Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

“N-h-h.” Kiwi made a clicky sound in the back of his throat. (Growing up with the Chief, Kiwi had become the master of the lukewarm assent.)

On their first day on duty together, Yvans announced that he would handle “the hard stuff”—tasks rated as difficult by Yvans included counting the cash drawer and “improving the retail experience” of the female customers. Kiwi could do “the easy stuff,” defined by Yvans as plunging the toilets and running the gleaming armadillo-beveled nozzle of a futuristic vacuum over the carpeted walkway that constituted the Tongue of the Leviathan. Yeah , thought Kiwi, tugging at a fat knot in the vacuum cord with his incisors, the easy stuff, real simple …

Kiwi looked over with a spurt of envy to the Devil’s Oven, the baked-goods stand where Yvans worked, ostensibly selling baked goods, although at this particular moment Yvans appeared to be making some kind of lewd visual analogy for a female customer using a container of pretzels and hot cheese. How has he not been fired ? Kiwi wondered, but then the short Italian woman Yvans was talking to began giggling and scribbling something on a paper fished out of her purse. She let Yvans feed her a pretzel. Kiwi resisted the urge to document this baffling progression on his notepad — his note-taking seemed to make his fellow workers uncomfortable, and Carla García-Founier, a black girl with a smattering of beautiful acne on her nose, had asked Kiwi very seriously if he was some kind of serial killer.

Inside the World of Darkness, Time happened in a circle. Shifts were nine hours, and the hours contracted or accordioned outward depending on several variables that Kiwi had cataloged: difficulty of task, boredom of task, degree to which task humiliates me personally. For a while all Kiwi had to do was vacuum in the anonymous many-peopled solitude of the front hall, but then he screwed up that sweet gig. Kiwi made wide orbits with the industrial vacuum cleaner, which trembled and belched in repose like a rodeo bull; on the first day of his third week he ran over his own shoelaces with it and broke it in a way that he couldn’t ignore, hide, or repair. Fuck-fuck-fuck , Kiwi thought — his fluency in mainland expletives had made huge leaps in just two weeks. Kiwi glanced around the World and considered ditching the vacuum in a different hallway to distance himself from the truly alarming sound it was making, a g-r-r-r like the prelude to fire or explosion. A group of Catholic schoolgirls in mauve-and-navy-blue checkerboard skirts froze in front of the Vesuvius Blast Off, just outside the mock-up of a charred Italian village; they began to scream, one after the other like bells tolling, their braids and faces bright spots of fever among the waxy Pompeian mannequins.

“Sorry, children!” Kiwi Bigtree waved at them from inside a cloud of smoke. “It’s my first day!” He’d used this “first day” excuse at least three times hourly since his actual start date two and a half weeks before.

Vijay didn’t know how to fix the vacuum either. He knelt and touched the vacuum cleaner’s bag sorrowfully, as if it were the belly of a crippled horse, and Kiwi felt that in a different epoch he and Vijay could have been El Paso ranch hands together: Vijay shoots the horse and romances all the saloon prostitutes, and I am the wussy sidekick. Yes — in the movie I am the ranch hand slated for death in a midnight raid; I jump into a barrel of rattlesnakes or small cactuses or something, trying to escape, a bullet makes a hole in my hat, the crowd loves it …

“Hey, did you hear me, Margie?” Vijay was staring up at him. “I said, just tell Carl. He’s not going to fire you.”

Kiwi’s manager was a baby-faced young man named Carl Jenks. Carl Jenks was thirty-seven years old, his oldest sister taught astronomy to undergraduates at Dartmouth College, he himself had a master’s degree in some undisclosed discipline — he’d offer these facts to anyone who approached him, like a caterer with a tray of bitter hors d’oeuvres. He was always reading fantasy books with orcs and orc princesses on the cover. (Why did these orc princesses have breasts like human women? Kiwi wanted to ask someone. Was that really likely?) In short, Carl was the sort of mainland nerd with whom even Kiwi, with a rare social intuition, knew better than to ally himself. Carl listened to Kiwi’s apologies with an expression of mild distaste; one thick finger was folded in his paperback book. He was wearing his high school ring, a Florida ring, an ugly garnet stone with a turd shape engraved on it — a manatee, the high school mascot — which caused Kiwi to look down at his own naked, knucklesome fingers in alarm. That’s the kind of wedding I want , Kiwi thought: to a school. No, to a mainland academy.

