I'm Fine, but You Appear to Be Sinking

by Leyna Krow

  This is the man who, when there is no answer, knocks hard. Who calls, “Anyone home?” in a friendly yet assertive voice. Who kicks three times at the base of the door to be certain he’s heard.

  When still there is no answer, it is someone else entirely who twists the knob and pushes the door open.

  Inside the Rolson Meth Lab, the front door opens to a shallow entryway and then the living room where Rolson’s got reddish shag carpet and three couches that don’t match. There’s a TV, a flimsy coffee table and a bookshelf filled with a variety of items that aren’t books. Plastic bags, matchbox cars, a socket wrench, an empty pastry box.

  There are people in the room, too. A man and a woman I’ve never seen before lie head to toe on one of the couches, their arms wrapped around one another’s legs, their eyes closed. Chet sits in the middle of the floor, cross-legged, his head down, chin to his chest.

  Whatever they’re on, it isn’t meth. Or, if it is meth, then they’re clearly on the come-down. Or the come-up. I actually don’t know much about meth.

  I stand in the doorway, just staring like an idiot until Chet notices me.

  “What do you want?” he asks.

  “I want to know what happened to the tiger,” I say.

  “What tiger?”

  “The tiger you were keeping in a cage in your backyard for which you insisted you had a permit. The tiger which is now gone.” I’m aware that there’s a danger in getting snippy with drug users. I’m also aware that I sound like a dick. But I can’t help myself. As it turns out, the version of me who has entered Rolson’s house has just as little control over himself and the things he says as every other version of me.

  “Well, sounds like you just answered your own question,” Chet says.

  “What?”

  Chet picks at a scab on his lower lip and doesn’t say anything else. Gone. He means the tiger is gone.

  “But where did it go, Chet?” I ask.

  Chet holds my gaze, but it’s clear he’s not actually looking at me. He’s looking through me, or maybe just at the middle distance between us. It feels like an enormously long time before he speaks again.

  “Tigers are beautiful creatures. So beautiful,” he says. “There’s even a poem about them. Listen. Tiger, Tiger, burning bright. Wish upon the first...tiger I see tonight.”

  “That’s from two different poems,” I tell him. “Or, a poem and a nursery rhyme, actually.”

  Chet shakes his head slowly, but doesn’t say anything. He closes his eyes. He’s still shaking his head when I turn to leave.

  Outside, I feel disoriented. I start down the gravel driveway back to the street, but then turn around. I pick my way through the overgrown brush on the side of the house. I’m sure Chet or anyone else could see me if they looked out the window, but I don’t care. I want to see the cage. Empty or not, I want to look into it and know what it was like for the thing inside.

  Right away I can tell there’s more to Rolson’s mess of a backyard than can be seen by peeking through the Wengers’ fence. In addition to the larger debris (threshers, cars, circus cage, etc.), there’s a whole world of smaller artifacts hiding in the tall grass. There are rusted pop cans, some scattered haphazardly, others standing in a row like a miniature fence in front of a neglected lawn mower. There’s a deflated kiddie pool. There’s a half-length of garden hose. There’s a man’s boot with a bottle of hand lotion emerging from its top.

  In one small section of the yard, not far from the house, the grass has been dug out. A menagerie of plastic toys sticks up from this raw patch of dirt. There are action figures—G.I. Joes and Ninja Turtles and some other characters I don’t recognize, muscle-y cyborg-like things—buried to their waists, or, in some cases, to their necks. And there are animals. They’re made of hard plastic and shaped like they are about to attack. These, too, are buried part way, but arranged in a semi-circle around the action figures as if standing guard, or poised to strike.

