Brood

by Chase Novak

  The water level in the toilet subsides. But the bat is still there, floating on its back, its wings spread, its black eyes wide open looking like repulsive, shiny licorice-flavored candies, perfectly round, disturbingly bulging, utterly sightless.

  She has to get it out of there. Somehow get it into the little ceramic trash basket and then into the heavy-duty plastic garbage pail outside. She opens the narrow utility closet and takes out the plunger. Holding on to the rubber end, she pushes the wooden handle into the toilet and navigates it under the bat. But every time she tries to lift the flying rodent out of the water, she manages to elevate it only an inch or two before it slides off the stick and back into the water.

  After five unsuccessful attempts to get the thing out of the toilet, she resorts to basically catapulting it out. She puts the handle of the plunger beneath the bat and flips it up, hoping against hope that she will get lucky and the bat will land in the wastebasket, at which point she can drop a towel over the basket, rush the thing out to the back of the house—and dispose of it.

  But she flips the bat out of the water with far more vigor than she had intended. The thing hits the ceiling with a dull, wet thwack. She looks up, horrified, expecting the worst.

  And she gets it.

  The water and the velocity of the bat’s upward trajectory combine to make the bat adhere to the ceiling, but just for a few moments. The bat, the dead bat—it is dead, isn’t it?—all at once becomes unstuck from the ceiling, and with its wings outspread and its awful mouth wide open, the thing falls directly onto Cynthia. It hits her on top of her head and from there it touches the side of her neck—each nanosecond of contact with it is unspeakable. It slides down her T-shirt. She is screaming now, with no thought of waking the children. She claws at her shirt, pulls it away from her body, and the bat—it is dead, it must be—lands on its back on the black and cobalt tiles of the bathroom floor.

  Its blind eyes are open. Why are they even born with eyes? Was there ever a better argument against intelligent design? It seems to be staring up at Cynthia.

  And its little bony chest, container of its virulent little heart, is rising and falling.

  “Oh no!” shouts Cynthia as she realizes that the bat is breathing.

  The bat emits a sound, some nerve-shredding blend of a click and a squeak.

  Its little rodenty curled foot twitches. It looks like withered grape stems.

  And then, worst of all, the bat attempts to flap its wings. In this position, and in this state of near collapse, it can only move them a quarter-inch off the floor, once, twice, a third time, before giving up.

  But not giving up, not really. It survived going into the toilet for a drink and getting stuck there, it survived being urinated on, and it survived being flung against the ceiling—the creature might well be indestructible.

  She is still holding the plunger. There is only one thing she can do. She raises it over her head to beat the bat to death before it manages to rise from the floor. Except for insects, she has never killed anything, but she prepares to do so now without hesitation. She holds the plunger a couple of inches above the concave rubber head, rears back to maximize the force with which she will bring it down upon the bat, and starts her downward swing, making a sound between a grunt and a screech, like one of those Russian women tennis players striking a backhand.

  But the swing is stopped midarc. The sudden stop wrenches Cynthia’s shoulder and wrist. Startled, confused, she turns around.

  “Do not,” Adam says, holding on to the end of the handle. “Please.” Still holding on to the plunger, he guides her to one side.

  He crouches down next to the bat. Adam is so beautiful, Cynthia must avert her eyes. He is murmuring something to the creature, but she cannot make out what he is saying.

  “Don’t touch it, Adam,” she says.

  “Adam?” It’s Alice, who’s standing in the doorway of the bathroom, rubbing her right eye. She has sweated through her little-girl pajamas. The teddy bears, born blue, are now black.

  “It’s okay, Alice,” he says, looking up at her. Crouched there, his eyes on his sister, he would not be out of place in a Museum of Natural History diorama illustrating the earliest cave dwellers. He covers the bat with a towel, carefully scoops it up—clearly more mindful of the bat’s safety than his own—and gently shakes the towel until the bat slides into the wastebasket.

  “I’ll be right back,” he says.

  When he is gone, Cynthia and Alice stand in silence until Alice says, “He loves them and they love him.”

