I climbed over the daisies and onto the lawn. I knelt in front of the animal, fighting the compulsion to squeeze its big paw between my hands. Its eyes were silver, its teeth yellow, and thick as my thumbs, and its hot breath smelled like sawdust. What didn’t smell like sawdust? Its new wings weren’t just wings but lumps of black-feathered shoulder, too, sewn on with copper wire that bubbled with syrupy blood against its golden skin. I saw the telltale shaved patch back on its hip.
“Hello,” I whispered to the creature.
Its brown whiskers quivered, once. Its breath collected like dew on my forehead, but the wings lifted again to briefly fan us. Had it crash-landed? No, even if they were nine feet long it wasn’t possible that the two wings could’ve lifted it in the first place. Four wings—I could see two from its other shoulder, pressed beneath it. Clear fluid ran out of its ear and down its forehead. Even if I’d had bacon, the thing would’ve been too far gone to chew. Of the whole sorry mess, that deflated udder was really the most disgusting, and that’s from the guy who’d cleaned out Patrick and Pimples’ camper.
“You all right out here?” I whispered, and its whiskers flickered again. One paw moved a half-inch across the grass.
I sat up straight to see a bony guy, seven feet tall, ambling across my lawn from the direction of the porch. He was bare-chested, in overalls and gumboots, so maybe the place was staging Of Mice and Men in addition to its other fucked-up endeavors. He had small squinting eyes and the rest of his face could’ve been used to drive nails into concrete. He looked past me at the lion. Had moles all over his shoulders.
“There he is,” the big guy muttered.
Kneeling beside me, he ruffled the chocolate-brown fur behind its ear. He glanced at the top of my head.
“Penzler sent me,” I said.
“Oh,” he murmured. “Sorry about this, I guess.”
So I had some authority? I stood up—and even then his eyes were only a foot below mine—and folded my arms mightily.
“Are you Tyrone or Don?” I asked.
“Dean.” He went on petting, flattening the thick folds of skin each time. The thing’s breathing was turning into a continuous hiss, like the end of a record before the needle comes off. “I guess they didn’t know anybody was coming.”
“What’s happened to it?” I asked.
“He’s had all the chemicals and everything.” Dean shrugged. “Did Dr. Duffy tell you how this happens every time? No matter what. See his grafts? They’re all good. None of them work, but they’re solid. Now I let him go around wherever he wants.”
He gave the neck one final emphatic stroke then clambered to his feet, throwing his shadow over me.
“It’s dumb, I mean, how’s the balls going to work without a cock attached, right? He’s done already and that’s such a dumb combination! But I think the wings are pretty, I do, I do. Poor Hopper.”
I craned my neck to look up at him, shading my eyes because of the sun breaking from behind his head.
“This isn’t an extended visit,” I announced. “Take me to Natalia.”
Dean nodded, folded his arms around himself and started for the porch, his first two steps taking him eight feet. Then he looked back at me.
“Dr. Duffy should show you,” he murmured. “He doesn’t think she’ll—”
“I don’t have time. Mr. Penzler needs me to fly back tonight.”
I strode up the grassy slope, stepped for a second onto the dirt driveway then turned onto the porch. A red painted bench ran the length of it, displaying the same big-eyed ceramic kitten Kirsten McAvoy had glued to the dash of her car. Conspiracy of inane shit.
“I’ll get that screen door,” Dean said. “The handle kind of sticks.”
He tried it but the door just rattled, so he gave a yank and the hinges tore out of the wood. He glanced down at me.
“Crap,” he said.
He leaned it against the bench and I followed him into the cool house, through a narrow foyer with a bighorn sheep’s head on the wall, then down a dark corridor. A rectangle of light showed around a doorframe at the far end, maybe the kitchen, but Dean pivoted left and started up a staircase that twisted to the right every five or six steps. The house smelled sawdusty, but lemony like insect repellent too. On the third step it came to me: the slow-breathing lion was like my mom.
Upstairs was bright thanks to windows at either end of the hallway. Framed needlepoints on the walls showed rampant dragons and such, maybe a family crest. Dean led me across into the first room—the door stood open. The room was pale pink, its ceiling tilting down with the pitch of the roof, flowery dresses spilling out of the closet toward a single mattress smothered with magazines. A stony-faced model on the cover of Allure. Rose-tinted perfume floated in the air but it couldn’t disguise a sawdust stench so strong it just about turned my stomach, even though the same smell was coming out of my armpits. I burped up a taste of hot dog and coffee.
“I forgot.” Dean pressed one great hand against the ceiling. “They put her in the other room.”
He wandered into the hallway and tried the next door down, which was a small yellow room containing a pull-chain ceiling light and a toilet. He shut the door, embarrassed.
“I don’t come up here much,” he said.
We went to the end of the hall where he wavered between closed white doors on either side.
“Why don’t you yell her name?” I asked.
He looked down at me, eyes wide. “I sure don’t want to wake her if she’s sleeping!”
He swallowed hard, decisively, reached for the knob on the right. The door opened an inch and I saw a strip of navy-blue wallpaper.
“Okay.” He jumped back. “You go in.”
