CHAPTER SIXTEEN. Kiwi Bigtree, World Hero

The reporters talked him into hair and makeup. Some TV crew assistant had deflated his water-logged trunks by pounding on Kiwi’s actual ass, cheerfully conversant as he did this — as if Kiwi were somehow not attached to it, the ass. Great tinfoil sheets and lunar caps of light went up around the lifeguard station. The World of Darkness had closed an hour before and without the crowds the Lake of Fire felt newly eerie, water jetting from its sides in bruise-colored clouds. Kiwi flinched; a short, ebullient male stylist from the Loomis Register was combing the snarls from his hair. His mother used to powder his cheeks by the Gator Pit, using some sort of drugstore magic to transform her acned son into a wrestler of Seths. This is fraudulent, Mom! This is a dubious project. He’d pumped up his anger with big language like a bicycle tire.

“We think this might run on the front page, love.”

The front page of a mainland newspaper! He hadn’t allowed himself to be photographed for the Swamplandia! brochures for years; in the most recent one he was fourteen, wearing his sister Osceola’s red ribbon around his forehead and furious about it, a feather sticking up behind his head like a middle finger.

The stylist licked his thumb and tamped down Kiwi’s owlish eyebrows. “Gawd! Stubborn! We don’t want you looking like a warlock in the photograph, do we?”

“Well, I guess you’re going to need more gel, then.” Kiwi rubbed at his forehead.

The newspaper photographer made him pose in his trunks, which hung flabbily down his chicken legs, still loaded with water. He stood shivering on the cement edge of the Lake of Fire. Emily Barton curled herself against Kiwi’s shoulder and arranged her hair so that it curled in a pretty raven lock around Kiwi’s right nipple. Kiwi didn’t want to touch it, the raven lock. It seemed to have its own important agenda down there. Kiwi badly wanted a T-shirt. The stylist, meanwhile, was circling Emily’s head with the hairspray like a maniacal bug exterminator.

“Emily, babe, don’t move? We want that hair to stay put.”

Emily kept tugging one black strap and wiggling closer to Kiwi, until he could feel the dampness of her black swimsuit pressed against his side — she, too, was still wet from the rescue.

“Thank you for saving me,” she told him breathily. “For saving my life.

“Sure. I mean, no problemo.” Kiwi felt a little sick.

“Emily, babe, when you stare at him? Can you look a little more, you know—” The photographer made a noise like a popped balloon and Emily shuffled her hair back, nodded like she understood this directive perfectly. “Like: wow. I am so happy to be alive. Like, give this man a medallion.”

Kiwi straightened at the word “man.” Instinctively, he clenched his pectorals.

I didn’t save her, Kiwi was going to answer honestly if the question came up. They were cheek to cheek, and he could feel all the smiling muscles tensing in her face.

“Bag-tree,” a female reporter asked him, “how do you spell that?”

“It’s Bigtree. As in Hilola Jane Bigtree,” he said. And it felt wonderful to say it, like swinging an ax into the glass case of his Loomis identity. “I belong to the Bigtree tribe of Swamplandia!”

“I’m sorry?”

“B-I-G-T-R-E-E. We do an alligator-wrestling show? Have you seen that billboard on I-95? Big guy in a headdress?”

Her smile went vast and glassy.

“Channel seven came out a few years back to film a segment about us? We advertised in all the local papers. We call the alligators Seths,” he added, as if this fact might spin some tumblers for her.

The pen hovered an inch above her pad.

“Okay, give me that, I’ll write it for you,” Kiwi said. “Can you at least put her name in there? It’s H-I–L-O-L-A.”

Kiwi started talking faster. He heard his voice taking on the Chief’s ringleader intonations. This is how I can help them. If he could pull it off. He pictured an article that would drive the mainlanders seaward like lemmings, pushing them deep into the swamp, toward his father and his sisters and the patient Seths, toward Hilola Bigtree’s glass tomb in the museum, a hundred new tourists clutching dollars, a hundred new mourners come to pay his mother the tribute that counted.

“… and that’s why I’m working this job at the World of Darkness in the first place …” Kiwi heard himself urgently quoting his father. “… we’re just sizing up the competition, building capital for our Carnival Darwinism expansion. I’ll level with you, ma’am, Swamplandia! is the superior park. Best value, biggest thrills. Catch the late show, Saturdays. Alligators! Starry nights! It’s like Van Gogh meets Rambo. We’re got ninety-eight true-life monsters.

Kiwi frowned — had he just seen the nib of her pen trace a little star in the pad’s margin? “Did you catch all that? Could you perhaps list our showtimes in there?”

To his left, Emily was sipping a bottle of orange soda inside a crescent moon of reporters. She wasn’t so much giving an interview as she was performing respiration for them. “I saw a tunnel,” she was saying—“of light!” she added, to clarify that she wasn’t talking causeways. The TV crew formed a little carousel of approval around her, nodding and ahhing. She sucked air as if air were a milk shake, demonstrating the joy of life.

“One last question, Mr. Bigtree: is this the first life you’ve saved?” The reporter’s glasses made her eyes look far away, like tiny moons.

“Yes? I mean, I guess so.”

She smiled with creamy indulgence. “That’s quite a milestone.”

Kiwi felt himself redden. The photographers were zipping their cameras into silver bags when he stopped them.

“Wait, ma’am? My quote was not entirely accurate. I just wanted to add, apropos of your last question …”

The reported looked over with a white, harried face. “You just said — did I get this right? — ‘a porpoise of your last question’? Is that supposed to be a Leviathan joke? Afraid I missed that.”

Apropos,” Kiwi repeated, touching a finger to his new mustache. “Would you like me to spell that for you?” In fact, Kiwi had once again mistakenly said “a porpoise.” He had been bungling his SAT buildingblock words for months now — he pronounced “fatuous” so that it fit the meter of “SpaghettiOs.” He’d been using the word “meningitis” in compliments.

