by Nick Mamatas
Or maybe it was something else, she decided. Tony was a weirdo. That was part of why she married him—they used to have good conversations, and sometimes he would just say something she couldn’t imagine a man she was with ever saying. He was against gun control, voted for the Green Party instead of Obama like everyone else, made his own Turkish coffee one cup at a time instead of drinking Starbucks, and couldn’t bear to listen to even a minute of NPR. Tony played Dungeons & Dragons with dateless, careerless men he had met on Craigslist once a week, and one time at a dinner party had declared himself a “non-presenting genderqueer.” Cheryl snorted her wine through her nose at that one, and Tony smiled the smile that meant he was lying but wanted you to believe it.
Would her baby grow up to be a genderqueer, or a half-elf ranger with a few levels of magic-user, or a Communist, or a “good Greek boy” like her mother-in-law, who had taken to calling herself “yiayia, ” and aloud for Christ’s sake, wanted? The baby was never far from Cheryl’s thoughts. The baby looked like Tony. Tony had said once, just a few days after they’d all come home from the hospital, that all children look like their fathers at first. Children were genetically programmed to survive, and one way to live past infancy was to make sure one’s father didn’t wring the neck of his own true offspring—the face of a child was thus necessarily a mirror for the father to peer into.
Tony was a weirdo, all right.
Then Tony spoke. “They have big ones too. They’re five bucks. Gaudy, like little sequined Liberace pillows. The dollar one was a better deal. No reason to pay extra for a good luck charm.”
As to the second question, of course the baby stirred. Don’t be ridiculous. Both his parents were up and at the crib railing before Charlie Kyriakos even started his naked, hysterical screaming. The baby often wore a “Howl”-themed onesie from City Lights Books, but not today. He didn’t have to wear it; he lived it.
Neither Cheryl nor Tony forgot about the filakto. Tony put it back under the crib mattress the moment he was able to, and Cheryl Googled it—though she spelled the word “phylacto” at first and didn’t get much. Her Presbyterian upbringing hadn’t prepared her for amulets and icons and gibberish. On one message board she came across, the mati hanging on the wall was denounced as “peasant magic.” For a moment, she was angry on behalf of Tony, of his mother, of every Greek in the world, even though normally she would agree that a big amber eye was creepy and weird and certainly not rational.
A few weeks later the filakto fell to the floor and a mouse got to it. Cheryl vacuumed it up without noticing, and Tony didn’t remember to check for it either.
Tony had wanted one thing, and what he wanted was so simple he couldn’t even articulate it. Instead he tried explaining things roundabout. “It’s just that I had a lot of cousins my own age, and our kid probably won’t,” and “My grandfather has Alzheimer’s. He remembers better in Greek.” Neither had anything to do with the filakto. It’s just that Tony didn’t want to be the last member of the Kalafatis family, its thousand-year march of industrious goatherds and restaurateurs and hunch-backed widows, to have a filakto.
Three generations in America. It would be hard enough for the baby to grow up with anything but an empty hole where his culture should have been. And how would little Charlie fill it, except with video games and baseball and maybe even growing up and changing his surname to Kelly. Let the baby be a little Greek, just for a while. Easter on the Eastern calendar—half-price jelly beans and chocolate rabbits four years out of five!—lamb and spanakopita, a few words of the old language here and there. Curses and the weather. Maybe the baby could go back one day, meet the cousins, even settle down, once America finished tearing itself apart.
Forget it, Tony thought to himself one night. He was sneaking a cigarette out on the porch. America is going to tear Europe apart first, and then just swirl down the toilet. There were fireflies everywhere, and the smoke in his lungs wasn’t any hotter than the air outside. Fucking climate change. What was Cheryl up to? Yoga class, probably. The kid? Shouting into a headset and racking up a body count in the virtual ruins of radioactive Pakistan with his online pals. Tony lit another cigarette and watched the whole thing burn down to the filter. They lived in New York now, to be closer to Cheryl’s parents.
