12
There is no way Slawa can get back up to the shop carrying his cats unless he has a ladder, but all the stores are, at this hour, closed. Maybe he can find a long rope and tie knots in it? And those poor cats, he can hear them mewing faintly, and a rushing of water. They must be trapped somewhere or they would surely come to him. “Kapiton!” he shouts, “Murka!” but now there is no response.
At the moment he can’t think what to do. It is so hot in the shoe repair, and he is miserable. The bitch threw him out! Bocar is the only one who might soothe him. And now this, losing his cats! The sweat is pouring off him, tiny pearls of emotion, each droplet pure suffering in a condensed form. Here he sits, slumped in despair, a bindlestiff in a spindle-backed chair.
What has he ever gotten out of life, apart from Julie and his cats, that brought him any happiness? And once again it feels as if alien rays or particles are throbbing inside his head, or even worse, like someone has taken a baseball bat to his head when he wasn’t looking. His eyes are dry and crackly, his sweat is oily, his armpit hair a virtual forest that soon will grow so long it will circle his neck and strangle him.
He might as well throw loaves to the fishes, is how he feels about the uselessness of it all. To cool off, Slawa decides after climbing out of the Smoke-Easy, catless, to go to a nearby bar, where he orders a Moscow Mule.
Here are the ingredients of a Moscow Mule, a drink developed around 1946 and mentioned in one of the works of the great writer Erich Maria Remarque
Vodka
Lime juice
Ginger ale
What you see below is not a picture of a Moscow Mule; nevertheless it is a drink.
The President and Scott are on HGMTV, standing next to the horse.
“Oh gosh Wes, isn’t he gorgeous!” Scott can’t help squealing, he is so happy! He embraces the President. Scott, yes, what a man, those muscles, that polished skin, hairless; only his voice is maybe a little offensive, from going to those fancy schools out there where they learn to speak as if their back teeth have been wired together. Scott can’t help this, though: is it his fault he grew up in the New Hollywood section of Nature’s Caul Valley? Adopted at an early age by Big Momma Taneesqua, star of that never-ending sit-com, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, given etiquette lessons, taught to ride through the green fields and across the Nature’s Caul streams, able to ski and fly his own private plane.
He knows how to decorate a home! Is able to give tips on how to frost a red velvet cake in butter cream icing! He can top a cake with candied violets and daisies, and he is beside all that a really nice guy. He is a vegetarian and rescues stray dogs and he is on the board of all sorts of charitable institutions such as, oh never mind. The commentator who has been explaining all of this runs out of time; he has to cut short his praising of Scott and says, “The horse, who is to be renamed Tab Hunter, is a gift to Scott from Mr President. Tab is seventeen hands high – seventeen hands – now that’s a big white hunter! At eight years of age he is still quite young in the equestrian world; purchased secretly by Mr President as a wedding gift for Scott, who is going to give him, shortly, his own gift in return. Let’s listen in, shall we?”
Slawa will never get used to this holographic TV. It is bad enough to have the news commentator standing there behind the bar, so real, but now when the President and Scott and the big horse come into the foreground, Slawa recoils with a start. It was one thing when the holograms were teeny tiny little things. But life-sized! When the horse leans forward for a moment he is certain it is leaning toward him, lip curled, about to take a chomp on his sleeves.
But everyone else seems used to this new system; they all laugh when they notice Slawa jump, making it clear that, to them, Slawa is about as sophisticated as those first viewers of the motion pictures, who yelled and ran from the theater when it appeared a train was coming down the track – toward the audience.
“I can’t call him Frosty,” says Scott, rubbing his face against the horse. “I am going to call him Tab Hunter. Don’t you think?” What the President doesn’t know – but the viewing audience, most of them do know – is that Scott has discovered the horse some time before and has to pretend, wink, wink! that it is a surprise.
The President shrugs. “Whatever you want, baby. He’s all yours. Happy birthday. I hope he’s what you wanted.”
“Ooh, he is. My big mack daddy.” Scott gives the President a brief hug, and in one easy motion places his impeccable left boot into the stirrup and lifts his other leg over Tab’s big white bottom. Tab, in a brief power-play neighs and bucks a little, as if he doesn’t know what Scott is trying to do! Only Scott is such an equestrian that, somehow, with a firm grip from Scott’s strong thighs, Tab settles down immediately, for he realizes now who is in charge.