“Well, I’m a wrestler, ma’am.” Kiwi kept his eyes on his big hands but his voice grew in conviction. “I used to tape up alligators …”

Several people had turned to stare at him now. Kiwi corkscrewed his fists into Bigtree Wrestling Grip 7 for the Circumnavigator trick. Was that it? All his fingers looked smashed and broken on the tiles.

“So, ah, viz-a-viz your, your inquiry?” he coughed. Behind him the Lake of Fire gurgled benignly, a cleaning solvent fizzing on its surface. “Can you change my answer? I guess I’ve saved my own life before.”


Saturday night in the World of Darkness! Kiwi Bigtree had been alone for his whole small life and he was ready to party. He had mainland friends and a reason to drink with them. A hero’s welcome awaited him at Lotsa Shots, on the Paradise Level of the Sunrise mall next to the Have a Shakee Shack and Gamenesia. Kiwi borrowed one of Leo’s polo shirts and his El León cologne. When he and Leo stood next to each other now, they smelled like a fire hazard. Their polo shirts might as well have been rags soaked in kerosene.

“You sure you’re okay to drive, Vijay?”

“What, do you want to drive, asshole? No? You want to walk? All right then.”

The skunk lines of the road whipsawed in front of the windshield. Everybody had piled into the shitbox Volvo, two of the girls from the Dorsal Flukes and Leo in the backseat and Kiwi representing for Team Safety and Legality by wearing his seat belt in the front. Had there been a crash-test helmet, he would have worn it. Someone thunked a flask against Kiwi’s head.

“Ow! What was that for?”

“Make a note of this, Bigtree,” Leo giggled. “We earth people call it a flask. It’s for transporting awesome feelings. Getting-laid juice.”

“Fuck you,” Kiwi said, but he was exhausted. “I know what a flask is for.”

Red orb after red orb floated dreamily over their car roof. Vijay’s huge sneaker stayed flat on the accelerator. Stoplights swayed yellow and green over the Loomis intersections, like air plants, the mainlanders’ epiphytes. I-95 extended from Florida to Maine, and that faraway syllable made Kiwi fantasize about college, snowfall … Kiwi found his reflection in the side mirror: his eyes squeezed black and small above the ruddy poles of his sideburns. This face appearing in tomorrow’s newspapers, everybody!

“Running lights!” Vijay crowed, a yellow globe pinging to red in the side mirror. “You know why, ’cause we can’t crash, bro, we got the fucking hero with us! Kiwi Bigtree!

Everyone in the World of Darkness was calling him Kiwi Bigtree now. How had this happened? It was anthill intelligence. Even Nina Suárez and her moussed coterie of World girls were kissing his cheek in greeting; they tiptoed up and called him “Kee-wee” at close range, like they were talking into a phone. Margaret Mead, RIP. Kiwi seemed unable to collect and absorb it, this happiness he knew he should now possess.

KIWI BIGTREE: SON OF THE SWAMP. He hoped the newspaper printed the name of their park. It would be a Trojan attack inside an article about the World of Darkness.

The bouncer at Lotsa Shots was a white man with ratty wheat-colored hair, his arms a lewd sleeve of nude blue fairies.

“You boys having a good time tonight?”

“So far, bro,” Vijay said, just as Kiwi slurred, “Heretofore.”

“How old are you boys?”

Vijay nudged Kiwi forward. “My friend saved a girl’s life today.”

My friend, Kiwi grinned. He was trying to remember his phony birthday — according to this card he was twenty-seven. These IDs were the handiwork of Vijay’s cousin’s boyfriend, a dimply Cuban-American kid who had introduced himself to Kiwi as Street Magic.

“It’s true, you don’t believe me? He did CPR on her! Check it out, that bitch is right over there. She could be dead if it wasn’t for him.”

Oh no! Kiwi thought, because Emily Barton was here, at the bar. She was sitting on a stool, talking to the bartender, rowing her arms like a hockey player. She looked a little goofy. At the same time she was oppressively beautiful, with waist-length ebony hair.

“Congratulations, hero,” the bouncer said sourly, flipping their IDs. He waved them through a frail parasol of cigarette smoke. “I hope she blows you.”

“Asshole!”

“Not worth it, bro,” Kiwi said gravely, thinking it came out sounding pretty good. Being Vijay’s friend felt a little like being his personal accountant — girls, aggressors, who should Vijay invest his time in?

Everybody wanted to buy the heroic lifeguard a drink. A menu board listed 301 different kinds of shots — NO REPEATS!! someone had boasted in marker on the wall. For the first hour of his party, Kiwi, afflicted with a booze-specific lexical insecurity, kept asking everybody in his loudest voice, “Hey, am I really drunk? Like, drunk-drunk?”

Leo clapped Kiwi’s back and cheerfully offered a diagnosis: Kiwi was wasted.

Carl Jenks had come out, too. He stood behind the pool table, next to the wooden cues like he was trying to blend in with them, and his face looked so swollen with distress that Kiwi wondered if Carl was holding his breath. Why is he here? Their boss’s face was like a stubborn sun that refused to set, burning uncomfortably late into the night. He took off his wire-rim glasses and glanced around blindly. Nobody was talking to Carl Jenks; Kiwi watched him nervously set one of his orc books, number 7,012 in that series, on the edge of the pool table. He was staring into a sunset-pink cocktail.

Kiwi stared at Carl Jenks. For a second he had the disorienting feeling that he was looking into a mirror — that somehow Carl Jenks’s miserable expression reflected something truer about Kiwi than the strip of glass behind the bar. I should go talk to him …

But Kiwi couldn’t talk to Carl Jenks because he had a girl on his lap. Yes: Emily Barton, a beautiful girl, had volitionally climbed onto Kiwi’s lap and was now, with a dreamy casualness, as if she were reaching up to touch her own face, stroking Kiwi’s cheek. Just above his nouveau goatee-thing. Nothing like this had ever happened to Kiwi before.

Emily Barton was speaking very eloquently on the topic of herself. She was the only child of the only child of the CEO of the Carpathian Corporation, who had been visiting the Loomis World of Darkness chain on the day of her near-drowning. She was also, on her mother’s side, an heiress. She had a red-gold locket with her own childhood picture in it and her black hair smelled like peeled oranges.

