23

When Julie wakes she has no clue where she is, or what has happened. For a moment she thinks she is back in her own bedroom, at home. It is only then that she realizes Sue Ellen is no longer with her. The moldering dampness is gone, yippee! She is so relieved, but where is Breakfast? Her mom?

Her mother is gone, and the dog, and Dyllis. They don’t dare return to the campsite; Cliffort will be taken somewhere – it is against the law to be homeless; Julie will be hauled off to foster care. Julie wants her daddy.

“Cliffort,” she says. “Do you think we’re going the right way? I wish you could talk. I wish you could tell me who did this to you. Cliffort, I want to find my daddy.”

He croaks something that sounds like, “Me, too,” and nods, pointing to his throat. She thinks this means yes. They set out in silence, picking their way through rusted refrigerators, heaps of tires, past mounds of heavy-duty trash bags which had been tossed from cars or trucks, years ago, never collected… And with every minute, now that the moldering wet spot is gone, the boiling inside Julie grows worse. Now she goes on boiling, faster and faster, each cell exploding in turn, and she is in constant pain, not so awful but tiny, sharp and constant. But perhaps equally as terrible her skin is peeling in sheets, layer after layer, as it is being cooked, though no one could say where the heat was coming from except that in a sense her own body is burning itself up, as eventually so do all stars.

Dyllis is always so cheerful but now she is getting tired. And her lavender feather donkey grows weaker and weaker. Murielle has to keep removing their items from the panniers the donkey carries, but even that is no good, and emitting a sound that is a cross between a bray and a crow, it keels over – poor little thing, dead in the dirt, and the bright eyes of rats peep from dirt holes and pipes, only waiting politely for them to leave so they can begin a carrion feast.

Dyllis is also looking sickly; she darts behind refuse every few minutes to relieve herself. “You okay?” asks Murielle.

Dyllis shrugs. It is odd but she feels she is running out of words.

Both Murielle and Dyllis are thinking, is it cholera? Typhus or yellow fever? Whatever it is, Dyllis can’t go on any more. She has only a few words to say. “I can’t go on.”

“But we must go on! Just a little further, we’ll find somewhere to stop for the night.” Murielle can’t help her much, she has to carry Breakfast, it is too difficult for him to walk now on his tender, blistered pads.

“I’m sorry. Thank you, Mama. Where we going, Mama?”

“We’re trying to get to your daddy’s, poor doggy.” In her fatigue, loveliness has come over her, she is kind, the dog wags its tail, how gently she carries him, cradling him in her arms.

“How far?” Breakfast asks.

“I don’t know, I guess… it’s gotta be, what, thirty miles away? We’ll have to sleep somewhere, eventually, and keep walking in the morning, maybe we can go along the highway, don’t worry, honey, Mama’s in charge… Come, Dyllis, I think I see something.”

In the darkness, ahead, is a fire, not too large… Rapists? Not too likely, there really aren’t any men around capable of sex, let alone those who want to have it with a woman… Murderers? Perhaps, but then one speaks to her in such a polite tone, somehow… old-fashioned, courtly. “Ma’am?”

She coughs. “Hello… Mind if we join you?”

The people around the campfire shift where they squat or sit, looking nervous. “Ma’am? Any chance you got any work fer us?”

“Don’t any of you have a job?”

The fire crackles gently. “Cain’t find no work, nowhere, ma’am.”

Derelicts, homeless people, crazies… who knows… they must look pretty terrible by now themselves. She takes Dyllis by the elbow, the others make room. “Sorry about the dirt, ma’am.”

One has a guitar and is strumming a few unfamiliar notes. “‘I’ve been doing some hard travelin’, this much I know…’”

“My friend’s sick and my dog needs some water. We’re tired out and can’t go on. The government bulldozed my home and they hunted us down.” Murielle is weary, so weary, and though she hasn’t eaten in what seems like days she has shown no signs of weight loss. Is it her metabolism, then? If only she could lose even five pounds, then she would be happy. Maybe she could exercise, do crunches, Pilates, yoga – but without any strength, how can she?

“I’m sure you’re welcome to join us.”

“It’d be a right pleasure, ma’am.”

She sits next to Dyllis and is given a little dish and a bottle of Nature’s Caul Morphew Valley Recycled Pure Export water. For a few minutes around the stinking rubber fire no one says anything. Then the man picks up his guitar again and another joins in, “‘…Brother can you spare a dime?’”

“You know,” says another man after a pause, “That little lady, she’s got some kind of a ghost behind her, jes’ a-floatin’ there.”

“Tha’s right,” says another, “mebbe we been out here too long, but I can see it too. Kinda… damp and gloomy, like.”

Murielle knows nothing about any ghosts but at this remark a giant wet spot surrounds her and she is one with the wet spot.

