Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

“Max,” Gayle said, but he ignored her. The toys he'd flung away were suddenly the only ones he wanted, and all the others lay abandoned behind him. His face was getting redder and redder, and a pink flush was spreading down his white chest, too. The sun was hot and strong and he was going to get a burn, she thought; so was she. She dipped her hands in the pool and splashed her face. When she opened her eyes, the kid was all the way in the water, paddling frantically toward his toys, having difficulty holding his huge head above the water, and terrible gasping noises were coming out of his nose and mouth. He'd moved about three feet into the center of the pool, out of the shallow end, but the wake of his awkward swimming had only pushed the toys further away from him.

“Max,” Gayle said, “can you swim?”

The kid's eyes — pale blue, unfocused, Higginbottom eyes— moved toward her, his lips moving soundlessly, and his arms flailing around in a circular movement that didn't look even close to the crawl. Gayle saw the enormous blond head sink lower and lower until it was beneath the surface of the water, and his pale, small feet were kicking in a sideways frenzy that wasn't going to do him any good at all.

She jumped into the pool and swam over to him. The kid was spazzing out in the water, his limbs going in all directions, and when she reached him he kicked her in the stomach, hard. She kept trying to grab his body, but his skin was slippery and each time he wriggled out of her grasp. Her skirt twisted itself around her waist. Something scraped her leg — a toenail? a toy? — and she couldn't see clearly, the water so frothy from all the commotion. Finally she got hold of his midsection and heaved herself up. The kid was scraping his hands up and down her arms, and she broke the surface saying, “Ow, damn it, Max,” and he was screaming with what she thought was panic but then realized, as his arms kept extending behind her, was rage: he was still reaching for his toys and couldn't get them. In his anger he kneed her in the chest and she choked and sank down, the two of them wrestling. She couldn't believe how strong he was, how capable he was of pulling her down. He'll kill me, she thought for one crazy second. Then, with a last push, she got him into the shallow end and carried him out. There was a piercing sound in her ears, which, she now became aware, had been going on for some time. It was her sister, who tore Max out of her grasp and wrapped him in a towel and her own arms, shrieking all the while.

Gayle stood up, dizzy, heart going madly, dripping in her clothes. She pulled her skirt down over her thighs. Behind Erica and Max, Hank stood by the glass doors with another drink in his hand, watching.

“Are you okay? Are you okay?” Erica was saying to her son, and Gayle couldn't hear what, if anything, he was answering. Erica looked at her over his head. “What the hell were you thinking? I can't leave you alone with him for five minutes? Were you trying to kill him? What the hell is your problem?” She burst into tears and hugged Max again, her two-colored hair mingling and dampening with his wet blond strands.

Gayle rubbed her arms. Her legs were shaking. There were streaks on her biceps where the kid's fingernails had broken her skin. “I was trying to help,” she said, and looked at Hank, but he said nothing.

“I don't know why you even had to come,” Erica said, sobs thickening her voice. “What do you even want?”

If this were a sales deal, Gayle thought, she would have the perfect answer to that question; she would be able to calm Erica down; she would know exactly what to say to close. But it wasn't, and she didn't. She stood there wet and shivering and silent. The kid was turned away from her, his body hidden by the towel that fell to his feet. She only knew that, though she had been misunderstood, she was bound to come back. It was just the way things were, and it was never going to leave her, this craving she had for blood.

I'm more of a cat person, really — I prefer a warm purr on the lap to the bouncing, slap-happy kisses of dogs. But when my husband, Phil, brought Blister home from the park, I have to admit that I fell in love with him just as deeply, as swooningly and childishly, as he did. Phil'd been out jogging, which he did every weekend (although I knew, from having accidentally driven past him once, that he jogged five blocks to the park, walked to a bench, and sat down for a while before jogging back), when Blister came up, prancing, and licked his ankle. Blister was a small dog, knee-high, with short black hair that shone like an oil slick in the Saturday afternoon sun. He was wearing a red collar with a round tag that bore his name. After petting him a little, Phil looked around for the owner, who was nowhere to be found, and after a further while he brought him home to me, when the previously mentioned falling in love happened and there was a lot of petting and fetching and wagging and speculating about his name, which seemed to suit him perfectly in some strange way, and there was also, I'll be honest, some baby-talking to the dog, and after looking for posters and ads in the paper we took him to the pound, and since no one claimed him in fourteen days, Blister was ours.

We don't have kids. Phil doesn't want them, and I kind of do but not badly enough to push; but with Blister we made a family. Phil works days, as an actuary, and I work the night shift in the clean room of a computer-chip manufacturer, so we cross paths at home like the proverbial ships in the proverbial night. Before Blister, we were often so tired that we'd just sit on the couch, not talking, watching an hour of shared television before heading off in our separate directions. After Blister, we'd venture out into the neighborhood, to the park or along the weedy industrial lots behind the shopping center, where Blister could run off leash, investigating trash, spills, and the accidental wildlife that thrives along the unkempt edges of suburbia. We'd talk, Phil and I, not about anything major — just our days, people who were annoying us at work, that kind of thing — and although I hadn't realized that our marriage was in any danger, I could feel cracks being mended, a kind of basement-level fortification, and I knew that the dog was saving us.

Even in the freezing winters we walked Blister, or he walked us, even in ice storms when his paws slipped comically over the glittering carapaces of lawns, even in black afternoons after the end of daylight savings. The dog walk was our together time. And then, in March, Phil got his promotion and started working longer hours. The money was welcome but the hours were difficult; for one thing, I had to walk Blister alone, by myself, in the afternoon. When Phil finally got home, Blister would greet him in a frenzy, curling up beside him on the couch, his black chin on Phil's thigh; but I only heard about these things, because by then I was already gone.

At work I wear a bunny suit, helmet to booties, the entire thing, and have to move slowly, so as not to disturb the complex air-filtration system, and I don't talk much, either. I use a scanner to examine chips for defects. People say it must be hard working nights, the same tasks each shift, in silence. This, however, is not the case. It is an atmosphere of almost one-hundred-percent calm. I move through the shift in a trance, my mind in total focus, my body swathed and clean. The chips are made out of a square wafer and then cut out into circles, and the chemicals on them produce gorgeous and geometric patterns of pink and blue. When a chip comes under the scanner and I look at it — carefully, carefully — it reminds me of a jewel sparkling in a store window. It shows me that human beings can make something perfect and beautiful. I love what I do, and don't want to give it up, not even to be at home in the evenings on the couch with Blister and Phil.