  “Bats?” Cynthia says. “Really? Bats?”

  “Everything,” Alice says. “Everything that’s alive.”

  Chapter 6

  They are coming from all directions—uptown, downtown, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Westchester, even Staten Island—and they are coming on foot, on skateboards, on bicycles, by subway. A few of them, though young and with no legal right to do so, even drive cars, and now, like any other New Yorker hoping to avoid astronomical garage fees, they are circling the blocks around Central Park, trying to find places to park. They are traveling in ones, twos, and threes, though, like teenagers everywhere, they like to be with a crew, a pack mentality that applies to these teens in particular. But they do not wish to draw attention to themselves, and a convoy of youngsters converging on Central Park in the middle of the night—it’s actually morning, three o’clock, and hot and humid, the full moon appearing and disappearing and appearing again in a clotted black sky—would most assuredly attract unwelcome attention.

  Later in the day, in another part of the park, Mayor Morris is going to appear at an event that has been weeks in the planning. David Chilowich, one of the few New York hedge-fund managers whose difficulties with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the attorney general of New York have never resulted in legal action and who has been compiling a spectacular public record of civic engagement, has donated three hundred million dollars to the Central Park Conservation Guild, and he will be handing the mayor the check in a ceremony that, if all goes well, ought to boost Morris’s sagging poll numbers (he’s been fading for months) and increase Chilowich’s odds of walking out of court a free man should his ability to evade prosecution ever falter. A stage has been set up overlooking one of the park’s many lagoons, and seating for five hundred so-called dignitaries has also been set up. Microphones, speakers, closed-circuit TV, all are at the ready, and several cops from the Central Park Precinct, as well as Central Park Conservation Guild employees and volunteers, are on hand, even now, in the middle of the night, to make certain none of the careful preparations are disturbed.

  The upcoming ceremony means that park security has been increased, but the security is concentrated near the north end of the park, around the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, and tonight’s pack meeting is twenty blocks away and on the park’s west side, at the Diana Ross Playground. And now in the little play area, named to commemorate the singer’s concert in the nearby Sheep Meadow decades ago, the band of runaways and castaways congregate beneath the full moon, which has at last emerged from the congestion of clouds.

  Rodolfo is their undisputed leader and he has gathered them all tonight because, counting the disappearance of Toby, four of their kind have vanished in the past month. Dressed in artfully torn jeans and a flowing muslin shirt, Rodolfo stands at the top of the silver corkscrew slide in the pocket park’s center while the others arrange themselves on the wooden climbing structures or the tire swings, or simply stand there and listen with the rapt attention that Rodolfo always manages to command.

  Though he must address some seventy people, Rodolfo delivers his speech in a voice barely louder than a whisper. They have gathered in darkness and they must be as quiet as possible. The luxurious towers of Central Park West loom nearby, and the teenagers in the park, whose lives are ones of flight and stealth, do not wish to be heard.

  Some of these teenagers, raised not far from where they now stand, used to play
in this little park within the park when they were small children, under the eye of an overworked nanny or the anxious gaze of parents—parents who hoped against hope that somehow the project of creating a family would turn out all right. A couple of them sit on the very tire swings that used to carry them aloft when their legs were pink and smooth and they would close their eyes and imagine they were magically endowed with the power of flight.

  “Ye’s and me’s, brothers and sisters,” Rodolfo passionately whispers, striking himself vigorously on the chest and then spreading his arms wide to embrace all who have congregated.

  “Ye’s and me’s, brothers and sisters,” whispers the row of teenagers closest to Rodolfo.

  “Ye’s and me’s, brothers and sisters,” the row behind them whispers to the next row back.

  Five times it is repeated, until everyone has heard.

  “Tonight is not about business; tonight we’s here to talk survival,” Rodolfo whispers, and he waits for his words to be conveyed row by row.

  “They are taking us’s brothers and sisters. Who is doing this to us’s? This we’s must know.”

