MARTians (17 page)

I know the rich history of the mannequin people. I studied it in school. The first were made of wax. They had realistic nipples and hair, real hair, fit strand by strand into their wax skin. Their eyes were glass, with mirrors set behind to give them a brightening glance. On hot days, they melted in the store windows and their red lips slid down their porcelain teeth like blood.

Those were the fierce ancestors of this vague blank-paper shell. Mannequins evolve, in our image, in the images of how we want to be.

“My keys are in my pocket,” says Juliette. And she turns her hip toward me so I can see them, a disturbance in the curve.

She needs me. She needs me to reach into her pocket and pull out the keys. That’s what she needs, so I do it. And when I do, my heart flips upside down like a sad little refrigerator magnet. The reason I am touching her is almost jolted out of my head. I forget about her keys and her need and I’m only aware that I need something too. I want to be in her pocket. I want. I want. I want. I get why they are all so willing to carry her boxes and kill her spiders. If we weren’t in the desert, Juliette would disorganize the tides.

Juliette shifts the burden in her arms, and I’m reminded of my purpose.

I have the keys. I lead the way to the door marked
ERUPT SALON
, unlock it, and brace it open while Juliette passes on a current of air that smells like peaches and toasted sesame.

The space inside the salon feels endless, but that is mostly because mirrors are reflecting mirrors in that hopeless, endless way that mirrors do.
no laSt purE,
the mirrors tell themselves while they reflect the mural of an erupting volcano and a painted sea with wooden boats.

“It felt lonely,” says Juliette.

I look at the floor; it is scattered with arms and legs.

“Will you help me put them together?”

Yes. Yes. Yes, of course I will. And I will kill spiders for you, and I will do anything. I will live and die for you, Juliette, because when I put my hand in your pocket, my heart woke up in a whole new world.

We get 5er too, and he helps us fit the parts together as well as they will. There aren’t enough heads. Joints jut in the wrong direction. This body has three legs and no arms. We have made them in our own image. The gold light paints the blank surfaces in glow.

I sit on the floor. 5er rests his head in my lap.

Juliette has stacks and stacks of tissue paper, all colors of the rainbow. It was wasting away in the dark corner of an abandoned stockroom until Juliette gathered it up and brought it into the light. I remember when shopgirls wrapped pretty new things in tissue paper cocoons sealed with special store stickers on them like kisses. I remember when I had an AnnaMom.

Juliette sees me crying. “You okay?”

I see her face is as wet as mine.

“Yes,” I say. “You?”

She pulls her phone out of her pocket and shows me a screen. There is message after message from RAOUL. They all say “I <3 U.” She scrolls and it seems like he loves her infinitely.

“Yes.” And, though it is clearly a lie, we are both good with it.

Juliette’s hands make magic little folds, and the pages of tissue paper blossom into perfect clothes for the Mannequin family. The floor of the store is covered with clouds of crumpled paper. It crushes and brushes around her feet.

She works for hours, while I watch her. Then, at last, she steps back, leans against a mirror, and says, “When Raoul comes . . .” The empty thought threads away like candle smoke.

Juliette is holding a baby on her lap. The baby, being a baby, hasn’t learned that it shouldn’t love Juliette with crazy abandon, so it does.

And Juliette, being Juliette, is loving the baby right back with the same crazy abandon.

It is a recipe for disaster.

“Just explain,” says Timmer, “so I can figure this out. How come we got a baby?”

It’s an excellent question. As we learned in Sexual Responsibility class, babies appear sort of slowly, with some indication like a rejection of bacon or a shameful shift in fashion awareness toward unconstricted shapes. None of that has gone on. We have all seen Juliette in her customary naked state. Seriously, she couldn’t have sneaked this baby past us.

But still, there it is, with its wrists and ankles so fat it looks like it’s some sort of balloon animal, a hand like a chubby starfish, touching Juliette’s cheek while the drool of adoration shines all down the front of its grubby shirt.

“Thing is,” says Juliette, “today I was working Baby Escape. I’m bonded, you know? So I can not only handle money and a cash register, I am authorized to work at Baby Escape, where shoppers hand me their babies so they can shop more conveniently.

