Reptile House Read online

  Roger took a shower without soap. The hot water pummeled his shiny head and naked skin just like it would anyone’s. Roger Cotton dried off. He drank at the fountain. He found bandages in the bottom of an open locker near Bench 7 and fumbled to cover the Blue Nevus. He dressed. He walked to his car and sat for a long time on the bumper under the parking lot light. It was a terrible car. The Middle Ages was a better time to live. Life spans were shorter and more defined. Smallpox and Black Plague took people quickly regardless of sin or previous health. Horses were the main form of transportation, besides walking, which was what most people did, the average people. Average horses lived and died and had average foals who lived and died. The people fed the horses in the fields. The people opened the fence door and watched the horses walk through. Once upon a time, people brushed horses in the morning as their first act of the day. They picked the dirt between the horse’s shoes at noon. The horses stood and ate in beautifully green fields in the afternoon. It was a wonderful time.

  A child’s small bike leaned unchained on the fence. It was an older model, green and yellow, with streamers and a bell. It had a flat tire. The child had left the bike stranded and gone to get help. But this child had not found help. This child had not returned. Once upon a time, there were people down the street such as cobblers and blacksmiths who could fix the bike in a snap and who cared about the child, who wanted to make his life good, who asked after his happiness and well-being amongst themselves.

  Roger looked around him. The parking lot was empty. The Y lights were still on but it was just the janitor. A car was parked on Campbell with its interior lights on, but no one was in it. Roger waved at the car to be sure. No one waved back. Roger opened his trunk. He went to the bike and petted the green and yellow seat. He picked up the bike by the throat of the handles and laid the bike in his trunk. The bell trilled as he slammed the trunk door. Roger Cotton drove home smelling of Stan Penrod’s cigar. He carried the small bike down the basement steps to the Ping-Pong table, which was never used anymore for Ping-Pong. He pulled the string over the net for light.

  On the near-court, Roger Cotton stored his collection of silver and gold amulets, arranged in a small city of boxes within the service line. Across the net in the far-court stood a corresponding city of boxes, the amalgamated metals, the coppers and the pewters too, the lesser amulets, neatly lined and stacked, rarely opened. In total, the entire Ping-Pong table metropolis was built of one hundred and twenty-seven amulet boxes. Each small, handcrafted trinket within represented the handiwork of one of Roger Cotton’s favorite historical and notable human cultures of the extinct past: amulets crafted in celebration of the Golden Age of postcolonial Africa, high-latitude/nonguttural Native American, and the late-north Low Frisian of central Europe were his special subspecialties, though he owned a smattering of others. He had ordered them from Mexico City as he and Martha could afford it. It was a thorough collection, but hardly exhaustive. This was just the beginning. He stood and admired the shadow the tallest buildings cast.

  Roger Cotton set the bike down. He rolled it and parked it against the far-court backhand line. Its small front wheel and handlebars tangled easily into the cluster of seventeen other bikes.

  That night, Roger shaved his mustache with the straight edge. The bathroom mirror needed cleaning, but that was Martha’s work. The mirror had a round face and a round lip. At the doctor’s office, there had been a glass box with a phone girl in it with a headset over her skull. She talked to air: dirty carpet, orange plastic chairs, old magazines. The hairs over Roger’s lip were like dried-up grass. The doctor was dark and smelled of carpets and frankincense from India or Mongolia but the diploma said Baltimore. Roger had looked at the diploma closely. He had taken it from the wall and cleaned it with his sleeve while waiting for this doctor forty-three minutes.

  A toothpaste lump fell. It stuck to the sink. Roger picked the skin with his nail and the lump slid away. The hairs slid down the drain, gone, absolutely gone.

  Roger heard a noise in the house and called “Martha?” No, it was not Martha. It was the Blue Nevus. Blue Nevus. Blue Nevus.

  Roger neatened his sideburns with the straightedge and said something original: Up yours, Cinderella, you pink-pantied Fool, you Glass-shoed liar, what a Moron you are. I wish the stepsisters had burned your Dress. Smashed your Pumpkin. Caught your Mice in a Trap and dropped them in the Barrel, the one in your stepmother’s Barn.