  He waits for the message to be rewhispered. His chest is heaving. He feels so alive, it would not surprise him if he were to burst open and become nothing but pure light. He would not admit this to anyone, but power excites him, this kind of power, to have those faces turned toward him, to have them listen…

  For the most part, the whispered speech is transmitted without difficulty, though, as always, there are a few of the gathered—lads, usually—who are restless and distracted. If they were in school—and most of them have not stepped inside a schoolroom in years—they would surely be diagnosed as hyperactive, or suffering from (and making others suffer from) attention deficit disorder, diagnosed either officially by the school psychologist, or unofficially by a teacher or a parent who had simply run out of patience. These manic few do their best to follow Rodolfo’s speech—and, indeed, they do hear it and have a basic understanding of what Rodolfo says; surely, they hear enough to decide they don’t really need to hang on every word. But these kids cannot stand or sit still, so their listening is done along with hacky-sack kicks, games of you-push-me-and-I-push-you, hands drumming their knees, or, for one poor soul, a compulsive and slightly repulsive puckering and unpuckering of the lips.

  “Listen now,” Rodolfo whispers. “We’s not talking no more to people we’s not familiar with. Don’t matter for nothing how money they look or if they’s handing over to you a big juicy Chewtown hamburger with all fixin’s jus’ the way ye always liked it. Keep away. We’s havin us no idea who doing this mischief. Maybe a man, maybe a mommy. Could be cops, CIA, FBI, DEA, NSA.”

  “Could be PETA!” a voice from the back calls out. And the laughter that it causes is even louder.

  Rodolfo laughs too while gesturing for everyone to keep it down, keep it down.

  “If you in the bidness, know this, brothers and sisters, the danger be ten times more,” he says with his hand over his heart, a look of the gravest concern on his face. “They want us’s blood, they want to feel what we’s feel, so big, so money, so fast and alive. But we’s got to be a million carefuls. Of the pigs, go without saying. But we’s got to remember how this runs. If we’s sell the wrong blood, the bidness is fucked. Not all of us’s carrying blood we’s wanting to sell. We’s been through this many times, brothers and sisters. Me’s thought we’s all clear on this.”

  Rodolfo drops to a squat, dangles his folded hands between his knees.

  “If ye smooth gots no desire to be doing terrible tings, if ye like your meat cooked, if ye know how to read, then come see me’s and we’s look you over and you can be a supplier. Suppliers get a bigger share, they do, but everywe gets something, and in the end we’s all gonna be rich and life is going to be sweet. Okay? But if we’s start selling hot blood and we’s customers start getting heart attacks or hairy asses…”

  A ripple of nervous laughter, like a sudden smudge of phosphorescent light in dark water.

  “Then we’s all going to lose. The bidness will be over. These rich people, they not fools. They be talking to each other. One gets in trouble and they alls run away.”

  Rodolfo stands again and holds up three fingers.

  “ ’Nother ting,” he whispers. “Sex.” He puts his finger over his lips, shakes his head. He doesn’t want to risk any excitement, any noise. “We’s all like what our bodies do. No problem there, brothers and sisters. But we’s must be careful. Use a condom; use two if you be fucking one of we’s. We’s not going to reproduce.”

  “Why not?” whispers someone in the crowd, and the question is delivered to Rodolfo row by row.

  “Why not? I’ll show you. Shulamith and Kevin. Now, we’s all know Shulamith and Kevin, they be together forever, since the days we’s eating squirrels and living in the Brambles. They love each other. And we’s loving them.” He gestures and two figures rise from a bench outside the playground.

  Shulamith is a lean, dark-haired girl with a narrow face and full lips. Kevin is broad-shouldered with a low center of gravity; his facial expression at rest is both merry and secretive. Shulamith carries a swaddled infant in her arms, and those who have gathered in the Diana Ross Playground move to the side to make a path for them as they walk toward Rodolfo. With no more effort than a normal person would expend to move on a flat surface, they quickly walk up the corkscrew slide and stand next to Rodolfo.

  Rodolfo says something private to them and then commands, “Tell everyone how old this baby be.”