Whenever one of Kiwi’s colleagues came over, she began talking in a singsong little-girl voice about her brush with “l’morte.” Quit calling it that. She kept touching Kiwi’s face with a small, repeated pressure, the kind of coy gesture that pretends to be void of intent; after a while Kiwi began to feel like a door that she was pushing at. Onto what? He had a feeling that whatever room he opened onto could only disappoint her. You are a liar, he thought, stroking her back. We are lying together. To date he hadn’t saved anybody — not this brunette mainlander, not his mother, not a single human or reptilian member of the Bigtree tribe.

“You know?” she’d ask after nearly every sentence. But Kiwi never did. He managed to touch her ponytail once, very lightly, with enough frail resolve to seem both timorous and creepy. The deep citrus smell of her hair was deranging him.

Emily was an only child but that had not made her spoiled. She skied with a famous Ukranian, Trainer Bart, in a mountain town in Colorado. Her father was a “cheese enthusiast.” He toured wineries and he collected big rocks of art with fabulous price tags for their “hideaway” in Putney, Vermont — her family was rich enough to have these alien hobbies.

Emily giggled at something bland and declarative he said, kissed the tip of his nose — sort of fell there, actually. Her head crashed into Kiwi’s shoulder. He could smell and taste that she was very drunk.

How strange, Kiwi thought, that you could want so badly to insert a part of your anatomy inside someone who you hated. Kiwi had never once seen a pornographic film. Henry Miller’s books had aroused but confused him. At some midnightish time he put a hand on Emily’s forehead — smack on it, like a TV athlete palming a basketball or a shaman attempting an exorcism — and tried to kiss her. Did he miss? His lips grazed a left eyebrow. The attempt was not repeated.

Much later Emily announced that she would give Kiwi a ride home.

“No, thanks, it’s way too far.” She was going the wrong way on the highway. Then he remembered where he lived now. “Home” was one of those magnetic words, it would stick to wherever you slept. “Home, you know what’s so funny about it …,” Kiwi slurred. His epiphany about the origins of species dissolved into unnameable feeling (“You are drunk as a skunk, bro,” he heard Leo tell him). “Wasted” [adj]. The road in front of them billowed and fell like black parachute cloth.

Emily moved a hand from the wheel to her own thigh, and Kiwi watched this descent with a great disturbance that he did not yet know to call arousal. She tugged his hand down to join hers. Fortunately the hand, compared to the rest of Kiwi, seemed courageous and self-possessed. It caressed her knee, rucked the fabric of her tights. The hand slid up the length of her leg with the confidence of a psychic, as if it knew exactly what was coming next. I surely hope one of us does, Kiwi thought, watching the hand disappear. He touched the band of her underwear and then stopped; now the hand just sort of hung out there, under the skirt, not really doing anything. Like a bookmark. Apparently it was just going to hold his place until Kiwi developed a spontaneous literacy of the female body. Did Emily wish for the hand to be there? Was she just sort of tolerating it on her thigh for now, like a benign starfish that had become mysteriously attached to her? He ran a finger around the thin band. At the intersection on Segovia Road, Kiwi leaned over and with his free hand touched a barrette or possibly an earring? He had to duck a chandelier of jewelry to find her lips. Then they were kissing, a long, sloppy kiss, an incredulous kiss — Kiwi’s first.

Behind Emily’s head, Kiwi could see the tall buildings of downtown Loomis. Large ficus trees became a blotter for electric light. He gulped a moan and shoved her hand beneath the roomy waistband of Cubby’s jeans. Don’t ruin this, brain, please. He hoped this amazing thing that her hands and her warm mouth had committed them to could proceed without another word.

Forty minutes later Kiwi got dropped at the World of Darkness, no longer a virgin. His predominant emotion: confusion. A headache swaddled his thoughts like cloth. Don’t come back, brain, ever again. The few dreams he had were bad and broth-thin: Ava turned up in some of them, and Osceola. The Seths were an undersea quilt of lantern eyes and teeth. He woke up half a dozen times to a feeling of pins and needles — as if the entire length of his skinny body were a numb foot tingling awake, resigning itself to the pain of sensation.

By 4:30 a.m. Kiwi wasn’t drunk anymore, or a hero — that whiskey shimmer had been reabsorbed by his skin. I hate you, he thought, and this thought floated serenely outside of him, because who could it attach to? He couldn’t even pretend to hate the Chief at this hour. He missed his family too badly. I hate who? Carl Jenks? What about Dr. Gautman? Emily Barton? Every tourist? The Chief’s loan officer? Failure! He couldn’t hate any of them, he couldn’t find one person to use as a tether; the rage was like a balloon that drifted heavenward and broke free of its string. Kiwi, who considered himself a grammarian of human emotion, knew that anger required a direct object. (I am angry at ______. I hate ______.) “To hate” was a transitive verb. Anger needed an anchor, a plug, a wall. (I am angry because of ______.) Otherwise you had a beam of red feeling searching vainly through the universe. You had a heart that shot red light into space.

Kiwi shivered in his sheets. These, too, were rentals. “Prison linens,” Leo called them, although Kiwi sort of liked their stripes, which were wood-duck gray and a mustardy gold and indisputably ugly and which made Kiwi feel strangely at home. They looked like something his mom might have thoughtlessly plucked from the Goodwill bin. His mom in the Goodwill was like a girl in a field of dismal flowers.

I hate you, Dad, he tried again — but that old trick wasn’t working. Lately his dad had started to shrink in his mind, too thin to blame the big crimes on (loss of home, loss of life).

Kiwi Bigtree contracted into his smallest self. He smothered his face with the pillow. At one point he opened his closet door and stared at the green poster of his mother, closed it. Minutes dripped red light down one edge of the bedside clock. He stared at the closet door and he called this state “sleep.”

When Kiwi woke up at 7:09, he was a hero again. Everybody pounced in the break room. Barb from ticketing joked that she wanted Kiwi’s autograph. Half a dozen employees who had seen his article blocked his path to the time clock. Yvans shook the front page of the Loomis Register at him. KIWI BIGTREE, “HELL’S ANGEL” the headline read, and below this, WORLD OF DARKNESS HERO.

