When Kiwi woke up at 7:09, he was a hero again. Everybody pounced in the break room. Barb from ticketing joked that she wanted Kiwi’s autograph. Half a dozen employees who had seen his article blocked his path to the time clock. Yvans shook the front page of the Loomis Register at him. KIWI BIGTREE, “HELL’S ANGEL” the headline read, and below this, WORLD OF DARKNESS HERO.
One line four up from the bottom read: “And Kiwi Bigtree is no stranger to the water—he grew up on an ‘alligator farm’ in the swamp!”
A farm?
Two-thirds of the article was about Emily’s “tunnel of light.” Specialists were quoted next to their boxy photographs: a famous surgeon who claimed this tunnel was the happy fiction of a body deprived of oxygen, and a priest who called the light God.
Their debate on the cosmos was allotted one paragraph. Kiwi skipped it irritably, wondering: But where is my family?
Kiwi’s real name appeared in every paragraph, but with each successive mention the words “Kiwi Bigtree” seemed to grow more remote from his own understanding of himself until the newsprint looked like runes, glyphs, an obsolete equation for sound. Kiwi read the letters K-I-W-I B-I-G-T-R-E-E as if he were staring at two squads of ants.
The final line was a quote from a World of Darkness director, Mr. Frank Saleti, whom he’d never met before: “We couldn’t be prouder of his performance. Kiwi Bigtree is one of our finest employees.”
“And that girl you saved was on television, Kiwi, did you see it?” Yvans spun him toward the mounted television set as if Kiwi might appear there again this moment like a face in a mirror. “Channel five, how you call that show with the crazy lady? The large-butted one with hair like a squirrel’s tail? She seems like she is bipolar or something? Very hyper-acting?”
Kiwi knew the program. “Emily Barton was on Jenny Just Spills It?” This show was Loomis prime time and very popular with a certain histrionic-lady demographic. The eponymous host Jenny drank pots of coffee on air and often wept with her guests. Rescues were a regular feature. Kiwi had once watched Jenny interview a fire-truck dalmatian.
“What did Emily tell her? Did she use my real name?”
“That she had like a kind of a vision underwater.” Yvans grinned with all his teeth. “She says she saw an angel. You, Kiwi.”
Kiwi’s shoulders flew up around his ears.
Deemer and Floricio, two of Ephraim Lippmann’s thuggish buddies who had shunned Margaret Mead for weeks, now knocked into Kiwi Bigtree—in the friendly way—or punched him, in the friendly way, in the halls. “Saw you on TV, motherfucker! You’re big-time!” Kiwi smiled warily back at them.
Nina Suárez stopped him in the Flukes to gush, “Did you watch the news? It’s like we’re all famous now!” She’d seen her bike in the parking lot when the news crew camera panned out.
“You must feel wonderful!” strangers kept insisting. “You must feel …”
But from eleven to two fifteen Kiwi felt like puking, and when that feeling at last subsided he felt nothing.
When Kiwi was three or four months old, the Chief had photographed him in a wicker laundry basket on a sandy kink of land in the Pit. Kiwi wasn’t sure what the inspiration for this shot was: baby Moses meets Robert Louis Stevenson? Inside the photograph Kiwi had company: rat snakes and scarlet kings, thin ropes of them, and hatchling Seths with their yellow eyes bugged and wild around his clothes-pinned diaper. “My son didn’t cry at all,” the Chief told strangers at every opportunity. Everybody agreed that this was an auspicious image for a Bigtree wrestler. Baby Kiwi was wrinkled up with laughter, his pudgy fists swinging for the lens.
His parents had turned this image into a ten-by-fourteen-inch poster and sold hundreds of them to the tourists over the years.
“See, son?” The Chief liked to say, tapping the baby Kiwi in the poster. “What happened? You were brave as spit then.”
Gus Waddell will have brought him the newspaper by now. He pictured the Chief lowering his coffee. His son, a World of Darkness employee! But a “hero,” now. Did those two facts cancel one another out? Possibly the Chief would take the bus to the World of Darkness to look for him, he had to be prepared for that. Maybe the Chief was rolling toward him right now with a slow, inexorable rage, like a bowling ball …
Kiwi caught himself smiling at the thought. He smiled so hard that his eyes narrowed into crescents and began to water. And it was this grin that broke the news to the rest of him—Kiwi realized then that he would really love to see his father.
