by Anna Tambour
"Like chaos?" I asked.
"Ah, geez," He threw a shovelful my way. "Not that again."
He held himself back, but it mustn't be easy having a retard in your family, who sasses you about what she just can't get.
"We can't keep you here when you're grown up, you know," he said the obvious. I wasn't going to be a farmer, so there wouldn't be room. I knew but he didn't have to say it.
~
I don't have anything against Gene. He's a good man now, and a good farmer. I'm glad in a way that he doesn't know what has happened to me because it doesn't say anything good about life that he's building up his chances for a broken back while I'm living the good life as a precious retard. Sometimes I wonder if there's an equation for that.
So I live in this room with Albee, the deal with Albee being that I take physical care of him, like poke him till I can get him to concentrate long enough on food to eat a meal. Take him every three hours to our toilet whether he wants to or not. Put him to bed, wake him up, report anything that I think maybe won't show up in the audio/visuals. We walk, Albee and I, for an hour each day in a big room with a smooth wood floor. There is nothing there to distract. We walk around and around, and then we walk back to our room.
And in the meantime, I do my own thing. I have a touchscreen handpiece loaded with a full library. I can keep notes on the piece, and I can mindroam. I have found three more numbers since I got here, all from my immediate environment. I think I might be getting close to One.
Dr. Babiram originally thought that it was coincidence—the three being so much a part of my immediacy. But he now seems to be wavering. Today when he entered, he entered backwards, pulling a trolley. On it was an antfarm, and a bottle of wine and a corkscrew, a collection of small, rubber-stoppered bottles with liquids "that you must explore. Don't taste" he warned.
I think he's trying to stimulate, but he is pitiful. The stimulating is that note. It churns in my guts. "Chaos cannot be allowed to rule."
The ants are shoveling, shoveling. Their pathways clean and naked to my gaze. They farm so neatly in their calm society. The dirt behaves itself.
They stimulate as much as going home would, watching Gene, or listening to his children chanting homework. The same homework we had, preparing them, as it did us, "for a life of certainty in a world of uncertainty."
Nice try with the wine, but I don't need that. Nor the other stimulants that he's offered me, or that they've tried in various surreptitious ways. I don't like stimulants, but now that he's planted a thought ...
Albee. What about Albee?
~
It's night now, though our lights are on as usual. The room is just as unshadowed as in the day. The audiovisual in our sleeping/living room is on as usual.
I know the time because they put a clock in, to help me structure Albee's toiletings. It's now middle of the night, and time for Albee to go to the toilet.
"Albee," I shake. He screams. He smiles. The usual thing. I shove him into the bathroom. Sit him on the toilet. He wees into it and smiles at me. "Good boy," I whisper. "Albee!" I yell. "Not again."
I turn the taps on for the bathtub. Turn on the water for the sink.
Open the window above the toilet and pull myself up. "Albee," I whisper. And I put my finger to my lips and hope he knows what that means. I know he doesn't, but as this is going to be confusing, he will probably not want to do his happy scream anyway.
"Come," I whisper.
Albee does. He pulls himself up in some exaggerated quietness. His feet are naked, his toes gripping the cold concrete. We are stuck, the two of us, in this transomed window, and I have to drop out first. I hold out my arms and he drops out, too. He's caught his scalp on something sharp. I wipe the blood out of his eye, but he doesn't seem to notice. He looks frightened but trusting. I take his hand.
"Can you run?" I ask.
He doesn't reply. I run, pulling him. I have only my room slippers on, as we haven't been outside since we arrived.
Outdoors for the first time in years, I held Albee close. Who knew when Albee had last touched grass. I listened for people, but I could only hear water splashing into the tub. Out here, clouds threw shadows on the lawn. I couldn't see individual grass blades. The leaves on the trees ahead looked comfortingly darkening, but soft. Everything looked flannel. Nothing I had seen in years had been more than a few feet away. The world was fuzzier than I remembered.
Albee bent over and reached out his hand.
"No, Albee," I whispered, and pulled him up. I didn't know what he was doing, but we needed to run. "Come."