One line four up from the bottom read: “And Kiwi Bigtree is no stranger to the water — he grew up on an ‘alligator farm’ in the swamp!”

A farm?

Two-thirds of the article was about Emily’s “tunnel of light.” Specialists were quoted next to their boxy photographs: a famous surgeon who claimed this tunnel was the happy fiction of a body deprived of oxygen, and a priest who called the light God.

Their debate on the cosmos was allotted one paragraph. Kiwi skipped it irritably, wondering: But where is my family?

Kiwi’s real name appeared in every paragraph, but with each successive mention the words “Kiwi Bigtree” seemed to grow more remote from his own understanding of himself until the newsprint looked like runes, glyphs, an obsolete equation for sound. Kiwi read the letters K-I-W-I B-I-G-T-R-E-E as if he were staring at two squads of ants.

The final line was a quote from a World of Darkness director, Mr. Frank Saleti, whom he’d never met before: “We couldn’t be prouder of his performance. Kiwi Bigtree is one of our finest employees.”

“And that girl you saved was on television, Kiwi, did you see it?” Yvans spun him toward the mounted television set as if Kiwi might appear there again this moment like a face in a mirror. “Channel five, how you call that show with the crazy lady? The large-butted one with hair like a squirrel’s tail? She seems like she is bipolar or something? Very hyper-acting?”

Kiwi knew the program. “Emily Barton was on Jenny Just Spills It?” This show was Loomis prime time and very popular with a certain histrionic-lady demographic. The eponymous host Jenny drank pots of coffee on air and often wept with her guests. Rescues were a regular feature. Kiwi had once watched Jenny interview a fire-truck dalmatian.

“What did Emily tell her? Did she use my real name?”

“That she had like a kind of a vision underwater.” Yvans grinned with all his teeth. “She says she saw an angel. You, Kiwi.”

Kiwi’s shoulders flew up around his ears.

Deemer and Floricio, two of Ephraim Lippmann’s thuggish buddies who had shunned Margaret Mead for weeks, now knocked into Kiwi Bigtree — in the friendly way — or punched him, in the friendly way, in the halls. “Saw you on TV, motherfucker! You’re big-time!” Kiwi smiled warily back at them.

Nina Suárez stopped him in the Flukes to gush, “Did you watch the news? It’s like we’re all famous now!” She’d seen her bike in the parking lot when the news crew camera panned out.

“You must feel wonderful!” strangers kept insisting. “You must feel …”

But from eleven to two fifteen Kiwi felt like puking, and when that feeling at last subsided he felt nothing.

When Kiwi was three or four months old, the Chief had photographed him in a wicker laundry basket on a sandy kink of land in the Pit. Kiwi wasn’t sure what the inspiration for this shot was: baby Moses meets Robert Louis Stevenson? Inside the photograph Kiwi had company: rat snakes and scarlet kings, thin ropes of them, and hatchling Seths with their yellow eyes bugged and wild around his clothes-pinned diaper. “My son didn’t cry at all,” the Chief told strangers at every opportunity. Everybody agreed that this was an auspicious image for a Bigtree wrestler. Baby Kiwi was wrinkled up with laughter, his pudgy fists swinging for the lens.

His parents had turned this image into a ten-by-fourteen-inch poster and sold hundreds of them to the tourists over the years.

“See, son?” The Chief liked to say, tapping the baby Kiwi in the poster. “What happened? You were brave as spit then.

Gus Waddell will have brought him the newspaper by now. He pictured the Chief lowering his coffee. His son, a World of Darkness employee! But a “hero,” now. Did those two facts cancel one another out? Possibly the Chief would take the bus to the World of Darkness to look for him, he had to be prepared for that. Maybe the Chief was rolling toward him right now with a slow, inexorable rage, like a bowling ball …

Kiwi caught himself smiling at the thought. He smiled so hard that his eyes narrowed into crescents and began to water. And it was this grin that broke the news to the rest of him — Kiwi realized then that he would really love to see his father.


Attendance at the Leviathan spiked by 20 percent during the week following the “Hell’s Angel” story. People wanted to meet him, to pump his hands and thank him for some reason, as if he had saved them personally. They posed for snapshots in front of “the Lake where it happened.”

“Are you religious?” Lost Souls asked him. “Do you believe in angels?”

“No,” Kiwi replied seriously. It was his kid sisters who believed in ghosts, angels, life after death, conjuring spells. “I am not. I do not. Who knows what Emily Barton thinks she saw down there, but I can tell you with one hundred percent certainty that I am not a literal angel, no.”

He gave several dozen autographs as Kiwi Bigtree, Hell’s Angel. As he signed he’d feel the bones inside his back clench against these credulous people, unaccountably furious.

“Ticket sales are up twenty-two percent this week,” Mr. Jenks reported grudgingly on Friday, reading off an enormous legal pad that said MEMOS. Many of Mr. Jenks’s managerial accessories were labeled in a font sized for the legally blind.

“So enjoy your fifteen minutes, Bigtree …,” Carl grunted through the roll of tape in his mouth. Back home a roll of duct tape in your mouth meant you had an alligator’s jaws in your fists, but Carl Jenks was just taping up cardboard.

“Can I help you, Carl?”

“No. I know how I want my things.”

Carl was moving, or “being removed,” by his own boss, the Carl of Carls, to the other side of the World. Lamentably, he said, he would still be Kiwi’s supervisor. Orcs and pencils disappeared into the box.

“I hope you know how lucky you are,” Carl Jenks muttered. “The training alone is a huge company investment. They’ve hired a private CFI who brags that he taught his semideaf nine-year-old niece how to fly. Promises even you can pass the check ride. If you ask me you’re a bad investment — who is going to remember this Lake of Fire story a week from now? — but Tom Barrett saw your picture in the paper this morning and he’s just giddy about it. Thinks we’re going to get all this free publicity, and new clients from the ‘crystals-are-my-medicine’ crowd. New Agers.”

