"Just about, huh?" he said.
"Just about."
"There's a lot of wiggle room in *just about*, Arthur. It's a free
country, but just the same, I don't think I like you very much. Far as
I'm concerned, you could get lost and never come back."
"Sorry you feel that way, Krishna. I hope I'll grow on you as time goes
by."
"I hope that you won't have the chance to," Krishna said, flicking the
dog end of his cigarette toward the sidewalk.
#
Alan didn't like or understand Krishna, but that was okay. He understood
the others just fine, more or less. Natalie had taken to helping him out
after her classes, mudding and taping the drywall, then sanding it down,
priming, and painting it. Her brother Link came home from work sweaty
and grimy with road dust, but he always grabbed a beer for Natalie and
Alan after his shower, and they'd sit on the porch and kibbitz.
Mimi was less hospitable. She sulked in her room while Alan worked on
the soundwall, coming downstairs only to fetch her breakfast and coldly
ignoring him then, despite his cheerful greetings. Alan had to force
himself not to stare after her as she walked into the kitchen, carrying
yesterday's dishes down from her room; then out again, with a sandwich
on a fresh plate. Her curly hair bounced as she stomped back and forth,
her soft, round buttocks flexing under her long-johns.
On the night that Alan and Natalie put the first coat of paint on the
wall, Mimi came down in a little baby-doll dress, thigh-high striped
tights, and chunky shoes, her face painted with swaths of glitter.
"You look wonderful, baby," Natalie told her as she emerged onto the
porch. "Going out?"
"Going to the club," she said. "DJ None Of Your Fucking Business is
spinning and Krishna's going to get me in for free."
"Dance music," Link said disgustedly. Then, to Alan, "You know this
stuff? It's not playing music, it's playing *records*. Snore."
"Sounds interesting," Alan said. "Do you have any of it I could listen
to? A CD or some MP3s?"
"Oh, *that's* not how you listen to this stuff," Natalie said. "You have
to go to a club and *dance*."
"Really?" Alan said. "Do I have to take ecstasy, or is that optional?"
"It's mandatory," Mimi said, the first words she'd spoken to him all
week. "Great fistfuls of E, and then you have to consume two pounds of
candy necklaces at an after-hours orgy."
"Not really," Natalie said, *sotto voce*. "But you *do* have to
dance. You should go with, uh, Mimi, to the club. DJ None Of Your
Fucking Business is *amazing*."
"I don't think Mimi wants company," Alan said.
"What makes you say that?" Mimi said, making a dare of it with hipshot
body language. "Get changed and we'll go together. You'll have to pay to
get in, though."
Link and Natalie exchanged a raised eyebrow, but Alan was already headed
for his place, fumbling for his keys. He bounded up the stairs, swiped a
washcloth over his face, threw on a pair of old cargo pants and a faded
Steel Pole Bathtub T-shirt he'd bought from a head-shop one day because
he liked the words' incongruity, though he'd never heard the band, added
a faded jean jacket and a pair of high-tech sneakers, grabbed his phone,
and bounded back down the stairs. He was convinced that Mimi would be
long gone by the time he got back out front, but she was still there,
the stripes in her stockings glowing in the slanting light.
"Retro chic," she said, and laughed nastily. Natalie gave him a thumbs
up and a smile that Alan uncharitably took for a simper, and felt guilty
about it immediately afterward. He returned the thumbs up and then took
off after Mimi, who'd already started down Augusta, headed for Queen
Street.
"What's the cover charge?" he said, once he'd caught up.
"Twenty bucks," she said. "It's an all-ages show, so they won't be
selling a lot of booze, so there's a high cover."
"How's the play coming?"
"Fuck off about the play, okay?" she said, and spat on the sidewalk.
"All right, then," he said. "I'm going to start writing my story
tomorrow," he said.
"Your story, huh?"
"Yup."
"What's that for?"
"What do you mean?" he asked playfully.
"Why are you writing a story?"
"Well, I have to! I've completely redone the house, built that soundwall
-- it'd be a shame not to write the story now."
"You're writing a story about your house?"
"No, *in* my house. I haven't decided what the story's about
yet. That'll be job one tomorrow."
"You did all that work to have a place to write? Man, I thought *I* was
into procrastination."
He chuckled self-deprecatingly. "I guess you could look at it that
way. I just wanted to have a nice, creative environment to work in. The
story's important to me, is all."
