Babylon and Other Stories (3 page)

From the moment I punched my time card the next morning, everything was chaos. All the techs were gathered in the hallways outside the labs, whispering chemical terms like crazy. I got to the front desk and all fifteen lines were blinking. I took a deep breath and dug in. “Dejun Enterprises, good morning. I'm sorry, Mr. Dejun is not in, would you like to leave a message? I'm sorry, I don't know anything about that. Dejun Enterprises, good morning.”

The next time I looked up it was ten o'clock. Mr. Dejun came thundering in, wearing a dark blue double-breasted suit with gold buttons.

“Don't talk to the press, young Aggie!” he said, grabbing a fistful of While You Were Out slips. “Don't let anyone here talk to the press, either. Just don't talk to them, whatever you do!”

“But I'm the receptionist,” I said. “I have to talk.”

“This is no time for secretarial humor,” said Mr. Dejun sternly. “Now listen, I'm out to everybody except my lawyer.”

“Dejun Enterprises, good morning,” I answered. All fifteen lines rang constantly. All the newspapers and radio stations and TV stations in town called. It was weird to talk to people I usually watched on TV at night. It wasn't just the press on the phone, though, it was people who'd driven through the area around the time the spill had taken place. I took down all their names and numbers. Pink messages piled up around me like leaves. My voice cracked and went dry. No one came to the front to see me, or talk ball, or tell me what was going on. For all I knew, I was the only one there.

“Listen,” a man on the phone said. “I have a young child who
was exposed to this stuff. He's four years old, my son. Please, isn't there anything you can tell me?”

“Hold on, please,” I said. I picked up another line and hung up on the person to free it up, then called Sophia's extension and asked her what I should say to people with young children who'd been exposed.

“Take a message, for chrissake,” said Sophia.

I could hear her exhaling smoke. “But what about his kid?”

“Take a message,” she said, and I did.

“Is someone really going to call me back?” he asked.

“Of course they will,” I told him convincingly, knowing it was a lie. Then I took off the headset and walked outside and caught the bus home. There was no one at the house. I walked around the living room. I looked at the pictures on the mantel—my grandparents, my parents' wedding picture, me on vacation in L.A., me graduating from junior high school, me and Mom and Dad sitting on the living room couch. There were more pictures of me than of anything else. I picked up the phone and called work. Sophia answered, and I hung up. I went upstairs and crawled into bed.

I woke up at night and lay there for a while, trying to decide whether to just keep on sleeping. I could hear the rhythmic sounds of the ball game. I was hungry, so I went downstairs. Mr. Dejun was sitting on the couch in the TV room, watching the game with Mom. He was still wearing his navy blue suit, minus the tie and the jacket, which were folded neatly over one of the armchairs. He'd taken his shoes off and had his feet up on the table.

“Hi, Frank,” I said.

“Aggie,” said my mom. Sitting on the couch, Mr. Dejun came up
to her shoulder, which was bare and pale. Ordinarily, by this time in the summer she'd have freckles there, from mornings spent outside gardening. But not this year. She was wearing a sundress and her eyes were shiny.

“I was worried about you, young Aggie,” said Mr. Dejun. “I thought I'd come by and see how you're doing.”

“Fantastic,” I said. I didn't think he was a very good liar, or would be a decent receptionist. I went into the kitchen and got a beer. I was sort of expecting someone to follow me in there, but nobody did. I went out the back door and sat on the steps, sipping my beer and looking at the stars. It was a nice, clear night. The phone rang, three times, so I sighed and got up. If there was one thing I couldn't stand hearing that summer, it was the sound of a ringing phone.

“Dejun Enterprises. I mean, hello. Shit.”

“Aggie, it's me,” said my dad.

I couldn't think of anything to say and so I didn't. Instead, I carried the phone back outside with me. “Ahoy, matey,” I finally said.

“What?”

“Never mind. How's Margaret?”

“How are
you,
Ag? Are you all right?”

“Who wants to know?” I said.

