Book of the Dead (31 page)

“She’s coming back, right?” Deb is saying and she’s looking at Skip and she’s looking at DJ and then she’s looking at me. “Bret?” she is asking me and she is crossing her arms and she isn’t smiling now. “She’s coming back, isn’t she?” Deb is saying “I mean, we’re all coming back, right?” Skip is putting the knife in his pocket and DJ is finishing his cigarette and I am standing and she is saying “Right?”

People are afraid to live on the streets of Los Angeles. This is the last thing I say as I walk away from Skip and DJ and Deb and get back into the car. I don’t know why I keep saying this thing. It’s something I started and now I can’t stop. Nothing else seems to matter.

I sit behind the wheel of the car and I watch the windshield wipers go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and the city blurs, out of focus, beneath the thin black lines. I want to say that people are afraid. I want to say that people are afraid of something and I can’t remember what and maybe it’s nothing, maybe it’s a dream and I am running, I am running after something and I can’t remember what, I can’t remember the dream, and the windshield wipers go back and forth, back and forth. People are afraid of something and in my dream I am running and the radio is playing and I try to listen but it is playing the song I do not know. The windshield wipers go back and forth. The doors open and close and then I drive away.

BY STEVEN R. BOYETT

[1]

 “
Good
morning, happy campers!” blares the loudspeaker on the wall above the head of Marly Tsung’s narrow bed. “It’s another beautiful day in paradise!” A bell rings. “Rise and shine!”

Marly the sleepy camper slides out from her pocket of warmth. “Rise your own fucking shine,” she mutters as she rises from her pallet and staggers to the computer screen that glows a dull gray above her desk. The word
UPDATE
pulses in the middle of the monitor; she flicks it with a finger and turns away to find the clothes she shed the night before.

“Today is Wednesday, the twenty-ninth,” says her recorded voice. “Today marks the three hundred seventy-second day of the station’s operation.” Marly sniffs and makes a sour face at how pleasant her earlier self sounds. How
enthused
. “Gung ho,” she says.

“The structural integrity of the Ecosphere is ninety-nine point five percent,” the recording continues brightly, “with indications of water-vapor leakage in panels above the northern quadrant of the Rain Forest environment.”

“Christ,” says Marly, hating the daily cheerfulness of her own voice. She slides into faded, baggy jeans, then scoops on peasant sandals.

“Unseasonal warm weather in this region of Arizona has increased the convection winds from the Desert environment, and as a result the humidity has increased in the Rain Forest environment. Rainfall may be expected in the late afternoon. Soil nitrogenating systems are—”

Marly puts on a T-shirt, sees the neck tag pass in front of her, pulls the shirt partway off, and turns it around.

Leaving, she pauses at the door and looks back. Computer console on oak desk, dirty laundry, precariously stacked pop-music cassettes, rumpled bed. If someone were to come in here, someone who knew Marly but wasn’t on Staff, would they be able to figure out who lived here?

She looks away. The question is moot. The only people in the entire world who know Marly are the Ecostation personnel.

She slides shut the door on her own voice and heads down the narrow hall to one of the station’s two bathrooms.

FLUSH TWICE—IT’S A LONG WAY TO THE KITCHEN
is scrawled in black felt-tip on the wall facing her. It’s been there a year now. More recently—say, ten months ago— someone wrote, below that,
EAT SHIT
. And below that— with a kind of prophetic irony—
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER
.

Marly never did think these were very funny.

She flushes—once—and heads for the rec room and the inevitable. Her waste heads for reclamation and the (nearly) inedible.

Four of the other seven station personnel are in the rec room ahead of her. Billtheasshole stands on the blue wrestling mat. He’s wearing his gray UCLA sweat suit again. If clothes could get leprosy, they’d look like that sweat suit. On a leather thong around his neck is a silver whistle. Marly thinks her usual idle morning thought about what it would feel like to choke Billtheasshole by that lanyard. She imagines his stern face purpling, his reptilian eyes dimming. Watching his tinfoil-colored eyes staring at the door, Marly invents Tsung’s law: The biggest shithead and the person in command can usually be shot with the same bullet.

