Happy Mutant Baby Pills

by Jerry Stahl

  Nora seemed weirdly unaffected. She wasn’t one of the users who changed when she used. She didn’t slur. She didn’t dumb up. Neither did I, normally. But those fumes weren’t normal. I had to focus just to lift up my words and set them down in a remotely coherent row, to even remember what words were, let alone what you were supposed to do with them. “Why . . . are . . . you . . . doing . . . this?”

  “I told you before. That guy fucked me.”

  “Wait . . . the guy who—that guy? What does this have to do with him?”

  Between the Rust-Oleum clown mouth and her still-glistening slit, that gulch in the rainforest, which she stroked idly as she aimed a blurry half smile my way, I was not focusing. Then she dropped her hands to her sides. Stopped smiling and sighed so deeply she seemed to slump.

  “He really raped me, Lloyd.”

  This was one of the rare times she used my name. “You mean he raped you . . . when he stole your ideas?”

  “Does it look like I’m talking about ideas?” Exasperated, she ran her hands over her belly, where she’d X’d in the Axiron. “Are you blind? I’m pregnant.”

  “Are you serious?”

  My first thought, insanely, was that we hadn’t been together long enough for this to be mine. But then, she didn’t say it was, so why was I instantly obsessing? (Sometimes it was impossible to tell guilt from wish-fulfillment.) Would all of this be made more heinous, or less, knowing the baby whose health and well-being she was massively jeopardizing had sprung from my seed. Narcissism or martyrdom—you be the judge!

  “See it?” she asked again.

  I couldn’t, but if I squinted, and thought about it, I could almost imagine the tiniest of baby bumps swelling her belly.

  “I do. Sort of. Well, y’know . . . almost. So, uh . . . what are you going to do?”

  “I told you. I’m going to fuck him up.”

  “I was talking about the baby.”

  “So am I.”

  “But why would you . . . I mean . . . you’re sure it’s a boy?” I asked idiotically.

  “Are you that out of it? I’m talking about the father.”

  Maybe the problem was not just those rust-fighter fumes.

  Some ideas are too cosmically wrong to contemplate on the first take. You need time to let them manifest. Then you can claw out your brainpan, douse it in lighter fluid, and strike a match. But Nora was not even discussing an idea. She’d left “idea” behind. She’d crossed from conceptual to actual. The proof, apparently, was right there in her pudding.

  Real life. The ultimate performance!

  Not until she reached for the Roundup and lay down on her back did the obvious sink in. The vision still scalds my eyeballs. Picture it: Nora on the floor, legs spread in the air, aiming the nozzle and spraying Roundup directly into her vagina. What in nature, what in life, what in religion, TV, Tumblr, or Japanese pornography prepares you for such a sight?

  I stood over her, reeling, and watched while she squirted. She tossed the empty Roundup onto the carpet. Then, still holding open the shiny-with-poison lips of her pussy, she asked if I wanted to fuck her.

  She whispered hoarsely, “We could do it now. It’s nice and wet.” Now?

  Why, having witnessed what I just witnessed, would I even ask? Plus which, who was I kidding? I’d offed a man in a bus station because the woman who’d just aimed weed killer into her birth canal had suggested it. At the time I barely knew her—which was completely crazy. Now I did know her, and I was still here. So what did that make me? Besides even crazier?

  Nora’s eyes glazed over, the way they did when dope first came on. Her voice grew huskier. “Sperm is the best delivery system. The poison will get there faster.”

  “Get where?” My own voice was cracking, but not from lust. Or not so I could admit. “There are easier ways to abort, if you don’t want to have the thing.”

  “Who said I don’t want to have it?” She spread her labia even wider, easing her right hand halfway in, fisting herself, and trembling her clit on top with her left thumb. “I want to have the baby, then I want to tell everybody it’s his. And I want to give it to him.”

  “Wait, you want to . . . to do all this, to use all these products to—tell me I’m wrong, please!—to give your baby birth defects? That’s your revenge?”