“Baby Escape,” Juliette continues. “It doesn’t seem so bad from the customer side. Up front’s the playroom, where there are always a couple of babies sitting on the cushy-colorful mats, and there’s always as many staff as babies, helping them play with the toys featured in the JoyZone! sale-o-the-week. But there is also the back room, the nap room. In there, that’s where we keep most of the babies who get dropped off. It’s floor-to-ceiling baby crates. They got a door on the front, and they got a tray on the bottom lined with absorba-pads. And before we put the baby in there, we give it a shot of sleepy-time juice from a sippy cup. Most times, a baby is out for a couple hours before the family comes back. ‘Shhhush!’ we say. ‘Baby’s in the nap room. Come back in ten minutes.’ They come back in a half hour or so, and we got the baby, all butt-clean in a fresh diaper, still sleeping off the sippy cup we gave them or, you know, a little subdued. And we say, ‘She played herself right out. She really loved whatever-toy-is-featured.’ And we point that out, and we scan the parent bracelet and we scan the bracelet on the baby’s leg and cancel them both out of the system. If they buy the toy, there’s no charge at checkout. If they don’t buy the toy, then there’s a service surcharge added to their credit card. Easy-peasy. Except this one’s parent didn’t come back.

“That’s not supposed to happen. I wasn’t trained for it. I mean, what was I supposed to do? Leave it there in the nap room? The morning crew would have noticed. And it would have been on me, you know? ’Cause I was the one who closed out the baby register at Baby Escape.”

So there it is. The story of how we got us a baby. Timmer is staring at Juliette, and I can see his face is starting to soften. Juliette is cranked up to eleven, that’s for sure. I know that baby was noticeably smelly when we walked into the salon and first saw it in Juliette’s arms, a trickle of pink-stained curds slipping down its cheeks and disappearing into the wrinkles under its toothless chin. The bulging diaper, the spit-up — Juliette’s wanting is canceling that all out.

“Timmer!” I say. “How are we going to solve this?” I need him to remember that this is a problem, not a miracle.

“Can you take it back in the morning?” says Timmer.

“I’m not scheduled to work at Baby Escape. I’m Fancy ManiPedis tomorrow,” says Juliette.

“If the parents come back,” says Timmer, “and they say ‘Where’s the baby?’ What then?”

“I closed the register,” says Juliette. “So that would be bad, I think.”

“What was your plan?” Timmer has a lot of faith in Juliette.

“I didn’t have a plan,” says Juliette. “I just, you know, the lights were dimming and I had to do something.”

I can almost see Juliette’s powers of persuasion wrinkling the air like heat waves.

Tears collect and sparkle for a moment before they spill onto Juliette’s cheekbones. “This is the sort of thing that will kill my chances for future employment,” says Juliette.

“Poor baby,” she says.

Timmer steps forward and bends to study the bar code band on the baby’s leg.

“Maybe I can fix this,” he says. “We know how the system works. We could maybe check it into the Baby Escape tomorrow? Pretend we are shoppers? . . . Who is off tomorrow? You, Pineapple, you work in the back so you’re not so recognizable. You could pretend it’s your baby and, you know, check it in . . . then it would be somebody else’s problem.”

I have a sick feeling. What if this has been going on for months? What if this baby was left there months ago, and each night somebody finds it and doesn’t know what to do so they take it home and then they pose as a busy shopping parent?

“Well, shit,” I say. “You can’t just embezzle a baby. You can’t just erase the transaction. Babies aren’t fungible. You can’t just swap them like wrong-size underpants.

“No,” I say. “What we have to do is get this baby completely out of the system, permanently. For good.”

“We can’t keep it,” says Timmer, but the way he holds the baby’s round little foot in his hand, it is obvious he would like to find a way to make that work. And not just for Juliette’s sake.

“We absolutely cannot! I’m not saying we keep it.” How could that work? 5er is the only person home most days, and it worries me that we expect him to be responsible for himself, much less a baby. “No,” I say. “We have to get rid of it.”

