Brood Read online

  He snaps out of his semi-reverie.

  “What are you doing?” he asks, reaching for his phone.

  “Nothing,” Polly says.

  “You’re not supposed to be just walking around.”

  “It’s okay.” She continues walking, and now she is practically flush against him, ignoring the most basic rules of personal space.

  “You’re supposed to be in your quarters, young lady,” Rogers says. He has already dialed security. He holds the phone away from his ear, listens to the ring-ring-ring.

  “Yeah, I guess.” She puts her hand on his shoulder. “But here’s the thing. You want to hear the thing?”

  Fucking security! Where is everyone? Rogers realizes he must take matters into his own hands. He removes this horrible girl’s hand from his shoulder but holds on to her wrist. He rarely has direct contact with the subjects of his investigations—it’s strictly a blood-and-tissue-sample relationship. But now he grasps her tightly, so she will know who is in power here.

  He knows it’s crazy thinking, but he can’t help noticing how attractive this young girl is.

  “Your hands are cold,” she says, tugging away from him, but without much force or purpose.

  “I’m taking you back,” Rogers says.

  “Okay, but before you do?” She stops. She has strong legs and it’s hard to budge her when she digs in.

  “What?”

  “You guys are supposed to be—what? Doctors? Scientists?”

  “Yeah? What’s your point?”

  “Well, you’re hurting us. These are our bodies, you know? Doing all kinds of personal shit too. It’s not right. We didn’t do anything.”

  “Think of it like this: You’re making a contribution.”

  “We didn’t ask to be born. And we didn’t ask to be different.”

  “You’re out of the rain. Right? You’re fed. Place to sleep. Three hots and a cot. You’ve got nothing to complain about.”

  “The stuff hurts. The needles. The scraping.”

  “We do our best, honey. No one wants to hurt anyone. Hurting is the furthest thing from our minds.”

  “Two of us have died here.”

  “No one feels worse about that than I do.”

  “Really?”

  “Come on, it’s back to quarters for you, young lady.”

  She shrugs. “It’s up to you.” She relaxes her legs and allows Rogers to lead her through the double doors.

  “Do you have children yourself?” she asks.

  Cal Rogers is swiping his ID card through the door’s reader, but the reader seems not to be working—or necessary. The doors swing open to his touch.

  Separated as he has been from the grim business of imprisonment and the forced extraction of genetic data, Rogers is slow to recognize just how insanely out of control the situation is—he actually thinks that those bodies slumped against the wall are part of some kind of game. Or exercise? A drill?

  Those two seconds of fantasy will be the last time he is not in agony. But the agony will not be without its end point. He is slammed against the wall. He feels the impossible pain of teeth in flesh. His final thought: It’s going for my liver.

  All of the surviving wild children are out—instinctively obeying the call to quit the city. The doors to their enclosures are open wide. The stench of their imprisonment comes off them in waves. Their excited, raucous voices fill the air like a rain of coins. Hurry, hurry.

  There is no time for further retribution. Some of the bodies against the wall are dead, others…maybe not. But time is what matters now. Time. Revenge does not matter, nor does justice. All that matters is freedom, and freedom is theirs. Some upright and some on all fours, evolution’s errors streak down the hall toward the loading dock.

  Is it just New Yorkers, or do the residents of all the great and complicated cities of the world—London, Singapore, Istanbul, Rio—learn to live without entirely seeing what is happening right before their eyes? In the multitudes, all manner of human variation exists, unseen. And when something odd is noted, there is rarely time or space to take it in and evaluate its meaning. Hoodlums, mystics, the terminally ill pass city dwellers by like little bursts of light, apprehended and then gone, leaving no trace. Here comes a man dragging his useless leg, making his way forward on the pavement on one hardworking leg, like a gondolier poling up a concrete river. Here comes a nun with a shiner. Here is a couple in their forties on their way to see a charlatan who runs a so-called fertility clinic. Here is a cop who has just learned that a man whom he crookedly sent to prison is being released. Here comes a father and his two young daughters whom he shepherds quickly, as they are on their way to the hospital where the girls’ mother, dying of cancer, wanly awaits them. It’s summer, and more than any other season, there are children among the urbanites. Children of all stations, children bearing destinies as light as spun sugar or burdens too massive to be borne. Boys afraid to go home. Girls in terror of their mothers’ new boyfriends. Children who have not had breakfast today. Children who have not had breakfast since school let out. Children with bruises under their shirts. Children on meds administered by those in charge of their well-being. Children on speed. Children dizzy, sleepy, and growing fat from their drugs, dragged through the psychoactive alphabet from Abilify to Zoloft. Children with weapons in their pockets.

