by Lydia Millet
“Your father is everywhere,” mumbled Betty, brushing at the wig with an affected air, her eyes, adorned with fake lashes, shuttered closed.
“When’s he coming back?”
“Your father never leaves, Estée,” said Betty. “He’s with us all the time. Would you hand me my mirror?”
She stayed in the bath until her skin was waterlogged and began to peel off, at which point she allowed the maids to lift her out.
Number 76, the last of the faithful, was the only moth left alive when Bill returned from his hunting odyssey. He had a special treat, he told Estée, taking her aside when he came in the door. “The specimen to end all specimens. It’s the big one, kid,” he bragged, and rushed for the kitchen to pop open a beer and swig. His face was gritty, mottled with sweat and dirt. “Breaches of security will not be allowed. You will not be leaving the house till the specimen’s been experimented.” He ushered in a corps of four burly security guards and ordered them to post themselves as sentinels at the front gate, the front door, outside the first-floor windows.
“I will bring the specimen in through the back door and afterwards one of these fine gentlemen will be on guard there too,” he said to her in confidence. “Luckily we have the weekend to ourselves.”
“I don’t condone this,” said Estée. “I’m not your ally.”
He dismissed her protests with a wave, chucked his half-full beer can through a window, and went out. She watched him reverse a rented van up to the back door and trundle in, on a dolly, an eight-foot box covered in white cloth. The portals were closed after him by a uniformed man, wooden faced, bearing truncheon and holstered revolver.
Estée retired to her room, where she locked herself in and read an old history textbook. “Copernican theory displaced the ancient Ptolemaic system, in which the earth was at the center of the universe, unmoving.” One of her mother’s Valiums improved her mood till boredom moved her, eventually, out the locked door again and into the kitchen. She was snacking on Doritos and bootlegged Coors when Bill snuck in behind her, put her in a headlock, and dragged her to the lab. A crowbar lay on the linoleum beside the open crate; inside, on a bed of straw and foam, an old woman was curled, snoring.
“Specimen 243, Homo sapiens,” said Bill proudly.
“You’re a fucking lunatic,” said Estée.
“Language!” reprimanded Bill, casting an eye upon the woman, and clapped his hands in glee.
“You can keep me here,” she told him. “But you can’t make me do anything.”
“You can take notes,” suggested Bill.
“I’m going,” she said, and turned to leave the room. Bill performed a flying tackle and they landed in a painful sprawl. Her back hurt, her chin bled. She’d bitten a ridge in her tongue when she hit the ground and Bill’s weight, pinning her beneath him, more than compensated for his poor muscle tone. “Jesus Christ, get off!” she said, and elbowed backward till her funnybone crunched his nose.
Bill bellowed and mooed, a wounded steer. He rolled off her and staunched the flow of blood with a dust rag he dragged from the counter. Leaning into the crate, Estée shook the old woman’s shoulders. “Wake up!”
“Ha ha hee,” giggled Bill, with a nasal twang. “That won’t do anything. Shot a trank right into her main line. A trankwee-ly-zer.” He wore a small goatee of blood.
“Who is she—?”
“Old bag. I found her selling Bibles in Tulsa, and crappy pictures of angels. Religious comic strips.”
“You’re letting her go,” Estée said, but again she’d misremembered Bill’s strength. It had been a mistake to try straightforward defiance; a devious path would have been wiser. Her father was a fat man, some might say obese, but that didn’t stop him from charging. He had the strength and mass of a bull, the speed of a human cannonball. He was on top of her again in seconds, pressing thick thumbs against her windpipe.
She woke up with a headache and swollen tongue, her back sore, across the room from the old woman. They were both caged. She sat up, put her hands on the bars, and threw up. Bill pulled life-size cages from his hat. He was a prestidigitator. Had he planned the operation in advance, reckoning on her resistance? Was the old woman merely a ploy? Red-herring bait for the real prize? Specimen 244: daughter.
“I’m not surprised,” she said aloud.
The granny raised her head. She was thin and grimy, potbellied and bleary. Her white-crusted eyes were gummed shut.
“I’m sorry,” ventured Estée.
The woman blundered around in her cage, feeling at the bars. “Hello?” she quavered. “Hello?”