They all look at me. I read confusion, sadness, a flicker of horror.

“Shhh! We’re not going to smash it like it’s an escaped popcorn mousie.”

They hadn’t thought of that. Now all the sadness is replaced by horror. There is still plenty of confusion.

“The SpeedyMed hospital,” I say. “We cut the bracelet off and take it there. Sneak it in and leave it in a bathroom or something. I’m pretty sure they have surveillance in the hospitals, but we can work around that. I mean, we can scout the place out, stand so we block the cameras. I mean, it works for Kral; we can make it work.

“We can’t spend time thinking about this,” I say. “We just need to get it done. Timmer, get the car.” I can’t let anybody back out now. I know that. They know it too; that’s why they do what I say.

By the time we get to the hospital, we have the whole plan. It’s a good plan. 5er and Timmer stay in the car with Juliette, because we all know she can’t be any part of this. She is not a person who goes unnoticed, and I still don’t trust her not to go wobbly. At least she thought far enough ahead to grab a clean diaper and some sleepy-sippy juice when she left work, so the thing shouldn’t make noise or smell bad. I put the baby in my AllMART bag with some air holes punched in it.

All we have to do is go inside the emergency room, then Luck makes a blind spot, Pineapple starts a fight, I put the bag in a corner — and we all run. It is a great plan.

We didn’t expect the metal detector at the doorway, but it doesn’t matter because the baby isn’t metal, so we sail right through. We didn’t expect the really long line of sick people snaking back and forth in the hall either. But a crowd is good. Extra cover. Good. Luck moves into position and gives a little thumbs-up. Pineapple punches the guy in front of us in line. That guy turns around and snarls at Pineapple before he hits Pineapple in the teeth so hard I’m shocked. I’m frozen. But before Pineapple gets hit again, the guy is on the floor twitching and bucking. Tased. That’s when we see the guard. The guard has already used his Taser, so he’s got a gun drawn now, and it’s pointed at Pineapple.

Luck is on Pineapple’s side, though, and yells, “Gun! Gun!” The whole crowd stampedes and crushes against one another. We are close enough to the door that we get pushed back through the metal detector and into the street.

That’s when I notice I’m still carrying the bag with the baby in it. Pineapple and Luck are running down the street. I don’t know what else to do, so I put the bag full of baby down in the middle of the sidewalk, and then I run too.

I don’t say anything except “Go, go, go” when I scramble into the front seat. I’m rocking back and forth like I can push the car forward with my own nervous weight. Timmer turns the key in the ignition and pulls away very prudently, which makes me nuts. I’m listening for sirens, which I hear, but there are always sirens in this neighborhood. Sirens are just background noise. I’m chewing on my lips and watching for I don’t know what to descend on us, and catch us, and punish us. In the backseat, Pineapple and Luck are high-fiving. Juliette leans over and pulls Pineapple into an embrace. “Thank you,” she says.

5er climbs between the seats and squats on my lap. He puts his hands on my cheeks and stares at me, hard.

“5er should be in a child-safety seat,” I say.

“Seriously?” Luck says. “Shouldn’t we all be in child-safety seats?” Everyone in the car except me thinks this is very funny.

We have turned eleven corners and idled at three stoplights before Timmer takes an on-ramp onto the freeway. That’s when I say, “We are going the wrong way. We should be going east on Camino Campesino. This is northbound Enterprise Expressway.”

“We did the right thing,” says Timmer.

“But we are going the wrong way,” I say.

“If we did the right thing, then we can’t be going the wrong way. Trust me on this, Z.”

In the backseat, Luck is wiping blood off Pineapple’s mouth, and Pineapple is wiping tears off Juliette’s cheeks.

“I miss Raoul,” Juliette says, so softly. “I want him here,” she says. And her loneliness crushes my heart.

“We did the right thing,” says Timmer. “And so we are going to be rewarded.” And we drive and drive, just like gasoline is free. Streetlights are still on in some of the neighborhoods we pass, but they become less and less common, until the places where people used to live are dark and dead as asphalt. And then even the dark neighborhoods are gone. There is nothing but the road and the empty desert night.