by Lydia Millet
“Is she fine?” she asked him.
“No,” he said. “She is not fine. She is gone.”
Then he left.
GLOSSARY: HOMO SAPIENS
SPECIMEN 12:
GONE.
She was flossing her teeth—the back molar loosened during the brawl had been extracted and her tongue played, with some melancholia, in its warm little hole—when she looked up to the medicine-cabinet mirror and was shocked to behold the corpulent and evil physiognomy of Bill.
She sat down on the tile floor, which smelled of lemon-scent disinfectant. All formal observations of the species must be shelved. She had her father’s eyes, but not his fat arms or legs, which took up the space of others. His system was deficient.
She got up and leaned on the sink, and in this position spent two hours staring at her reflection, until at long last Bill’s tiny swine eyes disappeared into her own, his upturned snout shrank back into the contours of her nose, and his triple chin receded and vanished. He bowed out of her, genuflecting as he retreated, and seeped dark and wraithlike into the toilet tank. But her innocuous reflection was only the skin: beneath it her veins and organs swelled with hereditary toxins. She would expunge them by sheer force of will.
They discharged her in the afternoon. An orderly wheeled her out in a chair, as per hospital policy, with Pete Magnus walking alongside. She was dizzy but otherwise whole.
“Kept your room for you Esty,” said Pete Magnus. “Your bag, your stuff, kept it all safe and sound.”
While he was at work she counted her money, put Betty’s jewels into a plastic Vons bag, and boarded a Rapid Transit vehicle going to Wilshire Boulevard, where Collateral Lenders of Beverly Hills was located. She left the jewels to be appraised, ate lunch reading People, and went back to pick them up.
“Not even your expensive imitations, your cheap paste is what these here are,” said the man behind the counter, and dangled the supposed Cartier bracelet from a forefinger as though it were a carrier of buboes.
Sickened, knees weak, she stuffed the maligned trinkets into her bag and slouched out of the store. The pawnshop man and Pete Magnus were nothing but bearers of bad tidings. They were the salesmen of the normal, and they were everywhere. She had to make an odyssey. The risk factor was slight, for the Krafts could not capture her and keep her at home now. Those days were past. Bill had given Pete Magnus a lot of money; it was possible that he would consent to give her something. Not probable, but possible. She studied the bus routes, left a Post-it note for Pete Magnus on the refrigerator, and struck out for Santa Monica Boulevard.
By the time she got to her old neighborhood it was twilight. Tall palm trees with tiny heads swayed in the breeze, and as she made her way along the sidewalk to the cul-de-sac a streetlight winked out. But she saw, and stood still in her tracks. There was no house. The lot was empty. Where the Kraft residence had stood there was only bare ground.
She wandered through the gate, the iron gate inscribed with a flowing capital K, past a blackened patch of grass where the customs booth had been, up the crescent drive, still extant. There was the line of trees ahead that had formed the back boundary between Kraft and the neighboring gardens; there was the burial mound for the roosters, the same earth she remembered, and the square lot of sand and gravel that had served as their forum. Nothing else. The lawn was scorched in the configuration of the house’s blueprint. Ashes had been cleared, debris, every component, brace, beam, foundation stone, cinder block, everything was gone. Even the basement had been filled in: fresh dirt was level with the burned ground. She dragged her foot along the dead grass and heard it rustle like old paper—desiccated, brittle.
She wandered around the perimeter of the lawn once, twice, and then went out the gate again, walked slowly back to the bus stop and waited.
“Burned to the ground?” said Pete Magnus, chewing on a carrot. “What happened? Who can you ask? There was nothing in the news. Don’t you know your old neighbors, or like friends of the family?”
“The family has no friends,” said Estée, but then she remembered the crematorium. They would know where Bill was and what had happened to Kraft.
“Bill Kraft? With a K? Never heard of him,” said the manager heartily behind the echo of his speakerphone.
“But he owns the place,” said Estée. “He’s my father.”
“Owned by a Dallas-based conglomerate, give you their number for verification if you like,” said the manager.
She hung up. “Lawyer?” queried Pete Magnus. “Or maybe they were in the obits if they, like, if they were in the house at the time?”