“Hello,” said Estée. “Can you hear me?”
“Are we at the hotel?” asked the biddy. “In Bermuda?”
Senile; possibly blind.
“Excuse me. Can you see?” asked Estée.
“See? See what? Where’s my beads?”
“See anything?”
“See everything. I seen it all,” said the woman. “Is this the presidential suite?”
“Presidential suite, oh yeah,” said Estée. “What’s your name?”
“Margaret! Margaret. Tell me the view.”
“I can see white sands,” tried Estée. “Tall palm trees, date palms, and the water’s green. There’s a cool breeze when I lean out.”
“I’ve always wanted to come but they said I couldn’t go,” sighed Margaret, pulling at a matted gray lock. “They said I couldn’t because of the money. The people at the hostel, those mean girls. That bitch Maria, and she was dead wrong. Tribulations! Trials! I knew I’d get here, the Lord made me a promise. Did we fly?”
“We sailed on a cruise ship,” said Estée. “It’s beautiful here.”
Margaret sniffed and nodded, her iron smile unflinching.
“A couple’s lying on the sand. They’re tanned dark brown, wearing swimsuits. Their skin’s shiny with coconut oil, can you smell it?”
“It smells good enough to eat,” said Margaret.
The door opened and Bill stood over them, a tray in his hands.
“Room service,” said Estée.
He handed her a sandwich through the bars.
“I don’t want it, can’t you see I was sick? And how am I going to go to the bathroom?”
“A chamber pot will be supplied,” said Bill.
“Don’t they have modern plumbing?” queried Margaret.
“It’s the simple life,” said Estée. To Bill she whispered, “What are you doing? Let me out. I won’t go anywhere.”
“If you’re not part of the solution, my girl, then you’re part of the problem,” he said, waggling a finger in warning.
“But what are you planning? Come on.”
“Ho! That would be telling,” said Bill. He shoved an apple through Margaret’s bars. She dropped onto all fours and felt around on the floor till she found it.
“I would like a Wiener schnitzel,” said Margaret with her mouth full. “And a Rhine wine. Dry. And I’ll take the whole bottle, waiter. Tell him to bring the whole bottle.”
Bill picked up a pointer from the countertop and poked her thighs and stomach through the bars. She dropped the apple and cowered at the back of her cage. “Stop poking! Make him stop the poking,” she shrieked. “This hotel has bad waiters.”
“Physical fitness,” said Estée firmly. “It’s to improve your cardiovascular endurance.”
“Stop it anyway,” grumbled Margaret, her arms up protecting her face.
When he left them alone Margaret polished off her apple, drank the water Bill had left, announced she was having a siesta, and went to sleep again. With a neck cramp and one foot full of pins and needles, Estée counted the pocks in the hardboard ceiling tiles and computed the average number of pocks per tile. She tried to discern signs of movement from the cage of Specimen 76 against the wall, and finding none memorized portions of the periodic table. 75. Re. Rhenium. Atomic weight 186.2. 76. Os. Osmium. Atomic weight 190.2. She played at establishing a correlation between Specimen 76
and osmium. The atomic number of osmium was 76. There were 76 protons in the nucleus of an osmium atom. Specimen 76 was the longest-lived of all the specimens she and Bill had subjected to pain. Did it signify? Seventy-six was also the name of a chain of gas stations. Gas—osmium—octane? Ga-O-O. Ga was the abbreviation for gallium, and O for oxygen. Possibly she had hit on a formula. GaO2. A miracle molecule? A secret yielded up by chance?
Exercises were futile. Tedium blurred the surfaces, the counter and the fluorescent bulbs in their white metal casings. She dissected the sandwich, lined by Bill with rancid salami and yellowed mayonnaise, and threw it through the bars.
Margaret stirred in her sleep and muttered, “Hot, hot, the spaniel.” Estée was longing for change, any change. She fell asleep watching fleecy white grannies leap over picket fences, counting them as they baaed.
Bill woke her up by rattling her cage. It was night and he was a ghostly Michelin man, nude and white.
“How long are you keeping me here?” she asked him groggily. “And her? She’s blind. Plus she’s senile. How long?” In her sleep, Margaret moaned. Bill munched on a moonpie.