“Right. All that miraculous bullshit.” Kiwi felt the stab that accompanied all thoughts of Osceola. He could see her face smiling under the goofy puple turban.

“Barrett doesn’t get many ideas, so when he has one he likes he throws a lot of money behind it.”

“Yes. Got it. Ideas need money to become a reality.”

Kiwi rocked way back on his red-and-black sneakers ($22) with his hands in his pockets, as if he were vying to become a Human Slingshot. He had no idea what Carl was talking about.

“What I’m telling you, Bigtree, is that HR is casting against type. The Loomis directors want you as one of the Four Pilots. They think it’ll be cute—” Carl’s smile went taut. “That girl Emily Barton is going on all the news outlets and calling you her ‘angel.’ So that’s how they want to bill you.”

The office was almost empty now, the walls bare except for glue and pegs. A World of Darkness calendar was the last thing left to pack, and Kiwi felt a rueful stab as he thought of the Bigtrees’ own calendar. Kiwi’s face was always the mascot for July, and for one month each year he grinned out at himself from the gift shop’s walls with a ferocious self-hatred, desperate for August to come.

“To be honest, I doubt they’ll let you fly in the end. What are you, twelve? I’m shocked it’s even legal for you to get a pilot’s license, frankly. Probably they’ll use you as a stewardess. Give you a little beverage tray and a catcher’s mitt to nab the Lost Souls’ vomit, you’ll excel at that. I’m just telling you for your own sake: Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t let your hopes get higher than your girlish hips.”

Kiwi reddened; it was true that he’d become a little pear-shaped. Burger Burger portions. All the pizza.

“Excuse me, Bigtree.”

Carl patted Kiwi’s wingless back and picked up a large box.


That afternoon, Kiwi conducted an intake interview with the Take to the Skies flight school on Carl Jenks’s new office phone, with Carl Jenks’s forehead visible behind the computer. Kiwi felt an incredible power over this man. To be envied was a new experience. Just the sound of Kiwi dialing made Carl’s forehead wrinkle and smooth. His boss’s skin was the pasty, poreless color of cake batter. Sad evidence, the Chief would have said, of a lifetime spent indoors. And when the Chief sees me skyed inside a cockpit? What will he have to say about that?

“You’re that Hell’s Angel kid?” a voice was saying. “The one that saved Teddy Barton’s girl?”

“I’m Kiwi Bigtree.”

“Well, you sure screwed up these forms that you faxed us pretty good, Kiwi Bigtree. They’re just about illegible. You’re how old, son?”

“Eighteen. Almost.”

“Almost. So that would make you seventeen, correct?”

“Right.”

“Excellent. You can fly solo at fourteen, but older is better. How tall?”

“Six five,” Kiwi lied, shifting his weight onto his toes in Carl’s office.

“What on earth are you doing, prima ballerina?” Carl muttered from behind the computer.

“How’s your vision? You got your medical certificate yet?”

“No, sir.”

“You need to get that. High school diploma?”

“I’m attending the Rocklands High nontraditional student program, sir. Night school.”

“Degree expected?”

“Oh!” said Kiwi, misunderstanding the question. “Yes, definitely. I want to get several. The MA, and the PhD as well.”

“What year will you receive your high school degree?”

Kiwi was silent. Somehow he could more easily imagine his graduation from Harvard University in five years than any of the intervening steps. The prospect of actually passing Miss Arenas’s final exam next month and transferring his single credit to Rocklands High School was so overwhelming to him that it temporarily short-circuited his brain.

“It’s sunny out today, Mr. Bigtree, why not be optimistic? I’m going to put down ‘September.’ Okay, you’re all set in the computer. First class is Tuesday. Three thirty. You can do the lesson modules at the public library. I’ll put your Reach for the Skies! packet in the mail.”


Life was a phonograph in an empty room. The World was a silent record, turning. Whatever song we are making in this place, we are going to die without hearing. Such was Kiwi’s stoned thinking on a rainy Tuesday at 1:30 p.m., with five hours and fourteen minutes of his shift left to go. He was back to pushing the vacuum again, filling in for Leonard.

“Cover for me,” Leo had commanded Kiwi that morning. “My thumb feels wrong.”

“Your thumb?”

“Both of them,” Leonard said slyly. As a dedicated malingerer Leo set a new standard; even his lies were lazy. “Both thumbs hurt now. I think I slept on them or something. You have to cover for me.”

Which was fine by Kiwi, because now he’d have ten hours of overtime this week. After taxes, this boosted his salary by $43.12.

Yesterday — two Mondays after his “miraculous resuscitation” of Emily Barton — he’d gotten on the number 14 city bus after his shift with no real destination in mind, happy to pay a buck seventy to get out of the World. He’d wound up riding it all the way to the ferry docks. It was raining when Kiwi climbed down from the bus. A black cat was stalking a fat, doofy pelican across the cement landing; Gus’s ferryboat and a few misused U-RENT kayaks were moored there. The ferry had received a fresh coat of paint, a spectacularly ugly gourd orange. Nobody was around. FERRY SERVICE SUSPENDED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE said a sign on the gangplank. Kiwi sat through the intensifying rain for an hour and fifty minutes, the time it took for the bus to repeat its loop, and for that entire period he stared in the direction of the island. Slowly it sank in that he couldn’t get home that afternoon, even if he’d wanted to. Kiwi could feel this thought descending from his brain to his lungs, where it winnowed like a noose. You’re stuck here, kid, Kiwi imagined the Chief saying in his microphone voice, a booming, put-on friendliness. We need you and you’re nowhere.

Lost Souls percolated around him in the Leviathan, sightlessly munching at diabolical corn chips or tugging up their bathing straps. A few of the tiny kids were wearing Whalehead hats, foam skullcaps in orca whites and blacks that looked vaguely French, monastic, cost $17.99, and disintegrated — Lost Souls were always complaining — in the wash. Kiwi Bigtree seemed to have hit minute fourteen of his fifteen minutes of fame. It had been over a week since Emily Barton did her last TV interview about “the angel” whom she had seen underwater and later pegged as the human lifeguard Kiwi Bigtree. Since Monday he’d signed only three autographs. Lost Souls still stopped him in the halls, but most of them needed to validate their parking ticket, or urinate.

Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn’t have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gauging your literacy by reading the names on your book spines, and there wouldn’t be a single other patron. The whole place would hum with a library’s peace, filtering softly over you like white bars of light …

Kiwi grunted; someone had written BOOTY FUCK THE MOTHERFUCKERS on the wall beside the escalator to the Jaws. Where was his paintbrush?

Heaven would be a comfy armchair, Kiwi decided, rubbing at expletives with his elbow. Beige and golden upholstery, beige and golden wallpaper (what he was actually picturing here, he realized, was the pattern of his mother’s brown rosettes on their curtains). You’d get a great, private phonograph, and all of eternity to listen to your life’s melody. You could isolate your one life out of the cacophonous galaxy — the a cappella version — or you could play it back with its accompaniment, embedded in the brass and strings of mothers, fathers, sisters, windfalls and failures, percussive cities of strangers. You could play it forward or backward, back and back, and listen to the future of your past. You could lift the needle at whim, defeating Time.

Roaring erupted from the high, angled vents that lined the Leviathan — it began all at once, as sudden as a flood of rainfall. The white intrusion that makes you aware of what the silence had been before. Kiwi paused with his hands in the bucket.

Mom? Kiwi shuddered, feeling immediately stupid.

“Whadduppp, Bigtree!” Sergio from concessions appeared in one of the labyrinthine hallways, wheeling a trash can behind him. His name tag was coming loose on its pin and the great red moose fans of his devil horns hung around his scrawny neck.

“I thought I was the last fool in the World. Weird to be inside the Leviathan so late, right? That air conditioner sounds like a fucking hurricane, bro! I’m freezing.


On Monday, Kiwi got special permission to leave work early and get his medical certificate for the FAA licensing requirement. He’d thought about making the appointment with the Bigtrees’ family physician, Dr. Budz, a liver-spotted Ukrainian man who was sort of mentally spotty as well — who did not, for example, require that his patients have insurance or even legally viable surnames; who’d instructed the Bigtree tribe to call him Al in an accent thickened by his weird humor, and whose office was above a women’s gymnasium. You could hear the basketballs drumming as he stethoscoped your heartbeat. No one had seen Dr. Budz since the previous fall, when Hilola’s medical needs introduced them to a new class of death specialist.

Instead, Kiwi made the appointment through the World-contracted flight school with an AMA-accredited physician. The office was in the fanciest part of Loomis, where the buildings were identical pastels and weepy-eyed with windows; even their decorative plants had this sort of futuristic sheen that said, “I’m germless.”

Kiwi had to answer pages and pages of questions about himself. Nope to measles, never to mumps, scabies, diabetes. He’d had two weeklong bouts of weird dreaming and terrible chills when he was six that his mom referred to as “grasshopper fever,” but who knew how that illness translated into mainland etiology? Old crackers in the swamp used bear piss to cure chicken pox. One section of the form was called “Family History.” Well, for starters, my sixteen-year-old sister is crazy, she has aural and visual hallucinations … my youngest sister is an equestrian of Mesozoic lizards … my father wears a headdress … my grandfather bites men now …

The doctor’s office smelled like lemon disinfectant and even the big-shouldered leather furniture made him very nervous.

“Oh, Mr. Bigtree!” the receptionist called after him. “You forgot one. No, don’t get up, hon. I’ll fill it in for you. I just need your home address.”

“The World of Darkness” fell lightly from his lips, Kiwi noticed.


The private CFI the World of Darkness had hired to train him was an ex-army guy in his early sixties, Dennis Pelkis, or Denny, as he kept encouraging Kiwi to call him. “Relax, relax,” Denny would say, and then he’d proceed to regale Kiwi with some story about a former student who fell out of the sky. In every case these tragedies had occurred because the student pilot failed to obey the teachings of Dennis. He kept referring to “Denny’s ground rules” and “Denny’s philosophy on that issue,” with open arms and a tour operator’s smile, as if he were giving Kiwi a cultural orientation to the country of Denny. Dennis Pelkis had silvery chest hair and a satyr’s physique. He smiled at Kiwi in a sightless, professional way, a smile that faltered only slightly when Kiwi asked him, apropos of nothing, if he and Mrs. Pelkis had ever been to a place called Swamplandia! to see Hilola Bigtree wrestle alligators.

“I’m sorry?”

“Sorry,” Kiwi mumbled, which was the usual volley. “Thought you looked familiar …” Really, Kiwi had hoped that his face would look familiar to this Denny. On those rare occasions when Kiwi found a mainlander who knew about Swamplandia! even secondhand, he went after their memories like a magpie tugging at bright string. He’d strike up conversations with the Lost Souls in the Leviathan and engineer an opportunity to ask them, Say, have you ever visited Swamplandia!? A few days ago he’d met a couple from Sarasota, Florida, who began nodding immediately when he mentioned the Bigtrees.

“Oh, right, those alligator people,” the wife had laughed. “I remember that place. Swampy Land. That woman alligator wrestler, Don, what was her name, we used to pass her billboard on the way to your sister’s …?”

Hilola!

Whenever tourists remembered her name, men with beards included, Kiwi wanted to passionately kiss them. Her name in a stranger’s mouth was a resurrection: however briefly, she was alive with him again. Even that little shove could roll back the tomb. On those rare and wonderful occasions when he found an entire mainland family who had seen his mother’s show, Kiwi could watch the strangers’ eyes brighten with recognition and picture a tiny Hilola Bigtree climbing a tiny ladder in each of their brains, walking out to the edge of the green diving board.

Dennis Pelkis coughed once and resumed a rolling discourse about the World of Darkness floatplanes versus “terra firma” aircraft. He punctuated his major points by jabbing a lit cigarette at the sun.

