Tama Janowitz - They Is Us

Tenderly Julie strokes the leaves of the dying common house plantand places it under the trickling tap; the veins – if that’s what they are – flush and weakly pulse. The plant is slurping up water, she can sense its gratitude. To hurt anything – some nights she can’t sleep, thinking of how wretched it must be to be an ant, with people around who actually like to crush them.

“Let’s go back in – I’ll show you the rest of the animals and their food.”

“Um… okay. Sure! Great. So, um, Dyllis, you invented all this stuff?”

“Oh, jes, and if I had my own lab I could have made a fortune. But I work for the company, which is not so bad – they give me good health insurance. So come on, let me show you the kitchen area. Here’s where you have to prepare the different kinds of food.” Dyllis opens a refrigerator. “To keep everybody happy, put the different things on each little plate. But some days you can chop everything and mix it, whatever, just so it looks attractive. Now, we gonna go feed some toads.” She puts the plates on a wheeled cart and off they go.

The room is very hot and dry, so dry that for a moment Julie’s lungs feel seared. “This room, we gotta keep it like a desert.” Dyllis points to a row of glass tanks. “Don’t ever touch the animals in them, they are puffball toad, a cross of puffball mushroom and toad. When they get scared, poof, they let out a cloud of spores, get you right in the face. I heard we going to try to get in the anthrax gene next, so when they puff out, they blow out anthrax spores. It’s interesting, no?” Dyllis opens the tops to each tank and carefully lowers the plates to the sandy floor. Julie thinks she will never be able to arrange the food so beautifully, topped with parsley and the wriggling mealworms in a circle around the edge. “They eat the compost, too, that’s because they have the mushroom gene.”

When Julie was little she helped her father in his shop on Saturdays. There was always the rich smell of leather, or leather cleaner, of glue and something fecund. Maybe he had a mushroom gene, unbeknownst to her. She has been ignoring her father for so long, years, really, maybe since she turned ten or eleven, wrinkling her nose at his beery stench and cleaning-fluid breath. Poor Daddy with his winky bald spot and big proud belly; where is he now? Anything she dislikes about him is forgotten; how she misses him. Why doesn’t she spend more time with him? She will be nicer to him from now on.

In Room 1829.wTd are animals that are sort of… pigs. But they are like no pictures of pigs Julie has ever seen, with human arms and legs, some too fat to be supported by such slender appendages who lie on their sides delicately putting biscuits in their mouths with their… Yuck, they look like big thumbs? Hands with nothing but thumbs? No, it is just that their fingers are half-trotters. The pigs have rilled snouts, small eyes fringed with pale white lashes, pink gigantic torsos; what is wrong with them? Julie doesn’t want to ask but Dyllis tells her anyway. “You see, these pigs, they got human parts, so we can transplant what we need.”

“But how many human parts do they have?”

“It’s not so much as a number, these are only first generation, so it’s fifty-fifty. In other words, we mix the pig sperm with the woman egg and implant in the sow.”

Some pigs look as if they have worked out, done sit-ups, pull-ups and developed muscular biceps, legs with toned calves, ripped thighs. Even so, human arms are not strong enough to support the weight of a full-grown boar. Supine and languorous, unable to stand, occasionally feeding themselves with those odd hands, the pigs lie in the heat, yawning, bored. “These little piggies love to get a manicure!” says Dyllis when Julie stares, slightly alarmed at a pig’s red fingernails. “If you want, when you have extra time, I got some extra polish in my desk, they so cute when they see the polish and make their little squeals!”

A boar – overweight, grayish with bristles – is gently fondling himself. He has a corkscrew-shaped penis. He looks up at Julie and starts to rub faster. Julie doesn’t like the way he looks at her with a smirking leer while he plays with himself. She averts her gaze. Julie wishes now she had lied about her age to get the job in the strip club; by comparison this is much worse.

“Hey, cut that out!” Dyllis says to the pig. “We working now on how to transplant the male organ. Some guy going to be mighty lucky, if we can figure out how to avoid rejection.”

Apart from the job, summer passes slowly. Here there isn’t much for kids to do: in her neighborhood is the petrochemical swamp, and the local nuclear plant and the waste disposal system of Bermese Pythion Technologies. Here there are building materials determined to be hazardous to one’s health, deposits (man-made) of chemicals or radioactive substances with a half-life of a hundred thousand years.

Somehow everyone who lives in this neighborhood or grew up here has something wrong. They blame the chemical swamp and the crematorium, the high-voltage power lines overhead and the airport nearby. Then there is the pollution from the highway, carbon monoxide, the hulks of cars leaking oil and gas and transmission fluid.

Even at the lab, mostly, the work Julie is given is depressing, not only because she doesn’t know the purpose of any of the experiments (which all seem pointless) but also because of the pervasive misery. Some of her job is cleaning cages, feeding the animals, and one day, going into the pig stall with a platter of bananas (some of the pigs have been listless, not eating, and it is hoped this will tempt their appetites, which is a bit rough on Julie since she herself has never eaten a real banana, only reproductions) by accident the door to the pen swings open and the big boar, leering, comes after her. She screams and runs to the door and out into the hall but the pig is after her and gets out of the room. He is slow but has mean little tusks and gets her backed into a corner when her screams are finally overheard.

A security guard with a cattle prod scurries down the hall and jabs her a couple of times with the electrified device before he finally gets the pig subdued; the pig has both arms around her neck and whether he is about to strangle her or kiss her she never has a chance to learn.

The security guard is yelling at her in Spanish when Dyllis comes running down the hall. Julie is crying with humiliation. “I’m sorry,” she says. Frightened, embarrassed, scared at having been the subject of the pig’s sexual interest.

“What’s he saying?” she asks Dyllis when the guard, still blabbing angrily, leads away the pig.

“What?” says Dyllis.

“What’s he saying? I never learned Spanish.”

“Ah, I’m not sure. He is angry, though, I theenk!”

“I know, but…” It occurs to Julie: Dyllis doesn’t actually speak or understand Spanish. All she has is a Spanish accent.

After this incident she is told not to go into the room with the pigs anymore. Instead she is given a lot of agar plates into which she has to pipette exact quantities of substances she has been told must never get into her mouth. Sometimes she stains slides, or counts various living organisms under a microscope. Even though the organisms are infinitely small, they do not, mostly, appear very nice – most of them spend their whole lives destroying, or trying to destroy, others.

And yet there are creatures, such as the spiderfish, she loves. When she comes into the room they all swoop down to her eagerly and twirl around her head as if they are carousel animals.

What if her whole life continues this way – the animals, always hungry, for food, for light, for air – nothing could help any of them, herself included, to escape. Here are these animals, these animals that are wrong – herself as well. Just wrong, and they know it and suffer, with their extra body parts or human limbs that were never meant to blend. And she is guilty of not being able to feel compassion for them, but only disgust, despite how sorrowfully they regard her and plead with their terrible saucer eyes.