Here’s a little peasant magic for you. Imagine a tiny cup in front of you, white with blue trim, on a tiny white saucer. Drink the coffee in it down. It’s strong, like you put a tablespoon of grounds in your mouth and started sucking the flavor out directly. Let’s read the muddy grains that remain. That’s where Greeks keep the future. Charles Kyriakos Kalafatis never marries, but he does have kids. Three girls: Krystlyn, Karr, and Korynne. The girls call Cheryl “grandma,” and Tony “pop-pop.” They never manage papou. They like their mother’s family better anyway. The Schnabels have real money, and a temperature-controlled swimming pool. One time the girls program it to freeze right in the middle, and they play The Last Polar Bear Ever with an inflatable raft. Their other grandfather yells at them for wasting energy.
Karr is missing something—a bit of the beta chain gene on the #11 chromosome—her inheritance from her father, and grandfather before her. She’s a sickly girl at first, but there are gene therapies now, and targeted folic acid supplements. She never reproduces and that little anomaly that causes thalassemia fades out of the family line once and for all.
Krystlyn does reproduce; she’s blonde, like her mother, with a squinting smile. In college she says that she has some Greek in her, because there’s a Greek-American boy she’s interested in. They date for a few weeks, but that’s it, except for the baby that she, in a fit of nostalgic pique, carries to term and gives up to adoption to a nice family in China.
Korynne is a nice girl, dark-haired like her father, and whip-smart. Then she goes and marries a stern evangelical Christian man, an engineer she met in college. There is no Easter candy to be had in her home at any price.
Peasant magic is concerned with peasant things. Babies and whatnot. The weather too. Which gets steadily worse, and wild on our way down to the last dregs of coffee. A very old Tony makes a joke about retiring to fabulous seaside Dayton, Ohio, and a very old Cheryl laughs and hugs a plastic headwrap around her short hair to keep the rain off, then pushes him in his chair down the street. Tony’s other joke is that he is the last Kalafatis in the world and so someone should commission a bust of him to be made from of non-compostable plastics. It isn’t quite true since Tony has a son, and some far-off cousins whose first names he has forgotten, though surely many of them are named Antoni, Kyriacos, Vasso, Athena, and Kalliope, after their grandparents. But Kyriacos—fucking “Charlie”—did change his name to Kalafatis-Schnabel to please his girlfriend’s family, finally, and none of the girls kept the Greek name at all.
And near the lower curve of the cup there is a young man, Yu, in Shanghai, whose dark hair has a bit of a curl to it from the rain. He is looking down at his newborn child, in a time and place where people have agreed that to speak of gender in infants before they can express gender themselves is rude, if not oppressive. After its tempestuous twentieth century, did you think patriarchal China incapable of change? Yu’s own parents were perverse in their way, which neighbors credited to wayward Western genes. Their family name is Feng, fourth tone, and that makes it an unusual one. Feng Yu’s father was from America, and he was born of a white mother with olive skin and screeching voice. Feng Yu—were feng first tone instead of fourth—could be read to mean “wind and rain,” and that would have been a terrible thing to name a boy. Yu thinks he sees himself in his own child, who stares up with glassy eyes, ready to burst into furious tears. Yu looks a bit foreign to most, but his child looks right at home.
The coffee cup tells me that a great wave is coming. I hope the baby will be okay.
____________________
After a miscarriage and a fetus “incompatible with life,” my wife’s third attempt at a pregnancy took, though we did get a scare after nuchal transl
ucency testing suggested possible birth defects. The whole experience was fraught, and I could not stop thinking of the future, the familial future rather than the socio-technological future that usually preoccupies me. I can barely communicate with my father’s side of the family as my Greek is marginal, and I’ve often wondered what my paternal ancestors would think if they could see me now. And what would they think of a half-Greek child? (They’d love him, of course, but they might also be surprised. . . .) With a child of my own on the way, the occasional wool-gathering metastasized into a constant rumination.