"What are you going to do with it once you're done? There aren't a whole
lot of places that publish short stories these days, you know."
"Oh, I know it! I'd write a novel if I had the patience. But this isn't
for publication -- yet. It's going into a drawer to be published after I
die."
"*What*?"
"Like Emily Dickinson. Wrote thousands of poems, stuck 'em in a drawer,
dropped dead. Someone else published 'em and she made it into the
canon. I'm going to do the same."
"That's nuts -- are you dying?"
"Nope. But I don't want to put this off until I am. Could get hit by a
bus, you know."
"You're a goddamned psycho. Krishna was right."
"What does Krishna have against me?"
"I think we both know what that's about," she said.
"No, really, what did I ever do to him?"
Now they were on Queen Street, walking east in the early evening crowd,
surrounded by summertime hipsters and wafting, appetizing smells from
the bistros and Jamaican roti shops. She stopped abruptly and grabbed
his shoulders and gave him a hard shake.
"You're full of shit, Ad-man. I know it and you know it."
"I really don't know what you're talking about, honestly!"
"Fine, let's do this." She clamped her hand on his forearm and dragged
him down a side street and turned down an alley. She stepped into a
doorway and started unbuttoning her Alice-blue babydoll dress. Alan
looked away, embarrassed, glad of the dark hiding his blush.
Once the dress was unbuttoned to her waist, she reached around behind
her and unhooked her white underwire bra, which sagged forward under the
weight of her heavy breasts. She turned around, treating him to a
glimpse of the full curve of her breast under her arm, and shrugged the
dress down around her waist.
She had two stubby, leathery wings growing out of the middle of her
back, just above the shoulder blades. They sat flush against her back,
and as Alan watched, they unfolded and flexed, flapped a few times, and
settled back into their position, nested among the soft roll of flesh
that descended from her neck.
Involuntarily, he peered forward, examining the wings, which were
covered in fine downy brown hairs, and their bases, roped with muscle
and surrounded by a mess of ugly scars.
"You...*sewed*...these on?" Alan said, aghast.
She turned around, her eyes bright with tears. Her breasts swung free of
her unhooked bra. "No, you fucking idiot. I sawed them off. Four times a
year. They just grow back. If I don't cut them, they grow down to my
ankles."
#
Mimi was curiously and incomprehensibly affectionate after she had
buttoned up her dress and resumed walking toward the strip of clubs
along Richmond Street. She put her hand on his forearm and murmured
funny commentary about the outlandishly attired club kids in their
plastic cowboy hats, Sailor Moon outfits, and plastic tuxedoes. She
plucked a cigarette from his lips, dragged on it, and put it back into
his mouth, still damp with her saliva, an act that sent a shiver down
Alan's neck and made the hair on the backs of his hands stand up.
She seemed to think that the wings were self-explanatory and needed no
further discussion, and Alan was content to let them stay in his mind's
eye, bat-shaped, powerful, restless, surrounded by their gridwork of
angry scars.
Once they got to the club, Shasta Disaster, a renovated brick bank with
robotic halogen spots that swept the sidewalk out front with a throbbing
penis logomark, she let go of his arm and her body stiffened. She said
something in the doorman's ear, and he let her pass. When Alan tried to
follow her, the bouncer stopped him with a meaty hand on his chest.
"Can I help you sir," he said flatly. He was basically a block of fat
and muscle with a head on top, arms as thick as Alan's thighs barely
contained in a silver button-down short-sleeve shirt that bound at his
armpits.
"Do I pay the cover to you?" Alan asked, reaching for his wallet.
"No, you don't get to pay a cover. You're not coming in."
"But I'm with her," Alan said, gesturing in the direction Mimi had
gone. "I'm Krishna's and her neighbor."
"She didn't mention it," the bouncer said. He was smirking now.
"Look," Alan said. "I haven't been to a club in twenty years. Do you
guys still take bribes?"
The bouncer rolled his eyes. "Some might. I don't. Why don't you head
home, sir."
"That's it, huh?" Alan said. "Nothing I can say or do?"
"Don't be a smart guy," the bouncer said.
"Good night, then," Alan said, and turned on his heel. He walked back up
to Queen Street, which was ablaze with TV lights from the open studio
out front of the CHUM-City building. Hordes of teenagers in tiny,
outrageous outfits milled back and forth from the coffee shops to the
studio window, where some band he'd never heard of was performing,
generally ambling southward to the clubs. Alan bought himself a coffee
with a sixteen-syllable latinate trade name
("Moch-a-latt-a-meraican-a-spress-a-chino," he liked to call them) at
the Second Cup and hailed a taxi.
