exactly, they would be transformed was a mystery that would be revealed when she got there. In the meantime, it was their job to wait.
“When she comes, she’ll make us big,” said Sneezy. He had the comics section of the Sunday paper, and an egg of Silly Putty, and was flattening a doughy oval onto a panel of Calvin and Hobbes.
“Oh, bullshit,” said Grumpy. “It’s about inner transformation, man. That’s the whole point. Materialism is a trap. Identifying with your body is a trap. All this shit”—Grumpy swept his arm to indicate not just their loft but the tall downtown buildings beyond the windows, and maybe more—“is an illusion. Maya. Samsara.” He shook out the last Marlboro from a pack, crumpled the pack, and tried a hook shot into a wicker wastebasket by the window, but missed. He looked around. “Matches? Lighter? Who’s going for more cigs?”
“She will,” insisted Sneezy. “She’ll make us six feet if we want to be.”
“She can’t change genetics, you dope,” Grumpy said.
At the word dope, Dopey’s head jerked up for an instant. He was nodding on the couch at the opposite end from Grumpy, a lit cigarette ready to fall from his hand. The couch had a few burn holes already. One of these days, Doc thought, he’s going to set the fucking place on fire, and then where will we be? How will she ever find us? He got up from the floor, where he’d been doing yoga stretches, and slid the cigarette from Dopey’s stained fingers. He ground it out in an ashtray on the table, in the blue ceramic water of a moat that circled a ceramic castle. From the castle’s tiny windows, a little incense smoke — sandalwood — drifted out.
“She’s not an alien from outer space who’s going to perform weird experiments,” Doc said. He hunted through the newspaper for the Food section.
“Where is she from, then?” Sneezy said. Sneezy was a sixteen-year-old runaway, the youngest of them. From the sweet credulousness of his expression, you’d never know what terrible things he had endured. He’d been beaten, scarred between his shoulder blades with boiling water, forced into sex with his mother by his own father. Sneezy liked to ask the obvious questions for the sake of receiving the familiar, predictable answers.
“She’s from the castle,” Doc said. “She’s the fairest in the land. She will come with the sacred apple and all will be changed.” This much the Book said. Once upon a time, it said. But when was that, exactly? Doc wondered. They’d been here for more than six years already. Or he had, anyway. Ever since he’d found the Book in a Dumpster — the covers ripped away, most of its pages stained and torn — where he’d been looking for food a nearby restaurant always threw out. He’d been on the streets, addicted to cheap wine, not giving a shit about anything or anyone. He’d slept on cardboard in doorways, with a Buck knife under the rolled poncho he used for a pillow, had stolen children’s shoes from outside the Moon Bounce at the park. He had humiliated himself performing drunken jigs in the bank plaza for change tossed into a baseball cap. The Book had changed all that. It had shown him there was a purpose to his life. To gather the others, to come to this place and make it ready. He had quit drinking and found a job, at the very restaurant whose Dumpster he used to scrounge through. He had gathered his brethren, one by one, as they drifted into the city from other places, broke and down on their luck, headed for the streets and shelters. They had become his staff — two dishwashers, a busboy, and a fry cook. The restaurant’s name was Oz, and the owner had been willing to hire dwarf after dwarf and present them as ersatz munchkins. There had been a feature article in the Weekly, and write-ups in some food magazines, which had drawn a lot of business. The dwarves were mentioned in the guidebooks, so there were often tourists from Canada and Denmark and Japan, who brought their cameras to record the enchanting moment the dwarves trooped from the kitchen with a candle-lit torte to stand around a table and sing happy birthday. They used fake high voices, as though they’d been sucking on helium.
“Why is the apple sacred?” Sneezy said dreamily. He had abandoned the comics and now had a few Magic cards spread out on the floor and was picking them up one by one, studying them.
“Because she will die of the apple and be resurrected,” Doc said. He glanced at one of Sneezy’s cards: Capashen Unicorn. An armored unicorn raced through a glittery field, a white-robed rider on its back. Underneath, Doc read, Capashen riders were stern and humorless even before their ancestral home was reduced to rubble.
“Why do you collect that crap?” Doc said. “And those comic books you’ve always got your nose buried in. Read the Book again. Every time I read it, I discover something new. The Book is all you need. You have to focus on the Book.”