Research proved fruitless. Giving up on her cycles of phone calls to newspapers, to Information in Akron, Detroit, and St. Louis, where Betty’s maiden name yielded only dead ends, relinquishing her round of field trips to reference libraries where she perused local papers, obituary columns for two counties under which K gave forth Konditsiotis, Marlie, 74, Keger, James, 76, Kantry, Emma, 65, and Kreet, Bernice, 43, she took it upon herself to retire to the sofabed, where she stayed for three days. She moved and flailed her arms in restless, semiconstant sleep through dreams of Bill in flames, his blubber burning orange like a whale-oil lamp.
If Bill had come full circle to the end, it stood to reason he had seen at last that he and Betty were specimens too, had chosen as his final form pyromaniac and ignited his own habitat. Once he made this final judgment, to which all other judgments had led, he might have watched as Betty shrank where she lay, grew softly dead as wisps of smoke trailed through the rosebud lips of a shining plastic Boop mask.
Until Pete Magnus, refusing to take no for an answer, roused her and propelled her out into the kitchen, there to feed her milk, toast, and pep. She was healthy again, he reminded her, though on the side of her head were contusions; yellow bruises climbed along her ribs, thighs, and shins, and she felt a twinge in her hip when she twisted from the waist. She should count herself lucky.
“Come on Esty,” said Pete Magnus. “Gotta move on, put it behind you. Hard to accept, you’re depressed, I’m here to help. They’re probably just on vacation or something, sold the house to developers, putting up like a golf course or condos there so they tore the place down. Relocating, you know, kids leave and the old folks need a smaller place, I see it all the time. They’ll be in touch. Stressed about money? Stay here. What’s mine is yours, babe. Just don’t be so depressed, you gotta get out more. Boys miss you, Stew goes, Where’s that babe Esty, he’s all, What’s up with her, and I go, She’ll be back Stew, right? Just an accident, she won’t hold it against you guys. I go, she’ll be fine. She’s a survivor.”
GLOSSARY FINAL ENTRY
Prognosis for Specimen 1, Real Estate Agent: Extinction.
TWO
PETE MAGNUS ANNOUNCED A SCHEME TO BROKER THE SITE of an Arizona nursing home to a strip-mining outfit. Overnight he shifted into high gear. He brought his work home with him and spent the mornings talking on his cordless phone while Estée brewed coffee and toasted bread. Between calls he stuffed his mouth and confided in her his workaday trials.
“Marsha, right, this woman that works for me? She’s irritating the hell out of me. She’s doing this primal scream therapy, she chants a lot and she has this altar set up in her filing cabinet. Her husband won’t let her do it at home so she’s doing it at the office, and I mean she locks the door and shit but there I am on the speakerphone and through the wall she’s chanting oogala boogala.”
“Primal scream?” asked Estée, pouring orange juice.
“You don’t do the scream right away, you have to work up to it. She’s been in this therapy for a year or something, she still hasn’t worked up to the scream, all she does is fucking chant. Come in at the wrong time and she’s cross-legged in front of the filing cabinet with her eyes closed going oogala boogala schmoogala doogala.”
“Eggs?”
“Awright, take ’em off your hands. Gonna think big from now on, Esty. Been playing it safe but now I’m g
oing big, big, big. What’s that asshole’s number, my asshole broker, guy’s got a corncob up his ass. Steve? Strategy here, I wanna off-load all the blue-chip, total liquidation as soon as it’s up say three-eighths on the Argentine ITT, a quarter with the Coca-Cola. Esty, hand me the half-and-half wouldja?”
She left the kitchen, taking her toast into the living room to eat in front of Joan Lunden’s “Good Morning” face. Padding into the hall where her closet was to look for a pair of underwear, she burrowed in the dirty clothes hamper and, scrabbling through the soiled mass of Pete Magnus’s king-size sheets, found a fifty-dollar bill in his pants. She pocketed it slyly.
Sitting on the side of his bed, Pete donned lozenged socks while holding the receiver couched between his jaw and collarbone.
