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  More silence.

  “Look,” said Tom. “The eagle’s coming back.”

  It was headed right for the same cedar tree. “Oh shit,” Tom said.

  …Swoop.

  …Shriek!

  And off went Mr. Eagle with a second crow chick snack.

  Everyone kind of stared at each other. Then Claire’s daughter, Simone, eleven, came out on the deck. “Mom, what’s double anal? Howard said I should ask you.”

  My son, Howard, fourteen, was going to get a thrashing tonight, but thank God Simone arrived when she did, because it was very funny, and it broke the mood.

  “We’ll talk about it in the car headed home, sweetie.”

  Then Simone saw the eagle. “Mom! Dad! Look! An eagle!”

  Yes, our eagle was headed back to the tree.

  “Simone,” her mother ordered, “get back inside and watch some more TV.”

  “I want to see the eagle!”

  At this point, the youngest three children burst out the kitchen door, wondering what we were all looking at.

  “An eagle!” said Simone. “Up there!”

  “Cool!”

  Lucy then did something she’d once heard would distract people from something bad, which was to drop a large ceramic or glass object onto the floor. She deftly flicked the $300 Spode water jug onto the deck, where it shattered just as baby crow number three was plucked. It didn’t work.

  “Mom, that eagle just stole a baby chick!” Simone yelled.

  The three youngest children shrieked and burst into tears.

  “Fuck it,” I said, “I’m getting the scotch. Anyone want some?”

  All eight adults, Noah included, said yes.

  03

  Splenda

  MY NAME IS OLIVIA. I’m eighteen and I have cystic fibrosis, but I’m okay with it. I grew up in a scary farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. I say scary because my family is super-religious and I’m not—I never was—which has to be genetic or something. My parents believed God would fix my CF, and they only took me to the hospital when I genuinely couldn’t breathe. When I was fourteen I had a note prepared and slipped it to the ER nurse. Social services found a lawyer, Adelle, who took on my case pro bono, and she got me out of that scary hillbilly dump.

  I’m now into my second life, my real life. I’m realistic that it’s not going to be a very long one, and I’m okay with that. I live in a basement suite (not the best for CF—mildew) and I have proper medical care, and people come check in on me all the time. I may never again feel as free in my head as I do now. I’m drunk on freedom.

  My place is in a neighborhood that’s neither urban nor rural. The only time you ever hear about it is when news crews interview local parents who can’t believe whatever horrible new thing one of their children has done, things like throwing caribou heads off the freeway overpass. My neighborhood is like that street at the end of Carrie where cars drive backwards and bloody hands reach out from the soil to pull you to hell. I just saw Carrie for the first time last week. Go easy on me—I’m a pop culture blank. I have five thousand movies and TV shows to catch up on.

  I was born on 9/11, which freaked out my parents, who, I think, secretly viewed me as a demon child. On my tenth birthday there was all sorts of 9/11 anniversary buzz, but instead of throwing a birthday party, my parents took me to church in the strip mall beside the auto mall that had just closed down. I remember everyone staring at me like 9/11 was my fault. At the same time, they seemed to be hoping I’d reveal something divine and illuminating. When I turned thirteen, I made the mistake of saying 9/11 was an inside job—I didn’t even know what that meant—and a couple of pervy-looking pastors came and interviewed me for four hours. Another reason why I fled.

  But I try to forget about all that now. Imagine feeling 100 percent alive every moment of every moment of the day! Maybe that’s how animals feel. Or trees, even. I sometimes stare at the plastic bag tree visible from my apartment’s ceiling-height window and marvel that both it and I are equally alive and that there’s no sliding scale. You’re either alive or you’re not. Or you’re dead or you’re not.

  A drag queen named Trashe Blanche lives in the other basement suite here. I like her even more than my social worker. She comes over and runs the electric tumbler up and down my back to loosen up the mucus in my lungs. I have to do this sometimes twice a day, because it lessens the chance of airway infections. I’ve also been taking an antibiotic called azithromycin for years. It makes my burps taste like floor cleaner and I hate it and I want to be Alanis Morissette and get off antibiotics. I want to be part of the world—your world.

