Swamplandia! (11 page)

Kiwi could feel his intelligence leap like an anchored flame inside him. His whole body ached at the terrible gulf between what he knew himself to be capable of (neuroscience, complicated ophthalmological surgeries, air-traffic control) and what he was actually doing.

“Why don’t you take a crack at the family bathroom, Bigtree. It’s disgusting.”

At the World of Darkness, there was a dignity gulf between staff and management. Carl Jenks, for example, got to wear a plain black polo shirt, which made him seem like a pope compared with everybody else. Kiwi had gotten off relatively easy—at least his janitor’s uniform had cap sleeves and a zipper fly. He’d seen a tall kid walking around in a red spandex jumpsuit and death hood. And this in Florida, in deep summer!

Kiwi’s penance was to work overtime picking up the wetter, less decipherable pieces of trash with his gloved hands. The World’s lasers moved in green helixes all around him, a lonely geometry that traveled up and down the entrance to the Whale’s Gullet. Cleaning the family toilet was, by his inexact estimate, one million times more degrading than any of his Bigtree duties on Swamplandia! Worse than putting out popcorn fires, worse even than the buckskin costumes and the jewelry. He was trying to flip the clown-nose plunger inside out with his shoe.

“Gah!” he cried, successful.

Success, in this instance, meant an outpouring of terrible yellow bile from the plunger cap.

The good news: Kiwi had a place to live. Employees at the World of Darkness could apply to live in a block of staff dormitories in the basement of the complex. Originally these were built to house foreign workers, but the recruitment program had been suspended owing to some “legal snag,” a bit of “red tape with Immigration.” All the Turkish and Bulgarian teenage guest workers had been sent home, and now
any employee could pay to live here. Kiwi’s dorm, a linoleum cave, came furnished. His room had a bunk, a metal chair, and a desk bolted to the ground, and a dresser with a single, enigmatic tube sock in it—the only evidence of his foreign predecessor. A wonky mirror over the dresser gave his features a funhouse wave. The room was a single occupancy. “A luxury!” he was told by several different women in HR, none of whom lived in these dorms. It was just wide enough for Kiwi to turn a full circle without touching anything, and the windowless fluorescence made him feel like a submariner. Kiwi had figured out that the dorms were located two levels below the central room of the Leviathan, and sometimes he had nightmares of being crushed to death in his bunk. After shifts he’d stare at the ceiling and take a gloomy pleasure in imagining the Chief reading his obituary in the
Loomis Register
.
EMPLOYEE BURIED IN AVALANCHE OF TOURISTS!
Ossie would spot it. She’d try to locate Kiwi’s ghost with her “powers” … Kiwi groaned and pushed his cheek against the metal coils inside his mattress, waited for the thought to float away. “Really, it’s unproductive to ruminate on that particular problem of our sister’s,” he’d told Ava on the night before he left home, by which he’d meant “It hurts.” Ossie’s need was like a fire that ate all the oxygen in a room. Her “lovesickness.”

Regarding fire and oxygen: whatever minor administrative deity in the World of Darkness’s pantheon controlled the central AC, he or she liked to keep this basement at a freezing temperature. You could hear the whir of the air conditioner deep in your sleep. Kiwi had dreams in which he crawled along the World’s hallways and subterranean pipelines until he discovered a
CONTROL PANEL
, labeled in buzzing gold letters; each night he reached out for it and shut off the air to the dormitory vents. Then he’d wake up under four blankets with a sense of relief, thinking that he’d switched off the indoor winter.

This is not forever
, Kiwi would think as he held his breath and plunged one of the World of Darkness latrines with the clown-nose suction cup.
You are still a genius. You are just a temporary worker
. That was the rank that Kiwi had been hired at—full-time staffers all had their high school diplomas. The HR lady had flicked her dry eyeballs over Kiwi’s body and shouted (Why so loud, madam?), “Women’s size medium!” into an intercom. “And get me a temporary ID badge.” Temporary workers, as opposed to staffers, got paid a dollar less and clocked
out to take their lunch hour. Temporary workers were uninsured. This meant that if something fell on you, a flaming pretzel or one of the tinted panes from the Leviathan’s intestinal slides, you were shit out of luck.

“Why do I have to be a peon in this system?” Kiwi grumbled.

“Aww, when you get your high school diploma they’ll make you staff, Margine,” Vijay said, trying to cheer him.