“What are you talking about, buying-selling like crazy, make a big fat fucking commission, what do you even care if I crap on myself? But I won’t, Steve, I won’t I gotta feeling. Steve, you’re lucky I don’t take my business to a deep discount house, trade at two cents a share, save myself your goddamn fat-cat cut,” and he waved a shoe at Estée, bidding her to forage for its mate in the pile on the floor. “What do you mean I don’t know, capital gains bullshit, turn it over, but listen I gotta go. That’s why I said three, I figured in the IRS levy, at this point I just need liquid, whaddaya think, no, I gotta go, catch ya later Steve,” and he hung up and joined Estée in scrounging around for the shoe.
“Seizing the fuckin day,” he told her. “Been lying in wait, all these assets sitting there, I mean shit I’m taking risks, gonna go for broke, why stay small? You ever hear that song by that purple midget Prince, you know Ronnie’s got a bomb we could all die any day, you seen my Filofax?” and then, while in the background she tore his Porsche calendar off the wall of her bedroom, he was dialing again. “I tolja already when we signed the leaseback deal it was—the lease runs out in July, so what I think we gotta sell the property, gotta crazy offer from this company in Tulsa, keep it quiet obviously,” and she crumpled the calendar into a waste can, opened desk drawers and scanned their contents. The stack of magazines pertaining to his apartment, named Penthouse, she removed. Flipping through one she saw its subject matter was not real estate. “What are you telling me, give me this grandmother shit? No, if it was my grandmother I’d go honey, time to move on. What two hundred seniors? Give me this Golden Age crap. Move ’em out! Outside Tucson there it’s geriatric heaven, they got your dude ranches look like the Taj Ma-fuckin-hal, there’s a godzillion nursing homes, it’s like a Disneyland for dialysis machines. Please, relocation’s not gonna kill ’em.”
“Pete?” she asked, walking into his bedroom. He was rubbing a Mennen Speed Stick on his armpits. “I’m cleaning my room. Do you need these magazines?”
“Christ,” he said, and dropped them in a corner.
“Onanism is healthy,” recited Estée. “It’s really the best way. When you’re older I will show you the devices.”
“What?” he asked, distracted, but before she could repeat Betty’s dictum he had knotted his tie and was on his way out.
He upped his rate of acquisition of native art, bringing home a despoiled icon almost every day: now a Fon iron statue, now a Baule figurine; Monday a Makishi dancer costume, Tuesday a Dukduk mask. Pete was on a spending quest. He bought luxury foodstuffs wholesale, storing cartons of capers and anchovy paste in the broom closet, crates of Belgian chocolate in the bathroom. In a flurry of extravagance he purchased a huge truck on jacked-up wheels, which he equipped with a booming stereo system. “I’ll teach you to drive Esty, get around on your own.” He no longer troubled himself to turn off faucets, burners, or fans; water ran constantly, sometimes from multiple taps at once while Estée went around shutting them off. He often switched on the heater to counteract the effects of the air conditioner. The laundry went unwashed until Estée put it in the washing machine. He left cartons of milk going sour on the counter, broken beer bottles on the kitchen linoleum.
She told herself that, being an unpaying guest, she could set no conditions to her tenancy, and it was natural that, while he was trying to get big, mundane events were beneath him. The world was now, he told Estée, his oyster. Apparently he was a pearl, swimming in gray mollusk muscle. A pearl did not concern itself with its oyster, though the oyster built itself around the pearl.
Pete Magnus’s burgeoning mass was filling the finite space of the apartment. If she was uncomfortable with overlap she would have to shrink to accommodate, contract as he expanded. To this end she did not respond to his displays and was stiff and unforthcoming in mixed company. She avoided Stew and company. The form her shrinking took was covert: she kept exchanges to a minimum, made no demands, and receded quietly under verbal assault. Her situation, she assumed, was of brief duration, peopled by temporary characters and governed by arbitrary rules. Bearing with it was less a function of stoicism than of cost-effectiveness. She had to acclimatize. Advances were incremental: the real grew at her sides in the shape of new wings, vestigial and membranous. She loitered in public places, waiting to learn. It would happen by accretion, like geology. But Pete Magnus was not a patient man.
