oreo liked being scratched where the pustules pushed from his back. I think the growths irritated him.
The only real event I remember was that Oreo got out this one time when I was home. Mom said Oreo got out a few times, but I only remember one time. It had figured out how to work the front door. It was a Sunday, and we had left him alone to go get breakfast with my grandparents, and Oreo freaked out because it hated being alone for too long. We ran late. No one really thought about it. We thought it would be screaming and flopping in the kitchen when we got in, making a mess because it was angry and scared to be alone that long. We thought it might have gotten onto the furniture and pooped on them to get back at us.
The donor got out, though, right through the front door. One of the neighbors saw it happen and walked over when we pulled in. He pointed us up the street, where I went to wait for the school bus. We ran around the neighborhood, looking for it. We shouted for it. That was the only time I ever heard my mom use the name that dad and I had given to it. Oreo. He was hiding in a neighbor’s garage six blocks away, scared and moaning, and I don’t even know how he flopped that far and no one stopped him. One of the low pustules had been punctured, and it was bleeding and leaking saline. He would need a band-aid for it and the nurse was going to have to come by special to sew it up and check the growth for injury. It was crying with tears like you or I would cry. A cat was hissing at him. Oreo was almost a hundred pounds, by then, and a little cat had scared the donor half to death—backed into a corner of a garage. Thank god a dog hadn’t found it. There were wild dogs all over the neighborhoods. They’d have torn Oreo up, and we’d have had to get another one and hope I lived long enough to harvest. They’re not cheap; I know that.
That’s about all I remember.
There’s some pictures around of him. My dad took pictures of everything. I think that’s why I wanted to do a picture project. I take after my dad, like that.
Here’s one of dad’s pictures. My mom thought she got rid of them all, but you can’t get rid of everything when your parents live in two houses. My dad kept his old hard drives.
I hadn’t really thought about Oreo for a long time until I started this project.
My dad and I were exploring in this abandoned office building. We had found the boiler room, and my dad was climbing around, checking to make sure the boilers weren’t going to fall on me or anything if we went in there. He had structural design goggles tied to the blueprints of the building, through wifi, and then he stopped out of nowhere. He took off his glasses. He peeled his mask off and ran towards the door. He threw up right there, in the doorway. I didn’t know what to do. He placed his hand on my chest. “You don’t go back there,” he said. “You don’t. We should go.”
“What is it, dad? Should we call the cops?”
“Let’s just go,” he said.
He didn’t stop me.
Here’s the picture of what I saw. Close your eyes if you’re squeamish.
They get out. They’re smart. They get out because they’re smart and they don’t like being left alone and they get scared. They’re expensive, but they’re expendable. There’s no one to call if we find one unless we recognize it. There’s no one to come for what’s left and bring it home, if anyone would even bother to do it.
I’ve only seen my dad cry twice in my life.
This next slide is what my father looked like when he was young. Here he is older. He still crawls around these old buildings. Here’s a picture of me, and I’m doing the same with my dad. My dad’s family was contractors right up to the quake. Dad used to be a structural designer with his uncle’s firm. We kept building these houses, building them right on top of where there used to be houses.
My mom told me this story that when she was a gloomy little kid she got really confused because so many generations of people had lived and died and been buried. She couldn’t figure out where anyone would bury the new people who had died, because everything had to be a cemetery. She pulled her mom aside and asked her about that. My grandma explained that everything falls back to the earth. Everything falls back into the earth, disintegrates into dust. We’re burying people on top of each other, inside of each other, and we’re all living on top of each other. Breathe deep, and you’re breathing the dust of ghosts.
I guess that brings me back to the title of my presentation. I’m saying that everything is haunted. Everyone and everywhere is haunted. It could be poetry, but it isn’t, because watching my father throw up and cry right in front of my face in that sad place is not a metaphor for anything.