Monsters

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANITA ZOTKINA

HE WAKES, AS HE SO OFTEN DOES, moments before his alarm is to ring. He reaches to the nightstand to turn it off. He hears the soft sound of his wife's footfalls as she makes her way across the still-dark room, hears the door open, then sees her silhouette against the slightly-less-dark hall. The door shuts again. She's on her way to wake the children, and then to the kitchen to make breakfast for all.

He is filled, as he so often is, with a profound gratitude for this life he has been given, for the family he shares, for the simple elegance of their daily routines, for his ability to work and to provide food and shelter for them, especially during this time of sacrifice.

He reaches again to the nightstand, this time to turn on the light. Then he sits, and slides his feet from under the covers and over the side of the bed. He stands, walks to the wardrobe, opens it. He dresses.

By now he can hear the children, their sleepy voices drifting through the walls.

* * *

He's at the kitchen table. The scents of coffee, sausage, and eggs permeate the air. The children file in, sit in their accustomed chairs. His youngest son's shirt is buttoned wrong, so he points this out. The child fixes the error with his tiny hands.

An overweight, graying dachshund waddles into the room. The man looks at his children, ostentatiously checks to make sure his wife's back is turned, winks, then hands the dog a piece of sausage.

His wife says, "I know what you just did."

The children giggle.

She turns to face him, says, "We shouldn't be wasteful. We must be grateful for what we have."

"I am," he responds, and he thinks again about his good fortune to be able to provide all this for his family. He asks his children, "Are you grateful?"

"Yes, papa," they say.

He takes a bite of eggs, chews carefully, swallows. He looks at the dog again, then asks, "Where's Schatzi?" Normally their two elderly dachshunds are inseparable.

His wife responds, "She can't get up this morning." A look passes between them. She continues, "I think it may be time."

Another look between them. His expression warns her not to discuss it in front of the children.

Message received, she says, brightly, "But maybe some sausage will convince her to get up." She looks at the children, "Who would like to give Schatzi a treat?"

All of the children raise their hands.

* * *

He makes the short walk to work. The sun is not yet up. There was a wind in the night, so the air is clean. One of the few things he does not like about his work is that sometimes the smell offends him. But not on mornings like this.

* * *

The transition from home to work doesn't come for him the moment he steps out of the door of his home, a villa provided on site. Nor does it come the moment he walks into his administration building. It does not come as he greets those who work for him. Nor does it come when he exchanges pleasantries with his personal secretary. It does not come even when he walks into his office.

It comes as he sits in his chair. That is the moment each day when the awesome responsibility he carries strikes him anew, the responsibility he carries as commander of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

* * *

This is what happens.

You don't panic when the first entrance is sealed. There's no reason to panic: that's why there are multiple exits. You move to the next exit. It also is sealed. You're still not concerned. Of all places, this is where you're supposed to be safe. Nonetheless it is troubling that two entrances are sealed. You check out a third, and a fourth. All sealed.

You're not the only one to notice. Many of the younger members of your community are confused, discomfited. You and some of the others of older generations reassure them, the same way members of older generations among your kind have always reassured those younger when they're scared. You say again and again, "It's going to be okay."

They start to calm. Then one of your daughters — she's nothing more than a pup, really — complains of nausea. Her grandmother — your mother — rushes to her side, strokes her head and back, talking to her constantly. Then one of your nephews doubles over, begins moaning from abdominal cramping. Your sister hurries to him. The nephew lets go with explosive diarrhea. This does not deter her from comforting him.

You find the father of your children. He opens his mouth as if to speak, and blood gushes out. You touch his hair, whispering to him. Blood pours from his nose, from his other orifices. He cramps, then begins to convulse. He tries to speak. You say to him softly, "Don't talk. You're going to be okay. You're going to be okay."

You're having a hard time holding down your own panic. Around you, your friends and family are losing control of their bodies. They are vomiting, defecating, bleeding all over themselves. Some are moaning or keening. A few are screaming. You want to attend to them, but you need to help your beloved.

And then his body stiffens, seizes, seizes, and seizes again. Something shifts inside of him. Then it leaves, and he is finished.

You turn away from him and toward the chaos that until very recently was your community. You bark out commands, telling this one to take care of the young, that one to find a way out. You don't know what is sickening and killing everyone. You just know there must be a relationship between the forced sealing of the entrances and the deaths that have now followed.

Those around you are vomiting, convulsing, seizing. Those who can still control their limbs are clawing at the walls. You move from individual to individual, trying to calm those you can, comfort those you can't. You keep saying to anyone who will listen, "It's going to be okay. We will get out of here."

