Reptile House Read online

  She opened her flight pack and pulled the coil of silver in her glove.

  “Please confirm Step 1. Over.”

  CODE was designed for perfect recordation, transmission, reconfiguration and global composition of every cell in her body from toenail to ponytail, every thought, every memory, and mood. Every molecule relative to every other, and tendon, muscle, and organ, hormones and fluids by volume of blood in those famous veins, arteries, capillaries. Each follicle and curvilinear trajectory of skin, every blemish, bump, and cavity. The clog in the kidney that would cause problems with urination in 5.2 years. The minor infection in the throat that had ignited a cough two days into the mission, ovum number 264 that had just dropped down the fallopian tube ready to implant. The expansion of lungs, then discharging. The heart pumping as the lips changed from red to purple in gray space light. Each hairline and line of thought of memory of fact forgotten and remembered by recording in the brain, for hurling back through space to the nose of a satellite dish on a Hawaiian volcano, once dormant but now rumbling and snow-capped at such low latitude, to be flung on to Omaha and scribbled in the fresh tangled gray matter in the Omaha basement: I am Kelsey Starr. I see the space line of blue-brown meteor rising in the retina. I know who she loved best, mother or father. The horse and the field. Her crystal ball spinning silver and backward in the moments before cardiac arrest.

  “What’s that? Over,” said Kelsey Starr.

  The glove released Roger Cotton’s amulet and chain. They floated above her head, an inch an hour toward a pretty, nameless nebula.

  “Kelsey, can we confirm CODE? Over.”

  “Tell Roger I did it,” said Kelsey Starr.

  “Kelsey. Can we initiate CODE?”

  “Tell Roger Cotton I released his object,” Kelsey Starr said. “Tell him his object is now projectile in infinity forever. You copy that?”

  “We copy.”

  “Great,” said Kelsey Starr. “Tell everyone: friends need to help each other out.”

  “Kelsey. Standing by for affirmative on CODE Transmission. Kelsey, we need you to do this. We are standing by. Over.”

  “Can you get my mother on? Over.”

  She unclipped the last anchor.

  She turned a somersault.

  “Please confirm Step l. Commander Starr. Please confirm. Over.”

  “I want to speak to my mother,” said Kelsey Starr.

  “We do not have time. Please confirm.”

  She pushed off the meteor in a new direction.

  The mandatory CODE Note of Decision and Explanation by Ms. Kelsey Marie Starr was sealed and addressed to Belinda Starr. It was in a safe at Mission Control. It was handwritten on scented paper with lily pads in the corners in a matching envelope inside standard issue Air Force stationery, also sealed with real wax. The President wanted to read the letter on the National Day of Mourning, with the flags at half-mast, but it was election season and Belinda Starr was against the incumbent. She was especially against such transparent political maneuvers when her daughter’s death was involved. Instead, Belinda Starr read part of her daughter’s words, with some exclusions and edits for style, by candlelight to thousands in the Lennox courthouse square. Mrs. Starr was front and center. She wore a pretty flowered dress to demonstrate her attitude about her loss.

  “I died how I wanted to,” she read, “which is better than most anyone can say.”

  Jason Starr wore black beside Belinda and was too distraught to speak or read.

  Mourners poured into town all that day. The gas stations and markets sold T-shirts for charity that said, “Never Forget,” with Kelsey Starr’s picture smiling over a map of the U.S. surrounded by appliqué comets and ringed planets. The shirts were expensive but sold out in hours. Stars on sticks waved above the heads in every color with more Kelsey faces. She had not been pretty, but it hardly mattered. Mrs. Starr held the handwritten note up for the crowd. The people cheered and cried, embracing strangers.

  Several bikes were stolen from the shrubbery during the Kelsey Starr event. A few lucky others lay on their sides on Main Street and First Avenue, as if abandoned by the culprit mid-crime. Still other bikes, equally carelessly parked, leaning and unlocked on trees or against parking meters, were spared altogether. “There was no rhyme or reason to it,” said the police to the victims who reported the thefts after the candles were extinguished and smoke cleared and people began yawning and looking about them. The police wrote reports by their squad cars in the blocked-off streets until well past eleven. The out-of-town riffraff were blamed.