“I understand you're upset,” Dad said. “I understand you're mad. I'm sorry I haven't called. I've had some things to work out, do you know what I mean?”

There was silence on the line. I was listening for the game, trying to get the score and the inning, but couldn't hear it anymore. I drank some of my beer, gulping it noisily down my throat.

“Ag, sometimes adults and kids get the same sorts of feelings
about their lives—you know, um, powerlessness, feeling trapped and that kind of thing.”

“Are you speaking hypothetically?” I said.

He took a deep breath and let it out. I imagined Margaret in the background, giving him big, encouraging nods with her big, wide head.

“What I mean is, sometimes adults don't know what to do, like kids don't always know what to do. Do you understand what I mean?”

I looked up. The stars blurred in my vision and I shook my head a little bit to clear it. “Sure I do,” I said. “I just have one question—who's the kid in this scenario, you or me?”

“You're so sarcastic,” he said in a soft voice. “You sound just like your mother.”

“It's not my fault,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I know. Okay, listen.” Suddenly he was all business. “I hear you had a bad day at work. Do you want to talk about it?”

“Who told you that?”

“Your mother called and told me.”

“Oh,” I said. I didn't even know she knew how to get in touch with him. Tears slid down the receiver and collected in the base of it, cool against my cheek, sliding into the little holes.

“Ag, your mother knows, and I hope you know too, that I love you more than anything. That's one thing we see eye-to-eye on, and that'll never change, no matter what else happens.”

I felt like this was the worst thing I'd ever heard. The King of Kohlrabi was in my living room drinking a beer in his socks, and I had to talk to my dad on the phone with a lesbian who wasn't a lesbian listening in the background. Somewhere in the desert, green slime was oozing toward families as they slept. What else
was happening all around me, all the time, and I couldn't do anything to stop it or even slow it down.

“Dad,” I told him, “Mom's inside watching baseball with Mr. Dejun.”

He said, “Oh? So how's the game?”

I sighed, and then the sigh turned into a hiccup.

“You like the Dodgers this year?” he asked.

“Their bullpen's a disaster,” I said.

“You've really been following? Aggie, there might be hope for you yet.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Are you coming back?”

“I don't know,” my dad said. “I just don't know.”

“Okay.” I stood up and looked at the night sky, the sound of cicadas throbbing around me. “I have to go now,” I said.

“Listen, Aggie, take down my number, okay? Take it down so you can call me whenever you want. Do you have a pen?”

“Sure,” I said. I didn't. But I closed my eyes and listened carefully to his voice in my ear, as if I were taking the most urgent message. As he told me the numbers I traced them, small and invisible, in the air in front of me, then let them go out into the night.

Walter was coughing again. He sat up in bed, his red face hanging over his chest like a heavy bloom, coughing. He didn't try to speak or even wheeze, instead dedicating himself to the fit with single-minded concentration. Carl watched the oxygen threads quiver across his cheeks. The cough ran down like an engine, slowing to sputters, then ended. Carl handed his uncle a glass of water, and he drank.

“Thanks,” Walter said. He pressed one of his large hands against his sunken chest, passed the glass back and took a few breaths.

“How do you feel?”

“I feel fine.” He grabbed his handkerchief from the bedside table, hacked up some phlegm, looked at it, and then put the cloth back on the table, folded.

“Do you want something to eat?”

“No. “ Walter looked at his watch and his features brightened. “Time for my beauty routine.”

Carl fetched the towel and the electric razor. Walter took off
the oxygen and offered his face, eyes closed. He didn't have much facial hair, but he always insisted on being shaved before a visit from his girlfriend, Marguerite. His skin was cool and pale and evenly colored, like clay or a smooth beach stone. While shaving him, Carl thought about how Walter's face had looked when he was a kid—swarthy and stubbled, deeply tanned by cigarette smoke—and how different it was now, the skin so papery and light, as if in transition to becoming some entirely different substance. The bedroom was quiet except for the mosquito buzz of the razor and the hiss and pump of the oxygen machine. Every once in a while Walter drew a labored breath. When he was done, Carl dabbed Aqua Velva on his face; Walter was, and always would be, an Aqua Velva man.

