Naked Mole Rat Saves the World

by Karen Rivers

  “Grandma says he joined a cult and then killed himself,” said Clem.

  “She told you that?”

  “Yes, Mom, she did. And guess what? We didn’t die! What did you think would happen if we found out? That we’d fall apart?”

  “Oh, well. Maybe. I don’t know! It’s just a lot for a kid to process.”

  “I’m processing just fine.” Clem looked at her phone. The meat picture already had 127 likes. “Was he crazy?”

  “I think you have to be careful of that word, honey.” Her mom pushed her hair behind her ears. “People always have all kinds of things going on. Crazy is a pretty powerful word. It doesn’t take into account . . . ”

  “MOM.”

  “I don’t think he was crazy, no.” She ran her hand through her hair again, making it stick up in about five different directions. “I think he was troubled and vulnerable. I think he thought it would make him happy. But you know what? I think we hardly ever see happiness in the moment. It’s something we only see when we look back.”

  “Gee, that sounds wise, Mom.” Clem leaned back, nearly falling off her stool. She wondered if her mom was right. She had been happy before the accident. Did she know it then? She didn’t remember ever really thinking “I’m so happy!” that was for sure. But she had been. “Poor Grandma. What if she had been happy? And he took that when he left? That’s really mean.”

  “I don’t think it was mean. I think he felt choiceless, and that drinking the Kool-Aid was not just an option but something he had to do because he was commanded to do it. Sometimes life is like that. It doesn’t feel like you have a choice, even if you do.”

  “Whatever,” said Clem. “If he’d asked Grandma, she would have commanded him not to!”

  Her mom exhaled, blowing her bangs off her forehead. “I can’t understand how it happened, really, all those people dying because that man told them to do it.” She shook her head.

  “He could have said no to drinking poison.”

  “Maybe,” said her mom. “But I think only a few people even tried to refuse or to run away. Everyone drank it. They were brainwashed.”

  “Then the leader was crazy!”

  Her mom had stopped stirring the meat and it was starting to burn. She didn’t seem to notice. “Or a complicated person who lost sight of what he was doing who was struggling with his mental health. He really did think he was a god. Imagine what that must have felt like.”

  “He knew he wasn’t a god. He knew he was, like, taking their money and stuff.” Clem sniffed. “Mom, the meat!”

  “Oh, it’s burning!” Her mom snatched the pan off the stove.

  “Crazy is more interesting than boring, at least,” said Clem, getting up and opening the window. “I can’t breathe! Too much smoke!” She took a picture of the smoking pan.

  “Maybe.” Her mom scraped the meat out of the pan and into some bubbling red sauce. The pan was a mess. “I know Grandma doesn’t like to dwell on it, so please don’t ask her too much more about it.”

  “Okaaaaay,” said Clem, but she wasn’t sure she could leave it alone. She had a lot of questions. “I don’t get why you didn’t tell us before. He was our grandfather, too. So he, like, belongs to us. Right?”

  “You weren’t ready.”

  “I thought he died in an old-timey war. That he was captured by Germans or something.”

  Her mom made a face. “Wrong generation. Don’t they teach you anything in school? Sheesh. If he’d died in a war, it would have been in Vietnam.” She plonked the pan into the sink and added some soap and water. “This has to soak, maybe forever.” She laughed.

  “They don’t teach us about cults, that’s for sure. No one mentions utopia! They leave all the good stuff out.”

  “Cults involve all kinds of things that aren’t appropriate for twelve-year-old brains to absorb.” Clem’s mom leaned on the counter next to her.

  Clem let that sink in. “I know enough. I know the world is bananas. Everyone is bananas.”

  “Everyone’s trying to do the right thing. It’s just that sometimes they get it wrong.” She turned back to the sink and scraped the spatula on the bottom of the pan. “Maybe we get it wrong and we don’t even know we’re getting it wrong.”

  “True,” said Clem. “How would you know you were doing the wrong thing if it felt like it was the right thing, the thing that might make you happy?”

  “No one is one hundred percent happy all the time, we’re all just some fraction of happy.”

