Darwin's Bastards

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  Nanami is chattering about the only discussion group she’s attended so far in Heaven: “Not All Deaths Are Natural.” It was held at 22 Wormwood Road where she and Bobby share a room in a high-rise residence reserved for the murdered.

  “People just bragged about how they died,” Nanami claims. One-upmanship. Whose death was the most gruesome. Who suffered the most. “Mrs. Lebowitz was the worst. Okay, so her husband buried her alive in a steamer trunk in her backyard. But she was practically in raptures describing how she’d broken off her fingernails picking the lock from the inside. I lied that my killer had put me through a wood chipper semi-conscious, and that shut her up.”

  Bobby turns to Nanami. She has a half-smile on her face. She’s made up that story about Mrs. Lebowitz, the old lady who lives next door to them in the murder tower. His roommate is testing his credulity again. (The other day, she claimed that a neighbouring building was reserved for people killed in embarrassing freak accidents. Rubbed out by a runaway grocery cart. Drowned in a bowl of party punch. A brain aneurysm caused by a cotton swab inserted too deeply into an ear canal. “Really?” he exclaimed. “Cotton swabs can kill?”)

  But now in the hallway, that half-smile of hers quickly fades. Nanami sees Bobby’s sweaty forehead. His sudden pastiness. “What’s wrong?”

  Bobby turns away, embarrassed by his frailty. He steadies himself against the wall, one hand resting against a slate that reads: “AWARE: Atheists Were Almost Right about Everything.” His legs go wobbly. The hallway tilts. He drops the canvas bag carrying his sketch pad, and his pencils scatter across the floorboards like a game of pick-up sticks.

  Down on his knees he goes. Nanami crouches beside him. “Put your head down, Henzel.” She pushes his head to his knees. “It’s a dizzy spell. It’ll pass. I got them too when I first came to Heaven.”

  He stares at the cracks between the floorboards. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. This is a perfect excuse for missing that anger session. They’re probably group-hugging as we speak.” She pats the back of his head. A little too hard, though. Her clunky plastic ring denting his skull.

  “The group leader’s probably telling everybody, ‘Quash that anger! Just be nice!’ But niceness is overrated,” Nanami says as she crawls across the floor gathering Bobby’s pencils. Being nice, in fact. “Take you, for instance, Henzel. When you lived on Earth, you were probably Mr. Young America. Didn’t talk back to teachers. Didn’t spit in public. Girls in your classes must have had secret crushes on you, written your initials in the margins of their math books. Blogged about you.” Here her voice goes high and lilting: “‘Bobby smiled at me in the cafeteria lineup today.’ But where did all that niceness get you?”

  Bobby lifts a clammy face toward this girl. Mr. Young America? Smiles in the cafeteria? What’s she talking about?

  “It got you here,” Nanami says. “The same place as me, and I was obnoxious to everybody.”

  They hear shoes squeaking in the hallway. Bobby’s head jerks sideways. His heart thumps. He half expects to see his skinny blond murderer. But no, it’s an Asian man with a ponytail. When the man turns the corner, Bobby mutters,“I think I saw my killer, Nanami.” He puts his head back down, mumbles to his knees. “I think I saw him on the 727 that brought me to Heaven.”

  “What?!” Nanami cries. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I only caught a glimpse of the guy on the plane. I can’t swear it was him. Maybe my eyes were playing tricks.” Bobby sits up. “Maybe I’m losing my friggin’ mind.”

  “You’re not losing your mind, Henzel,” Nanami insists. “If anybody around here is going mad, it’s definitely not you.”

  Behind them the door to a classroom swings open. A head pops out. Closely cropped curly hair. A black man with skin light enough to reveal a smattering of dark freckles across his nose and cheeks. “What do we have here?” he says in mock surprise. “Two young people ready to regale us with stories of a godless yet fruitful life!”

  Bobby has elected himself secretary of the meeting. But instead of taking the minutes, he draws caricatures of the members of AWARE, whom Zachary, the group leader, jokingly calls “barbaric heathens.” Zachary looks like a superhero with his broad shoulders and a tight red tracksuit that shows off his muscles. Bobby is sketching him, no easy task given how hyperactive Zachary is. As he talks, he waves his arms and bounces around the classroom, his sneakers squealing. Zachary is complaining about medication in Heaven. “The only drugs available here are homeopathic. Sugar pills. People pop them for warts, insomnia, jock itch, hay fever. And, depressingly enough, they work. All very homeopathetic if you ask me.”