It is so vivid, so real, that she begins to wipe herself off with her skirt, then rummages in her bag for one of the fancy towels she had bought on sale at the ZWiport Discount Outlet Mall and had the sense to take with her.

But the wet spot! It is scary. It is so sticky, so… gelatinous. It is as if she is far, far outside her body, up in the air, high above the planet, looking down at the stunted swirling seas and dusty continents, pink sand and black burning rubber tires. Or even higher, nothing but stars winking whitish blue phosphorescence in a sea of black emptiness. And someone screaming. What the heck, who is it? “Capitalist roader! Landowner. You no good. You eat and eat; I hungry all time.”

“Oh no!” Murielle suddenly gets what Julie had always been blabbering about. “Now I’ve got to sleep on the wet spot!” She could have cried: the wet spot, she sees now, is the loneliest, meanest place in the world. “It’s Sue Ellen!”

“You no even know my name, you calla me Sue Ellen, it Xie Yao Lin.”

“Huh?”

“Yes, I Red Guard in Cultural Revolution, I turn in my neighbors, I turn in my teacher, I turn in my mother and when I find my father has used Little Red Book in toilet, I turn him in too! When I am student, twelve years of age, we go by train to Beijing, trip very long, train crowded, I no paying attention, I fall out window, hit head, die!” Xie Yao Lin’s voice softens a bit. “Sometime I think, maybe I no fall, maybe I pushed, some girls, they maybe jealous, I am captain of squadron. But… anyway, it my own fault, my family not so good, I find Mother’s Guoylin statues under floor, I smash and turn her in! These things of the corrupt past, we must move to future! Also she take extra food from place of work, she serving State Dinners, this wrong! I send her for re-education! ‘Why, daughter, why?’ Mother is crying, ‘I only take food for you.’ This not true, it wrong! Now your turn to learn. You know nothing! In China, first thing you say, ‘Have you eaten?’ You never ask me if I have eaten, you are land-owning family.”

But, she’s just a little girl! Xie Yao Lin, Murielle thinks, why are you bothering us?

“Hole through planet,” Xie Yao Lin explains, “bad idea. Fell in. Little kids, we used to dig holes in ground and say, ‘Let’s dig all the way to USA!’ Now I miss my mama, especially her dumplings.”

Here and there as Cliffort and Julie walk hand-in-hand, bits of green are sprouting through the asphalt cracks. Rapid-growing weeds, maybe non-indigenous, or hybridized mutations. It is nice to see green things, however, even if the tendrils do claw at them, hooking into flesh, as they go by. As they get closer to the city, there are more and more homeless people at campfires. “We bin ta war with them torrorists for more n’ eighty years now,” says an old man.

“It’s the darn President,” says another. “He made an enemy of the country when he picked Robert Emmerling as GOP leader and Suki Fossing as Secretary of State.”

“That’s for sure,” says the first. “And whaddaya think, the Mets going to make it to the finals this year?”

“Dyllis? Dyllis, are you okay?”

“I… I… I…” That is the last word Dyllis has left, and it is a short one. Then she dies.

It is too late to help. Murielle would like to bury her, but her arms are too weak to dig even if she had a shovel. She would like to cry, but her eyes have no tears in them. Dry eye syndrome. With the dog, Murielle departs, hoping to find help. So it goes. Who mourns Dyllis? It made no difference. Dyllis is dead. Dead as a doornail? Doorknob? Doorbell? Who knows.

Murielle forgets she wanted to find assistance in burying Dyllis. Murielle by now is miles away, at a different campfire, watching HDMTV. As always someone has one rigged up, somehow, to a generator or an engine. It occurs to Murielle that if she were alone, she could never make the slightest thing work; all of history, as far back as the Iron Age, even earlier, would be lost forever. No stainless steel, no cyclosporine, no telephone. There would be no hot and cold running fluids! Nor could she rub two sticks together to make a fire, nor repair an escalator, nor hunt with bow and arrow.

“Everything okay there, ma’am?”

Murielle shakes her head. She is being harangued once again by Xie Yao Lin, Little Miss-Know-It-All! Little Miss Red Guard is screaming at her, over and over, “You will be re-educated!” Her voice is the torment of a million flies. “You left your friend, she is dead! Now your beautiful decadent daughter is dying right this minute!”

“Who?” says Murielle.

“Number One daughter. You have no sons, you no good.”

“What? Tahnee? What happened?”

“She dead, she no good. She go with men for money. She have baby in belly, no married. Had to be punished! You will be sent for re-education. You cow-demon!”

