Behind Emily’s head, Kiwi could see the tall buildings of downtown Loomis. Large ficus trees became a blotter for electric light. He gulped a moan and shoved her hand beneath the roomy waistband of Cubby’s jeans. Don’t ruin this, brain, please. He hoped this amazing thing that her hands and her warm mouth had committed them to could proceed without another word.
Forty minutes later Kiwi got dropped at the World of Darkness, no longer a virgin. His predominant emotion: confusion. A headache swaddled his thoughts like cloth. Don’t come back, brain, ever again. The few dreams he had were bad and broth-thin: Ava turned up in some of them, and Osceola. The Seths were an undersea quilt of lantern eyes and teeth. He woke up half a dozen times to a feeling of pins and needles — as if the entire length of his skinny body were a numb foot tingling awake, resigning itself to the pain of sensation.
By 4:30 a.m. Kiwi wasn’t drunk anymore, or a hero — that whiskey shimmer had been reabsorbed by his skin. I hate you, he thought, and this thought floated serenely outside of him, because who could it attach to? He couldn’t even pretend to hate the Chief at this hour. He missed his family too badly. I hate who? Carl Jenks? What about Dr. Gautman? Emily Barton? Every tourist? The Chief’s loan officer? Failure! He couldn’t hate any of them, he couldn’t find one person to use as a tether; the rage was like a balloon that drifted heavenward and broke free of its string. Kiwi, who considered himself a grammarian of human emotion, knew that anger required a direct object. (I am angry at ______. I hate ______.) “To hate” was a transitive verb. Anger needed an anchor, a plug, a wall. (I am angry because of ______.) Otherwise you had a beam of red feeling searching vainly through the universe. You had a heart that shot red light into space.
Kiwi shivered in his sheets. These, too, were rentals. “Prison linens,” Leo called them, although Kiwi sort of liked their stripes, which were wood-duck gray and a mustardy gold and indisputably ugly and which made Kiwi feel strangely at home. They looked like something his mom might have thoughtlessly plucked from the Goodwill bin. His mom in the Goodwill was like a girl in a field of dismal flowers.
I hate you, Dad, he tried again — but that old trick wasn’t working. Lately his dad had started to shrink in his mind, too thin to blame the big crimes on (loss of home, loss of life).
Kiwi Bigtree contracted into his smallest self. He smothered his face with the pillow. At one point he opened his closet door and stared at the green poster of his mother, closed it. Minutes dripped red light down one edge of the bedside clock. He stared at the closet door and he called this state “sleep.”
When Kiwi woke up at 7:09, he was a hero again. Everybody pounced in the break room. Barb from ticketing joked that she wanted Kiwi’s autograph. Half a dozen employees who had seen his article blocked his path to the time clock. Yvans shook the front page of the Loomis Register at him. KIWI BIGTREE, “HELL’S ANGEL” the headline read, and below this, WORLD OF DARKNESS HERO.
One line four up from the bottom read: “And Kiwi Bigtree is no stranger to the water — he grew up on an ‘alligator farm’ in the swamp!”
A farm?
Two-thirds of the article was about Emily’s “tunnel of light.” Specialists were quoted next to their boxy photographs: a famous surgeon who claimed this tunnel was the happy fiction of a body deprived of oxygen, and a priest who called the light God.
Their debate on the cosmos was allotted one paragraph. Kiwi skipped it irritably, wondering: But where is my family?
Kiwi’s real name appeared in every paragraph, but with each successive mention the words “Kiwi Bigtree” seemed to grow more remote from his own understanding of himself until the newsprint looked like runes, glyphs, an obsolete equation for sound. Kiwi read the letters K-I-W-I B-I-G-T-R-E-E as if he were staring at two squads of ants.
The final line was a quote from a World of Darkness director, Mr. Frank Saleti, whom he’d never met before: “We couldn’t be prouder of his performance. Kiwi Bigtree is one of our finest employees.”
“And that girl you saved was on television, Kiwi, did you see it?” Yvans spun him toward the mounted television set as if Kiwi might appear there again this moment like a face in a mirror. “Channel five, how you call that show with the crazy lady? The large-butted one with hair like a squirrel’s tail? She seems like she is bipolar or something? Very hyper-acting?”
Kiwi knew the program. “Emily Barton was on Jenny Just Spills It?” This show was Loomis prime time and very popular with a certain histrionic-lady demographic. The eponymous host Jenny drank pots of coffee on air and often wept with her guests. Rescues were a regular feature. Kiwi had once watched Jenny interview a fire-truck dalmatian.
“What did Emily tell her? Did she use my real name?”
“That she had like a kind of a vision underwater.” Yvans grinned with all his teeth. “She says she saw an angel. You, Kiwi.”
Kiwi’s shoulders flew up around his ears.
Deemer and Floricio, two of Ephraim Lippmann’s thuggish buddies who had shunned Margaret Mead for weeks, now knocked into Kiwi Bigtree — in the friendly way — or punched him, in the friendly way, in the halls. “Saw you on TV, motherfucker! You’re big-time!” Kiwi smiled warily back at them.
Nina Suárez stopped him in the Flukes to gush, “Did you watch the news? It’s like we’re all famous now!” She’d seen her bike in the parking lot when the news crew camera panned out.
“You must feel wonderful!” strangers kept insisting. “You must feel …”
But from eleven to two fifteen Kiwi felt like puking, and when that feeling at last subsided he felt nothing.
When Kiwi was three or four months old, the Chief had photographed him in a wicker laundry basket on a sandy kink of land in the Pit. Kiwi wasn’t sure what the inspiration for this shot was: baby Moses meets Robert Louis Stevenson? Inside the photograph Kiwi had company: rat snakes and scarlet kings, thin ropes of them, and hatchling Seths with their yellow eyes bugged and wild around his clothes-pinned diaper. “My son didn’t cry at all,” the Chief told strangers at every opportunity. Everybody agreed that this was an auspicious image for a Bigtree wrestler. Baby Kiwi was wrinkled up with laughter, his pudgy fists swinging for the lens.
His parents had turned this image into a ten-by-fourteen-inch poster and sold hundreds of them to the tourists over the years.
“See, son?” The Chief liked to say, tapping the baby Kiwi in the poster. “What happened? You were brave as spit then.”