  Twenty or so people are sitting around the classroom in moulded chair-desk combos. The man next to Nanami, a hefty guy who seems to be wearing his desk like a corset, nods vigorously. Behind Bobby sits a young woman knitting, her needles click-clacking. Taped to the walls of the room are caricatures of American presidents. Theodore Roosevelt hugs a mangy teddy bear. Lincoln’s top hat sports a bullet hole. Washington swings an axe at a cherry tree.

  “So Heaven isn’t a place of scientific rigour, I grant you that,” says Zachary. “But nor is Heaven home to the supernatural. Nor is Heaven home to the Christian god! What did Thomas Jefferson, my favourite Atheist president, say about the Christian god?” Zachary glances at Jefferson’s caricature: the third president of America is tearing the Bible in two the way a strongman will rip apart a phonebook. “My man Tom said that god was a being of terrific character: cruel, vindictive, capricious, unjust. Is the It cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust? No, the It is simply blasé. The It gives us a home and food, and the It lets us be.”

  “Who’s It?” Nanami asks.

  “You don’t have the floor yet, young lady,” Zachary replies, a bit petulantly. “I have the goat, so I have the floor.” From the teacher’s desk, Zachary picks up a foot-long crucifix with a blue toy goat nailed to the cross. He brandishes the goat crucifix like a magic wand. “But because you’re new here, I’ll answer your question. The It is simply this place.”

  Bobby crosshatches shadows onto his drawing as Zachary likens Heaven to a mammoth underground fungus whose spores inch up through the soil to spawn the apartment towers, the subway, the thrift stores, the schools, and all the rest. “I believe the It to be an organism,” Zachary says. “When a crack in a sidewalk slowly fills itself in, the It is mending itself. Just as a scab on your knee heals itself.”

  He points the goat toward Nanami’s knee, which is covered with a bandage. She scraped her knee on the weekend when she fell while jogging along a forest trail.

  “But is the It some omniscient, omnipotent god?” Zachary continues. “Is the It magic? I think not. Not any more than your healing scab is magic.”

  “Are we part of the It?” Nanami asks.

  “Did I say I was ready to take questions yet?” Zachary admonishes.

  Nanami looks at Bobby. Rolls her eyes.

  “Okay, then, yes, I shall answer. Are we part of the organism? A kind of living cell? I think so. This is not magic, mind you. This is nature. The nature of the It. The nature of Heaven.”

  Bobby has sketched a big toadstool beneath Zachary’s feet and is now drawing a cross-eyed goat peeking over the man’s shoulder.

  “The It isn’t like that megalomaniac god in the Bible. That cruel, vindictive, capricious, unjust god never existed, thank god. That’s why we Atheists were almost right.” Zachary’s voice grows louder, more irate. “Unlike the Christian god, the It doesn’t give a hoot whether we believe in the It. The It doesn’t care if we pray to the It. The It doesn’t want to hear our tedious confessions. The It doesn’t read our dreary thoughts. The It doesn’t care if we covet our neighbour’s ass. The It doesn’t mind if man lies with woman, man, or even goat. And the It”— here Zachary pauses, a smile frozen on his face—“doesn’t give a flying crap if we take Its goddamn name in vain.”

  A few chuckles from the participants.
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br />   “What about murder?” Nanami asks. “Does the It care if we kill?”

  Zachary walks toward Nanami. With his face twisted into an exaggerated scowl, he raises the goat crucifix above his head as if to bludgeon her with the thing.

  She cringes and slides down in her seat.

  “Hey!” Bobby yells. “Hey!”

  But Zachary just smiles sweetly and hands the crucifix to Nanami. “Please enlighten us, young lady,” he says, “with your own beliefs.”

  What does Nanami believe in? Getting even. At least that’s what her story seems to be about. Getting even with those damn Mormons back in Utah. Standing at the front of the classroom, she seems less bold, less poised than when she’s alone with Bobby. She speaks softly, pauses often. She slouches. She glances out the window. She keeps fiddling with the goat crucifix and finally lays it down on the teacher’s desk.