What is a cow-demon, anyway, Murielle wonders, watching the screen. A healthy blonde, fertile in appearance, announces in a superior tone, “Look around you. Doesn’t this look so green? We are working to save the environment from Homeland ecO2-terrorism. We are working to keep it green. This is thanks to Bermese Pythion and Great Divide Petroleum Coconut edible jelly products. You can contribute by sending your money to PO Box 1128…”

“I don’t know what this thing is but it sure is something,” says one man.

“What are you talking about?” says Murielle.

“Ma’am? The big screen? We never seen nothing like it outside a motion pitcher house, and this one’s got the craziest pitchers on it I ever did see.”

She squints in disbelief. “Where are you fellows from, anyway?”

“Most of us… we lost our farms, dust bowl came and blew away our crops, an so the banks foreclosed –”

“What? Farms? Where?”

“Oklahoma, them parts.”

“We thought we was heading for Californie,” says another. “They say the oranges just fall from the trees.”

“They say there’s plenty of work out there,” said the first. “But, I don’t think this is the right place.”

“What?” Murielle shakes her head. “You guys are nuts. California fell into the ocean years ago. You’re in New Jersey.”

“New Jersey! I don’t understand. How’d we get in New Jersey?”

“That’s east, ain’t it?” says the first, taking out his guitar and beginning to strum. “We been traveling a long time. What year is it, anyway?”

“What year do you think it is?” says Murielle suspiciously.

“Nineteen hundred and thirty-three, thereabouts, I reckon,” he says, and begins to sing while he plays, “‘This land is your land, this land is my land –’”

The hologramovision blares in the background. “Looking at the five-day forecast, Monday there’s a chance of snow, temperatures in the mid-twenties to low thirties, according to the Doppler radar. Tuesday, a beautiful day, folks, we’re looking at ninety-degree temperatures, no humidity, get out your golf clubs and tennis racquets!”

Over the voice of the weatherman, the others join in, their voices cracking, out-of-practice, “‘From California, to the New York Island, from the Gulf Stream waters, to the redwood forest – this land was made for you and me.’”

“Hey, ma’am, would you get your damn dawg offen me?” At the campfire the dog, normally very shy in public, begins to talk. Perhaps it is the fire, surrounded by glowing eyes; there is something left in him of the wild, after all. Who knows what genes have been incorporated in the lab to create him, there are still the genes of some distant ancestor who lurks just outside the outskirts of warmth, hoping for a bone or bit of fat and not a kick.

“Teecher. Bruther,” he pleads with the man. “Please let me fock you. Please let me fock leg.”

“Get away from me, peckerhound.”

“Aw, Mike, let the little feller get some action.”

“Aw, awwright. What the.”

But it has taken all the dog’s energy to produce such complex sentences and, feeling a possible bowel movement coming on, he goes off in the darkness to hunch.

He misses Slawa desperately, more than he would ever have guessed. It was Slawa who had the patience to train him to speak; he had tried for so hard and so long, when the girls first got him, but they laughed at his moans and dull squeals, it was Slawa who stroked his throat to show him how to push out air to form language, who placed a pencil in his mouth to press his tongue into place; it was because of Slawa’s patience that when at last the first few words burst out they had a faint Russian accent. In Breakfast’s head is a warm yellow circle. And though Breakfast thinks only in shapes, he knows that Slawa, eventually, will find him.

It seems days later that Julie and Cliffort arrive at the tunnel. They have to rent oxygen masks and canisters at one end, to be returned at the other – if they make it. The tunnel is lined with cars, moving so slowly it takes days to get through; the drivers bring along extra liters of sugaroline so they can refuel, the windows are cranked up and the air-conditioning is on, it is a passage only for the very wealthy; those traveling by foot will die if they can’t move quickly enough, oxygen used up, but it is sometimes difficult to move at all, with the crush of other pedestrians attempting to squeeze by.

Strangely, the limited oxygen, the occasional blasts of carbonized caramel methane-monoxide gases, makes Julie feel healthier – maybe whatever organism inhabiting her is dying. She has to admit now, she has not been this well since Sue Ellen was around, if only because the ghost’s mildewed wetness made the exploding cells within her, fat drops in a frying pan, burst less frequently.

In the city they find the nearest subway. Julie thinks she remembers the way, get off at 42nd Street, Times Square. Neither had realized they would wait so long for the uptown train to arrive.

A full day passes, waiting on the platform. This is how people in India used to live! The garbled announcements coming from overhead, “For your safety, let the people off the train! We are sorry for the unavoidable delay!” Mostly recordings, the occasional real voice saying, “Due to a police investigation…” or, an hour later, “Because of a fire earlier this morning –”

When the train does arrive the car they get onto is strangely empty. The odor is peculiar, perhaps that is why others have chosen, mostly, not to be on this car; the smell is familiar, Julie can’t place it, until she realizes… it reminds her of her daddy. And the smell to her is curiously comforting.