  The crowd dissipated. The Lennox High Band played on beautifully, softly, as the mourners drifted to the edge of the square and stood in groups, talking and admiring the courthouse that was lit up with enormous spotlights on wheels that had been rented and trucked down from Kansas City. The carvings on the façade had an entirely different appearance that night than on any normal day or night, mysterious and ancient. The people went home to their beds but the golden lights beamed up at the marble columns all night long. An excess of light mounted into the sky. The golden cloud, in fact, could be seen for miles over the flatland, so bright that a traveler passing through the region, a stranger approaching Lennox from one of the several small dark highways that converged there, might have slowed at the crest of a hill outside town and parked on the shoulder to marvel at the burning glow.

  He might even have checked his map, adjusted his instruments, dials and digits, reset his coordinates, awaited recalculation and reconfirmation, for a moment mistaking Lennox for a huge, important city.

  Then confirmation would have come.

  “Yes, indeed. Lennox at fifteen kilometers. And what a fire it must be!”

  The traveler might have pulled back on the highway and coasted down the hill toward the light. Happy. He had not, after all, lost his way.

  Reptile House

  Carl’s wife lay back, sanitized stirrups biting at her heavy ankles. Ten centimeters. The steel edge under her spit out a baby. A pair of blue rubber gloves made the catch.

  Carl’s head had hovered between the suspended knees and witnessed the exit close up. A tunnel and black fist of hair. Then shoulders, tiny but slumped like an old man’s, then the crooked little body came out thrashing, apparently wanting no part of this new light world. Carl could understand. The skinny legs slid out last, kicking hard with feet too small to take seriously. This baby was a messy smear, a victim of riot, when the good place turned inside out.

  The face was embedded with a pair of eyes that roved, a sort of nose screwed in the middle, and a small mouth that was small but loud, like it belonged to a thing with a dial. A cord coiled into the place where Carl’s wife was. Carl didn’t like his wife much anymore, but he didn’t know it yet.

  “Carl, cut the cord,” she said.

  “Cut the cord,” he repeated, and set a hand on the knee.

  Carl didn’t want to cut the cord. He had done it for the others and this, he felt, was more than his share. The other kids were tucked in and away for a few days at her sister’s spread in Winnetka, not far from his parents’ old farm. His own modest house off Cicero, just southwest of downtown, was enticingly empty tonight, all five windows to the street, three on top and two on each side of the red door, would be dark. He hoped to get home tonight and sleep some in the big empty bed, in all that still and lonesome.

  The green nurse handed Carl the scissors and the scissors sliced through red and blue flesh. This done Carl stepped from between the legs and made way. Someone tied a small knot of independence.

  “Carl, hold the baby.”

  Carl’s arms took the baby, bounced it, pitied it, then gave it back. The TV bent down from the ceiling like a nun. A breathing machine, EKG on a cart, and devices Carl didn’t know stood at ready for ON and OFF, breathe, don’t breathe, live, don’t live.

  The doctor reached in and stitched Carl’s wife with a black seam. The blue and green nurses huddled close as the thread pulled through. Sponges, sy
ringes to blood and bruise. A wince and moan. When the baby first cried and everyone laughed.

  One thing: the fluorescent in the ceiling fixture had flickered to almost out. This bothered Carl. Another thing: the breathing machine box was off plumb on the wall and irritating. Carl was in construction. He worked in the showroom of a leading building supply outfit, his boss having flown him for training in fasteners—now the go-to guy on this very subject. No excuse for sloppy work. Carl stared down the off angle.

  “Carl, some water.”

  The plastic pitcher tipped and the water poured. “Straw?”

  “Yes, a straw. You’re a love, Carl.” She tossed a kiss without looking. She was exhausted. She wore a baseball cap backwards on her disheveled head. She sipped on the straw while the baby sipped on her. Carl sipped on nothing. No one brought him water.

  The baby was off for a bath and immunizations. Carl’s wife dabbed cocoa butter on her wide brown nipples. Carl turned his back with the Tribune and folded into the crossword. There was nothing wrong with her at all. A mother. Wide hips, a smile, and a mind. “Heart of gold” was what people said, but these were just three words.

