Father did not look like himself in his uniform. There was deception in his navy encasing, like the fabric was hiding something. Some accident, moreover, in the cut of the slacks made it look like there were diapers underneath. That couldn’t be right. Was that really Bridget’s father, under those slacks, that jacket?
“Step right this way, please.” He pronounced the phrase in a silly, brazen voice like a carnival barker’s. “Leave all shoes at the door, no exceptions please-thank-you.”
Decorum demanded he keep a certain distance. There was no hug and whirl-around, nor kissing nor entreaties nor handholding on Father’s part, though in truth Mother’s manner was no frostier than usual. She reached out with both hands to smooth down the lapels of Father’s jacket. A dutiful gesture not devoid of affection.
His uniform was that of a security guard. The week before at the multi-purpose exhibition space where Father worked, the rubber-covered robots of Dinos Alive! had moved their necks and jaws up and down like they’d done every year since Bridget was a baby, i.e. with the music from Jurassic Park looping over at ear-splitting volume. Before that, around Easter, Father had also got free tickets to Space Discovery, with its old cosmonaut spacesuits and replicas of lunar rovers and such. A schoolmate of Bridget’s had joined them that day. A short, prim, cluelessly handsome boy whose mother was one of Mother’s oldest friends, but whom Bridget had at best a nodding acquaintance with. Much to her own private embarrassment, she quite fancied this boy, and it was much to his credit that his cluelessness was never less than civil. It was largely accepted that young girls became interested in such things before boys did. Totally normal. There was nothing Bridget could do.
Another peculiarity with Father’s uniform was the pairing of slacks with flip-flops. Bridget had never seen him wear these. Then again, it was also her first visit to Innard Expo. The no-shoe rule made easy-off, easy-on footwear a must, or so Bridget reasoned as Father removed his flip-flops and Mother lay her sandals aside. Bridget, sans her sneakers, was the only member of their party in stockingfeet. She stepped across the cool grey polyvinyl flooring towards an introductory placard that hung on a wall near the entrance, her chin pointed forward at a text presented in English and several other languages.
“Here, let me summarize that for you,” Father said. “This exhibit is curated by Blahzee-blorp, and now here’s a quote from the poet Dingleberry and so on, etc.’ Let’s not dilly-dally, shall we? And don’t forget, when the bell rings, it’s time to go.”
Spaces like this were mutable by design, and in contrast to, say, the plastic jungle exuberance of Dinos Alive!, the feeling was one of solemnness. A ceremonial fixity governed the arrangement of dark walls and bright spotlights, and each subspace felt like an altar, like the backdrop of some gloomy Renaissance oil painting. At the first exhibit, a metal table held up the gray plastic tray alluded to on the accompanying plaque:
Item 1. (Tray)
A group of visitors gathered round at a stiff, fretful distance, studying the lump of tissue inside. How swollen the veins became! How they wriggled like overgrown maggots, as if each possessed a larval mind all their own! Childlike, almost secretively, Bridget slipped her hand into her mother’s. This brought a smile to Father’s face which lasted almost one-and-a-half seconds.
Presently, a look of annoyance transfigured his features, and in two strides he reached a thick-necked visitor in too-tight jeans who was photographing the writhing maggoty veins with a blank, clinical absorption. “Sir,” Father said, louder than necessary, more for the whole group’s edification than for the individual infractor. “Pay attention to the signs please. No mobile phones, no photos, please-thank-you.” To which the thick-necked gentleman did not reply, nor even register in any visible way that he had been spoken to. Instead, he touched a shape on his phone’s screen to close the camera app and calmly, as though the prerogative to do so was his and his alone, stuck the phone in his pocket such that an unsightly stretch-denim rectangle now protruded from one thigh. (In his defense, Bridget hadn’t noticed the signs either.)
A moment later, Father was back by their side. “Sorry about that,” he said.
“The organizers won’t be pleased,” Mother said with deadpan mock pique.
“No sirree, Bob,” Father said.
These ‘organizers’ were the subject of much conversation between Bridget’s parents, at times spoken about in grousing tones, other times with great reverence. Always at inscrutable adult cross-purposes. They need us more than we need them, she’d once heard her father say. I’m not convinced of that, Mother responded. Maybe not need. Require. They require us, if that makes sense. But it didn’t make sense, not to Bridget anyway.
“I’m so glad you were finally able to come,” Father said, and now he and Mother both looked down expectantly at her, as if she was meant to reciprocate, as if there were some secret password she was meant to invoke. Teachers and family friends gave her no small amount of grief for being so quiet, so shy, but it was her right, wasn’t it? To keep herself to herself, if she so chose? People loved to ask what she wanted to be when she grew up, they insisted on knowing this tidbit about her, but she would never answer, for the simple reason that she did not envision herself existing in the future. Grown-up Bridget was not a firefighter, or hairdresser, or the CEO of a pharmaceutical company; she was a non-entity, an emptiness where one of those people might one day stand.