  He wrote it down then tore it up. He knew he had gone too far.

  When done with the sideburns, Roger pressed the blade to the neck of Blue Nevus but did not cut. Everything was backward in the mirror, confusing and dangerous. Roger Cotton went to bed since a good night sleep changes everything.

  In the morning, Roger Cotton tried Martha’s number in Omaha. He left a message. Before work he wrote a card to Ms. Kelsey Starr. He addressed it to her in Omaha at NSA headquarters on the Flight Crew Campus, though he knew her to be traveling in Europe on a promotional tour for the Gypsy VIII Program. She would get the card when she returned.

  Dear Kelsey,

  Thanks for the article. I am ever honored you take the time to edify fellow Lennoxonians and your fans. I love your work on meteors, especially, and cancer treatment. I’ve seen the protesters in Omaha. But they are fear-mongers and people see through that sort of thing. Don’t let thugs like that bother you. They are not worthy of your fear. Threats are easy, words, words, words. Enclosed is an interesting article on free-test inversions, my specialty. It might interest you. The best of everything to you. The launch is coming soon, I know, and you must be very, very busy. Please know what an inspiration you are to me and my wife (Martha), who is a colleague of yours over at the Research Pod on NSA campus. She’s redesigning the individual oxygen gooseneck scrubber valve assembly for safety improvements. She’s brilliant and always wanted to go up there to space. Like all of us did/do. We can’t all go. Maybe you will see her. Say hello from me if you do see her, thanks.

  Yours,

  Roger Cotton

  It was not his place to ask about a new boyfriend. He mailed the card, a pussy willow print signifying spring, on his way to work. That day, work scheduled Roger for six Marksman inverter installations, laborious and tedious. He was running nonstop from nine to five though hardly at the top of his game. His Blue Nevus was throbbing.

  National Space Risk Assessment Manual

  1. Safety first.

  2. Space is not political.

  Kelsey Starr got her foot in the door during the Gypsy VI era when most in Lennox had lost hope. Lennox worried, by then, Kelsey was wasting her time. Other flight candidates from various Tier One institutions could match Kelsey Starr’s skill set; they were younger, and they did not carry with them the “always the bridesmaid” aura. But Kelsey Starr made the alternate list a month before the last launch of Gypsy VI. The destination was a rendezvous off Titan with a meteor field of particular promise for Uranium 238 harvest, one of Kelsey Starr’s subspecialties. When a fluke flu hit Omaha and knocked out the meteoric science officer three days before launch, Jason Starr was the only person not surprised. He said privately that his daughter was like an old-style caboose: “Never first on board, often last, but Kelsey always made it on the train.”

  Kelsey proved herself on Gypsy VI and VII, and by VIII there was no question who would fill the science officer slot for important meteor work. Kelsey was also well liked. She was outstanding with crowds and children and the press. Protesters’ accusations of corruption and incompetence at NSA, criticism of privatization of public resources for the gains of big mining interests, and general attacks on the imperialistic nature of space travel were rendered impotent by Kelsey Starr’s open, forthright, scientific style and small town manners. Everyone loved her. Kelsey Starr was brilliant, competent, and good for crew morale on the torturously long round trips to the frontier mineral outposts that obsessed the NSA at the time. She was a shrewd staffing decision from the upper levels of the Gypsy VIII Pro
gram, despite all its other well-known disappointments.

  The Gypsy VIII was the most perfected class of craft of its day. Designers and engineers had worked out all the persistent issues with deep cold solubility and permeability that had plagued previous versions of the craft. Kelsey Starr, at the time, was still a middle-30s tomboy. She did five hundred sit-ups a day, but was not beefy. She drank only persimmon tea and water and gave up all meats native to her upbringing due to current damning analysis of nitrates and the liver. Kelsey had a pristine liver. She had perfect organs generally, as preflight body scans and development scans for the CODE premortem cloning system confirmed. She was, in fact, the favored subject of all the CODE scientists since all her organs ranked in the ninety-ninth percentile. Kelsey Starr had a lifespan expectation range from one hundred and ten years on the low end to one hundred and twenty-eight years on the high depending, of course, on lack of unforeseen mishap, unnatural death, foul play, or inadvertent toxicity exposures. She looked twenty-five at the blastoff of Gypsy VIII.