  When she first moved to Salt Lake City in grade four, Nanami tells the members of AWARE, she thought the Mormons were called Ladder Day Saints. She pictured them, on the day of their death, climbing giant, wobbly ladders to Heaven. These Mormons believed in an afterlife, something her parents dismissed as rubbish. She wanted to believe too. An afterlife! So storybook magical! But she learned no rung of that giant ladder had space for a Japanese girl.

  “For these saints,” she says, “if you weren’t white, you were of another species. They looked at you and saw a panda bear or a water buffalo.” Within a couple of years, she no longer wanted a spot on their ladder.

  She glances at Bobby, who smiles at her so she’ll keep talking. He’s drawing her skinny legs, her knobby knee with its droopy bandage. (The other day he drew a close-up of her scraped knee, the skin torn and pimpled with scabs. That drawing is the only sketch of her she’s let him tape to the wall of their room. “My bloody knee feels more like me than my face does,” she said.)

  At the front of the classroom, Nanami is badmouthing the Mormons. You had to be a gullible chump, she insists, to believe that the church’s founder, a con man named Joseph Smith, dug up golden tablets in his backyard that were scrawled with a message from god. Tablets nobody but Mr. Smith could see. “And the man was visited by an angel named Moroni,” she says. “Moroni the Moron Angel.”

  Nanami picks up a piece of chalk and prints these slogans on the blackboard:

  Jesus Is Lard.

  Praying Is Begging.

  Apes Evolved from Mormons.

  She wipes her chalky palms together over a garbage pail. Tells the group she used to print these same sentences in indelible ink on bathroom walls across Salt Lake City. “My angry phase,” she says, throwing Bobby a wry half-smile.

  “But the Mormons got their revenge,” she adds.

  About five months back, a Latter-day crackpot by the name of Cage Young climbed onto the roof of her school for some target practice. Nanami looks away from the class, out the window, and slowly utters: “You shall not drink coffee or tea, Mr. Mormon, but you shall shoot a girl in the head.”

  A sharp intake of breath from the knitter behind Bobby. Zachary, seated three rows away, claps his hands once. Holds those two hands together in front of his mouth. You’d swear this Atheist was praying.

  “Why did Cage Young do it?” Nanami asks wistfully. “Did a voice tell him to? The voice of god, maybe?”

  The murdered girl looks at the floor. Then back up at Bobby. Her eyes blink. Then she grabs the goat crucifix. Raises it above her head like George Washington’s axe. Whacks the thing against the teacher’s desk.

  The blue goat pops off, does a triple axel, lands across the room in the garbage pail.

  For a few seconds, there’s silence. Everyone stares at the garbage pail. Even Nanami looks amazed.

  “A miracle!” Zachary finally cries. “We were wrong after all, people. There is a god!”

  That night in the murder tower, Nanami wakes screaming from a nightmare about the sniper. In fact, her screaming triggers Bobby’s screaming. So they both awake yelling their heads off and thrashing with their covers. Their hearts thumping. Their hands clammy. Their eyes wide in the dark.

  Mrs. Lebowitz, the old lady in the next room, comes rapping on their door. Her voice tremulous, she calls out, “You two all right in there?” They’re killing each other, she must think. They’re ripping each other’s throats out.

  For an hour afterward, Bobby and Nanami sit on Nanami’s bed with their desk lamps on. Their throats are raw from screaming. In the voice of a two-pack-a-day smoker, Nanami talks about hating Cage Young. He’s a eunuch of a man, she says. He has no balls. He has bullets where his testicles should be. How unfair, she says, that she knows so little about a ball-less man who played such a pivotal role in her life. “All I know about him is his rage,” she says. “When that bullet entered me, so did his rage.”

  She goes on to say she loathes Heaven. The place reminds her of the community her grandparents retired to in Florida. Every day is like Sunday. Mind-numbingly mellow. She gets weepy and starts dabbing her eyes with the corner of her pillowcase, and Bobby doesn’t know what to say. When his depressed mother used to get sad and teary-eyed, he wouldn’t say much either. He isn’t a talker. He’s at best a mumbler. But he used to sketch his mother when she was in these moods, and that’s what he does with Nanami tonight. His sketch emphasizes the wire-hanger skinniness of his roommate’s collarbones and the choppiness of her hair. He draws a smoky cloud over her head, smudging the graphite with his fingertips. When Nanami asks what that cloud is, he says, “Sorrow.” Then, with his pink eraser, he rubs out the cloud and tells her she can sleep now. “Sorrow’s gone,” he mumbles.