Besides, she was feeling quite hungry at present, and if she spoke her mind on that topic, a mild tongue-lashing lay in store, considering the spectacle she’d made of turning her nose up at her luncheon not an hour before. She’d passed the age limit for the kids menu, and they didn’t make the adult menu items quite the way she liked. Mother had demanded an explanation, but she had become bored of the subject and then, as now, said nothing. Her parents desisted in their expectant attitudes. Everyone moved on.
An even larger group was gathered around the second piece on display.
Item 2. (Vat)
The vat was full of gizzards and tripe. Unlike the preceding tray of veiny larvae, there was no writhing movement amid the gizzards. Nothing bubbled in the vat. It sat there, lifeless. The visitors, too, stood lifeless. Not even staring, just looking. Maybe it was a game people played. They situated themselves before the spectacle and tried to assimilate to what they saw. Become the gizzards and tripe. A silly game, it seemed to Bridget, and such a boring one!
They did not tarry long at the vat. Father broke away from the main body of visitors, and the ladies of the family followed him up a circuitous passageway built from movable partitions, aluminum rectangles upholstered in a soft grey-pink. Father and Mother’s bare soles made faint quacking sounds against the slight stickiness on the floor. They turned several corners. Father’s voice pitter-pattered all the while: “It’s not every year the show comes through, you know? It’s like the stars and planets have to line up just perfect. I don’t know, like the Olympics or something. Anyway, we’re growing up nice and strong, eh, Bridget? Your mummy wanted to bring you a couple times back, when you were still in the womb, did you know that? But of course that’s not allowed. Still, we’ve got your clean bill of health now. Ruled out IBS, CFS. Dyslexia, other learning differences. Isn’t that lovely?”
“Okay,” Mother said. Which in the argot of the harried schoolteacher on her day off, meant: Enough.
The hall opened onto an unexpectedly large area. The size of a high-school gym, give or take.
Item 3. (Hall)
Laid out with little apparent care was an impossible length of intestine. Sections of it uncoiled, stretched, coiled again in a rippling motion. An errant, orphaned pyloric wave, digesting nothing.
A woman in a silly red beret came and stood, several yards away. Bridget didn’t recognize her; she’d glommed onto their foray down the hall, a poorly-dissembled distance behind them, like a non-paying tagalong on a guided city tour. She looked upset, unable to contain herself. Her voice was shrill, discordant against the entrails’ subliminal rustle.
“Is it supposed to move like that?”
“Ma’am, please use your inside voice,” Father said. “And no, it’s not supposed to move like that. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Anyway, time’s short. Come.”
Father took off once more. Another makeshift partition maze which, it now occurred to Bridget, itself had something of the intestinal. She had no desire to traverse this intestine any further. Her parents disappeared around the first corner. Meanwhile, the woman in the red beret knelt beside the coiled entrails, gingerly, with a morose look as if she were about to stroke the head of a beloved, fatally injured dog. Bridget’s heart leapt aghast at the thought of it. She bolted and ran to catch up but could find neither Father nor Mother amid the crowd that blocked up the mouth of the passageway.
Item 4. (Bath)
An armless, headless thorax was installed upright in a large bathtub, centered in an artful spotlight, thronged with gawkers. Inside the tub, a wet substance with the consistency of oatmeal was growing, bubbling, overflowing. The dripping fat dollops gave a sensual hiss as they hit the floor and dissolved on contact. The ooh and ahh of satisfaction.
Those sounds, and the sight of that thorax, would linger for quite some time in Bridget’s psyche, would come to mind in a very specific fashion years later when she and the handsome little schoolmate who’d accompanied her family to Space Discovery reconnected on “the socials”. They’d run unrelated paths all though secondary school, and completely diverged at graduation, but years of misery on “the apps” would conspire to make the prospect of dinner seem not uncongenial. All those years of Bridget suspecting something was wrong with her. Him, divorced, knowing this was the case. The boy, now a man named Liam, would ask after her father. She would explain he had passed from kidney failure. Liam would have one glass of wine too many, which would prompt him to wonder aloud whether “people are the things we do, or if we do the things we are”, and so forth. They would stumble into bed together, how many times Bridget would lose track of. Liam would occupy, if only in a contingent and temporary manner, a fraction of the space inside her. Each time his naked torso would remind her of that earlier armless, headless analogue. An adult male’s, she had to presume, though it was so thin and flabby and scarcely fleshed out as to be androgynous through the chest region, stark shadows burrowing in the cleft between each clearly defined rib. Similarities aside, there would be one important difference between the torso in Bridget’s future and the armless, headless one in the bathtub, one feature Liam’s would lack: in the place where the left nipple should be, the thorax in the tub was growing a purulent, fist-sized boil.