“Until I prove my point,” he said, licking a crumb off his lip.
“And what’s your point?”
“I have it here,” said Bill, and lifted an envelope, “but it is highly secretive. Though at the same time, if I may say so, it is widely understood by geniuses. Such as yours truly.” He stuck it through the bars. “You may read it after I leave. I will flick the lights on.”
“Just tell me what you’re doing. What?”
“A test, whaddya think?” said Bill indignantly, and snuck off, his buttocks flopping like dimpled saddlebags on the flanks of a pack mule.
4 TRUTHS
This Old Bag is Genus Homo Sapiens. Homo Sapiens in general are all Secret Aliens. Proof: SAPIENS-ALIENS If you change a P for a L the Word Alien is Hidden in Sapiens!!!!
An Alien does Not feel Pain.
Aliens are Enemys.
“We have seen the Enemy and He is Us.”
Solve this clue: Ima dog
“Please call room service for my potty,” said Margaret. “I gotta go.”
“Room service can’t come yet,” said Estée. “They’re having a problem in the kitchen. You have to wait.”
“Can’t wait,” said Margaret. She squatted and urinated in her cage.
“I’m sorry about this,” offered Estée. “It wasn’t my idea.”
“Some enchanted evening,” warbled Margaret softly, “you may find your true love.”
Bill came in with breakfast trays after Margaret had sung three verses.
“Shut your trap, granny,” he said.
“Let me out,” said Estée. “This is ridiculous. I’m not going to run off.”
“Got my guards out there, you couldn’t go if you wanted to,” said Bill, and unlocked her cage. She crawled out and stood up, then stretched and ran to Margaret’s cage, but Bill was ahead of her.
“Let her out too,” said Estée.
“Hold your horses,” grumbled Bill, but he opened Margaret’s door and, while Estée hoisted her out, laid down paper towels to soak up the pool of her urine. Margaret roamed around the room, bumping into things, and then sat down cross-legged on the floor to eat her grapefruit. Estée leaned against the counter, drank the coffee Bill had brought, and watched him drag a spool of twine from the supplies cupboard. He hammered three-inch nails into the linoleum, four of them in a large rectangle. Margaret ignored this, smiling and nodding. “You hear the wedding bells?” she asked Estée.
“Bells, yes,” said Estée. “A white church with a steeple, on the beach.”
“You may see him dancing … across a crowded room.”
“What are you blabbing about, you stinky hag?” asked Bill. He dealt her knee a quick kick as he knelt down to tie twine to a nail. “Your religious crappola? I’ll show you who’s boss, not some old faggot with white hair and a dress.”
“What a lovely vacation,” said Margaret, and spat out a grapefruit seed.
Bill attached four stout lengths of twine, with a lot of slack, to the four nails. He made them secure with many complicated knots and then fed their ends through four small plastic collars. He took the grapefruit rind away from Margaret and snapped one of the collars around her right wrist.
“Jewels?” she said, and went compliantly to her bondage. “Lovely. They are fit for a queen.”
He snapped on the second collar, and then the last two to her ankles, around the grimy bobby socks.
“She reeks,” he remarked.
“Some enchanted evening,” sang Margaret, and smiled.
Bill pulled out a plastic groundsheet and cut a hole in it. He put it over Margaret’s body, with the hole over her face. “For observation of the subject,” he told Estée.
“You may find your true love.”
“She’s revved and ready to go,” said Bill approvingly. “Don’t try anything. I’m going out, but I’m locking the door behind me. Back in five.”
“What’s the young man doing now?” asked Margaret, as he went out.
“A mud pack. For the skin.”
“Some enchanted evening …”
“Don’t worry.”
“… you may see a stranger …”
She was spread-eagled, arms and legs splayed. Estée knelt beside her and patted her arm.
“You may see a stranger …”
Bill came back in pushing a dolly loaded high with bricks.
“The mud packs,” said Estée nervously.
“Here we go, here we go,” trilled Bill.
“Come on,” Estée urged him. “You don’t need to hurt her. Your theory is true, completely true. Who needs to prove a truth? I believe it 100 percent.”