  I puzzle over this display for some time. Is it the work of a child, angry and bored, burying his own possessions in the yard of his negligent, unpredictable parent? Or is it some art project undertaken by the father himself who, in a drug-addled state, and with no regard for the feelings of his son, wedged these toys into their current arrangement? I scan the animals for tigers, thinking their presence might prove something, one way or the other, but I see none. The closest I can find is a wolf. I bend down and pull it out of the dirt for closer inspection. It’s a blue-gray color. Its jaws are open, and one paw, complete with tiny claws, is up, waiting to slash at whatever there is to slash. I realize right away this action is a mistake. Removing the wolf from the ground has broken the spell that’s been over me since I first opened Rolson’s door. I am suddenly acutely aware of where I am, of what I’m doing. I decide I do not actually need to see the cage at all. What I do need to do is get the hell off Rolson’s property.

  I set the wolf back into its original position in the dirt, but it looks all wrong there—skewed and obviously tampered with. Better that it be missing entirely than so clearly out of place. So I pick it up again, dust the soil off, and put it in my back pocket. Then I go.

  I am trembling a little as I jog away from Rolson’s and back down the street toward home. I keep my eyes on the ground, but after a moment, I am overtaken by the feeling of being watched. The sensation is so immediate, so visceral it stops me cold. I feel the tiny hairs along the ridge of my neck stand up—a most basic warning signal from the depths of my mammalian mind. Jenny is right; animals know when other animals are in trouble. There are, without a doubt, animal eyes upon me.

  I lift my head, fearing the worst, the neighborhood nightmare come true.

  But there’s no tiger blocking my way. No creature of any sort stands in the middle of Derring Street.

  The animal watching me has hidden itself beneath a cluster of patchy bushes that ring the Wengers’ mailbox. These are feline eyes, yes, but small, surrounded by thin black fur and grown lazy from daily brushings and feedings. They belong to my own pet. Relief spills over me. I reach down and pull Boomer out from his hiding place. He doesn’t resist. I carry him back home cradled in my arms. Jenny kisses me on the cheek and tells me I’m her hero.

  Again, I think about apologizing to her, or saying “Okay, I’m ready to do what you want to do,” or, at the very least, offering to call the police about Rolson. I think about showing her the wolf and telling her what I’ve seen—about the weirdness and sadness of the lives being lived just down the street from us. But I don’t do any of these things and Jenny doesn’t ask.

  We’re half way through summer now and whatever was making the sound is long gone, I’m convinced. It died or left or just folded up into itself and gave up on its sound-making. Sometimes I still catch Jenny listening for it, standing at the living room window, petting one or the other of the cats and looking pensive. I like to tease her about this by startling her from behind, or saying something inane like, “What’s the matter, Jen? Tiger got your tongue?” She takes my kidding well.

  Though I’d never admit it to Jenny, I am still listening for the sound, too. The cries may be gone, but the presence of the alleged tiger has never really left me. It stalks me from a safe distance, biding its time. I feel it most acutely in the thin hours of the morning and at dusk, when I’m walking down Derring Street into town, or out in the fields. Everywhere I go, something is amiss.

  July 15, 2090, Bainbridge Island, Washington

  Caroline Olstead

  At ten o’clock exactly, Angie pops into my toll booth with a cup of coffee in each hand, just like she has every Monday morning for the last two decades.

  “I saw that little whore neighbor of yours at Starbucks,” she says, setting one cup on the counter beside me and fishing a handful of sweetener packets from her pocket. “She was flirting with the boy at the register, holding up the whole line.”

  She’s talking about Camden, Twila’s daughter. I flick the switch under the counter, w
hich sets the sign outside my booth to read “Lane Closed” in red neon. I am allowed to do this twice a day—fifteen minutes in the morning and sixty minutes at lunch.

  “Better her hustling baristas for free scones than out at my place bothering Spud all day long,” I say.

  Camden’s a year older than Spud and when they were little she was so sweet to him, almost like a big sister. Things changed though once the kids got closer to puberty, and these days... well, let’s just say she’s probably not the best influence in the world. But a crummy friend’s better than no friend and that’s what Spud would have otherwise. Once, I walked into his room to find the two of them on the bed, Camden’s hand in Spud’s shorts. They panicked and scrambled apart, but I just closed the door. None of my concern what two adolescents do.

  “Does Spud even like girls?” Angie asks. “I never see him with people at all except you.”