I wrote this story in a hurried burst while visiting my sister. The baby was due in a month; it would be my last time at my sister’s house without him existing and being part of our lives. My brain was boiling over with anxiety. But that wasn’t motivation enough to write. I find writing exhausting and distasteful, remember? I happened to see that the Boston Review was holding its annual fiction contest, and the deadline was at month’s end. I suppose the literary met genre in that moment—I had all these inchoate feelings I was desperate to somehow articulate, and I saw an opportunity to make a thousand bucks if I could just make a tight deadline. I pulled what I had at hand and in mind: Greek folklore, my actual marriage in the state it was at the time, the names of some famous masters of the martial art, Chen taiji, I’d been studying for several years and which I’d chatted with a cousin about earlier that day, and I stayed up all night, and submitted the story.
I lost the contest. Didn’t win, didn’t get an honorable mention, didn’t get a friendly note in the rejection email. But I did have a new story to submit to magazines, and a bit of time to fix a few things. My friend, the writer John Chu, helped me out with Chinese naming conventions, and I started submitting it to other big-time literary journals: Granta, Tin House, The Kenyon Review.
Not even close.
So the genre mags it was. Apex Magazine, a wonderful online magazine where I publish not infrequently (that’s not what makes it wonderful, but still. . . .) took it, and published it in its December 2015 issue, a couple of months after my son was born and a couple of weeks before Christmas. With such good timing, “The Phylactery” was read by almost nobody—not even my wife.
SLICE OF LIFE
NOT MANY WOMEN of child-bearing age make arrangements to leave their bodies to science. Fewer still die while in their third trimesters. Punya’s team supervisor had found one, somehow, and it was the team’s job to cryosection the body—the bodies, Punya reminded herself—into 2,063 slices along the axial plane for mounting and photographing.
“Imagine going to the deli section at the supermarket and getting a pound of salami, sliced. Sliced thin, the way an annoying old lady always demands it,” Punya explained to Emily, her roommate. Punya was whispering, practically hissing. There was something holy about the evening Starbucks line, a serenity Punya didn’t want to tear down.
“Oh no. I can’t believe it. What a horror show,” Emily said. “Horror for a good cause . . . but, nevermind.” Emily waved her hands before her, wiping whatever she was imagining away. Everyone shuffled ahead, one boot-length closer to the counter, and looked down at their phones. Emily and Punya were the only friends in the line. “How old was she?”
“Twenty-eight,” Punya said.
“I meant the baby,” Emily said.
Punya had lots of things she could have said, about the philosophical trap of calling fetuses “babies” and counting age rather than considering development, but the only thing that came out of her mouth was, “Seven months.”
“Jesus,” Emily muttered. Then it was time to order and nothing more could be said that wasn’t about coffee, and coffee sizes, and what to wear later.
Punya’s new work assignment came up a lot that long Friday evening.
So, do you freeze-dry them first or . . . some girl who liked talking about all her Android app ideas. Lots of them had to do with keeping track of menstrual cycles and “fun” branding. Punya also had to explain to her that she was a lab tech, not a doctor. Twice. Oh God, oh God. That’s why I’m going to be a dermatologist, not a pathologist. Simon, in med school, his first year. Punya had dated him on and off for three months, and he was still nice to have around as he liked to make himself useful—twenty bucks for a cab, playing boyfriend when drunk guys came around—in the forlorn hope of getting back into Punya’s pants.
Encased in gelatin, eh? That reminds me—let’s do Jell-O shots. Punya turned that guy, some hopelessly entangled ex-with benefits of Emily’s college roommate, down cold, despite his broad shoulders and little chin dimple. The Vinyl wasn’t even the sort of place that served Jell-O shots. Really. It was just the club Emily had dragooned everyone into going to because it was “’80s in Manchester” night and she had never gotten over being too young for The Smiths.
Point two-five millimeters? What’s that in human hair width? Isn’t it strange that everything tiny is compared to human hair? That was the bartender. Punya was pleased. She got to smile, hold up a long finger, and say, “One! A single human hair—a head hair, anyway—is just about the same diameter.” She purposefully left an opening to move the conversation toward the diameter of the kinds of human hair not found on human heads, but the bartender didn’t take the bait.
Hey, hey . . . that was how App Girl initiated a conversation as she toddled up to Punya. They did it already. She had found a YouTube video on her phone and flashed the screen around the little crowd around Punya’s stool. Everyone watched the montage—it started at the top of the head—cheered when convicted murderer’s Joseph Paul Jernigan’s lone testicle made its appearance, and turned to Punya at the end, eyes wide and questioning.
