“No.”
“Are you sure? You look an awful lot like him.”
“I’m sure.”
“It doesn’t matter. Everything’s all right now. I’ll be there soon.” And with that, she closed her eyes and continued rocking.
If you saw her out in the world she would have been just another old woman, the type who usually holds up the line in a grocery store, or is waiting for a bus that’s always running late and so wants to strike up a conversation in the meantime; one of those meticulous old gals who knows and cares about the exact type of gift you’re supposed to give on a particular anniversary, who has so many interesting stories to tell but no one to listen to them because you don’t want to bother with a dry, old, used-up little bit of carbon whose hands are arthritic claws covered in liver spots and grotesque, plump purple veins; you would have looked at her and seen only another humorously annoying old woman counting out exact change as if it were a holy chore assigned to her from above. And you wouldn’t have stopped to think that underneath this monumental punchline of dying cells, wrinkled skin, and fading memories there existed someone who’d always been, but now was rarely seen as, a real human being; one with hurts and hopes and lonely places in their life they filled as best they could by standing in the line at the grocery store, or chatting with strangers at bus stops, or endlessly bending the driver’s ear while counting out exact change. You would never see her as ever having been in love, or dancing with her favorite beau to music from the Glenn Miller Orchestra, young and vibrant, with a laugh that rang like crystal and a long, promising, full life ahead of her. You would never wonder or care if she often cried alone at night, or how many times she’d offered her heart only to have it crushed and spat upon, or if her children remembered to call her on the weekend or visit at Christmas. Maybe there was a Great Love who lay slumbering in some graveyard and she was the only person who took the time to replace the wilting flowers with fresh blossoms-you might have imagined that, maybe, and then smiled at the sad, sentimental absurdity of this image from a fairy tale: There once was an old woman who lived in the past where someday all of us will be.
At that moment you wanted to know everything about her and her life, every detail no matter how extraneous or trivial. You did not want to walk away from her because she might be gone when you came back; they collected them fast around here.
A sound a few yards away startled you and you looked in its direction.
Someone had coughed.
“Don’t worry,” you said to Miss Acceleration. “I’ll come back for you. I promise.”
She continued chatting as you walked away: “I think a bunny would be nice, don’t you? A big, round, fluffy gray bunny with great floppy ears. Yes, I think a bunny would be so nice…”
You blinked back something in your eyes, swallowed against something vile roiling up from your stomach into the back of your throat, wiped some more blood from your hands onto the sides of your pants, and found the next occupied cage.
Behind these bars a little boy with massive facial deformities lay on a cot, his lower body covered by a sheet. From the ceiling there extended down a pencil-thick cable that spread out at the bottom like the wires inside an umbrella, each one attached to one of the matchbox-sized rectangles implanted in his skull. The skin of his exposed scalp was crusty and red where it fused with the metal. He jerked underneath the sheet as if in the midst of a seizure, arms and legs twitching as the silver matchboxes sparked and faded in a precisely-timed sequence. His eyes were held closed by two heavy strips of medical tape and fresh, glistening stitches formed a “W” across his face from temples to cheeks, meeting above the bridge of his nose. A clear plastic tube ran from one of his nostrils into a large glass jar set on a metal table beside the cot; with each jerk, dark viscous liquid crawled through the tube and oozed into the jar. With each sequence of sparks he bit down hard on his lower lip, breaking the skin and dribbling blood down the side of his face. His skin was red and glistened with sweat and every time he convulsed, he jerked back his head to expose the pinkish-white scar across his neck.
… when there are this many, they cut out their vocal cords…
You kept moving; movement was good, movement reinforced the illusion of an assured destination and a guaranteed way out once you reached it, and you needed to believe that you were going to get out of this.
You passed beaten, bandaged dogs of every shape and size, kittens and cats who had been kicked nearly into pulp or whose fur had been doused in gasoline and set aflame; they lay very still, taking shallow breaths as tubes fed them both oxygen and liquid protein.
The monitors in the wall showed happy pictures, happy families with their happy pets having happy times.
A deep aluminum bathtub sat in the center of the next cage. The steady drip-drip-drip of water from the faucet echoed like faraway gunshots. Something splashed around, pounded one reverberating boom of thunder against the side, then rose partway above the lip; it was a woman-or had been, once-with red hair, mottled and discolored skin, and a neck that had been slashed several times in different places with a straight-edge razor; she looked at you through bulbous piscine eyes and brushed a wet strand of hair from her forehead. Then the slashes on her neck opened moistly, blowing air bubbles before contracting again.
Gills. She had gills.
You made some kind of a sound, soft and pitiful and child-like, that crawled out of your throat as if it were afraid of the light, and then you backed away, hands pushed out as if holding closed some invisible door.
Your legs felt weighted down by iron boots. You did not so much walk as shuffle along, periodically looking down at the floor to make sure the earth wasn’t about to split open and swallow you.
Next was a teenaged boy with dozens of membranous man-of-war tentacles slobbering out all over his body in phosphorescent clusters; in the cage beside him was a shaven goat whose front legs were far too thick and ended in a clump of five toes; across from the goat was a plump Down’s syndrome girl of uncertain age with a jutting facial cleft whose body was sprouting thick green feathers; in the cage beside her, a bear was grooming its fur not with claws but a model’s thin, creamy-skinned, delicate hands; then came a little boy with an impossibly thin neck who smoothly rotated his head so his too-long and thin tongue could snap at the midges swarming around the light; and, finally, a middle-aged woman who might have once been pretty, before the split lip, broken nose, and two black eyes: she squatted on sludgy, misshapen legs that bent outward at incomprehensible angles. Most of her weight seemed to rest on her gelatinous, flat webbed feet. She looked at you first with confusion, then longing, and, at last, a resigned sort of pity.
You staggered backward, pressing yourself against the bars of the cage behind you in order to keep from collapsing to the floor. You closed your eyes, shuddering, then looked farther down the corridor to where a curved brass railing disappeared into a stairway under the floor.
“You don’t want to go down there. Trust me when I say this to you.”
You spun around and saw him standing- standing! -in the middle of the cage, half-hidden in shadows. You could see his face, part of his exposed chest, and a moist, leathery-looking towel wrapped around his waist. You’d never seen him fully upright before; he seemed so tall.
“Whitey!”
“Captain Spaulding,” he replied. “Decided to do some more exploring, did you? Hooray-hoorayhooray.”
You gripped the bars. “Jesus Christ, Whitey, what the hell is this place?”
“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place-goodness gracious me, what a mess you are. Been waltzing with fresh carcasses through a slaughterhouse? I trust it was a Strauss-one should never waltz to anything but.” He blinked, then made a disapproving tsk-tsk. “You are not at all presentable, dear boy-not that you were a breathtaking heartthrob to begin with, but the importance of good grooming and careful hygiene cannot be overrated. Soap and water are our friends. You may quote me on that.”
“Whitey, for chrissakes! What is this place? ”
“Hark-what’s this I see? My goodness, the programming schedule around here never gets boring, I’ll give ’em that. You ought to take a look at the screen there, Captain. Required viewing.”
The scene on the monitor changed from the home movies of before to a close-up of an asphalt alley floor. The camera seemed to be hand-held because the image jerked and shook but, after a moment, things settled down and the camera did a slow turn to the right. The face of a border collie filled the screen. The silver tag hanging from its collar caught a glint of sunlight and threw a bright spot into the lens, but then the camera turned forward once more, catching a fast glimpse of the top of a cat’s head, tilted upward a few degrees, and focused on something in the distance.