And then you feel it. Your mouth begins to water, and the first wave of nausea rolls through you. You force it down, but it returns. Your chest tightens, and in that moment you know — as you've known all along, but would not allow yourself to say, even to yourself — how this will end. You begin to vomit blood, and you desperately wish that there was someone here to touch and kiss and stroke you, someone to whisper to you over and over, "It's going to be okay."

* * *

She knocks on his office door, hears him say, "Enter." She does. She's about to speak when his phone rings. He has set his ringtone to play "Tears of a Clown."

She likes the song, but hates that he's using it. She hates most everything about him, from his intentionally ugly hipster glasses to his expensive suits to the smug superiority he seems to show at every moment.

Last week his ring tone was the opening vocals of "Afternoon Delight." She knows he chose it to convey the message to anyone within hearing range that he can choose a crap song and still be cool. He pretends he doesn't care what other people think, but he's so empty that his entire persona is based on his perception of how other people perceive him.

So far as she can tell, he doesn't have a genuine character, or anything resembling an interior life, but only a shell he puts forward to everyone he sees. His only redeeming quality, she thinks, is his ability to make money. But, she also thinks, the ability to make money makes up for more or less every sin. She thinks it's interesting, too, that making money is the only area of his life where he actually doesn't care what other people think. He's going to make it, and if someone doesn't like it, well, they can fuck right off.

He glances at his phone to see the number, gives the screen a tap, then puts it to his ear. He says, "Speak."

Fucking typical, she thinks.

A silence as the caller say something, then she hears her hipster boss, the moneymaker, say, "You killed them? Good."

More silence.

"All of them?"

Short silence.

"Why not?"

Long silence.

"Don't give me that shit. You were hired to kill them all. We need them all dead."

Silence.

"I don't understand why anyone cares either. They're vermin. They're in the way. They have to die. It's not like they're humans, and Jesus, even if they were ... But they're not. Kill the rest of them."

Silence.

"I don't want excuses. I don't hire you to tell me what to do, and I don't hire you to tell me what's possible. I don't hire you to tell me what's legal. I hire you to figure out how the fuck to do what I tell you."

She's only half listening. She'd be hard pressed to say how many times she's had this same experience, standing in front of this same desk, listening to him speak on his phone, telling whomever is on the other end that he will brook no impediment to making money.

He ends the call without a good-bye and palms it down hard on his desk. He looks at her, says, "Prairie dogs. Fucking prairie dogs. Holding up a multimillion dollar mall. Can you fucking believe it?"

She asks, "How do they kill them?"

Moneymaker makes a sprinkling motion, says, "Drop in poison pellets, seal up the dens." Then he does a double-take before saying, "The fuck you care? They're in the way."

* * *

This is the moment you live for. Not this one, right now, but the one you know is coming soon. You know it's coming soon because it's that time. You know it's that time because everyone else does, too. You can tell by all the jostling: everyone's trying to get in position.

"Hey," you say to one of the jostlers. "Quit poking me." You poke her back. She pokes you back. You poke her back. This could go on for a long while, especially when — as is nearly always the case — the light has given one or both of you headaches. But this time it dies down after a few pokes.

You are perfectly aware that things could be worse: you could be stuck in a different part of the room, where you couldn't see the moment you live for. Then things would be really bad.

You look across the room and stare intently at the door in the otherwise featureless wall. You see that many of the others are doing the same. You know this is the moment they live for, too. You know this because all of you have talked about it endlessly.

* * *

Your best friend died last week. She was also sometimes your worst enemy, but that was to be expected, all things considered. Sometimes she just had to poke you, and then you'd poke her back. Sometimes when your or her head hurt from the lights this could go on through almost an entire light cycle. Sometimes you were both almost bald from all the poking.

She loved to talk. She especially loved to talk about the moment you all live for, about how she knew what it was like beyond the door. She told everyone about it, whether or not they listened. Often you didn't believe her, not only because so many of the stories she told seemed frankly impossible, but also because she was, if you're honest with yourself, completely insane.

Not that you can blame her for that, either. Who wouldn't go a little crazy?

* * *

After she died, her body remained for several light cycles before any of the Others took her away. You tried to tell the Others she was dead, but they didn't listen to you. They never do. Some of your friends — you guess you'd call them friends, though you're not sure you like them all — think the Others never listen because they're deaf. But you're pretty sure they can hear. You just don't know if they're capable of intelligent response to anyone but themselves. There is some debate among your friends as to whether they're intelligent at all. You think they are. You think they just don't care.

* * *

This is the moment you live for. The door opens, and one of the Others enters. Once inside, the Other closes the door.

That's it.

