Large Animals in Everyday Life (6 page)

“Nope,” Pat said. “Just garden-variety Apalachicola oysters.”

“Oh yes, and your reporter is here,” Dr. Roland said. “She's out in the reception area whenever you're ready.”

Maura was waking up now beside the Trinidadian; perhaps he sang when he awoke. A weak, sick terror took hold of Pat: what if Maura planned to visit some other student today, someone she had managed to keep secret this whole time? Then he thought of her running her hand through his own thin hair so kindly, so easily—it was impossible. It was impossible that she not love him. “Your body is perfect,” she had told him. “Your body has nothing to do with reality.”

“If you're wondering about safety,” Dr. Roland was saying, “as well you might, let me assure you there is no cause for concern. As you'll see when you take the complete tour, there's a significantly thick concrete wall between us and the source. I just thought we'd best get started right away with these little devils in case there's a hitch. Plenty of time later to go exploring.”

“Right,” Pat said. He blinked and stamped his feet. “Let's go. Let's load them on.”

Silent men in jumpsuits moved at Dr. Roland's command to lift the oysters onto the machine. There was nothing left for Pat to do but watch.

• • •

The insects who ate their way through fruits and vegetables did not waste time worrying about what would become of them. They knew they were romanticized by no one, and they lived accordingly, hurling themselves with abandon at mouths and ears, TV screens and lightbulbs, suns and caves. If they died, they
died. On the wheel of
samsara
, they had no place to go but up. Life for them held no shame, mystery, or promise, and they did not care who spied on them or recorded them going about the business of it.

• • •

Whatever it was, it was beginning to happen. The sun itself seemed to be rotating. Each oyster sat deep in its own mystery, waiting for the shock. The shock was moments away, already sending waves back in time at them, though the waves were impossible to interpret. The air around the oysters was like music. Ordered currents began to flow. The new earth beneath them began to turn. And then the light cracked into them, and the question mark that was the world snapped itself out straight, dividing them from mystery forever.

• • •

“Back in Gainesville,” Pat told the reporter, “I'd have to orient each oyster individually. Here we have the advantage of dosing whole bushels at a time. We can study both shelf-life and microbiology in one experiment.”

The reporter peered at him through grass-green contact lenses, her breath smelling strongly of buttered toast. “How will you be able to tell if the oysters are dead?” she asked.

“We know they won't be dead,” he said impatiently.

“But just hypothetically,” she said, grinning.

He didn't see the joke, but he explained to her that any looseness in the shell was an indicator. There could be no slippage between the halves, none.

“Wow,” she said.

He glanced over her shoulder at a carpeted vestibule in which was set up a courtesy telephone for guests of the plant. The phone had drawn his eyes throughout the interview, like a
bomb or an unlocked safe. It shone blackly on a small table on which also sat a plate of crullers.

“What's next?” the reporter said.

“I beg your pardon?” Pat said.

“What other foods will you be working on?”

“Oh, dead chickens,” Pat said, sighing.

“I can see I'm wearing you out,” the reporter said, finally. She went away looking a little annoyed, her eyes somewhat dimmed.

When she was gone, Pat went and sat by the phone. He removed the pocket dosimeter from his beltloop and set it on the table beside the crullers. It was a small instrument that resembled a Sharpie pen, only with a lens at one end. Zero, it had read when he commenced the tour of the plant, and zero it read now. He had absorbed no radiation. He had penetrated wall after wall within the warehouse-sized building, moving ever closer to the source. At every new level, Dr. Roland had pointed out more buttons, more controls, more men. There were earthquake buttons and flood buttons, hurricane buttons and buttons to press if someone fell asleep. There were men whose job it was to watch buttons, and men who watched only other men. The whole thing reminded Pat of some giant child's ant-farm. He had gone as close as one could go to the great source, and his dosimeter still registered zero.