At a brisk trot Scott waves to the camera, heads out of the White House Fortress and into the grassland beyond. The houses and buildings in the vicinity were long ago knocked down, turned into green verdant swathes to house the bunkers below in an extra blanket of safety.
“Be careful!” the President calls as the two firm bottoms – one belonging to Scott, the other to the horse – disappear from view. “Now that’s a pretty sight, isn’t it?” says the President into the camera. “And now let me turn for a moment to a more serious matter: in our quest for oil, it has proved necessary to once again set off underwater nucular bombs.” Mr President chuckles. “One great thing about my tenure as President was being able to change that word to nucular. Let me pause to say, thank you viewers for your support on this important issue, I received nearly half a million letters praising my action. And now it’s time, I believe, to take a break for a commercial. Mr Clean and the Green Giant – I hear CLEAN PEAS is a new co-product you’re to tell us about?”
Once in a while a murderous rage comes over him. The first time it happened, he had just been released from whatever kind of institution it was, back in Russia. When he got home his mother was no longer there. All the old people in Moscow had disappeared, the babushkas, the toothless granddads with their bottles.
Two men occupied the apartment. Growing up in the Soviet Union, he had not known what homosexuality was. There had been no mention of such activity or such people, because it was illegal. Therefore, it did not exist. And then, on this, his first day out, to be greeted by two men who claimed to have never heard of his mother, to claim they had lived there for fifteen years, and inviting him in for a 3-way. In his grief and confusion, Slawa supposed he had a temper tantrum, or something: throwing the garbage pail, breaking up some furniture, smashing one man, repeatedly, into the refrigerator until the door opened and inside he saw orange juice, and cheeses, and chocolate! Meat and coffee, whole coffee beans in a bag! Tins of caviar, a plump cooked chicken! Then he really lost it, he could not even force himself to think of what had happened. Anyway, it was a long time ago.
Apart from rare occasions, though, Slawa is really a gentle soul. Even though Murielle thinks he drinks a lot, as far as he is concerned he drinks very little. Perhaps something has been slipped into his drink? He is so angry, suddenly. He could kill them. He should kill them. These people, what do they know of suffering? They are the golden ones, inheritors of objets de vertu and antique Japanese swords. They dwell in the Lost City of Atlantis, or Treasure Island. The VIP room of Pimlico Racetrack.
For him, Slawa, with anvil and hammer, a lifetime or many lives spent as a serf, a peon, kulak, coolie, slave. The blood of the lowly has run in his veins for a thousand years. What do they know of Beriya and the KGB and his one hundred years of cabbage and rotten fish in the loony bin?
In his youth he memorized great chunks of poetry: Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pushkin. Samizdat-style he could recite hundreds of pages at a time. Now he remembers none of it. How can that be? It is as if a file up there has been deleted. It will soothe him, he thinks, to find something familiar. He tries now to find something on the computer, types in Akhmatova, under a variety of spellings, under a number of search engines, but the only things that come up: BUY AKHMATOVA ON EBAY; EGYPTIAN ANKHS; TOVA FELDSHUH.
It is almost dawn before he drifts to sleep in the hot chemical air of the shoe repair shop; momentarily the cats have stopped their mewling; he dreams of Alga, his first wife. Alga had been young when the first signs of reeTVO.9 began. He would come home and find her standing in the kitchen, staring into space and even after three or four “hellos”, she still remained in that kind of trance.
Meanwhile on the stove the butter in the fry pan long since melted, first the honey-gold picking up to a sizzle, browning, browning, growing dark and then, zzzzz! That moment from brown to burnt, nothing remaining but an acrid smell and the dull hissing of the furious pan, such a long trip from cow udder, even to get to cow udder, four stomachs, the cud regurgitated, green and fetid, you could go through each single step, no, it was impossible.
Before they left the house, she couldn’t find her pocketbook, her glasses, in the house her glasses disappear, there are sunglasses and there are glasses for reading and there are bifocals, nobody will get any laser treatment any more, not since two million people who had had the lasik went blind overnight! The house keys, she puts them down and the next time she tries to go out they are gone; the frozen TV dinners are underneath the bed, the hologramovision controls are in the refrigerator; the scissors, her left shoe, the steel wool, the list of – where could they possibly have gone?