His cinder-block feet clumped down the stairs.
I could’ve stood there savoring the moment, my trail’s hard-fought end, but I swung the door open with the flat of my hand. The room contained an ancient claw-foot bathtub, its enamel striated and yellow. The tub in turn contained a red-haired, white-faced girl, though I couldn’t quite make out what she was doing. She looked up at me.
“Yeah?”
“Oh,” I said. “Can I come in?”
“You’re in, looks like. Did you forget the smoothie?”
“Uh, that might be another minute. Um…”
“Sit on the edge. That’s what everybody does.”
“You don’t mind?”
She dropped her eyes. I perched my behind on the curved lip of the tub. There was no water. The girl’s naked body filled the bottom as a shapeless mass, like her bones had dissolved, leaving her head propped at one end of a bag of freckled skin. Her hair, for what it’s worth, looked thoroughly brushed.
“You new?” she asked.
“I don’t work for Duffy,” I said. “Your sister sent me to bring you home.”
“Oh, finally.” She blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Let me get my things and we’ll hit the road.”
I smiled at her. My jaw ached as though Dean had already hit me.
“She hoped maybe you’d be cured,” I said.
“You’re Alice’s type, definitely. Did she move pretty fast with you?”
I nodded. She had at that.
“God, I love her,” Natalia said.
“I don’t want to pester you,” I said, “but if they have anything close to a cure—”
“You see the horse they made me? They killed a lot of birds to make that horse. They worked on it a long time before I even got here, supposed to cheer me up.”
“Did it?”
“Huh. I guess you haven’t seen my horse. If you have to ask.”
“I’ll get them to show me.”
“There used to be this transmitter tower up on the hill, did you know that? My horse flew into it.”
“Flew?”
“I had a bad b
ack for a long time. Like razors,” she said. “Then I did such a terrible thing to Dad.”
“What was that?”
“Our dad’s very protective.” She chewed her bottom lip. “Maybe Alice told you our mom had stomach cancer. She was outside the clinic in Columbus and got hit by a motorcycle.”
“That’s terrible.”
She didn’t answer. Her eyes had glazed over, but then her head suddenly gave a hop and she sucked in frantic breaths, one then another. After half a minute of that she shot me a bored look.
“Dad said if he’d been there he could’ve saved her life with this thing he was doing with his buddies, and Alice and I were like, ‘What the fuck, Dad? You manufacture rubber boots.’ That tanked. No Mom anymore, and Dad figured he was on such a roll, he was like, ‘I’ve got this stuff right here, girl, so you never get that pain in your back ever again.’ ”
“And do you still have pain in your back?”
Her eyes darted down at the expanse of herself.
“No. Problem solved.” She gazed up at me. “You better kiss me.”
She did have a lovely face. Those brown eyelashes, the creases around her eyes like she’d grinned a lot in her time, her top lip a little upturned like it was made for kissing. But I didn’t lean across. I looked at the enamel edge of the tub.
“You know Alice pretty well,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“So pretend I’m her, for Christ’s sake. I remind you of her, right?”
“That’s why I don’t want to.”
“Because of where I am?”
I hadn’t flown from Nebraska to hurt the girl’s feelings. But even so, I nodded.
“You don’t want to picture Alice all melted down in a bathtub,” she said.
“No.”
“All right, mister, that’s fair.”
She was looking out the window, her green eyes open wide like she was studying hummingbirds and all the acrobatic things they could do. I could gleefully crush Carver’s skull but I couldn’t kiss this girl? Sure, I could.
I knelt on the floor, the tub’s edge digging into my belly, leaned across and kissed her on the lips. They were soft as a Kleenex. I kissed her for about two seconds but she didn’t kiss back. I opened my eyes. Her gaze was still on the window. No breath was coming out of her.
I put my hand on her cheek, rocked her back and forth. Her red hair swayed across her white skin, but she might’ve been moulded out of plastic. Natalia Penzler was dead.
I sat on my behind, laid my hands on the floor, and for a minute just studied her. It was easy to imagine that she’d never been alive, that the people-manufacturers had fouled up her components too much to ever bother plugging her in. One day I’d be looking out of a dry tub myself, wondering how such a pool of meat had ever been alive.
Every thought I’d had for the future dissipated because there was no cure.
My arms shook and I covered my face with my hands, and pinkish tears as thick as pancake batter trickled between my fingers. PBF, my kids, Styrofoam containers of bacon.
I sat up, gasping for air.
“Huh,” I said.
Hairy feet in a pair of ragged Birkenstocks stood in the doorway. I closed my eyes and gulped back snot.
“Hello, Dr. Duffy,” I murmured.
“Did she pass?” he calmly asked.
“Obviously.”
A dumb teenage thing to say, sure.
“I thought it would be today,” he said slowly. “I’m sorry I wasn’t up here.”
“What for?”
“To comfort her.”
I sat up on the edge of the tub. Duffy was leaning an elbow against the doorframe, one foot cocked behind the other like he was posing in hunting garb with a pack of beagles.
“What’s your name, sir?” he asked.
“Lee Pert Girl,” I announced. “Peter Giller.”
