by Idra Novey
So, the wife said in a loud, confident voice, I’m guessing you two know each other from Oscar’s backpacking days?
Oscar, still clutching his wife’s coat like a life jacket, nodded and said, Yes, we met in a used bookstore, though it mostly sold pot.
His wife let out a little ironic laugh at this, which Oscar immediately echoed. At their conspiratorial laughter, Lena felt her legs weakening, an unsteadiness rising into her chest and up into her head. Since she’d arrived in this country, the Sublime had taken on an air of holiness in her mind—the freeing absence of judgment she had felt there with Olga, nursing Cosmo and inventing humorous roles for him in future revolutions, the joyful relief she’d felt every time she walked in and collapsed on the sunken couch in Conspiracy.
In an amused voice, Oscar’s wife asked her if she’d worked there, at this place fronting as a bookstore.
It wasn’t just a front, Lena said and looked over at Oscar to correct his wife and explain what a defiantly revolutionary place the Sublime was. But he just stood there staring back at her with an agonized expression, his eyes making it plain that seeing her again was causing him torment. If the current world order had not gone up in flames that morning—or if it had, but their gut reaction had not been to attack each other—Lena wondered if maybe her son might have grown up with a father.
Well, whatever the store really was, his wife said, her hands coming together protectively in front of the curve of her shimmering satin shirt, I hope you’ve been able to find better work here.
Lena emitted a flat, ironic laugh in response. She wanted nothing more than to get away from them, but knew it was possible she may never find herself standing in front of her son’s father again.
You know, she said, I should get your email, Oscar.
* * *
Freddy waited till the blond couple had moved toward the ticket window before he drew up and looped his arm through Lena’s. Did you invite those blond people? he asked.
You could put it that way, Lena said with finality as another northerner stepped into the theater, a tall bald man with bad posture and glasses and what seemed like the confident air of an important critic. Freddy tried to repress the birdlike flutter of hope in his chest, to ignore the growing commotion of it and keep his focus on Lena beside him. But what if this hunched-over, bespectacled man was indeed from the most revered paper in this most revered of cultural cities?
With Lena beside him, the intensity of his desire for a major critic here to approve of his work felt shallow and absurd. But this city’s paper had been the gateway for every recent playwright on the island whose work had gotten out. A review here made all the other destinies that much easier to reach.
Isn’t it maddening, he said, his arm still through Lena’s, all of us hoping to get something out of this country that’s orchestrated how many horror shows all over this hemisphere?
It is obscenely maddening. Lena cast her eyes around the entryway at the clusters of people around them, the vast majority of them from their island.
A strange thing happened to me in that little office at your friend’s house, where the coats were, Lena said, still facing away from him. There was a woman in it who looked eerily like Maria P. You know who I’m talking about, right? Lena turned to him now. The student who died on Trinity Hill? Lena paused, averted her gaze a moment. Your brother nearly choked me to death once, she said. Over a flyer I lost.
Freddy keeled slightly toward her. Victor told me he panicked about the flyer. But, Freddy said, the way Victor told it, that was all.
From The Islander
Fight for Repeal of Amnesty Law Continues
. . . Among the senators pushing for a repeal of the amnesty law protecting military and correctional personnel from being tried for crimes under Cato is the port’s own senator, Victor M. . . .
“Until we prosecute every single person who got away with murder in this country,” the senator said, “we can’t move forward as a society. Families deserve the truth. We all deserve the truth. How can anyone move on without the truth?”
* * *
On the stage, once again, a man spun with nothing in his arms but a feathered red boa. With each turn he made, all the feathers lifted and reddened the air around him. The tendons went taut in his neck as he tilted his head back, exaggerating the distance between himself and the feathered red proxy in his arms.
But only for a moment.
At the next spin, the man clutched the boa to his chest again. Oscar watched even more breathlessly than the first time how conflicted the man looked as he turned in furious circles about the stage. Endless turns which resolved nothing.
How was a father—how was anyone—supposed to know who to be true to at any given moment? In giving Lena an erroneous email address in the lobby, had he been cowardly and deceitful? Or had it been a necessary act, what any loyal, chivalrous husband with a pregnant wife would do?
He had felt his wife’s shoulders relax under his arm as he’d recited the numbers of his long-defunct first college ID. Ok65, he had repeated, watching Lena’s delicate fingers move over the screen of her phone. He’d felt no choice but to show his loyalty, to be true to his seven-month-pregnant wife. Hadn’t that been what had destroyed his parents’ marriage, failing to remain true to each other before anyone or anything else?
If he’d come alone, or with a friend, Oscar was certain he would have been able to say more, to ask Lena about what had brought her to the city, and about Olga. He would have rambled his way to expressing his regret at not seeing her again before he left the island. After fleeing Lena’s, he’d done nothing but sit in his hostel listening to the updates get worse and worse. He’d left the island less than a week later, without finishing the classes he’d already paid for at the language school.
