Dinner was brief, destroyed by the savage appetite of Lester, who engulfed his meal before Rachel had even taken a bite, and begged, begged to be excused so that he could return to the platoon of small plastic men he’d deployed on the rug. According to Lester, his men were waiting to be told what to do. “I need to tell my guys who to attack!” he shouted. “I’m in charge!”
At the height of this tantrum, Jonah, silent since they’d returned from the doctor’s office, leaned over to Lester, put a hand on his shoulder, and calmly told him not to whine.
“Don’t use that tone of voice,” he said. “Mom and Dad will excuse you when they’re ready.”
“Okay,” Lester said, looking up at his brother with a kind of awe, and for the rest of their wordless dinner he sat there waiting, as patiently as a boy his age ever could, his hands folded in his lap.
At bedtime, Rachel asked Martin if he wouldn’t mind letting her sleep alone. She was just very tired. She didn’t think she could manage otherwise. She gave him a sort of smile, and he saw the effort behind it. She dragged her pillow and a blanket into a corner of the TV room and made herself a little nest there. He had the bedroom to himself. He crawled onto Rachel’s side of the mattress, which was higher, softer, less abused, and fell asleep.
In the morning, Jonah did not say goodbye on his way to school, nor did he greet Martin upon his return home. When Martin asked after his day, Jonah, without looking up, said that it had been fine. Maybe that was all there was to say, and why, really, would you ever shit on such an answer?
Jonah took up his spot on the couch and opened a book, reading quietly until dinner, while Lester played at his feet. Martin watched Jonah. Was that a grin or a grimace on the boy’s face? he wondered. And what, finally, was the difference? Why have a face at all if what was inside you was so perfectly hidden? The book Jonah was reading was nothing, some silliness. Make-believe and colorful and harmless. It looked like it belonged to a series, along with that book The Short. On the cover a boy, arms outspread, was gripping wires in each hand, and his whole body was glowing.
Precious Precious
It was late in the wretched season, and there was a sweet chill in the halls at Thompson Systems, where the future was getting fondled by some of the most anxious and self-regarding minds of Ida Grieve’s generation.
Tonight a bunch of them were at drinks, because death was coming, and Foster, the wunderkind, whose official title at Thompson was Beekeeper, had ordered some nasty brew called Mud. It oozed up his glass and clumped in dark nuggets along the rim. When they asked the waiter what was in it, he seemed forlorn, as if he might soon bleed out on the carpet.
They watched him shuffle away, perhaps to go find out, or perhaps to throw himself from a cliff.
“Oh no. It’s like we just sent him to the principal’s office,” said Foster. “Hey,” he whispered toward the bar. “You’re not in trouble. You didn’t do anything wrong. We love you.”
“Do we really love him, though?” said Aniel, a little too loudly. “I mean, we don’t. In some ways we hardly think of him as human, or people like him, even though we know not to admit that.”
“Jesus, Aniel,” said Foster. “Apparently we don’t really know not to admit that.”
At the table were the brooding engineers—Mort and Bummer and Cerise—youngish and facially steamrolled from all-nighters at their terminals, and if they were rich they still dressed cheap and drank cheap and lived in cheap, bullshit apartments up in the hills. Maury Beryl was there because he was always there, sipping some cloudy fizz, sometimes swishing it in his mouth, as if he might spit it in someone’s face. Ida felt that she could be sad around him, not that she’d tried. One day, maybe. She’d spill her moods over Maury Beryl and see what happened.
Sitting next to Maury was Harriet, about whom nothing could be said, or thought, or felt. Except that Harriet pushed a certain button of Ida’s that very nearly seemed like the size of her entire body. Harriet had to be met with force, or else you just became her backup singer.
A mysterious young man named Donny Wohl sat at the end of the table. He was possibly still a teenager, despite his pretty mustache, so Ida was afraid of him, even though he was strangely beautiful and she thought about him sort of a lot when she was alone. And alongside Donny, or maybe just accidentally sitting nearly inside Donny’s pants, and accidentally soothing a terrible itch of his under the table, Ida guessed, was Royce, who cock-blocked ideas in the pitch room at Thompson. It was Royce’s job to pump discouragement into the Thompson intellectual climate, through the tiny pink valve in her face. Ida felt reliably like shit after every encounter with Royce. To drink with Royce, though, that was different. She was competitively bleak, and even though she seemed to be indifferently molesting Donny right now, taking her turn with the little love child, Ida was glad she was there.
Foster took careful sips of his drink and tried to smile. A watery brown stain crested up his mouth.
“I will not even remark on the kind of grin you have right now,” said Aniel.
“Maybe the dirt is from somewhere and kind of, I don’t know, amazing for you,” said Harriet, pinging the glass with her finger. “The Dead Sea. Some legendary, healing mudflats.” She studied the menu.
“It doesn’t taste terrible,” he said. “I was expecting cream.”
Aniel got up and sniffed the drink. He struck a snobbish, wine-tasting face.
“It’s a superfood, dude,” he said. Aniel was older, which meant thirty-two or so, with all the shame that that entailed. He dressed young, but fancy young. Fifth Avenue Skate. He always seemed so well laundered.
“I was reading somewhere that certain regional soil samples have more protein than meat,” Aniel said. “Per cubic whatever.”
“Oh yeah. Read that too. In Scientific American, last August. That’s totally right.”
This was Bummer, a compulsive affirmer. Whenever Ida needed agreement at work, an ally or a second or a foil, a fall guy or a fool or a friend, or even just a live human being who bled on command, she sought out Bummer, but his inability to produce conversational friction had melted him into a puddle, contained, if barely, by a few odd bones.
“I don’t know,” said Harriet. “I could see that being true. If animals were buried in that soil, there’d be some protein in the sample. Vestigial.”
Ida laughed. “If? Isn’t that what soil is, ultimately? A compost of the dead? So, Foster, you’re really just drinking your grandfather.”
“No need to make it personal,” said Foster. “And my grandfather is still alive, so that’s gross.” He’d abandoned his drink and was glancing around. For help, maybe. For an escape.
Royce whispered something to Donny, and Donny’s face registered nothing. Donny was staring, it seemed, directly at Ida, and she squirmed in her seat. Activity seemed to accelerate under the table, as if Royce were solving a Rubik’s Cube without looking.
Ida wouldn’t have minded watching, without the table blocking their doings, but just in a casual way. Not sexual, exactly. Almost as you’d watch a short documentary at the museum. With others, on a bench, in a cool, dark room.
“I wish there was a more obvious way to make money off of that idea,” Maury said. “That the earth is simply compacted corpse material. A kind of condensed, spherical dead body.”