by Leni Zumas
The watcher’s beloved is one of the ones who never go outside. He does his work at home where the sun can’t get him. His face is the coldest white, much like those of eighteenth-century women who ate arsenic wafers to bleach their skin. (The arsenic killed the hemoglobin in their blood, and the women grew pale as spiders living on the floor of the sea.)
The beloved reaches the world through his machine. Upon his ashen cheeks, at all hours, jumps blue breath from the screen. He sends reports, receives instructions, unbuckles his belt and digs one hand down to pump while the bodies topple from position to position.
When this latest war started, the academy upped the number of trainees it sent to America. We are sorely needed in the land of the green mermaid. Other places, people are forced to reckon with their midnights because they’re standing right in front of them, often holding a rifle. Not so in a country where you can choose, instead of rifles, to think about wrinkle-fighting injections or celebrity custody combat.
During a previous war, slightly to the east of this one, I was fresh-eared at the academy. I couldn’t wait to be a dragon on a pagoda, watching gunfire like a cricket match. But my instructor assigned me to the United States.
Shouldn’t I go to where the wounded are? I protested.
If you want the blossom to grow, said my instructor, it won’t do much good to water the petals. The roots of this suffering are in America. To help the people who are being bombed, you have to go to the nightmare’s source.
To his foam display board the collector nails a skinny white leg flecked with golden, girlish hairs.
There are three types of Antarctic penguin, says the morsel.
Is that right, says the father.
King, macaroni, and jackass.
They taught you the word jackass at school?
No, I read it just myself. The king penguin is the size of a goose.
Have you ever seen a goose? demands the father. Shit, the fact is, we’ve never taken you to the zoo. Wife! he hollers at the kitchen.
The macaroni is smaller, continues the morsel, with a white throat.
What about the jackass?
They make a noise like a donkey. And have tiny flippers.
We need to figure out where the zoo is!
The mother stands in the doorway, biting the lip of her glass. But did you see about that kid who got mauled by the Siberian tiger last month? Through the bars, she adds. I think he might’ve died of his injuries.
The biggest midnight sniffing for the mother is fear—which, of course, is every human’s midnight, but for her it assumes an age-old guise: fear of the morsel coming to harm because she, the mother, did not take good enough care of her. Tuberculosis, speeding truck, Siberian tiger: so much could happen.
The father is scared of doing nothing they’ll remember him for. Not a single footprint—film, book, record, madcap stunt—to prove he was here. Am I actually here? he sometimes mutters into his hand.
Significant fears to face, I would say; but these two do a bang-up job of not. Their evasion strategy is deftly honed. They sleep half the day, snarled up in each other’s arms; the other half they drink snowbroth. Eating is not high on the priority list. Their daughter, in fact, seems to be the only cook in the house. What sauce you want on your eggs, Dad? Hot or plum?
They are practically impervious!
Well, it’s my job to thwart blitheness. To keep drawing the midnights up from the caves, no matter how slippery these two might be.
I’m not sure what my obligation is to the young one. At what age should a person start being visited by eye-opening discomfort? Our instructors didn’t teach us a great deal about children. I think I will leave her alone for now. She already has her parents to cope with, after all.
The watcher and her beloved happen to cross the lobby at the same moment.
She emits a gurgling scream.
He says uneasily, Whut up?
Oh!
Huh?
Hi, she corrects herself.
He nods and hurries out the door. She stands still for several minutes, listening to his voice—three dazzling syllables—play back, play back.
As the sun drops behind the scaffolds of a half-built high-rise, the mother returns from a rare day out. Mrs. Megrim, sitting guard, sees her spit gum onto the sidewalk.
Pick it up! she yells.
The mother walks faster.
Megrim stands with difficulty and arranges her bulk against the door, blocking entry.
Are you kidding? says the mother, adjusting her sunglasses.
I kid not.
Look, I need to get upstairs. I’ve had this tampon in since seven A.M.
Pick it up off the ground! says Megrim.
It’s not on the ground, it’s in my cunny, growing lethal bacteria.
You want somebody to slip on that? Pick it up, dirty!
I had two job interviews today. Move out of my effing way.
Not until you fetch your effing garbage and stop expecting the world to be cleaned for you.
Not strong enough to shove her aside, the mother stomps back to retrieve the wad.
The shame collector’s grandmother has taken to ringing several times a day. When he answers, she does nothing except breathe and fidget; then, before hanging up, she whispers: Poop.
He imagines her in the assisted-living facility, next to a jar of plastic flowers, fretting fruit-bar wrappers in her speckled hands. So he picks up every time, even though the sight of the Florida area code sends a blade into his lung.
How you doing, Nanna? he murmurs, pinning to his board a lame joke he told at the Halloween party.
The flautist departs well before the deadline. A great excuse to travel, she remarks to Mrs. Megrim. I’m going on a singles cruise!
Decent, nods Megrim. But you’re still a weakling.
A shark would not be practical, knows the watcher. The tank alone would take up the whole flat, even if she could find someone willing to install it.