  “No. Yes. You don’t get it,” she said. “You think small. That’s your problem. One of your problems.”

  I must have sulked.

  “This isn’t about you, okay? Listen. Do I want to make the man who did this to me miserable? Make him want to hang himself? Absolutely.

  “But that’s too easy.”

  Her face had grown red, her eyes with some internal chemical fire. “You ever read about the monk who burned himself in Saigon during the Vietnam War? Or the ones in Tibet who lit themselves up to protest China chasing out the Dalai Lama?”

  “Of course. But they burned themselves. They didn’t destroy a baby.”

  “I’m not destroying. I’m creating.”

  “Creating what? A little deformed metaphor?”

  “You don’t know anything,” Nora said, the sex-glaze gone right out of her eyes, replaced by something I didn’t recognize.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The Final Solution, Horizontal

  Now I’d offended her. A woman sprawled on her back with a pea-sized fetus in her belly and a full can of Roundup aimed up her uterus. But instead of lashing out, as I’d expected, she went the opposite way. Grew quiet. Subdued. Testament, undoubtedly, to the serious thought she’d given the endeavor. I’d bet anything, I thought moronically, that no one in this motel room, probably any motel room, has discussed deliberately mutating an unborn child to make a point. Let alone to save the world.

  “It’s nothing new,” she said, still low-key.

  “What isn’t?” Just having a conversation, any conversation, in the middle of this travesty, made me feel like an accomplice. Mengele’s towel-boy. But here I was. So I listened.

  “Deforming babies. Deliberately. The government’s been doing it forever. Talk to the downwinders, in southern Utah. May 25, 1953, we tested Grable, a nuclear bomb.”

  “We?”

  “The United States. The Defense Department, asshole. For months afterward southern Utah was showered with nuclear grit. Everybody pretended the government was testing the power of the blast, to intimidate the Russians. But it was never about megatonnage, or kill capacity, or any of that. It was about the birth defects. We pretended during the Cold War, that we were going to pulverize their people to dust. But that wasn’t the real message. The real message was, ‘Hey, Khrushchev, forget the little commies we’re going to obliterate. The ones who don’t get obliterated are going to be born with cleft palates, limb deformities, brains the size of pigeon eggs, rampant myeloma . . . The works! I’m talking about babies born with bones so brittle Mom and Dad would have to take them back and forth to the hospital wrapped in foam rubber.”

  “Did they have foam rubber then?”

  “Lloyd, are you listening to me? I’m talking about Dow, Monsanto, the Koch Brothers, General Electric . . .”

  “General Electric,” I recited out of habit. “We bring good things to life.”

  “Lloyd! The whole point of everything is not what they want you to think. Even liberals, even progressives, they’re all wrong. The point is not that birth defects are a side effect of rampant capitalism. The point is, birth defects are the point! Disease is the point! You think deregulation is just to make sure it’s easier to make a profit? Wrong. It’s so the general population can stay gene-raped, from conception on.”

  Nora grabbed another item from her bag, chartreuse nail polish, and began artfully painting her already painted toe- and fingernails, making sure to inhale huge, chest-filling gusts of the shellacky fumes.

  “Why do you think the Supreme Court
ruled against those poor farmers in Utah whose babies grew up with spleens attached to their femurs, and God knows what else? Not that God even gives a shit. Why do you think there are PCBs in kid’s pajamas, in couches, even in nursing pillows? This guy, Nicholas Kristof, wrote a column about it in the New York Times. And that shit is nothing.” She stopped to bite her freshly painted pinkie nail, then kept going. “By now it’s corny to even mention corporations polluting rivers, destroying mountaintops. All business does is eat the resources and shit out death. From the hollers of West Virginia to the dead fish of Love Canal, from the Amazon River Basin to Exxon in Nigeria. Woody Guthrie could write a song. You name it, and it’s tainted!”

  I had a feeling she’d given this rant before. Her speech, gone a little slurry after huffing aerosol rust proofer, sharpened right back up when she picked up a pipe and fired up what, from the acrid stink of it—and it had to be very acrid to cut through Rust-Oleum and nail polish—had to be bathtub crank.

