HERE IN DEATH’S DREAM KINGDOM
The smaller building that bears the large white word OFFICES seems as if it will be the easiest to search, but once Aleem and Kuba get inside, they discover a warren of rooms on two floors. The place is a sieve, two or three inches of water throughout the lower floor. Debris floats on the rank and slimy tide—empty beer cans, foil bags once filled with potato chips or corn chips, pale condoms ballooning like jellyfish or slithering like translucent snakes.
“Must be where country kids sneak away to party,” Kuba says.
Grimacing as the beam of the Tac Light plays across the draff and garbage, Aleem says, “Might better take a sample of this, send it to your health app, see what you contaminated with.”
“All these offices. Who knew apples was big business?”
“Since Adam,” says Aleem.
“What Adam that?”
“Don’t be ignorant. Adam and Eve.”
“Adam I know, he with Simone.”
“Weren’t no Simone then, only Eve.”
“Simone she got a nice ass.”
Having cautiously checked out the ground-floor offices, as Aleem leads Kuba up the stairs, he says, “You got an iPhone, homey.”
“Back in the mud somewheres.”
“I mean—you know their symbol?”
“What symbol?”
“Their company symbol. Apple’s symbol.”
“Ain’t it an apple?”
“Apple with a bite out. It’s a symbol of knowledge.”
“An apple someone took a bite, I don’t want it. That ain’t a symbol of knowledge, that a symbol of garbage.”
“I’m talkin’ the first apple off the tree of knowledge.”
“Tree of knowledge? Eat an apple and it’s like you gone to college, now you can be a dentist? You the man, Aleem. I respect you, but shit. This here’s another weird idea, bro, like your explodin’ salt.”
They proceed a few steps into the upstairs hall, something crunching underfoot, before Aleem stops and slowly brooms the light from baseboard to baseboard. All is dry here. The stain is worn off the tongue-in-grove hardwood, and the planks are cupped. Hundreds of dead beetles lay in regiments like a vast defeated army under a thin shroud of gray dust. No one could pass this way without leaving a trail of disturbed dust and scattered bugs.
Leading the way down the stairs to the swamp, Aleem says, “I know you heard of the Bible.”
“Heard about the ’cyclopedia, too. So what?”
“An apple off the tree of knowledge, it’s a Bible story.”
“Since when you read the Bible?”
“Never done. But when I was little, Grandma Verna she told me some Bible stories.”
“Your same Grandma Verna she runs upper-class whores on the Westside?”
“Who has two Grandma Vernas?” Aleem says as he steps into the dismal waters on the ground floor.
“That mean old woman, got them implant teeth could crack a walnut, wears more diamonds than Tiffany ever sold, why she poundin’ a Bible?”
“She don’t pound it. She just finds it entertainin’。 Like Goliath the giant.”
“The seven-foot wrestler, tattoo of a snake comin’ out his belly button.”
“I’m talkin’ the first Goliath. Check it out, man. He was ten feet tall.”
As they slosh through the party debris where once commerce was conducted and busy workers supported families by supplying something real and nourishing, Kuba says, “This Goliath, he live in a castle between the tree of knowledge and the tree of salt?”
Speedo Hickam is waiting for them just outside the front door. In his long black raincoat and hood, he reminds Aleem of a nun, too soft to endure hard weather like a man. “We found somethin’。”
“What somethin’？”
“You gotta see. Over at Whole Fruit.”
As the three head toward the largest building in the complex, Kuba says, “Another thing, with all respect, nobody ever been ten feet tall.”
Aleem says, “Speedo, you know about Goliath?”
“He a wrestler, bites the heads off baby chicks?”
“That’s him,” Kuba confirms.
“Ain’t real chicks,” Speedo says. “They’s marshmallow chicks like them at Easter.”
“Real as real can be,” Kuba insists.
“You want to think so, that’s cool with me,” Speedo says.
“Grandma Verna she say the way it happened, this shrimp David figures he can jack up Goliath, bring him down. Goliath he picks up little Davey, loads him in a fuckin’ big slingshot, and splatters him all over the side of the temple.”
“What temple?” Speedo asks.
“Don’t matter what temple. Important thing is David been taught a moral lesson.”
At Whole Fruit, Jason, Hakeem, and Carlisle are waiting just outside the big opening that once was filled by a roll-up door. When Jason directs his light at what they found beyond the threshold, Kuba declares, “No tooth fairy left it. Bitch is here somewhere.”
Aleem can almost feel her head in his hands, his thumbs pressing through the warm jelly of her eyes.
LUCKY
The darkness is so thick that it seems to have substance. Nina feels it pressing on her, coiling in her ears. The air is oily with this darkness, as though it leaves a residue in her lungs when she exhales.
Now and then, she thinks she hears voices, ordered packets of sound different from the wind howl and rain chatter that is muffled by the walls of the packing plant. These moments of suspected human presence do not seem to issue from within this building. They’re as brief as they are faint, like voices from some nameless Beyond that you might expect to hear at a séance. Time passes without the storeroom door being thrown open.
John is afflicted with allergies, and the environment here challenges his determination to be silent. The poor kid stifles a sneeze and minutes later another, perhaps clamping his hands over his face or pinching his nose—God forbid that it happens if one of Aleem’s homeys does step into the room—and both times he whispers, “Sorry,” and she whispers, “It’s okay.”
Maybe ten minutes pass, and he makes a furtive sound, which must have been his hand digging in a coat pocket, because then he blows his nose discreetly. Following a silence without an apology, he reveals a problem in a voice so soft that she strains to hear him.
“Oh no. It’s gone.”
She whispers, “What?”
He barely breathes his reply: “The lucky hundred.”
For a moment, his words don’t compute for her, but then she remembers. In the kitchen. Before they fled their home. He pulled one bill from a bundle, examining it with wonder. It’s real. He tucked the banded hundreds into interior pockets of his jacket, but he folded the loose hundred into an exterior pocket. It’s like a lucky penny ten thousand times over. Maybe the same pocket where he had kept folded Kleenex. Now it must be in the water around them.
“Forget it,” she whispers. “We have so much more.”
After a freighted silence, he says, “Maybe I didn’t lose it here.”
He’d first blown his nose when they stepped into the building, just inside the threshold.