Cliffort removes his chewing gum, his last piece of Terrific Exploding Cyclone Shock Strawberry Trouble Whammy Bubble Gum (a non-edible chewing product from Condé-Bertlesman!).

He has been chewing it for days, he sticks it under the seat, there is already a huge lump there, bumpy and hard. He sticks his piece on top; for some reason this strikes him as amusing. Gum on top of gum. Eventually the whole train will be a sticky rubber tomb.

“Watch the closing doors! If you see a suspicious object, report it! The next stop is…” There is a hissing noise, it sounds like it’s coming from somewhere on their car.

Between stations, a woman in their car jumps up and yells. “No, no, no!” Then she runs to the doors between the cars and bolts. This is unusual, but only a little bit. The passengers shake their heads; another New York nut.

The train stops. The lights flicker, then go out. The pre-recorded announcement, “We apologize for the unavoidable delay,” is followed by that of the conductor saying, “Folks, we have a sick passenger on the train –” The hissing becomes a shrill whine, similar to the sounds once made by cicadas, only nobody now knows that. The conductor speaks again. “Due to an ongoing police investigation –”

“So irritating!” Julie mutters.

Cliffort thinks it is coming from underneath the seat. He reaches down. No, it is only the big wad of gum, topped with that of his own. Strange, though, that the sound is so close. Still the train does not move, then, slowly the lights flicker on, they seem to be making progress. It lurches forward again.

Beneath the seat, the time bomb makes a sound like a heavily breathing man. Then a series of musical notes, the chord of D and then of G. The train is again moving! And in that time bomb is time, all the time in the world, all the time lost and wasted and the time that has been used. The time of a hot summer afternoon in 1898 in the Midwest when the green leaves snore on the tender branches and in a nearby office a young man looks out the window wishing he was at Lake Will O’ The Woods. The children’s laughter floats from the cool water, higher and higher into the atmosphere until it disappears but it is not gone. It is only somewhere else in time.

Time spins out of the canister in loopy curls, baked flat, a sheet cake topped with butter cream frosting and edible violets for Betty Smiekowski’s twelfth birthday party in 1947. That takes forty minutes of time. 1969, three hours it takes two guys to walk two miles down the highway to Max Yasgur’s farm; they had to leave the Karmen Gia behind when the road closed, bumper-to-bumper traffic, it’s a slow walk, smoking a joint, talking to so many groovy chicks, digging the scene.

And the subway car fills with time, hanging in ropey coils, the time spent while four men in poplin raincoats and gray hats wait for the bus to Paddington Station in 1956. The time it takes in 1914 for the smell of orange blossoms to reach the nostrils of the last wild Carolina parakeet.

My gosh! Julie remembers Greg. She has been carrying him around all this time in that vintage matchbox. She slides open the top to give him a crumb and clean the place.

Greg’s legs are sticking up. She touches him and he is a dry husk. Oh, no! “Greg? Greg?” She turns him over, he is dead, maybe it’s not Greg? But there’s that garnet chip of red on his back, as if someone has embedded a little chunk of apple. Is it that she forgot to feed and water him or was it simply the end of his natural life? She will never know.

It is time they are out of but time comes out in a ribbon of chalk. It takes time.

The length of time a bubble of air takes to be trapped in a cube of water turning to ice. And – aw, just look – the passengers smile, here is Ralph Waldo Emerson, standing at his cherry writing desk, so proud, a heron on one leg holding a quill pen. What a time we are having! We’re all together now and the pollarded lime trees blossom at Yasnaya Polyana, while – oh, oh! – here is the Minotaur sobbing and grunting in the back of his sour cave. It is the time it took – though no one knew who it is, or why it needs to take time. They are absorbed in time and then it is quiet.

Slowly it spreads, so slowly, so quickly, from the first subway car to the next, squeezing through a crack in a door or sliding through the molecules of the glass, and drifts across the platform, first one and then the next fall silent, and in time it floats up the stairs leading to the street, sometimes with an odor of mustard gas in the trenches, Ardennes, 1916, sometimes of fresh crushed rosemary in a garden in 1643 near Stratford-Upon-Avon. Or it might be the color one minute after the sun sets, when the sky changes from violet to bitter blue.

Breakfast sits pensively, alone now, at the edge of the fire, the flicking blades of light. “Pee-pul,” says the dog in a mournful voice, “peepul, stay away from the brown acid. Stay away from the brown acid.”

And the people on the subway car are still except for the occasional sigh or shuffle of shoes. One or two may have coughed; one says, in a small voice, “Mama?” but that is all.

The world is the same as always, only a little worse. Life as we know it is not the same, although it is pretty darn similar! Besides, who really knows how it was before? Nobody alive can remember.