It is in this sense that inanimate objects are animate. She is convinced objects have lives, thoughts and feelings of their own. And she is convinced, too, they are out to get her. What if she is right? He has noticed tiny quartz crystals appearing here and there all over the house, as if someone had cried and the tears froze; or flaming pieces of toast leaping out of the toaster across the room, flames made solid; knobs spontaneously falling from doors, leaving in their wake a trail of tiny wires, screws, door-knob innards of springs and pink rubber.
For Alga things rapidly got worse – admittedly she was quite young but in a sense this was a relief, whatever is wrong with her isn’t his fault. All this time his irritation with her had progressed as well. He could not help himself. “Alga, what the hell’s the matter with you! How many times do I have to tell you:
Pick up your dirty laundry from the floor
Bring your dirty dishes to the kitchen
Separate plastic, glass and metal
Turn off the lights when you leave a room
Don’t leave the water running
After you take a shower
open the window in the bathroom
Close the refrigerator door
Don’t mix coloreds with the whites
Lower the volume or you’ll go deaf
Did you hear me?
Are you listening?
Close the cap tightly
Write it down.
Write it
Down.”
It did no good to tell her these things. Whimpering, sobbing, she told him he was mean. Also she had become oversexed, lascivious; she followed him around leering, rubbing up against him, trying to get him, humpity, humpity, twitching bunny.
It did her no good.
They had never had what you might call a passionate sex life; now she was mentally the age of ten, mind going backward, only body headed the other way, rapidly.
One day he opened the front door and a flood of water – which even in those days was gray, though at least it did run when you turned on the tap – flowed out over his feet. Alga had put the stopper in the bath and left the water on, before going out… “Slawa!” she yelled in horror when she arrived home some time later and found him mopping, mopping. “What has happened, what did you do?”
“What did I do? Me? You’re the one who is a danger, you turn everything around you into some kind of weapon! What were you thinking of?”
He starts listing her crimes only she starts talking at the same time; the two of them are involved in some kind of weird ancient poetry slam, Keats versus Grandmaster Flash:
“Of? Of? Don’t dangle your participles at me young man! Of what were you thinking?” “What was I thinking of?”
He never dangled his participles again. He gave up, what was the point? There is no choice. He waits months for a place and finally is allowed her admission into La Galleria Senior Mall and Residence Home for the Young at Heart.
In much the same way as the inhabitants are falling apart, so is this place.
It is a nightmare.
Most of the escalators are permanently defunct, the glass elevators often break halfway up or down, leaving ten or fifteen sick and old people – who usually crowd in beyond the maximum number – hanging in mid-air, unable to surmise what has happened. Though sometimes, forces combined, they’ve been known to gather enough
strength to crash out the glass elevator walls and occasionally tumble several stories to the ground floor of the atrium below in what could be mistaken for a group suicide.
In addition to working all day for his uncle, Slawa puts in hours on the weekends and at night as well, driving the “limo”, a town car, in order to pay the monthly fees at the home. He has little time to sleep, even less time to visit Alga in the home, though he goes whenever he can.
One day at the Senior Mall he found himself chatting with a guy who also had a wife in there. “They’re saying within a few years three-quarters of the population is going to come down with this kind of reeTVO.9 thing, brains slowly turning to spider webs, cotton bolls, ectoplasm, gelatin, candy floss, kapok, what have you, fluffy nebulous stuff; thousands upon thousands are coming down with this disease, this virus, whatever it is, hey, I have inside information they don’t want the rest of you to know, pretty soon millions will walk the streets gibbering, still human but without a brain.”
Finally he escapes by saying he has to go find his wife; at last he spies her in the Music Room, which had once, in a previous incarnation, housed a Food Court. Today’s activity: Sing-A-Long. Generally these days Alga is past being able to participate but this day, as he sat down beside the boarded-up Wok On (where once Chinese food and Japanese sushi sat in their sad world of stainless steel trays), he sees her singing, mouthing, at least, the words to Like A Virgin, an old song, perhaps played to her in her childhood, and he finds that tears well in his eyes as he listens to the words: “Like a virgin, touched for the very first time. Like a virgin, when your heart beats next to mine,” sung so sweetly and badly out of tune by listless shufflers, the dazed and mentally confused staring off into space, some of whom wear helmets for their own protection, others in wheelchairs, or rolled in on wheeled beds, only able to weakly flail arms and grimace from time to time, either to the music or as indication that sheets are in need of a change.