The moment has nothing to do with the Other, except that he is the instrument that brings the moment you live for: the far-too-brief vision of what lies beyond the door.

You see what your best friend called dirt, and beyond that what your best friend called grass, and beyond that what your best friend called a tree, and above that what your best friend called sky. You burn these into your memory so you can see them again and again through the hellish monotony — broken only by pokes and more pokes by those who are too close to you — that is the interminable light cycle.

* * *

Here is what your best friend said to you. She said that she herself once lived beyond the door. Not here, beyond this door, but somewhere else entirely. She was always vague as to where and how this happened, which is one reason you never believed her. And why would she have traded "dirt" and "sun" for this?

Once, your best friend told you that she had never actually been outside herself, but had heard stories about what lay outside passed down generation to generation, mother to daughter. That didn't make any sense either; what's a generation, and what's a mother?

There's no such thing as a mother. You've never heard such nonsense. You suspect that either she was nuts — and once again who could blame her — or that she had a great imagination, or that she had heard these stories from a hen who heard them from a hen who heard them from a hen who ...

As such the stories had become mythic. And most importantly they passed the time, so you listened. She said that beyond the door you can walk as far away as you would like from everyone else, and she said that you can stretch your wings all the way from tip to tip. You told her you didn't believe her, and that you didn't believe that was possible. Your muscles won't even go that far, you said.

She also said she took baths in dirt, and threw it all over herself. You asked her what dirt is. She said she loved to eat grass, and you asked her about grass, too. She said you could roost in trees. You asked her to explain the word roost as well as the word trees. She loved the wind, she said.

You just stared at her, unblinking.

She said her favorite thing in the world was the sun, that it was bright and warm and yellow and it moved across the sky. Whenever she'd say that you'd always tell her that was too much, and then you'd poke her, but not real hard, so she'd know you didn't mean it.

Then she'd say that no, her favorite thing in the world wasn't the sun, but her mother.

"What's that word?" you'd say.

She'd say that when you were a baby your "mother" would talk to you and teach you things. And when you were scared she'd put you under her wing and hide you with her body.

When she'd say this you'd always tell her that you didn't want to hear such nonsense, but she always knew that really you did. And she said there were roosters, whatever they were, who could be a pain and who were always prancing around and trying to impress everyone, but whom she was also occasionally glad to know.

She also said that sometimes the roosters were noisy, especially just before the "sun came up," whatever that means, and that the roosters always claimed it was their singing that caused the sun to rise. She said she never believed that at the time, but since she's been here she hasn't seen a rooster, and she hasn't seen the sun, so maybe they were right.

You didn't respond to that at all, because even more than the other crazy stories, you couldn't imagine what this story described.

But it's a nice dream, isn't it? The story helps you survive another light cycle, and that's really all that matters.

* * *

The lights are off, and the room is as quiet as it ever gets. Most of the hens are sleeping. Hen 10 in cage A-438 (Sector A, Row 4, Cage 38) is asleep. She's dreaming of something her friend had called the sun. In the dark warehouse, her skin twitches slightly as she dreams she feels wind on her body. In this dream she stretches her wings as far as they will stretch, and she dances in the dry dirt. She dreams of a mother who covers her with her wings and protects her from all bad things. But even as she sleeps, a part of her knows she is dreaming, and that part of her hopes that this sleep lasts forever, that she never again wakes up.

* * *

The newscaster reads from her teleprompter: "Egg farmers are fighting for their lives as the public considers a referendum to ban the safe, humane, and essential caging of egg-laying hens. This referendum is not only an assault on farmers but on poor Americans, who will no longer have access to this inexpensive and nutritious part of their diet. Further, because poor Americans often receive federal assistance, all taxpayers will be 'shelling out' money on this boondoggle of a bill ..."

* * *

You're tired. Really tired. You can't wait to get home. You know that's a cliché, but right now you're too tired to think in much other than clichés. You hurt all over. You're hungry. You want to sleep. You've been through so much. The only thing keeping you going is that you don't have much farther to go now.

And you're lonely. You've heard stories that there used to be thousands of you, and then hundreds, and even a few years ago you remember there were a couple of dozen. Last year there were five. This year three started the trip, and now there's only you.

The trip has been full of disappointments. It seems every trip your entire life has been full of disappointments. Things changing in ways you don't like. That's one reason you're so tired and hungry. You've heard stories that generations ago the trips used to be fun, an annual adventure, a sort of vacation. Travel a little, stop and rest and play around, sample the local foods, and then after you've slept off your full belly, get the travel bug again and head on up the coast. That's not to say it wasn't tiring, even back then. But everyone knows that traveling is always tiring, even when it's fun.