“Soon it will be time to fly,” he concluded. This was also the title of the 630-page flight instruction manual that he handed over to Kiwi. Kiwi had a polynomials test this week in Miss Arenas’s class and he was picking up shifts for Yvans; lately Kiwi felt like an understudy in his own life on the mainland, stumbling over his lines and missing important cues and waiting with less and less patience for the real actor to show up.

“I can’t wait,” Kiwi said sincerely. He was thinking about money. From Denny’s explanation of the pilot licensing requirements, it sounded like he and this cheerful and alarming man were going to spend forty hours together in the plane and twenty more in ground school — four months.

“Longer than a Vegas marriage,” he grinned, and Kiwi let out an accidental whimper. The kind of grief that shows up at a Halloween party with its costume in tatters, swears “I’m a chuckle!” What if Swamplandia! went into foreclosure before he got his license, his pay raise?

“Ha-ha! Four months does sound like a long time. And there’s no way to, ah, expedite the process?”

“Ex-speed-ite.” Denny frowned. “You sure that’s how it’s pronounced? We can’t speed anything, Bigtree. Same FAA rules apply for heroes.”

Kiwi frowned down at his fingernails. “Your hands are damn pretty,” Sawtooth used to say accusingly. Like most alligator wrestlers, Sawtooth Bigtree had lost substantial chunks of several fingers. Part of his thumb was somewhere in the Gator Pit, remaindered by one of the Seths. Even Ossie boasted scars from an accident that took place when she was four years old and a juvenile alligator had snapped at her hand while she was pulling up weeds along a riverbank. Kiwi was the only Bigtree with zero injuries — no stitches, no scars. He’d once cut his pointer finger opening a can of cherry soda after a wrestling match. He tried to imagine his ladylike hands throttling up inside a floatplane.

“Do you happen to know, sir, what my ranking is going to be? Second? Third?”

“Huh? That ain’t how the check ride gets scored.”

Kiwi nodded. “I recognize that I probably won’t rank as the First Pilot of the Apocalypse, given that I am an airplane greenhorn. But do I necessarily have to be the last one?”

Denny exhaled two cool gusts of smoke through his nostrils and stared at him.

“You’re a funny young man, Kiwi.”


On Thursday, Kiwi found himself ducking the crack in the break room door, where he got a brief glimpse of a bunch of flame-clad staffers watching TV, and then he was pinball-whizzing out of the World: upstairs, downstairs, through staff-only hallways. There was an empire of supplies down here: pyramids of toilet paper (single ply; this was Hell), boxes of BrimStones that spilled over the cardboard like collapsed speech bubbles, devil horn hatbands and devilish ribbons for the ladies. Finally he exploded through the same small service hole that spat out garbage. Yvans was standing right there by the Dumpster, waving at him.

“Where you going, Kiwi?”

So much for the secret mission.

“Nowhere,” he said, hurrying past Yvans. Really, he had no time today to listen to Yvans complain about the complaints of his wife. Kiwi’s secret destination was the gas station. You couldn’t really skulk there, you had to walk across the highway. Kiwi walked through four lanes of stalled traffic. A knotted sock of quarters bulged in his pocket. The pay phone was at the end of the candy aisle. It was the nearest semiprivate phone that Kiwi knew about. He hunched between the black- and yellow-jacketed candy bars and the gigantic freezer. For twenty minutes Kiwi kept plunking the same quarter in the phone and dialing Swamplandia!

“Answer,” he commanded the receiver. “Pick up.”

The phone was busy. Busy! Busy! Busy! Busy! it told his ear in black starbursts.

Weird, Kiwi thought, which became:

Bad.

Wrong.

Really fucking worrisome, as a mainland kid would say.

The busy signal whammed into his head in a series of right hooks. He rolled his quarter out, dialed again. “Ava. Ossie. Chief,” he said between teeth. After a while he switched the speed and order: “Chief-Ossie-Ava. Ossie-Ava-Chief. Pick. Up.”

The owner dropped his newspaper and stood. He was an older Afro-Cuban man with powdery hair and eyes like acetone. He didn’t like Kiwi — he’d sell Black and Mild cigarettes to Leo and Vijay but never to Kiwi. The cigarettes cost one dollar and came in two flavors: wine and apple. The last time Kiwi had tried to buy a pack with his fake Kiwi Beamtray ID, the owner had shouted at him to get out of the store. A curtain of pink and green lottery tickets hung level with his forehead, which gave him an exotic, Scheherazade look.

“Hey! In the back!” He unlatched the little gate to the register. “¿Qué haces?

“Hey, sir!” said Kiwi. “Good afternoon?” Maybe he thinks I’m making sex calls, Kiwi thought, his ear smashed and rubbery against the receiver. Masturbating into the CLOSET OF ICE!

He dropped another quarter into the slot, watched his fingers hopscotch across the dial pad onto his home numbers. Last try. Okay, no, this is the last try—he began threatening the receiver, trying to bluff the universe into giving him an answer.

“Hang up the phone, maricón!”

“I’m not doing anything wrong here. I’m a hero, sir. Hell’s Angel. Don’t you watch TV?”

Kiwi hung up the phone. He tried to mad-dog the owner and then gave up, felt his face tremble and collapse. On the way out he knocked over a display of gummies.

“Sorry,” he said, rubbing his cheeks with his fists, a teenage mantis. “God, sir, I’m really sorry.”

The owner held the door for him. He patted Kiwi’s left shoulder.

All that day and into the next his head felt clouded. Where was everybody? Were they visiting Grandpa or something? Had the Chief instructed the girls not to answer the telephone — were they avoiding the creditors? Probably he was overreacting? Kiwi pictured all ninety-eight Seths in the pit lifting their great warblers’ chins at the sun while just inside the screen door the telephone rang and rang and rang.


Kiwi Bigtree, Hell’s Angel, got a leather jacket from the World of Darkness management with his new epithet emblazoned on it. He got a free Friday. He stood in his jacket and waved sightlessly into the lanes of traffic until a green Toyota that was batwinged with dents on its left side honked at him, screeched to a halt well before the intersection.

“Hello again, Mr. Pelkis.”

“Oh My Christ Son the Light Is Green Get in the Car!”

