Swamplandia!

CHAPTER EIGHT. Kiwi’s Debt Increases

The employees of the World of Darkness got paid on a biweekly basis. On his third Friday in Loomis County, Kiwi queued up outside a small office catty-corner to the Jaws, waiting to ask a question about his paycheck. He whistled the new hit single “Haters Will Hemorrhage Blood!” (Incredibly, this turned out to be a love song. It had a violin in it. Very popular that year, Vijay informed him, at area proms.) Kiwi undid a triple knot on his shoelace that had been bugging him for weeks, which felt as satisfying as solving a crime. A bunch of kids were shrieking as they slid down the Tongue.

“We love the World!” an entire family screamed in unison — this was the catchphrase from the World of Darkness commercials. People liked to scream it down the slide from the top of the Tongue, as if to confirm via sonar that they were at the location they’d seen advertised on their TV screen. Kiwi craned around to watch their descent. The mom and tiny daughter were wearing matching skirted yellow bathing suits and foam Whalehead hats. Mere seconds after they vanished inside the Leviathan ride, another family appeared at the top of the slide, their wide buttocks pancaked and drawn upward by the cushioned ruby pads.

Watching people board the ride and get released down the chute was like watching an eerie factory assembly line. Real whales, Kiwi had to believe, were less orderly but more expedient about their consumption of plankton. There were no lines winding around outside their great teeth, no hand stamps and tickets; the real whales just opened wide and destroyed.

At the apex of the Tongue, the ride operators came running out like bandits to pluck the eyeglasses and rings and wristwatches from the startled riders; you couldn’t wear these things into the deep inner pools of the Leviathan. You couldn’t have heart arrhythmias, spinal injuries, psychoses. You couldn’t have a baby growing inside you, either — not if you wanted to plunge headlong into the Jacuzzi steams of the Leviathan! No pregnancies! No stowaway futures! A chubby new hire in a tight WORLD OF DARKNESS SECURITY shirt was escorting a pregnant woman in a pink-and-blue-striped bathing suit down a side stairway just now. “Twins” he mouthed to Kiwi when their eyes met across the long hallway, rolling his eyes, as if he had just caught a nervy shoplifter.

“My mother had a pregnancy that turned into a cancer!” Kiwi shouted back to him, confident that over the roar of the Tongue’s salivary jets he would not be understood. Then he pushed a fist to his mouth, stunned. Really, what the hell was wrong with him? (She wanted a baby and she got cancer instead! Isn’t that funny …) The new hire grinned, shook his head. He waved good-bye before disappearing down the stairs with his ward.

The full length of the Leviathan experience, a.k.a. “Digestion,” took twenty-three minutes. Lost Souls dropped seventy-six feet from an elevated chute into the first of a series of domed funnels, pools, and bowls meant to replicate the twists and turns of a labyrinthine whale’s stomach. Kiwi had never been on the Leviathan ride himself, in part because it would have required changing into a bathing suit, in semipublic. And Kiwi, according to his first paycheck, couldn’t afford a bathing suit, or any suit. Or food.

This office had a marmalade-tinted window that opened onto a dark, box-strewn artery of the World. Kiwi wondered how the payroll guy could stand to exist here. You could go a full day inside this part of the Leviathan without seeing the sun. Kiwi made sure to take breaks with Vijay on the roof. Some days he’d go running into the parking lot at noon, nostalgic for clouds and shadows. Finally the door swung open.

“Good morning! How can I help you, ma’am?” the payroll manager asked. He had the crew cut and the saturnine blue eyes of an ex-marine. He introduced himself as Scott, and Kiwi thought he looked crisp and official compared to the grunts on the World’s payroll.

Kiwi hadn’t cut his hair in a while; it hung in glossy waves over his ears.

“My name is Kiwi Bigtree,” he said politely, and when that didn’t help he tugged at the puffy brimstone design on his collar and added, with a note of quiet apology, “I’m, uh, I’m a guy?”

“I’m sorry?” Scott the payroll manager said. He was linking paper clips into a chain that ran across his desk. Scott was alternating colors: blue clip, red clip, green clip, white clip, repeat. They hung over the side of his desk and trailed into his wastepaper bin, swaying hypnotically. How much does Scott get paid per hour? Kiwi wondered.

“Well, you see …” Kiwi realized that he was unconsciously craning his neck to display his sizable, indubitably male Adam’s apple. Evolutionary psychology: he’d read about this. A vestigial, animal impulse to impress his superior. In fact the payroll manager was just a kid himself, a twenty-something in a glittery red World jacket, his black-and-magenta dress socks peeking beneath his ordinary slacks. He had a framed degree from Volmer State, economics BA, 3.2.

(Later, on the rooftop, Kiwi would try to gauge the weirdness of his encounter with the payroll manager by relaying it to Vijay: “I wish you had seen that jacket they make him wear … bro. He went to college! I saw his degree. Do you think he is embarrassed to be wearing that?”

“You think you know everything about everyone? Please. You don’t know shit about shit, Margaret. Maybe the payroll manager loves to dress up like in that jacket. Maybe that’s the reason he even went to college — maybe he, like, can’t wait to put it on in the morning. Maybe he sets a fucking alarm, bro …”)

“There’s been some mistake here.” Kiwi smoothed the check on Scott’s desk; according to the computer-generated invoice that accompanied it, Kiwi had worked three sixty-hour weeks inside the Leviathan and yet he somehow owed the Carpathian Corporation, the World’s parent company, $182.57.

“Well.” He wheeled his pencil around the well of one freckled ear. “Well! That’s what I’m here for, Mr. Bigtree. Let’s do the tally together.”

Lunches, those Jumbo Magma sodas that only left you thirstier and the eye-watering Hellspawn Hoagies? They weren’t free and neither was his dormitory rent.

Water, AC, electricity, et cetera, mumbled the payroll guy without looking up at Kiwi’s face. Instead he stared sternly down at his computer keyboard, as if he were trying to draft a letter with no hands.

Seventy dollars had been deducted for his flame-emblazoned World of Darkness uniform, Scott informed him.

“Wait, they made me pay for this shirt?” Kiwi stared down at his chest, which glowed like a barbecue coal. “Is that hopefully against some law?”

This uniform was starchy, ill-fitting. It had a huge puffy flame exploding out of it. “Like a blister,” Kiwi told Scott. Kiwi was no expert, but it seemed like the World of Darkness employees should be the ones receiving extra money to wear these suits. Yvans liked to jog around the ladies in his outfit and blow into an invisible whistle. “Margaret!” he’d shout. “Look! I am the referee for a girls’ soccer game in hell!”

Forty dollars had been deducted as well, a “processing” fee for his ID badge and locker assignment.

The lock on his locker cost him $5.02.

Kiwi was paying city and state taxes now.

He was also, unwittingly and against his wishes, saving for retirement.

“Oh,” Kiwi said, and “Thank you.” Terrific. He smoothed the cotton flames on his seventy-dollar shirt with the flats of his hands and left the office. I’m turning out to be a pretty shitty Redeemer here, he thought. He hadn’t yet made a penny to send to Swamplandia!