Tama Janowitz - They Is Us

She is evil, and probably evil incarnate, evil personified, even though she had no intention of ever doing anything wrong. Her head hurts all the time, she has inhaled the terrible fumes and now her hands are blistered and getting blacker almost like she has frostbite or gangrene. She has cried so much her eyes are permanently swollen.

On the other hand this year is the big Eighth Grade Test and she should be spending her after-school hours studying. She likes her English teacher, Miss Fletsum, but Miss Fletsum isn’t the easiest teacher; she’s had her before, she’s one of the tough ones. “Pay attention class! We must do more preparation before the day of the big test! Name three hits by Rogers and Hammerstein and two by Rogers and Hart.” No one raises a hand. “This test can affect your entire life! So, think children, think!” Miss Fletsum strikes herself dramatically on the side of her head. “Ow, sorry, head!” The children laugh and no one pays any attention for the rest of the period.

Miss Fletsum is funny. Of course Miss Fletsum is also a little strange and sometimes, often, actually, she announces to the kids that her head isn’t really hers. Once, during a minor breakdown (she had to take a couple weeks off, afterward) she had actually gone over to Mystique and tried to pull off Mystique’s head, insisting that somehow Mystique had taken what was rightfully hers.

At least now she is on different meds. “Children! The United States is lagging far behind the rest of the globe and that is no small laughing matter! Who starred in Now Voyager ? Name five rules for owning a successful fast-food franchise! You’re going to have to know these things to pass the test! Essay: what it must be like to live in Nature’s Caul. Who are the sort of people who get to live there? Compare and contrast.”

The class sighs and whines.

“Remember your topic sentence, guys!”

All the kids are drugged because they are hyperactive with saudiautistic tendencies and/or saudiautism. And if not openly saudiautistic then they have Sasporger’s Motif, Wharf Planchette, Florie’s Palsy, ADDA or vitamin deficiency caused by petrochemical solvents causing depression.

A depressed child is not a happy child. A depressed child cannot focus. “Focus, children. Fluorescent lighting,” Miss Fletsum says. “Spelled f-l-u-o-r-e-s-c-e-n-t.”

“Miss Fletsum, that’s not what our spell check says.”

“What?”

“It spells it flourescent.”

“But – but –” Miss Fletsum is spluttering. “That’s absurd! That’s wrong!”

Miss Fletsum likes to make sure the kids know and can use clichés and idioms, as well as famous quotations. She has told the children more than once that she is an accident. She is given to statements such as, “If the shoe fits, wear it – but it will be uncomfortable outside the store,” and “Still waters run deep, unless it’s a puddle.”

Julie knows she is lucky to have Miss Fletsum as her teacher. All the kids like her, apart from her wacko thing about her head not being the right one. Those lapses can be dangerous. But then, she is old, and something might have started to go wrong for a long time.

Miss Fletsum is so old she started teaching in the days before there was mandatory retirement; Miss Fletsum is one of the last members of the Teachers Union; Miss Fletsum lost all of her savings in the Walbuck’s scandal. Miss Fletsum says, when she was growing up, people could actually read, whereas nowadays they are all spoiled because the computers are able to put everything – books, articles, whatever was formerly printed – into wide-screen high-definition hologram format.

“I will never be able to stop teaching!” Miss Fletsum says dramatically, and once more she tries to get Julie’s class to learn to read. “‘In the great green room,’” begins Miss Fletsum once again, “‘there was a telephone, and a red balloon, and a –’”

The class groans. “We can’t do it, Miss Fletsum,” says Daqoyt, “our eyes don’t work that way! How many times do we have to tell you?”

“And besides,” mutters Cryhten, who sits next to Julie, “why should we, there are no books any more.”

At least Julie is going to get extra school credit for working as an intern. It is still lonely, though. Dyllis is nice, but she is mostly working in a different lab these days, and when she is around, Dyllis spends most of her time trying to find dates on the computer.

She likes women who are muscular, with large clitori, an interest in restoring antique yachts and an appreciation of classical music such as Bartók, Aaron Copland and Stevie Nicks.

How will Dyllis ever meet anyone? She is so so lonely. She misses her friends in Vieques so much. There, in the cool evenings, everyone gathers in the central square; they can never go far because of all the undetonated shells that litter the whole island, but it is enough to walk, hand in hand, with a friend, around the zocala , or sit at a café and eat a dish of fried plantains or roasted pepnuts. Here, during the day, she is alone in an air-conditioned mausoleum, and at night she drives three hours back to her grim apartment, where she has to keep the doors locked and the windows shut at all times.

Dyllis knows she talks too much, but there is no way to stop herself. Even when she tells herself, most firmly, to be quiet, still the words pour out in a never-ending river until she is trapped, helpless, behind the waterfall, unable to emerge. Even when she is alone the words keep coming, though, fortunately, if she is walking down the street, everyone assumes she is plugged in to her site.

Julie never sees anyone else in the building.

For security reasons, Bermese Pythion has some kind of policy about employees never interacting. If Julie stays late, dinner is delivered into the lab through a slot in the door, on a tray with a menu to describe the contents. It might be poached quail eggs with strawberries and edamame, served with a haunch of civet cat in a nut crust. Or chilled candy-corn soup with blue aji dulce peppers and quinoa grits. Once there was a glacé encompassing uni , eel and snake, accompanied by multi-textured tofu strands with a sauce of mirin and raw squid-ink foam. The labs at Bermese Pythion are known for serving fine cuisine. Other people come in at night, or in the evenings – at least three shifts per experiment, people whose paths never cross.

Sometimes animals, like the adorable kitten with eyes so huge they took up most of its face, mysteriously vanish. Or in the morning things are dead in their cage. Or worse, hooked up to electrodes or blossoming with strange growths.

The fall passes slowly. Each day Julie listens to the news, wondering if today will be the day the authorities discover it is she who killed all those people on Flight 21894. Now she is at the mercy of her sister, who has got her doing all her chores, her homework, and threatens to blab if she doesn’t obey her. Her dad is gone; her mother hates her.

Anything is better than being at home. Why wouldn’t she prefer to spend all her time at the lab? The lab is kept cold and she takes a sweater with her, though outside it’s usually blistering by six in the morning. It’s hard to believe that when she leaves for the day she will not be able to breath in the searing heat. The temperature has been between a hundred and a hundred-and-twenty farenheit for months.

According to scientific records there has never been such a long, hot Indian summer since record-keeping began. The newscasters say previous estimates regarding global warming are incorrect : unless there is a sudden ice age, the warming of the planet will be far faster than the rate of seven degrees a century. Home air-conditioning isn’t really possible. Nobody around these parts can afford current electrical rates. Anyway, there are power blackouts almost every day, for hours at a time.