Babylon and Other Stories (2 page)

He looked surprised. “We do?”

“Well, my mother and I do,” I said. She told me this all the time. I started putting the groceries on the conveyor belt. It was what my mom called peasant food, or life's necessities. I couldn't help staring at the decadent foods, like Pop Tarts and Ruffles, that other people had in their carts.

He nodded. I looked over at him and saw that his gray T-shirt and jeans were neatly ironed.

“I'm Mr. Dejun,” he said.

“Aggie.”

We shook hands and shuffled forward in line.

He unloaded his kohlrabi behind my stuff. “So what do you do with yourself when you aren't coming to the aid of strangers in grocery stores, Aggie?”

“Well, right now, I'm supposed to be looking for a job.”

“Is that right?” said Mr. Dejun. “What kind of job? Can you type?”

I didn't see why not. “I guess so.”

“I'd like to hire you, Aggie,” he said. “I could use someone with
your outgoing personality and discriminating eye for produce. Come see me tomorrow.” He pulled a business card out of his jeans, and I put it in my pocket, then we shook on the deal.

I was at his office by nine the next morning. His company, Dejun Enterprises, Inc., was a private environmental testing firm. They tested just about everything you could think of—water, soil, air, machinery, fabrics, textiles, even once, he confided, condoms. As soon as I got there Mr. Dejun took me on a tour of the place, through all the labs where technicians in white coats hovered over long orange counters covered with Bunsen burners and petri dishes and test tubes, just like the labs at school.

“Listen, if you can think of something that needs to be tested, we'll test it for you. That's our attitude here at Dejun Enterprises, Inc. We test things that have never been tested before, and we test 'em cheaper than anybody else. Never turn a job down. Listen, Aggie, I've been in business for a long time, and one thing I've learned is that you
always
have to be willing to take the cus-tomer's money. Got it?”

“Got it,” I said.

He led me down hallways and into the employee lounge. I was completely disoriented, but somehow we wound up back in the reception area. There was a frowning, wrinkled woman sitting at the desk wearing a headset, apparently to leave her hands free for smoking. Her ashtray was full of cigarette butts. Next to the desk was a free-standing fishtank. Its water looked alarmingly gray, and I wasn't sure whether there were fish in it or not.

“Sophia, you're free,” said Mr. Dejun. “The cavalry is here.”

“Yippee,” said Sophia, not moving.

“She loves me,” Mr. Dejun told me.

“She's a young one, isn't she,” said Sophia.

“Hi, I'm Aggie,” I said, and shook her hand. She didn't really shake back.

Mr. Dejun said, “Sophia is actually not the receptionist, she's our accounts payable czaress. She is the Diva of Debts, aren't you, darling?”

“Sure,” said Sophia.

“She loves me. The point being, Aggie, that she's just filling in because we had to, ah, part with the receptionist. But now we have you for the summer and we don't have to hire a new receptionist until fall. Isn't it great, Sophia?”

“Good morning, Dejun Enterprises,” said Sophia. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke at Mr. Dejun.

“What happened to the receptionist?” I said. I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and saw some fish emerging from behind the plastic plants of the tank. They looked okay in spite of the secondhand smoke.

“She was a terrible liar. Are you a good liar?”

“Pretty good, I guess,” I said.

“Only pretty good?”

“Actually, I'm an excellent liar. The ‘pretty good’ part was a lie.”

Mr. Dejun tilted back his head and laughed. His long gray hair was stiff and bristly and maintained its shape when it moved, like a cloud formation. I could see the backs of his teeth.

“You know, I'm really starting to get a kick out of you, young Aggie. Now listen. We get a lot of calls here, a
lot
of calls. And we can't always take them, right? We're only human, and there are only so many hours in a day. So sometimes we'll come to you and say, ‘If so-and-so calls, I don't want to talk to him, tell him I'm in a meeting.’ Now if I were to say that to you, what would you do?”

“Tell him you're in a meeting.”

“Excellent! That is exactly the right answer. You're brilliant, Aggie. You are really terrific.”

“What did the old receptionist say?”

“It turned out that she was a very devout woman who refused to lie. She'd say, ‘Yes, he's here, but he doesn't want to talk to you right now.’ Nothing about meetings. You've got to respect her integrity, but man-oh-man did we have a lot of pissed-off people on the phone.”

