Insect Dreams by Marc Estrin

Author:Marc Estrin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2002-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

23. The WOUND and the BOW

He awoke to

Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh,

And the southern smell of burning flesh

Maybe he wasn’t awake. That song going round and round in his flaccid sensorium, the southern smell of burning flesh and the southern smell of burning flesh of burning flesh . . . the six million six million strange fruit hangin the six million down giant nerve fibers six million burning flesh . . . fiber! fire!

He sprang out of his straw nest and flung open the door to the early morning kitchen. Henrietta Nesbitt, the head housekeeper, was standing, unflappable, grim, at the smoking door to the electric oven.

“Good morning, Gregor. You’re up early.”

“What’s burning? I smell something burning.”

“I’m burning the feather dusters. Go put something on.”

“What?”

“Go put something on. I don’t talk to strange naked males.”

“What? Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry.”

Gregor went back in his room and put on his kimono.

“I thought I smelled fire. What do you mean you’re burning the feather dusters?”

“Just what I said. I told the staff two months ago I wanted no more feather dusters. They just lift up the dust and throw it around to settle right down again. Vacuum cleaning only. We have the new Hoover vacuums. Do they listen? Even after they’ve been warned? So I’m burning the feather dusters.”

“Maybe they don’t use anything called Hoover. Is it the same Hoover?”

“No. I don’t know. In any case, it doesn’t matter. It’s ongoing insubordination.”

“It makes a terrible stinking.”

“That’s why I’m doing it at four-thirty in the morning. The smell should clear by the time the six-thirty shift arrives.”

“I thought it was—I don’t know what. In my dream. A lynching. Isn’t that strange? Then I thought it was six million piglets tossed into the fire.”

“If I were Mr. Wallace, I could never live with myself. Killing those pigs may be good economics, but what kind of a man . . .” She shook her head.

It is one of the more tasteless ironies of history that in 1933, and for half a dozen years after, the phrase “the slaughter of the six million” was connected to a most unkosher cohort of piglets that Wallace’s Department of Agriculture had ordered killed.

“I’m sorry if the smell disturbed you,” the housekeeper semi-apologized, “but the kitchen is not a place most people sleep. I forgot you were in there.”

“It’s good I get up. I have much to prepare for the children that come.”

“Yes, I do, too. Fifteen cots on the second floor. Toilet accommodations for seven in wheelchairs. Oxygen for three.”

“And I have stage to set up. Including somehow the appearance of a deus ex machina—and we have no machines.”

“What are they doing?”

“Sophocles’ Philoctetes.”

“I mean what do they need machines for? What kind of machines? We have plenty of machines. The machine shop can . . .”

“This is a play. They do a play.”

“Why does a play need a machine? What sort of play?”

“A Greek play.”

“Why don’t they do an American play?”

“This is a play about someone who can almost not walk.

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