Tama Janowitz - They Is Us

Still, that is not what is really the matter at all.

She has let the kids take over the living room with their house plants. It had seemed harmless enough, even positive, their hobby. They acquired clippings from neighbors – Christmas cactus stubs, rubbery succulents, the offspring of spider plants; dead and dying discards.

There isn’t a single thing that perishes after the kids acquire it, no matter that it appeared completely dead it is now growing at a frightening speed, Caladium and kumquat, Dieffenbachia and Norfolk pine needing to be moved practically weekly into bigger and bigger pots. When it’s time to water them, the two kids fight: “You’re over-watering! It doesn’t need that much!” – “Yes it does, can’t you see how dry it is?” – water overflowing, spilling onto the floor, making rings under each pot.

A moist jungle humidity permeates the house: the living room windows can’t be opened and roots have begun to crawl, fingerlike, into floorboards or along the walls, the tendrils of ivy and a kind of Philodendron that had air-roots waving white, obscene stumps that several times a year gave birth to a single, phallic-shaped stinking flower which was able to move to a new pot, slowly and painfully, by air-roots.

Two dwarf banana trees eight feet tall with great stalks of ripening bananas – that neither child would permit the other to pick – are so tall they hit the ceiling, the flies have merrily swarmed on the rotting fruit. Apart from the sofa, the plants – the jungle – take up the entire living room and the floor is buckled and rotted from the moisture.

The kids collect animals, too. She is passive in the face of their gargantuan demands, two giantesses – or so they appear to her – two giant daughters with gaping maws waiting to be filled with worms that she has no energy to collect. Long before Julie’s internship at Bermese Pythion the kids had managed to acquire a number of animals – post-experimentation – others had actually been thrown out, scarcely alive – and Murielle couldn’t help but believe these animals were products of genetic tampering of some sort – anyway, she has never seen creatures like these.

The girls, or at least Julie, keep a lot of them in cages in the basement. Mice with hair so long it can be braided. Guinea pigs with incredibly long legs, little tusks, and nasty dispositions. And the family pet? Something the kids said was a type of dog called a Muskwith who wanted – according to them and Slawa – to be called Breakfast.

Only, if it is a dog, what kind of dog jumps on the table to eat apples and using its claws climbs the curtains to the point that they are completely shredded? The kids say that a Muskwith is a modern canine combined with some genetic material from an aardwolf – who knows, though. She has to admit she is fond of the animal, though she had totally objected to it at first, a fluffy little thing with tufts of white fur and great bald patches, runny black eyes, short-legged and a long pink snout lined with sharp, pointy teeth more feline than canine.

The dog (it is apparently a hermaphrodite; at least that’s what the vet says) feels alone and isolated. Breakfast often disappears for days on end down some hiding hole, or at the neighbors’; it knows everyone in the vicinity and, digging its way under the fence in the back when in a sulky mood, has other homes to visit.

All the neighbors are fond of it, fortunately, and report new words it can speak or how it affectionately likes to rest its sharp, pointed chin on whoever is around. It loves bananas, chopped liver and the glue on the backs of stamps or envelopes . When at home, it has a terrible habit of taking hold of one end of the toilet paper roll and running through the house; or will think of ways to deliberately hurt her, if she doesn’t pay it enough attention – climbs on her lap and smacks her, forcefully, with its paw, or lifts things from her pockets, so stealthily she doesn’t know until hours later that the dog has taken a whole packet of chewing gum, peeled each stick and eaten it.

Breakfast isn’t like any dog she has ever known. It is cute, in its own way, and can even say a few words – “Mama” and “Breakfast” and “I’m hungry”; occasionally says “out” or “cold” – not in a human voice, but painfully, sounds coaxed under duress not dissimilar to that of a child being tortured.

Sometimes it will talk when promised a treat of chicken liver; other times in its sleep, a bad dream, she hears whimpers and “no, no,” or, more astonishingly, “no hurt, no hurt.” But ultimately, in time, it doesn’t seem all that odd – it isn’t like the dog is putting together whole sentences or anything.

Still, it isn’t what a dog is supposed to be. Nothing in Murielle’s life is the way it is supposed to be. Not her marriage, not even her own kids – willful, uncontrollable, sexed-up –! Even being alive wasn’t what she had thought it was going to be. But then she actually had no clue as to what it should have been like, either.

In the morning she has a Health-Nut muffin, the type that heats itself in a little bag if you pull the string, containing ZERO CALORIES and One Hundred Percent of Daily Requirements of Vitamin C, sugar and salt . The kids don’t eat breakfast. When Slawa had still lived here he ate various health foods, yogurt with fresh fruit and nuts, wholewheat cereal with bran or thin slices of heavy dark stuff gritty with sunflower seeds that was supposed to be bread but was a closer relative of paper, hand-made from newsprint or dryer lint.

Her baking. If she had time she would have made regular meals, but why bother? The kids prefer pre-made growth products in different textures and flavors: frozen burritos heated in the microwave, pizza, everything nowadays comes from one of the factories. Slawa is a vegetarian – if you want to call it that, vegetables are expensive but probably also made out of the same stuff – and he usually ate before he came home.

Even when she tried to bake muffins with wholegrain-enriched flour, he said that anything she cooked had hairs in it, or wasn’t sanitary – and it was true, the flour, no matter how recently purchased, was swarming with meal worms, moths flew out of the cabinets, jars of spices swarmed with heaving larvae of one sort or another and even the refrigerator had roaches which thrived on the cold and darkness and the spills of syrup and ketchup or ancient crusts that oozed from the walls. “It’s probably healthy, to eat bugs,” Murielle says. “Protein. I never get sick. Look at you, you have a cold all the time.”

“It’s not a cold, I am having reaction to the shoe repair chemicals,” he says. “And I am telling you – you kids!” he shouts upstairs as the girls scramble, perpetually late, to get dressed. “The best thing you can do for yourself is to eat a healthy breakfast and have a regular bowel movement!”

“Ew, gross!” Their groans of contempt could be heard up the narrow six-step flight of stairs.

“Yeah, you kids with the laughing, to sneer, wait until you are in a place of work wishing you didn’t have to take a big crap in the middle of the day with all your co-workers wanting to kill you for stinking up the toilet, or like me, gotta find a public toilet and getting some filthy on your shoes! You gonna be sorry you didn’t listen to me then.”

“Wow,” yells Tahnee, “you really give me a lot to look forward to, why don’t I just kill myself now?”

It is true everyone but Slawa is constipated, even the dog, Breakfast, who squats, a tortured U-shape in the backyard, slowly stumbling around for hours until finally one hard pellet drops. You might as well throw loaves to the fishes, Slawa thinks, what’s the point, how could they not be constipated when they never eat vegetables nor fiber, and besides, as soon as you poop, those things, whatever they are, no one is ever quite sure, come scrambling up the pipeline to eat the… shit. These nasty primordial-looking little creatures will, with nothing but a mouthful of teeth, leave you with a buttock full of pinholes if you don’t jump off the pot immediately. Whatever they are, you could pour bleach down the drains and it would kill the ones who are there but afterwards their brethren would be back, more furious than ever and could even on occasion hop out onto the floor, surfaced all the way up from the sewers.