“Right!” exclaims the sprightly instructor LaVitra. “How many of you remember Gwen Stefani and her number one hit, Hollaback Girl!”
No response. But LaVitra is determined, she’s got the microphone in her hand and goes from person to person; still no response. “Can you believe this, Keith?” She’s talking to the keyboard player; neither of them can believe that this is where they ended up, both of them had such plans and dreams, they were even once on a TV program! Now, in order to pay the rent they have to travel one day here, one day at another place, all the time singing these senior ancient songs, maybe they could even have their own show on TV, like, the Lawrence Whelk Show or something? Singing, I Can’t Get No Satisfaction or…
“Oh, I don’t believe this! Nobody here remembers Hollaback Girl? Let me try and refresh you all – Oooh, ooh, this is my shit, oooh ooh, this is my shit – come on, everybody join in – oooh, ooh…”
Keith on the electric keyboard tries to energize the crowd, he claps his hands over his head, “Let me hear you put your hands together!” until finally, some dull glimmer of recognition and one or two join in.
“Okay then!” says LaVitra enthusiastically, “How about some requests! Anybody?”
An old lady in the front pipes up, “Do you know Too Drunk to Fuck by The Dead Kennedys?” Nervously the music therapist looks over at the keyboard player, “Keith? Ever hear of that one?”
Keith shakes his head, “Oh boy! Nope! My goodness that must be a real Oldie-but-Goody, huh? And to think I thought I knew them all! You got me stumped!”
“How about anybody else?”
“Um… I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For?”
“Yeah, who doesn’t know that one, from that famous Nobel Prize two-time winning pop star who founded Shop to Help the Poor! Okay, this time I want to hear everybody sing, at least on the chorus, a-one and a two – ‘I have kissed honey lips, felt the healing in her fingertips it burned like fire, this burning desire. But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for’.”
The old people are pierced and tattooed, they have rings through their noses and lips; this is useful because when they wander off they can be chained to their beds or hooks screwed into the corridor walls; the tattoos on the flabby drooping skin have warped, melted, silly-putty shapes of what was once a rose or a faux-Maori symbol, eagles with saggy beaks, skulls with bared teeth that now need dental work from moles and skin tags and warts that look like chips and cavities.
The old ladies have huge breasts, so old they date back to the days when women had them implanted before tiny breasts became the fashion – all the women have them. It’s not even their fault. It dates back to some kind of medical/drug company scandal. At one time virtually all women were diagnosed – falsely, as it turned out – with breast cancer. They had all gotten the big boobies. The men are so wrinkly it is clear they date back to the days before men had face-lifts.
And their clothing! It is so last year! What could they have been thinking, that styles remain unchanged since their youth when they wore blue jeans and stiletto heels? Or had silky straight hair and plucked eyebrows?
Slawa can’t help but fume. He is going to strangle someone! It is boiling up in him, it is all so pathetic. How could they have let a man win a Nobel Prize who doesn’t know he has written C- lyrics that include a sentence ending with a preposition!! It should be… I still haven’t found the object for which I was looking! English isn’t even his first language but he knows better than that! Talk about a cliché! “Honey lips/burning desire”. But those old people – well, some of them aren’t that old, they are just brainless, missing dendrites, neurons, synapses, glucose – they are all singing along in a funereal dirge, it’s not even a song!! It’s a dirge! If Bononobo – whatever his name – was here he would personally strangle him!! Long since dead, go on, award the Famous Celebrities all the money and prizes, why?
All that was a long time ago…
And it rains. It rains. Snows, and rains; this is followed by tornado and then one hundred twenty degrees. But mostly, now, the rain. And when it rains the water never goes anywhere, it stays in the troughs of the street that turn into canals. The whole damn place a temporary Venice of spittle, soot, papers, oysters of phlegm, dog poop, the rain water combines with chemical waste and tranny fluid, bilious acid green, luminous, iridescent. Chemical salts, left over from winter, strange rubbery clusters blossom in damp doorways, and the New Yorkers spend all their time scratching their heads, the stuff goes on the sidewalk, dander, flakes, the fingernail parings, bits of old dental floss, earwax scraped out with a fingernail and rubbed off to the pavement. You can put the stuff on an agar plate and blistering forms of life hitherto unknown to man will blossom, not that anybody ever does this but… still, there it is, all getting washed down and mixed together, the drops from an almost empty can of soda pop, dregs from paper coffee cups, bird droppings, swollen crumbs from bagels and pizza rinds.