  Yesterday, out of the blue, Trashe gave me a pair of Lana Del Rey knee socks.

  She likes to take care of me, I think, just because she’s a nice person. Her boy name is Erik, and if Erik doesn’t shave for five days, he turns into a handsome overweight guy, but when he turns into Trashe, it makes the whole boy/girl thing confusing, because he/she’s equally convincing as both.

  Trashe is confused by me, too, always trying to figure out if I’m straight or not. I tell her I’m straight, because I am! But I also tell her that mostly I’m traumatized, because I was raised as a mandatory never-nude. (I just learned that term a month ago.) God, how embarrassing. I always figured I was going to be dead before I ever made it with a guy, so who I’m into was moot. I like it when my doctors are realistic with me, but I know they’re lying when it comes to my life span. They tell me I’ll live to thirty-five, but because my parents never allowed me treatment when I was younger, I lost probably a decade off my life from all the wear and tear inside my body. I suspect people talk about me the way they do about dogs: “Oh, you know, those large-chested breeds like Bernese Mountain dogs only make it to six if you’re lucky. Mutts make it to ten or eleven.” I’m one of those short-lived specialty breeds: “You know, those Olivias only go to thirty-five if you’re lucky.”

  Trashe says it would be a shame if I died a virgin, but she doesn’t want me throwing myself away on somebody like I’m a skank. “Skank” is another new word in my vocabulary, and I love it…skank! It sounds like what it is! The people upstairs from us are a meth-y tattoo artist and his girlfriend, who most definitely is a skank. I truly don’t think I’m a skank, but I don’t want to die a virgin, either.

  Still, the biggest pleasure of my day right now, besides catching up on all the movies I missed growing up, is stealing Splenda packets from fast-food places. Handfuls at a time. I have a drawer full of them and I like to stare at them—I want to have them near me. They’re the opposite of the house I grew up in: Scientific. Measured. Clean. And if I mix them with some water and swallow them with my antibiotics, my burps smell like cheap vodka instead of floor cleaner. When you’re me, you take what you can get.

  04

  Rhnull

  I MET MY HUSBAND, Steffan, because of my blood type, which is Rhnull. You pronounce it “R. H. Null,” like it’s a Hollywood director from the 1940s. Only about fifty people on earth are Rhnull, including me and my thirteen-year-old daughter, Kelli. In order to be born with Rhnull blood, two astonishingly rare mutations have to happen at the same time. You’re more likely to win $250 million in the Powerball lottery than to have our blood type. If nothing else, when I walk down the street on even the worst day, I can say to myself, Lorraine, your very essence is rare. You’re a unicorn.

  Of course, that’s total BS. Rhnull has never done anything for me except complicate my life. Universal donor blood doesn’t work on me so, for example, I’ve always driven wimpy cars so that I won’t be tempted to go too fast and crash. And I wasn’t allowed to ride a bike: What if I got hurt and needed a blood transfusion?

  At eighteen, when I was legally old enough to donate blood, all manner of doctors from around the world turned up on our doorstep. I knew they were coveting my blood for research purposes, but before they asked me for a donation
, they always tried to become my friend. Two doctors took me and my parents to swanky hotels for dinner, wooing us with luxury. Two others were so earnest I had to flee. (I never want to hear this line again: “You owe it to humanity.”)

  Then came Steffan, hot and moustachey and with a French accent. He was from a town called Montpellier in southern France, and he flew all the way just to see me. My parents had gone to Florida for a vacation, leaving me home alone, so it was only the two of us. There was genuine chemistry. I look back at eighteen-and-a-half-year-old me and cringe, but when it was happening, I thought I was queen of the world. Steffan made blood types sexy and fun. OMG, I just reread that previous sentence and I sound like a vampire, but it’s true. And after he proposed and I accepted, we drove around the country searching out other blood freaks. My parents were thrilled.