More than once, while molding scones or washing trays, he’d thought about what he might say to Lena if he ever saw her again. To imagine the elaborate explanations and apologies he would offer to her had filled him with a sense of decency, and relief.
The thought that he would never have to see Lena and actually say them had filled him with relief as well.
In the dark, while the father on stage went on maniacally spinning with his contradictions and his ring of feathers, Oscar reached over and placed his hand on his wife’s thigh. The theater had no permanent seats, only rows of cheap folding chairs with the thinnest of cushions. He murmured to his wife that the seats were abominable and asked her if she was uncomfortable.
I think we both know I’m uncomfortable, don’t we, Oscar? she murmured back and moved her leg away. If you only knew that woman for a few days, why would she ask for your email when you’re clearly married and expecting a baby?
I honestly don’t know, I swear. Oscar lifted his eyes again to the stage. Three other actors had emerged with feathered boas and were beginning to turn in sync with the father. Oscar didn’t recall anyone else joining this scene the first time. The others had come on later, after the intermission. Or had the others been there from the beginning and he just didn’t remember, having been so riveted by the father?
Onstage, sweat was trickling down the father’s temples now and gleaming on his chin. Stains had darkened his underarms and the front of his thin shirt. Swift and hard, over and over, the father extended one of his feet out a few inches then slid it back to meet his other foot. Then he took another step, slightly wider, then a smaller one. With an emphatic stomp, the whole ambivalent sequence repeated—his leg extending out only to slide back. Out. Back. Stomp. Faster. As if the father had lost all control of his own feet.
* * *
The drilling across the street began at exactly six a.m., the sound blasting into every dream of every slumbering being for blocks around. Nowhere on the island had Lena ever heard a drill shattering through concrete at this hour. It was uncivilized.
As occurred every morni
ng, seconds after the aural assault of the drilling started up, a small creature in leaf-print pajamas bounded into her room and pressed its cold nose against her forehead. Hello, my favorite mother, the creature said.
Hello, my favorite offspring. She raised the bedcover for the creature to burrow down beside her. The warmth of Cosmo’s small body against her own felt protective, a fortress she could seal herself behind anytime, even after the shock of seeing Oscar. Although maybe it was terrible of her to covet her child as a fortress—proof that some part of her still longed for the walls she had grown up behind.
She thought of her mother just before she’d left the island, trailing her to the wrought-iron gate that was the only way out of her parents’ compound, asking why Lena was compelled to make life so difficult for herself.
You’re not going to change the world, Lena, her mother had declared, by moving alone with a baby to another country. Your real problem, her mother insisted, her voice strident and rising, is not the judgment of anyone else on this island. It’s that you can’t stop judging yourself. That’s your real problem, and it always has been. Your family didn’t kill anyone. I’ve never understood what you’re so ashamed of.
As her mother shouted, Lena had yanked on the gate to release herself and Cosmo onto the street in front of her parents’ house. But the latch on the gate was sticking from the heat and her mother just stood with crossed arms and watched her struggle. Lena tried to jangle the latch harder while balancing Cosmo on her hip, clutching him as intensely as if she were clutching humanity itself.
No, she didn’t want Oscar or anyone questioning how she chose to raise her child.
Come closer, she said to her one and only under the covers. I’m cold.
* * *
Victor counted the open mouths of the zeroes on the check from his cousin. He hadn’t been expecting another donation check. It had arrived as unbidden as the odor of pig shit. The way they’d set things up, his cousin was to receive four consultant fees and then send a portion of the total sum along to Victor as a donation for his reelection campaign. There wasn’t supposed to be a second donation check. It was hush money and his cousin should have known better than to cash anything unexpected with the national news reporting now on the smell.
But people near the factory had to be exaggerating. The flow of waste couldn’t possibly be enough to have formed an entire lake of fecal sludge. Grandmothers weren’t actually fainting from the odor. Whatever people placed on their tongues couldn’t actually taste of pigs. Children weren’t really beginning to snort at school and root around in the mud. And now, the parents of four teenagers hospitalized for nausea and dizziness after bathing in a nearby pond were insisting the cause was the factory runoff reaching the pond underground.
You told me people did this sort of consultant fee all the time and no one cared, his cousin shouted at him on the phone, and Victor assured him they were going to resolve the problem. Although in truth he did not see how they would, and if there was anyone who was going to end up jobless over the debacle it would be his cousin, whose name was on every inspection report. His cousin was the one who had received checks from the farm as an independent agricultural consultant. Victor had assured him the arrangement was no big deal. He’d promised his cousin government employees often augmented their salary with consultant fees though no one talked about it, which was true. What Victor had not mentioned was that such an arrangement was technically against the law, while his receiving a donation from his cousin was not.