  “Gort is seventeen weeks old,” Shulamith says, forgetting to whisper.

  “And?” Rodolfo asks.

  “He’s a very good baby,” Shulamith says.

  “And?”

  “And we’s love him.”

  “Anything else, Shulamith?”

  The teenage girl hesitates for a moment—but the decision to do this was made hours ago. She slowly unwraps the blanket from her child and lets the blue cotton square fall to the ground. The child has been sleeping, and the sudden touch of the night air, even on this steaming summer night, awakens him. He lets out a peevish peep.

  Shulamith turns him around and touches her nose against her baby’s little nose. And at the same time, she exposes the infant’s back for all to see. Those farthest away don’t know what to make of it, but those who are standing in the first couple of rows see it very clearly: where the child’s shoulder blades would have been, Gort has sprouted two pale gray wings.

  Chapter 7

  Sometimes the twins call her Cynthia, and sometimes Aunt Cynthia. The Aunt Cynthia is a bit disheartening to her—it seems permanent, a dead-end job with no promotion possible. It surprises her to be continually colliding with that small, tender, and undefended part of her that would love it if one day Adam and Alice called her Mom.

  But no matter. One way or another, they are becoming a family.

  The children cleave to her. They don’t help but they closely observe her every move when she makes her bed. They sit and talk to each other right outside the bathroom door while she takes her shower. They eat quickly and they watch quietly while she finishes her breakfast. It’s heartbreaking and slightly annoying, and it’s also sort of amusing, and on top of all that, it is touching and even a tiny bit gratifying. This is what she is learning: In family life, no one thing is just one thing. Everything holds a multitude of meanings.

  There is no downtime. Especially not with these two. Their needs, as yet unspoken, overwhelm her. The fear they lived with, the gruesome things they saw, their months and months and months tumbling through the social-service system. What do they dream of? What do they say to their therapists?

  A week that feels like a month goes by. She wishes she were younger, in better shape. Yet older now—she is forty-five—she is perhaps able to tolerate their using up every minute of her day, every ounce of her energy, without feeling impatient or trapped. If the worst thing you feel in your life is exhaustion—not pa
in, not loneliness, not hopelessness, not rage, not hunger, not terror—then you might as well consider yourself among the fortunate.

  Another week passes. The New York summer is the kind Al Gore predicted: the sun a dirty yellow scream, the sky a crazy jumble of clouds, the nights thick as oil spills.

  She knows she ought to have found a meeting by now, but it’s been years since she’s had a drink, or even thought about using, and there is something about being in New York that says fresh start to her. Drinking and its attendant dependence on AA feels like something she left back in California.

  Cynthia has many contacts in the New York antiques world, and though it doesn’t seem realistic to think that she will soon have her own shop—when she closed Gilty Pleasures back in San Francisco, she did so with the knowledge that she might never run an antiques store again—she has to begin earning some money, and a job has been all but promised her, working for Fay and Jiwani a few doors down from the Pierre, and there is a good chance at another position at a place called American Pastoral. But right now, who has time?

  The twins must be fed. Every day. Three or four times a day. Though they are still determined to limit their caloric intake, they are also—despite all their talk about becoming vegetarian—ravenous for meat, which they seem to grab with one hand and push away with the other. She is happy—delighted, really—to feed them all the meat they could ever want, and often the huge kitchen smells like a barbecue pit. And they must be clothed. Cynthia doesn’t want to be snobby or grand about it, but they don’t look right in those Target and Kmart outfits they came out of foster care with. She takes them to City Outfitters, drawn in by the funky mannequins wearing casual clothes, but feels faint when she sees that a pair of pre-torn blue jeans costs $250. Luckily, the twins do not object when she steers them out of the place. Eventually, she gets them clothes she hopes will take them through the rest of the scorching summer and into the (she hopes) more temperate autumn. She must get them at least one outfit each that they could wear to church or a nice restaurant, and she must get them clothes to run around and be kids in, and she must get them school clothes.