The Old Reactor Read online

  THE OLD REACTOR

  THE OLD REACTOR

  DAVID OHLE

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.

  Ann Arbor, MI 48103

  www.dzancbooks.org

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  THE OLD REACTOR. Copyright © 2014, text by David Ohle. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.

  Designed by Steven Seighman

  ISBN: 978-1936873562

  First U.S. Edition: September 2014

  Printed in the United States of America

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  When we have communicated nicely within ourselves, the stool reflects a simple reasonable operation (cowflop is, for example, modest in its odor) but where we have failed…the odors and shapes are tortured, corrupt, rich, fascinating (that is attractive and repulsive at the same time) theatrical, even tragic.”

  —NORMAN MAILER, “THE METAPHYSICS OF THE BELLY”

  THE OLD REACTOR

  In those days Moldenke stayed in the city of Bunkerville and was so full of passion for the labor movement his nose bled when he spoke of it. He could be seen day after day going up and down Esplanade Avenue in the company of a few like-minded friends, passing out the pamphlet, “Fair Play for the Working Stiff.” He knew, though, that his bowel could make sudden demands. Wherever he picketed or passed out leaflets, the location of the nearest public toilet was always something to keep in mind. The condition had come upon him in his teens, in school at St. Cuthbert’s. Doctors told him it was a stubborn inflammation that could last the rest of his life. They had given it a name he had long ago forgotten.

  It was also a time when his dear aunt lay dying of a persistent and growing abdominal teratoma. She lay tucked into a narrow room at the Broad Street Charnel House, living out her last days. It was an awful place and Moldenke hated going there, yet he did so religiously every Sunday.

  His aunt’s surgeon, the well-known scientist Edgar Zanzetti, could do no more. It was now up to her to settle into dying. The growth that protruded from her abdomen looked to Moldenke like an apple under a tablecloth. Weakened muscles in her drooping lids required that she wear small lid-lifting appliances made of gold plated rods and rubber knobs. She was a plaster mold of her former self who’d come to look like an illustration in a medical text.

  When he went to see her on those anxious Sunday afternoons, Moldenke’s stomach burned and his hands shook. He’d been living in her house on Esplanade for nine months, keeping an eye on things while she underwent surgery after surgery. He paid no rent, nor had he done well keeping an eye on things. The house had been broken into many times. Antique silver services, jewelry, rare first editions, musical instruments, and a beaver coat had been stolen.. The thieves came in almost nightly while Moldenke slept upstairs with cotton in his ears to shut out the noise of the streetcars running on Esplanade.

  He paid no particular interest to maintenance or sanitation. The rusting gutters sagged with a load of leaves and twigs. Windows had been left open during rain storms, leaving soaked carpets in the parlor and buckled tiles in the kitchen. Rarely had the dishes been washed, the vacuum cleaner had never been taken from its closet under the stairs, there were generations of wharf rats living under the kitchen sink, and a frilly gray fungus thrived on curtains and walls.

  As soon as Moldenke arrived at the Charnel that Sunday, his aunt began to needle him, a froth forming at the corner of her lips. “How many times did your mother read you the fable of the grasshopper and the ant?”

  “Not that again.”

  The little nook where she was kept was so narrow that Moldenke could not stand at the side of her cot but had to remain in the doorway a few feet away. He lit a cork-tipped Julep, inhaled, then let the smoke out as he said, “You conveniently forget the tortoise and the hare. She read that, too. I’m off to a slow start, but I could have a strong finish. That’s the lesson I took.”

  “Please don’t smoke those things in here. They smell like burning hair.”

  “All right.” He smashed the Julep out on the bottom of his shoe and slid the leftover stub into his shirt pocket for later.

  “Worse times are ahead,” his aunt warned. “You know that, don’t you? They liberated Altobello. Bunkerville will be next.”

  “I’m as ready as anyone,” he said. “For anything.”

  “Have you found work? Idle hands are the devil’s workshop. You know that.”