She closed her eyes for a long moment, then opened them again. “Yes,” she said, loud, over the Happy Mondays. “We all look like prosciutto under the skin.” She chin-pointed to the guy with the shoulders. “Even you!” She hoped he’d blush at least, that terrible beautiful idiot god of a man, but it was by turns too dark and too strobe-y to really tell.
“We’re doing it again for a few reasons,” Punya said. “A younger woman, with a fetus. That’s not been done before. Digital resolution is a lot sharper now too. We have so much more to learn.” She licked her lips. “And we’re slicing even thinner now.” Half-a-dozen blanching faces, that much Punya could see in the flashes of club lighting.
App Girl recited aloud a YouTube comment demanding footage of a body being sliced from nose to the back of the skull, how that would really be useful for the sake of science, but Punya didn’t want to argue. She felt fingers on her shoulder, then her elbow. It was the bartender, with a buyback. She needed it and drained the bottle of Red Stripe in two heroic gulps. Slick enough for some cheers.
There was dancing, and flirtatious trading of ice cubes on necks and across backs. App girl and Simon had wandered off at some point, Punya noticed, which was fine with her except that it wasn’t. Then she reminded herself that we’re all just bags of water and other chemicals, reacting and twitching and moving about, then making up stories about it later to explain why our bodies did what they had done. The stories just came from a bag within a bag—the wet and sloshy brain. But Punya headed toward the mezzanine anyway, to see if she could spot them from up above. Someone muttered something about her hot little brown ass as she squeezed up the staircase, but she ignored it, having no drink to weaponize and spill. She didn’t even tug on the hem of her skirt as she pushed up onto the last step.
The downstairs bartender seemingly materialized next to her, and leaned his elbows on the railing. He was in his civilian clothes now, meaning a normal T-shirt from Walmart or someplace, and not the Joy Division number he’d been wearing.
“Hiya . . .” he said.
Punya smiled, deciding that she thought he was cute even though he no longer had the power to dispense free rounds.
“The Visible Human Project 2.0!” he said. Then he explained, too quickly, “I went and Googled. Anyway, isn’t it funny? Aren’t we all visible
humans already?”
“Yes, that is funny,” Punya said. “I’m Punya.”
“Rod,” the bartender said.
“I bet,” Punya said.
“Pardon me?”
Punya smiled, showing plenty of teeth. “I was just thinking,” she said, “about how much time I have to spend pretending that people aren’t really people, to get my job done. And it’s all because I wanted to help people in the first place. Cure diseases.”
Rod smiled, and made sure that his arm was touching Punya’s. “Me too,” he said. “I mean, I want to help people as well. Bartenders need to be good with people. It’s like being a therapist. Or, really, a pharmacist.”
“Everyone wants to help people,” Punya said. “And yet everyone seems to need ever more help.”
“Well, not everybody wants to help people. What about politicians, Wall Street types, dictators?” Then Rod stopped. “Sorry, I don’t mean to get political when you’re trying to be existential.”
“I guess we’re not all visible humans,” Punya said. “Like that girl I’m working on.”
“What happened to her? How did she die?” Rod said.
“Suicide. She gave her body to science in the suicide note. An EMT tipped us off, so we swooped in. The family contested it, saying that she wasn’t in her right mind, that she was too distraught. And that since her suicide note hadn’t been signed by a witness, it wasn’t a legally binding last will and testament.”
“Wow.”
“Then do you know what happened?” Punya asked. “I’ll tell you, but you have to keep it a secret. Actually, everything I’ve said so far is off the record, you understand?”
Rod turned square with Punya and held up his hands, showing off nice palms. He must get manicures, Punya decided. “I won’t tweet a word.”
“What happened is,” Punya said, leaning in conspiratorially, “that my boss gave the parents five thousand dollars to shut up and go away.” She kept her tongue out after saying “away,” just for a second, wondering what it would be like to lick Rod’s ear. “And they did go away. It just took two days and we got the body.”