“ ‘Giller.’ Dean said that Penzler sent you. I’ve just phoned him and he can’t—”
“Not the father. Alice.”
“No, he told me very clearly that she didn’t—”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“But where’s your vehicle? Who let you through the gate?”
“Walked up from the road. I’d been sitting in a car too long.”
“And the gate?”
“It was open.” I held up my palms, helpless to the fact. “I came on through.”
“But what do you want here?”
“Alice Penzler wants me to bring back a cure.”
He brought his elbow down and stared at me.
“But how are you here already?” he asked. “We only learned this morning that Alice was affected.”
I stared at a diagonal scar that crossed his hairy knee. Sweet Alice in her T-shirt, a zombie. Thick blood simmered in my lips and I raised an eyebrow at him—that had always been my fail-safe for ninth-graders mouthing me off.
“That right?” I asked. “Are you usually the first to find out about anything?”
With his bottom lip he smoothed his moustache. Dropped his eyes to Natalia.
Something kept flickering across my peripheral vision like a fly buzzing in the room, but when I focused on a corner of the ceiling, where blue wallpaper rose to the white crown mouldings, there was nothing. I’d wasted the final days of my life like so much piss down a urinal. But I’d been a monster in Hoover, unable to so much as live with my kids. Piss down a urinal was what I deserved.
“Have you found anything remotely like a cure?” I asked.
“I have no clearance to tell Alice anything,” Duffy said quietly. “And that connective tissue under your ears gives you more than a professional interest.”
I raised a finger to feel down the edge of my jaw, but stopped. Duffy relaxed his posture, smiled his beardy smile.
“We never found any procedure that arrested the process completely. Radiation seeding had her back on her feet for almost a month, but that’s prohibitively expensive, and who knows what it did to her cells long-term—look at her. Nobody else had degeneration like hers.”
“Never thought to put her in a fridge?”
He raised his shaggy brows, eyes wide as petri dishes.
“Why would I?”
“Subjects in Nebraska preserved indefinitely,” I said, though now every one of them was dead.
“And no ill effects, seriously, in a fridge? None of them died?”
“Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Wasn’t the fridge’s fault in any case.”
“Lord a’mighty,” said Duffy. “And all our subjects ended up—”
“Reminds me of when we were first going into space.” I had to distract myself from PBF. “NASA says, ‘Ballpoint pens won’t write in zero gravity, we need a space-age pen,’ we spend x-amount of money, meantime—”
“Russians used pencils,” he said quietly. “I get it.”
He walked across the room and leaned against the window sill. Looked down at the lawn for a minute. I knew it was time to formulate spectacular plans but then my eyes fell on Natalia’s waxy features, and vestiges of thought evaporated. Someone else I hadn’t reached in time, like Franny.
“Oh, well,” Duffy finally said. “Kirk’s been having trouble thinking long-term.”
“Kirk jumps through hoops,” I said. “I know that. This is all your show. Penzler’s just the means of production.”
He rolled an eye back at me. “That’s what you think, hey?”
“Everybody points to the hippie doctors in California.”
“Hippie doctors.”
“So where’s the other one?”
“Ah, those gentleman in Velouria, that’s who you talked to. They must’ve meant George. We have a minute before Dean comes up. Let me tell you a few things.”
“Talk away.” I
noticed my left wrist—the filaments had nearly dissolved back into the skin. “I’m an empty vessel.”
“Twenty-five years ago.” He turned to the window, hairy knuckles folded behind him. “Twenty-five years ago, three guys got Chemistry degrees from Michigan, and the army paid for that, provided we were infantry medics every summer and for a couple of years after, so bright futures for all, mothers and fathers proud as peacocks.”
I swallowed hard. “I want no one else to die from this crap.”
“We don’t want a cure, all right? We want a compound that works properly from day one! You see this?” He gripped the edge of the window and bent his knee so I could stare at his scar. “First year after college, Bush Senior takes us over to Iraq, and here’s what I get. Friendly fire, too, but that’s not the issue—after triage I had a ligament and three arteries still intact, and an artery is not load bearing, you understand? But Lieutenant Kirk Penzler, my buddy, had this stuff the Kuwaiti medics left with him before their unit withdrew, some Bedouin cure-all no one had heard of, a kind of gum, a sap, and it took eighteen months of chewing it before the bone and tendon had grown back, rolling my foot behind me on a little cart—and George, he got leave to sit around Kirk’s house with us while I healed up.”
“I’ve been in that house.”
“Well, you couldn’t have met Alice anyplace else. But George got bored, went back west so he could nail his high school girlfriend, but she kept him out there, got married, and what’d the girl do?”
“Probably dropped dead.”
“Not your first rodeo, is it? Stroke at age thirty-four, just about kills our lad too, that messes George up but good. I’ve got my fellowship from UCSB, working on seed crops, so he comes out here in the summers, mixes one compound, spits in another, and this past July he and I cobble up this faster version of the Kuwaiti concoction, rich in omega-threes, gets pet odor out of furniture, and Kirk sends his little girl out here to try it on her to fix the kid’s scoliosis. Ol’ Kirk was scared spitless of her, I guess she’d gotten pretty rough with him—hard to picture.”
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