  “Dad is one hundred percent happy,” said Clem.

  “He loves the store, that’s for sure. It’s like his calling!” Clem’s mom smiled at her. “I like how things are, too. I’m eighty percent happy on a good day. Sometimes even as high as ninety! What about you?”

  “Things are okay,” Clem said, but that was a lie.

  “Give me a percentage, hon.”

  Clem shrugged. “Happy” felt like something that was a million miles away from where she was, like on a different planet or like a shape she could see only in the distance through thick fog and couldn’t possibly get to. “Fifty percent,” she said.

  “That’s low!” said Mom. “Do I need to worry, Clemmy?”

  “I’m kidding,” said Clem. “Sixty percent.” That was a lie. Even fifty seemed like a high estimate. She tried to change the subject. “Abu is another hundred-percenter,” she said. “It must come from Dad’s side of the family.”

  Abu was Clem’s other grandfather, but he was a completely different type of grandfather than Grandpa, who spent most of his time napping on the couch, or Beau, obviously, who was dead.

  Abu was a sparkly, big person, like her dad, but even more so. Kit said he was a rainbow of a person, and she was right, he was. He was exuberantly joyful. Clem couldn’t even imagine him ever being sad.

  He designed puppets that he made out of broken things. He had an Etsy shop where he sold them that was pretty famous. And that wasn’t even his job! His job was even better than that: He was a set designer for Broadway shows.

  Not only was he happy, but up until now, Abu was the most interesting person Clem knew. But strangely now he didn’t compare to this new grandfather figure who was a dead teenager named Beau who drank the Kool-Aid.

  Clem tried to make all that into something she could say out loud, but nothing came out of her mouth. “Sixty percent is probably great for a teenager,” she said, instead. “They don’t call it teen angst for nothing.”

  Her mom didn’t laugh. “Maybe,” she said. “But you’re not actually a teenager yet.” She still looked worried.

  Clem picked up the picture again. “I wonder how happy he was.”

  Clem’s mom looked over Clem’s shoulder at the photo. “You two look so much like him, in this photo especially. I didn’t know him, so I don’t know if he was happy, but from what Mom told me, I know he was impetuous. You two are a bit impetuous, too.”

  “Thanks,” said Clem, even though it wasn’t exactly a compliment.

  If they looked like him, maybe they also thought like him. Maybe they were also cuckoo. Bananas. Crazy. Craziness could be genetic, she knew that.

  Clem badly wanted not to be crazy.

  She also wanted him to have not drunk the Kool-Aid, to have become an old man like Abu, a rainbow of a person, the kind of person who definitely would not have killed himself because some crazy person told him to do it.

  A one-hundred-percent-happy person.

  “I’m going to call kit,” Clem announced.

  Sometimes talking to kit helped Clem untangle what she was thinking when it felt like she was thinking too many things at once, a woolly colorful tangle of thoughts that she’d never be able to unravel on her own.

  That’s what she liked best about kit.

  Clem

  “If you were an animal,” kit answered, wi
thout saying hello, “what kind of animal would you be?”

  “I don’t know,” said Clem. “A human? Humans are animals.” She thought about the sizzling meat. “Definitely not a cow.”

  “Wouldn’t you be a dog? What kind of dog? A soft-and-loose dog?”

  “I like dogs, but I wouldn’t want to be one. You can like a thing without wanting to be a thing.” Clem didn’t feel like talking about dogs. She wanted to talk about utopia. She wanted to tell kit about her new, dead, teenaged grandfather.

  “Purebreds are weaker than mixed breeds,” said kit. “If you are going to be a dog, be a mutt. I was just at the shelter and that’s what Chandra said. Oh, someone adopted Ralphie.”

  Clem didn’t know Chandra, but she had seen a picture of Ralphie, who was basically her dream dog. He looked like a golden retriever, except he was small and had pointy ears. “Oh,” she said. She felt weirdly annoyed, like someone had stolen her dog, and then even more annoyed with kit for telling her.

  “Chandra says that small dogs live longer, too, so Ralphie will probably live forever.”