  Are they invisible? They might as well be. They are flesh, but they come and go in a flash. How can anyone be expected to notice, much less care? Too many, too fast. And who doesn’t have plenty of problems of his or her own?

  And so the feral boys and girls of the parks make their way through the city in twos and threes, safely unnoticed. Some glow; a few will spawn more winged babies. We are at only the beginning of the breathtaking dance between science and nature. What has been done with the atom will be done with the gene.

  To Pelham Bay Park! Those with money—and who can stand the confinement and the noise—take the subway. Others, with Zoom dollars in their pockets, share taxis. Still others go on foot, some straight up Broadway, some on the bike paths along the Hudson.

  Mayor Morris and his wife are having the windows of Gracie Mansion soundproofed. Once the work is complete, it is their fondest hope that passersby will no longer stop and cock their heads curiously toward the windows, wondering if what they are hearing is the howl of a dog or the wild cries of a caged child.

  Alice, Adam, and Rodolfo wait for the number 6. They are the last ones from the Upper West Side pack to make their way north. The air in the subway is filthy and hot. The other people waiting for the train look as if they are hovering in some imperiled state between life and death. A strong wind could blow them in either direction—but no wind can enter this tunnel several feet beneath the stinking sidewalk. The electronic message board promises that the next uptown 6 will arrive in four minutes. But it has been saying that for a while…

  “You’s okay?” Rodolfo asks Alice.

  She shrugs, then poses the same question to Adam.

  “I miss Mom,” says Adam.

  “Our mother’s dead. We watched it happen.”

  “I mean Aunt Cynthia. She is our mother. Now.”

  “We don’t have a mother, Adam. We never did and we never will. When you have a mother, you’re like her. Do you actually think we’re like Aunt Cynthia?”

  “In some ways,” Adam says, looking away. He’s afraid he is going to cry, and he doesn’t want his sister to see his eyes.

  Alice glances over at Rodolfo. He is staring at her. She can’t discern if he is furious or if it’s just his usual over-the-top intensity. She moves closer to him, her fingers wiggling in the air. She plucks at the shoulder of his T-shirt.

  “Hi,” she whispers.

  “Don’t leave,” Rodolfo says. “Please.”

  Alice doesn’t say anything.

  The arrival board is suddenly functioning again. The northbound 6, it says, is approaching the station. Alice cranes her neck, looks down the long sooty tunnel. The distant
light of the oncoming train shines in the darkness.

  The Hotel Hedley on East Twenty-Sixth Street is not luxurious, to say the least. There are a few hipsters who have a special affection for the place because it reminds them of what New York was like in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the city teetered on the brink of collapse and the stink of empty municipal coffers was everywhere, like the smell of mildew on a scarf. Now it seems as if the addicts and scammers and unshaven German documentary filmmakers from that era have found a permanent home at the Hedley. The rooms are tiny, the beds are penitential, and any windows that don’t look directly at a brick wall have views of an air shaft. But at the Hedley, it is not only the ambience that recalls the 1970s; the prices are old-fashioned too, and it is here that Dennis has been staying since leaving his apartment and the mess therein on Ocean Parkway.

  He cannot stop dosing himself with his ever-dwindling stash of Zoom, even now as he walks through the Hedley lobby with his phone to his ear. The Borman and Davis line rings and rings—no answer, no voice mail, nothing. Screw it.