He stirs milk on a low flame. According to her logbook, he likes milk to be hot and weather to be cold. He likes cereal to have marshmallows and women to be drunk. Ten-thirty is his preferred hour to rise.
Look up, she whispers. Look up.
Look up because here I am.
There is a lot about the beloved that the watcher can’t know. Such as that he spikes that milk with mock absinthe. Such as that he doesn’t even own a mattress, and sleeps on a sleeping bag full of twigs and dirt. This girl is really getting the short end of it—in love with deadly marine beasts and writers of smut! I ache to expose him. But that would be solving her pain for her. We are not trained to give them shortcuts.
Agape at his screen, he squeals into the phone, Smoke these subject headings, chap! Kaela gets laid by her horses. Jalisa sucks off her cows. It’s more or less poetry! Average moms open their legs for you.
You don’t have a junk-mail filter? demands his sidekick.
I don’t want one, because this poetry’s going straight into Helen Keller.
Sunlight enters the body through the eyes, so the residents of Leopard Arms, dark-glassèd whenever they step out, do not get enough vitamin D. Even the morsel is forced to wear red plastic contraptions that make her look like a miniature-golf docent.
A lack of D causes rickets in the young, osteomalacia in the older. Is the morsel walking knock-kneed? When she came home from school yesterday, I noticed a hint of a limp. Could her bones be turning to jam?
At the academy, where we train before manifesting as architecture, they are very firm on one point: Do not sympathize. You will think these humans are hapless, indeed pathetic. Do not give in! They must tackle some truths. Confront a few facts. If you let them lead lives of carefree denial, of callous fun-seeking, the race will self-destruct even sooner than it’s scheduled to.
Although, chuckled one of my instructors, scratching the horn that left his right eye in shadow, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, now would it?
We baby gar
goyles tucked behind our desks giggled too, but nervously. The job seemed massive—beyond our gift.
The little morsel taps on 5-C, palms flat on the sticky door to keep from falling. She is wearing her new skates, smuggled out of the lost-and-found by a teacher who took pity.
The collector answers, holding a box of adhesive strips worn across the bridge of the nose to reduce snoring. They have just come in the post and he wants to practice before night. Yes?
Will you please come watch me skate because I’m not allowed to alone?
Wull. . . .
Because I could get hit by a car or abducted or also killed.
Can’t you ask your mom?
She’s still asleep.
What about—
He is too.
The collector looks at his watch, raises an eyebrow. Sophie throbs at his ankles.
So can you?
Wull. . . . He is nauseous at the prospect of showing his face in public.
Please? Her rabbity knees are twitching.
He sighs. No, I can’t.
The morsel nods.
I’m sorry, I just—
That’s okay, she says.
At dawn on March 15, the old emerge from their homes. Some are whisked into the cars of impatient relatives; others lurch by themselves into taxis. Once the sun is up, the rest of the banished start making their way. They pile crates and boxes, picture frames and cacti, into borrowed vans. They push laden shopping carts toward the bridge. They glance wistfully at the new coffee shop/handmade jeans boutique/gym but cry, Fuck this neighborhood anyway. Asthma’s not on my Christmas list!
Mrs. Megrim watches the exodus from behind her curtains, shaking her unusually large head.
The morsel has been hurting at the back of her mouth.
You probably just drank something too hot, says the mother.
I was scalded?
Yes you were. Get a piece of ice.
The almonds of her throat are aflame. If anyone were to look, they’d see a raw red swelling. Nobody looks.
A Complete Guide to Hazardous Marine Life contains a photograph of the shark she pines for: not a big shark, only a few feet, but beautiful. Brave. She has peered into its tiny eye a thousand times, even pressed her binoculars up to the page, trying to see to its heart. A shark would defend the watcher from the loneliness I have called upon her. Loneliness, according to our instructors, is among the worst of midnights. It is not a flashy problem like crack, nor easily sympathized for, like cancer. Instead it works slowly up your spine, taking sips of the fluid.
The tour guide exclaims, As you may have guessed from the cute foot traffic, this area has finally been cleared of erstwhilers. Local representatives have been trying to pass an age-and-beauty law for several years and were at last triumphant, making the neighborhood the most enviable address in the entire—
Too bad you cannot live here, observes a tourist.
Excuse me?
Well, you are no spring turkey.
The guide’s eyelids flutter, but he contains himself. Now then, if you will crane your necks to the left. . . .
On the third day of tonsillitis, the morsel requests a visit to the doctor and is told, Do you think insurance suddenly fell from the ceiling?
Pocketing house key and pink wallet, she strides off toward the high street. Returns with a lemon, a radish, and a thick yogurt made in Iceland. She squats over a patch of dirt from which climbs a spindly tree, digging until she finds her quarry.
I’m sorry, she whispers, and chops off the earthworm’s head with her key.
Please do not eat that.
If only I had a voice she could hear!
Where is Megrim? Watching her stories, of course. Damnit, Mrs., you are needed.
The tonsil-poultice, pestled in a plastic cup from a hamburger restaurant, is one part radish, two parts worm, and three parts polar curd. Delicious, she whispers staunchly. The parents, heads on fire in the next room, can’t hear.