  She looks at him, that slack-jawed deadpan of hers, and says, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” But she does slip back under the covers. She does fall back to sleep.

  Bobby, however, does not. He lies on his bed in the dark and stares at the full moon smiling at him through the window of their room. Heaven may not have gods or guns or magic, but Bobby likes to believe in these things. Tonight he imagines the doily moon as his god. The moon is his It. The It is magical. The It transports him back to a high school outside Chicago. The It arms him with a pistol. The It whispers in his ear, eggs him on— “Thatta boy!”—as Mr. Young America stalks the hallways for a stranger to kill.

  JAY BROWN

  GLADIATOR

  NIGHTS ARE THE worst part at AtGen. RT15N is narcolaxic, meaning sleepiness makes you feel like you need to pee, and so every forty-five minutes or so I find myself in my gown hovering overtop of the urinal in the Gastro Ward lavatory trying to squeeze out a few drops. That’s when I’ll bump into Polly, who’s on YL96B, which they’re calling final phase. The peeing thing on YL96 is physiological—standard diuretic and not so severe. It’s sticker-grade warning at best. It’s always good to see Polly and to get the low-down on the YL trial. He’s stuck it out from YL8 and onwards, from back when the juice caused dermal complications in people with more than one-fiftieth Polynesian gen. stock. They’ve shaved all of the growths off his face and arms, though you can see where they used to be: scars like oval liver spots above his lips and on the backs of his hands. He’s such a goer he even had them leave one on, like a badge. It’s a wobbly knot of flesh connected by the slenderest bit of tissue to the joint of his right thumb.

  “Clifferton,” he says and nods at me.

  “Polly-boy.”

  We go about our business.

  Just above each urinal’s motion detector is the AtGen fountain of life symbol, the three wavy lines falling onto the raised cup of a tulip. It’s backlit by a throbbing blue LED. You get the story behind that at the Participant Inductee Hall where they screen you before admission. There’s a row of quiet little rooms with a single leather sofa and a pitcher of Herbavit Water inside each of them. You get to go into one and have it all to yourself for fifteen minutes while they play the welcome vid. It shows how the AtGen militico-pharma model goes all the way back to Napoleon. How, once you sign the appropriate paper
work, you’ll be a part of the AtGen family, and how at AtGen we all work not just for ourselves but also for a better, richer, safer, longer-lasting world.

  Why? Because the world was once a beautiful place, says this tired, grandfatherly voice, and still is but it’s been buried under horrible things. It’s like going to the dump and finding your high school sweetheart’s sweater, which smelled like her fresh skin that time when you held her under this tree they show in a now dark and lonely field. Her sweater’s all balled up and covered in rotting food and tilting at the lip of the incinerator. Hold up, operator! Meanwhile, such images of suffering and wasting: emaciated and naked bodies heaped in frozen piles, enemy combatants stringing up the still-smouldering corpses of dead soldiers from a rusty iron bridge, children—little children—in some kind of sandy tent and like zombies with flies on their mouths. Thunder, darkness, then a sunrise and a giant cheer, a close-up of a handshake behind a podium, a husband and wife opening the door on their new home and their little boy dancing for joy in the kitchen, a field of purple canola flowers and a cow munching by a fence, a man and a woman (wearing a familiar, and now laundered, sweater) walking slowly, romantically, away from the camera, towards the cow which continues to gently graze and gives no sign at all that it could charge and trample them—which is a thing, don’t ask me why, I sometimes worry about when I imagine standing in a field next to one. At the very end it shows a simulation of the AtGen headquarters in Laval rising from the ground like how a flower grows and unfurls its leaves and petals. The soft blue rain comes down through the sunshine. A hum you barely knew was there rises in volume until your glass of Herbavit is dancing on top of one of the subwoofer armrests and you can really feel the force of all the possible beauty there is in this world.