  “I think they’re wrong,” she told the reporter for a women’s magazine. “I expect to live to be one hundred and forty-eight.” Kelsey Starr had a disarming, nonprofessional voice.

  “How does that feel?” a magazine asked.

  “It feels like I am the luckiest person on planet Earth,” Kelsey Starr said.

  “Do you have hobbies?”

  “Horseback riding.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend, Ms. Starr? We’ve heard rumors.”

  “No comment.”

  “Some people criticize the space program for unethical practices. You yourself, we understand, have received death threats. What do you say to those people, Ms. Starr?”

  “Space is not political,” Kelsey said.

  “That’s a slogan, Ms. Starr,” said the magazine.

  “Space is personal,” said Kelsey. “We are all all alone just like that.”

  “How tall are you anyway?”

  “6'1".”

  “That’s very tall for space travel.”

  “Yes,” she smiled. “It certainly is.”

  The suit Kelsey designed as a post-doc altered the field. She spoke to her mother on Saturdays at 9 AM unless in a different time zone. She wrote weekly longhand to her father. She braided her hair daily. The tail touched her coccyx and drew cameras even before becoming an alternate. She had attended Lennox Public High School though accepted to the Academy, and had been the high school mascot in a brown fuzzy suit. The buck-toothed head was separate, clawed feet and a flat slapping tail—the Lennox Fighting Beaver with a braid down its back. SMALL TOWN BEAVER BLASTS OFF was printed in a font that had not been used by the Lennox News since a 20th-century president was shot.

  In the Christmas parade, Kelsey Starr had her own float. Roy’s Service built it with sheet metal, a capsule over the bucket of his loader, in which she sat and waved when home for the holidays. “HITCH YOUR WAGON TO A STARR!” one banner read and was rolled up later and stored in the basement under the Ping-Pong table the rest of the year. Martha never liked her.

  “All flash,” Martha said, and never attended the parade. Such factors must be measured and calculated, if possible, for an understanding of the beginning.

  At high school commencement, Kelsey Starr spoke as valedictorian. It was a humble speech about small towns and lifelong friendship.

  “May we all live exciting, happy, successful lives,” she said, concluding her speech. “May we all love everyone!”

  She sat on the stage after. A man in a mustache brought her a glass of water while the superintendent stood at the podium to gave his statement that concluded in the following:

  Remember this, graduates: A beaver was once like a mermaid in water, turning and diving for pure joy. She slapped her tail at strangers, yes, but only to make her territory clear. She was nature’s perfect creature of industry. Beavers never gave up, were never greedy, or complained. (My mother, in fact, once saw an actual beaver in an old national park.) A beaver took what she needed only. She helped others when possible. If the dam of another was destroyed by flood or incursion, she would hurry and swim to help stem the flow. Her teeth never stopped growing. It was her nature to chew and build. Her bloody spittle was left on forest stumps and calcified there for decades. A beaver became intimately close to few, biologists say, though she was kind to all, and she loved lodge and family. She was a wonderful species and hope persists with continuing Canadian efforts at repopulation. May your generation continue to attend to the world’s most vexing and persistent problems, like the beaver, with wonderful progress.

  But, graduates, remember this also as you strike your path tonight. The beaver was brave and a fine swimmer. She was an example to follow in her aquatic life. But if a beaver found herself too far from lake or lodge, she, being shy and slow on land, was easily caught by unfriendly predatory jaws, even merely thoughtlessly or unseeing, who can say why? Thus, she might easily be snagged in a leg-trap to be skinned out and flayed out by any bungler. My friends, take note of the beaver. Keep close to your safe shores. Good luck to you.

