Darwin's Bastards

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  Speaking of words, a picture is worth a thousand, so they say. I counted precisely seventeen pictures of you under Photos. That’s seventeen thousand words, and all of them WOW. You are beautiful, Louise. You have very bad skin, but other than that you look like a model. I’m so glad your skin is terrible (assuming it’s acne and not VRSA). A girl that looks like you but with good skin could never be mine. Of the twenty-three pictures stored under Photos, three are of your cat (cute, but should you let him/her sit on your kitchen table with that F-94 Feline virus that’s going around?), and three are of the Golden Nugget Hotel sign in Vegas. I see you had a good time there. I think it’s cool that you stayed at the Golden Nugget instead of one of those tacky, modern monstrosities like Las Vegas: Vienna or that freaky Guantánamo Bay Las Vegas. Also happy (and relieved) to see that you went with a group of gal-pals, Louise. It took me a while to figure out which one was you. For some reason you turned your Tag app off, you naughty thing. Naughty gloves. Pick up a dime. A wink of pink. All of the Vegas people shots are group shots. You could have been any one of those laughing girls (except maybe the see-through-top blonde with the RealFeel boobs and the nipple-bling, who I’m sure is nice enough, I just don’t believe she subscribes to the LearnOutLoud Philosophy Series).

  Luckily, shot number seventeen is not a Vegas shot or a group shot. It’s a cottage shot. It’s you alone on a dock. That’s how I knew you were you. You’re alone on the dock and you’re wearing a plaid shirt that looks very soft. Flannel. Not itchy. You’re wearing shorts and canvas sneakers with no socks. Not hot. Your legs are bony and you have two bruises on your left shin. You look extremely satisfied. The lake is still and shiny and foam-free. You look entirely calm. The corner of the cottage is brown and rustic. The trees are pine and poplar. In the Vegas shots, you are laughing and laughing. Squinty eyes. Teeth. Adrenalin. In the cottage shot you are not smiling. Your mouth is a slit, open just a crack and you look completely happy and wonderfully fatigued. The toe fungus isn’t contagious, Louise. The nannies all have iPhones. I am immune to listeriosis.

  Last night we were in bed together. A brown out. A black room. Rain was pinging off the air-cleaning unit. I caressed you in bed. Pink. I touched you to my lips. I used my thumb to turn you on. Your mouth was a slit, open just a crack. Legs, bony. Flannel, soft. You looked extremely satisfied. I put myself against your mouth. You looked entirely calm. After, we listened to slow rain in a dark room. Droplets pinging off the air-cleaning unit. You looked completely happy and wonderfully fatigued. Across their breasts it says Juicy Couture. We stayed in bed for almost two hours until the power came on. I made turkey sandwiches with salt & vinegar chips on the side. Diet Coke-GT® has green-tea compounds that help burn calories. 575 Gladstone Ave., Apt. 301. It was a great night, Louise. My little pink, my sweet slender. I fell asleep without my pills.

  ANNABEL LYON

  REMOTE CONTROL

  TRY THIS ON:

  The year is 2013. You are an alien from outer space. You have an excellent spaceship with important flashing lights on the console and many tasty foreign foods for your snacking pleasure. You are passing planet Earth when you decide to do some impromptu research.

  To a native, the couple you choose would not appear to be promising. You, however, have the advantage of being able to see slightly into the future, so you’re able to pick them out before they’ve actually met and follow them through, knowing the outcome.

  Your pet comes bounding into the room and jumps up onto your lap, where you stroke its silvery fur as you watch the wraparound video screens from your ergonomic swivel chair. It is not a dog and not a cat. It’s a pet, okay?

  The screens on the left side of the room show the man. The screens on the right show the woman. When they meet, it will happen right in front of you, as you sip your delicious alcohol-style beverage. You can have it this way because you’re an alien.

  Look at this man, now. See his head? Inside his head, chaos. Fucking dank, man. Words are swishing around in the oil in there, you’re getting boss, you’re getting Tuesday deadline, you’re getting injunction, you’re getting drink, drink, drink. You’re getting penury. That’s him in the elevator, rain in his shoes, breathing too hard. You get dying, death, dead.