  “Now you’re tweaking?”

  “Everybody’s tweaking. We live in a great big tweakiverse.”

  “Nice. Just be careful you don’t blow yourself up with all those fumes you’ve got floating around.”

  As she smoked she fished in the bag and came out with a can of floor wax. She smeared the stuff on her hands like moisturizer, taking big whiffs off her palms. “It’s almost funny. All these so-called prog types going on about depleted uranium turning a generation of newborn Iraqis and Afghanis into nerve-damaged, brain-fucked little leukemia bundles. Meanwhile, it’s nothing, nothing compared to what we’ve got going on right here.”

  She paused to take a can of Glade out of her bag—Cleansing Rain scent—and splooshed a few puffs between her legs and in front of her face.

  “Toluene and phthalate. Look them up. Tests on spider monkeys showed infants born with gender abnormalities, including external ovaries and doubled testicles. You believe people spray this in their own homes? It’s like, ‘Oooh, we’re Americans! We don’t mind malignancy as long as we can breathe fake nature smells instead of our stink.’ Not that there’s nature anymore, right? You ever listen to Helen Caldicott? She says you can’t even find an apple in Europe that isn’t irradiated. Especially in France. Jerry Lewis and nuclear reactors. That’s culture.”

  “I get it, I get it,” I snapped. “Don’t eat the French fruit.”

  Pacing above her as she lay naked on the motel carpet, breathing what she was breathing, I felt my own gorge rising, felt myself begin to sway. Not just from the bouquet of industrial death vapors she’d unleashed, but from the fact that she was unleashing them. That this was her thing.

  I tried to stay calm. “Nora, baby, do you know how hard this is, watching you douse yourself? Stashing a chemical smorgasbord up your hole? The worst part is, I know what you’re doing. I know the side effects. I know what might happen to you.”

  “Not me, I told you. It’s not about me.” Here she cupped her hands over her barely discernible belly. Speaking softly. “It’s about my baby. My precious little American mutant.”

  She touched her stomach tenderly and raised her shining face to mine—exultant—while I gulped back vomit. “Nora” was about all I could manage without clunking down hard on the floor. “I mean . . . we’re talking about an innocent child.” That sounded tinny even to me, but I kept going. “It’s all so fucking Holocausty. Is that what you want, to be a portable Holocaust?”

  “Why not?”

  “Nora,” was all I could think to say to that, “Nora, what did this guy do to you? And don’t insult me with the thing about stealing greeting card ideas, okay?”

  For a long time she didn’t say anything. When she did start talking, she had that “faraway look.” Like she wasn’t talking to me at all. Like she was talking to herself, telling herself a story she’d been telling herself for a very long time. Gone was the buxom bad-attitude pixie who sneered when I sat beside her on the bus. In her place, right now, I saw the face of a true believer. My naked, passionate schizoid, my delusional beauty, my insane, and insanely hot, wanna-martyr. Who deep down, I was beginning to think, just wanted to be some kind of dangerous saint. That, or she was just a chick who liked to lie on her back, get fucked up, and touch herself while she described her plan for becoming Genetic Apoca-Mom.

  At some point, I just had to ask, “How can you do this stuff?” Her answer, like everything else about Nora, was not what I expected.

  “When you love yourself, you can do anything.”

  It was one of those moments, with Nora, where I didn’t know if she was insane (door number one) or just had a very dark sense of humor (door number two). Door number three: you have no fucking idea where this door is going to take you. Which is the one I followed her through. But you pretty much know you are never walking back out of it.

  Listen to her:

  “It’s one thing when you read about their horror, what they do, in the abstract. Like, okay, Dow Chemical makes napalm, phosphorus bombs, and PCB-dusted flame retardant that ends up in couches. I get it . . . Or like, in the photo of that burned little girl running naked down the street in Vietnam. You think, like, ‘Okay, I get that. America may have deployed them. But Dow made the chemicals that burned her skin off. Shit that didn’t just kill, it maimed and tortured. Got it.’ But imagine meeting, in person, the man responsible, more than anyone, for all this death, this suffering. All right, maybe not the man responsible, but the fucker who makes the most money off it, the CEO . . . and in person he’s just so . . .”

