by Nick Mamatas
“It doesn’t matter. We’re cutting off all financial aid to Palau and Morocco and Italy and all those other little nothing countries that have decided to use your father as a wedge against us.”
“Us who? The US? You never talked like this before!”
“And that was my mistake. I wanted you to grow up to be a patriot, Herb, to have a little pride in yourself and your fellow Americans, not to be an annoying, know-it-all cynic like your father.”
“I’m not a cynic. It’s very idealistic, starting a new country, opening doors to the tired and hungry yearning to breathe free.”
Mom put her elbows on the table and ignored the wobble as she buried her head in her hands. “Let’s just go home,” she said, and of course she meant to Colorado, where she had a new garden apartment with a small microwave where she warmed up her frozen dinners and a satellite dish where she spent eighteen hours a day watching Weinbergia, hoping to catch a glance of me or my silhouette in one of the windows. (We generally kept the shades drawn, due to the number of new citizens who liked to walk around naked on whichever floor I wasn’t on at the moment.)
“Weinbergia is my home.”
“You’re not going back to that house.”
“Then I’ll go live with the poor people in the dump.”
She sneered at that, more disgusted with me than I would have ever thought possible. “My son, the doctor,” she said. “I’m your mother, I have custody, we’re going home, and if you want to stay here and have a tantrum I’ll have the guards throw you on an Army helicopter to get you home if I have to.”
And that’s the story of my first-ever trip in an Army helicopter.
6
The worst thing about my mother’s house in Colorado was that Colorado is still in America. Also, you need a car to get anywhere. My mother even drove down to the private road that surrounds the complex to pick up her mail from the boxes on the corner of her block.
I was being “homeschooled” by Mom, which meant that she’d watch me fill out workbooks and I’d occasionally ask her a question I knew she couldn’t answer in order to let me use the computer. There were all sorts of parental controls on her box too, but of course it was easy to learn her passwords with a little telepathy so I was back online. I didn’t feel like writing very much though, and instead just read the various headlines about Weinbergia and checked out some of the hatesites that have sprung up about it.
That’s the funny thing that Daniel and the Weinbergians never seemed to get. They were always so worried about propaganda and media—which is why Richard wasn’t just depantsed and thrown over enemy lines in the middle of the night—but the media doesn’t matter at all. People instantly go totally crazy when you build a nuke and start your own country; there’s no need for the networks to spin it. They’re all trained to distrust the new idea, the individual initiative that has nothing to do with making a zillion dollars or being in movies, the idea that someone might just announce, “I’m not part of you guys, so there!”
I know this not only because you’re all open books to me, but because my workbook told me so. The Social Studies unit was on immigration—my job was to find an immigrant and interview him or her about coming to America. I had to fill out this sheet explaining Five Reasons Why Your Immigrant—my immigrant?—Left His or Her Home Country and Five Reasons Why He or She Likes America. Then I had to get a picture of something that my immigrant thinks represents America and paste it into the workbook. Well, the only immigrant I knew was myself, so here’s what I filled out:
Five Reasons Your Immigrant Left His or Her Home Country
I was overcome by crazy purple knockout gas.
Long lines for the bathroom.
All the adults around me started saying things like “make love” when they thought I was in earshot, and that’s one creepy phrase.
China didn’t kidnap me first.
I was too scared to push the button.
Five Reasons Your Immigrant Likes America
I’d better like it.
Life’s a bit easier under America’s domestic policy than it is under its foreign policy, let me tell you.
My mom lives here.
It’s where they hold Wrestlemania every Spring.
Mostly I like that it’s fraying at the edges, and that all these other countries are popping up out of nowhere. I think that’s a good sign, and it’s really nice of America not to just randomly kill anyone and everyone who tries it, at least not right away. Thanks.
And for my picture of America, I found one on the net, on some freebie angelfire.com webpage by some guy who used to be a Marine or really likes the Marines or his brother was a Marine or something (it really wasn’t clear which). It was a photo of my father, in his shorts, his mouth shaped like a big O and his forehead glistening from sweat as he leans into the steering bar of his lawn mower. There were two captions on the pic too, in big red computery-font letters. fueled by marx said the caption up top, and on the bottom of the photo, ruled by satan.
