Like Pavlov’s Dogs
BY STEVEN R. BOYETT
[1]
“Good morning, happy campers!” blares the loudspeaker on the wall above the head of Marly Tsung’s narrow bed. “It’s another beautiful day in paradise!” A bell rings. “Rise and shine!”
Marly the sleepy camper slides out from her pocket of warmth. “Rise your own fucking shine,” she mutters as she rises from her pallet and staggers to the computer screen that glows a dull gray above her desk. The word UPDATE pulses in the middle of the monitor; she flicks it with a finger and turns away to find the clothes she shed the night before.
“Today is Wednesday, the twenty-ninth,” says her recorded voice. “Today marks the three hundred seventy-second day of the station’s operation.” Marly sniffs and makes a sour face at how pleasant her earlier self sounds. How enthused. “Gung ho,” she says.
“The structural integrity of the Ecosphere is ninety-nine point five percent,” the recording continues brightly, “with indications of water-vapor leakage in panels above the northern quadrant of the Rain Forest environment.”
“Christ,” says Marly, hating the daily cheerfulness of her own voice. She slides into faded, baggy jeans, then scoops on peasant sandals.
“Unseasonal warm weather in this region of Arizona has increased the convection winds from the Desert environment, and as a result the humidity has increased in the Rain Forest environment. Rainfall may be expected in the late afternoon. Soil nitrogenating systems are—”
Marly puts on a T-shirt, sees the neck tag pass in front of her, pulls the shirt partway off, and turns it around.
Leaving, she pauses at the door and looks back. Computer console on oak desk, dirty laundry, precariously stacked pop-music cassettes, rumpled bed. If someone were to come in here, someone who knew Marly but wasn’t on Staff, would they be able to figure out who lived here?
She looks away. The question is moot. The only people in the entire world who know Marly are the Ecostation personnel.
She slides shut the door on her own voice and heads down the narrow hall to one of the station’s two bathrooms.
FLUSH TWICE—IT’S A LONG WAY TO THE KITCHEN is scrawled in black felt-tip on the wall facing her. It’s been there a year now. More recently—say, ten months ago— someone wrote, below that, EAT SHIT. And below that— with a kind of prophetic irony—WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.
Marly never did think these were very funny.
She flushes—once—and heads for the rec room and the inevitable. Her waste heads for reclamation and the (nearly) inedible.
Four of the other seven station personnel are in the rec room ahead of her. Billtheasshole stands on the blue wrestling mat. He’s wearing his gray UCLA sweat suit again. If clothes could get leprosy, they’d look like that sweat suit. On a leather thong around his neck is a silver whistle. Marly thinks her usual idle morning thought about what it would feel like to choke Billtheasshole by that lanyard. She imagines his stern face purpling, his reptilian eyes dimming. Watching his tinfoil-colored eyes staring at the door, Marly invents Tsung’s law: The biggest shithead and the person in command can usually be shot with the same bullet.
Pale Grace sits glumly at an unplugged gaming table, drumming her nails against the dark glass tabletop. Marly shakes her head. A year now, and Grace still looks like someone desperate for a cigarette. She catches Marly watching her and ducks her head and twitches a smile.
Marly thinks of just staring at her to drive her even more crazy, but what’s the point?
Slumped against the heavy bag in the corner like a determined marathon dancer is Dieter. He smiles sleepily at her and scratches his full, brown beard. “Grow me coffee,” he says in his pleasant Rotweiler growl, “and I will unblock your pipes for the next year.”
She smiles and shakes her head. “No beans,” she replies. This has become their daily morning ritual. Dieter knows what that headshake is really for: He’s unblocked her pipes enough already, thank you.
Sitting barefoot in lotus on the folding card table is little carrot-topped Bonnie. She smiles warmly at Marly, attempting to get her to acknowledge the spiritual kinship that supposedly exists between them because Bonnie is into metaphysics and Marly is Chinese.
Marly makes herself look inscrutable.
In walk Deke and Haiffa, a mismatched set: him burly, her slight; him hairy, her smooth; him Texas beefeating good-ole-boy-don’t-shoot-till-you-see-the-black-of-their-skin, her Israeli vegetarian educated at Oxford. Naturally they are in love. Marly pays them little mind beyond a glance as they walk in holding hands like children and sit on the unraveling couch; Deke and Haiffa return the favor. They have become Yin and Yang, a unit unto themselves, outside of which exists the entire rest of the world. Proof again that there is such a thing as circumstantial love, love in a context, love-in-a-box.