Pale Grace sits glumly at an unplugged gaming table, drumming her nails against the dark glass tabletop. Marly shakes her head. A year now, and Grace still looks like someone desperate for a cigarette. She catches Marly watching her and ducks her head and twitches a smile.

Marly thinks of just staring at her to drive her even more crazy, but what’s the point?

Slumped against the heavy bag in the corner like a determined marathon dancer is Dieter. He smiles sleepily at her and scratches his full, brown beard. “Grow me coffee,” he says in his pleasant Rotweiler growl, “and I will unblock your pipes for the next year.”

She smiles and shakes her head. “No beans,” she replies. This has become their daily morning ritual. Dieter knows what that headshake is really for: He’s unblocked her pipes enough already, thank you.

Sitting barefoot in lotus on the folding card table is little carrot-topped Bonnie. She smiles warmly at Marly, attempting to get her to acknowledge the spiritual kinship that supposedly exists between them because Bonnie is into metaphysics and Marly is Chinese.

Marly makes herself look inscrutable.

In walk Deke and Haiffa, a mismatched set: him burly, her slight; him hairy, her smooth; him Texas beefeating good-ole-boy-don’t-shoot-till-you-see-the-black-of-their-skin, her Israeli vegetarian educated at Oxford. Naturally they are in love. Marly pays them little mind beyond a glance as they walk in holding hands like children and sit on the unraveling couch; Deke and Haiffa return the favor. They have become Yin and Yang, a unit unto themselves, outside of which exists the entire rest of the world. Proof again that there is such a thing as circumstantial love, love in a context, love-in-a-box.

Last in is Leonard Willard. Marly still spells his name
LYNYRD WYLLYRD
on the duty roster, long after the last drop of humor has been squeezed from the joke, which Leonard never got anyway. Leonard is the youngest staff member, always compensating for his inexperience with puppyish eagerness to please. But despite the fact that Leonard could have been one of the original Mouseketeers, Marly takes his constant good cheer as an indication of his bottomless well of self deception. The Ecosphere station is his world; everything outside it is… some movie he saw once. In black and white. Late at night. When he was a kid. He really doesn’t remember it very well.

Predictably, Billtheasshole blows his whistle the moment the last person walks in. “Okay, troops,” he says. “Fall in.” He likes to call the staff members “troops.” He would still be wearing his mirrored aviator sunglasses if Marly hadn’t thrown them into the Ocean.

She falls in behind the others as they line up on the wrestling mat to begin their calisthenics. Or, as Billtheasshole calls them, their “cardiovascular aerobic regimen.”

[2]

Sweetpea spits gum onto low-pile, gray carpet. “Flavor’s gone,” she explains.

Doughboy laughs. Shirtless, his hairy belly quivers. “Where you gonna get some more, girl?”

(“Sailor?” someone calls from the stacks upstairs. “Goddamn motherfucker—
Sailor!
”)

Sweetpea just shrugs and turns her back on Doughboy. She goes to join a group gathered behind one of the tall bookshelves. 0900: American History. One of the group pulls a book from a shelf and heaves it, then gives the finger to someone Doughboy can’t see. The hand is snatched back as a return salvo is launched from Engineering. The book tumbles across the floor and stops facedown like a tired bat near Doughboy’s left boot.
Alloy Tensile Strength Comparisons
. He doesn’t attempt to interpret the title, but bends down, picks up the book, and pulls Sweetpea’s gum from where it has stuck against a page that shows a graph. He brings fingers to chapped lips and blows. Fingers in mouth, then out, and wiped against blue jeans that have all the beltloops ripped loose. “Dumb bitch,” he says, and chews.

A loud slap from above. Doughboy looks up to see gangly Tex being thrown against a tall shelf. The shelf tips, but does not fall. Books do.