Bored, I went to the fridge. A half-empty jar of Best Foods mayonnaise and an old sock were in it. I can’t even imagine how my mother ended up with those two items and nothing else in her refrigerator, and I’m a mind-reader. Best Foods. God. It’s the same company as Hellman’s back in New York, but out here, in the West, they call it Best Foods.
Maybe, I thought, I should change my name from Herbert Weinberg to “Handsome” Johnny Stryker or something like that.
In Weinbergia, the fridge was always full. Cuban sandwiches (from Cuba!), Chinese food (from Hunan Gardens, in the King Kullen strip mall across Route 347, on the southern frontier), crazy hippie green stuff, ice cream bars, lots of chicken cooked in all sorts of ways. You name it. In Weinbergia, I always had some company, if only because people would come up to me in little groups of two and threes, to marvel at the Smarty Kid who didn’t wear a backwards baseball cap and let his jaw drop to his nipples as a matter of course.
And I guess that’s why it was such a big deal that dad built a nuke too. After my kidnapping, the news sort of petered out, even though Weinbergia is still ringed by foreign troops, and even though the garden gnome is still ticking out on the lawn. Weinbergia is just fodder for various Internet nerds and political science and law school students writing their papers. At least the weather has turned now, so there’s no need for Dad to mow the lawn. Portuguese UN peacekeepers did the raking, which was over pretty quickly because the gas attack defoliated both the trees in my yard. My mother became the new celebrity, what with the TV appearances and “the book” about her brave struggle to reclaim me. Geri was so naïve; she actually wrote the first ten pages herself and gave them to an agent. The first page is hanging on a bulletin board at the publishing house, because the first paragraph reads like this:
I knew that I had to rescue my loving pure little innocent son from the dastardly clutches of my diabolical husband because I love my little Herbert so very much and nobody else could love him like I did. My husband who is mentally ill and now I realize has been for years ever since that time during Christmas shopping three years ago when he tore open a twelve-pack of toilet paper at the Walmart and grabbed three rolls and flung them over the shelves into the next aisle while he hysterically screamed madly “Hey-o! Heads up!” When he began to secretly skulk around in the shadows in broad daylight I knew I had a battle for my life and the life of my loving son in my hands and that I would do anything to protect my innocent child from the world, which is full of unknown dangers.
The rest they shredded, thank God. Geri spent a lot of the time she was actually home talking to and emailing the ghostwriter. She ate most of her suppers out as well, but was always happy to bring home “doggie bags”—Gee, thanks Mom! Love, The Dog—from Wolfgang Puck’s place or wherever she’d been treated that night.
I had little else to do with my days but allow my mind to drift, all the way back to Weinbergia. Weinbergia, where Rich was leading a daring commando mission over the wire
and into enemy territory, namely, the Qool Mart about half a mile into American territory.
“I just can’t get them out of my head,” Rich said. “I haven’t had a Cuebar since I was a kid. They have those four little rectangular sections: caramel, coconut, peanut butter, and strawberry.” My father was just staring at him, but a couple of folks littering the dining room, on pillows or half-rolled up and wrinkled sleeping bags, nodded. Then there was Adrienne, who felt like she was in a commercial, because she was.
“It’s only one klick down to the Qool Mart. We should make a move.”
“We?” asked Barry. “Besides, candy is never as good as you remember it from when you were a kid.”
“The corporations,” Rhiannon said, and murmurs of agreement rose up from the crowded room. Coups in Haiti, mass production, the decline in union labor in factories, the fact that milk chocolate doesn’t melt as quickly as dark when loaded into trucks—that’s why chocolate stinks these days, except for the expensive stuff. It’s amazing what people think they know.
Richard leaned in, his elbows balanced oddly on the arms of the chair in which he sat. “You know we need to make a move, Daniel. Do something. People need a new adventure to focus on. You know, make the front page, over the fold, again.” He leaned back in his chair, held out his arms, then brought his hands together so that his index fingers and thumbs met, making a little cube-y shape. “Cuuuuuue-bar” he said, just like the voice-over guy from the commercials used to.