“It’s not enough to believe,” said Bill. “You have to know. I know I’m the boss. She doesn’t think so now, she’ll know it soon. Seeing is believing.”
“She knows. She knows, she’s just senile.”
“You think she knows? Then what’s that bullshit? You hear that?”
“Across a crowded room …”
“Write this down,” said Bill. “Experiment on Subject 243 began at 9:32 a.m.”
He started piling bricks on Margaret’s abdomen.
“Are you taking me dancing?” she asked Bill, blinking.
“He’s submerging you in the mud and then you soak for a while,” said Estée. She smoothed the ratty hair on Margaret’s temple.
“Shut up,” said Bill. “No bullshit. Stand back. No interference! Mediation could wreck the whole thing.”
“Some enchanted evening, when you find your true love …”
As the bricks weighed her down Margaret sang louder. They stacked up in a pyramid on her midsection.
“… when you hear her laughing …”
“Shut up,” said Bill, heaving three bricks onto her pelvis.
“Stop!” said Estée, grabbing them off again. Bill cuffed her hard and she fell back, hand up to a bloody nose.
“… across a crowded room …”
He dropped a brick on Margaret’s mouth and then picked it off to survey the damage. Her lip was split and teeth might have been broken, but she licked the blood off. Estée watched her eyes glint from between the near-closed lids, darting back and forth as the chapped lips puckered and stretched.
“… then you will know, you will know even then …”
“She’s a beaut, ain’t she? Now who’s the boss, you old sow? Who’s the boss?”
“… the sound of her laughter …”
Bill was dropping the bricks now. They fell on Margaret’s legs and chest, gouged her forehead and slid off.
“… will haunt you again …”
Estée scuttled backward on the linoleum and struggled to her feet, retreating toward the door. Bill had forgotten to lock it when he came in with the bricks. She opened it and was out in the hallway, home free, dashing for the telephone in the foyer. She dialed 911 and ran ou
t the front door. She paced on the porch, wiping blood from her nose. No one came. Maybe they were driving slowly. The Kraft house was set far back from the street, but beyond the palm tree border she could see the orange cast of a streetlamp. Otherwise, dark and silent.
“Police!” she yelled, but no one answered. Finally, shivering, she went back inside. The guards had disappeared.
In the lab, nothing was visible but bricks. Bill must have trundled in a second dolly: at its peak the pile was as high as her waist. Bill stood back, his arms crossed over his protuberant belly. “Experiment concluded at 10:28 a.m.,” he told Estée. “Write it down. The subject showed a complete lack of awareness of masonry weighing her down. The subject was dumb and insensate.”
“But where is she?” asked Estée, and started to pull off the bricks. Bill drummed his fingers on his stomach and then rooted in one ear with a pinky. She dug through bricks until her fingers were raw.
“We showed ’em who’s boss Esty. Me myself and I.”
“But she has to be there,” said Estée, digging with frantic hands. She could find nothing but bare floor.
“Number 76,” announced Bill gravely, “is deceased.” He raised his hand to Estée and showed her the last of the moths, dangling single-winged between thumb and forefinger.
“What happened to Margaret? Where did you put her?”
Bill shrugged and flung Number 76 carelessly to the floor as he exited. Estée dropped to all fours and kept scrabbling through the bricks, but nothing lay beneath them. Rotting salami was scattered and trodden underfoot.
Despairing, she repaired to Betty’s room, where she found her mother knitting a cat-sized sweater. The bed was hung with crepe-paper streamers, and Betty sported a frilly pink pinafore. “A little party for your father,” she chirped. “The man is a martyr to science,” and as Bill descended on them, for once decent in a dressing gown, she cast away the needles and opened her arms. “Here we are!” she said brightly, hugging Bill to one side of her and Estée to the other. “Just one big happy family.”
THREE
BILL THREW BETTY OUT WITH THE BATHWATER. HE referred to it later as spring cleaning, though it took place at the beginning of summer, the year Estée labeled T-1 in her diary to signify approaching freedom. One afternoon she entered Betty’s boudoir to find it empty. The shrine had been dismantled, the bed stripped, the closets laid bare. An alcove formerly reserved for wigs housed a vase of fake flowers.