Reproduction

by Ian Williams

  Stop saying that. You weren’t saying anything. Faye tossed the can of tuna into the garbage bag.

  Huh?

  You can’t just randomly begin a sentence with as I was saying.

  As I was saying, Army said (stay on message), he has no choice but to leave all this for me.

  Faye sighed. You don’t know that, Army.

  People like him are pretty much born with generational wills, Army said.

  If you say so.

  He has an executor, Army said as if it proved something. He poured the liquids into the sink. Cream. Coke. Mango juice. Orange juice.

  And, just say, hypothetically, what if you’re not heir to the throne?

  Then I probate. Legally, I’m entitled to everything as next of kin.

  You sound white, Faye said.

  It comes and goes, he said. He could see them in a big house like this, he and Faye and two boys. He’d put up a hoop at the front and the neighbours would think the Fresh Prince of Belair had moved in.

  The ice cubes in the freezer were dried down. Edgar had frozen dinners, which Army left there, mixed vegetables, shrimp.

  Army took a photo of the neat interior of the fridge to show Edgar. He was stoking Edgar’s confidence and pride in him.

  After finishing the kitchen, Army and Faye took on the living room. They opened the curtains and the windows. Next time he came, he’d wash the curtains. Or were they supposed to be dry-cleaned? The house was deep in smoke smell. Faye wiped down the surfaces, then she posed, holding a can of Pledge and a rag across her chest like a gang sign and mugged as Army took a photo.

  There are no pictures of you, she said, lifting picture frames that had been turned face down. FYI.

  There were photographs of vintage-looking people—grandmothers, fathers, mothers, rich aristocracy, fur hats, stiff family portraits.

  There are no pictures of anyone born this century, Army said.

  You weren’t born this century, Faye pointed out.

  Faye, you know what? Just shut your hole.

  She dropped the dusting cloth and climbed the stairs.

  Army waited a few moments, lifting the face-down frames, then he went upstairs into the master bedroom. Another dark space. Curtains closed. He opened them, left the sheers closed. Still dim. There was supposed to be a carton of cigarettes on the floor next to the bed. Four-post bed. He emptied the ashtrays. He considered taking some of Edgar’s clothes for him, but he liked having Edgar in his clothes. Felicia thought Edgar looked ridiculous in jeans and a sweatshirt. He located a carton of cigarettes in a lower drawer. Those he would take.

  Army found Faye coiled internally in another bedroom. The musk was so overpowering, it was almost visible. She was standing in front of a chest of drawers holding the tail of her ponytail over her nose. He took a picture as she looked up.

  Everything feels preserved, Army said, kinder.

  I need you to say that you love me, Faye said.

  She had found her grandmother in this room, Army thought, long white hair over her face, and needed consolation.

  He stuck out his bottom lip. I say it to you all the time.

  Not to me.

  Of course to you.

  To everyone else maybe. To your dad, probably a hundred times in the last week.

  Army rolled his eyes.

  I don’t mean now. And I don’t care if it’s corny or if you think I’m being a little girl. I just need you to say it. Sometimes. Faye nodded to herself. Only to me.

  Fine, I—

  It doesn’t mean anything now. She ended the conversation abruptly by pulling open the top drawer. Look.

  So you tell me to say something then when I say it you don’t want to hear it.

  There’s a woman’s jewellery in here, Faye said.

  The top drawer of a chest was converted into a jewellery holder with velvet at the base of the drawer. Necklaces, rings, bracelets, all tangled with each other. Earrings scattered.

  Is he married? Faye asked.

  Army shook his head. I mean, that’s not how women store their bling. He paused. You think he is?

  Maybe not married. But, well, unless he’s wearing it himself—

  Army gripped his forearms. So there was a woman in Endhr’s life, a woman who had returned his jewellery after she ended the relationship and he dumped it upstairs because he knew she came and went. She was an Italian soprano, an elegant woman with short grey hair that she brushed vigorously with a bone-handled brush in front of a vanity wearing a silk nightgown while he took off his cufflinks. They spoke German to each other. They had been apart for the last two years. She didn’t know he had cancer. Army’s wattage dimmed. What was he doing caring for a man who had been living with a soprano for the last thirty years of his life?