A man stepped forward and leaned against the lip of the tub. The same thick-necked visitor who’d been snapping photos earlier. His fingers, Bridget noticed, were long and bony, ill-fitting to the rest of his body shape. He poked a sharp pinky nail straight into the center of the giant nipple-boil. Nothing came of this poking the first couple of times. The third time, Bridget let out a scream.
The nipple burst, and liquid shot outward. An amount of liquid which should not have fit inside there. It simply was not possible. The man held still, too-tight jeans soaked in the spurting grey stream of it, finger held out before him like a dowsing rod. His blank face broke out in sudden self-deprecating laughter.
An echoing voice answered from the dark outside the spotlight.
“Sir!”
Father jostled through, as if from some other plane of existence, and grabbed the culprit around the nape of his thick neck. Bridget then spied her mother among the many strange faces and ran to her, skirting the fuzzy white rim of the spotlight’s circle. Without her intending it, the placement of her footsteps lined up with precision along that bright circle’s edge, like a tightrope walker, as though the light were a deep depression or hole and she was in danger of losing her balance and falling in. She’d made it nearly all the way across when her left foot splashed into a puddle. Thick grey bile infiltrated her sock, the crevice between her two smallest toes. It wasn’t until she felt another revolting sensation of wetness, the one on her cheeks, that she noticed she’d begun to cry.
Father returned from wherever he dragged the boil-lancer off to, an air of defeat hanging over his shoulders. In his wake came a pair of teenage boys, their pimply faces half-covered with sanitary masks, mops and buckets in tow.
“I honestly thought they’d have made more progress,” he said.
Mother’s silent scowl betrayed neither fear nor disgust but rather plain disappointment. Innard Expo was developing poorly this year, much worse than was hoped, and to judge from Mother’s expression she could only interpret this fact as some kind of personal affront, as though her husband’s involvement in the disaster, albeit only as security staff, reflected secondhand on her own validity as a human being. Meanwhile, the sensation in the webs of Bridget’s toes, together with the moist flatness of sock against floor, had become unbearable.
“Daddy,” she said, “can you pick me up?”
“You know I can’t, Bridge. You’re too big now, it’ll mess up my back.”
She cried harder, her cheeks even wetter now. She could not stand when Father called her Bridge, had hated it ever since she was very small and had not yet learned that words sometimes had more than one meaning. She was no object for horses to tramp over, for trolls to live under, no conduit to connect two riverbanks—she herself was the riverbanks!
“The organizers don’t know what they’re doing,” Mother said, fuming. “They think they do but but they don’t. They don’t even know what it is they want.”
“They know.”
“Yes, yes, of course. ‘Corporeal form’.”
“Hey, don’t look at me. I just work here, sweetheart.”
Her parent’s quarreling, their unbecoming sneers, had the usual repulsive effect on Bridget. Like the north pole of one magnet, and she was the same pole of a smaller, far less powerful magnet. She wiped her face dry, calming herself as she wandered away. She was so hungry now. Her stomach, so empty, gurgled like echoes in a cavern. The crowd got more sparse. Near to the exit, she came upon the last exhibit.
Item 5. [∅]
Hardly anyone was there to gather around. Everyone had had their fill of Innard Expo. Either that or this final exhibit, coming on the heels of the bursting nipple-boil, had already been judged a blatant anti-climax. Or perhaps it was because no one even knew what to look at . . . here, an unfortunate multiplicity of folds . . . there, a tepid broth in which a chalky precipitate was floating . . . melty margarine substance, tiny brown stubble-hairs adhered to its surface . . . fat raindrops from above, whose source Bridget could not divine up among the black rafters.
And then it fell, and came to rest right beside Bridget’s still-slimy sock. She knelt to pick it up.
A tiny bit of organic tissue, encrusted in dirt. It looked like a chicken finger. It seemed to sizzle between her thumb and pointer finger.
“Bridget?”
From across the room, Mother’s face sought her out for questioning, a frank non-verbal interrogation. With her other hand, Bridget peeled off her wet sock and held it aloft. Thus satisfied, Mother’s attention turned elsewhere, and with utmost stealth, Bridget popped the thing into her mouth.
The flesh was gummy in texture, like squid, the crust of grit like Grape Nuts cereal between her teeth. Her stomach calmed. The echoes in the cavern were silenced.
The bell rang.
“Time to go, dear,” her mother’s voice said behind her. “Wave goodbye to your father.”
For a moment, Bridget was mortified. Mother had not seen what she’d done, that much she was sure of. But Father? There was no such certainty. She waved, and he waved back, but not to her. Rather, he was almost waving to her. Something related to her, perhaps. Something that could be construed as her. Almost-her, tangential to what she was, whatever she was now destined to become.