“Check her out.” Sneezy held up another card, of an anorecticlooking woman with green skin in a gold ballerina outfit. One long-nailed thumb and forefinger were raised in the air in some kind of salute. In her other hand she held aloft a green and white flag. A couple of men in armor rode behind her, and behind them rose broccoli-like trees, being erased by mist rising out of the ground. Doc read: Llanowar Vanguard. Creature — Dryad. Llanowar rallied around Eladamri’s banner and united in his name.
“Will she look like that?” Sneezy asked.
“Give it a rest,” Grumpy said, and nudged Dopey with his foot. “Hey, man,” he said. “We’re out of cigs.”
Sneezy will outgrow it, Doc thought. Dryads and unicorns. Made-up creatures and clans and battles. “I don’t know what she’ll look like, exactly,” he sighed. He stood up and began tidying the coffee table. Empty semicrushed cans of Bud Light that Grumpy and Dopey had drunk the night before. A half-eaten bag of tortilla chips. A plastic tub of salsa had spilled on the naked body of a Penthouse Pet. The magazine lay open to her spread legs, her long, slender fingers teasingly positioned above her pink slit; it glistened, as though it had been basted. What would she look like? Maybe she would look like this, would come and drag her fingers through the graying hair on his chest and position her sweet eager hips above him. Maybe she would whisper to Doc that he was the one she came for, the only one; they could leave all the others behind, now that she was there. They would leave the city and move to an Airstream in the woods, overlooking a little river, where he could catch bass and bluegills. She would stand in front of their stove in cutoffs and a white blouse, sliding a spatula under a fish sputtering in a pan. When the moon rose, the two of them would go down to the river and float together, naked. Their heads would be the same height above the water. Doc closed the magazine. He gathered up the beer cans, carried them into the kitchen, and threw them on top of the pile of trash overflowing from the can.
The next afternoon he left a note on the refrigerator, securing it with a magnet Bashful had bought, of the Virgin Mary’s stroller with the baby Jesus riding in it. The magnet set included Mary in a nightgown, her hands raised in prayer, with several changes of clothes and accessories including a skateboard, a waitress uniform, flowered pants and a hippie shirt, a plaid skirt, and roller skates. Right now Mary had on just the nightgown, and was riding the skateboard. Another magnet, of a small Magic 8 Ball, had been stuck over her face. HOUSE MEETING 7 P.M., Doc had written. IMPORTANT!!! PLEASE EVERYONE. I’LL BUY THE BEER. He knew that would ensure that Grumpy and Dopey showed.
Dopey didn’t arrive until 7:30, strolling in with a bag of peanut M&M’s. But at least they were all there, with a couple of six-packs and cigarettes and Nacho Cheese Doritos in a bowl on the table. Doc was drinking his usual, caffeine-free Diet Coke. Bashful passed around a large order of McDonald’s fries and unwrapped a Big Mac. Crap, Doc thought, watching him eat, but it smelled pretty good, and he couldn’t resist a couple of the fries.
“Why do we need a house meeting?” Grumpy said. “I got things to do.” He hadn’t shaved in a while, and his black beard stubble went halfway down his neck. Not so long ago, Doc remembered, Grumpy used to shave every day, no matter what.
“Oh, I love house meetings,” Happy said. Happy loved nearly everything. He loved communal living, and being a bus boy at Oz. He loved being one of the Chosen who had been selected to wait. He loved the Book and would defend it when anyone criticized it, which seemed to be more and more often lately. Just a couple of days ago, Sleepy, who was taking a community college class, had come home talking nonsense. “It’s like the Bible,” he said. “It’s, like, a metaphor or something. You know the cross? Jesus on the cross? The professor said the cross is really like a pagan fertility symbol.” Sleepy had no idea what a metaphor was, though. When pressed, he couldn’t define symbol, either. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” Happy had concluded, and Doc explained to Sleepy that the Book was nothing like the Bible. The Bible was meant for normals, Doc said, but the Book was for dwarves.
“I called the meeting,” Doc said, “because I’m sick of picking up after all of you. Sleepy cleaned the bathroom and left soap streaks all over the mirror. I can barely see myself in it. And you, Grumpy, you and Dopey — all you do is strew beer cans and cigarette butts and fast-food trash from one end of this place to the other. And this morning Bashful put the dishes from the dishwasher back in the cupboards when they hadn’t even been washed yet.”
“Sorry,” Bashful muttered.
“I have to do everything around here,” Doc said.
“Don’t be such a goddamned martyr,” Grumpy said, popping his second bottle of Red Hook.
