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"What you have?" says Olaf.
Olaf isn't like you and me. You and me, we're sitting, baking, locked up in a stuffy school library, reading stories
to each other. Olaf, he barely speaks a word of English. Until today, he's never even been to the U.S.. Today,
he lands in San Francisco for the first time, and probably for the last time, for he intends to stay, and Olaf
might be in need of a drink.
The stewardess cocks her head to one side, flashing a phony, glittering, perfectly aligned grid of grin. "Tonic,
gin, soda," she recites. "Juice, tea, coffee. We've got beer, vodka. I could make you a Bloody Mary,
sir," she says.
Olaf grimaces and waves her away. "I have nothing," he mutters, with a brunt Russian accent.
Olaf may just be the first Russian man in recorded history to have refused vodka. But then, he isn't like you,
or me, or the Russians.
If we were to crash on this airplane, they'd probably find Olaf's body first. It could be in the desert or the
ocean or on the damp, dirty floor of some long-forgotten jungle, rainshower or shine or monsoon, and they'd still
find it first. Olaf's got so many preservatives in him, so many pesticides and toxins floating around in his blood;
he's pumped with so many chemicals that his corpse would likely be rendered indestructible, virtually weatherproof,
if we were to crash.
If we were to crash, he'd rot, sure. If you lie there, dead, long enough, the flies'll get to you. They'll get
under your clothes and wriggle up your nose and deep down your ass crack and lay their eggs where it's nice and
moist and warm. And the hairy, juicy maggots that'll hatch out of those, they'll squeeze their greasy way under
your skin. They'll crawl in and chew their way through your soft palate and begin working on your brain. Like all
your other organs, it'll turn yellow with pus and fat and rupture. It'll leak and bubble and froth out your ears
and nose and mouth, along with those maggots. Not long before you're reduced to a sticky, bony consistency, a soupy
colony of pus and plasma and green mold crawling with sickly yellow insects. No, blood, no guts. No distinguishable
features. Not long before all that's left of you is a dark, smelly stain on the ground, in the place where you
evaporated.
This would happen to Olaf. It would happen to us all, and it will happen to us all, at some point. The difference
between Olaf and you and me is, he'll boil over and fall apart in a period of about ten, twenty years. It would
take us a few weeks.
Olaf has a big onion head. All of his dirty, brown hair stands up in one massive cowlick in the middle of his head
and his jaws get progressively wider from the bottom of his colossal cleft chin to his ears. He's got two big ears,
not floppy or sticking out, but flat and pressed to the sides of his head. His pale, pasty neck looks exploded,
a bulbous mass that only adds to the effect of his onion shape.
Olaf didn't always look like a legume. He didn't always smell like one, either. Now his skin is drained of color,
hanging off in dead strips. His eyes glaze over, his fingers tremble, and he sneezes everywhere. Pills rattle in
their bottles in his pockets when he shakes.
It wasn't always like this. It wasn't like this five years ago, when Olaf himself was just twenty years old. When
he found a pretty girl and decided to settle down. When he picked the city of Chernobyl to live in. Not only because
the best fields were there, for farming, but the biggest, largest nuclear power plant. After all, in a society
defined by its struggle for world domination, who doesn't want a piece of the pie?
Olaf always was a man of onions. A farmer. A Commie. Power to the Reds. In '86, when the plant blew up, he took
his pregnant wife to the rooftop and they drank champagne as they watched the nuclear embers glow red in the night.
When the government refused to grant access to the plant, and when the Ukranian president refused to concur that
a cloud of radiation was settling over the city, Olaf believed them. When they blasted announcements over the radio
to remain calm and remain in place, even as hundreds of thousands of people were evacuating Chernobyl, Olaf and
his wife stayed behind. Even as the onions in their fields quadrupled in size and took on an odd, fluorescent purple
shade, Olaf and his wife continued to harvest them and to ship them out, and to eat them, too. They ate them not
necessarily because they wanted to, but because there was no one left to sell to, and no place to buy produce from.
It wasn't until his wife gave birth to an onion baby that Olaf began to have doubts.
She might have been a pretty little girl if she hadn't had a giant head. Olaf's daughter, she came out blue, and
dead, and with a big, bulbous onion head, just like his.
She had a bloated throat. Thyroid cancer. What happens with thyroid cancer is the cells in your throat will swell
up to make an enormous, hanging bulge at your neckline. If you're an adult and you have this, you'll probably get
asthma and wheeze a lot. If you're a fetus and you have this, you'll choke on yourself before you ever take your
first breath. And that's what happened. Olaf got a slimy, blue, dead little alien, and his wife caught a fever
died before ever hearing the news.
Olaf didn't call the hospital. He dismissed the midwife and he wrapped up his family in their best sheets and he
dragged them outside, to a wooded area of his onion field. He unwrapped his wife and he unwrapped his child and
he laid them out in front of him, naked. He took out a digital recorder and he watched. And he sat with them on
the radioactive ground, and he watched.
Death isn't really a thing. It's not an event. It's a process. The soul goes God-knows-where, but the blood, once
it's got nothing to pump it around, it drains to the bottom. You become a bit bottomheavy, literally, since most
of it will settle in your ass.
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