I ran, pulling him with me. He stumbled once, and I pulled him right. I fell, and he stopped immediately.
We ran again, this time with him taking my hand first.
I didn't remember the grounds from when I came, so it was a few minutes of panic before I found a way out. Then we were on a country road. I know country roads. We walked in this soft, gray flannel landscape until the road was making our feet sore, when I saw a blob in a field. I clucked to the horse, and Albee clung to me. "Smell, Albee," I said, and put his face near the horse's nose.
Albee turned to me and opened his mouth.
I put my hand over his lips. "Shush!" But he smiled, and I did, too.
I swung myself up onto the horse's back, and pulled Albee up in front of me. The only way I could get him to sit was facing me, riding backwards, but that was fine. The horse was so swaybacked that she must have been a pet. I asked her where the gate was, and she led us there. I told Albee to stay on her back while I slid off and led her out onto a lane. Albee flopped his body flat and clutched her sides, like a frog amplexing. I led the horse out of the gate, and left it open. Then I mounted the horse again, and Albee clung to me.
We took off again, through lanes, across fields, across two creeks, to sight of a highway. I slid off, pulled Albee off, and took his hand to lead him away, but he pulled me instead, back towards the horse standing patiently beside us. He put his face to hers. They stood touching for a long minute, and then Albee and the horse each turned away. The horse began clomping her way home.
My skin prickled when I heard the scream, but no one was in earshot.
There was a service station in the distance. We walked toward that. On the other side of the highway from the service station, though, there was a farm. The kind of farm that is cut in two by a highway. The house was next to the service station, but the barn was on the other side of the highway.
We hid in the barn. I milked a cow, not too much, and fed us the milk. It was okay to Albee, I could tell, but not good. He certainly had never had fresh milk before. He didn't smile, and his toes were still. He was frightened when I left him to milk the cow, but a frightened Albee is a quiet Albee. There was dried corn on cobs. Last year's corn. Not much good it could do to us. I took Albee out into a golden field and pulled off two fresh ears, shucking them as if I'd never left home. The white kernels weren't sweet, nor milky as they would have been a month before, but chewy, drying from the sunny days. I handed Albee his, and we ate them standing there, our elbows going shka shka against the stalks. Albee closed his eyes. His toes were moving in the cold clodded soil. That same dark dirt that I thought I might have to have trucked into my house forever and a day before I became a retard Discovered.
I heard a sound like bees in spring, but it was night. I bent my head, and it was Albee. He was humming. He looked at me and smiled. I put my head against his chest so I could listen, and the sound that he made moved through his chest and into my head. A pattering began, so slight that I thought Albee was making it. But raising my head, it was a pattering of rain. "Darn," my father would have cursed.
This close to harvest, he never wants rain. The tension of those last days before harvest made the sky a thing of palpable harm.
Now, I worried about us catching cold. I looked at Albee. His fingers were moving, patting against his softly covered thighs, but that wasn't making any sound. His toes were clinging to the cl
ods, now sogging over his feet. He was shivering. I hadn't been outdoors barefoot since I was a girl. And Albee?
The sound of raindrops ended. I led Albee out of the cornfield and when we cleared the tall stalks, the pink glow of dawn caught the top of Albee's cranium, as it must have, mine. We ran to the barn together, and though there wasn't hay in the loft, there were a lot of burlap sacks. I stripped us both, rubbed us down with the dirty sacks, and pulled us under them together.
The cow in the byre below changed her position, and I heard a plop, then a sound I hadn't heard for so many years I forgot what it was.
Small claws caught in the burlap, then pulled at the edge. A round head first, and then a body slid underneath. The barn cat slid between our bodies, Albee's and mine. The purr rolled loud as a rusty can on concrete. In the dim light of the loft, I looked through Albee's eyelids. He touched the cat, and his fingers moved down its back. The purr intensified. Albee opened his mouth and I did the only thing I could think to do. I covered it with mine. He screamed and his scream filled my body, like a purr from the two of us.
And when he screamed I knew I found the One. Our joining.