Attendance at the Leviathan spiked by 20 percent during the week following the “Hell’s Angel” story. People wanted to meet him, to pump his hands and thank him for some reason, as if he had saved them personally. They posed for snapshots in front of “the Lake where it happened.”
“Are you religious?” Lost Souls asked him. “Do you believe in angels?”
“No,” Kiwi replied seriously. It was his kid sisters who believed in ghosts, angels, life after death, conjuring spells. “I am not. I do not. Who knows what Emily Barton thinks she saw down there, but I can tell you with one hundred percent certainty that I am not a literal angel, no.”
He gave several dozen autographs as Kiwi Bigtree, Hell’s Angel. As he signed he’d feel the bones inside his back clench against these credulous people, unaccountably furious.
“Ticket sales are up twenty-two percent this week,” Mr. Jenks reported grudgingly on Friday, reading off an enormous legal pad that said MEMOS. Many of Mr. Jenks’s managerial accessories were labeled in a font sized for the legally blind.
“So enjoy your fifteen minutes, Bigtree …,” Carl grunted through the roll of tape in his mouth. Back home a roll of duct tape in your mouth meant you had an alligator’s jaws in your fists, but Carl Jenks was just taping up cardboard.
“Can I help you, Carl?”
“No. I know how I want my things.”
Carl was moving, or “being removed,” by his own boss, the Carl of Carls, to the other side of the World. Lamentably, he said, he would still be Kiwi’s supervisor. Orcs and pencils disappeared into the box.
“I hope you know how lucky you are,” Carl Jenks muttered. “The training alone is a huge company investment. They’ve hired a private CFI who brags that he taught his semideaf nine-year-old niece how to fly. Promises even you can pass the check ride. If you ask me you’re a bad investment—who is going to remember this Lake of Fire story a week from now?—but Tom Barrett saw your picture in the paper this morning and he’s just giddy about it. Thinks we’re going to get all this free publicity, and new clients from the ‘crystals-are-my-medicine’ crowd. New Agers.”
“Right. All that miraculous bullshit.” Kiwi felt the stab that accompanied all thoughts of Osceola. He could see her face smiling under the goofy puple turban.
“Barrett doesn’t get many ideas, so when he has one he likes he throws a lot of money behind it.”
“Yes. Got it. Ideas need money to become a reality.”
Kiwi rocked way back on his red-and-black sneakers ($22) with his hands in his pockets, as if he were vying to become a Human Slingshot. He had no idea what Carl was talking about.
“What I’m telling you, Bigtree, is that HR is casting against type. The Loomis directors want you as one of the Four Pilots. They think it’ll be cute—” Carl’s smile went taut. “That girl Emily Barton is going on all the news outlets and calling you her ‘angel.’ So that’s how they want to bill you.”
The office was almost empty now, the walls bare except for glue and pegs. A World of Darkness calendar was the last thing left to pack, and Kiwi felt a rueful stab as he thought of the Bigtrees’ own calendar. Kiwi’s face was always the mascot for July, and for one month each year he grinned out at himself from the gift shop’s walls with a ferocious self-hatred, desperate for August to come.
“To be honest, I doubt they’ll let you fly in the end. What are you, twelve? I’m shocked it’s even legal for you to get a pilot’s license, frankly. Probably they’ll use you
as a stewardess. Give you a little beverage tray and a catcher’s mitt to nab the Lost Souls’ vomit, you’ll excel at that. I’m just telling you for your own sake: Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t let your hopes get higher than your girlish hips.”
Kiwi reddened; it was true that he’d become a little pear-shaped. Burger Burger portions. All the pizza.
“Excuse me, Bigtree.”
Carl patted Kiwi’s wingless back and picked up a large box.
That afternoon, Kiwi conducted an intake interview with the Take to the Skies flight school on Carl Jenks’s new office phone, with Carl Jenks’s forehead visible behind the computer. Kiwi felt an incredible power over this man. To be envied was a new experience. Just the sound of Kiwi dialing made Carl’s forehead wrinkle and smooth. His boss’s skin was the pasty, poreless color of cake batter. Sad evidence, the Chief would have said, of a lifetime spent indoors. And when the Chief sees me skyed inside a cockpit? What will he have to say about that?
