emerge to perform on the quarter-hour from a giant cuckoo clock emblazoned with the Bermese Pythion corporate logo, though it’s hard to discern what product is being advertised. “It’s Maya turn – For Fun! Now Available with Individual sub-cutaneous Poppers!”
The streets are full of workers in dresses and skirts – not kilts, but the pleated knee-length wear that is the latest city street trend of men. Meanwhile a man shoves a talking pamphlet chip into his free hand, the one that isn’t holding the crate of cats. “GOT A HEADACHE?” it says in a shrill high chirp, “TAKE NEW HARMONY! NOW AVAILABLE AT DISCOUNT PRICES. ASK YOUR PHARMACIST. SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE PSYCHOTIC BREAK, UNCONTROLLABLE BLEEDING AND LIVER DAMAGE…”
He crushes the chip in his hand. A banner, words floating in space, is strung out over the avenue: “UNTIED WE STAND. Join the Marines Today!” From all sides the distributors press in, handing out chips there’s one with a deep booming voice, “Lose one hundred pounds in thirty days. That’s right, only thirty days!” Not a bad idea, actually, he’d be down to what, a hundred and fifty? A hundred twenty?
But Slawa has heard it isn’t safe. A lot of people kept losing weight until they just disappeared and there is nothing you could do to stop it.
There’s a man handing out samples – it’s a copy of the President’s fiancé’s memoirs – it’s called a book, a present to the American people. Scott has had it privately printed, enough copies for each and every citizen, free, a wee square of papers, with a red and gold cover. And it’s free! Slawa shoves it in his pocket.
To get into his shoe store he now has a circuitous underground route for nearly two blocks, and finally exits into the area that says EXIT CLOSED. This is worse than on his last visit. He pulls up the heavy gates that covered the front. It’s untouched, no break-ins. Everything as he left it. He is relieved, relieved and happy; this is his home, his office, after all.
He puts down the crate with the cats and opens the door. Poor things will want water, food. With gassy hisses of contempt the cats come tumbling out, running in circles as if they have been over-wound. They resemble molecules bouncing off the floor and walls. He watches, amused, until one, the Siamese, Murka, finds what must be a hole in the wall, darts in and is gone.
Moments later a scream, hideous, from what sounds miles away. He goes to the hole, a wind is blowing out, as if there is an underground chamber or tomb far below. He hears Yuri Gagarin yowling, now more plaintively and then abruptly ceases… Has he broken his back, perhaps, or a leg? From the hole a strange odor wafts, musty, vaguely stale, almost familiar. He can’t get enough of an angle to see the secret room – if that is what it is. He will have to make the hole bigger so he can go in.
“Here kitty kitty,” he calls, knocking through what he sees now is only feeble fiberboard, so old it is rotten. No sound at first and then a faint meow. “Here kitty kitty.” Even if he hangs over the edge it must be more than a twelve-foot drop. A wind is blowing up from below. Something he could put down there to jump onto? The cushions from a sofa he once found on the street and hauled in so customers could sit? Though how he will get back, he doesn’t know. Anyway, for tonight, it is too late, all he can do for now is go to sleep. In the morning he heads around the corner to Chez Gagni Kota. Mornings, the restaurant is empty; Bocar is almost always there before his aunt and uncle, sometimes he even spends the night there. The two of them can sit and drink sweet tea, have a chat.
Throughout the day Slawa will be back to eat.
Health food, it isn’t that. Slawa isn’t sure how much longer he can eat the stuff, tomato-curried rancid fish and artificial potato flakes, spinach leaves that are probably something else, processed paper maybe, everything heavy on the dendé oil which is not even dendé but… strained tallow? and too salty.
The meats are halal – so they say, though it is unlikely it is halal, let alone meat – nowadays everything comes from the manufacturer’s, where piles of meat cells are coaxed into reproducing themselves until they have formed vast living slabs. Bocar says the food is authentic, because in his country the people had been starving for so many years and the famine was so dire they had long since developed national dishes based solely on donated American supplies.
He goes there, actually, just to see Bocar and make sure the kid is okay. It is no way to live, not that Slawa has to eat lunch and dinner six days a week at Chez Gagni Pota, but it is the only place where he has a friend.
What now is left? Once, on first meeting, he had even thought Bocar was a girl. If not a girl, a neuter entity, with beautiful black coils of hair decorated with feathers, ribbons, glitter. But, male or female, he was an extraordinarily beautiful creature.
Bocar was an illegal. The family had sold him to someone – some rich American – to do their military duty – and though it was frowned upon, somehow he had gotten two weeks before training camp to spend in New Jersey. He had come to stay with his aunt and uncle and cousins and his uncle had promised to send him to two-year college, after his military service was complete.
Even Slawa could have told him this was a complete lie; after military service – in the unlikely event he was still alive – he would be sent back immediately; somebody, probably the uncle, must have made so much money off of him they felt guilty – but then the uncle’s partner in the business had run away with the money and at first Bocar’s uncle said the vacation was over, he was needed at the restaurant, off the books.
Of course all this took a while to learn: the kid could speak English but he had learned it from books, he put emphasis on the wrong syllable of each sentence, which was how English looked on the page to one who hadn’t heard it – and the truth was, Bocar was practically deaf.
He had fought with the rebels, back home, making bombs and one had gone off when he was ten or twelve, he wasn’t exactly certain of his age. It had not been by choice, his village of tin and cardboard was raided by the rebels, he was taken away to join them. This year’s rebels had been in power ten years before.
Now Bocar’s country was ruled by an evil despot. It took Slawa a while to figure out what this meant, Bocar kept saying the words ‘ev-ill de-spot’ though finally he figured it out. The children – Bocar and the other kids – were told that the ruler, who had previously been a rebel and a good guy, had become one of the bad guys, and it was up to the children to assassinate the evil despot and restore the country. Restore it to what, Bocar often wondered; his country had never been any different than the way it was now. But maybe there could be change. Then he still had optimism.
On the other hand there were the various factions at war even among the rebels, and then the tribes – the Lala Veuves Clickot, who wanted to see the Rolo Greys eradicated. It didn’t matter who took him to fight with them: Bocar’s parents had died of Hepatitis P. or Srednoi gas, or slow Ebola X; he no longer knew what had happened to his brother, his older sister had been killed in front of his eyes.
When there had been food it had been flung from the sky by the airplanes: macaroni-and-cheese (there was no water with which to cook), ketchup, pigeon peas, Frosted Flakes. Anchovy filets in tins without keys, for those in a country where everyone was thirsty all the time. Jars of cocktail olives. Gummy worms, Cremora, Nutela and jars of peanut butter pre-mixed – and inseparable from – grape jelly. Bags of crispy pork rinds for a Moslem country.
It was a country where it rained every other year, if they were lucky; but it had not rained since before Bocar was born. Dry, parched, the lands continuously churned up by heavy machinery searching for… oil, or diamonds, no one was quite sure what… and when it did rain, it was no relief, it only meant that thousands drowned; the tin and cardboard villages were washed away.
The weather had not always been this way, it was said, but no one remembered if the past had been better – or worse.
Bocar hoped that his uncle, who promised to send him to school, would let him train in the field of Massage Therapy Techniques using External Devices.
But Uncle, he is slowly realizing, has no intention of ever doing so. Only when Bocar’s high heels had holes in