“What you gotta have, Esty, is people skills,” he urged. “You gotta be able to make people do what you want. You’re not gonna learn that at the library Esty. I mean you’re a good-looking girl, you could be a model or something. You just gotta know how to work it. Keep it in mind Esty. When you get up in the morning, say to yourself: people skills. Aims, goals, and objectives. Interaction. You’re too quiet Esty. What people like most about me is, why I sell so many houses is, I can talk Esty. I have what you call conversational flair. Take it from me. Every morning I get up, I take a look in the mirror, and I go, Pete, today is going to be a great day. And why? Because I got aims, I got goals, I got objectives.”
She schooled herself in Magnus appreciation. She conjugated verbs on his behalf: like, likes, likability. I like Pete. Pete is neat.
Tiring of boring old Nigerian bronzes, Pende masks, and Sri Lankan disease-devil faces, he brought home the pièce de résistance one Friday night. He announced a celebration, with delivery food to come. He had an electrician wire a light into the wall and bolted a custom-made stand to the living room floor. It was Plexiglas outfitted with a small refrigeration unit in the base. As Pete bustled through these excited preliminaries, Estée reclined on the couch reading the Times. Keep an eye on personal finances this month. Pete lit candles and brought out a bottle of wine. Take-out Indian arrived. They ate it off the crate.
He adopted his proud-father look, presiding over the meal in kingly fashion. He fed samosas into his maw with relish, smeared chutney on garlic nan, and orated. Paging through People, he said, “She got that stuff injected in her lips, collagen or whatever. Makes them puff out. Would you look at that pink shirt? I’m sorry, but that man is a faggot.”
She drank glass after glass, until Pete opened a second bottle. She was pleasantly buoyant. A homey glow infused the carved ebony lingam, the frog mask from Bali, and the spear-holding demon with brotherly warmth. “Nothing is as hard,” she mused, “as it looks.”
“Hell yeah,” said Pete Magnus. In the dim light the sunlamp-tanned orb of his face shone as if polished: he was a gleaming cherub, a round and sated doll. “In veeno very tass, right?”
“Not exactly veritas,” she said, but he stood and swept the white boxes of food off the crate with a flourish. He hefted a hammer and pried two nails from either side of the crate, dropped the hammer on the couch, and lifted the lid. Estée, still seated on the rug, peered over the edge and saw only white Styrofoam peanuts.
“And now,” said Pete Magnus, “for our feature presentation. Straight from Papua New Guinea.”
He dug slowly into the peanuts until he’d cleared enough away to grab both sides of a smaller box, which he extracted. He set it on top of the peanuts and opened it, pulling out a wad of waxy tissue paper the size of a softball. This he held gently on the palm of one hand as he tipt
oed to the display platform, where he placed it.
“C’mere,” he whispered, and beckoned to Estée. She went to stand beside him. “For your viewing pleasure, exclusive contraband from one of the last man-eating tribes known to the modern world,” he announced, and carefully peeled off the paper.
It took her a minute to get it. The object was slightly larger than an avocado, wrinkled like a prune and almost as dark, a mahogany tinge to it. She leaned closer: on the top she could make out strands of coarse black thread peppered with a little gray. It was riddled with craters, indentations, and bulges. A faint, sweet odor when she inhaled. The upper half shriveled, marked with two small crumbling dabs of red paint near the front, seemingly ancient. On either side, crusty flaps.
Pete Magnus stood back and she moved around to look at it straight on. Two puckered slits in front: eyes. The crusty flaps therefore ears, the threads hairs. A shrunken head. In the center of the face, a caved-in blister, no doubt referred to in happier times as a nose. It had been divested of its cranium, of teeth, bones, apparently of cartilage too; nothing remained to it but some distant descendant of skin.
“Wanted one of these things forever, you have no idea how impossible it is to get one,” said Pete Magnus. “Is it awesome! Jesus.”
“Maybe it’s not real?” she offered.
“Not real, are you kidding?” snapped Pete Magnus. “What I paid for this, it better fuckin be real. This guy I talked to deals with the Indonesian government, coupla guys in customs there you got a few bribes, deal with the copper-ore trucks coming through from Papua, drivers have contact with people, I could tell you some stories. Problems I had. Started looking four years ago, that’s how long. Persistence, Esty. Dee-termination.”
“I’d like some more wine,” said Estée, and headed back to the couch. Pete Magnus fiddled with the stand, closed the glass case, and bolted it at the back. He turned a dial beneath the cooling unit till it hummed.