  Let’s mow the lawn and get out, Faye said.

  Not today, Army said. Seeing the jewellery had sapped his energy. He ran his fingers through the tangle. It was old jewellery, wealthy-European-heirloom jewellery.

  Take whatever you want, Army said.

  I’m not doing that.

  Army picked out a ring. From the back it looked like a single gold band but at the front it appeared anthropomorphic, one arm swooped upward and the other downward to grip a clear stone, a diamond, Army was sure. Maybe a blood diamond. His whole body was fizzing with Pop Rocks. He took Faye’s right hand. The ring was too big for her. She removed it and placed it in the drawer. Army reclaimed it and put it in his pocket. To have appraised.

  Mrs. Gross, he said.

  Don’t do this, Army.

  Play along, he said.

  I don’t want to be Mrs. Gross.

  Mrs. Shaw then. How do you like your new house?

  What’s old is new again.

  He retrieved the key from his pocket. He should make a copy. That would be responsible. He should in case something happened to Edgar, and he needed (to say you love me) to get into the house in a hurry. Yes.

  * * *

  After Heather left for her light administrative job without title or benefits, Riot took his camera and went out filming, same thing he’d been doing since he arrived.

  Day 16 of project Day, he said into the camera then he set it down on a table in a coffeeshop and let it record the interactions of the barista. Riot would need a job soon. Maybe he could parlay his experience at Shoppers Drug Mart into—oh, no work permit. Every day, the same thought. But he was white. They could work something out. He got his ninety minutes of footage there.

  Day 16B: Subway, he said into the camera. He used to ride the train from Inwood down to 59th Street–Columbus Circle then transfer to line 1 and ride north again up to 207th Street. He would hold the camera on his knee, facing the seat in front of him. This footage tended to be mostly crotches and feet. The point was you could tell a lot about people if you didn’t just watch their faces. For budget reasons, he now sat outside the entrance on the sidewalk, recording the shoes of people entering and leaving. He also made some spare change this way.

  Day 16C, he said into the camera when he got tired of that. He recorded himself making and eating lunch in Heather’s apartment. Today, the couple upstairs was not fighting but he already had enough footage for their inevitable domestic violence trial.

  Day 16D, he said. Riot recorded himself turning pages of Vogue. Every day he tried to put a medium inside of another medium. Today it was Vogue. His Grade 11 English teacher (Faye and Army, really?) waxed wet over the play-within-a-play part of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Riot remembered the impact of the play on his teacher and not much else. There was an ass and a girl named Titania, or Titty for short.

  Day 16E: nap. As stated. See Warhol. He wasn’t sure about this Day project. Too much action. The night project he shot in high school was so much cleaner. He recorded the moon for an hour each night of the month. It was hard to tell the nights apart so he spliced one second of sun between the nights. He called it joy cometh in the morning after he heard Mutter quoting the psalm while talking to som
eone on the phone.

  Day 16F, he said. Let’s check on the ants. Heather kept an ant farm on the balcony in memory of Hendrix. How are my boys? It was probably the best footage of the day to that point—a line of, an army of ants (that was the correct collective noun), working an assembly line. By then it was evening. This project was interrupted by

  Day 16G: phone call.

  What’s your plan exactly? Oliver asked.

  To make movies.

  You tried that for two years after high school and how did that turn out, Scorsese?

  I’m a different person now.

  Oliver explained that Felicia was still working to get him back in school on a part-time basis, that is, under a different status. A loophole, she thought. He’d be four courses short at the end of the academic year, but he could make those up in the summer.

  Great, Riot said.

  Today you’re getting on a bus, Oliver said.

  I’m not coming back.