“Please do not call me that.” Why were other dudes his age so averse to calling him M&M? “When I get my high school diploma I’m going to Harvard.”

“Ooh, sorry, Mrs. Mead. Goddamn. Bring me back a sweatshirt.”

But in the staff cafeteria, Kiwi’s colleagues taught him that it was unwise to self-describe as a genius here in the World. It was unwise to mention colleges, or hopes. Telling your fellow workers that you were going to Harvard was a request to have your testicles compared to honey-roasted peanuts and your status as a virgin confirmed, your virginity suddenly as radiant and evident to all as a wad of toilet paper that was stuck to your shoe, something embarrassing that you trailed through the World. The other guys went after him with such vim (another pointless word from Kiwi’s SAT box) that afterward he never mentioned college to anyone besides Vijay and Carl Jenks, whom he figured he’d need later as a reference.
Three
people had to recommend you, apparently. Yvans had already offered to write Kiwi “a two-thumbs-up letter” if Kiwi continued to cover for him, and to call his wife on Adultery Fridays and say that Yvans was going to be “in an after-hours conference” with Carl Jenks until the moon rose. Vijay said that he would sign any letter that Margaret put in front of him. That left Carl himself. Kiwi was more deferential to Carl Jenks than he’d ever been to the Chief. He tried to scrub children’s vomit from the webbing of the Tongue in a way that suggested deep reservoirs of genius. When a three-year-old Lost Soul came howling around the corner and knocked over a garbage can of Dante’s Tamales—which looked like masticated rubies and burned your bare skin—Kiwi righted it. He was monastic, scrupulous. He really hoped that Carl Jenks was keeping track of this.

Vijay Montañez, Kiwi realized, was actually an angel disguised in smelly A-necks and skunk-striped Adidas breakaway pants. Vijay was a wonderful aberration in the World of Darkness’s social universe—he
seemed to feel a sincere fraternal affection for Kiwi, and he defended Kiwi’s dorkiness to the other workers as if Kiwi Bigtree were a country under his protectorate. Vijay was an only child, he lived with his mother and his grandmother and what Kiwi judged to be eighty Chihuahuas, if you based your estimate on the terrible noises they produced through a door, in a closet-size apartment on Regal Avenue—and he’d mentioned right away to Kiwi that he’d always wanted a brother. His father had remarried a white woman,
Susannah
. Technically he did have a brother, Vijay said,
Ste-phen
, breaking the name hard as karate on the syllable. Vijay had never met him; Vijay’s father had relocated that family to Grand Rapids, Michigan. For reasons that Kiwi didn’t fully understand, he felt certain that this infant in Michigan was the reason Vijay was so kind to him, and so unreasonably loyal.

Vijay was not Kiwi Bigtree’s only teacher. Kiwi received many complimentary tutorials from his other colleagues those first weeks. When he’d used the word “pulchritude”—a compliment! he insisted—in unwitting reference to another janitor’s girlfriend; he later found condoms full of pudding in his work locker and a new phrase to dissect in his Field Notes,
GAYASS ASSFUCKER
, etched with a cafeteria knife above the locker gills. When he recited “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” hoping to impress Nina Suárez, who was wiping cigarette butts out of the whale ashtrays with a rag, Ephraim Lipmann happened to overhear him and told everybody on the Leviathan crew that Margaret Mead was definitely
gay
.

“No, no, I was
seducing
Nina!” If people believed that he was sexually attracted to woolly, goony Ephraim—if people believed that Kiwi desired to see big-eared Ephraim naked, in any context—his life in the World of Darkness would be over. What was wrong with these philistines? “I read it to her because I like
women
! It’s a poem about love!”

Then Nina herself got wind of this—that skinny Margaret Mead was hitting on her?—and now all of Nina’s friends who worked in the Flippers were boycotting Kiwi, a political strike against his nerdly advances that took the form of girls rolling their exquisitely lashed eyes at Kiwi in the Leviathan. They touched the hair frizzed above their ears as they passed him as if radioing their disgust to some central intelligence.

To bribe Ephraim Lipmann into reversing his river of calumny, Kiwi
offered to work overtime for him. Then he started to recite Keats’s “Ode” to Ephraim, believing that the beauty of the poem would be self-evident and exonerate him.

“Fuck, Margaret!” Ephraim said. His reedy voice was loud enough to echo throughout the Coils, the purple foyer to the whale’s belly. A few young mothers pushing their whale-fluked rental strollers looked over disapprovingly. “I do not want to sleep with you, dude! God, leave me alone!” He gave Kiwi a little push, hard enough to cause Kiwi to fall backward against a mesh trash can.