Kiwi was relieved when Dennis Pelkis told him that they were just going to eyeball the plane. He drove Kiwi to the papaya-colored seaplane hangar off Route 302 where the flight school conducted their lessons. He taught Kiwi how the water rudder and the floats worked and walked him through a preflight checklist. It took Kiwi two tries and a rump-assist from Denny to scrabble over the gap between the dock and the plane and get inside the cockpit.

Later Dennis drove Kiwi to his house in the Coconut Creek development, in a suburb of Loomis, so that Denny could have black coffee and a roast beef sandwich that was hemorrhaging horseradish, treat a corn on his big right toe, watch the ball game; and also so that Kiwi could take a test on the pitot-static instrument family. Kiwi felt sort of forgotten about. Kiwi pictured his existence in the mind of Dennis Pelkis: a tiny Kiwi politely letting Dennis’s other concerns cut in front of him in line at the register until he was the last priority, the afterthought.

The test was easy. Kiwi had retained most of the colorful facts from the textbook:

A white arc indicates the arc in which it is safe to use flaps.

The green arc is the normal operating range of the aircraft.

The yellow arc is the caution range for the airplane.

“More apple juice, Kee-wee?” asked Denny’s dotty wife, whose hostessing strategy was to remove each item from her refrigerator — a carton of juice, a pie slice with lime green filling, a single egg — and offer it to Kiwi. She did this with the serene efficiency of a crazy person; was this a custom of the suburbs?

“No thank you, ma’am.”

“Too bad they don’t make kiwi juice, right?”

“Ha-ha, right. Thanks, Mrs. Pelkis.”

I am going to be a pilot, you bitch! Kiwi thought. His rage felt wonderful, like cake icing in his mouth. Pure lipids dissolving onto his taste buds. Kiwi didn’t care for middle-aged women. He found them all to be ugly, flighty, soft. Their wrinkles enraged him. Their dyed or graying hair. All the obvious, dimpled evidence that they had enjoyed years and years of life.

Coming into the kitchen, Denny rolled his eyes at Kiwi and barked at his wife: “Kid has to take a test, Nancy.”

Now that Kiwi had at last made it to a suburb it was easy to want the swamp. What was this fresh hell? The World of Darkness seemed like a cozy and benign place compared to the sprawl of these stucco boxes, these single-family houses. Kiwi saw no coconuts and no creeks. The Pelkises had a poinciana tree dragging magenta combs over the grass and a bunch of rusting croquet wickets in the yard. Inside, they had a Wurlitzer piano and a mantel covered in what appeared to be hundreds of tiny porcelain cats. The Pelkises’ decor was such a clean and pleasant variation on the Bigtrees’ cabinets of gin and lizards that Kiwi found himself holding tightly to the edge of the Pelkises’ Lysoled table, as if these shiny surfaces were trying to buck him. Instead of a Juggernaut Human Cannon, they had a green Toyota. Instead of a Gator Pit, their backyard had a shrunken plastic house that contained an animate cotton ball that turned out to be a dog.

“That’s the wife’s Pomeranian,” Denny said, following Kiwi’s gaze. “Vol de Nuit. She gave him a French name. Do I look like I speak French, son? The wife does a lot of things that just mystify me. Totally worthless animal.”

My dad would feed your dog to the Seth of Seths.

“How we doing?” Denny asked forty minutes later. He was on his fourth plain doughnut and listening to baseball on the radio. He looked over the page in front of Kiwi.

“Well! You must have memorized that whole dang chapter.” He planted the doughnut into milk. “But you know, son, this test, strictly speaking, doesn’t count for anything? These are for practice. It’s the FAA written exam you gotta pass. And then you gotta actually fly the damn plane.”

Kiwi nodded. “Right.” He covered his test with his palm and slid it toward his edge of the table.

“See you next Friday. We’ll see what happens when we get you airborne.”


The Jaws were terrifying at night. Something gaseous seemed to shimmer around them, a trick of the weak lighting and the ventilation. The molars shone like huge basalt blocks and everything looked suddenly, impressively real to Kiwi, the giant cave of the maw arching forty feet above him, the web of puce and ruby mesh shot through with dangling yellowish gray threads on the roof. A luxury of being the only rider in the Leviathan was that you could drift for hours. You could let the current conduct you. Also it was a good study break, Kiwi thought.

At two o’clock, after finishing the last of his homework, Kiwi stripped to his boxer shorts and climbed the frozen escalator up the Tongue. He crossed his arms in the SAFEST POSTURE depicted on the sign and he flew down the slide into the first of a seemingly infinite number of brachiating chambers — caves of water, some neck-deep and others shallow as dishes. The Leviathan felt bigger than he had ever imagined, impossibly big. The white points of his knees looked like distant buoys in the darkness. Kiwi’s mouth slammed shut and his teeth hit together as he flew around a bend in the Esophagus, and then he was submerged in deep water, his feet cycling and touching nothing.

Usually at this juncture one of the more athletic park employees would drag you up and bully you out of the pool and into another tortuous line — the Leviathan staff moved four hundred people through the ride each hour. Some kid’s feet would be punching into your back.

Kiwi shut his eyes and breathed very slowly. At night he felt less like a kid than a sick calculator. He ran the same problems and numbers in his head. What am I doing here? Kiwi wondered. Why don’t I go home? The longer he stayed in this place, the less he understood about his own motivations. But the World of Darkness gets me! Kiwi thought. The World has me gotten. The World of Darkness seemed to understand its workers the way that floating sticks got understood by a river, and studied to splinters, and undone by it.

Kiwi floated from room to room with his palms up. He got sucked beneath a grid of radiance, little stars that glowed blue and lime green above him — as if the roof of the Leviathan had suddenly opened onto the real sky! And with his own eyes filling with salt and his total spatial disorientation, the slow flow of the water, the turgor of a nonsensical hope in his body that grew and grew beneath the stars and left him airless, bewildered, so very unexpectedly happy — over the roar of his own happiness it took Kiwi a long time to understand that the blue and green galaxies spooning above him, blinking down in some holy binary, were actually banks of emergency lights.

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