Sophia gave me five minutes of training and then left me on my own, carrying her big ashtray with her down the hallway. The reception area was separated from the rest of the building by almost-walls that stopped about a foot from the ceiling. I was alone. Mr. Dejun was right—the phone rang all the time. Mainly I had to find out what it was they wanted tested and transfer them to the appropriate lab. There were labs for textiles, for chemical compounds, for river water and for drinking water. Besides transferring calls, mainly what I did was lie. I hadn't even been up there for an hour before people started coming up front to introduce themselves, saying things like, “If that jerk from San Miguel Water calls, tell him I'm out working in the field today.” Everyone who worked at Dejun seemed to be ducking somebody—clients, spouses, or accountants. Reports and results and bills were always overdue. This was how I got to know most of the people who worked at Dejun, through all the lies I told on their behalf. I did it all the time, fluently and convincingly. It was kind of exhilarating. I told Lucy and Karen it was creative work.

Within days, life settled into a routine. I rarely saw Mr. Dejun, and then only when he was striding out the front door to meet a client for lunch, wearing small, beautiful gray suits. I wondered if he had to get them custom-made, since he was so short. Or
maybe they were hemmed for him by the Queen of Kohlrabi. I punched a time clock and ate my lunch in the smoky employee lounge with the lab techs and accounting clerks and got paid every second Friday. I wore hose. It was like a game of real life. At five I'd head home and collapse on the couch, refusing to speak to my mother except in nods and hand gestures.

“I talk all day,” I'd whisper exhaustedly, hand to my forehead. “Please, no more.”

“Oh, you poor working stiff,” my mother would say. “Get changed and let's watch the game.”

Lucy and Karen were working nights during the week, so Mom and I spent the evenings slumped on the couch, watching TV and drinking beer. I'd never drunk beer in front of my mom before, but it didn't seem like a big deal. After all the stuff that had gone wrong, who could worry about a minor issue like the legal drinking age? We didn't hear anything from my father or Margaret. Apparently they were still sorting out whatever needed to be sorted. Mom and I didn't talk about him much. Mostly we talked about the Dodgers.

My father tried to get me to follow baseball the whole time I was growing up, and I was never interested until the summer he went away. There was something about the games that was perfect for those nights, the lazy pace of long games, the commentators' voices hushed and reverent and excited at the same time. By the middle of July I could trade statistics with the guys in the employee lounge. They treated me like some kind of child prodigy just for knowing division standings in the National League. They'd come up front just to ask me what I thought of the game.

“The whole bullpen is pathetic! We'd have won it if that guy hadn't blown it in the bottom of the fifth. Dejun Enterprises, good morning.”

Then one morning in July I woke up in so much pain I couldn't breathe or speak. I just lay there in bed until my mother came to tell me I was late for work. She'd taken to wearing her housecoat most of the day and night, with anything she might ever need stuffed into its pockets: nail polish, a deck of cards, rubber bands, gardening tools. She was starting to look like some kind of crazy building superintendent.

“What's the matter with you, sailor?” she said, fishing a bottle of Tylenol out of her pocket and offering it to me. “Too much fun on the town last night?”

“Guh,” I said.

“Aggie, you know what? I think your whole face is swollen.”

“Guh.”

“Is that the only word you can say, or just some new kind of teenage slang?”

“Guh.”

She drove me to the emergency room, where they told us that my wisdom teeth were impacted, causing an infection in my mouth, and would have to be removed immediately. I was in no condition to argue.

“You're going to be fine, honey,” said my mom. “Here, drink some water.”

“Has it been tested?” I mumbled.

When I regained consciousness, I had four fewer teeth and no memory at all of their extraction. I didn't even know what day it was. I woke up in my own bed, with a bowl of red Jell-O sparkling on the bedside table. I was starving and dug right in.

“The princess awakes,” said my mother, striding into the room. She fluffed my pillows and stood back. She was wearing a suit and lipstick and looked like a million dollars. For a couple of seconds I wasn't even sure it was really her.

“Guh?” I said, not from pain but shock. Some Jell-O worked itself out of my mouth and dribbled down my chin.