  She had half-finished the puzzle in pen back when she still could concentrate, sometime between two centimeters and three. The puzzle was called “Creatures of Our World” and now Carl used a pencil. The empties, across and down, seemed glad to have his latest scratchings, starting with four letters down for “A dog without pedigree.” Carl wrote M U T T in the boxes. She moaned in the bed, turned and moaned again. It was contagious because Carl moaned too. Sick, edgy, out of sorts. Carl.

  “Carl!” she said.

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Carl.”

  He went back to his puzzle.

  “Disney’s orphan deer,” but she had beat him to it: B A M B I, five down in the bottom right.

  If Carl could have been anything it would have been a long-haul truck driver. He would have gone by Jack for the snappy consonants and driven this Great Land in his shiny eighteen-wheeler. Driving fast and long miles with red eyes and a filled thermos. He’d have lived in that cab, slept in the space behind the seat with a propane cook stove and a satellite TV. He’d have dozed to the CB chatter while rainstorms and snowstorms blasted the windshield, Manifest Destiny served up with coffee and pie from girls with slim ankles and pink aprons. He would have dropped in at the house off Cicero from time to time for a little two-on-two with the boys, report cards, and hand over the paycheck.

  An orange nurse came in with a clipboard and plumped his wife’s pillow. “How are we, sweetie? Big night.” His wife smiled, signed a few papers, and the orange nurse left.

  A beat-up pigeon presided on the brick sill out the window. He liked it at first as it paced and pecked at nothing. It seemed pleasant and interested. It tapped the glass with its dirty beak from time to time. Carl thought it looked pregnant, but it was the wrong time of year. Just getting a lot to eat, lucky bird, born at the right place at the right time.

  From the sill the pigeon could see a room with a man and crossword. A lady with brown nipples, rubbing them in circles, and looking at the doorway as if waiting for someone. A perfectly clean and empty trash can by the door under the light switch which was a small fixture, about the height of an infant’s foot. The doorway opened and welcomed out. A hallway beyond was wide, cool and serene, leading to an elevator bay somewhere around the corner with a button pointing down to the foyer, where a reception desk was tended at this hour by a sleepy man with a handlebar mustache and a winter coat since the revolving glass doorway went around and around forever like a child’s toy, perpetually offering the Outside to any taker, fresh air without end, and beyond this, if the bird turned and looked over the edge, was the shoveled walk to the parking lot, hooded streetlamps spraying light over all including the edge of a street beyond, a street to other streets, a clutter of streets which by and by rambled to a cloverleaf entrance ramp, around and around up and merging left to eight sprawling lanes and seventy miles per hour even in the middle, and many miles before it cinched down to six lanes, then four, until maybe in Iowa or Nebraska, there was a simple ramp off right and down to two lanes, with the double-dash for passing, yellow, a sloping shoulder to the perpetual ditch, and west to Elsewhere.

  Carl’s finger pulled a string and the blind rolled down. A pigeon can be eradicated that easily.

  “Carl.”

  “Yes, love.”

  She needed to pee and he walked her elbow to the bath. She was five feet four inches, 135 lbs., light brown hair. That’s what her driver’s license said about her. Mrs. to the neighbor kids, Mom to her own and Carl, since her other name got stuck in his jaw sometime between the first and second child. A set of creases was forming around both of their mouths.

  “Carl, did you call Daddy?”

  “Not yet,” said Carl. “It’s too late. He’ll be in bed.”

  “Of course you’ll call.”

  The pay phone down in the hall had a seat and a folding door that closed. The quarters dropped and the finger dialed. Pull yourself together.

  If he ever got a chance he would go to Catalina Island. He would be an old-fashioned man there, tall, stout, round as a rock, and reliable. Big hands and a big mouth. It was a beautiful place, he’d heard, just close enough to the continent that you could still see it, know it’s there, but still give civilization the finger. Like paradise with orange trees, lemons and pomegranates everywhere you look. He read in a book there was a town where people pedaled one-speed bikes up and down the little roads to get milk and eggs from friendly neighbors and smell the flowers and apples day and night. Carl later learned there were cars and trucks on Catalina, ferries to the mainland, and phones to anywhere else too. So that book was out of date and wrong. He had never eaten a pomegranate except once in Sunday school.