  Pet sighs like a person as you knuckle its spine.

  Now the woman. Most of her thoughts surface as one word: no. She sits at a desk, paging through a file, making minimal, decisive marks with a sharp pencil. Before she leaves for the day, she will have bought two small companies, initiated three legal actions, bought her secretary a tasteful, expensive, congenial birthday present, run 10K on the company treadmill, and redesigned her firm’s corporate logo and colours. Her clothes are silk. Her favourite colour is graphite. Her favourite word is graphite. Thoughts which do not come through as no come through as graphite. With these two words as her arsenal, she blows most problems to penny-candy shards.

  She has a background in design and a foreground in law. She is the gun you always wanted.

  The man in the elevator is now stuck in the elevator. The roil in his brain has thickened and darkened and reduced to a sauce below the level (marked by a line inside the brain-pan) of articulate speech. He is late, late, late. Still, his eye is drawn to the instep of the girl by the buttons, who has stepped right out of her pump to flex her toes. He wants to touch it, the ticklish pale curve. Lust brisk as pepper, succulent as salt. Surprising—this day of all days—as sun.

  You, meanwhile, are trying to figure out if his elevator is in her building. Looking at the future is like looking at a night sky obscured by rags of cloud, black on star-spackled black, where the sweep is knowable but the details obscured. You decide not: his fake-walnut and Lysol to her exposed brick and hardwood. You hazard same city, though, from the blurred ashen view from her window and the rain on his clothes. With one curiously elongated finger you point to the screen and teach your pet: rain.

  Pet yawns. Fast forward.

  Rain makes Byzantine patterns on the woman’s office window as she glances down, an hour later, and you had better believe that the difference between dribbling and Byzantine patterns is her exquisitely cool take on the world. She watches a man come out of the building across the street and hail a cab. When the birthday secretary offers her a coffee she turns, smiling automatically because she is a good boss, and when she looks back the man is gone.

  In the cab, at the airport, he reaches into his coat to touch his heart.

  “Fifteen fifty,” the driver says.

  His mouth tastes of salt. Is it possible, he wonders (an hour at his wife’s—ex-wife’s—lawyer’s having restored language, just), that tears withheld long enough find other exits. Nose and mouth, like a head cold; a bittersweet crystalline residue on the skin.

  “Take care of that,” the driver says, giving him a Kleenex for his twenty.

  Entering the terminal, he wonders if there really is such a thing, in law, as stalking your own wife. The judge obviously thought so.

  “Going home,” he tells the woman at the ticket counter. “No bags, no.” Behind him, a dozen Japanese schoolgirls in knee socks and kilts and dark green blazers, the backs of their knees staring at him. He wants to kneel amongst them. Home is approximate. The woman behind the counter tells him his flight does not depart for another three hours.

  “That’s okay” he says, tears spilling over.

  Pet’s stomach growls in its sleep. This is so cute!

  The man sits in the airport bar. The woman sits at her desk, working. You try to recall the picture you first had—a messy straddling—but as always the future fades as you involve yourself in the details of the present, and like a good moviegoer you surrender the image as both highly improbable and absolutely certain. All you have to do is wait.

  Home, these days, is in the East. Home, for the man, is a white city, not this grey city where his wife—now ex-wife—has chosen to spill her sweet sticky days. He understands the ocean is beautiful to some people but he doesn’t t
hink he’ll come here again. Also the injunction was fairly specific and he has a Tuesday deadline, at his job, at his home, if he cares to meet it. Plus his debts, his many little chickens, are over there. He is, at any rate, not really here: on his boss’s war-map he is a pin in suburbia today, pitching to clients, not three thousand miles away getting waxed in this honey-coloured hole of an airport sports bar, click and slice of hockey on the overhead set. With luck he won’t be missed.

  He watches a Thai Air jet snug up to the corrugated tubing that will feed it passengers. He won’t know how bad he is until he stands up. His fingers trace the facets of his chunky glass, glass so thick the hot little burnish of drink seems buried in it, until he realizes that, doing this, he has turned himself on. Furtively, he looks around at whatever might be watching—carpet, game, darkling day.