  It’s gotten to the point where he actually knows people lurking in this lobby, this dank repository of dozens of fake ficus trees. The furniture looks as if it’s been dragged out of the world’s most melancholy Hopper painting; the bellman looks as if he has done freelance work as a hit man; and the desk clerk stands rigidly tall with an oxygen cannula clipped to his nose and a large No Smoking sign in front of him—the clerk is legitimately worried about exploding.

  Oh yes, yes, yes. Dennis has to upgrade his situation, and today he aims to pick up those twins, get his bonus money, and start looking in earnest for a decent place to live. Getting them should be, he thinks, relatively easy. He knows where they live. It’ll just be a matter of needling them, putting them in the van.

  How many times has the phone at Borman and Davis rung? Thirty?

  Dennis’s face is gray and moist, like wet clay. He walks with a bowlegged gait, maneuvering one of those fabled eight-hour erections the hawkers of ED medicine brag/warn about. Dennis very much doubts there is anything on the market that can turn a noodle into a battering ram, but yesterday’s gulp of Zoom is still working its mysterious way through him. He is half mad with desire. As determined as he is to capture those twins and get his reward, he is nearly as focused on putting his stiff prick inside a woman—in his imagination, it will be like a blacksmith cooling his red-hot tongs by plunging them into a bucket of water: the sizzle, the steam, the relief.

  His Watertight van is parked on the street, a block from the hotel. As he gets in, he sees, to his surprise, that a parking ticket has been placed under the windshield wiper—usually the cops are good sports about his van, figuring he’s on a job somewhere and cutting him some slack. Oh, well. The van is not registered in his name and he couldn’t care less about parking fines. It’s Borman and Davis’s baby to rock.

  He is dressed in loose-fitting clothes. The weather is beastly. Even in the raspy, slightly rancid air-conditioning of the van, he is pouring perspiration. Sweat drips from his armpits, from the tip of his nose. His underwear feels like a slur of wet cardboard. His ankles are wet. He knows this profusion of perspiration is in all likelihood a side effect of the Zoom—but hey, you’ve got to pay to play, right?

  Traffic is not too bad. At least, not by Manhattan standards. (If cars were moving in such a molasses ooze in any other city, you’d think there’d been an explosion somewhere or that a sci-fi monster was loose on the streets, hurling buses and breathing sulfur.) He travels north on Madison. The sidewalks are filled with shockingly good-looking people. The shops display their legendary brands.

  There is a vial of Zoom in his breast pocket. He pulls it out, looks at it, tilts it back and forth; the blood leaves a smudgy trace of itself along the glass. Then, feeling kind of “what the heck,” he pops the cork out of it (using his thumbnail) and downs his second Zoom hit of the day.

  Soon enough, he arrives at the house. There is a parking space (saved especially for him by a fire hydrant) close to the front door. The twins are not very big; he can fling one over each shoulder, toss them in the back, and have them in Flushing by one o’clock, where for all he cares the researchers can scoop out their DNA like the gooey web of seeds in a cantaloupe.

  He kills the engine and sits there for a moment. Think, he orders himself. But he’s not completely certain what he is supposed to be thinking about. He opens the glove compartment. A few used needles fall out. He doesn’t bother to retrieve them. They sink into the litter on the van’s floor, the PayDay wrappers, the Red Bull cans, the sucked-pale Stim-U-Dents. He closes the glove compartment and thinks: The English call it a glove box. That is so stupid.

  What he has not thought about is how to gain entrance to the twins’ house. He wants those freaking twins so badly, he would even consider just hurtling himself through the window of their fancy house and grabbing them. That obviously is not a good plan, not smart, not even viable. He is aware that he is not thinking clearly. Desire, sheer carnality—which he is used to experiencing as a kind of distant thunder, a warning of sexual weather that seems to be rolling in but that never quite lives up to its rumbling fanfare—desire is now, as Van Morrison would have it, a full-force gale. He is pelted by it, drenched. He is caught on the vast open prairie of his aloneness and there is nothing to shelter him from this storm of desire. All he can do to protect himself is remember that he is not thinking very clearly…

  There is another working van parked near the house, this one beige and red. An exterminating company called The Verminators. Bingo! That’s his way in.