  On those trips I got to meet chimeras—people who aren’t at all what they appear to be. Like this lumberjack guy named Lars, from Spokane, fully equipped with beard and dick and balls, who was, according to his bloodwork, a woman. And supercentenarians, people older than 110, whose blood Steffan was studying to try to figure out how they got there. I felt like a member of some kind of superclub.

  After Steffan and I got married, I moved with him to France, and soon enough I was pregnant. Then Kelli was born with Rhnull too, which made me feel way less alone in the world. Life was good. Steffan was part of the international blood-brokering universe and he traveled a lot. Talk about an esoteric business. Depending on where you live, there are all kinds of rules on what you can do with your blood. In some places, selling your blood is likened to selling your body parts and is forbidden. In other places, it’s a free-for-all. It’s hard to explain, but blood is like diamonds: it’s worth nothing and a shit-ton at the same time. I was proud that Steffan kept roaming the globe searching for rare specimens, and I loved the French lifestyle and that my daughter, as soon as she could talk, was fully bilingual.

  On Kelli’s ninth birthday, it dawned on me that Steffan had somehow changed. It wasn’t a big, cosmic revelation. I was icing Kelli’s cake and I thought, Hmmm—Steffan spends more time away than he ever used to. That’s all, but it was definite. That night I tried calling him at the office but couldn’t get through, and he missed the birthday cake, which isn’t as big a deal in France as it is in the States, but still, come on. He came home late that night and said he forgot because he was zonked after flying back from Cairo. I told him he needed to travel less, and he agreed, but soon enough he was away from home more often than he was with us. Then money seemed to start rolling in, and we bought two new cars and a small, adorable cabin up in the mountains. Was our life suspiciously luxurious for a lab manager with a wife and one child? I’ll admit it: I was like Tony Soprano’s wife and I wasn’t yet ready to ask the tough questions. I also enjoyed our family holidays in Abu Dhabi and Cape Town, and wherever we went, I did as Steffan asked: I donated my blood.

  And then came the summer afternoon I was tending my kitchen garden, which, in the south of France, was a marvel to behold. The rosemary alone! I was looking for a chicken manure fertilizer I’d bought a few weeks back and went out to the small barn that served as our garage. I walked directly in on Steffan handing an insulated cooler to a man in return for a wad of euros, like we were in a mafia movie. There was no possible excuse for this.

  After Steffan’s “client” was gone, we met in the kitchen. Out the window I could see Kelli bouncing on the trampoline with her friends. “Steff,” I asked, “I’ve been donating blood at your request to do my bit for science, but was money the actual reason?”

  He took too long to answer. Steffan had evolved into a black marketeer in blood, and there are an astonishing number of very rich and very sick people in the world who will pay almost anything for rare blood types, or for blood from people with specific antigens or mutations that protect them from AIDS or malaria or…you name it.

  “Steffan, why did you marry me?” I asked.

  05

  Thong

  THERE’S THIS JOKE about 9/11 that you’re not supposed to tell because you still can’t make jokes about 9/11, but I’m going to tell it anyway.

  Knock knock.

  Who’s there?

  9/11.

  9/11 who?

  You said you’d never forget.

  I was asleep with the flu for all of 9/11 and only woke up hours after the attacks were over. I’ve noticed that a lot of people lie about where they were when 9/11 happened. Unemployed West Coast night owls were all magically awake at 6:45 a.m. on September 11. “And then a friend phoned me to say a plane crashed into the North Tower”—(BTW, why the hell would anyone do that?)—“and then just as I turned on the TV news, the next plane hit the South Tower!” I’ve heard this same story from so many people, I wonder if what’s really happening here isn’t so much a cosmic lie as it is some kind of necessary myth we need to tell ourselves so we feel like one of the gang. Super-FOMO.

  You can’t figure out who’s speaking here yet, can you? Am I male or female? Am I old or young? Am I in a burka? Am I in a wheelchair? Or am I an average guy named Logan who sells Roundup glyphosates and is currently wearing a raspberry-red thong bikini under my jeans because I like the way it makes me feel like a hot teenage girl?

  Well, yes, that last one is me. Hi, I’m Logan. I sell poison for a living. As a consequence, I have had to learn how to lie to people: “This stuff is harmless! It’s practically a vitamin!”