~
We slept. When we woke it was early evening. The cat was cleaning itself, leaning its back against my naked head.
I put my lips on Albee's, and he woke. I put my fingers to my lips, so I could look around. I motioned that I had to leave. He understood, so I climbed down from the loft, and scouted around. I was looking for a wad of clothes, a couple of old discarded caps, a knockaround jacket or something. Even an old horse rug.
What I found was more burlap sacks. We had to get dressed. Back into our old clothes, the soft white shirt and pants that we always wear, now filthy. And bare feet.
I took Albee's hand. He was doing that bee buzz thing again. We walked across the road to the farmhouse. I yelled "Huh-loh!" from the road, and after a bit, a man ventured out onto the porch.
"Could you make a telephone call for us?" I yelled to him. I held Albee's hand.
For answer, he ducked back inside and a few minutes later he yelled through the door that he'd called the police, which is what I expected when I thought about it. I sat us down by the road, to wait.
The police came fast, and were polite.
"We had been doing an experiment for Dr. Babiram," I began. "I don't know if you know who he is—" when one of the policemen interrupted. "You're the lost Potentials, aren't you?"
"Yes," I said. "We must be." It was nice that he said "lost." It was more reassuring, in these troubled times.
"We'll have to radio the station. Then we'll take you back," his partner said.
"Can I speak to Dr. Babiram?" I asked.
They looked at each other, then at Albee, who had his eyes closed. He was quiet but holding my hand so hard that his nails had torn off bits of skin in my palm. His toes were curling and uncurling in a kind of spasm.
"Sure, little lady," the first policeman said. He handed me his phoneset and walked away, pulling his partner with him.
"Excuse me," I said. "I don't have the Institute's number."
"Of course, he said, embarrassed that I should have to remember it. He got it from Headquarters and rang the Institute himself, got Dr. Babiram, handed me the phoneset, and walked away again.
"Dr. Babiram?"
"Why did you do that? Are you alright? Where's Albee?" Dr. Babiram's voice sounded like I'd never heard it. It sounded like the time my father ran over my little brother with his tractor. My little brother was fine, having fallen into furrow, but my mother didn't know.
"I'm fine. Albee's fine. And Dr. Babiram. Albee is Discovering. And I know what One is. Dr. Babiram? Dr. Babiram?"
Dr. Babiram agreed that he had to be ready at the Institute, so that we could report to him when we had made our discoveries. To do this, we need to be able to roam. Not mindroam, as I have been doing, but roam. I don't know what that will take us to, but if he stays put so that we can unload when we get home, then he will be able to fund his studies for his old age.
He agreed. There was something there, though. Would he agree now, only to lock us up?
"Chaos cannot be allowed to rule," I said to him. I wanted to hear his outrage, or at least caught breath, but there was just the sound of air, like he was waiting. "Jennifer," he said, in a voice I'd never heard. It wiggled as if he was frightened.
"Jennifer." I think his other hand was muffling his mouth. "The note was mine. Help me prove it."
My eyes prickled with the suddenness. "Dr. Babiram. Albee ..."
He didn't answer.
"Albee, Dr. Babiram. He's really syncopating."
My phoneset cracked. He must have dropped his. I heard him blow his nose. "I'll be waiting," he said finally, and clicked off.
Albee held my hand the whole time, except when he bent for a moment and straightened up. He began humming again, deep from his chest.
The policemen wanted to take us to a restaurant, but I declined for both of us. The policemen looked disappointed, but like they didn't really expect us to accept.
Albee and I got in the back of the police car. We set out for home, and after a few minutes cruising on the smooth road, out from the neck of Albee's shirt popped a little furry head. Albee opened his mouth, and meowed.
Exhibition
"Road kill. They're all road kill."
"Such a relief." The blonded hair swished, Hermes wafted, and a little black egg escaped on the way to the speaker's mouth, to be squished in the melee of another opening night party, invitation only. The cost to the museum? Twice that of the exhibition itself, an illusion of desert life complete with the sound of wild parakeet twitters punctuated at unnerving intervals by the mordant howl of a dingo with maybe a taste for toddler.