Last in is Leonard Willard. Marly still spells his name LYNYRD WYLLYRD on the duty roster, long after the last drop of humor has been squeezed from the joke, which Leonard never got anyway. Leonard is the youngest staff member, always compensating for his inexperience with puppyish eagerness to please. But despite the fact that Leonard could have been one of the original Mouseketeers, Marly takes his constant good cheer as an indication of his bottomless well of self deception. The Ecosphere station is his world; everything outside it is… some movie he saw once. In black and white. Late at night. When he was a kid. He really doesn’t remember it very well.
Predictably, Billtheasshole blows his whistle the moment the last person walks in. “Okay, troops,” he says. “Fall in.” He likes to call the staff members “troops.” He would still be wearing his mirrored aviator sunglasses if Marly hadn’t thrown them into the Ocean.
She falls in behind the others as they line up on the wrestling mat to begin their calisthenics. Or, as Billtheasshole calls them, their “cardiovascular aerobic regimen.”
[2]
Sweetpea spits gum onto low-pile, gray carpet. “Flavor’s gone,” she explains.
Doughboy laughs. Shirtless, his hairy belly quivers. “Where you gonna get some more, girl?”
(“Sailor?” someone calls from the stacks upstairs. “Goddamn motherfucker—Sailor!”)
Sweetpea just shrugs and turns her back on Doughboy. She goes to join a group gathered behind one of the tall bookshelves. 0900: American History. One of the group pulls a book from a shelf and heaves it, then gives the finger to someone Doughboy can’t see. The hand is snatched back as a return salvo is launched from Engineering. The book tumbles across the floor and stops facedown like a tired bat near Doughboy’s left boot. Alloy Tensile Strength Comparisons. He doesn’t attempt to interpret the title, but bends down, picks up the book, and pulls Sweetpea’s gum from where it has stuck against a page that shows a graph. He brings fingers to chapped lips and blows. Fingers in mouth, then out, and wiped against blue jeans that have all the beltloops ripped loose. “Dumb bitch,” he says, and chews.
A loud slap from above. Doughboy looks up to see gangly Tex being thrown against a tall shelf. The shelf tips, but does not fall. Books do.
“What the fuck you yelling for, man?” Sailor stands above Tex, who has set a hand to his reddening cheek. Sailor remains there a moment, looking down at Tex with hands on hips, then bends and pulls Tex to his feet. He dusts him off and pats his shoulder. “Look, I’m sorry I hit you, man,” he says. “Only, don’t run around yelling all the time, okay?”
“Sure,” says Tex. His hand leaves his inflamed cheek, and he glances at his palm (for blood? wonders Doughboy). “Sure. But, I mean, I was just wonderin’, y’know? I mean—” He looks around the library. “What’re we gonna find here?”
Sailor frowns. He looks around. One hand tugs at the face of Mickey Mouse hanging from his right ear. When he looks back at Tex, he’s smiling wryly.
“Books,” he says.
Doughboy nearly chokes on his gum, he thinks this is so goddamn funny.
“What are you laughing at?” from above.
Doughboy only shakes his head.
Sailor shakes his head, too, but for completely different reasons. “Fuck,” he says. “I used to go to this school.” He comes down the stairs with two hardcover books tucked under one arm. “Yoo of A.”
Doughboy angles his head to see the titles; Sailor hands him the books. Doughboy holds one in each hand before him. His lips move. Furrows appear in his forehead.
Sailor taps the book in Doughboy’s left hand. “Principles of Behavior Modification,” he supplies. He taps the thicker in Doughboy’s right. “Radiation and Tissue Damage.” He clasps his hands behind him and rocks back and forth, beaming.
“You taking a test?”
Sailor shakes his head. “Nope. Deadheads are. I think I can teach them to find food for us. Real food.”
Doughboy makes a farting noise. “Shit. We can’t find real food; how you expect them to?”
“The name ‘Pavlov’ ring a bell?”
“No.”
Sailor sighs. “Why I stay with you limpdicks I will never know,” he says.
Doughboy stacks the books. “But how you gonna get—”
“God damn you, nigger!”
They turn at the shout from Engineering.
“That hurt, motherfucker!”