Walter ran his right hand over his cheeks and down under his chin, then frowned. “You missed a spot,” he said.

He reinserted the oxygen in his nostrils and walked downstairs slowly and purposefully, carrying the oxygen line raised behind him like a king with his robe. Adding to this effect, his wispy hair stood up and waved, crownlike, above his balding head. By the time Marguerite showed up he was installed in the living room in his favorite armchair, his thick, veiny ankles visible between the cuffs of his brown pants and his brown socks.

“Hi, handsome,” Marguerite said.

She was wearing a flowing green pantsuit with gold buttons and smelled like roses. She and Walter had been dating for years. They'd met in the home, and Walter's moving back into his house, when Carl came to live with him, had given him the reputation among the residents there as a heartbreaker. But Marguerite came to see him faithfully—taking a taxi—every Tuesday and Thursday, and they drank weak coffee that Carl made, and played gin. Marguerite looked better than Walter did, in spite of
being older, but she was delicate and getting a bit, as Walter put it, soft in the head. Sometimes she'd smile at Carl and say, “Oh, dear, my mind is going. If you see it anywhere, could you tell it to come back?” Other times she'd forget words and Carl, walking past the living room, would see her sitting on the couch with her hands up in the air like an agitated bird, saying, “I'm so stupid— what's the word I want?” Walter could never guess.

Carl put out the coffee, went downstairs to his office, turned on the computer, put on the headset, and listened.

He had started working from home a year ago, when he moved back in with Walter, in this house where he'd grown up. Walter didn't say anything to him about the first heart attack, just checked in to the convalescent home and then called to announce the change of address. Carl understood that this was Walter's dignity in action: the refusal, at all costs, to be a burden. But when he went and saw the place he felt sick. The fecal smell, the dim light, the wan, shrunken people like some alien and unfortunate race, all this had frightened Carl and pissed him off. He resolved to do whatever was required—including quitting his job, moving back home, and taking care of Walter himself—to get Walter free of it. While he was sitting in Walter's room, a man passed by the open door in a wheelchair, then back in the other direction, then again, and again. When he noticed Carl watching him, the man bared his gums and laughed.

“Walter,” Carl said, “we're getting out of here.”

“Don't trouble yourself, son,” Walter said, but he was clearly pleased.

Before setting up his own business, Carl was employed by a
transcription service at a hospital, and he didn't realize how much he hated going to work every day until he no longer had to do it. Everything about it—the commute, the workplace banter, the fluorescent lighting and bad coffee—had filed him down into points. Carl had no ear for gossip, didn't tell jokes, was uneasy with the siege-like camaraderie of the office. He was not a people person. And now, away from those things, he was a great deal happier. He worked only with voices he turned into reports.

Transcription was a habit that could be mastered and even internalized. When he was watching television with his uncle or shopping for groceries, he would hear people's voices and almost unconsciously transcribe them, his foot tapping as if he were working the foot pedals. In medieval monasteries there was a room called a scriptorium where certain monks labored all day long transcribing the world into text, and it seemed to him there was an equivalent purity to the work he did in this bare basement room. Correct spelling and grammar, the unadorned finality of the perfect text, these had an astringency that pleased him.

Carl worked for exactly one hour. It took him forever to get through reports by Dr. Sabatini, who was his least favorite of all the doctors. Here was the height of rudeness: he ate while dictating. Chomps and smacks between words, slurps and molars grinding. It was disgusting and necessitated guesswork on the part of the transcriptionist, which Carl hated; but it was either that or ask him to clarify every other word. Sabatini sounded like a jerk, too, his syllables impatient and clipped. For some reason that Carl couldn't specify, he also sounded bald. This suspicion hadn't been confirmed, though, since they'd never met.
Carl avoided the hospital as much as possible, which was very nearly completely. The world of technology made this miracle happen.