Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

Regarding fire and oxygen: whatever minor administrative deity in the World of Darkness’s pantheon controlled the central AC, he or she liked to keep this basement at a freezing temperature. You could hear the whir of the air conditioner deep in your sleep. Kiwi had dreams in which he crawled along the World’s hallways and subterranean pipelines until he discovered a CONTROL PANEL, labeled in buzzing gold letters; each night he reached out for it and shut off the air to the dormitory vents. Then he’d wake up under four blankets with a sense of relief, thinking that he’d switched off the indoor winter.

This is not forever , Kiwi would think as he held his breath and plunged one of the World of Darkness latrines with the clown-nose suction cup. You are still a genius. You are just a temporary worker . That was the rank that Kiwi had been hired at — full-time staffers all had their high school diplomas. The HR lady had flicked her dry eyeballs over Kiwi’s body and shouted (Why so loud, madam?), “Women’s size medium!” into an intercom. “And get me a temporary ID badge.” Temporary workers, as opposed to staffers, got paid a dollar less and clocked out to take their lunch hour. Temporary workers were uninsured. This meant that if something fell on you, a flaming pretzel or one of the tinted panes from the Leviathan’s intestinal slides, you were shit out of luck.

“Why do I have to be a peon in this system?” Kiwi grumbled.

“Aww, when you get your high school diploma they’ll make you staff, Margine,” Vijay said, trying to cheer him.

“Please do not call me that.” Why were other dudes his age so averse to calling him M&M? “When I get my high school diploma I’m going to Harvard.”

“Ooh, sorry, Mrs. Mead. Goddamn. Bring me back a sweatshirt.”

But in the staff cafeteria, Kiwi’s colleagues taught him that it was unwise to self-describe as a genius here in the World. It was unwise to mention colleges, or hopes. Telling your fellow workers that you were going to Harvard was a request to have your testicles compared to honey-roasted peanuts and your status as a virgin confirmed, your virginity suddenly as radiant and evident to all as a wad of toilet paper that was stuck to your shoe, something embarrassing that you trailed through the World. The other guys went after him with such vim (another pointless word from Kiwi’s SAT box) that afterward he never mentioned college to anyone besides Vijay and Carl Jenks, whom he figured he’d need later as a reference. Three people had to recommend you, apparently. Yvans had already offered to write Kiwi “a two-thumbs-up letter” if Kiwi continued to cover for him, and to call his wife on Adultery Fridays and say that Yvans was going to be “in an after-hours conference” with Carl Jenks until the moon rose. Vijay said that he would sign any letter that Margaret put in front of him. That left Carl himself. Kiwi was more deferential to Carl Jenks than he’d ever been to the Chief. He tried to scrub children’s vomit from the webbing of the Tongue in a way that suggested deep reservoirs of genius. When a three-year-old Lost Soul came howling around the corner and knocked over a garbage can of Dante’s Tamales — which looked like masticated rubies and burned your bare skin — Kiwi righted it. He was monastic, scrupulous. He really hoped that Carl Jenks was keeping track of this.

Vijay Montañez, Kiwi realized, was actually an angel disguised in smelly A-necks and skunk-striped Adidas breakaway pants. Vijay was a wonderful aberration in the World of Darkness’s social universe — he seemed to feel a sincere fraternal affection for Kiwi, and he defended Kiwi’s dorkiness to the other workers as if Kiwi Bigtree were a country under his protectorate. Vijay was an only child, he lived with his mother and his grandmother and what Kiwi judged to be eighty Chihuahuas, if you based your estimate on the terrible noises they produced through a door, in a closet-size apartment on Regal Avenue — and he’d mentioned right away to Kiwi that he’d always wanted a brother. His father had remarried a white woman, Susannah . Technically he did have a brother, Vijay said, Ste-phen , breaking the name hard as karate on the syllable. Vijay had never met him; Vijay’s father had relocated that family to Grand Rapids, Michigan. For reasons that Kiwi didn’t fully understand, he felt certain that this infant in Michigan was the reason Vijay was so kind to him, and so unreasonably loyal.

Vijay was not Kiwi Bigtree’s only teacher. Kiwi received many complimentary tutorials from his other colleagues those first weeks. When he’d used the word “pulchritude”—a compliment! he insisted — in unwitting reference to another janitor’s girlfriend; he later found condoms full of pudding in his work locker and a new phrase to dissect in his Field Notes, GAYASS ASSFUCKER, etched with a cafeteria knife above the locker gills. When he recited “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” hoping to impress Nina Suárez, who was wiping cigarette butts out of the whale ashtrays with a rag, Ephraim Lipmann happened to overhear him and told everybody on the Leviathan crew that Margaret Mead was definitely gay .

“No, no, I was seducing Nina!” If people believed that he was sexually attracted to woolly, goony Ephraim — if people believed that Kiwi desired to see big-eared Ephraim naked, in any context — his life in the World of Darkness would be over. What was wrong with these philistines? “I read it to her because I like women ! It’s a poem about love!”

Then Nina herself got wind of this — that skinny Margaret Mead was hitting on her? — and now all of Nina’s friends who worked in the Flippers were boycotting Kiwi, a political strike against his nerdly advances that took the form of girls rolling their exquisitely lashed eyes at Kiwi in the Leviathan. They touched the hair frizzed above their ears as they passed him as if radioing their disgust to some central intelligence.

To bribe Ephraim Lipmann into reversing his river of calumny, Kiwi offered to work overtime for him. Then he started to recite Keats’s “Ode” to Ephraim, believing that the beauty of the poem would be self-evident and exonerate him.

“Fuck, Margaret!” Ephraim said. His reedy voice was loud enough to echo throughout the Coils, the purple foyer to the whale’s belly. A few young mothers pushing their whale-fluked rental strollers looked over disapprovingly. “I do not want to sleep with you, dude! God, leave me alone!” He gave Kiwi a little push, hard enough to cause Kiwi to fall backward against a mesh trash can.

“Guys, come quick, Margaret Mead wants to butt-rape me in the Flukes …”

Every day, Kiwi’s colleagues taught him what you could and could not say to another person here on the mainland. This was a little like having snipers tutor you on the limits of the prison yard.

“My colleagues,” you were encouraged to call your fellow stoned, moose-eyed teenage workers. “My colleagues,” to sixteen-year-old Nina, who wore her jeans so tight around the plush heart of her ass that sometimes Kiwi had to walk behind the cardboard flames to compose himself. This egalitarian recommendation did not apply to the management, Kiwi discovered — Carl Jenks could call his staffers anything he liked. Carl’s “colleagues” were mysterious people to whom he communicated via yellow sticky memos and the telephone. Carl Jenks had a habit of referring to all his teenage employees as “new hires” until such time as he had to fire them. Yes, it makes sense, Carl Jenks joked. Oh, it makes perfect sense that Hell is staffed by teenagers! If there is a hell, I know it’s a NASA space station manned by monkeys your age.

Kiwi wondered how things had gone for Carl Jenks in high school. His hypothesis was: Siberian bad. On-the-deck-of-the -Titanic bad. On par with Kiwi’s early weeks in the World.