  You listen to me. Get yourself on a bus—

  Pop-Pop, I’m sorry, I’m not—

  Then Oliver insisted he put Heather on the phone. She wasn’t home.

  Riot said, She’s doing makeup for a—

  Then the truth hit Riot.

  * * *

  +

  Less than a month after Faye’s grandmother was put in the home, she died. Of what?

  In the nursing home, longterm care facility, pardon, they said it was natural causes. In the hospital, they said a viral infection that was going around.

  Before she died, Army told Riot, they—

  Who?

  The nursing home people called to say she was being admitted into hospital. Of course, they’re not going to let her die there.

  People die in homes all the time, Riot said.

  Still, it’s bad for business.

  Whenever Riot thought of the grandmother, he recalled a hunched, feather-haired woman, walking down the street in a walker then back up again. No one at her side. Saturday mornings.

  So I guess you’re coming back for the funeral, Army said.

  Sometimes Riot would send Faye a photograph of the grandmother when she neared their window. Pop-Pop always wanted to know what he was looking at. He used to call him a cat because he loved himself a good window.

  Was Heather around when you guys adopted me? Riot asked.

  Maybe, Army said. She might have been in Massachusetts. Why?

  Just asking.

  You making an investigative, Sarah-Polley doc?

  I don’t work in genre.

  Right, right. Anyhow, Faye’s grandmother’s funeral’s in like two days. You know Asians. Chop-chop.

  At the end of the summer, he wondered what felt odd in the view along the street. Not the neighbours coiling up their hoses or the new city garbage, recycling and compost bins. It was absence. He hadn’t seen the grandmother walking a few weeks before they put her in the care facility.

  Hello? Joke. Do you laugh anymore? And you should call her. I ran into her somewhere and she said she hasn’t heard from you in, like, a week.

  * * *

  +

  Army sent Riot up-to-the-minute texts during the funeral as if he were missing game seven of the NBA championship. Army wanted to sit at the front, near the family, but he had to sit with Felicia and Oliver, his family. That didn’t make it into the texts. Mourning family or feuding family? Mourning or feuding? Felicia wanted Oliver to wear a jacket but he said he was not going to squeeze himself into the black velvet one and she said she wouldn’t be seen next to a man without a jacket at a funeral. Army sat between them, absorbing radiation.

  * * *

  The video of Riot surfaced again on Pornhub, under bushy teen solo action. Oliver was just minding his own heterosexual business, clicking through pages of teen girls in the uppermost bedroom away from Felicia and Edgar and, well, Army was out somewhere, when he came across the dead animal of Riot’s pubic hair.

  He had to go to The Mansion to wash his eyes out with women.

  On the way he called Riot several times. No answer. He called Heather.

  Put him on, he said.

  He’s not here, Heather said.

  Lies. Lies. She got that from her mother.

  I’ll tell him you called.

  Tell him he needs to call me immediately.

  He’s having some problems with his phone, I think.

  Tell him his video is all over the internet again and I want it removed tonight. Oliver pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and proceeded to read the address of the video, with all its utf-8&% gibberish, while driving. Did you get it?

  I’ll tell him you called.

  Heather, whose side are you on? Oliver asked. Usually she was on the side of the woman but in the absence of a woman where did her loyalties fall? She had degrees in Women’s Studies (housed in the English department) and Sociology and had written her cross-disciplinary thesis project on the circulation of female bodies in Victorian literature. Felicia read it but Oliver couldn’t get through the first few pages.

  Look, the video’s going to spread. as I was saying There’s no stopping it. Even if he threatens whoever posted it to take it down, it’ll show up again somewhere else. You have no aesthetic distance from it because he’s family but maybe you could engage it as a site for Einfühlung.

  English.

  I mean that conquest or defeat are not your only options. The fact that the dissemination of an object is beyond your control does not mean that your vita, your viability, is contingent on its regulation.

  What are you talking about, Heather? He was lost in the parking lot of The Mansion.

  I’m saying—

  Tell him I want the video down now! Oliver hung up.