Over the weekend, he’d thought about going to see his cousin but decided a visit would only invite more accusations. The previous week his cousin had emailed a photo of the vast brown expanse of porcine piss and waste behind the factory, though Victor had told him not to send anything by email. He had never seen that much sludgy, crusted shit in one place. It was indeed lake-size. Just looking at it, Victor could imagine how vile the smell must get with the heat in the interior, how the odor would just keep growing fouler and traveling farther every day.
For his cousin to be dull-witted enough to deposit an unexpected check this large and send on another donation struck Victor as astoundingly naïve. Or maybe his cousin knew he was going to get fired anyhow and decided he might as well cash in on this last sum while he could.
I have someone looking out for your cousin. He won’t get fired, Victor’s father-in-law had assured him. Neither of you are going to be exposed or blamed for this.
His father-in-law, however, had also promised that his inept friend, the owner, was getting the situation under control, that the factory had just bought a top-of-the-line industrial filter. His father-in-law hadn’t mentioned that the filter was equipped to handle the waste of a mere five thousand animals. Not forty thousand.
That morning the island’s main tabloid had run a spoof, printing swine-shaped clouds floating across the rural middle of the island. It was only a matter of time before the papers would figure out who was to blame. They would start with his cousin but it wouldn’t end there. Sara had already come to him about some journalist with a stutter asking for his comments on the situation. The journalist had noticed the owner was an old private school friend of a certain venerable senator, and the name on all the inspections was a man with the same last name as his son-in-law, known for his mesmerizing speeches on the importance of exposing the truth.
Victor had called the owner and threatened to go and cut the pigs’ throats himself if they weren’t all slaughtered within the week. The whole thing had become an all-you-can-eat dinner buffet for the media. Victor didn’t see what choice he had but to let his cousin take the fall at this point.
He folded the check and tucked it into his wallet. Sara would be savvy enough to deflect the questions somehow. They’d move past it. Decisively. To reap the rewards of the world, a man had to learn how to move forward at any cost. It was the relentless questioners like his brother who got stuck and failed. Of course it was.
SCENES TO BE INCINERATED
(WORK IN PROGRESS BY ANONYMOUS)
SET
To the left, a suspended cardboard statue of Socrates.
To the right, a heap of laundry.
The senator and his brother stroll onto the stage together.
They are sipping beers.
The senator passes the statue and keeps on walking.
His brother stops next to it.
SENATOR’S BROTHER
You walked right past my Socrates.
SENATOR
Your who?
SENATOR’S BROTHER
My new Socrates—“Be as you wish to seem.”
I’m writing about his proverb.
His followers say he adhered to it.
But maybe they just didn’t know him that well.
Maybe Socrates was secretly a hypocrite.
SENATOR
And who cares if he adhered to it?
He’s still Socrates.
He’s got playwrights cutting out crude statues of him instead of doing something about their laundry.
When was the last time you washed any of the pants here, in this heap?
The senator’s brother turns and addresses the statue.
SENATOR’S BROTHER
Tell him, Socrates, tell my brother how much that proverb came to haunt you. I bet you were quietly horrified at your private capacity for hypocrisy, weren’t you?
SENATOR
I can’t believe you’re interrogating a piece of cardboard.
You need to get out more, brother.
You need to wash your pants and go eat in a restaurant.
The statue of Socrates begins to spin.
It swings left and then right and then more wildly around the stage.
A commanding male voice, issuing Socratic proverbs in Greek,
emanates from the speakers.
As the Godlike voic
e drones on,
the brother pursues the swinging Socrates across the stage.
The brother’s pursuit should include a range of movements.
One move like an elephant, another like Baryshnikov.
The swinging statue should hit the senator at least once.
The two brothers could collide as well.
Whatever happens,
the senator should remain impervious.
After minutes of escalating absurdity,
the brother trips over his own laundry.
He falls.
The statue comes to a halt as well.
Expressionless, the senator polishes off his beer.
He exits alone.
* * *
Olga felt the least capable of being alive when it was overcast. If she had to head up the stairs to the store under a mass of clouds, she would find herself longing most acutely for a heart attack, or an aneurysm—anything to get it over with already.
Occasionally, however, there would be a morning as clear as this one, with such an abundance of crisp early light accompanying her up the crumbling steps to the Sublime that she couldn’t help feeling irrefutably among the living. The recent boom in the island’s economy had been moving books off the shelves at an unprecedented rate of two a day, and her dope sales had gone through the roof. She’d finally fixed the pipes in the bathroom and bought a used computer off her journalist friend Simon. With Lena gone, she let Simon stammer on to her about his investigations as much as he wanted. He kept her internet working and she couldn’t fathom going without it again. She rarely opened her transaction log now. It was so much easier to zone out and click her life away, bingeing on the infinite sickening reports about everywhere.