  “My friends and I will be picketing Eternity Meadows later. I don’t have time to look for a job today. Do you have any idea what they pay their grave diggers?”

  “You’ll get into trouble. They’ll send you to Altobello on a freighter.”

  “It hardly matters. I wouldn’t mind going there. Some pure freedom might be good for a while. Scary, but interesting.”

  “What about the jellyheads? They’ve been infesting the place. It’s been in the papers.”

  Moldenke had seen jellies walking the streets of Bunkerville, too, but didn’t want to frighten his aunt with the real news. Instead, he opened a waxed paper envelope. “I brought you a bear claw. You love them.”

  “I’m too sick to eat. You bring them for yourself.”

  “Yes, I know.” He ate a bite of the sugary confection, rolling balls of it on his tongue before swallowing.

  “Still taking care of my house on Esplanade, or have you found a place of your own?”

  “If I weren’t living there, who would? The house is a shambles. You couldn’t rent it to jellyheads. I’m doing you a favor by staying in it.”

  His aunt made a strenuous but successful effort to turn onto her side and say, “You’ll find a nice pretty girl someday. You can live with her in my house.”

  “Thank you, Aunt.”

  With another thrust she attempted to turn onto her back. Moldenke made a move toward helping but could reach only her feet. If he hadn’t been afraid of breaking her ankles he might have tried to twist them to help her roll. She managed to turn with an exhausting struggle. In the process, her lid lifters fell to the floor and her eyelids drooped. It took her a few minutes to catch her breath. “Can you get my lifters for me?”

  The distance between the wall and the cot was only a few inches. Moldenke couldn’t reach the lifters without climbing into the cot with his aunt. “I can’t get to them. I’m sorry.”

  She pinched her nose. “You smell. That bowel of yours isn’t getting any better, is it? You’ve shit your pants, haven’t you?”

  Moldenke looked upward, as if there were something eye-catching above him. “They haven’t been washed for a while.”

  “Dear nephew, is the ceiling easier to look than I am?”

  “That lump is just something I’d rather not see. Zanzetti told me those kinds of tumors have hair and teeth and small bones in them. And I don’t want to talk about my angry bowel, either. I have to go.”

  “I may die tonight, or tomorrow, so there is something I’ve kept from you.”

  “Hurry, tell me again.”

  “When your father woke up that morning your mother was standing naked at the foot of the bed in a puddle of water and blood saying, ‘He’s here too soon!’ Your father spread bath towels on the bedroom floor. The labor was short. A few contractions and there you were. You came to them the way the Sunday paper is thrown on the porch. They were expecting it, but were startled when it dropped.”

  “I’ve heard this a hundred times.”

  “Such a nice boy. Give you a few pins, a ci
gar box, a handful of mothballs, and there you’d go, collecting earwigs and spittle bugs and having the time of your life.”

  “I really have to leave. My friends and I are picketing.”

  “You made molds of your fingers with paraffin, filled them with plaster and lined the dresser top with these little monuments to yourself. You even tried to make a mold of your little Johnny Brown, but the hot paraffin burned you.”

  “How many times have I heard that one? I’m going.”

  “It was cute the way you couldn’t make up your mind about anything.”

  “Please stop.”

  “The simplest questions, you never answered them…. What did you have for lunch at school? You’d hem, you’d haw, you’d look down at your shoes as if they were golden slippers.”

  “I overthink things sometimes, granted. I’m leaving. I really am.”

  “And let me say, I find it odd that you care so much for the worker, yet you don’t work.”

  “My work is working for the worker.”

  “Without pay? The worker is doing better than you are. Don’t you see it?”

  “I have to go.”

  “I suppose I’m in general sympathy with your fair-wage cause, but I’m afraid it will all end badly. I can see in you and your friends the promise of fanaticism. I’m convinced nothing good can come of it all.”

  “Thank you for that strong encouragement.”