  He bounds up to the porch, presses his thumb against the doorbell.

  Cynthia is making a call to yet another real estate company when she hears the doorbell ring. Her heart accelerates. With the twins on the loose, every sound in the world triggers either hope or dread. She quickly breaks the connection and hurries to the door, forgetting the New York procedure and failing to look through the fish-eye peephole to see who it is.

  It’s a sweaty, rather frantic-looking man in loose-fitting clothes who’s shifting his weight from his left foot to his right and back again. He looks vaguely familiar, but there is too much going on in Cynthia’s mind for her to spend more than a moment on this particular thought.

  “I’m with Verminators,” the man says, stepping quickly into the house, not even giving her a moment to consider.

  “Oh,” she says. “The others are already here. I think they’re starting off in the cellar. It’s really bad.”

  “Well, that’s what we’re here for,” the man says. He reeks. His distressed humanity oozes from every pore.

  “I’ll take you to where—”

  “That’s okay,” he says. His voice is webbed with phlegm. “I got it covered.” He breezes past her—a foul breeze—and the phone in her pocket starts its chapel-bell chimes. Sunday! God is in His Heaven! All is right with the world! Except it is Wednesday. God, if He exists, has surely left New York for Martha’s Vineyard or Sag Harbor. And not a thing is right with the world.

  Except! The display on her phone says Alley-Oop.

  Welcome home, God!

  “Alice?” Cynthia breathlessly says into her phone. “Where are you?” (The greeting that has replaced “How are you?” since the advent of the mobile phone.)

  But what is that sound? A dragon chewing a tin roof? People trapped underwater struggling to get out?

  “Alice? Alice?”

  Now Cynthia can make it out: It’s the noise of a subway. She can hear the amplified voice of the conductor announcing one thing or another—these squawking bulletins are usually impossible to understand even if you are physically on the train, so whatever is being communicated is completely unintelligible in this incarnation.

  “Honey? Honey, can you hear me? Are you there?”

  Cynthia realizes she has been ass-dialed—Alice obviously sat on her cell phone and accidentally called home.

  Or is it so obvious? Maybe the
call was not an accident. Maybe Alice deliberately called but is not in a position to safely say anything. Maybe this call is like a roadside flare set off to mark the location of a disabled vehicle.

  Cynthia paces around with the phone to her ear in case, against all odds and expectations, Alice’s voice comes through, but the call is disconnected. She goes to the window, looks out at the street in the stark summer light, the leaves of the tree silvery and parched, the passersby immodestly dressed. She hears the exterminators clumping around in the cellar, hears their voices, manly and monotonal, all information, no emotion.

  “Nest,” one says.

  “Where?” asks another.

  “Here we go,” the first one says.

  “Gimme that, uh…” a third voice says, the indefinite uh sizzling like a strip of bacon on a hot griddle.

  From somewhere up above: footsteps. At first heavy, then quieter, as if whoever is up there suddenly wished to go unnoticed. Cynthia’s brow furrows; she looks up. Why are the exterminators up there? They are supposed to be concentrating on the cellar, where inside the walls—she is sure of this—there is a veritable honeycomb of rodents. And didn’t they already agree that she would show them through the upstairs rooms herself before they started setting traps, chipping away plaster, rummaging through closets, putting out poison pellets?

  “Hello?” she calls out, looking up at the ceiling.

  Of course there is no answer. What is she thinking? They’re exterminators, for crying out loud. They are not here to talk.

  Maybe she should just sign off on this whole project and leave them to it, give them the run of the house. Maybe she should leave the house, go to a coffee shop—iced tea and fries! But no. How could she even consider leaving? What if the kids came home and found the place empty save for three—now four—strange men carrying rat traps and canisters of whatever rodenticide they are using? (The head rat assassin—an elegant man with a Spanish accent, bald except for a swoop of hair on either side of his head, the hair black and glossy like the fenders of a hearse—was very hocus-pocus about what kind of poison they were going to use, calling it only “our secret potion.”)