  The kids threw their caps in the air. They knew exactly what the superintendent meant. It was an old speech. He had used it for the class of ’35 and some of the graduates had siblings in that class so had heard it before. The kids collected the caps between the folding chairs and divvied them up. Some heads did not fit. It hardly mattered. “Moments like this are important!” the superintendent called over their heads and caps as the kids headed for the swimming hole at the old gravel pit for the celebration.

  National Space Assessment Checklist Manual Preamble

  1. Checklist is order.

  2. Order is safety.

  On the way to Alonzo Porter’s Celebration of Life, Roger Cotton’s car broke down. He pushed the car under a big tree on Cherry. He waited for the tow. He wrote a note for the tow driver to leave on the dash:

  Hello Roy—I hope things are good on your end. My car has some very serious sounding/seeming problems. It was making a terrible sound under the engine and rattling. Started overheating very suddenly (smoking) and the battery and brake lights came on. I was afraid to drive it, then it died. Can you work on it? I’m at BN-672321, as always. Talk to you soon about this, I hope. Sincerely,

  Roger Cotton.

  PS: I’m having some other troubles right now (with my skin and a recent loss of a friend). It would be outstanding if you could get this car worked up promptly. Martha sends her best. (Key in ignition.)

  The tow dropped Roger off at Alonzo Porter’s curb. The rooms were full of mourners shocked by Alonzo’s sudden death. The air was warm with cheese and meat. The dining table was scattered with bowls and crocks and the spoons labeled up the shaft with masking tape.

  “If he’d been in Africa, or an African, we would have burned him on a pyre with some colorful robes, the chief of a tribe, a king, a man of resource,” they toasted. They sang songs to a picture of Alonzo on an easel. The casseroles were abundant: lidded in circles, ovals, squares and rectangles. Steam squeezed from their lips. The women wore mitts and aprons and flew by like comets with flowers. Roger held the kitchen door open with his back. He held his arm as if in a sling.

  “How’s that arm?” said Albert Bunting the way a brother or uncle might speak.

  “The doctors took it off,” said Roger Cotton. “The Blue Nevus.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said Albert Bunting. “Will you have a scar?”

  “Not much of one,” said Roger Cotton.

  “The right diagnosis is everything,” said Albert Bunting, and waved at Jonelle Porter who was weeping near the arctic entry. “Who’s your doctor?”

  Roger Cotton said the name of the doctor.

  “I met that doctor once,” said Albert Bunting. “A dark man and foreign. I have nothing against that. That doctor won the city tennis tournament, the whole damn thing, the first year he entered. Where do you think this doctor learned tennis?”

  “I don’t
know,” said Roger Cotton. “I have no idea at all.”

  “I feel badly about Alonzo,” Albert Bunting said. “But it was quick and natural. Cavemen just died like that too. With spears and rock rings on the top of a blue sky hill.”

  “I know it,” said Roger Cotton.

  “It’s admirable,” said Albert Bunting. “Most death is common.”

  Roger Cotton drank down his juice and seltzer from a plastic cup while Albert Bunting had real glass. Alonzo’s urn was on the mantle between two sets of Dutch figurines dancing. Jonelle Porter wore high heels. There was a lump in the carpet runner to the kitchen and Roger Cotton bent and pressed at the lump in the carpet. Albert Bunting looked healthy.

  “You look very healthy,” said Roger Cotton.

  “Omaha has a wonderful layout,” said Albert Bunting later. He set his plate on a plate on the table. Max Robinson passed by picking his neck. “Wonderful brickwork and history.”

  “Yes,” said Roger Cotton.

  “Omaha has a wonderful zoo,” said Albert Bunting.

  “Martha likes animals so much,” said Roger Cotton.

  “Lennox is sunnier than Omaha,” said Albert Bunting “You should remind Martha that Lennox is sunny.”

  “Oh, I will,” said Roger Cotton.

  Stan Penrod arrived. Roger Cotton found his umbrella and departed. He walked from street to street looking for his car. The sun set. Walking home, Roger found a bike abandoned between a fire hydrant and a tree. It was unlocked and not tethered in the smallest way. Roger Cotton had no brothers or uncles. He took the bike.

  He rode the bike the whole way home seven blocks north and seven blocks west.