“What the fuck you
yelling
for, man?” Sailor stands above Tex, who has set a hand to his reddening cheek. Sailor remains there a moment, looking down at Tex with hands on hips, then bends and pulls Tex to his feet. He dusts him off and pats his shoulder. “Look, I’m sorry I hit you, man,” he says. “Only, don’t run around
yelling
all the time, okay?”

“Sure,” says Tex. His hand leaves his inflamed cheek, and he glances at his palm (for blood? wonders Doughboy). “Sure. But, I mean, I was just wonderin’, y’know? I mean—” He looks around the library. “What’re we gonna find here?”

Sailor frowns. He looks around. One hand tugs at the face of Mickey Mouse hanging from his right ear. When he looks back at Tex, he’s smiling wryly.

“Books,” he says.

Doughboy nearly chokes on his gum, he thinks this is so goddamn funny.

“What are
you
laughing at?” from above.

Doughboy only shakes his head.

Sailor shakes his head, too, but for completely different reasons. “Fuck,” he says. “I used to
go
to this school.” He comes down the stairs with two hardcover books tucked under one arm. “Yoo of A.”

Doughboy angles his head to see the titles; Sailor hands him the books. Doughboy holds one in each hand before him. His lips move. Furrows appear in his forehead.

Sailor taps the book in Doughboy’s left hand. “
Principles of Behavior Modification
,” he supplies. He taps the thicker in Doughboy’s right. “
Radiation and Tissue Damage
.” He clasps his hands behind him and rocks back and forth, beaming.

“You taking a test?”

Sailor shakes his head. “Nope. Deadheads are. I think I can teach them to find food for us.
Real
food.”

Doughboy makes a farting noise. “Shit.
We
can’t find real food; how you expect them to?”

“The name ‘Pavlov’ ring a bell?”

“No.”

Sailor sighs. “Why I stay with you limpdicks I will never know,” he says.

Doughboy stacks the books. “But how you gonna get—”

“
God damn you, nigger!
”

They turn at the shout from Engineering.

“That
hurt
, motherfucker!”

“Why you didn’t move, then, home?” replies American History. “What you been throwing at
me
the last—”

Shouts, something heavy thrown against a wall, a bookshelf falling against a bookshelf, scuffling, and cheers as American History and Engineering begin beating the living shit out of each other.

Sailor walks over to break it up. He takes his time, wondering why the hell he’s bothering in the first place. He oughta just let evolution sort ’em out. Well, he’s there now; he might as well do something to split ’em up.

It’s Cheesecake and Jimmy. Figures. Cheesecake’s got the upper hand, which is no surprise, and with no more than two or three blows he’s already made a mess of Jimmy’s face. White boys never could fight.

He leans forward to grab Cheesecake’s teak arm as the knotted fist at the end of it rises, but something stops him. Around them

(“
You gonna let that nigger put a hurt on you, boy?
”) are scattered newspapers. One lies spilled like a dropped deck of cards

(“
Fuck ’im up! Yeah! Yeah!
”),

fanned out to expose the Local section.

Dull slap of bone-backed meat on softer meat.

Sailor bends to pick up the paper.

(“
Cheese, man, ease up. C’mon, man
.”)

          ‘Space

          Breaks

(“
Motherfucker hit me on my head with a book. A big book, motherfucker!
”)

Sailor turns the paper over.

               Station’

               New Ground

He unfolds the paper.

(“
Ah! Fucking nigger! I’ll kill you, fuckin
—”)

                    ‘Space Station’

                    Breaks New Ground

Sailor frowns. An artist’s conception accompanies the article.

“Let him up,” Sailor says mildly, and they stop.

(Tucson)—Official groundbreaking ceremonies were held Monday morning in a tent 60 miles northwest of Tucson, to mark the beginning of construction on Ecosphere—a self-contained “mini-Earth” environment that may prove a vital step in mankind’s eventual colonization of other planets.