“Why you didn’t move, then, home?” replies American History. “What you been throwing at me the last—”
Shouts, something heavy thrown against a wall, a bookshelf falling against a bookshelf, scuffling, and cheers as American History and Engineering begin beating the living shit out of each other.
Sailor walks over to break it up. He takes his time, wondering why the hell he’s bothering in the first place. He oughta just let evolution sort ’em out. Well, he’s there now; he might as well do something to split ’em up.
It’s Cheesecake and Jimmy. Figures. Cheesecake’s got the upper hand, which is no surprise, and with no more than two or three blows he’s already made a mess of Jimmy’s face. White boys never could fight.
He leans forward to grab Cheesecake’s teak arm as the knotted fist at the end of it rises, but something stops him. Around them
(“You gonna let that nigger put a hurt on you, boy?”) are scattered newspapers. One lies spilled like a dropped deck of cards
(“Fuck ’im up! Yeah! Yeah!”),
fanned out to expose the Local section.
Dull slap of bone-backed meat on softer meat.
Sailor bends to pick up the paper.
(“Cheese, man, ease up. C’mon, man.”)
‘Space
Breaks
(“Motherfucker hit me on my head with a book. A big book, motherfucker!”)
Sailor turns the paper over.
Station’
New Ground
He unfolds the paper.
(“Ah! Fucking nigger! I’ll kill you, fuckin—”)
‘Space Station’
Breaks New Ground
Sailor frowns. An artist’s conception accompanies the article.
“Let him up,” Sailor says mildly, and they stop.
(Tucson)—Official groundbreaking ceremonies were held Monday morning in a tent 60 miles northwest of Tucson, to mark the beginning of construction on Ecosphere—a self-contained “mini-Earth” environment that may prove a vital step in mankind’s eventual colonization of other planets.
Budgeted at a “modest” $30 million, according to project director Dr. William Newhall of the University of Arizona Ecological Sciences division, Ecosphere will be a completely self-sufficient, 5-million-cubic-feet ecological station. The station will contain five separate environments, including a tropical rain forest, a savanna, a marshland, a desert, and a 50,000-gallon salt-water “ocean,” complete with fish. There will also be living quarters for the Ecosphere staff, scientific laboratories, livestock, and an agriculture wing—all on two acres covered by computer-controlled “windowpanes” that regulate the amount of sunlight received. Even Ecosphere’s electrical energy will come from the sun, in the form of arrays of solar-power cells.
“Ecosphere will be a sort of model of our planet,” says chief botanist Marly Tsung. “We’ll have a little of everything”—including several thousand types of trees, plants, animals, fish, birds, insects, and even different kinds of soil.
If all goes well after Ecosphere is constructed and stocked, eight “Ecosphereans” will bid goodbye to the outside world and enter the station’s airlock, and they will remain as working residents of this model Earth for two years.
Designed to reproduce and maintain the delicate balance of the Earth’s ecosystem in the midst of a hostile environment—presently the Arizona desert, but conceivably Mars by the end of the century— Ecosphere will also serve as an experiment in how future interplanetary colonists might get along working in close quarters for long periods. However, Grace Havland, team psychologist, does not foresee any problems. “We’re all self-motivated, resourceful, problem-solving people,” she says. “But we’re also very different from one another, with widely varied interests. I think that will help. That, and the fact that the station itself provides a lot of stimuli.” What could go wrong? In the first place, Eco-sphere’s delicate environment could suffer a
(turn to page 16D)
“I remember this,” says Sailor as the others gather around to see what’s got him so interested. Jimmy mops his face with his torn, white T-shirt. “They started building it when I was in school.” He turns to 16D. “They interviewed a bunch of these assholes before they went to live in it. There was this Chinese girl with blue eyes.” He whistles appreciative recollection and lowers the paper. Suddenly he frowns and hands the paper to Florida, who scans the article and studies the cutaway drawing of the Ecosphere (which is not a sphere at all). Florida’s dark eyebrows flex toward his hairline. One big-fingered, skull-ringed hand strays to his scarred leather hunting vest. He passes the paper around for the others to read and scratches the back of his neck under the red elastic band that holds his long pony tail.
Ed the Head squints at the article as if it is out of focus. His lips move as he reads, then he turns bleary eyes to Sailor. “So they, like, built some kinda space station in the middle of the goddamn desert. So fuckin’ what?”
“So now you know why no one lets you do the grocery shopping,” says Sailor. “You wouldn’t recognize an opportunity if it gave you a whip-cream enema.”