He looked again at the little instrument and thought, That's me. A big zero, coming and going. Nothing will ever change—I
am
invisible. He grabbed at the phone's receiver and punched the buttons hard, hurting his finger.
I've had it with this secret life
, he would tell her.
Keep your deceptions, your illusions, your stupid, hopeful Trinidadian. Without you my life will open up like a wonderful picture book, what people know of me will be the truth
. The phone was ringing blankly in his ear. It went on, ringing and stopping, ringing and stopping. He let his head fall for a moment and felt the blood rushing to his face like a child's hot tears. He felt like a child planning to run away from home. His courage was already dissolving, he could not sustain it.
Fine, I'll call
her later
, he told himself.
From the hotel, let the University pay for it
. But even as he thought this, it was already passing out of him, going out of reach like a helium balloon. It was passing out of him and it was gone. He lifted up his head and landed back in the sweet hopelessness of his life. The oysters awaited him.

• • •

The oysters felt different, but it was difficult for them to say how. They felt as though something had been added or something taken away. They felt vaguely the urge to produce pearls, but they could not produce them. Clearly, they were leaving something behind, moving with smooth speed away from something of great importance, but what this thing was they could not remember. They felt frustrated, distracted. Where were they going? they wondered. What would happen to them? What were they supposed to do? Oh, they were only oysters! Who was there to tell their story, and who was there to listen?

The child was scared of everything. She was scared of being left alone but scared of baby-sitters, especially the young ones who wore black eyeliner. The child's mother owned a tube of black eyeliner which the child could go look at anytime, sitting unassumingly in its basket on the bathroom counter, but the child wasn't scared of that. She was scared of the violent sound of her own bathwater running. When it was time for her bath, her mother would run the water and she would stay in her room with the door closed until the tub was full. But even in her room, she was scared the walls of the house would fall down. First the pictures would fall off the walls and then, a second later, the walls themselves would go, breaking apart at the corners and crashing down to the ground. She could see it so clearly, sometimes she ran fretfully from room to room, desperate for relief. Her stomach hurt when she was scared, so now she
was scared of her own stomach, of its mysterious acid whims. It could start up at any moment.

“She just has a fast metabolism,” the child's blasé grandmother said. The child had a blasé grandmother and a passionate grandmother. The two grandmothers sat on adjacent identical striped sofas in the living room of the child's house, watching the child practice headstands using the tripod method. They did not care for each other, though they both certainly adored the child. They lived only blocks apart, so whenever they were coming to visit the child, the blasé grandmother picked up the passionate grandmother, who didn't drive. When they arrived at the child's house, they often did not come inside immediately but could be seen sitting for minutes parked in the driveway, arguing silently behind the windshield of the blasé grandmother's sky-blue Chevy Nova.

“There's nothing wrong with the child's metabolism,” the passionate grandmother told the blasé grandmother. But in her head she was not so sure. It was a fact that the child could not eat enough, could not seem to keep up her weight. What if it were true? the passionate grandmother thought. She often lay awake at night worrying about the child, and as the child grew, the grandmother's visions grew more vivid. Metabolism, my God! she thought. The child was digesting herself out of existence, evaporating by invisible increments every minute, even now, right here in front of them! The passionate grandmother stood abruptly and left the room, her eyes wild.

“Grandmother, wait, look,” the child cried, in a muffled, upside-down voice.

“Back in a sec, duckie,” the passionate grandmother called tremulously from the powder room. She shut herself in and sat on the fluffy blue toilet seat cover, clutching an embroidered guest towel to her stomach and imagining outrageous things. She imagined the child years from now, lost to the world, out in the dark city without grandmothers to guide her. The child
would suffer flat tires, unemployment, hepatitis. In an effort to escape her parents, she would suffer any number of things. She would live in the back room of a run-down theater, eating off a hot plate and sleeping alone on a giant foam rubber pea-pod costume. The passionate grandmother could see it so clearly, she could barely catch her breath. The child was crying alone, her small sobs lost to the dark Chicago winter. The child was blindfolded and tied to a cot with Marshall Field's gold Christmas package string, letting a young man with glasses and a mustache tickle her most private parts!

