the short Italian woman Yvans was talking to began giggling and scribbling something on a paper fished out of her purse. She let Yvans feed her a pretzel. Kiwi resisted the urge to document this baffling progression on his notepad—his note-taking seemed to make his fellow workers uncomfortable, and Carla García-Founier, a black girl with a smattering of beautiful acne on her nose, had asked Kiwi very seriously if he was some kind of serial killer.
Inside the World of Darkness, Time happened in a circle. Shifts were nine hours, and the hours contracted or accordioned outward depending on several variables that Kiwi had cataloged: difficulty of task, boredom of task, degree to which task humiliates me personally. For a while all Kiwi had to do was vacuum in the anonymous many-peopled solitude of the front hall, but then he screwed up that sweet gig. Kiwi made wide orbits with the industrial vacuum cleaner, which trembled and belched in repose like a rodeo bull; on the first day of his third week he ran over his own shoelaces with it and broke it in a way that he couldn’t ignore, hide, or repair.
Fuck-fuck-fuck
, Kiwi thought—his fluency in mainland expletives had made huge leaps in just two weeks. Kiwi glanced around the World and considered ditching the vacuum in a different hallway to distance himself from the truly alarming sound it was making, a
g-r-r-r
like the prelude to fire or explosion. A group of Catholic schoolgirls in mauve-and-navy-blue checkerboard skirts froze in front of the Vesuvius Blast Off, just outside the mock-up of a charred Italian village; they began to scream, one after the other like bells tolling, their braids and faces bright spots of fever among the waxy Pompeian mannequins.
“Sorry, children!” Kiwi Bigtree waved at them from inside a cloud of smoke. “It’s my first day!” He’d used this “first day” excuse at least three times hourly since his actual start date two and a half weeks before.
Vijay didn’t know how to fix the vacuum either. He knelt and touched the vacuum cleaner’s bag sorrowfully, as if it were the belly of a crippled horse, and Kiwi felt that in a different epoch he and Vijay could have been El Paso ranch hands together:
Vijay shoots the horse and romances all the saloon prostitutes, and I am the wussy sidekick. Yes—in the
movie I am the ranch hand slated for death in a midnight raid; I jump into a barrel of rattlesnakes or small cactuses or something, trying to escape, a bullet makes a hole in my hat, the crowd loves it …
“Hey, did you hear me, Margie?” Vijay was staring up at him. “I said, just tell Carl. He’s not going to fire you.”
Kiwi’s manager was a baby-faced young man named Carl Jenks. Carl Jenks was thirty-seven years old, his oldest sister taught astronomy to undergraduates at Dartmouth College, he himself had a master’s degree in some undisclosed discipline—he’d offer these facts to anyone who approached him, like a caterer with a tray of bitter hors d’oeuvres. He was always reading fantasy books with orcs and orc princesses on the cover. (Why did these orc princesses have breasts like human women? Kiwi wanted to ask someone. Was that really likely?) In short, Carl was the sort of mainland nerd with whom even Kiwi, with a rare social intuition, knew better than to ally himself. Carl listened to Kiwi’s apologies with an expression of mild distaste; one thick finger was folded in his paperback book. He was wearing his high school ring, a Florida ring, an ugly garnet stone with a turd shape engraved on it—a manatee, the high school mascot—which caused Kiwi to look down at his own naked, knucklesome fingers in alarm.
That’s the kind of wedding I want
, Kiwi thought:
to a
school.
No, to a mainland
academy.
“Has anybody ever told you, you have a beautiful smile?” Carl Jenks’s tone made Kiwi think of iridescent acids. “What’s so funny? You think it’s hilarious to break World equipment that costs more than
Inside the World of Darkness, Time happened in a circle. Shifts were nine hours, and the hours contracted or accordioned outward depending on several variables that Kiwi had cataloged: difficulty of task, boredom of task, degree to which task humiliates me personally. For a while all Kiwi had to do was vacuum in the anonymous many-peopled solitude of the front hall, but then he screwed up that sweet gig. Kiwi made wide orbits with the industrial vacuum cleaner, which trembled and belched in repose like a rodeo bull; on the first day of his third week he ran over his own shoelaces with it and broke it in a way that he couldn’t ignore, hide, or repair.
Fuck-fuck-fuck
, Kiwi thought—his fluency in mainland expletives had made huge leaps in just two weeks. Kiwi glanced around the World and considered ditching the vacuum in a different hallway to distance himself from the truly alarming sound it was making, a
g-r-r-r
like the prelude to fire or explosion. A group of Catholic schoolgirls in mauve-and-navy-blue checkerboard skirts froze in front of the Vesuvius Blast Off, just outside the mock-up of a charred Italian village; they began to scream, one after the other like bells tolling, their braids and faces bright spots of fever among the waxy Pompeian mannequins.
“Sorry, children!” Kiwi Bigtree waved at them from inside a cloud of smoke. “It’s my first day!” He’d used this “first day” excuse at least three times hourly since his actual start date two and a half weeks before.
Vijay didn’t know how to fix the vacuum either. He knelt and touched the vacuum cleaner’s bag sorrowfully, as if it were the belly of a crippled horse, and Kiwi felt that in a different epoch he and Vijay could have been El Paso ranch hands together:
Vijay shoots the horse and romances all the saloon prostitutes, and I am the wussy sidekick. Yes—in the
movie I am the ranch hand slated for death in a midnight raid; I jump into a barrel of rattlesnakes or small cactuses or something, trying to escape, a bullet makes a hole in my hat, the crowd loves it …
“Hey, did you hear me, Margie?” Vijay was staring up at him. “I said, just tell Carl. He’s not going to fire you.”
Kiwi’s manager was a baby-faced young man named Carl Jenks. Carl Jenks was thirty-seven years old, his oldest sister taught astronomy to undergraduates at Dartmouth College, he himself had a master’s degree in some undisclosed discipline—he’d offer these facts to anyone who approached him, like a caterer with a tray of bitter hors d’oeuvres. He was always reading fantasy books with orcs and orc princesses on the cover. (Why did these orc princesses have breasts like human women? Kiwi wanted to ask someone. Was that really likely?) In short, Carl was the sort of mainland nerd with whom even Kiwi, with a rare social intuition, knew better than to ally himself. Carl listened to Kiwi’s apologies with an expression of mild distaste; one thick finger was folded in his paperback book. He was wearing his high school ring, a Florida ring, an ugly garnet stone with a turd shape engraved on it—a manatee, the high school mascot—which caused Kiwi to look down at his own naked, knucklesome fingers in alarm.
That’s the kind of wedding I want
, Kiwi thought:
to a
school.
No, to a mainland
academy.
“Has anybody ever told you, you have a beautiful smile?” Carl Jenks’s tone made Kiwi think of iridescent acids. “What’s so funny? You think it’s hilarious to break World equipment that costs more than
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