“You’ve noticed they have humans handling the food? They never let roaches handle the food?”
“How do we know that roaches didn’t handle the food before it got to us? It’s just some kind of paste-more like mechanic’s lubricant than any kind of proper food. It certainly looks like the kind of thing that a roach would have handled, or made, or thrown up, actually.”
Falstaff made a face. “Don’t be grotesque. Humans need to eat, they expect to eat—things go wrong if they don’t eat—but they don’t like thinking about where their food came from. But if they were to see the roaches handling the food, theywould probably turn it down. They might even starve themselves.”
“How do you know this?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. The roaches don’t even train us to do the job—it’s passed down human to human.”
The paste came out of three different dispensers: one with the symbol of a cow, one with the symbol of a fish, one with a leaf symbol. All the paste was of an identical, slightly grayish color, but the textures and flavoring varied. The vegetable paste tasted of greens. The fish paste tasted fishy. And the meat paste could have been chicken, beef, or pork—depending on your mood. To further individuate the offerings, the “cooks” cut the paste into a variety of shapes as it solidified, then ran it through a dye-and-flavor apparatus one batch at a time.
“Wait,” Falstaff said. “That was vegetable paste.”
“Yes.”
“You applied the meat dyes to it.”
“I doubt it makes much difference. It all tastes oily and greasy anyway.”
“We’ll see. I’m not greatly enamored of roach cuisine, either,” Falstaff said. “But at least they’ve solved the food problem for themselves.”
“I’d still like a good steak from time to time.”
“Have you ever heard the expression, ‘Meat is murder’?”
Daniel stared at the entries assembling into individual packages. “I won’t argue with the ethics, but people have to eat. You were right. People don’t like to think about where their food came from.”
HE’D BEEN A summer child, Daniel’s son. Oh, he was born in winter and might one day die in winter for all Daniel knew, and the last few years before Daniel had been yanked off to Ubo, Gordon had had the look of winter hanging about him. His hair was dark and fuzzy in a way that reminded you of coal, skin pale and translucent as plants grown with too little sun. And frozen eyes, shiny with their hard layer of ice, unmoving eyes that could accuse you like no other.
But he really should have been a summer child. He would have been had Elena and Daniel been able to make love that cold October when Daniel lost his job and Elena had first understood that the life she was going to have wasn’t the one she’d signed up for. It was the first time they had gotten into trouble with their marriage, the first time they had been unable to talk each other out of worry, make each other feel safe again. From that moment on their pain had taken them down separate paths.
Although Daniel had been sure the marriage would be good again—it had to be, as he could not imagine a life without her—the estrangement shook him. He went back over the things he had said, the things he had done, determined to fix anything he had cracked or broken.
And so Gordon was conceived the first week in June during a hot spell in Miami. They’d gone there so that Daniel could look for work. The air conditioning in their cheap motel had broken down. They’d stripped but still couldn’t get to sleep. And although things between them would get much better over the next few years, Daniel would never forget that they’d had Gordon simply out of frustration and a desperate need for comfort.
Gordon was born in Denver in March, during the worst snow storm in ten years. People talked about how global warming was obviously a fraud when they still could have such temperatures. The car lodged in a snow bank on the way to the hospital and Daniel was sure the baby would be born right there in the freezing automobile. But Gordon waited for the hospital to make his entrance, and from then on avoided the cold. Daniel could tell even in that initial cry—sluggish and forced out, as if he were afraid the winter would force its way into his body through his open mouth—that this child would hate the winter.
Gordon wanted to be a summer child: it was there in the set of his shoulders as he concentrated on a new project full of artificial color and light, in the tentative corners of his smile on the first really sunny day of spring, in his eyes the first time they saw a drive‑in movie together, just the two of them, Daniel and his boy Gordon.
But all these gestures of promise and light were finally absorbed in the paleness of skin, a certain flaccidity of tissue that erased the boy’s smiles. As Gordon grew older he settled into being a quiet and somber child. The cold organism that had wrapped itself around Gordon’s heart had decided to smother anything else, and no wishes, lies, or dreams were able to stop that.
This boy here, the youngest resident Daniel had seen in Ubo—where there were no fathers or sons—had the same dark hair, the same paleness of skin, but the ambient light gave the skin a reddish, healthier tint. The black hair shone as if sprinkled with tiny jewels, from silica trapped in the strands, he guessed, and infrequent washing. The boy pretended to be at the beach with the bright blue sand bucket he carried and the short-handled shovel. Daniel went up to the roof of Ubo every day he could, which was where he first met him.
The boy glanced up at Daniel and the resemblance to his son snatched his breath. Then he pointed at the object between his feet, half‑covered with filthy debris. It was the corpse of a small aquatic bird, its beak open, eyes closed, left wing bent awkwardly underneath. Birds sometimes crashed onto the roof. Few flew or walked away. The boy poked the bird’s body with the shovel.
“Bird’s dead,” the boy said.
Daniel nodded, not sure how to handle this. But he thought he should say something. “Too bad. How did it happen?”
“I didn’t do it!” The boy looked up at him defiantly, his lower lip puckered out.
“I didn’t say you did… son. I just thought you may have seen it happen.”
“No… I was just here, then there it was by those old cans. Dead. It won’t ever move again, be alive again.”
“That’s right.”
“Why can that happen?”
“It just happens, I’m afraid. It just happens that way.”
The boy nodded. Then with an irritated little grimace he began digging up the debris around the bird as if trying to bury it in the roof. There was a great deal of dirt and debris here, but Daniel didn’t think he could get deep enough to bury even a small bird. Finding damp, darker dirt underneath, the boy began to dig more violently. It seemed to Daniel a primitive reaction.
Daniel nodded again, feeling incredibly stupid. “That’s too bad. Are you going to bury it?”
The boy bent over the bird with knitted brow, as if this were an extremely difficult question. “Maybe. I guess so. But maybe I oughta ’xamine it first, though.”
Daniel crouched beside the boy, looking at the dead bird intently, as if he were just as interested as the child. And maybe he was. He reached and, absentmindedly, began to pick sand grains out of the boy’s thick black hair. The boy looked up briefly, then turned back to the bird, apparently not minding.
“Why did it die?”
Daniel shifted uncomfortably, then sank his knees onto the roof and leaned closer. “I don’t know… disease most likely. Maybe a heart attack. I’ve heard that birds have a lot of heart attacks…”
“Where’s the blood? Didn’t it have any blood in it?”
Daniel touched the bird gently with the boy’s shovel. The blood appeared to be gone, and he’d seen animals in this state before, usually off the side of the road. But he couldn’t really explain it—the question, a very good question, had caught him off guard. “I’m… not sure. I think maybe they get dehydrated. That means the sun dries them out once the heart isn’t pumping anymore, or the lungs breathing. They turn… sour, I guess is the word. Like if you take a tomato out of the refrigerator and forget and leave it on the windowsill.”