Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

After his first disastrous lunches in the staff cafeteria, Kiwi began to eat alone. He brought his pimiento-and-cheese sandwiches into the last stall of the men’s bathroom, his back against its broken door. The World entrées each had some stupid name, Hellspawn Hoagie or Faustian Bargain Fish Tacos. Kiwi marveled at his lunch — how could a hoagie be soggy and incendiary at the same time? His eyes watered in the bathroom mirror. The whole theme park was like a joke that someone had taken too far! The water fountains didn’t even work here — Vijay had warned him on his first day. They piped in a manufactured salt water.

“Get it, bro? ’Cause it’s Hell.”

“Yeah, right, I got it.” Kiwi’s throat burned from getting that particular joke. Why weren’t natal dolphins swimming around in the salt water? Why weren’t hospitals using the saline solution to save a baby’s life or something?

When he was brave, Kiwi ate his lunch on the deep end of the Jaws. He sat on one of the whale’s rock-size plaster molars, a place where any of his colleagues could have approached him (they didn’t), but more often Kiwi slid between the teeth. He slumped as far down as he could go on the spongy mauve rubber mats. The gums were always filling up with rogue bits of trash that the Lost Souls dropped as they stepped into the Leviathan: cigarette butts and foldout park maps, doughnut holes grouped like tiny Stonehenges, pretzel paper — once, horrifyingly, a squidlike blue condom that got pasted to Kiwi’s elbow. (Not used? Kiwi prayed. Used! Yvans!)

Kiwi sat like that, a toothpick speck in the whale’s smile, and pretended to read Plato’s Republic until his lunch hour was up.

Kiwi often had to remind himself that no matter how badly a day could go at work, this present situation was in every way an improvement over his first week on the mainland. He had food now, access to clean toilets; he had money, a dormitory, a few embryonic friendships. At night sometimes he would sit alone in the dorm kitchen and microwave a frozen cheese pizza that he’d purchased at the nearby gas station, with his own income. He’d count down the beeps with a meditative fervor — if anybody had wandered in and seen Kiwi’s face in the microwave glass, they would have thought he was having a numinous experience. He ate the gas station pepperoni prayerfully, peeled the mozzarella off in slow ribbons, tore off warm gluey bites of crust that he swallowed like an animal in the dark. He’d drink a vending machine soda and think to himself, I’ve done it! and feel a twinge of uneasiness — because what had he done really? Used the Chief’s cash to make a purchase? And what was he doing here? Helping , he thought vaguely. He backed away from this thought and let it hang there, a Monet picture, beautifully out of focus. The colors of it were right; the shapes could sharpen and emerge later. He tried not to think too hard about the Chief, the girls. The ninety-eight Seths becoming anonymous in their Pit because the tourists had lost interest in that particular story. Kiwi had come prepared to disguise his identity, but nobody here ever mentioned the Bigtree Wrestling Dynasty or Swamplandia! Already everybody had forgotten the origins of the joke about him; they thought his real surname was Mead. Anonymity was a very easy goal to achieve in the Leviathan.

On weeknights, he could hear fat Leonard’s heavy breath coming from a dormitory off the kitchen. His snores came in fusillades, once causing Kiwi to jump up and ding his head on the microwave door, and yet Kiwi felt grateful for even this noise, and for all the small and tolerable irritations of dorm living. Leonard Harlblower was a park greeter, a loud, obnoxious young man who would probably go through life disliked by everyone he met and never know it. Sometimes Kiwi would look at his reflection in the bathroom mirror they shared and think: Oh my God, I pray that I am not a Leo . Large Leonard, via some athletic self-deception, believed himself to be the most popular employee in the World. He read everyone’s behavior backward to fit this thesis: Carl Jenks’s open contempt for him became a convivial respect, Kiwi’s queasy dislike was shy sycophancy, Yvans’s insults became “Caribbean banter,” and Nina Suárez and her girlfriends’ eye-rolling avoidance of him was just “those bitches playing hard to get.” “Ladies love Leo” was his auxiliary hypothesis.

Even Chief Bigtree — an “indigenous swamp dweller” who was actually a white guy descended from a coal miner in small-town Ohio, a man who sat on lizards in a feathered headdress — even the Chief seemed like a genius of self-awareness next to this kid Leonard. Leonard Harlblower was always slapping Kiwi too hard on the back and demanding to be called “Leo Nard-on” and cracking up at his own misogynist puns, many of which Kiwi would later hear repeated on TV reruns of the canceled sitcom It’s a Man’s Grand World .

Oh my God, you are not even an original asshole! You are a plagiarist of assholes .

Kiwi thought Leonard had the worst job in the World — he had to dress up in a whale suit in hundred-degree weather and shake the small children’s hands with his flippers, which were made of a hard bubbly plastic and about the size of car doors; the whale head alone must have weighed ten pounds. (The irony here was that Leo’s real-life head was also huge, the size of a moai; Vijay sniggered that the foam domehead was probably a snug fit.) You half-expected sweat to come pouring out of the whale’s eyeholes.

Kiwi had a PO box now, a mainland address, and he sent away for brochures from the northern colleges. He began to receive pamphlets in the mail with fall leaves and brunettes in toothpaste-colored turtlenecks, modest castles behind them. These were the New England colleges where he could get a liberal arts education. He had taken the number 23 bus to the public library a few times and checked out a stack of outdated books about the college application process. He’d left a message for a woman named Jennifer Davies at the LCPS about enrolling for the fall, and written out a short autobiography that he planned to read to her when she called him back on the World of Darkness pay-phone number.

Kiwi’s plans to save the park — or at least to forestall bankruptcy, to keep the family afloat until August or even September — these plans were off to a sluggish start. He had an envelope of twenties, but it wasn’t his salary — he had stolen this money from the Chief. This theft had been easy to justify: as an investment, or an early draw on his inheritance, or as his salary for years of unpaid tribal labor. Rationalizations buzzed inside him as he slid the bills out. Owed me , these shrill voices in Kiwi droned on and on, bees swaying in columns in the dark room, until he’d pocketed even the change. Pennies. A lintlike currency, value that collected in corners. He swabbed pennies out of the Chief’s wallet and trouser pockets. People thought the worst robbers stole the most, whole vaults. But it was the smallest denomination that you stole, he wrote later in the Field Notes, that was the real measure of your greed.

Kiwi shook out the envelope: $22.12 now. His thumbs found and pressed the two pennies; for some reason this action made him think of Ava and Ossie. One, two. He wanted to save for the girls’ college tuition. A doctor or a psychiatrist or something for Ossie. He had drawn up a budget to address the Chief’s deficits; Ossie would of course get priority. But given that he had a job flossing a whale’s teeth with a sudsy rope and the lowest salary allowed by law, things were not looking inspiring. Kiwi took out the repayment calendar he had drawn up on Swamplandia! and flipped through the weeks ahead of him, erasing the naive numbers, subtracting his state taxes, making adjustments based on phantom increases that he planned to receive to his tiny salary.