They Is Us. Tama Janowitz
time in years Slawa tidies the store. There are so few customers though, since the entrance subway has been closed, whether he is open or shut scarcely makes a difference. And the cats hate being here. At first he is so busy, cleaning, painting, he keeps thinking his cats will reappear but after a day he realizes he will have to go after them, down in the windy spot. But surely there is an easier way to get down there?
Against the wall in a back corner, behind some boxes, he finds a place where the paper is peeling; behind it is a little door.
He pulls it loose and puts his head through. Inside is blackness and cool air and a musty smell. “What?” he mumbles to himself. The flies that circle him are growing agitated. “Something back here… Cannot see… Is maybe –”
Grunting, he stands and fetches his flashlight. Then he stoops once again and waves the light. Steps lead down to pink squares, turquoise diamonds, beige and gold rectangles. Tiles of some sort. A mound of… some kind of stuffing. From an old sofa? He really can’t tell. The stairs descend, curving steeply, maybe twenty feet. One of the missing cats might be down there. Then from the depths – fifty, eighty feet below? – a faint mewling, a thin yowling, and a gurgling rush, perhaps of water, perhaps a million electronic devices receiving only static and mottled signals.
Each night Murielle drifts off but wakes at three or four in the morning and can’t go back to sleep. And she is hungry. It seems to her that she never eats, at least she can’t remember doing so. She is always hungry and she never eats and yet she grows and grows.
Refrigerator
Sometimes, late at night, she wakes to find herself in front of the refrigerator. Staring blankly at first then… lo and behold, a slice of Swiss cheese in one hand, a bottle of soda in the other! Breakfast at her feet prodding her ankle with a paw until she tosses him bits of the food. Only his whimpers of “More! Please, more,” rouse her from her comatose state. Does the damn dog have to have a Russky accent too?
“No more.”
“But why? Why, Mama?” says the dog.
She wants to say she’s not the dog’s mother but she knows the dog would cry. “Because in this lifetime I’m the person and you’re the dog! And, for your own health, I say so.” This doesn’t sound quite right. “So, if you don’t like it, come back in your next life as a human being! And my recommendation is, preferably male.” Lip curled, Breakfast slinks out of the kitchen with an expression simultaneously hurt and contemptuous.
How has she gotten here? Where has the food come from? She has no memory of buying the Swiss cheese, or the ham, or the puffy white flavorless Parker House Rolls.
Or whatever it is she finds in her hand, almost in her mouth. The combination lox-and-cream-cheese on a garlic-bagel, the Benny-Goodman-and-Jerry-Lee-Lewis-Nuts-Bolts-and-Berries-ice cream – let alone how or when she ever got out of bed and made her way to the refrigerator.
Murielle wonders what is wrong with her, that she can’t keep the place even remotely clean? She looks around the kitchen: implements – spatulas, knives, spoons, a blender, crumbs, dirty sponges, almost empty milk cartons – cover the green vintage Dormica counter. It gives her the skeeves, the sheen of gray grease rimming each area around the cabinet doors. In the sink strainer is a hummock of partially rotten food – bits of pasta, carrot cubes from canned soup, coffee grinds.
Bugs are in the walls, roaches and ants, a number of different varieties, fire, grease and sugar ants, the big black wood-eating ants, a strange mutated variety of leaf-cutter ants, or rather linoleum-cutter ants, at least, that is what they like to chew.
There are moths – the kind that live in food; hair-eating moths (attracted by the odor of urine), earwigs and flies. Tiny white flies that live on the children’s house plants (some plants in particular have bad infestations); fruit flies, houseflies, ichneumon flies as big as a chihuahua. The news has said that soon there will be a new kind of fly, beneficial, to eat old fibers and fabric, but slow enough to be killed easily.
The scene is one of chaos from which no order is possible. Tipping out the refuse from the sink strainer does not completely empty it, bits are still enmeshed in the trap; now Mister Garbage Dehydrator with grease dripping down the sides of the plastic trash bag liner should be cleaned! The disembodied voice says, “Who’s doing the dishes!” with a nasty, perky giggle, it’s part of the hologramovision system or the computer, then a man comes over the speakers, “Sey Vramos!” he yells, some kind of Spanish?
The forks and whisks lying around are rinsed, stuffed into drawers, counters wiped with paper towel – nevertheless nothing about the kitchen looks cleaner. It’s a kind of mental imbalance on her part, Murielle thinks. Other people have come into the room, gotten out the dustpan and broom, sprayed spritzer, wiped and tidied and polished and within minutes the place has appeared clean if not new.
But no matter how or what she does, objects seem only to be shuffled from one area to another; her attempts at cleaning only stir up more crumbs, grease, dust that emerges shyly, gaily, from secret nests and now expands in its own kind of reproductive frenzy.
From chaos it is not possible for her to create order, only an alternate chaos. Even with the friendly robototron whirling on its endless round of vacuuming and steam and plugging itself back in if it needs a charge, she is not lucky – all it does is strew dirt. Sometimes she finds it banging endlessly against the wall – which it is not supposed to – shouting, “Will somebody please help me. Help me. Time to change my bag!” and then, with greater panic, “Help me! Please! I’m gonna bust my bag!”
Still, that is not what is really the matter at all.
She has let the kids take over the living room with their house plants. It had seemed harmless enough, even positive, their hobby. They acquired clippings from neighbors – Christmas cactus stubs, rubbery succulents, the offspring of spider plants; dead and dying discards.
There isn’t a single thing that perishes after the kids acquire it, no matter that it appeared completely dead it is now growing at a frightening speed, Caladium and kumquat, Dieffenbachia and Norfolk pine needing to be moved practically weekly into bigger and bigger pots. When it’s time to water them, the two kids fight: “You’re over-watering! It doesn’t need that much!” – “Yes it does, can’t you see how dry it is?” – water overflowing, spilling onto the floor, making rings under each pot.
A moist jungle humidity permeates the house: the living room windows can’t be opened and roots have begun to crawl, fingerlike, into floorboards or along the walls, the tendrils of ivy and a kind of Philodendron that had air-roots waving white, obscene stumps that several times a year gave birth to a single, phallic-shaped stinking flower which was able to move to a new pot, slowly and painfully, by air-roots.
Two dwarf banana trees eight feet tall with great stalks of ripening bananas – that neither child would permit the other to pick – are so tall they hit the ceiling, the flies have merrily swarmed on the rotting fruit. Apart from the sofa, the plants – the jungle – take up the entire living room and the floor is buckled and rotted from the moisture.
The kids collect animals, too. She is passive in the face of their gargantuan demands, two giantesses – or so they appear to her – two giant daughters with gaping maws waiting to be filled with worms that she has no energy to collect. Long before Julie’s internship at Bermese Pythion the kids had managed to acquire a number of animals – post-experimentation – others had actually been thrown out, scarcely alive – and Murielle couldn’t help but believe these animals were products of genetic tampering of some sort – anyway, she has never seen creatures like these.
The girls, or at least Julie, keep a lot of them in cages in the basement. Mice with hair so long it can be braided. Guinea pigs with incredibly long legs,