  Here’s another universal lie—maybe you’ve heard it yourself. Ask anyone you know how their trip to Las Vegas went and they will all say, “You know, I don’t really gamble much, but before leaving for the airport I played the slots one last time and won [always] $150.”

  I don’t know about you, but when I go to Las Vegas, any money I put into a slot machine instantly disappears into a deep, flaming chasm of dead wealth. Yet everyone else makes $150, sometimes even $200, before cabbing to the airport. This one lie is so universal that it makes me wonder if it is encoded in our reptile brain.

  But wait—I bet your brain froze back there after you read the words “raspberry-red thong bikini.” I can understand that, especially combined with “feel like a hot teenage girl.” I think a lot of you now assume I’m gay, but I like to think of myself as a hetero fuck-machine. Surprise!

  Women go insane over the thong. Honestly, if you’re some poor incel out there, just pop into Forever 21’s lingerie department, buy a few thongs, then hit the bars wearing lowrider jeans so gals can see the strap at the top of your butt. Do it, bro!

  My older brother’s a gay drag queen. No thong for him. He has to duct tape his dick into his butt crack for hours on end while wearing wigs that roast his skull like a toaster oven. And he won’t lift anything heavier than a family-sized tin of Beefaroni so he doesn’t get “man arm.”

  Usually, in a family of male children, it’s statistically the younger brothers who are gay, but Erik was the eldest of five boys and our only Froot Loop. (He’s okay with me saying Froot Loop, BTW.) We even tried to pun on that to create his drag name—Froot de Loop? Not so good. In the end, Erik went with Trashe Blanche.

  The rest of us brothers are beanpoles, but Trashe is 125 pounds overweight. She looks like one of those women in horn-rimmed glasses in those old Far Side cartoons. She figures she’ll spend the rest of her life “circling the continent performing in dive bars and couch surfing, until I die from type 2 diabetes compounded by a sad heart that never even got a chance to be broken.”

  Trashe wants nothing more than to not be alone, but she created this fierce drag persona that I think scares people away before they get to know her. Me? Forget being with someone else—for now. I’m way too into sex, and I don’t “get” monogamy, and I don’t get “forever and ever.” I see people throwing marriages away because someone slept with a personal assistant or a tennis pro. Why would you do that? You’re so morally superior that yo
u can’t handle a fling? Grow up. Not everyone wants to be who they’re supposed to be 100 percent of the time. Everyone has hidden selves just waiting to pop out. It’s who we are.

  So, remember what I said about knowing how to lie because I sell poison? There’s also a truth I haven’t told, which is that twenty-one years ago, I killed a guy. Another thing you weren’t expecting, right?

  There was blood all over the place—mine and his—but I got away with it. And everything would still be fine if Trashe hadn’t let it slip at the Christmas dinner table that she’s sent her DNA off to 23andMe. “I want proof positive I was born into royalty and that my current life is one great big swapped-at-birth mix-up.”

  So I’m waiting for my doorbell to ring one day.

  06

  Theme Park

  HOW DID WE MEET?

  To answer that, I have to tell you about my old job. I worked as a mascot at a theme park, and no, it wasn’t Disney World. At Disney World they at least put electric fans inside mascot costumes so you don’t die of heat stroke in the summer. My park was owned by a Korean consortium on financial life support. No fans for us. I worked there for five years. It was only supposed to be a part-time job to get me through college, but after I learned that the world has no interest in my thoughts on Chaucer, it became full-time.

  I’m six foot two, so I played the tall characters, which for me meant alternating between Rooster Rick and Polo the Dog. Please note the cheesiness of the park’s mascots.

  One thing I liked about being a mascot was that, inside my costume, I could do whatever I wanted and people would think it was just wacky Rooster Rick being wacky and in character. Most of the time it was me trying not to gag from the costume’s interior stench of death, given they only got dry-cleaned once a month. The inner lining reminded me of this abandoned red sofa in the lot behind my high school where all the seniors would go every night and fuck their brains out.