The watcher scratches on the wall above her bed, in black pen: Love is when a thin flame flies under your skin.
Two floors below, across the courtyard, the beloved halts in midpump. He is wincing, not in carnal pleasure but in ordinary pain.
Fuck my back kills!
One can only hope that the twines and tissues of his lumbar are disintegrating, thanks to insufficient vitamin D, a little more each day.
I learned a new thing at recess, croaks the morsel. Want to see?
Stupid with snowbroth, they nod.
She laces her fingers and clamps her fists together. Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors and unload clips into the people.
Ha! says the mother.
Do it again, says the father.
In America I have learned the meaning of last straw.
Do not try to save them, warned the instructors. One may only teach lessons—never rescue.
But I’ve been in this country long enough to know that you can do anything if you just try hard enough and don’t ask the government for enfeebling handouts.
I thereby climb out from under the wet blankets of the British Empire and pledge: I will rescue.
Not yet sure exactly how.
Oh-em-gee, chap, were you aware that Pete’s mom is ready for hard-core action after some beers? Or that crazy farm women are screwing in the barn? A lot goes on in agricultural settings.
Helen Keller didn’t live on a farm, did she?
Sure she did, says the beloved. A farm of the mind.
Nanna, says the collector, did you know that my transformation into a shut-in reeking of cat pee is almost complete?
Breathing.
I haven’t left the apartment in a month, he says.
Rustling.
Literally, he adds.
Poop, she says.
Across the water from their horned wisdom, I am betraying my instructors. Merely to entertain the idea of rescue is in flagrant defiance of the gargoyle’s mission. We are to nudge humans out of their nests, not weave new ones for them.
I can’t think of a way to reach her. Not directly. I must act by proxy, entrust the salvage to a go-between.
Hoarse and feverish, the morsel decides to keep herself home from school. The sight of her alarms the parents when they rise at noon.
What the eff? says the mother. It’s not the weekend! And what’s that smell?
I can’t talk, writes the morsel on a take-out menu, so I am making some cookies.
Right ho, says the bewildered father.
My powers are limited, but they are powers.
A grain, a grain, a grain.
(I haven’t concentrated this hard since my leaving exams at the academy.)
From these grains, be gone all sweetness!
(My stone eyes ache.)
From this cupful, leach all music, expunge all hue, until the cup is sand.
Charity’s legs are spread on the ranch! shrieks the beloved, hunched pantless at his screen.
The watcher can see he is excited, and wishes she knew what his words were; she imagines them as little flowers of anguish. If I had a shark, I could ride it across the yard and through his window and then—
Oh dear girl, you couldn’t.
A knock. Soft, insistent. The beloved debates whether to answer, then—because he’s bored—steps into his corduroys. The watcher loses sight of him when he moves for the door.
What are you selling these for?
Only five mere dollars, she whispers.
No, I mean, what organization?
The morsel shrugs.
I’m not paying if I don’t know. You could be raising funds for the U.S. Army.
It’s for my dad and my mom, rasps the morsel.
They’re making you hawk baked goods for personal gain?
They’re not making me. I thought of it just myself. They need some money.
But you can’t—I mean, that’s just not done.
I’m doing it, points out the morsel.
Would you like to buy some delicious cookies?
She dangles the ziplock bag with its freight of charred lumps.
What flavor?
Oatmeal. Just five dollars only. You can try one for free.
The collector munches contemplatively. This is far from delicious, he says.
The morsel blinks.
In fact it tastes like crap.
He bends to feed the other half to Sophie.
The morsel stares at her thumb.
Did you follow the recipe? he asks, nearly kindly.
I’m pretty sure, whispers the morsel.
I suspect that sugar is an ingredient you overlooked.
No, I’m pretty sure.
I advise you to whip up a new batch before you go on peddling your wares.
Here it is. The moment. Please let it succeed, my stratagem, my dicey ploy! I don’t pray, because who to? but I concentrate my very hardest.
The old woman reaches into the ziplock, brings a black chunk to her mouth. What will she say?
This is nastiness. I wouldn’t pay a dime, much less five dollars.
I’m sorry, croaks the morsel.
Never apologize, says Megrim briskly. Just make more.
I don’t have more ingredients.
Megrim crunches her mouth into an almost-smile. Well guess who does?
I am embarrassed to feel so wildly relieved. It hardly befits a creature of my station. But her swollen little almonds—and the steeple—and the bloody broth—it simply would not answer.
Mrs. Megrim hands the morsel a wedge of butter wrapped in paper towel. Grease away!
The assiduous child sets to her pans while Megrim beats the dough. The heating oven (seldom cleaned) fills the kitchen with ghosts of ancient suppers.
They sent a needle down his throat, explains Megrim, to find out what ailed his ticker. But while they were doing it, he died. Right on the goddamn table. The needle must’ve hit something else.
That’s so bad, whispers the morsel.
Yeah, it was. It was the worst thing of all.
I wish that didn’t happen.
Well, thank you, says Megrim.
Mature ladies showing nasty tricks, mutters the beloved.