Mimi screeched and scratched at him. “Tim, what’s wrong?” she yowled. “Stop it, let me go!”
Tim locked her in her room without a word, went to the bathroom, threw up his tropical canapés, took three sleeping pills, deleted his dating profile, and oozed into bed.
In the morning Tim said nothing to Mimi, but he could not help being stern and cold in his manner, and she ate her pancakes sulkily, not bothering, as she usually did, to wheedle him for a cup of coffee. Tim’s head still hurt, and he was dizzy and faintly sick from the sleeping pills. In the train on the way to work, though, compunction struck him. Poor Mimi, who couldn’t be blamed for anything. He, Tim, was a thoughtless tyrant. Not only did he hold her natural human urges, the very things that endeared her to him, against her; but he was failing to provide her with a stimulating environment. Probably she wouldn’t be constantly coupling in the yard with Yoyo and every other vagrant in heat if she had the things that would keep her amused, a toy car and a swimming pool and new, unheard-of flavors of ice cream. Tim resolved to make it up to her. He would use some of his personal days. They would take a trip together. For a moment, he felt like himself again, steady and safe.
But at Tim’s beloved Wal-Mart, things were wrong. As soon as the tubes sucked him through the entrance, he heard Edwina yelling, strident and harsh, and the gluey, flat tones of their octopus supervisor, Nestor, dripping with malice.
All animals were equal, sure, but much as bacterial hives like Sunny were precious and different and almost sacred to Tim, octopi made him and Edwina and countless others shrink away in xenophobic horror. Tim was ashamed of this feeling and behaved with extra bootlickingness to Nestor on account of his bad conscience. Edwina’s hatred of Nestor was pure and uncomplicated and had her constantly on the verge of summary termination. Sometimes she claimed that octopi were overlords from another planet, sometimes she argued that they were experiments in genetic engineering from humantimes, and sometimes she hissed to Tim with fierce delight that the humans themselves were biopuppets of the octopi, the unconscious tools of a vast squid conspiracy that no animal had even begun to comprehend.
Today she was right up in Nestor’s face, snarling at him about corporate brainwashing and informed consumerism.
“What’s going on?” Tim whispered to Marcus, a big muscly Norway rat who, according to the all-female team of greeters, had pheromones whose potency could not be diminished even by a century of clonic reproduction.
Marcus was clearly thrilled to be asked. “Your girl Edwina is losing her shit,” he informed Tim. His whispers quivered with subversive excitement. “Nestor sent one of the sleepers through the checkout. Five-x-three credits in purchases! And then straight through the suctions into the parking lot, still snoozing like a baby. Oh, man. Probably gonna get plowed by a bus out there. And better that than waking up human brained in the middle of the city, no idea what her name is, with thirteen bags full of flashlights and nasal spray and not a dime in her pocket.”
Tim’s stomach lurched. “Who was it?” he said urgently. “Who was the sleeper?”
Marcus shrugged. “Some hot little fruit bat,” he said. “Sweet sticky proboscis; been here two, three weeks.”
Relieved but not yet released from his tension, Tim kept up his anxious questioning. “I don’t get it,” he told Marcus. “What about company policy? Did the sleeper stop moving?”
“Nah,” said Marcus, sticking out his front teeth contemptuously. “But today’s forty percent off pollutants, and she got caught up in register four’s long line of juiced-up multisex amphibia.” He shuddered. “Buncha freaks. Nestor said there was nothing in the policy about letting the sleepers pay for their purchases and vamoose. So he helped her through—helped, mind you—and now she’s a lost soul in the world of the waking for sure.”
Tim went in search of Sunny, somehow still anxious for her well-being. He found her in toys, jostling a squeaky ball into her cart. As ravishing as ever, her phosphorescence seemed to Tim nonetheless a shade duller and murkier than it had been before. At lunch he crept into the utilities closet and dimmed Wal-Mart’s beautiful fluorescents, then climbed to the employee lunchroom on the mezzanine. Peeking out over the railing, he saw Sunny’s glow, strong again in the gloom, and felt better.
Yet as the day wore on, everything seemed darker, not just the lights. The noises of the shoppers boomed yawningly down from the void of the ceiling, struck the floor with a crunch, and came creeping back, crippled and wordless, from the cracks in the displays, the vacant spaces in the shelves, like the distorted voices of nightmare. Tim stocked product as quickly as he could to muffle the shadowy echoes, and hummed his way through the discordant hours.
At the end of the day, clocking out, amidst the hubbub of twisted tongues, Tim heard Edwina and Nestor, at it again.
“This is your idea of a joke,” stated Nestor in his dead tones. “Or what. This is not your idea of keeping your job. Turning down the lights. Making everything look like shit. Or you have a problem with our photosynthetic friends. Tell me, because I’m at a loss.”
“Oh, right,” said Edwina, trembling with rage. “Of course it’s me. Because I’m the capitalist mastermind here. Because I’m the invisible hand of the markets!”
“Maybe you fancy yourself an energy activist, yes,” proposed Nestor. “Maybe you think you’re being paid to carry out some kind of extremist waveform-rights agenda here at Wal-Mart Corporations Universal.”
“Screw you and your pathetic conspiracy theories,” spat Edwina, seething. “Screw you and your petty overlord bullshit.”
“You know that one of our customers experienced a seizure due to the lack of ambient light this afternoon,” said Nestor. “One of our most valued customers, a longtime sleeper, really almost a mascot for many patrons of the store. A bacterial conglomerate who depends on a certain level of illumination to survive. A lovely lady, whose glow we fed entirely free of charge. Now collapsed, seizure, hospital, prognosis grave. You know we’re looking at a lawsuit here. That’s your agenda? You think you’ll throw this company to the litigation machine? You think one machine will eat another machine? That’s your symbolic victory, at the expense of an animal life?”
Nestor was, for the first time since Tim had known him, losing his cool. But then again, Tim realized slowly and as if from a great distance, he himself was losing it also. Oh, Sunny, he thought. What have I done?
Edwina, throwing back her head to retort, spine bristling, saw Tim crouched and colorless by the time clock. She looked at him for maybe a half second longer than Tim thought he could bear. Then she returned her attention to Nestor.
“Yeah, shit,” said Edwina. “I’m really sorry to hear that. You know, I was just trying to save the company some money. I felt pretty bad about our argument this morning, and I wanted to do something a little above and beyond to reinstate my loyalty as an employee. I’m sorry, Nestor.” She glanced up at Tim again, for just an instant this time. “Plus also, maybe I did think it would help the sleepers, to have things a little darker, a little calmer in here. I had no idea anyone was going to get hurt. I guess I just wanted to make a gesture toward them, a reconciliation, after the unfortunate event of earlier. I totally misjudged the situation. I regret turning down the lights. Whatever the company has to do, I understand. I have to clock out now, I have no overtime approved.”