“You’re that Hell’s Angel kid?” a voice was saying. “The one that saved Teddy Barton’s girl?”
“I’m Kiwi Bigtree.”
“Well, you sure screwed up these forms that you faxed us pretty good, Kiwi Bigtree. They’re just about illegible. You’re how old, son?”
“Eighteen. Almost.”
“Almost. So that would make you seventeen, correct?”
“Right.”
“Excellent. You can fly solo at fourteen, but older is better. How tall?”
“Six five,” Kiwi lied, shifting his weight onto his toes in Carl’s office.
“What on earth are you doing, prima ballerina?” Carl muttered from behind the computer.
“How’s your vision? You got your medical certificate yet?”
“No, sir.”
“You need to get that. High school diploma?”
“I’m attending the Rocklands High nontraditional student program, sir. Night school.”
“Degree expected?”
“Oh!” said Kiwi, misunderstanding the question. “Yes, definitely. I want to get several. The MA, and the PhD as well.”
“What year will you receive your high school degree?”
Kiwi was silent. Somehow he could more easily imagine his graduation from Harvard University in five years than any of the intervening steps. The prospect of actually passing Miss Arenas’s final exam next month and transferring his single credit to Rocklands High School was so overwhelming to him that it temporarily short-circuited his brain.
“It’s sunny out today, Mr. Bigtree, why not be optimistic? I’m going to put down ‘September.’ Okay, you’re all set in the computer. First class is Tuesday. Three thirty. You can do the lesson modules at the public library. I’ll put your Reach for the Skies! packet in the mail.”
Life was a phonograph in an empty room. The World was a silent record, turning. Whatever song we are making in this place, we are going to die without hearing. Such was Kiwi’s stoned thinking on a rainy Tuesday at 1:30 p.m., with five hours and fourteen minutes of his shift left to go. He was back to pushing the vacuum again, filling in for Leonard.
“Cover for me,” Leo had commanded Kiwi that morning. “My thumb feels wrong.”
“Your thumb?”
“Both of them,” Leonard said slyly. As a dedicated malingerer Leo set a new standard; even his lies were lazy. “Both thumbs hurt now. I think I slept on them or something. You have to cover for me.”
Which was fine by Kiwi, because now he’d have ten hours of overtime this week. After taxes, this boosted his salary by $43.12.
Yesterday—two Mondays after his “miraculous resuscitation” of Emily Barton—he’d gotten on the number 14 city bus after his shift with no real destination in mind, happy to pay a buck seventy to get out of the World. He’d wound up riding it all the way to the ferry docks. It was raining when Kiwi climbed down from the bus. A black cat was stalking a fat, doofy pelican across the cement landing; Gus’s ferryboat and a few misused U-RENT kayaks were moored there. The ferry had received a fresh coat of paint, a spectacularly ugly gourd orange. Nobody was around. FERRY SERVICE SUSPENDED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE said a sign on the gangplank. Kiwi sat through the intensifying rain for an hour and fifty minutes, the time it took for the bus to repeat its loop, and for that entire period he stared in the direction of the island. Slowly it sank in that he couldn’t get home that afternoon, even if he’d wanted to. Kiwi could feel this thought descending from his brain to his lungs, where it winnowed like a noose. You’re stuck here, kid, Kiwi imagined the Chief saying in his microphone voice, a booming, put-on friendliness. We need you and you’re nowhere.
Lost Souls percolated around him in the Leviathan, sightlessly munching at diabolical corn chips or tugging up their bathing straps. A few of the tiny kids were wearing Whalehead hats, foam skullcaps in orca whites and blacks that looked vaguely French, monastic, cost $17.99, and disintegrated—Lost Souls were always complaining—in the wash. Kiwi Bigtree seemed to have hit minute fourteen of his fifteen minutes of fame. It had been over a week since Emily Barton did her last TV interview about “the angel” whom she had seen underwater and later pegged as the human lifeguard Kiwi Bigtree. Since Monday he’d signed only three autographs. Lost Souls still stopped him in the halls, but most of them needed to validate their parking ticket, or urinate.
Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn’t have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gauging your literacy by reading the names on your book spines, and there wouldn’t be a single other patron. The whole place would hum with a library’s peace, filtering softly over you like white bars of light …
Kiwi grunted; someone had written BOOTY FUCK THE MOTHERFUCKERS on the wall beside the escalator to the Jaws. Where was his paintbrush?
Heaven would be a comfy armchair, Kiwi decided, rubbing at expletives with his elbow. Beige and golden upholstery, beige and golden wallpaper (what he was actually picturing here, he realized, was the pattern of his mother’s brown rosettes on their curtains). You’d get a great, private phonograph, and all of eternity to listen to your life’s melody. You could isolate your one life out of the cacophonous galaxy—the a cappella version—or you could play it back with its accompaniment, embedded in the brass and strings of mothers, fathers, sisters, windfalls and failures, percussive cities of strangers. You could play it forward or backward, back and back, and listen to the future of your past. You could lift the needle at whim, defeating Time.
Roaring erupted from the high, angled vents that lined the Leviathan—it began all at once, as sudden as a flood of rainfall. The white intrusion that makes you aware of what the silence had been before. Kiwi paused with his hands in the bucket.
Mom? Kiwi shuddered, feeling immediately stupid.
“Whadduppp, Bigtree!” Sergio from concessions appeared in one of the labyrinthine hallways, wheeling a trash can behind him. His name tag was coming loose on its pin and the great red moose fans of his devil horns hung around his scrawny neck.
“I thought I was the last fool in the World. Weird to be inside the Leviathan so late, right? That air conditioner sounds like a fucking hurricane, bro! I’m freezing.”
On Monday, Kiwi got special permission to leave work early and get his medical certificate for the FAA licensing requirement. He’d thought about making the appointment with the Bigtrees’ family physician, Dr. Budz, a liver-spotted Ukrainian man who was sort of mentally spotty as well—who did not, for example, require that his patients have insurance or even legally viable surnames; who’d instructed the Bigtree tribe to call him Al in an accent thickened by his weird humor, and whose office was above a women’s gymnasium. You could hear the basketballs drumming as he stethoscoped your heartbeat. No one had seen Dr. Budz since the previous fall, when Hilola’s medical needs introduced them to a new class of death specialist.
Instead, Kiwi made the appointment through the World-contracte
d flight school with an AMA-accredited physician. The office was in the fanciest part of Loomis, where the buildings were identical pastels and weepy-eyed with windows; even their decorative plants had this sort of futuristic sheen that said, “I’m germless.”
Kiwi had to answer pages and pages of questions about himself. Nope to measles, never to mumps, scabies, diabetes. He’d had two weeklong bouts of weird dreaming and terrible chills when he was six that his mom referred to as “grasshopper fever,” but who knew how that illness translated into mainland etiology? Old crackers in the swamp used bear piss to cure chicken pox. One section of the form was called “Family History.” Well, for starters, my sixteen-year-old sister is crazy, she has aural and visual hallucinations … my youngest sister is an equestrian of Mesozoic lizards … my father wears a headdress … my grandfather bites men now …
The doctor’s office smelled like lemon disinfectant and even the big-shouldered leather furniture made him very nervous.
“Oh, Mr. Bigtree!” the receptionist called after him. “You forgot one. No, don’t get up, hon. I’ll fill it in for you. I just need your home address.”
“The World of Darkness” fell lightly from his lips, Kiwi noticed.
The private CFI the World of Darkness had hired to train him was an ex-army guy in his early sixties, Dennis Pelkis, or Denny, as he kept encouraging Kiwi to call him. “Relax, relax,” Denny would say, and then he’d proceed to regale Kiwi with some story about a former student who fell out of the sky. In every case these tragedies had occurred because the student pilot failed to obey the teachings of Dennis. He kept referring to “Denny’s ground rules” and “Denny’s philosophy on that issue,” with open arms and a tour operator’s smile, as if he were giving Kiwi a cultural orientation to the country of Denny. Dennis Pelkis had silvery chest hair and a satyr’s physique. He smiled at Kiwi in a sightless, professional way, a smile that faltered only slightly when Kiwi asked him, apropos of nothing, if he and Mrs. Pelkis had ever been to a place called Swamplandia! to see Hilola Bigtree wrestle alligators.
Swamplandia! Page 26