Ubo

5

DANIEL WOKE UP on the floor by his bunk. He had his hands up and in front of his face. He stared at the red line as it moved down his right forefinger and began to spread across his knuckles, widening gradually until it was a thick swatch of blood. He turned. Mary Kelly’s entrails steamed on the floor beside his head. He could feel the heat coming off them. What he did… He bit his lip and tasted salt. “My God!”

“Daniel!”

What he’d done, he’d ripped her, he’d felt inside her, touched inside her, touched… “My god!” The things he’d touched… “My god my god!”

“Daniel, you’re back in the barracks. It’s over.” Daniel moved his eyes, saw Falstaff hovering over him. “Who were you last night?”

“The Ripper. Jack the Ripper. Or whatever his real name was.”

“Oh. Upsetting stuff. He was like a shark, wasn’t he? A human, butchering shark.”

“How he saw women… I couldn’t bear to think I had even a shred of those feelings inside me. I adore my wife. I loved my mother. I…”

He saw women’s torn and bloodied lingerie hanging from the ruined ceiling, jeweled with cobwebs and spider eggs. Discolored and fake-looking manikin parts. A baby hung from the webs.

“You were playing a part. Now you have to shake it off. Many of us have ghosts of those feelings, stray notions and longings, but it doesn’t mean we would do those things. We’re not the people whose parts we’re forced to play. You and I, we have food prep duty this morning. That’ll help take your mind off it.”

It seemed ridiculous that the roaches with their advanced technology should still require hands-on food preparation. Until Falstaff explained it to him.

“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.”

The boy nodded, then suddenly, vigorously poked the body with the shovel. The breast feathers depressed with a rubbery, sickening movement. “Will I die like that?” he asked in a near‑whisper. “I mean, somebody’ll find me on a beach or a sidewalk somewhere, and think I was just sleeping, ’till they poke me and I don’t wake up? I mean, just like that, like something broke?”

Something caught in Daniel’s breath then. Like a failing bird’s wing desperate for some small wind. “Well, we don’t know if that’s what happened to this bird. Maybe he was having a good time, doing tricks in the air, racing another bird. Birds don’t last long, you know—they die pretty quickly.”

“Yeah.” It sounded like relief. It made Daniel slightly nervous. “Maybe he won’t be so lonely now.”

“Why do you think he was lonely?”

The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. All birds are, I guess.”

He was smiling now. “Least maybe he was being excited when he died. He was… mad or something.”

“I think you may be right.”

Again, he looked so primitive, with his ragged shorts and face set over a problem he couldn’t begin to understand. Maybe the boy would have known if the bird had been lonely. And maybe children did share a certain kind of loneliness with the first humans—it wasn’t all that long ago that they had been a part of a wholeness that included everything in their universe. But then you’re born, and your eyes open onto yourself for the first time and see that you are separate and alone. But you want to go back to that all-encompassing love, and gather up the parts of you for a return trip to paradise.

But there was no turning back the clock. And that made you angry, made you want to tear the whole world—your house, your crib—apart. The child would always be that naive, painful part of you still aware of your first separation, when the shadow of violence slipped out. And that would make anybody furious.

It made you mad that the child was so naive, that he could not see the danger, and could not see the danger from you, your hands, your fists. Sometimes you wanted to kill that part that refused to grow up.

“Maybe I wouldn’t mind dying so much, you know, mister? How would you know?”

Daniel grabbed his shoulder. “Don’t say that-you have no idea what you’re talking about.” The boy looked disdainfully at the hand on his shoulder. Daniel pulled away and sat down on the roof facing the boy. “Where are your parents?”

“Dead, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe I’m the one—I fell asleep one night and then I was here. And now I have to pretend to be other kids I’m not.”

“Anybody to take care of you?”

“They’ve all gone away. What’s it like, mister, being dead? Are we in Heaven, or are we in Hell? Are we like gods, or are we like monsters?”