He felt only the shortest moment of anger at Mimi, but it quickly cooled
and then warmed again, replaced by bemusement. Decrypting the mystical
deeds of young people had been his hobby and avocation since he hired
his first cranky-but-bright sixteen-year-old. Mimi had played him, he
knew that, deliberately set him up to be humiliated. But she'd also
wanted a moment alone with him, an opportunity to confront him with her
wings -- wings that were taking on an air of the erotic now in his
imagination, much to his chagrin. He imagined that they were soft and
pliable as lips but with spongy cartilage beneath that gave way like
livid nipple flesh. The hair must be silky, soft, and slippery as a
pubic thatch oiled with sweat and juices. Dear oh dear, he was really
getting himself worked into a lather, imagining the wings drooping to
the ground, unfolding powerfully in his living room, encircling him,
enveloping him as his lips enveloped the tendons on her neck, as her
vagina enveloped him... Whew!
The taxi drove right past his place and that gave Alan a much-needed
distraction, directing the cabbie through the maze of Kensington
Market's one-way streets back around to his front door. He tipped the
cabbie a couple of bucks over his customary ten percent and bummed a
cigarette off him, realizing that Mimi had asked him for a butt but
never returned the pack.
He puffed and shook his head and stared up the street at the distant
lights of College Street, then turned back to his porch.
"Hello, Albert," two voices said in unison, speaking from the shadows on
his porch.
"Jesus," he said, and hit the remote on his keyring that switched on the
porch light. It was his brother Edward, the eldest of the nesting dolls,
the bark of their trinity, coarse and tough and hollow. He was even
fatter than he'd been as a little boy, fat enough that his arms and legs
appeared vestigial and unjointed. He struggled, panting, to his tiny
feet -- feet like undersized exclamation points beneath the tapered Oh
of his body. His face, though doughy, had not gone to undefined
softness. Rather, every feature had acquired its own rolls of fat, rolls
that warred with one another to define his appearance -- nose and
cheekbones and brow and lips all grotesque and inflated and blubbery.
"Eugene," Alan said. "It's been a very long time."
Edward cocked his head. "It has, indeed, big brother. I've got bad
news."
"What?"
Edward leaned to the left, the top half of his body tipping over
completely, splitting at his narrow leather belt, so that his trunk,
neck, and head hung upside down beside his short, cylindrical legs and
tiny feet.
Inside of him was Frederick, the perennial middle child. Frederick
planted his palms on the dry, smooth edges of his older brother's waist
and levered himself up, stepping out of Ed's legs with the unconscious
ease of a lifetime's practice. "It's good to see you, Andy," he said. He
was pale and wore his habitual owlish expression of surprise at seeing
the world without looking through his older brother's eyes.
"It's nice to see you, too, Frederick," Alan said. He'd always gotten
along with Frederick, always liked his ability to play peacemaker and to
lend a listening ear.
Frederick helped Edward upright, methodically circumnavigating his huge
belly, retucking his grimy white shirt. Then he hitched up his
sweatshirt over the hairy pale expanse of his own belly and tipped to
one side.
Alan had been expecting to see Gregory, the core, but instead, there was
nothing inside Frederick. The Gregory-shaped void was empty. Frederick
righted himself and hitched up his belt.
"We think he's dead," Edward said, his rubbery features distorted into a
Greek tragedy mask. "We think that Doug killed him." He pinwheeled his
round arms and then clapped his hands to his face, sobbing. Frederick
put a hand on his arm. He, too, was crying.
#
Once upon a time, Alan's mother gave birth to three sons in three
months. Birthing sons was hardly extraordinary -- before these three
came along, she'd already had four others. But the interval, well, that
was unusual.
As the eldest, Alan was the first to recognize the early signs of her
pregnancy. The laundry loads of diapers and play clothes he fed into her
belly unbalanced more often, and her spin cycle became almost
lackadaisical, so the garments had to hang on the line for days before
they stiffened and dried completely. Alan liked to sit with his back
against his mother's hard enamel side while she rocked and gurgled and
churned. It comforted him.