Ed fingers his matted beard. “Chill out, dude. Ain’t nobody fuckin’ with you.”
Sailor shakes his head. “It’s all just one big mystery to you, isn’t it?” He looks around at the group. “Jesus,” he says, and takes back the paper before leaving them.
“What he mad about?” Cheesecake rubs cut knuckles with two ragged-nailed fingers.
Florida folds his Popeye arms, making himself look twice as big as he already is. “That space station’s set up to go for years without any help from outside,” he says in his surprising melodic baritone. He pulls off his silver ear cuff and massages the outside curve of his ear. “They control their environment. They grow their own food. They raise their own livestock. Get it now?” His arms unfold. “Apples. Oranges. Chicken. Eggs. Bacon.”
“Oh, man…” from someone behind Jimmy.
“Aw, those dudes’re wasted by now,” says Ed the Head.
“Reefer,” adds Florida.
Ed the Head straightens. “No shit? Hey, Florida, man, you wouldn’t fuck with me, now…”
“How we know they still there?” demands Cheesecake. “They be walkin’ around dead and shit, by now.”
Florida smiles and replaces his earcuff. “We don’t know,” he says. He glances at Sailor and raises an eyebrow. “Yet.”
“Doughboy. Hey, Doughboy!”
Doughboy turns with a finger still up his nose. “Yo, Sailor,” he says mildly. He twists, pulls out—
“We still got that baby?”
—and puts the finger in his mouth. He withdraws it with a wet smack and shrugs. “I dunno. Maybe. You wanna go to the zoo an’ see?”
Outside the hurricane fence at the juncture of Optical Sciences and Physics: Sailor and Doughboy peer about the corral.
“I don’t see it,” says Sailor. “Maybe they ate it?”
“Nah. They don’t do that, much. Somehow they know the difference.” He bangs the fence with both palms.
Shambling figures turn.
“Hey,” shouts Doughboy. “Hey, you deadhead fuckheads!” He bangs harder. “ ’Course,” he says, more conversationally, watching their stiff approach, “they coulda tore it up. They’re kinda dumb that way.”
Watching them shuffle toward him and Doughboy, Sailor suddenly begins to giggle. He bends forward and his mouth opens, as if he has been kicked in the stomach. The giggle expands and becomes full-throated. He can’t control it. Eventually he drags a bare, anchor-tattooed forearm across one eye, saying “Oh, shit…” in a pained way, and wipes the other eye with the other arm. “Oh, Jesus. Whose idea was this?”
Doughboy grins and rubs a palm across sparse blond billy-goat beard. “You like it?” The hand lowers to hook a thumb in a front pocket of his Levi’s. “Florida ran across a T-shirt shop in the Westside Mall. He brought back a shitload of ’em. And a bunch of us got the deadheads outta of the zoo one at a time and put ’em on ’em.”
Sailor shakes his head in amazement.
A little old lady deadhead reaches the fence ahead of the others. Part of her nose is missing, and the rest flaps against one wrinkled, bluegray cheek in time with her sleepwalker’s gait. She runs face-first into the fence, then steps back with a vaguely surprised look that quickly fades. Hanging shapelessly about her upper body is a ridiculously large, blue T-shirt. I’M WITH STUPID, it reads, with an arrow pointing to her left.
Sailor begins to laugh again.
Doughboy is laughing now, too.
The dead old lady is joined by an enormous Hispanic deadhead with the figure of a bodybuilder. His skin is the color of moss. A strip of bone shows above his ear where a furrow of scalp has been ripped away. His arms and chest look over-inflated. He wears a tight, red maternity blouse. Centered over his bulging pectorals is:
BABY
↓
The deadheads make plaintive little noises as they reach like sad puppies for Sailor and Doughboy, only to regard the fence that blocks their hands as some kind of miraculous object that has inexplicably appeared in front of them.
There are twenty of them clustered around the fence now, purpled fingers poking nervelessly through the wide mesh.
“No baby,” says Doughboy. “But it wouldn’t be here anyway. Can’t walk yet.”
“Walk?” Sailor frowns. “It probably never will.” He regards the hungry drowned faces as he speaks. “I wonder if they age?”
Doughboy’s eyes narrow. “Baby doesn’t have to have been like that from the start. Coulda been born after everything turned to shit, then died an’ gone deadhead.”