  “He’s not the social type,” I say. “Just like his daddy, you remember? He’d rather read books, or hang around with cats and snakes. Spud’s got this stray pit bull trained up to wait for him on our front steps all day. The thing’s probably rabid. I keep telling him it’s only a matter of time before the dog turns on him and then he’ll be sorry. Can’t trust pit bulls.”

  Angie puts the lid on her cup and says she ought to be getting back to her own booth. I thank her for the coffee and tell her I’ll stop by before I go to lunch.

  I’ve still got ten minutes left on my break, so I step out for a cigarette. We aren’t allowed to smoke in our booths. I go over to the benches underneath the big green sign that says Bainbridge Island Bridge & Ferry Terminal. The sign is a lie. There are no ferries anymore. Only the bridge, which was built in 2070 to connect the island to Seattle when the last tech boom hit and every brand new baby executive wanted a mansion in the woods, but still close to the city. The island’s population tripled almost overnight. They were running two dozen ferries a day and the state built the bridge—ten miles long, a marvel of engineering—to accommodate all the extra traffic. A lot of town folks took toll jobs when it opened, Angie and myself included. But then when the bubble burst (whatever that means) nine years later and the economy turned bad, the state stopped running the ferries entirely. Now anyone who wants on or off the island has to cross the bridge, or drive their own boat. But who has the money for a boat anymore? No one, that’s who.

  At peak traffic times, I don’t just take toll fares. I also have to ask drivers what’s their purpose for leaving the island. If the answer isn’t professional or medical, I can’t allow them through. The state’s rules, not mine, I tell them. With only one way off the island, the bridge can get overburdened quickly. Too many cars at once, and it becomes ten miles of parking lot. So it’s only essential trips during rush hour, no exceptions. I had to remind Spud of that this very morning. He asked if we could go over to Seattle tonight, but I said no.

  I don’t feel too bad for the crossers I turn back. Everyone has had to make sacrifices since the market tanked. Some of us more than others. If it weren’t for the bad economy, I wouldn’t have Spud with me. This isn’t to say I don’t love my nephew (that’s how I refer to him). I just mean things would have been a lot easier for both of us if he was able to stay where he belonged.

  When the recession was at its worst, the University of Michigan lost funding for its genetics program and had to close down their whole kiddie-copy lab—couldn’t even take care of what they’d made anymore. They called me one day out of the blue and said as next-of-kin I had to come get the boy. So I drove three days straight to pick up this two-year-old I’d never met, never even seen a picture of. Not that I didn’t already know what he looked like. He looked just like Parker when Parker was two. There was a lot of paperwork, then this sophomore work-study nanny helped me strap him into a car seat and handed me a stack of files and a stuffed sea turtle she said was the boy’s favorite thing in the world. She had tears in her eyes when she waved goodbye to us and then there I was with this toddler. I was so totally unprepared to have him in my life. A lot of the time, I still feel unprepared. We drove back to Washington with him babbling to his turtle the whole way. Sweet kid. He had Parker’s giant, oblong head, squinty brown eyes, and straight hair on top. I couldn’t help but call him Spud.

  Potato Head. Parker Potato. When we were kids, my little brother dubbed me Carrie Carrot for spite, but I said it didn’t work that way since my head looked nothing like a carrot. When mom would hear me call him Parker Potato, she’d say, “Don’t be cruel.” But she thought Spud was all right, and after a while it was the only name either of us ever used for him.

  This one, too, just the same. Spud, too. Spud two. Spud, also. No one calls him Parker, which is for the best I think. Being a junior is hard, especially when you’ve never met the senior. So he’s Spud at home, Spud at school, Spud at church.

  Spud will never know he’s a clone and neither will anyone else. I made that promise to myself from the beginning. The University of Michigan clone program got a lot of press when it first started, none of it good. And since the lab closed, Spud’s peers from Ann Arbor haven’t fared well on the whole. The families who’ve been open about their children’s origins have taken a lot of flak. Just six months ago, there was a story in the news about a little clone girl who got her skull bashed in by a boy from her school. He hit her with a bat while others cheered him on. These days it’s fine to be gay or handicapped or pretty much any weird religion, but Lord help a kid if he’s a biological double of another human being. They’re the new schoolyard pariahs, clones are. As if the boy doesn’t take enough abuse already just for being himself.