“Not this again,” Mom said. “Is that all you can say after being unconscious for two days? Can't you find the will to add just a few more consonants?”

“You wook nice,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said, pulling the curtains open to let in the sun. I winced. “I've been filling in for you at work. You don't get sick days, you know. So when I told them you wouldn't be in for the rest of the week, they asked me to substitute. Or I offered. Whatever, we agreed.”

I leaned up on my elbows in bed. My head felt like a hot-air balloon, something large and heavy floating over the rest of my body. “No way,” I said.

“There's no need to be rude,” she said primly. “I am a substitute, you know.”

“Teacher.”

She shrugged. I hadn't seen her this alert in ages.

“Same difference. Look, I have to go, I'm late. There's more Jell-O in the fridge if you want it, and some soup.”

“You can't really be doing this,” I said.

She put her hands on her hips and said, “Oh, be quiet. You sound just like your father.”

I sat up and started struggling with the bedcovers. In my weakened state it was like wrestling a bunch of monkeys. My own mother stood there and laughed at me.

“Honey, come look at yourself,” she said. She led me by the hand to the bathroom mirror, and I gasped in horror. My face was about three feet wide.

“Now, you just relax today. Frank says to take it easy and get healthy, which is the most important thing.”

“Okay.” I was back under the covers before I remembered to ask who Frank was.

“I mean, Mr. Dejun,” she said. And that probably would've worried me had I not immediately lost consciousness again. When I woke up throughout the day, it was only to eat more Jell-O and leaf through the sports section my mother had left by the bed. The Dodgers were still having a lot of trouble in the bullpen, which was really depressing.

I was out for a week. After a couple of days I was well enough to get out of bed, but I didn't. My face was still swollen and I was afraid that by venturing outside I'd frighten young children and dogs. Karen and Lucy came by between waitressing shifts to keep me company. Lucy had some rum she'd gotten from the pirate restaurant, and she and Karen used it to make some alcoholic Jell-O. We sat around in my room eating it with our fingers. None of us was having the summer we'd thought we would.

“So where's your mom, anyway, Ag?”

“She's doing my job.”

“At Dejun Enterprises, good morning?”

“Yeah.”

“Your own mother replaced you in the workforce? Man,” said Karen, “that is just so typical of our generation. We have no control over anything.”

“Yeah, man, you're not a person, you're a statistic,” said Lucy.

“Thanks a lot, Peg Leg,” I said.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” she said. “Here, you can wear my eye patch if you want.”

“Cool,” I said, putting it on. Karen and Lucy burst out laughing. “Ahoy, mateys,” I told them from between my puffy lips.

After the swelling had mostly gone down, I went back to work and my mother stayed home, but nothing was quite the same at Dejun; it was just too weird that Mom and I had done the same job and everyone there had met her. The textile-testing guys came up front and said, “Hey, Ag, your mom's cool. And now we know how come you know so much about baseball.”

Now, this was unfair. Everything she knew about baseball she'd learned from me just that summer. “Actually, no,” I started to say, but then I had to answer the phone.

“Dejun Enterprises, good morning.” I was a little out of practice, and my mouth felt sore and dry. The hours dragged past until I went home and sank into the couch to watch the news. This was when I realized that disaster had struck yet again.

What happened was this: a truck carrying chemical material tested by Dejun Enterprises overturned on the interstate in Tijeras Canyon and spilled. Dejun had tested the stuff, inspected the storage containers, and declared it safe to transport, but environmentalists at the scene were saying it wasn't safe at all, and the truck should never have been allowed on the road. Police sealed off the entire area with a roadblock, causing massive delays. The road was contaminated, the soil was contaminated, everything was contaminated. I had never heard of the chemical and I didn't know what it looked like, but I pictured it as a fluorescent green ooze spreading like a living thing across the ground. The reporter, her stiff black hair barely flapping in the canyon wind, said there was some question whether Dejun had even looked at this material before issuing its report. Camera crews shot Mr. Dejun going into his house, saying “no comment,” over and over again, his scowl barely visible under a sport coat he draped over his head. “Allegedly” was a word the reporter on
the scene used a lot. In the darkness of the canyon behind her, groggy families evacuated their homes, children asleep in their parents' arms.