  “Great,” said Clem. She didn’t want to talk about Chandra, who worked at the shelter, where kit sort of volunteered. Clem had never even met Chandra. She was getting pretty tired of “Chandra says.”

  “Chandra also says . . . ”

  “A mixed breed,” interrupted Clem. “Small. Like Ralphie. That’s what I’d be.” She really wanted to tell kit about Beau. She was bursting to tell her. She couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t doing it.

  “What percent happy do you think you are?” she asked instead.

  “I’d be a lemur,” kit said, without answering. “Their eyes look like mine, sort of, with my glasses on. Or maybe a shrimp. Did you know that shrimp’s hearts are actually in their head? Hang on.” Kit put the phone down with a clunk. Clem could hear that kit was roller-skating around her echoey, empty apartment. She could hear the wheels-on-hardwood sound it made. Her mom had some kind of weird phobia about carpets so all their floors were bare.

  Kit didn’t have a cell phone—her mom was also super paranoid about brain tumors and stuff—just an old-fashioned phone with a long curly cord that sat on the kitchen counter like you see in old TV shows.

  “Honestly, I just wish I were a bird,” said kit, coming back, a bit breathless. “Are you still there? If I could transform into a bird, I would be one hundred percent happy, but right now, I guess I’d say seventy-five percent. No, seventy-seven percent.”

  “I’m here,” said Clem impatiently. “That’s oddly specific.”

  “I like sevens,” said kit.

  “Okay,” said Clem. There was a silence where she could have brought up the subject of Beau, but she didn’t.

  “I feel like I’d want to be a bird, but I’d end up being a rodent instead,” kit said. “Being a rodent would be gross, right? I mean, it would be the worst of all the possible things.”

  “You could be a turtle.”

  Kit giggled. “A non-turtle-y turtle.”

  Clem wondered if the turtle thing was even funny anymore. She pictured herself and kit as old people, leaning on walkers, rolling down the street to Dal’s burger place, howling with laughter because one of them said, “Be a turtle.” Instead of feeling happy about that, she felt sort of sorry for her future self, then mad at her current self for only fake-laughing, for not being fun anymore, for not even finding the joke funny. She squished the phone between her ear and her shoulder and walked over and picked the glass turtle up from her shelf and pressed it into her cheek. The glass was cool and smooth.

  “If you can’t be yourself, be a turtle,” kit added. “Remember?”

  There was a silence. Clem held the turtle up to the light. She could see glass bubbles inside of it.

  “Hello?” kit said.

  “I found a picture of my grandfather at Grandma’s. Not Grandpa, but my actual grandfather,” Clem said, even though she wasn’t sure she even wanted to talk to kit about it anymore. “We look just like him. He died at Jonestown. That was a cult. It was famous. A lot of people died there. They drank poisoned Kool-Aid.” The information came out of her in short bursts, like radio communications in an old war movie, like the kind of war she thought he’d died in.

  “What?” said kit. She was silent for a minute. “Who? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You had another grandfather who died before you were born?”

  “He died before Mom was born, even. He didn’t even ever see her. He didn’t know Grandma was preggo, even. So he was her father, but not her dad. Grandpa was her dad. Because he raised her. He was the one who was there.”

  “He was her father, but not her dad,” kit repeated. “That makes sense.”

  “I guess.”

  Neither of them said anything for a minute or two and then kit filled the silence. “Did you know that koalas have humanlike fingerprints? If I were a koala, I’d rob a bank or murder someone and the police would be stumped.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” said Clem. She put the turtle down on the floor and rested her foot on it. She wasn’t going to step on it. At least, she didn’t think she was.

  “Why not?”

  “You couldn’t murder anyone.”

  “Probably not. But maybe. I could if they were hurting someone I love. Or an animal.”

  “Jorge . . . ” Clem stopped. She was going to say that Jorge hurt her, because he did. He dropped her. But she sneezed. It wasn’t his fault. She closed her eyes. “Why are we talking about this?”