The original primordial ooze only supercharged and ready to pop even if the entire rest of the planet and all mankind and animal life finds itself nuked! This stuff is so highly ionized – positive and negative – it could burst into life in a day, if given the chance, and a day – or more – is what it took for the soup to drain, even when the sun comes out.
Which in a way is what happens. The grates, the cesspools, the swamp at the corner of each block is… how deep? A foot, two feet, deep with run-off because somehow the city had been designed in such a way that no water ever could run off. Maybe the drains are clogged, or simply higher than the rest of the sidewalk, and meanwhile you have to be extra careful, the battery acid in the water simply corrodes the insulation on the electrics, every other day someone is quite randomly… electrocuted! And on the first sunny day, when the temperature rockets to a hundred and twenty, the water doesn’t drain but begins to grow. It has turned powdery yet eggy, like that trick sand under water that stays dry, the lemon eggy color, only a bit lighter, and swells so rapidly it takes over the sidewalks and begins to seep down the steps leading into the subways, swelling and heaving; and if you touch it it burns your skin, just the top layer, but doesn’t hurt – but then, at least according to what’s on the news, you are prone to infections and this swollen dry yellow… spongiform feeds off the skin, stuff stinks like sulfur and can’t be washed off the street by water. Water only makes it sizzle and puff up! It’s an ecological disaster! However, a couple days later the temperature always drops, it goes below freezing and the dry mold cracks, splits, crumbles and disappears and within a day or two no one remembers anything.
There is something Slawa is supposed to buy. He has written it down but where is the paper, what is the object? A switch-cable-timer? A quart of milk? And in this filth he heads out once again. Fortunately the freeze seems to have gotten rid of the hard-boiled yolky substance, now once again it is hot and raining; the hot soup pours out of the sky. Hot! Today the rain coming down is so hot they say it is killing the birds – not that many are left – and it is practically raining chicken noodle soup.
You have to wear a self-cooling polyvinyl raincoat and hat in order not to be scalded. Who’s ever heard of rain with bits and pieces in it, my God, the worst days he had spent as a kid in Russia when the smoke rose from the factories black and tactile hadn’t been as bad as this. Only on the ground the pipe-worms came up, pink and coily. He makes his way gently, picking across the ponds that have gathered in every corner; the puddles are four feet deep in some spots when… all of a sudden, wham! He goes down, flat on his back.
At first he thinks, I must have slipped? Though, how odd, he hadn’t felt himself to be slipping, and, my God, his head, which, when he puts a hand to it, he realizes is dripping with something sticky. As if he has landed in melted ice cream? He hit the curb?
But no, someone is standing over him, yelling, pointing, smashing, it’s Bocar’s uncle, what is he doing here, holding something… What’s the old fellow’s name, Assam? Kamal? Ibrahim? “Oh, hello…” he says weakly, and holds out his arm, assuming that Aboud would recognize him and help him up but no, all too late he realizes it is Aboud who has brought him down and the guy is holding a bat in his hands, an all-American Louisville slugger, the name of which he can now see as Aboud slams the bat down over his chest. “Ooouuugh!” he yelps, and hears something crunch.
“Listen to me. Where is Bocar? You send him back to me, you understand? I know he is with you. Because of you I am in trouble, I have vouched for this youth and accepted the money. I am not going to jail for no reason, you send him back to me or…” And with one final blow of the bat, this time across the upraised right knee, Aboud disappears into the salty rain, leaving Slawa in the gutter while the traffic lights change from red to green and back again.
He doesn’t move. The hot rain stings where he is not covered with the raingear. And when he tries to rise at last, curiously, finds he cannot move. Now the pain replays, fast forward, slow motion, slight variations on a theme. Finally, crawling, a limp invertebrate creature dragging itself through the murk, he becomes aware that people are looking at him oddly. He puts his hand up to his head and finds it is covered with blood. It’s hard to breathe, something crackles in his chest, a bowl of rice crisps unsoftened by milk or popcorn, the sharp kernels scraping his throat.