“Guys, come quick, Margaret Mead wants to butt-rape me in the Flukes …”

Every day, Kiwi’s colleagues taught him what you could and could not say to another person here on the mainland. This was a little like having snipers tutor you on the limits of the prison yard.

“My colleagues,” you were encouraged to call your fellow stoned, moose-eyed teenage workers. “My colleagues,” to sixteen-year-old Nina, who wore her jeans so tight around the plush heart of her ass that sometimes Kiwi had to walk behind the cardboard flames to compose himself. This egalitarian recommendation did not apply to the management, Kiwi discovered—Carl Jenks could call his staffers anything he liked. Carl’s “colleagues” were mysterious people to whom he communicated via yellow sticky memos and the telephone. Carl Jenks had a habit of referring to all his teenage employees as “new hires” until such time as he had to fire them. Yes, it makes sense, Carl Jenks joked. Oh, it makes perfect sense that Hell is staffed by teenagers! If there is a hell, I know it’s a NASA space station manned by monkeys your age.

Kiwi wondered how things had gone for Carl Jenks in high school. His hypothesis was: Siberian bad. On-the-deck-of-the
-Titanic
bad. On par with Kiwi’s early weeks in the World.

After his first disastrous lunches in the staff cafeteria, Kiwi began to eat alone. He brought his pimiento-and-cheese sandwiches into the last stall of the men’s bathroom, his back against its broken door. The World entrées each had some stupid name, Hellspawn Hoagie or Faustian Bargain Fish Tacos. Kiwi marveled at his lunch—how could a hoagie be soggy and incendiary at the same time? His eyes watered in the bathroom mirror. The whole theme park was like a joke that someone had taken too far! The water fountains didn’t even work here—
Vijay had warned him on his first day. They piped in a manufactured salt water.

“Get it, bro? ’Cause it’s Hell.”

“Yeah, right, I got it.” Kiwi’s throat burned from getting that particular joke. Why weren’t natal dolphins swimming around in the salt water? Why weren’t hospitals using the saline solution to save a baby’s life or something?

When he was brave, Kiwi ate his lunch on the deep end of the Jaws. He sat on one of the whale’s rock-size plaster molars, a place where any of his colleagues could have approached him (they didn’t), but more often Kiwi slid between the teeth. He slumped as far down as he could go on the spongy mauve rubber mats. The gums were always filling up with rogue bits of trash that the Lost Souls dropped as they stepped into the Leviathan: cigarette butts and foldout park maps, doughnut holes grouped like tiny Stonehenges, pretzel paper—once, horrifyingly, a squidlike blue condom that got pasted to Kiwi’s elbow. (Not used? Kiwi prayed. Used! Yvans!)

Kiwi sat like that, a toothpick speck in the whale’s smile, and pretended to read Plato’s
Republic
until his lunch hour was up.

Kiwi often had to remind himself that no matter how badly a day could go at work, this present situation was in every way an improvement over his first week on the mainland. He had food now, access to clean toilets; he had money, a dormitory, a few embryonic friendships. At night sometimes he would sit alone in the dorm kitchen and microwave a frozen cheese pizza that he’d purchased at the nearby gas station, with his own income. He’d count down the beeps with a meditative fervor—if anybody had wandered in and seen Kiwi’s face in the microwave glass, they would have thought he was having a numinous experience. He ate the gas station pepperoni prayerfully, peeled the mozzarella off in slow ribbons, tore off warm gluey bites of crust that he swallowed like an animal in the dark. He’d drink a vending machine soda and think to himself,
I’ve done it!
and feel a twinge of uneasiness—because what had he done really? Used the Chief’s cash to make a purchase? And what was he doing here?
Helping
, he thought vaguely. He backed away from this thought and let it hang there, a Monet picture, beautifully out of focus. The colors of it were right; the shapes could sharpen and emerge later. He tried not to think too hard about the
Chief, the girls. The ninety-eight Seths becoming anonymous in their Pit because the tourists had lost interest in that particular story. Kiwi had come prepared to disguise his identity, but nobody here ever mentioned the Bigtree Wrestling Dynasty or Swamplandia! Already everybody had forgotten the origins of the joke about him; they thought his real surname was Mead. Anonymity was a very easy goal to achieve in the Leviathan.