  The woman, meanwhile, has accomplished more in one afternoon—well, you’ve already got the picture. Now, looking more closely, you begin to wonder if there isn’t, indeed, something strange about her—the efficiency, the diligence, the smoothness, as though her maker touches her joints each morning with dots of lubricant and puts her back in the box each night. Odd, too, the way her mind runs so smoothly on its tracks, so straight and true. Even you, a higher being, are occasionally distractible. (Pet will attest.) But she, you get the feeling, walks through each day as through a minefield—head down, forward, forward, forward. You wonder if she is afraid; but, if so, she’s squirrelled it so deep you can’t feel it. If you were a poet you would say: her mind is a mansion of sealed rooms. You would say: only the halls are lit, and those on timers, to keep you moving. But what is in those rooms? Or, you might say: her mind is a library, where you request materials and they are brought to you, promptly and quietly, crisp and speckless; but you cannot get behind the desk and wander the stacks yourself. No leafing and fingering for you. What’s the big secret?

  “See you tomorrow?”

  Startles you—the birthday secretary. You had been trying to guess between dead lover and dead baby from her shoes—black brogues. On the one hand, you think: the very shoes of the dead lover! She wears them still! On the other hand, you think: shoes of a woman befuddled past fashion by the tragedy of the death of her child. Or simply: expensive ironic designer articles that are sweet with that suit. But you’ve got the volume dialled up way too high from trying to hear the man over the airport hubbub, so that the secretary’s voice comes at you from everywhere, like the voice of God. You quickly adjust, but too late: the silly woman has woken Pet. Pet arfs.

  “Not until Wednesday,” your woman is saying. Beneath the silky patience, a minute reassessment, like a chess piece placed one square to the left—she’s forgotten the conference. The woman smiles as you realize that while she will continue to give her expensive presents, she will never trust details to this secretary again.

  “All packed?” the secretary says. You don’t dip into her mind, don’t bother. It’s written on the surface, the respect, the envy. “I love that suit!” the secretary frets, eyes darting. “You’re really flying tonight? Am I losing my mind?”

  Your woman gives her the rest of the day off.

  And, yes, she’s flying tonight, going to the airport straight from work, in fact. That briefcase behind the door is in fact a suitcase, laptop-slim, light as a cracker.

  Four days in the tropics. She’s wearing the suit. What else?

  Where is everyone, that is what the man would like to know. Where are the other travellers? He is pacing the length of the terminal, angry, stuttering. Why are all these counters closed, that is what he would like to know. How is the economy ever going to pick up with all these counters closed? Where is consumer confidence, all of that? What do they know that I don’t? Why the hell am I always alone?

  “Fog,” the taxi driver tells the woman, when she asks why it took him so long.

  You quick-squiggle through the next bit, having some fun with the cars—zip! Zing! At the airport, keeping your thumb on the speed button, you watch the woman pop out of the taxi, give the door a comic slam, and toddle stiff-hipped to the glass doors which, rotating constantly, never come into focus. Inside the terminal, she does the business of picking up her ticket and checking in, darting and jerking like a spastic. You realize she has a mannerism: she reaches to push her hair away, fingertips tracing the curve behind the ear. She does this over and over. You didn’t notice at the normal, slower speed.

  Pet starts to vibrate and change colour. This makes you both a little anxious and a little wistful: Pet is no longer a young pet, you know it’s normal at Pet’s age, but still you remember Pet as a baby and it’s the baby attributes you love—the warmth, the cuddliness, the little snuffling sound which means cookie or stroke me. You get preoccupied reassuring Pet (who comes out of these spells shocked and wheezing and desperately needing to see you) and let the big moment, the meeting, slip through on fast-forward. You glimpse the woman racing past the bolted ranks of plastic seats. In such a seat the man has come to roost. For a teasing moment—pure farce, this speed is actually good for it— their separate screens merge for the first time as she passes him on her way to the toilet. He doesn’t look up. Hug Pet, kiss Pet, while the woman attends to herself in the cubicle and the man ponders his future. Their minds are harder to penetrate now: like the revolving doors, they blur at this speed. The woman is completely opaque, although the man’s dark aura hovers like a cloud captured on time-lapse film, swelling and shrinking like a breathing thing, like poor Pet’s own taxed little lungs. As the woman emerges from the toilet the man glances up. The next time you look they are speaking. If you were using the vocabulary of their Renaissance painting you would say the woman had taken the courtier’s stance, the man’s stance, erect but leaning slightly towards the seated lady (in this case, the man). You would call them Swain and Maiden or Eros and Psyche. After a blink the man, too, stands, and they toddle off together. The man’s bad aura, you have time to notice, has deflated quick as a balloon, to a tiny, wrinkled black skin trailing off the back of his head—an apostrophe, a hopeful lick.