  “Look in my closet at home for a shoebox. There’s about ten million in there to get me a decent burial. I want to be in Eternity Meadows.”

  “All right. I’ll take care of that. But in case you’re not dead by next Sunday, I’ll visit again.”

  “When I’m gone, aside from the ten mill for my burial, you’ll inherit my house on Esplanade and a sum of money in trust for the maintenance and repair. As for your personal maintenance, you’ll have to find work, fair wage or not. Dig graves if you have to.”

  “I’ll manage.”

  She pulled the sheet over her head. “Dig mine if you get the chance.”

  “There’s the spirit. See you next Sunday.”

  After these visits, Moldenke hurried over to the Come On Inn, a tavern just across from City Park. A few glasses of strong bitters took away the shakes that seeing his aunt gave him. He’d always had a visceral aversion to the sick and dying and wanted no part of it. Dying should always be done alone, he thought, but all too often wasn’t. He and the aunt were the only living Moldenkes. He had no choice but to look after her post mortems.

  Jellyhead children with blue teeth were seen roaming aimlessly in City Park. Homeless and underfed, abandoned by frightened parents, they refused all food and drink left for them, preferring to eat grasshoppers and drink water from a drainage ditch. It is known that a type of jaundice related to an infection of the blood can cause bluing teeth and loss of appetite, but nothing can account for the other anomalies in their appearance and behavior. For one, they were hairless and as pale as chalk. For another, their ear valves were unusually well developed and their leg muscles were atrophied, giving them a stork-like gait. They beat one another mercilessly with sticks. The weakest among them were dragged to the park lagoon and drowned. Like goats, they relieve themselves wherever the urge strikes. Park visitors have been hit with slingshot stones and splattered with thrown stool.

  A week later, when Moldenke visited his aunt again, she was barely conscious. He didn’t think she would be around by the following Sunday. For the entire week, he devoted his time to more or less arranging her funeral and burial. When he arrived at Eternity Meadows, hoping to find an affordable gravesite near the back fence, some of his pro-labor friends were picketing outside the gate. Their banner read, “A Living Wage for the Living Worker.” One of them, Ozzie, an old friend of Moldenke’s, made no effort to conceal the small caliber pistol he carried in his belt.

  A bystander warned anyone approaching, “Don’t cross the line, he’s been threatening to shoot people.”

  While Moldenke took the warning seriously, he felt sure his friend would make an exception in his case, which he did, but not without a great deal of bluster and display, even once drawing his pistol and waving it in Moldenke’s face. “Are you with us or against us? You haven’t been picketing.”

  “There’s going to be a death in the family, an aunt, my last living relative. After her, I’m all alone in the world. She’ll need a place to be buried. I can’t be picketing anymore.”

  “All right, go on in. You can have an hour.”

  The cemetery was a pleasant, quiet place to be that afternoon, especially with Moldenke’s pals keeping everyone out. Though the weather had turned cold there were still thick morning glory vines, dying now, that had weaved themselves through and around all the spaces in the chain-link fence. Moldenke recalled summer walks in the cemetery, dragon flies flitting from one tombstone to another and little green lizards atop a few of them showed their dewlaps. For a moment he felt utterly calm, collected, and at peace. But as he looked among the empty plots for one that seemed affordable, he was stricken by a terrible urgency in his abdomen. There would be no time to find a toilet, even if he ran back to his aunt’s house or to a public privy, so he walked, skipped, and trotted as fast as he could to the tallest head stone he could see and squatted behind it to relieve himself.

  When he was finished, he used the only thing handy to wipe: a bouquet of withered flowers from the nearest vase. Standing and belting his pants, he bowed his head, clasped his hands, and addressed an apology to the deceased. “I’m so sorry. I hope you’ll forgive me for being such a dog. My bowel can’t be controlled. Don’t worry, the sun will come along and dry it out in a day or two and the wind will blow it away.”

  The picketers sat on the ground, handcuffed, bleeding from head and facial wounds as Moldenke was leaving the cemetary. One was being questioned by a police officer who had torn up the ‘living wage’ banner.