The details of her conception were always mysterious to Alan. He'd been
walking down into town to attend day school for five years, and he'd
learned all about the birds and the bees, and he thought that maybe his
father -- the mountain -- impregnated his mother by means of some
strange pollen carried on the gusts of winds from his deep and gloomy
caves. There was a gnome, too, who made sure that the long hose that led
from Alan's mother's back to the spring pool in his father's belly
remained clear and unfouled, and sometimes Alan wondered if the gnome
dove for his father's seed and fed it up his mother's intake. Alan's
life was full of mysteries, and he'd long since learned to keep his
mouth shut about his home life when he was at school.
He attended all three births, along with the smaller kids -- Bill and
Donald (Charlie, the island, was still small enough to float in the
middle of their father's heart-pool) -- waiting on tenterhooks for his
mother's painful off-balance spin cycle to spend itself before
reverently opening the round glass door and removing the infant within.
Edward was fat, even for a baby. He looked like an elongated soccer ball
with a smaller ball on top. He cried healthily, though, and gave hearty
suck to their mother's exhaust valve once Alan had cleaned the soap suds
and fabric softener residue from his little body. His father gusted
proud, warm, blustery winds over them and their little domestic scene.
Alan noticed that little Edward, for all his girth, was very light, and
wondered if the baby was full of helium or some other airy
substance. Certainly he hardly appeared to be full of *baby*, since
everything he ate and drank passed through him in a matter of seconds,
hardly digested at all. Alan had to go into town twice to buy new
twelve-pound boxes of clean white shop rags to clean up the slime trail
the baby left behind him. Drew, at three, seemed to take a perverse
delight in the scummy water, spreading it around the cave as much as
possible. The grove in front of the cave mouth was booby trapped with
clothesline upon clothesline, all hung with diapers and rags drying out
in the early spring sunlight.
Thirty days later, Alan came home from school to find the younger kids
surrounding his mother as she rocked from side to side, actually popping
free of the grooves her small metal feet had worn in the cave floor over
the years.
Two babies in thirty days! Such a thing was unheard of in their father's
cave. Edward, normally a sweet-tempered baby, howled long screams that
resonated through Alan's milk teeth and made his testicles shrivel up
into hard stones. Alan knew his mother liked to be left alone when she
was in labor, but he couldn't just stand there and watch her shake and
shiver.
He went to her and pressed his palms to her top, tried to soothe and
restrain her. Bill, the second eldest and still only four years old,
followed suit. Edward's screams grew even louder, loud and hoarse and
utterly terrified, echoing off their father's walls and back to
them. Soon Alan was sobbing, too, biting his lip to keep the sounds
inside, and so were the other children. Dillon wrinkled his brow and
screamed a high-pitched wail that could have cut glass.
Alan's mother rocked harder, and her exhaust hose dislodged itself. A
high-pressure jet of cold, soapy water spurted from her back parts,
painting the cave wall with suds. Edward crawled into the puddle it
formed and scooped small handsful of the liquid into his mouth between
howls.
And then, it stopped. His mother stopped rocking, stopped shaking. The
stream trailed off into a trickle. Alan stopped crying, and soon the
smaller kids followed suit, even Edward. The echoes continued for a
moment, and then they, too, stopped. The silence was as startling -- and
nearly as unbearable -- as the cacophony had been.
With a trembling hand, Alan opened his mother's door and extracted
little Frederick. The baby was small and cyanotic blue. Alan tipped the
baby over and shook him gently, and the baby vomited up a fantastic
quantity of wash water, a prodigious stream that soaked the front of
Alan's school trousers and his worn brown loafers. Finally it ended, and
the baby let out a healthy yowl. Alan shifted the infant to one arm and
gingerly reconnected the exhaust hose and set the baby down alongside of
its end. The baby wouldn't suck, though.
Across the cave, from his soggy seat in the puddle of waste water,
Edward watched the new baby with curious eyes. He crawled across the
floor and nuzzled his brother with his high forehead. Frederick squirmed
and fussed, and Edward shoved him to one side and sucked. His little
diaper dripped as the liquid passed directly through him.
Alan patiently picked dripping Edward up and put him over one shoulder,
and gave Frederick the tube to suck. Frederick gummed at the hose's end,
then fussed some more, whimpering. Edward squirmed in his arms, nearly
plummeting to the hard stone floor.
"Billy," Alan said to the solemn little boy, who nodded. "Can you take
care of Edward for a little while? I need to clean up." Billy nodded
again and held out his pudgy arms. Alan grabbed some clean shop rags and
briskly wiped Frederick down, then laid another across Billy's shoulder
and set Edward down. The baby promptly set to snoring. Danny started
screaming again, with no provocation, and Alan took two swift steps to
bridge the distance between them and smacked the child hard enough to
stun him silent.