Daniel bit his lip. “I don’t know. What do you think it would be like to be dead? Do you think it would be like this? Because I’m afraid you’d be wrong. You just wouldn’t be—at least that’s what I believe.”

“I don’t know for sure, but maybe it might be kinda exciting. It ain’t that easy to die, is it?”

“Usually not.”

“Then you gotta be doing things that are risky, things you shouldn’t do.”

“Well, not always.”

“And so maybe you’re doing exciting things when you die, maybe the most exciting stuff you ever done, mister.”

Daniel stared at the boy in exasperation. “What’s your name?”

The boy grinned. “I don’t know. I guess I lost it coming here. You can call me anything you like.”

From Gordon’s first days Daniel and Elena had had definite ideas about their son’s education and their obligation to instill certain values in him. To that end there were no toy guns in their house, no tanks or other combat equipment, no toy weapons of any kind. Gordon’s television viewing was carefully supervised, and programs with heavily violent content weren’t permitted him, including most Saturday-morning cartoons. Comic books and magazines were similarly scrutinized before Gordon was allowed to have them. This program started when Gordon was two years old. Daniel and Elena were determined that he have a repertoire of better solutions to his everyday problems than the aggressive ones his parents had grown up with. He’d be a better kind of person.

It wasn’t long before it appeared that Gordon had an even greater fascination with weaponry than the average kid. His playtime fantasies were dark and violent, full of monsters and colorful deaths. Children, Daniel concluded, were a mystery.

Children were human beings, but they weren’t “like us”—they weren’t adults. And few adults treated kids as if they were fully human. They treated them like animated dolls, robots, pets. The adults used unnatural tones and vocabulary. They referred to them as “cute,” or “noisy.” Parents were amused by the walks and dances that mimicked the human, but certainly didn’t duplicate it with much accuracy.

Children lulled you, made you think of them as small cuddly humanoids, but something would change, and the child would suddenly speak to you in an anguished, strangely human voice, and you felt ashamed.

Daniel vividly remembered one night becoming aware of soft moans from Gordon’s bedroom, interrupted by wet coughs and hiccups. He went into the bedroom and a wail from under the comforter made him turn on the light.

“Gordie…” He pulled the wet and trembling child from the tangled mass of bedclothes and embraced him fiercely, wiping awkwardly at the damp face with a corner of the sheet. “It’s okay, love. Daddy’s here… nothing to be afraid of. Nothing wrong here.”

“…bad dream…” Gordon gasped out between sobs.

“Oh, but it’s gone now. The dream can’t get you now, sweetie. Daddy won’t let that happen.”

Gordon gazed at him sleepily. “They were trying to get me.”

“Who?”

“The man and the woman. We were in the bathroom and they held knives to my belly and all the skin started coming off me and… they didn’t have no faces, and I was bleeding too much. I started yelling but that came out blood, too, all big and bubbly.”

Daniel held onto his son. After a while Gordon fell asleep. Daniel gently slipped him under the covers and kissed him, and as an afterthought tucked Flat Duck under his arm. Then he returned to his chair in the living room, where he brooded for hours.

He’d never thought of children having nightmares that bad, and over the next few months discovered that Gordon had a variety of them. Suddenly his son seemed a tiny container of horrors. Small cuddly humanoids should never have such dreams, nor should robots, nor dolls. Was it his fault, Gordon picking up Daniel’s own anxieties? But the source of Gordon’s fears remained a mystery.

After they had been told of Gordon’s heart condition Daniel thought he had at least a reason for the mysterious dreams and fears. This small thinking machine had created a compelling image or two to explain its hidden defect to its human masters.

Each night Daniel went into his son’s room, allowing the light from the living room to illuminate the bed in the corner. Each night he would walk over to the bed and stand a moment, watching carefully to make sure that the small chest was rising and falling as it should. Then he’d lean over and hold his son awkwardly through the covers, repressing the urge to climb up onto the bed and sleep with him.

“There’s still much we can do,” he whispered to end the ritual, and damned himself for a liar each time. It seemed the best he could do was imagine the worst.