“Yeah, but still—how would we know? Do they get older as time goes by?” He nods toward the fence. “Can a deadhead die of old age?”
Doughboy shrugs. “We’ll find out someday,” he says.
Sailor looks away from the fence. “Are you an optimist or what?”
Doughboy only snorts.
“Who’s the one by himself back there?” Sailor points. “He doesn’t move like a deadhead.”
“Whozzat? Oh, Jo-Jo? Yeah, he’s pretty fuckin’ amazing, ain’t he? He’s a regular Albert fuckin’ Einstein—for a deadhead, I mean. Quick, huh?”
The figure standing alone turns to face them. He wears a brown T-shirt with white letters that spell out HE’S DEAD, JIM.
Sailor’s frown deepens. “He’s watching us.”
“They all do that, man. We look like those big ol’ steaks in the cartoons.”
“No, I mean…” He squints. “There’s something going on in that face. His tabula ain’t quite rasa.”
“Yeah, what you said. Here—” Doughboy leaves the fence and goes to a plastic milk crate. He pulls out a disk that glints rainbow colors. “Cee Dee,” he says, grinning, and holds it up. “Michael Jackson. Thriller.”
In his other hand is a rock.
He steps to the left of the knot of deadheads who still claw vaguely toward them. He glances at Sailor and angles the compact disk to catch the sunlight.
“Jo-Jo,” he calls. “Hey—Jo-Jo!” He jumps (light on his feet, for a jelly-belly, thinks Sailor) and lobs the rock.
“Jo-Jo!”
hunger me jojo they call jojo and throw at me without hurt only eat and i with move them to jojo from their meat mouths i reach to hunger with light of hot above with bright the fence the hunger-others grab and pull but shining outside they hold the shining thing and forward i into the fence grab against press into my face and raise my hands in hunger not to the shining thing but to the hand that holds it in hunger jojo they say and i will eat
“He,” declares Sailor, watching the deadhead toss the rock it has caught from hand to hand, “is smarter than the average deadhead.”
Doughboy nods. “Fuckin’ A, Boo-Boo.”
[3]
Bill hangs around after the others leave, sweating from their cardiovascular aerobic regimen. They will disperse to attend to the many jobs that await them each day; maintaining the Ecosphere is a full-time job for eight people. And keeping those eight people in shape and responsive to the needs of the ecological station, maintaining their esprit de corps, making them understand their responsibilities to the station’s investors, to science—indeed, to the human race—is quite a burden. That’s why Bill is glad that he is the one in charge—because, of the eight, only he has the discipline and organizational abilities, the qualities of command, to keep them functioning as a unit. And—as a unit —they will persevere. He imagines he is a lifeboat captain, forcing the others to share their labor and rations, sometimes extreme in his severity and discipline. But when rescue comes, they will all thank Bill for running his tight little ship. Yes they will.
He goes to a locker and removes a French fencing foil. He tests the grip, slides into stance, and holds his left hand loosely above and behind his head. En garde. Blade to quarte. Block, parry, riposte. Lunge, hah! He is D’Artagnan; the wine of his opponent’s life spills upon the wrestling mat. Touché.
The pigs in their small pen near the corner formed by the human habitat and the agricultural wing are slopped by Grace. Of all the dirty work in the station she must perform (even though it is not her job to), the team psychologist finds working with the pigs almost pleasurable, and certainly less troublesome than working with Staff. Grace is a behaviorist, and a behaviorist will always work better with pigs than with people. The pigs in their uncomplicated Skinner box of a muddy pen are easier to direct and adjust than those upright pigs in their bigger, labyrinthian pen.
The ground darkens around her and she looks up at a cloud passing in front of the sun, distorted by the triangular glass panes above. She idly wonders how long it’s been since she went outside the station. She shrugs. What difference does it make?
She bends to pat Bacon’s globular head. She has named the pigs so that she will remember their prime function, to prevent her from becoming too sentimentally attached to them: Bacon, Fatback, Pork Chop, Hot Dog, Sausage, and Hambone. The pigs are wonderful: not only do they clear the quarter acre of land devoted to raising vegetable crops, and fertilize it as well, but they are astonishingly gregarious, affectionate, and intelligent animals. Which any farm girl knows—but Grace has devoted her life to the exacting science of manipulating human beings, and has only recently become devoted to the emotionally admirable pig.
If only the staff were as easy ...
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