Dad glanced around for a second, then reached for the glass sugar bowl and turned it over. Along with a cascade of white sugar fell a little black video camera, a new type hardly bigger than a roll of 35mm film. He snatched it up, stomped out of the dining room and up the steps, shouldered his way through the knot of people always milling right outside the bathroom door, yanked the door open, ignored the shriek and flailing of legs and panties stretched between white knees as some woman named Elly rushed to stand and cover herself, and flushed the camera. He nearly broke the handle to the toilet.
The screaming and flailing about—Weinbergians like to speak with their hands because of the close quarters, a little flick of a finger can mean a lot once you catch someone’s eye—clicked off like a television when my mother barged in to the living room, her hands full of big white shopping bags. She bought me a whole new wardrobe. Sweaters, which I hate to wear, “but you’re in Colorado now and it gets a lot colder here,” five pairs of shoes, all the same but in different sizes, because “one will fit and you’ll grow into at least one of the sizes; the rest we can return,” and slacks slacks slacks. No jeans. “It’s time to grow up,” she said. She was wearing jeans though. The last bag held three plastic domes holding roasted chickens from the fancy supermarket. I called them pheasant under glass and got a dirty look instead of a polite chuckle. I’m not so clever anymore, now that Mom has to look at me every day between photo opportunities and psychological assessments.
We ate a chicken, and salad out of a bag. Mom didn’t even pour all the leaves and whatever out onto our plates; we just leaned over the table like Weinbergian hippies and jabbed at the veggies with our forks.
“So, what did you do all day?” she asked me.
“I dunno,” I said. “What did you do all day?”
Mom dropped her fork. “I went shopping. I had a meeting. With a senator. I made some phone calls.” She sighed.
“Where?”
“Cell phone.”
“Oh. Who did you talk to?”
“Oh, Vanity Fair, some freelance writer from the New Times, that sort of thing.” She frowned, thinking. I peeked.
“Still haven’t heard anything from People, huh?”
“No!” Her hands contracted into tight little fists. “Can you believe it? I even faxed them.” She couldn’t even look at me, she was so disgusted. She turned back to me finally. “I faxed them twice today alone. I was worried about time zones. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to Mountain.”
“When People does call, they’ll probably want to take our picture. That’s why I bought you seven sweaters. You should keep the orange one at hand in case they call us tomorrow.”
I smiled. “Sure, Mom!” We ate in silence, while she fantasized about a handsome, flat-stomached photojournalist sweeping her off her feet and winning me over with lots of hair-tousling and non-molesting wrestling lessons. A People photojournalist. That way, no politics.
About six hours later, my father was staring at the ceiling in his dark room when he shifted to his side and peered over the edge of his bed at a few of the shadowy figures who took up the floor space in their bags and blankets.
“Who wants to come to Qool Mart with me?” he asked. “This sounds stupid, but I can’t get those damn Cuebars out of my head.” The shadows on the floor shifted and groaned like a talkative fog. Dad reached down and poked the mass, tapping shoulders (or foreheads, an ankle, a big fleshy something that he thought was a belly but worried was a boob, which would create a national crisis or, even worse, some horrible and lengthy lesbian “processing session” at breakfast) and rousing his confederates. “Feet,” he said softly as he sat up and swung around to get off the bed. A few shapeless blobs rose up and sprouted limbs.
“Cuebar, let’s do this thang,” Barry said.
“Should we . . . get Rich?” asked Adrienne in a quiet, sleepy voice, which came . . .
Which came from the side of the bed my mother used to sleep on. I hadn’t sensed her till she awoke.
She was in bed with my father. In bed. They had been almost doing things. Almost, so quiet, hardly a squeak, just hands and the tips of their fingers, down below. They were really tired, but with all the rolling over and the like on the floor, King Daniel couldn’t help but wake up, his brain a fog, having forgotten why he couldn’t have sex with the woman in the bed with him. For her part, Adrienne was happy to lie there and “be pleasured.”
She used the words be pleasured. Mentally. Dinner came up my throat and I ran to the bathroom to stare into the toilet for a long time, waiting. Once, either my father or my mother would come and comfort me. Back in Port Jameson, they were always so attuned to me, like they could read my mind. I’ve always wanted to meet someone who could do that, but as far as I knew then, I was the only telepathic person in the whole world.
