Tama Janowitz - They Is Us

Her mother has said she should lie, but Julie is nervous. She forgets. She looks away.

“What about any interesting deformities?”

“No,” says Julie. What if he wants to hire her? “I’m only thirteen.”

If she had extra breasts – or was a hermaphrodite, or at least a young boy – but these days, times are tough, who wants to watch a normal girl? “Come back in a few years,” he says. “Or, if you want, we got a wet t-shirt contest once a month, top prizes in the juvenile category.”

She is so relieved she could cry. Her life is going to go on and on, frightening her. She does not want to be frightened by her own life, but there it is, lounging ominously before her, one paw tapping its sharp claws on the pavement just ahead. She goes back to the car and tells her mother there was no work for her.

“How old did you say you were?” her mother asks.

“Um… I said I was seventeen?”

“Julie, it’s not just that you’re plain; it’s your attitude. Nobody would want to hire someone who seems sulky. You could have made some good money this summer,” says Murielle. “At least you’re not flat-chested like your sister. That’s one thing you have going for you.” She feels cruel as she says this but with a kid like Julie it’s better to be blunt.

Julie thinks she will never find work. But at last Murielle gets her a job in a lab, thanks to her friend Dyllis. “Julie, make sure you do whatever Dyllis tells you,” her mother says as she drops off Julie in front of the Bermese Pythion building. “I’ll be back at four-fifteen to pick you up.”

Her mother leaves her at the far end of the parking lot. Julie is sweltering by the time she gets to the main door. In the lobby of the vast complex the security guard sweeps an electronic brush over her before she is allowed in. Once she is scanned, her microchip will be altered and she won’t have to do this again, the guard says. Her mom’s friend Dyllis is waiting for her beyond the gates, buck-toothed, attractive. Even though she has always known Dyllis, Julie is still frightened at the idea of starting work.

“Ai, eet’s so hot today, you know what I mean?” Dyllis has a high-pitched voice and slightly buggy, wild eyes. “Sometimes, I jes’ look around and I think, what I am doing here? In Vieques, yes, it’s hot, but we have trees, palm trees, you got your coconut trees, when it’s a nice day you go to the beach… Here, you got no trees, everything dead. Tell me, when was the last time you saw a bird or any living creature?”

Dyllis grew up just around the block from Murielle, but two years on Vieques – the small island that was part of Puerto Rico where she worked for a government laboratory – has left her with a strong Puerto Rican accent.

“How is your mother doing, you tell her let’s get together this weekend, okay?” she says as they walk down the long, windowless corridor. The black granite walls and floors are flecked with embedded chips resembling glittery stars; the only light is from the artificial ones above. Murielle has told Julie that Dyllis was able to get a good job back in the States as a lab technician with Bermese Pythion only because she smuggled genetic material out of the lab when she left Puerto Rico.

There appears to be no one else around. The hall is lined on both sides with many doors of different colors. “You see, each color is for a different security level. You going to be working level three, that’s pretty important level. Later I got to make you sign a confidentiality form. And these are my labs.”

Dyllis is in charge of six or eight of the laboratories, each housing a different experiment in progress. Canary mice: they can sing like little birds, which is a problem if they escape and breed; they sing all night. Black-and-yellow striped fish hang from the ceiling on invisible threads. “These are clownfish-cross-spider, we call them spiderfish. You see, they don’t need no water, they spin a thread and they catch the flies, you want me to show you?”

She opens a box and releases four fist-sized flies, seemingly too large to get off the ground, but they hover in the air. “I call these SloMoFlies.”

“Yuck. They look like flying raisins.” The flies are creepy. And the fish, too, are somehow wrong. In formation, as a school, the fish on the threads lunge for the flies, then weave longer threads to lower themselves as the flies circle. When the flies go up, so do the fish, pulling in their threads.

“You see, I gotta do some more testing first, but if they interbred with regular flies, a lot of people going to buy them, they going to know after a while all the flies going to be real slow. Plus, they supposed to eat clothes that are out of style. But right now, nothing is going well. These flies, when you kill one, it makes a terrible mess.”

A web of words: J a N u A r y y y Y y yor J u u u uuuu u u lylinger in the room, blocking the windows and doors; there is no escape. Dyllis is a talker, the words never seem to stop. Trails of letters spin constantly through the air around her head, forming a virtual wall.

Dyllis stops to take a breath, it is almost as if she has to fight to clear a space for herself in the middle of all these words.

“What?” Julie is confused.

“Now, over here, this is something cute, right?” Dyllis points to a cage containing feathered rabbits. The feathers are downy, pink and blue. “Later on, I’ll give you one.”

What Julie doesn’t say is that she already has a feather-covered rabbit at home. Years before, she had come exploring with her sister. At that time the vast grounds where the labs are located weren’t yet fenced in. There were still trees back then. That was when they found their dog Breakfast and the rabbit; they had been tossed out with the garbage and managed to escape. Both were almost dead and had to be nursed back to health – surely that couldn’t have been stealing?

“Anyway,” she says, looking at the fluffy bunny, “won’t you get in trouble?”

“I’m jes’ gonna tell them, it die, a lot of these animals die, and they know that. But don’t tell no one, hokay? I put him in your backpack, just before you go home.”

Julie doesn’t know what to say. She can’t accept stolen property, even if it means the animal will be killed or tortured… or can she? She has never had to contend with this degree of ethics. Of course she will take the bunny home, even though her mother has said, No More Pets! She supposes she can sneak it in.

“Lemme show you something.” Dyllis takes Julie down the hall to the Women’s Room. A window – the only exterior one Julie has seen – looks out into a dumpster surrounded by a tall cinderblock wall. The refuse bin is filled with animals, either dead or dying. Even through the closed window the stench is terrible, and a few things down there are still wriggling.

“Oh, this is awful. What can we do, aren’t some of them still alive?”

“If you don’t take Mister Bunny… that’s where he gonna end up. Oh, sheet!” Dyllis lets out a shriek. “Look at this, somebody tossed out my experiment, can you believe that?” Over by the sink is a pot of dry dirt containing a plant with only two leaves covered with what appears to be human skin; beneath the skin Julie can see veins and arteries. “This plant disappeared, like, two weeks ago, I thought maybe my boss, he took it to decorate his office. I no want to say nothing. But now I am thinking someone took it to kill it. Jes’ look.”

“Is it dead?” Julie says.

“I dunno. Needs water, anyway.” Dyllis shakes her head in disgust. “I mean, who would have done this, I had the plant in my window!”