  When Spud asks about his daddy, I tell him stories about how he was an American hero.

  When Spud asks about his mother, I say, “That’s none of your concern.”

  It’s hard, me being the only family the boy’s got. Sometimes, I worry I’m not enough. I mean, he was supposed to be raised in a state-of-the-art lab with top teachers and high-tech accommodations. All I’ve got to offer him here on Bainbridge is a dinky old house and crummy, crumbling public schools. Money is tight. I can’t even afford things like summer camps and book-of-the-month clubs for him. And Lord knows I’m no great intellectual role model myself. Spud’s already past the point in school where I can be of much help on his homework, even if he wanted it.

  I think about all of this while I smoke my cigarette under that lie of a sign. What’s got me going on this whole train of thought, aside from Angie’s remarks, is that today is Spud’s birthday. His thirteenth. He wanted me to take him to the natural history museum in the city. What kind of kid wants to go to a museum for his birthday? Spud, of course. But, like I said, I had to tell him no. It’ll be rush hour by the time I get off work, and, birthday or no birthday, you need a damn good reason to cross the bridge at rush hour.

  The best I can do for him today is cake and candles. Except even in that, I’m falling short. We’re out of eggs and milk, both of which I’ll need for the cake. I call Spud to see if he can run down to the store to get some, but he doesn’t pick up his phone, which means his hands are busy doing God-knows-what.

  End

  Times

  The apocalypse will begin with a series of beeps. Not like an alarm clock or a smoke detector. More like the sound of a truck backing up: patient, but persistent. I know this the same way you know the address of your parents’ house or the color of the walls in your childhood bedroom—I’ve been there before and retained the salient details.

  I won’t personally make it to this apocalypse, however. My death is slated for a day in June 2031, a little over a year before the big event. While jogging around the indoor track at a 24 Hour Fitness in downtown Seattle, I’ll suffer an aneurysm and collapse. I’ll be dead before my face hits the spongy rubber floor. I will be forty-seven years old.

  The fact of my own death will come as such a non-surprise to me that I’ll fail to warn Cole of its imminence.1 This is ironic because from the time
my son is old enough to understand words, I’ll routinely remind him that the world will end before his sixteenth birthday.

  “So, best not to take life too seriously, sweetheart,” I’ll say.

  Cole will not heed my advice. He’ll be an honors student, captain of his Knowledge Bowl team, and an active participant in Amnesty International for Kids. He’ll be a chronic worrier. A sloucher, a brow furrower, and a bit of a hypochondriac. This is to say Cole will take after his mother.

  Would I rather see Cole spend his life as some pint-sized hedonist—apathetic, uninvolved, unconcerned, only interested in cheap thrills and the trappings of his own abbreviated youth? Certainly not. What I’ll mean when I tell Cole not to take life too seriously is that this show—this right here, right now—isn’t the only show there is. And as caught up as we get in ourselves, these selves are so very very temporary that it almost isn’t worth paying them much attention at all. I’ll want him to strive for a degree of non-attachment. Of course, I don’t know why I’ll think it’s reasonable to ask this of my child when I’ve never been much good at it myself. No matter how many times I’ve tried.

  Cole’s father Aaron will never express any particular concern over my warnings. As an acquisitions editor for a small but respectable publishing house and therefore a man with a keen appreciation for literary device, Aaron will take this apocalypse-forecasting as allegory. He’ll assume my prophecies function in much the same way other adults use the story of Santa Claus to ensure good behavior in their children. Aaron will be inclined to overlook other faults of mine as well. And I his. We’ll be tremendously fond of one another in that fault-overlooking sort of way. In this respect, Cole will do us both good. He’ll be our harshest critic. From the time he is very young, his honesty will be unwavering, unclouded by his affections.2