  “Before you called, I was thinking about something,” kit said, “I was thinking . . . ” Clem heard kit take a deep breath. “I was thinking that maybe, what if people can turn into animals. Or what if maybe everyone has an animal part to them, that comes out when they’re mad or sad or . . . I don’t know. Something.”

  “Turn into animals?”

  “An animal version of themselves. Like a magic kind of a thing.”

  Clem sighed. “Kit, come on. We’re twelve.”

  “I know how old we are. Samara believes in magic and she’s thirty-three!”

  “But that’s different. She believes in, like, conjuring up love and junk like that, and you can never prove if it works or doesn’t because maybe you’d have fallen in love on that day anyway, even if you hadn’t chanted and lit candles and smelled a bay leaf or whatever.”

  “I was just thinking about it, okay? I was trying to think about what kind of animal the best people would be. Like they would be the most magnificent, right? You’d have to earn that, the magic to become lions or elephants or dolphins. Bad people would have less power, so they’d be crummy animals.”

  “Marina would be a mermaid.”

  “Mermaids aren’t animals!”

  “Fine, whatever,” Clem said. “A dolphin.”

  “Are you mad? You sound mad.”

  Clem thought about it. She was mad, but not at kit. “I guess I would like to be a dog. But you wouldn’t get a choice, so I’d be something stupid and insignificant, like a caterpillar or a worm.”

  “You’d be a mammal, at least.”

  “No one really has choices. They just think they do.”

  “True,” said kit. “I guess. But this was my hypothetical thing, so I say you get a choice.”

  “It’s just, like, life,” Clem went on. “You think you are choosing one thing and you get something else. You don’t have any control.” She kicked the turtle. It bonked against the floorboard and turned over on its back.

  “Right-o,” said kit, like it was a joke.

  “You’d be a naked mole rat,” Clem said. She knew it was something kit’s mom used to say about the baby picture that used to be on the fridge, and she knew it really, really upset kit, and she knew it was mean that she was repeating it, but she didn’t care. She wanted to car
e, but she didn’t.

  She heard kit’s sharp intake of breath. “Sorry!” Clem said, quickly. “I was kidding!”

  There was a bang in her ear.

  Kit had hung up the phone.

  “Ouch,” said Clem. “I hate when you do that.” She called back, but kit wasn’t picking up and didn’t even have voicemail so the phone just rang and rang and rang for what felt like forever.

  She felt terrible. She didn’t know why she said the things she said sometimes, except she did sort of know. Her mom always said, “Hurt people hurt people.” It didn’t make sense until you said it out loud and then it did: When you were hurt, it was like you couldn’t help hurting the people around you. But she didn’t want to hurt the people around her. She especially didn’t want to hurt kit. But the scary thing was that it seemed to be happening in spite of how she wanted it not to happen. She pictured her insides being all dark and twisted, like the ancient roots of a tree, scary-looking and gnarly and half-rotten.

  Kit’s insides were not like that at all. Kit was a great person, inside and out. She would be something way better than a naked mole rat. She’d be a unicorn.

  “Shoot,” said Clem. She should have said unicorn, she realized. Kit was a unicorn. She was one of a kind.

  But anyway, what did it matter? People didn’t turn into animals. What was kit even talking about? People turned into themselves. Worse and worse versions of themselves.

  Like Jackson had. He’d gotten mean.

  Like Clem herself had. She’d gotten dark.

  Clem shuddered. If she transformed, she’d probably be something terrible, like a mosquito or one of those box jellyfish in Australia that would kill you without even meaning to do it, just by brushing by your leg.

  She lay down on her bed and curled up into a ball. Her stomach ached.

  Once, last summer, kit had brought a whole bag of shining ribbons to the park, and they had found a tree that was just slightly off the path and they had tied ribbons to each branch. On each ribbon, they’d hung a piece of paper that had a wish on it for a person who found it. Like “I wish for you a lifetime of free candy” and “I wish for you a winning lottery ticket” and “I wish for you a puppy named Thor.” One of the papers said, “I wish for you that Ben & Jerry’s names an ice cream flavor after you.” Clem would never have thought of that but it was her favorite one.