T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

"And don't try to rattle me with this bullshit about the mucosa, because I know that's what it is: bullshit."

1 Slam the door for punctuation, and then I'm alone in the bathroom. The dimmest of light here — a single amber-shaded fluorescent miser oozing just enough illumination to make me feel like I'm back in prison again — but I dig out my glasses reflexively and pick up the thin crumbling copy of the newspaper I keep on hand to get me through my more punishing bouts on the toilet. We don't see newspapers much anymore, I should tell you that-everybody gets their news electronically now, and the cost of paper, even newsprint, is prohibitive. Still, some of us like the physical feel of the thing, and the Los Andiegoles Times prints up a thin sheet every two weeks for the nostalgic and the deluded, not to mention the constipated. Rattle, rattle. Smooth out the pages. What am I reading? An account of a football game played in an empty leaking dome, the details as irrelevant as the outcome, page three of four, and the rest is about the weather. What's in store for us — or what was in store for us, two, or no, three weeks ago? Rain. Wind. Flooding in the low-lying and mid-lying areas. Hundred-percent chance of tornadoes, waterspouts, tsunamis.

There's a fire down below, no doubt about it, and I sit here waiting it out, reading about fumbles, interceptions and somebody's stout foot, the wind dragging its claws across the pitted stucco outside, my own familiar odor rising poisonously about me. I'll be here a while, a fact of life at my age (and forget the old-old, they might as well have their rectums sewed up), and I'm not hiding from anybody, least of all the two women in the next room, the ones who seem to have taken over my house. I'm not stupid. No matter how Andrea tries to spin it, love is the smallest part of what's involved here — they want access to Mac, that's what this is all about. They want money. And they want me. Or Sierra, that is. Sierra's ghost. So why do I put up with it? Why don't I run both of them out the door and go back to Lily and my anteaters and peccaries?

Because I'm bored. Because I've got nothing to lose. Because 1 know I can put the brakes on if I have to. Roll with it. Ride your pony. Oh, yes, indeed.

When I emerge, the two of them have their heads together, two wan little smiles for me, the lord of the house, and there's a smell in the air-fragrant, fecund, seductive — a smell that rings every bell in my olfactory lobe and knocks my defenses right back down to nothing: they're baking cookies. Cookies. The world has been transformed to shit, I'm about to be turned inside out, gutted, spitted, grilled and filleted, and they're baking cookies. It's too much. I just wave my hand feebly, in surrender, and fade away into the very damp bedroom for a nap.

I wake in darkness, to the sound of the rain. It's steady now, the kind of vertical pounding that brings to mind tin roofs, coconut palms and Singapore slings, but at least the wind has died down. I've been dreaming, a standard dream about a too-big house with too many wings and too many doors that lead to nothing but house and more house, and it takes me a good five minutes to resurrect my conscious mind. But what time is it? It feels like midnight, but then it always feels like midnight. My watch says 12:15-P. M. - and that seems about right. I hold my wrist up to study the glowing numerals against the dim backdrop of the room, my mouth dry, head throbbing, tireder than I was when I staggered in here an hour and a half ago.

For a time I just lie there, putting off the inevitable re-accessing of my dog's life for another sodden minute. (The walls are sweating, I don't need to turn on the light to know that, and the banana slug that lives in the architecturally inconvenient gap under the windowsill will be grazing the algal bloom over the portrait of Thoreau. And the gap itself will have grown perceptibly-subsidence, and with this rain what isn't subsiding?) Want more? There's a new leak in the roof, easily detectable as a kind of snare drumming in the corner over the regular splootching of the bedroom buckets, I'm probably going to have to sandbag the front porch again, and the fullness of the afternoon is going to be spent in a river of muck and hyena shit as Chuy and I try to keep the animals from drowning.

Then the pictaphone is ringing — or speaking, actually: Incoming call, a mechanical voice announces — and I'm lifting my other wrist to answer it. "Yeah?" I say, and I can't help it if my voice lacks enthusiasm-I'm not expecting much out of the day, or for that matter the week, month or year.

"Ty? You there?"

The voice is familiar, soft and sugar-coated, pitched as high as a child's, and I know it, I do, know it as well as my own… "Mac?" I venture.

"Give me a picture, Ty, come on--"

I hit the button, and there he is, Maclovio Pulchris, trapped in a little box on the underside of my wrist. He's wearing the fedora he was born with-it must have been clamped on his head all the way through the birth canal — and there are three strands of slick processed hair (his eel whips, he calls them) clinging to his mirror shades just over the place where his left eye would be. If he ever took his shades off, that is. "Jesus, Ty, you look like shit."

"Thanks. It's the look I'm after. I've been putting a lot of work into it."

"Are you in bed? At this hour?" A pause. All you can see of him, really, is his lips, nose and cheekbones. It's a disguise, and it makes him appear ageless, I suppose, though he's hardly one of the young-young, or even young. And then, in the softest, breathiest, most forlorn fifth-grader's voice: "You're not sick, are you?"

What can I say? Andrea's out there in the other room, and she's a kind of sickness. So's April Wind. And Earth Forever! "Petunia got loose — and don't worry, she's all right, we got her back" — bringing my bandaged arm into view- "but she chewed up my arm and plus it's raining like holy hell here and I was up before dawn scattering straw in the cages, checking on the sandbags, that sort of thing."

"I know."

I'm just looking at his face, and there's no more flexibility to it than you'd find in a carved wooden mask, but I know what my face is showing on his end: befuddlement, age and decrepitude, uncertainty, incompetence, a doddering around the eyes and a pronounced dwindling of the mouth and chin. "What do you mean?"

"I'm here. Back from sunny North Carolina and all those sweet tropical drinks. And it's a gas, it is-up in the nineties every day, sunshine like you wouldn't believe… But Ty, you know what?"

Here I am, the champion of the young-old, in full possession of my faculties and fresh from my latest sexual triumph, and what do I say? Something penetrating, like "Huh?"

The fifth-grader's voice again, pinched and whispery with concern: "I'm worried about the animals."

Well, so am 1,1 want to tell him, what do you think you're paying me for? Unfortunately, I never get the chance. Because at that moment, Chuy comes banging through the door — the bedroom door, and I wonder where my peace and dignity have fled to — and he's waving his arms and opening and closing his mouth on nothing, so excited he can't seem to form the words to tell me about it in either of the two languages at war in his brain. I can see it in his eyes, though-trouble, big trouble — and of course he's dripping and his hair and mustache have just been recovered from the bottom of the sea. "Sorry, Mac," I say to my wrist, "gotta go, talk to you later: 'and break the connection.

"What?" I throw at Chuy, bolt upright in bed now, the light from the other room shining sick and weak on the mossy walls and the banana slug fixed like a lamprey to the image of Thoreau's face. ( "Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountain head of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world.") "What's the matter?"