The passionate grandmother had not asked to receive these telegraphic messages, but she was definitely receiving them. Her son, the child's father, was no help; he only told her she was being irrational. And her daughter-in-law—forget it! The passionate grandmother had once, nine years earlier, called her daughter-in-law a bad word, and that word had never been forgotten. The daughter-in-law carried the word around like an invisible helium balloon fastened to her wrist. The passionate grandmother sat there sniffing a fragrant yellow guest soap in the shape of a bunny, trying to calm her senses.

“When I'm done I want to show you something else,” the child was saying to the blasé grandmother in the living room. The blasé grandmother sat solidly on her sofa, her hands folded in her lap, watching the powder room door and shaking her head. She wished for a cigarette, but she would have had to go outside to smoke it, a new rule made by the child's parents, even though it was the middle of winter, and what was one cigarette going to do to the child? On the other hand, knowing what was now known, she supposed that this was only being rational.

The blasé grandmother was the mother of the child's mother and was divorced. Not once but twice. She'd had her fill, she often declared these days. Her husbands were the least of her problems, really. She had come over on a boat from Hungary at the age of three, worked odd jobs for pay at the age of nine, and while raising her daughter, in between husbands, had never once
paid for a single grocery item without using a coupon. Now, thanks to the divorces, she had plenty of money, not to mention a Senior Citizen card that made her eligible for fabulous bargains on almost everything. What was life for, if not to enjoy the nicer things? She owned so many floral-patterned silk scarves that she had lost count. She wore them draped and pinned artfully over her shoulders, and she enjoyed without guilt the sundry and not-so-sundry comforts and privileges now afforded her. She wanted the best for her grandchild, but she did not understand the problem. She personally had never flown off the handle in her life.

The passionate grandmother was the mother of the child's father and was widowed. Her husband had been a sober podiatrist who tried always to set aside his petty desires and work for the greater good, but in private he was a different kind of man, and she had enjoyed him terribly, at a time when this was considered unusual, even unnatural. They were especially fond of playing shocking practical jokes on each other at sacred moments, although many people who knew them well would have found this hard to believe. If anyone ever found out what she'd hidden in his can of foot powder on their honeymoon! She was a worrier even then, however, and when her son was a baby she bought for him a plastic amulet embossed with the message
DON'T KISS ME
in large ornate letters and strung on a white ribbon so it could hang enchantingly around his neck, protecting him from the germs of well-meaning strangers in public places. Then, after the baby was safely grown and away at college, her husband had one afternoon popped his handsome head up out of the crawl space and said, “I am a goblin of the deep,” and she had laughed at him from the kitchen, where she was chopping carrots, and then he'd gone back down and had a cerebral hemorrhage and died.

Surprisingly, that event had not changed her personality much. During all those years she was enthusiastically loving her husband, she had in fact been living for her child—a guilty secret which had, she suspected, helped or even allowed her to
love her husband. So, after grieving for him a while in public and a while longer in private, she went on living for her child, just as she always had, and when that was no longer realistic, she lived for her child's child. Why else did one live? she wondered. The child's fears were her own, and she would fight, if necessary, to keep from relinquishing them.

The child is scared of everything
, the child's parents said. They recited this to strangers in department stores and waiting rooms and restaurants, even if the child was sitting quietly at that moment. It was impossible to take her anywhere, they said. They said it sometimes with scorn, other times irony, and still other times resignation. They took the child to a restaurant called the Ivanhoe that featured catacombs you descended to by elevator. The catacombs contained creative surprises especially for children, the nice lady who ran the elevator said. She had a sweet, apologetic voice and yellow hair in the shape of an optimistic, upward-floating bubble. Nevertheless, the child refused to go. Well, she got into the elevator but then caused such a scene the elevator had to be stopped and reversed.
Of course, what were we thinking
? the child's parents said.
She's scared of everything
, they told the nice lady. The lady worriedly worked the controls, her hair aquiver with concern.
And whatever she isn't scared of, she feels sorry for
, they told her.