  But a number of things are happening. First, you’ve lost sound: you turned off the chipmunk chitter of voices when you changed speeds, and now you can’t get it back. Stupid machine! Second, you are losing your bead on the couple, or perhaps the fog is interfering with your reception; at any rate, they are getting smaller and smaller as they walk the length of the terminal. If they turn a corner you will lose them. This isn’t supposed to happen! Finally, most annoyingly, you can’t rewind and replay. You can only go forward. The meeting, the first words, are lost forever.

  Uttering sibilant alien oaths, you get the speed back to normal. You still can’t hear them, but at least you’ve bought yourself some time. You manoeuvre your snazzy alien craft a little closer to the planet and right away their image snaps back onto centre screen. So it was a range problem. You curse yourself for not buying the upgrade when you had the opportunity because you were trying to economize. You tell yourself: next time, spend the money, cheapo! This is science!

  They’re back in the bar, and you find you can manage after all without sound. Their thoughts are clear as clear water, although their words, correspondingly, are distorted, like speech under water. You start to calm down. You’ll manage.

  Pet, recovered, tumbles from your lap and pads out of the video room.

  There is, indeed, something primeval and aquatic about them now, about the way they listen to each other, feelers out, alert to every last delicate cell. You understand all flights have been delayed because of the fog and they are having a companionable drink, waiting it out. You understand it was she who approached him. Curious about a couple of things, you hit a sequence of buttons and wait. After a moment the screens go black except for your two subjects, lit now from within, like fish tanks in a pet shop at night. You see their skeletons and organs, the pulse of blood, the brain-coral, the shopping-bag lungs. His heart, you note, squeezes faster than hers—that was one of the t
hings. When she reaches for her hair it is a glowing orange skeleton hand (you’re using an orange filter) caressing the brain. The hair is invisible because hair—you know this—is dead. On this setting, all you see is what lives.

  Changing filters, you observe brain activity. Hers is cool and constant, a few flares as she recrosses her legs or sips her drink, but mostly steady. His is a crackling web around a knot of blue light, locus and source of all his pain, lust, and hope, a light so small you could snuff it with a fingertip. His ex-wife is in there! His job! His desire to take this woman somewhere private, now, and bring her off! So very small!

  This was another of the things.

  The screen around them is not actually black, as you first thought, but dotted with specks of scribbling light so small you will think yourself dizzy before you realize they too represent life—billions of tiny one- and two-celled organisms, the kind that live on your eyeballs and in the interstices of your skin. You zoom in close, watch them billow in your lovers’ breath, swim in and out of their ears, light up the surfaces of their invisible drinks and get themselves swallowed that way. Solar explosions of brain activity in both subjects interrupt your observation of the mites—you have to pull back to see that the man has reached out to smooth the woman’s hair back for her. What you see, literally, is a skeleton shyly caressing another skeleton’s skull.

  Now words are coming through. But this is confusing. Are they both talking at once, saying the same thing? This is what it sounds like. Both heads are tipped back. Changing filters a third time, you watch the musculature of their faces, the meat. Both are frowning, face-meat like wood grain, like webbing; neither speaks. Quickly you turn their insides off and the lights back on, and, once tucked back into the cowlings of skin and clothes, you realize they’re listening to a slurry overhead announcement, something about all flights. That’s why the words in their heads are the same. You’re getting fog, cancelled, tomorrow morning.