“Has anybody ever told you, you have a beautiful smile?” Carl Jenks’s tone made Kiwi think of iridescent acids. “What’s so funny? You think it’s hilarious to break World equipment that costs more than your weekly salary?”

“No, I’m sorry. I was just thinking of something.”

“How exciting. Let’s hear it.”

“I was thinking that I’d like to enroll in high school here. To go to college.”

“School. Right. How old are you, fifteen? Sixteen?”

Kiwi straightened to his full height of six one. “I’ll be eighteen on September fifth, sir.”

“Ah. You’re a dropout and we hired you?”

Kiwi shook his head. “Homeschooled. But not really officially … I mean, we didn’t keep in the best touch with the LCPS Board. I assume I will have to take some, you know, some tests before they let me sign up …”

Kiwi was really hoping that Carl Jenks might clue him in as to who “they” might be.

“Well, gosh, I never would have guessed. You seem like an absolutely brilliant scholar. You speak like an orator. Look at that hair. I thought you were a professor emeritus. Ohkaaay, so let’s review — you broke the vacuum. What is this, your first week? Your third week. Terrific. Keep up the good work, Bigtree.”

Kiwi could feel his intelligence leap like an anchored flame inside him. His whole body ached at the terrible gulf between what he knew himself to be capable of (neuroscience, complicated ophthalmological surgeries, air-traffic control) and what he was actually doing.

“Why don’t you take a crack at the family bathroom, Bigtree. It’s disgusting.”

At the World of Darkness, there was a dignity gulf between staff and management. Carl Jenks, for example, got to wear a plain black polo shirt, which made him seem like a pope compared with everybody else. Kiwi had gotten off relatively easy — at least his janitor’s uniform had cap sleeves and a zipper fly. He’d seen a tall kid walking around in a red spandex jumpsuit and death hood. And this in Florida, in deep summer!

Kiwi’s penance was to work overtime picking up the wetter, less decipherable pieces of trash with his gloved hands. The World’s lasers moved in green helixes all around him, a lonely geometry that traveled up and down the entrance to the Whale’s Gullet. Cleaning the family toilet was, by his inexact estimate, one million times more degrading than any of his Bigtree duties on Swamplandia! Worse than putting out popcorn fires, worse even than the buckskin costumes and the jewelry. He was trying to flip the clown-nose plunger inside out with his shoe.

“Gah!” he cried, successful.

Success, in this instance, meant an outpouring of terrible yellow bile from the plunger cap.

The good news: Kiwi had a place to live. Employees at the World of Darkness could apply to live in a block of staff dormitories in the basement of the complex. Originally these were built to house foreign workers, but the recruitment program had been suspended owing to some “legal snag,” a bit of “red tape with Immigration.” All the Turkish and Bulgarian teenage guest workers had been sent home, and now any employee could pay to live here. Kiwi’s dorm, a linoleum cave, came furnished. His room had a bunk, a metal chair, and a desk bolted to the ground, and a dresser with a single, enigmatic tube sock in it — the only evidence of his foreign predecessor. A wonky mirror over the dresser gave his features a funhouse wave. The room was a single occupancy. “A luxury!” he was told by several different women in HR, none of whom lived in these dorms. It was just wide enough for Kiwi to turn a full circle without touching anything, and the windowless fluorescence made him feel like a submariner. Kiwi had figured out that the dorms were located two levels below the central room of the Leviathan, and sometimes he had nightmares of being crushed to death in his bunk. After shifts he’d stare at the ceiling and take a gloomy pleasure in imagining the Chief reading his obituary in the Loomis Register . EMPLOYEE BURIED IN AVALANCHE OF TOURISTS! Ossie would spot it. She’d try to locate Kiwi’s ghost with her “powers” … Kiwi groaned and pushed his cheek against the metal coils inside his mattress, waited for the thought to float away. “Really, it’s unproductive to ruminate on that particular problem of our sister’s,” he’d told Ava on the night before he left home, by which he’d meant “It hurts.” Ossie’s need was like a fire that ate all the oxygen in a room. Her “lovesickness.”