  She stopped talking and zoned, the silence going on so long it got awkward, so I barged in.

  “So arrogant? So piggish? So rich?”

  “What?”

  She looked startled, as if she’d forgotten she was talking, forgotten I was in the room. “No,” she said finally, “that’s the thing. He was so . . . nice.”

  “The CEO of Dow?”

  Again, I don’t think she heard me. She just kept going. “He was a really nice guy. At first. I know, right? It’s like, when you watch Sophie’s Choice. You see these prisoners in Auschwitz, dragging themselves around like starved, diseased ghosts, then one guard opens the gates and leads her into the Kommandant’s private quarters. Suddenly, flowers are blooming, children are laughing, his lovely wife is serving a happy, laughing family a meal . . . This was the world the Kommandant was in. This is the world all those CEOs are in. The rest of us are in the camp.”

  “How’d you meet him?”

  “How do you think? I was an escort. But I could talk. I was studying communications in college. In fact, that’s how I was paying my tuition.”

  “So—” I hated myself, but I had to ask. “The whole greeting card thing?”

  “That’s actually true. Sort of. You know . . . Dow had made an acquisition, Taupe and Timely Accents. They made decoratives. For home and office.”

  “Decoratives. Taupe.”

  “Taupe’s kind of light brown. Taint-colored. Decoratives are, you know, decorative: candles, pillows, doilies, inspirational plaques, and cards, that kind of shit.”

  “He told you all this?”

  “Men like to talk about their business.”

  “After they bring you to the Kommandant’s quarters.”

  “More or less.”

  Another little silence, but this time she ended it.

  “I know what you think, if I was a sex worker, how could he rape me?”

  “I wasn’t thinking that, Nora. Give me some fucking credit.”

  “There’s that,” she said. “What actually happened is I became his ‘girlfriend’ when he wasn’t with his wife. He thought I was clever, so he got me a job, or he said he got me a job. He wanted me to come up with something for their ‘inspiration’ line. It had to be good. So one night, after we had some shitty coke and champagne, I did. I came up with something.” She paused, her gaze going inwa
rd again, and recited dramatically: “The fearless man lives forever; the fearful man dies every minute.”

  “Wow. How’d you come up with that?”

  “It came to me in a dream.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “So was he. He liked it so much he had his products division head put it on greeting cards, on plates, on nine-by-twelve plaques. Even needlepoint. For one fiscal year it was a bigger seller than You want it when? and Hang in there, baby. You remember, with the cat holding on to the branch?”

  “I remember. You mentioned it on the bus.”

  “It was such a phenom, the Society of Decorative Manufacturers gave it their ISY Award. In that world, it’s a huge deal. He actually invited me to the banquet. Bought me a gown. The whole nine yards.”

  “So?”

  “Wait. When it came time to give out the award, they read my quotation, and then the presenter said that, for his money, this was more than something you put on a china plate, or on a card, this was a—don’t puke—‘a transformative idea,’ worthy of the highest ideals of man. He said he was ‘sniffing a TED talk.’ ”

  “He did not!”

  “He did. Then he said he was proud to introduce the great mind behind this concept, and right when I was about to stand up, the Dow CEO—his name was Elliot, but he liked me to call him Mumpy—leans over, puts his hand on my shoulder, and kisses me. Just like that. A little peck on the cheek. A peck. Then he winks. That’s when I knew the MC wasn’t going to be pronouncing my name, he was going to be pronouncing his. I had to sit there, while the cheesedick bastard who banged my head off the marble floor of a Four Seasons bathroom—after he bounced his balls off my face, shoved his fat cock inside me bareback, and called me a filthy cum-bucket—made a twenty-minute speech about the nobility of man.”