The centrepiece is the waist-high crafted sandy hill where scrubby spinifex only partly hides a kangaroo rat, watched interminably by a beaut of a monitor lizard—handbag belt and boots size.
~
I thought that the museum director's answer to the Friend's question was just something no one else overheard, but by the time I arrived at work the next morning, Carl, the entrance guard, had already made it Museum Legend. "Road kill!" he laughed, a tad deferentially. "Whachya think, Leah? They should party by Manfred Vojtech's pickle bins!"
My cool grin hid still-raw memories of a meander into the catacombs never open for display, where whole hosts of wildlife dissolve in the taxidermist's tubs. Carl chuckled nervously, still worried of overstepping his place and being accused of familiarity with the higher ups. I'd done what I could to get some morale here, but suffered my own problems, including being chewed out last week by the director's bitch for taking my secretary out to lunch.
Four months ago, the museum had looked for a magician to correct the recorded sag in popularity, and as a wildlife lover, I leapt at the opportunity. Just before my appointment, you could not distinguish the halls from a contemporary art museum in terms of decibel-level. Now families made this a noisy place, the sign of health for any museum.
But Dr. Critchley, the museum director, wanted up-market pr, in places that Friend-types frequent. So I arranged a fashion feature for a glossy brain-dead magazine. That one went so well that now the museum was flavour of the month with art directors and socialites alike. Critchley was chuffed, and I had a queue of bookings, all paying fees for the privilege of using the museum's collection as setting, inspired by that original spread of the t. rex flexing claws over a squirming virgin in designer undress. During that shoot the spine of bull clips gluing sheer silk to her skinny ribs looked evil to me, but the photos showed only camp fear, and the photogenic dinosaur leered, smitten with lust.
Tonight, another shoot at ten pm. The photographer could park in front of the museum then. Long day for me, but a much more fun evening than listening to the cockatoo-shrill voices of the Museum Friends.
~
Lunchtime. I stretched my back, and then it cricked as it sensed a percussive scutter approaching d
own the hall.
My boss Rowena entered without knocking. She was the Head of Public Affairs, whereas I was head of advertising and publicity. Rowena came in pink imitation Chanel, butt-grabbing too-short skirt, and matching poke-your-eye-out pink linen stilettos, with daisies on top. A Party Person, she was sooo happy to know it's road kill, and was probably planning her own deep question for the next Friends of ... bash.
She perched on the corner of my desk. "I've got this great idea for you, Leah."
At my elbow, Oscar the baby magpie lifted his tail and a green black and white splat hit the towel on the seat of the only other chair in the room, my allotted "visitor's chair," straddled by his branch. Oscar was a rescue from Dr. Wendell Dinger, chief ornithologist, whose treatment for injured and baby birds brought in by the nature-loving public that found them in the park across the street, was to open the window and toss the foundlings out.
Wendell loved birds, but not donated ones. Rare ones, as many as possible, collected on his many expeditions and brought back to the museum for first stop: pickle room; next stop, cabinet of stiffs, with toe tags just like in the city morgue.
Oscar looked remarkably perky. He warbled and opened his mouth. I leaned over to proffer him a fingerful of squished tomato and caterpillar. "Yes, Rowena? Ooh, good booooy!" The excess gook wiped on towel, it was time to sit back and give her full attention. On the wall behind my head, my other companion gazed at her, too: a magnificent Aboriginal man captured in a yellowed photo dated 1933. Standing tall beside a towering anthill, he held a dillybag and a spear, and looked calmly into the camera. He was dressed in a string around his waist, and dangled something the length of a didgeridoo between his legs.
"You have an idea?" I reminded.
Her eyes billiard-balled around the room. "Well, you know ABCDE? ... Well, I thought you could have an ad each week on that theme... Like A is for something. B is for something."
She stopped and I almost felt sorry for her. Almost. "Good one. I'll think about it. Thanks for coming, Rowena."
Oscar raised his tail, and she ejected herself from the desk. The door slammed and we heard her staccato down the hall. Long time till next party.