  His wife took something for pain below. Carl took something for pain in his head. He sat in a chair at the window, looking. At a crash down the hall, the blue nurse ran and Carl thought of crashes, the empty house, the level in his gas tank. The little white car. The baby slept, then woke, then slept. He grabbed the puzzle off the floor.

  Five down. “Humped and never thirsty.”

  C A M E L. He wondered what the word would look like in Arabic or some language and place that did not have camels at all. It would not fit the white boxes. That was near certainty.

  Once, before Carl had married, Carl’s boss was on the showroom floor. He had seen Carl many times, but asked Carl’s name anyway. “Carl,” said Carl.

  And the boss said, “Seems like someone was just mentioning something about you.”

  “Good or bad?” Carl asked excited.

  “Very good. Whatever it was, I can’t remember, but you are the very best at it.”

  Carl never heard.

  “So hot in here,” the wife’s voice said. “Should we open the window?”

  “Too cold for the baby,” he said. Carl was cold, though he was never cold, a warm-blooded man. A cold snap. Snap out of it.

  So cold, so sick, so out of sorts. At the showroom, he was cheerful and easy, the go-to guy for sticky situations and unhappy returns, the people with the warped beams, mismatched colors, the ratchet sets with missing ratchets. But now Carl wanted to zip out of his skin. On the bedside table was a bunch of daisies in a plastic cup tipped over and he could not set them right. Their heads leaned on a phone book three inches thick full of strangers and over a stack of seven identical postcards of the Sears Tower, already stamped and addressed to friends and family. “WATER BROKE AT WATER TOWER PLACE!! CRAZY! HERE WE GO AGAIN!!! XXX OOO!!!” The same message was printed on each.

  Carl clicked the box for the TV and an old ball game came on. October 1963, and three guys were talking with no volume and the players wore old-fashioned uniforms that Carl almost remembered. When Carl was young he wanted to fly an airplane or be a forest ranger. He might have been a scientist like the one who discovered the 366th day, an Arab with an abacus
and a stick for making marks in the desert sand, living in a stone room. A tray of wine and bread glided through a slot at sundown. Batter up, same as now. There’s the pitch, a line drive to second, thrown out at first for a double play which retired the side. Like any modern team. The channel jumped. The La Brea Tar Pits are asphalt seeps smack in Los Angeles and one of the only archaeological sights in the world where predator fossils outnumber the prey. They were like black swimming pools, these pits. Carl had always planned to get a backyard built-in pool for the kids. For swimming. Above ground would do. Maybe if the bonus came in. The channel jumped, a helicopter over the Great Wall of China, coiling down, all those stones set by some poor man, like an old animal lounging on the land green and pretty. The channel jumped back to baseball, pop fly to center, but Carl did not see what became of it because the TV clicked off.

  “Should we open the window?”

  “Too cold for the baby.”

  Yesterday Carl had stood in line at a busy downtown post office and bought the book of postcard stamps at her bidding. Writing her cards in the waiting room, though, she had rejected these stamps he’d chosen. She’d taken his Forever Stamps instead, his pretty stamps with the Liberty Bell on them, F O R E V E R printed in vertical next to the bell. Carl had never heard of them, but the clerk at the big counter was hawking them hard, giving his pitch to every patron in line: “The Perpetual Stamp. First Class guaranteed at forty-one cents from this day forward and forever. Hell or high water. Never expires, never declines in value, even if letter rate goes to a million bucks. Great investment. How many books do you want?”

  Carl had stood at the clerk’s big counter thinking of Fate and Perpetuity: the Sears Tower, house paint and report cards. He was tired. He was hungry. When they had met many years ago, he’d said he liked the “gravity of her character,” but he did not remember this feeling or what he had meant.

  Flat line. Highway. An eighteen-wheeler could hold a lot of peanut butter, jugs of water, pilot crackers and rationing. Carl had bought three books of the special stamps.