The human parasite
We moved to the living room and sat on a couch facing the big window. I was leaning back, drinking the cider now, watching a beam of sunlight crawl across the wall and listening to Audrey describe her daily schedule at the resort. “I never thought I’d end up like this — working as a bar wench. It was I who had servants. It was I who sat by the pool and was waited on.” She laughed and took another drag off her joint. She was leaning back now, too, looking at the ceiling. “Hard to believe that life was real, you know? You shoulda seen the home we had in Marin. Weekdays we were at our place in SF and then on most Thursdays, if we didn’t have anything happening socially, we’d head out and spend the weekends in Bolinas, surfing, lounging, visiting friends. The old me wouldn’t believe the now-me, but I strangely like my new life,” she said, speaking sluggishly, slightly slurring her speech on account of all the weed she’s been smoking. “I was so bored back then. It was too nice. Too comfortable. I sorta knew it back then but…I was too scared to admit it, I think. Keeps me busy…plenty of interesting people to observe, and when I’m not on my shift, I take care of the chickens, tend the garden, sunbathe, read, take walks around the resort beyond the walls. I’d live on the property full time, if I could. But Leo makes me rotate out once in a while, says I need to spend time in society. But…what society? I come back to a studio I rent from one of Leo’s distant aunts in an apartment building full of immigrant families that always smells like onion and cabbage. So my favorite place to live is the hotel where I work. I’m like some English peasant attached to the land or something. And I can trace my lineage back to the Mayflower, you know that?” She was giggling now, uncontrollably. “And now I’m changing linens in a hotel…and liking it.”
I watched her as she spoke, the light from the window falling on her face. I got the sense she wasn’t even talking to me but just vocalizing her inner thoughts…she didn’t expect any reply from me…she didn’t seem aware that I was there at all. But all her talk about her fallen status reminded of a short novel I read about the Russian Revolution. There were a few characters in there, aristocratic young women, who had to resort to sleeping with crude peasants who had become powerful Soviet bureaucrats after the Bolsheviks took power just so they wouldn’t starve. I tried to remember how it ended…one of the young aristocratic women ended up committing suicide, I think. And I realized I was seeing Audrey up close for the first time. When we had met and she spent the night in my bungalow, I had been high on oxys and drinking all day. My mind had been fuzzy. Now I was much more sober and saw her in the full resolution of daylight. She exuded a classic regal beauty — the only sign that something wasn’t right was her skin. I want to say it was like a cadaver’s, but that would be too much. Her skin had a grayish tint to it and was slightly pitted. When she’d laugh and move her head, I’d see the tension build up in the skin of her neck, with long lateral stringy ripples appearing on the surface, like if you were stretching out cellophane. It was something you saw in people exposed to direct radiation in the early days of the fallout — at least those who survived. Anetoderma it was called, a destruction of the skin’s subcutaneous fat and collagen. Being up in Bolinas, stuck there for days on Highway 1 with hundreds of thousands of other people fleeing south to the city, she got a good dose of cesium-137 and iodine-131 and strontium-90, gamma waves hitting her skin like millions of invisible flechettes, grinding up the epidermis, dermis, hypodermis, killing sweat glands, nerves, capillaries, calcifying arteries and veins…If you were lucky to not have your skin go cancerous on you, you were left with skin that aged fifty years in a week.
RADIANCE, my serialized novel, continues.
“A hunting party came through and killed a two-headed black bear right after the lockdown was lifted,” Audrey was saying, still talking to the ceiling. “It was sad. Why kill such a magnificent creature? It’s sociopathic. Those hunters make me really angry. But Leo says he needs the business these asshole killers bring. They’re the most stable clients…they keep the resort afloat. A family stayed with us at the same time. They had two kids. Well…actually, I guess, technically, three. Two of them were those, what do you call them, Siamese twins. One body from what I could see, but two heads. So we had these asshole mutant hunters and this mutant baby in the resort at the same time. They were there at the same time. I thought it was super weird. The hunters were at the bar by the pool talking loudly about their kills…bragging about all the mutants they tracked and slaughtered while the father with the Siamese twins swam with his girls right there no more than five feet away, holding them up by their armpits in the water.” She paused to take a hit off her joint. “I just found that to be so off-putting.”
