your weekly salary?”
“No, I’m sorry. I was just thinking of something.”
“How exciting. Let’s hear it.”
“I was thinking that I’d like to enroll in high school here. To go to college.”
“School. Right. How old are you, fifteen? Sixteen?”
Kiwi straightened to his full height of six one. “I’ll be eighteen on September fifth, sir.”
“Ah. You’re a dropout and we hired you?”
Kiwi shook his head. “Homeschooled. But not really officially … I mean, we didn’t keep in the best touch with the LCPS Board. I assume I will have to take some, you know, some tests before they let me sign up …”
Kiwi was really hoping that Carl Jenks might clue him in as to who “they” might be.
“Well, gosh, I never would have guessed. You seem like an absolutely brilliant scholar. You speak like an orator. Look at that hair. I thought you were a professor emeritus. Ohkaaay, so let’s review—you broke the vacuum. What is this, your first week? Your
third
week. Terrific. Keep up the good work, Bigtree.”
Kiwi could feel his intelligence leap like an anchored flame inside him. His whole body ached at the terrible gulf between what he knew himself to be capable of (neuroscience, complicated ophthalmological surgeries, air-traffic control) and what he was actually doing.
“Why don’t you take a crack at the family bathroom, Bigtree. It’s disgusting.”
At the World of Darkness, there was a dignity gulf between staff and management. Carl Jenks, for example, got to wear a plain black polo shirt, which made him seem like a pope compared with everybody else. Kiwi had gotten off relatively easy—at least his janitor’s uniform had cap sleeves and a zipper fly. He’d seen a tall kid walking around in a red spandex jumpsuit and death hood. And this in Florida, in deep summer!
Kiwi’s penance was to work overtime picking up the wetter, less decipherable pieces of trash with his gloved hands. The World’s lasers moved in green helixes all around him, a lonely geometry that traveled up and down the entrance to the Whale’s Gullet. Cleaning the family toilet was, by his inexact estimate, one million times more degrading than any of his Bigtree duties on Swamplandia! Worse than putting out popcorn fires, worse even than the buckskin costumes and the jewelry. He was trying to flip the clown-nose plunger inside out with his shoe.
“Gah!” he cried, successful.
Success, in this instance, meant an outpouring of terrible yellow bile from the plunger cap.
The good news: Kiwi had a place to live. Employees at the World of Darkness could apply to live in a block of staff dormitories in the basement of the complex. Originally these were built to house foreign workers, but the recruitment program had been suspended owing to some “legal snag,” a bit of “red tape with Immigration.” All the Turkish and Bulgarian teenage guest workers had been sent home, and nowany employee could pay to live here. Kiwi’s dorm, a linoleum cave, came furnished. His room had a bunk, a metal chair, and a desk bolted to the ground, and a dresser with a single, enigmatic tube sock in it—the only evidence of his foreign predecessor. A wonky mirror over the dresser gave his features a funhouse wave. The room was a single occupancy. “A luxury!” he was told by several different women in HR, none of whom lived in these dorms. It was just wide enough for Kiwi to turn a full circle without touching anything, and the windowless fluorescence made him feel like a submariner. Kiwi had figured out that the dorms were located two levels below the central room of the Leviathan, and sometimes he had nightmares of being crushed to death in his bunk. After shifts he’d stare at the ceiling and take a gloomy pleasure in imagining the Chief reading his obituary in the
Loomis Register
. EMPLOYEE BURIED IN AVALANCHE OF TOURISTS! Ossie would spot it. She’d try to locate Kiwi’s ghost with her “powers” … Kiwi groaned and pushed
“No, I’m sorry. I was just thinking of something.”
“How exciting. Let’s hear it.”
“I was thinking that I’d like to enroll in high school here. To go to college.”
“School. Right. How old are you, fifteen? Sixteen?”
Kiwi straightened to his full height of six one. “I’ll be eighteen on September fifth, sir.”
“Ah. You’re a dropout and we hired you?”
Kiwi shook his head. “Homeschooled. But not really officially … I mean, we didn’t keep in the best touch with the LCPS Board. I assume I will have to take some, you know, some tests before they let me sign up …”
Kiwi was really hoping that Carl Jenks might clue him in as to who “they” might be.
“Well, gosh, I never would have guessed. You seem like an absolutely brilliant scholar. You speak like an orator. Look at that hair. I thought you were a professor emeritus. Ohkaaay, so let’s review—you broke the vacuum. What is this, your first week? Your
third
week. Terrific. Keep up the good work, Bigtree.”
Kiwi could feel his intelligence leap like an anchored flame inside him. His whole body ached at the terrible gulf between what he knew himself to be capable of (neuroscience, complicated ophthalmological surgeries, air-traffic control) and what he was actually doing.
“Why don’t you take a crack at the family bathroom, Bigtree. It’s disgusting.”
At the World of Darkness, there was a dignity gulf between staff and management. Carl Jenks, for example, got to wear a plain black polo shirt, which made him seem like a pope compared with everybody else. Kiwi had gotten off relatively easy—at least his janitor’s uniform had cap sleeves and a zipper fly. He’d seen a tall kid walking around in a red spandex jumpsuit and death hood. And this in Florida, in deep summer!
Kiwi’s penance was to work overtime picking up the wetter, less decipherable pieces of trash with his gloved hands. The World’s lasers moved in green helixes all around him, a lonely geometry that traveled up and down the entrance to the Whale’s Gullet. Cleaning the family toilet was, by his inexact estimate, one million times more degrading than any of his Bigtree duties on Swamplandia! Worse than putting out popcorn fires, worse even than the buckskin costumes and the jewelry. He was trying to flip the clown-nose plunger inside out with his shoe.
“Gah!” he cried, successful.
Success, in this instance, meant an outpouring of terrible yellow bile from the plunger cap.
The good news: Kiwi had a place to live. Employees at the World of Darkness could apply to live in a block of staff dormitories in the basement of the complex. Originally these were built to house foreign workers, but the recruitment program had been suspended owing to some “legal snag,” a bit of “red tape with Immigration.” All the Turkish and Bulgarian teenage guest workers had been sent home, and nowany employee could pay to live here. Kiwi’s dorm, a linoleum cave, came furnished. His room had a bunk, a metal chair, and a desk bolted to the ground, and a dresser with a single, enigmatic tube sock in it—the only evidence of his foreign predecessor. A wonky mirror over the dresser gave his features a funhouse wave. The room was a single occupancy. “A luxury!” he was told by several different women in HR, none of whom lived in these dorms. It was just wide enough for Kiwi to turn a full circle without touching anything, and the windowless fluorescence made him feel like a submariner. Kiwi had figured out that the dorms were located two levels below the central room of the Leviathan, and sometimes he had nightmares of being crushed to death in his bunk. After shifts he’d stare at the ceiling and take a gloomy pleasure in imagining the Chief reading his obituary in the
Loomis Register
. EMPLOYEE BURIED IN AVALANCHE OF TOURISTS! Ossie would spot it. She’d try to locate Kiwi’s ghost with her “powers” … Kiwi groaned and pushed
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