  Nothing had changed what was I saying about The Mansion in the last eighteen years, which was one reason Oliver still patronized it. It had not acquired airs. Same furniture, gold railing, steel pole. What more was necessary? The girls were a little older than the ones at the new club, Up and Down, in an industrial park toward the airport, and the men overplayed their enjoyment of these could-have-been wives back when the men were in their thirties. Truth be told, he preferred the waitresses to the girls; they were pretty but had small flaws, a little older, frizzy bangs, a little wing in the upper arm, freckled and sunburnt cleavage.

  Of all possible stock performances, the girl on stage was doing a Japanese school-girl routine although she was neither Japanese nor a school we were talking about cells girl. She was too athletic, too tan, too thick in the thighs. Her wig looked Egyptian. Her uniform was inaccurate too, based on Oliver’s knowledge of the genre. At least, no after that get the facts right. Don’t these girls research?

  Oliver tried to swallow the cider that was placed in front of him but his throat was blocked by a hairball. It was only his second time seeing the video. The white adolescent male body. The strange sunken line under his pecs where his body slouched in the chair. The half-formed face that knew only ejaculation but not orgasm. Why would a man even make a video like that? Why couldn’t he stumble upon videos of Unnamable? The digital women Riot’s age were thin but soft and small-chested and large-nippled and wore their hair in pigtails and kept their panties on for a long time and they talked to you. They said stupid things that made him certain that he could also teach them a thing or two about life, about finding the hypotenuse of a triangle, about Japan, about letting strangers into your house. O, Mr. O, what are you doing?

  The Japanese girl was replaced by a librarian then by a video-game character of some sort then by the non-Japanese Japanese girl who was now a nurse, no, a doctor—she had a stethoscope that she used to floss between her legs.

  Oliver and Army brought onion cells snuck mitosis charmed meiosis the owner into letting Riot into The Mansion on his seventeenth birthday. Riot pretended to be on his phone but one of the girls flagged him and security came over and told him no recording.

  Can’t you just watch and enjoy? Army had said.
/>   But what about later? Riot replied.

  Oliver managed to swallow. Too much time, are you sure too much time. That boy had too much time on his hands. He needed the discipline of hard work. Oliver would find Riot a more labour-intensive job, even if it was minimum wage in a warehouse assembling buckles. Or he could train him to lay hardwood and install tile. Riot and Army could be Property Brothers. What he did not want was for Riot to be at home at thirty-six, contributing nothing to the GDP of the household, as Army would say without a whiff of irony, eating a box of cereal a week and laundering one sock at a time in the hot water superload setting.

  Some cider dribbled from his lip onto his shirt. He looked down at his belly. He was still wearing the white shirt from Faye’s grandmother’s funeral. His face grew hot. He wasn’t as tall or as slim as Edgar. Mendel But he didn’t have cancer either. are you sure Pricked by thousands of hot needles. His eyes. It was the only funeral Oliver had attended since Hendrix’s.

  * * *

  +

  There were already two people in the kitchen at breakfast on the weekend when Edgar shuffled in and kissed Felicia on the cheek.

  What do you drink in this house? Edgar asked.

  We don’t drink in this house.

  It’s for the pain, he said.

  Drinking is not going to do anything for you or the pain. She had arranged his breakfast in courses. First a bowl of assorted berries for its antioxidant properties and to help with constipation. Where does it hurt?

  Everywhere.

  You can’t drink with medication. Are you trying to—

  Edgar gripped his lips between his teeth as he was lowering himself into a seat.

  Felicia peered into the bowl of berries as a reason to look away. She knew it was Mendel what would happen. trust me He would ask Army. Army would buy rum (to Felicia all alcohol was rum) and pour it into his Cokes and coffees. They would think they were keeping a secret from her. She would act as if she knew nothing. Let everybody (go around the table and say) win.

  When the flash of pain had passed he was German you know Eggar asked, Was it you probably or Army who was telling me about licensing homeless people somewhere?