No, he won’t go to a hospital, utterly worthless, he had been to hospitals with his kids, emergency room: four, five, six hours of waiting to be taken into a curtained cubicle room by some doctor who acts as if you are bothering him.
Bocar would look after him. Bocar, he has to find Bocar. Aboud has probably already been to the shoe repair shop, he hopes Bocar hadn’t bothered to open the place. But how much time has passed, exactly?
Again he tries to get up, again slumps back. The rain is so soft, so warm. The pink pipeworms, freshly hatched, coil over him, devilish things are so quick, up his nostrils! If the rain stops the worms will dry up but there is no sign that the rain will stop. Nevertheless, he realizes he can’t lie here. He will have to get back, somehow. Then, thank God, he manages to get to his feet and just then Bocar arrives.
And, as always, when the kid takes him by the arm, this time picking him up in a half-embrace, practically sobbing, he has that peculiar swooning sensation.
“My fry-end, Slawa, Slawa – are you all right?” Tears are curling down Bocar’s face, are they really tears or is it rain? “Who has doney this thing to you?”
All his attempts to correct the kid’s English haven’t helped.
“Oh, I am all right. Slawa is strong man. Only just… Your uncle, he is very angry, he is looking for you.”
“My uncle did this? He might have killed you, we must take you to the hospital.”
“No, no. No hospitals. Now I want to go back to the shop.”
The kid half-carries him down the street. “I was looking for you, you have been gone all day! I am thinking, what has happened?”
“I told you not to go out!”
“Only, just, I am thinking something has happened, I came out to look but the wrong way. Finally, I was just about to go back when I es-pied you. My friend, you are badly wounded, you are bleeding from many or-ifices…”
“Just a head wound.” But he is limping and whether or not a rib had been cracked or broken he doesn’t know. And then he is no longer there.
It is almost twenty-four hours later before he regains conscious. And when he wakes his first idea is that he is on a beach, the tide has gone out, leaving behind the dying interior of a mollusk – the words conch or precious wentletrap or sixteen-chambered nautilus come to mind – only he now realizes, breaching sleep into wakefulness it is his tongue, hung over, stuck to the roof of his mouth. My God, what is going to become of him, he is stiff and sweaty from sleeping on the floor and far away he can hear the faint yowl of his cats and the rush of the subway train cascading, an underground cataract of metal bones. Coral. Various shells. Variegated shells in shades of taupe and tortoise. Abalone. Spiny urchin. Gooeyduck, gooeyduck, gooey…
Somehow, Bocar has gotten him to the hospital where now, twenty-four hours later, they are still waiting to be seen. It’s an entire next day! Bocar has covered him with some sort of hospital sheet, even so he is stiff from having lain so long on the floor. He manages, finally, to get up, drag himself to the filthy toilet, approach a nurse. “Yes. I told your little friend, you don’t have insurance. We need your insurance information or cash upfront.”
“How much cash?”
“We can keep the money in escrow but we’ll need two hundred fifty thousand as a deposit to proceed. I’m sorry, but by law I’m not allowed to touch you unless we know someone will be paying for the treatment. I gave your pal some antiseptic ’cause I felt sorry for him… and you, but… I was about to call the police. You see all these people?”
Through bleary eyes he looks around. There are hundreds of people with stab wounds, bullet wounds, he guesses, moaning, crying, little kids clutching their ears and even one holding an arm in a position as if it is broken. There are old folks with what had to have been Chuntey Bolls or even Derwent Scrubs, faces covered with virulent pussy warts. My God, he is just another in this hideous place. There are mouse droppings. And overflowing baskets of garbage, newspapers, fast food wrappers; he sees his pet SloMoFlies are having a field day. There are people plugged in to their music boxes wearing the video glasses, eating pitha, Yabba Bits; there are children’s shows blaring on the walls from the few hologramovisions that still work.
“But I don’t understand.” He puts his hand up to his head, it is scabbing over but he feels a chunk of something fingernail sized, holy-moley, his own brain?
“When we get one of these hot rains, a lot of people always seem to get hurt and they pour in here. I always feel too bad to throw them out until the rain stops, most of them have nowhere to go. But I have to get the place cleared out.”