I pushed Adrienne out of my mind, and concentrated on Dad. He and a small knot of Weinbergians—and yeah, Adrienne was among them, but to me she was nothing but a silhouette, a black blotch on the lawn—approached the border, giddy with anticipation. Sometimes, you can even look forward to maybe being shot, if it involves the promise of a little road trip to a convenience store. Exciting stuff; they have everything at those stores: Froot Loops, push brooms, coffee, magazines that promise six-pack abs with a single push-up, maps of the world (Palau, here we come!), and Cuebars.
“Hi,” my father said, so sure of himself that he wasn’t even thinking. A soldier looked at him like he was the dreamy remnant of an incomplete nap.
“What?”
“We’re coming through.”
“Uhm,” the soldier said, “I don’t think you can do that. I mean, I’ll have to radio up the chain of command.”
“Why? Just let us through.” The Weinbergians nodded. One of them had made a passport with a portable laser printer and an old Polaroid camera he had found at the bottom of the junk closet. “Where are you from?” Dad asked.
“I grew up in Spanish Harlem.”
“Dicey area.”
The soldier shrugged.
“But you were allowed to go where you wanted, right? Sure, someone could say ‘Get off my turf—’”
“Heh,” the soldier said, “I only ever heard the word turf on TV.”
“Yeah yeah, but anyway, here’s the thing, there was animosity, but you were allowed to travel wherever you liked. We’re not under arrest or anything, we’re not being detained in my house, we’re just ordinary Ameri—”
“Nah, you ain’t, remember? Weinbe
rgia.” The soldier smiled. He liked to be clever, and his job didn’t really offer much call for it.
Dad shrugged. “Okay,” he said, “we declare the hostilities over. Mission accomplished! Say, good job, soldier, for resolving all this. You’ll probably get a medal, maybe even a stamp with your picture on it one day.” Behind him, a Weinbergian passport was torn to shreds by its enthusiastic owner. Dad stepped forward and, careful not to nudge or touch the soldier, but with his hands out to direct him, crossed the border. Adrienne and the others followed, nervously. Dad smiled and waved as he picked his way across the driveway. Jake, the guy who carried the passport, accidentally stubbed his toe on a tank tread, but the gunner didn’t notice thanks to the iPod some Support the Troops campaign had sent everyone.
I hoped someone would stop them. By shooting Adrienne.
Dad made it to the corner of the block, turned, and led his band down Route 25A. Adrienne took his arm because the shoulder of the road isn’t designed for walking—everyone on Long Island drives everywhere—and was full of sand, dead leaves she thought were spiders, and rocks that were conspiring to make her twist her ankle.
You know, she doesn’t even like Cuebars.
A car zipped by and its passengers yelled something unintelligible to my dad, who jumped, startled. Adrienne’s nails dug into his forearm.
“What was that?”
“What did they say?”
“I dunno!” said Jake.
“Didn’t you hear?” asked Adrienne.
“No, why would I? Did you?”
“No!”
“Well then,” said Barry.
“Well then what?” said Adrienne.
In the darkness, everyone shrugged and walked on.
What the driver of the car, whose name was Paul DeMello and who worked in Port Jameson for his father who had a vinyl siding business said was, “Aaaah, you’re poor! Fucker!” He did this because on Long Island, everybody drives, except for the occasional poor person who somehow managed to find a place to live, in a tiny studio apartment, or even doubled up with someone. And it really drives Paul nuts to see someone dragging their ass along the shoulder of the road, because he feels the need to slow down so he won’t hit them, and who knows, sometime somebody, especially a “moulie,” might jump in front of his car and sue him for a million dollars after causing the accident. (By moulie, Paul, who actually thinks of himself as “Paulie,” means to think “black guy,” but “bad,” because moulie is short for mulignane, which he’s been told is similar to the Italian word for eggplant, and anyway his father used to call black people on TV moulies, especially if they led to gambling losses by their poor play on the football field or basketball court. Anyway, he’s a jerk, but I think it’s funny that “Paulie” and “moulie” kind of sound similar.) And he also gets mad because he works really hard all day, doing vinyl siding, and if he works so hard why can’t these people who walk around like apes just work hard too and get a damn car?