Alan grabbed a mop and bucket and sloshed the puddles into the drainage
groove where his mother's waste water usually ran, out the cave mouth
and into a stand of choking mountain-grass that fed greedily and thrived
riotous in the phosphates from the detergent.
Frederick did not eat for thirty days, and during that time he grew so
thin that he appeared to shrivel like a raisin, going hard and folded in
upon himself. Alan spent hours patiently spooning sudsy water into his
little pink mouth, but the baby wouldn't swallow, just spat it out and
whimpered and fussed. Edward liked to twine around Alan's feet like a
cat as he joggled and spooned and fretted over Frederick. It was all
Alan could do not to go completely mad, but he held it together, though
his grades slipped.
His mother vibrated nervously, and his father's winds grew so unruly
that two of the golems came around to the cave to make their slow,
peevish complaints. Alan shoved a baby into each of their arms and
seriously lost his shit upon them, screaming himself hoarse at them
while hanging more diapers, more rags, more clothes on the line, tossing
his unfinished homework in their faces.
But on the thirtieth day, his mother went into labor again -- a labor so
frenzied that it dislodged a stalactite and sent it crashing and
chundering to the cave floor in a fractious shivering of flinders. Alan
took a chip in the neck and it opened up a small cut that nevertheless
bled copiously and ruined, *ruined* his favorite T-shirt, with Snoopy
sitting atop his doghouse in an aviator's helmet, firing an imaginary
machine gun at the cursed Red Baron.
That was nearly the final straw for Alan, but he held fast and waited
for the labor to pass and finally unlatched the door and extracted
little George, a peanut of a child, a lima-bean infant, curled and fetal
and eerily quiet. He set the little half-baby down by the exhaust hose,
where he'd put shriveled Frederick in a hopeless hope that the baby
would suck, would ingest, finally.
And ingest Frederick did. His dry and desiccated jaw swung open like a
snake's, unhinged and spread wide, and he *swallowed* little George, ate
him up in three convulsive swallows, the new baby making Frederick's
belly swell like a balloon. Alan swallowed panic, seized Frederick by
the heels, and shook him upside down. "Spit him out," Alan cried, "Spat
him free!"
But Frederick kept his lips stubbornly together, and Alan tired of the
terrible business and set the boy with the newest brother within down on
a pile of hay he'd brought in to soak up some of Edward's continuous
excretions. Alan put his hands over his face and sobbed, because he'd
failed his responsibilities as eldest of their family and there was no
one he could tell his woes to.
The sound of baby giggles stopped his crying. Edward had belly-crawled
to Frederick's side and he was eating *him*, jaw unhinged and gorge
working. He was up to Frederick's little bottom, dehydrated to a
leathery baby-jerky, and then he was past, swallowing the arms and the
chin and the *head*, the giggling, smiling head, the laughing head that
had done nothing but whine and fuss since Alan had cleared it of its
volume of detergenty water, fresh from their mother's belly.
And then Frederick was gone. Horrified, Alan rushed over and picked up
Edward -- now as heavy as a cannonball -- and pried his mouth open,
staring down his gullet, staring down into *another mouth*, Frederick's
mouth, which gaped open, revealing a *third* mouth, George's. The
smallest mouth twisted and opened, then shut. Edward squirmed furiously
and Alan nearly fumbled him. He set the baby down in the straw and
watched him crawl across to their mother, where he sucked
hungrily. Automatically, Alan gathered up an armload of rags and made
ready to wipe up the stream that Edward would soon be ejecting.
But no stream came. The baby fed and fed, and let out a deep burp in
three-part harmony, spat up a little, and drank some more. Somehow,
Frederick and George were in there feeding, too. Alan waited patiently
for Edward to finish feeding, then put him over his shoulder and joggled
him until he burped up, then bedded him down in his little rough-hewn
crib -- the crib that the golems had carved for Alan when he was born --
cleaned the cave, and cried again, leaned up against their mother.
#
Frederick huddled in on himself, half behind Edward on the porch,
habitually phobic of open spaces. Alan took his hand and then embraced
him. He smelled of Edward's clammy guts and of sweat.
"Are you two hungry?" Alan asked.
Edward grimaced. "Of course we're hungry, but without George there's
nothing we can do about it, is there?"