  Moldenke made a sharp turn and hurried down Esplanade toward City Canal. But before he was across the silver-painted swing bridge, the officer yelled, “Hey! You! Stop!”

  Moldenke waited until the officer made his way to the bridge.

  “Yes, Officer?”

  “Sir, one of the gravediggers says he saw you take a crap on someone’s resting place. True?”

  “Yes, but I do have a chronic condition with my bowels. Sudden attacks. Almost no warning.”

  “No matter how you sugar-coat it, that’s desecrating a grave. You’re probably going to Altobello.”

  “How could I be sent there for this? You’re trying to fill a quota to populate the place. I really don’t mind going, but I’ve got a dying aunt. I’ll have to take care of her body when she goes. I need some time.”

  “Don’t smart mouth me and don’t make all those excuses.” The officer cuffed Moldenke. “Shitting on a grave is not child’s play.”

  “Who will bury my aunt if I’m sent to Altobello? Who’ll arrange some kind of ceremony?”

  The officer hiked up his shiny blue pants. “You’ve got a couple of weeks before you leave. You better hope she goes pretty quick.”

  It was reported in the City Moon that in the liberated city of Altobello, a jellyhead woman who lived near the Old Reactor entered Saposcat’s Deli on Arden Boulevard last night with five severed heads in a suitcase, those of her husband, Barry; her twin ten-year-olds, Muffy and Dale; Earnest, the blind and deaf son; and George D. Bennett, an uncle visiting from Bunkerville.

  Observers say she sat with a calm demeanor, though her clothes were blood soaked and glistening with gel and her suitcase oozing. She ordered a flash-fried mud fish plate from a trembling waitress. The fry cook prepared the order as quickly as he could. After eating a few bites of the salty fish and drinking a soda, the woman suddenly shouted, “Oh, shit! I forgot about little Timmy,” then dashed from the restaurant.

  Shortly, she returned with her youngest’s head in a soaked and dripping cloth bag. Now her family was complete. She finished her me
al and called for the waitress.

  “I’m through, thanks. You can take my plate.”

  “Would you like dessert? We have sweetened kerd, we have—”

  “No. I’m leaving these heads here and going. I have some ground to cover in a short time.” She waved in a grand gesture to the entire restaurant, let out a squirt or two from her ear valves, slid from her booth, and left at a slow trot.

  As the diners looked on, some in shock, some amused, the fry cook opened the woman’s suitcase and the bag and said, “We’ve got six heads here. Personally speaking, I’ve never seen a jelly bring in more than three at once. Don’t ask me why they sever them like that or why they always drop them off at Saposcat’s. I don’t have a clue. They don’t seem to know what they’re doing.”

  The beheadings of loved ones was something new to the native jellies of Altobello, who were formerly devoted to family, to the home, to community values, until they set up an encampment out near the Old Reactor about a hundred years ago and began drinking heavy water from the Reactor’s storage vessels in the belief that it was an all-around tonic for general health. After that custom became a part of their culture, there was no predicting how a given jellyhead might behave. They sometimes went critical.

  Moldenke looked over the obits every day in the City Moon, always a little displeased after reading down the list of hundreds of dead that his aunt’s name wasn’t there. He only had two weeks before he would have to make other arrangements, to find her a plot, to have a ceremony, to arrange at least a few words by someone in some kind of vestment. And the house on Esplanade—who would live there and watch the place while he was gone? And could they be trusted to spend his aunt’s maintenance money wisely?

  More pressing now was to find her a decent resting place without spending any more of the ten mill than necessary.

  On days when his aunt’s name wasn’t in the paper, Moldenke wasted a good portion of his time drinking bitters at the Come On Inn and thinking of ways to put her to rest with dignity, but inexpensively. What money was left could be stashed in the house on Esplanade, where there were plenty of hiding places. The fund would help get him started again when he returned from Altobello.