He drags himself back to Bocar and manages to explain the situation. “Anyway, my friend, I am fine now, come.”
Yet on the street he realizes he is weaker than he had thought. Crowds are flowing up from the subways, this means they aren’t working; this always happens after a flood. Buses, no, they stopped those long ago when traffic got too jammed. They might be able to take a mini-motor rickshaw, the city imported them from India years ago and they can get around, though slowly, up on the sidewalk, back down in the street – but between the two of them they don’t have enough cash and his credit chip is dead… With his arm around Bocar’s frail shoulder he manages to slowly hobble back to the shoe shop.
After the attack, Slawa’s teeth hurt all the time. A cheap dentist who advertised in the paper only laughs and says it is going to cost at least a hundred and fifty grand, maybe more. Root canal, crowns, caps, bridges… the whole system is rotted, infected. He is a head rotting on top of a rotting body. A rotting head on a rotting body in a rotting country on a rotting world!
And in addition to his teeth hurting, he is furious, with a kind of permanent fury inside him that he can mostly control but then spews out. Almost anything can set him off, a car blocking the intersection after the light has changed, someone cutting ahead of him on a line, it didn’t matter. He rarely has a drink, it makes his head hurt even more, his temper is so bad, he is so labile he beats up Bocar and not even for any reason.
He comes in from someplace, finds Bocar with the cash register till open. “What are you doing! You little thief!” He grabs Bocar by the ear, smacks him in the face, knee to the stomach. The kid is sobbing, on the ground, when Slawa emerges from his trance, a trance of rage, because of course now he remembers, there is no money in the till! The cash register is just for looks, because nobody has paid for anything in cash for years! He himself has said it was okay for Bocar to play with the register, the poor guy is just a kid after all! And in the moment of revelation he tries to obfuscate any reason for having struck Bocar. Then seeing the kid on the floor like a whupped dog, he bursts into tears. “Oh, my friend, I am sorry, forgive me.”
Now the kid is crying too, “You were the on-LY one I trust, now see, you are like the others! I have been sold as a slave, almost, so that the rich people do not have to fight… and when Uncle took me in I did not know he would be no better – now you. Don’t you see how wrong that is?”
Both of them are bawling. He hasn’t understood until now that Bocar is almost completely deaf. Why or how has he not figured that out? The kid has said, from time to time, what, or excuse me, I cannot hear, but he never took him seriously. “Yes I know this is wrong,” Slawa says. “What they have done to you, enslavement – is wrong, and what they have done to me, Slawa, taking away everything – is also wrong. What do you want me to do, I will do anything you ask of me.”
For a long time the kid says nothing, merely shows him.
Now for the first time he learns about the boy and some of what he knows. Bocar is an expert, and he demonstrates to Slawa how ordinary products can be turned into weapons, and how weapons can be used for mass destruction.
There are simple things: how to booby trap a place with trip wires and nails that can be propelled at top speed into a man’s head at the opening of a door; bombs using gasoline and soda bottles; bigger bombs made from ordinary chemical fertilizer.
How to replace the safety seal on a bottle from the pharmacy so that it appears never to have been opened. How to do the same with milk, or juice from the supermarket after adding botulism.
You can make your own botulism at home from ordinary food in Mason jars! Ordinary farm fertilizer makes a bomb. You can purchase ricin and sarin from some Japanese people on the Internet, if you join their cult! New friends in Africa can scrape anthrax spores from hides, put it in a sealed envelope so it looks like a letter, it can be mailed right here to Bocar’s shop for distribution in free hand-outs of sticks of gum!
It dawns on Slawa little by little. Bocar hopes to produce some sort of disaster that may maim, wound, kill hundreds. Or more. How will he feel, innocent people dead or dying?
But he can no longer claim connection with the rest of mankind, he doesn’t care, he can’t sleep or he sleeps too heavily, that nightly running of the bulls trampling the Pamplona streets, wakes in a hot sweat with the lingering fragrance of blood, manure, oranges, but why? He has never been to Spain. He must not look back.
“Okay,” says Slawa at last, “so I see you are really an expert in what you’re doing. But what do you want to do? What do you want me to do?”
“In the name of the people everywhere, who are enslaved to this country, this country who has done such things to me and to you, for their sake and your sake and mine, I want you to help me kill them all.”