The Triplets of Domestic Tranquility

I. Tick Tack. You are Dead

The Interpreter’s wife points to a tiny black spot on the white wall of the foyer and screams, “It’s a tick.” 

The Interpreter is schooled well. He’s a professional conduit for those who don’t understand another language, and an amateur conduit for same-language speakers who don’t understand each other. He’s also a grandfather of twins, and everyone knows that the twins demand strict discipline.

He takes a pair of tweezers he uses to extract tiny fish bones that stick between his teeth, and catches the creature. He deposits it in a clear plastic bag. He needs to take a picture, upload it to the web to make sure it is really a tick and not say a ladybug. He’s working with the medical professionals, but he’s not an entomologist so he relies on others on this subject. 

The Interpreter comes back with his SLR camera, but the tick suspect is too small. And it crawls around too fast. Should he buy a macro lens? It would take a day to mail order it. He doesn’t believe in going to a brick-and-mortar store. But the unfed tick would die in 24 hours, or so he’s learned from Google.

“Is it ethical to starve a deer tick to death?” he asks aloud. “It’s cuter than a fawn. Not to me so much, I admit, but to his mom. Ticks have moms, right?”

“Kill them all,” his wife says. “They spread Lyme disease.”

She’s normally not blood-thirsty. No, she’s never blood-thirsty. He’s trying to interpret her words, fails and settles for a joke. “Would the jury of its peers approve?”

“It’s either us or them.”

He thinks he’s seen that meme on Twitter.

The Interpreter pricks his finger and drops a tiny droplet of blood into the bag. Though he’s a humanist, he’s not a speciest. 

The tick dies anyway.

The Interpreter goes to the backyard. It smells of wild strawberries and deer droppings. Squirrels squawk. He’s an intruder here.

The Interpreter buries the tick in a shallow grave. He doesn’t know if the tick had any name, rank and serial number, but he makes a tombstone for him from a stick, and attaches a piece of paper that says “Here Lies Tack. He Crawled Too Far.” 

In the morning, the Interpreter finds that someone, probably a deer, stepped on the grave and overturned the tombstone. Nature is red in hoof and horn. He interprets that from the humanistic point of view: from subjective experience Tack no longer cares.

The Interpreter returns to the house and takes out a carton of buttermilk. A bold red warning is printed in the carton: “Lyme Disease Kills. May contain milk.” 

He pours some salt-free, sugar-free cereal. It may contain wheat. Time for breakfast. 

His wife screams from the foyer, “It’s a tick.” 

The Interpreter gets up and walks to the foyer, muttering to himself, “Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.” 

Kurt Vonnegut said that. He knew how to interpret the language of nature.

II. Pet Rocks

I walk the pair of the two year old identical twins outside my daughter’s house. They collect pet rocks, wild flowers, last year’s pine needles, and give them to their Deda for safekeeping. Deda means grandfather in Russian. Deda is me. I’m older than the surrounding hills by the factor of three. 

How old are you? I ask one of them.

She brings up her large grey eyes. Two.

And how old am I? Guess.

She struggles. It must be a big number. Four, five, six?

Six, she says.

When I was four, I lived in Siberia.

When I was five, me moved to Kazakhstan.

When I was six, we moved again, to Moldova. 

Not because we liked to travel, but because Stalin exiled my family. Since then I moved a lot, crossing borders and the ocean, finding a new home at least a dozen times.

Now, I interpret for money and pleasure. 

The other twin gives me yet another pet rock. It’s warm to the touch, and it looks like a miniature meteorite. It’s identical to one of its earlier collected sisters. As a meteorite, it travelled far, have times for reflections, and is probably even older than me. By the factor of six.

I collect the girls, and we are heading home. Home is where the twins are. 

III. The Reverse Doomsday Machine

The twins stand on a single low stool by the window, pointing at the fat snowflakes with their fingers. Polka-dots, they shout. Polka-dots. They are identical, but only look alike. One is exactly a minute older than another, which is a puzzle for everyone at first. When people are told the reason, they shout, of course, stupid me.  

Their Deda stands behind them, a guardian angel, who has never been an angel before, and is immensely proud of his promotion. In his youth, he was devilishly clever. He’s a bit smart even now. Though a lowly medical interpreter, he just invented a machine that blocks the gravity in a circle ten feet around it. So that the twins won’t fall. Or, if North Korea attacks, the room won’t collapse. Or in case of an earthquake. Or in any other case anyone can imagine, or no one can imagine. 

The machine stands on the floor so the twins won’t accidentally knock it over. It takes very little power, and it can be connected by an ordinary cord to an ordinary 110V outlet. The machine hums comfortably, so it can also double up as a white noise machine. Deda likes things that can be used for multiple purposes, and he likes deeply layered poems.

The older twin is more thoughtful, the younger is more energetic. Deda fancies that they each took a part of his sparkling personality. Deda calls himself a polymath. He’s bilingual, a fiction writer, an inventor, a photographer, and the world’s greatest grandfather. He has a mug and a T-shirt to prove the latter. 

The twins start fighting. Deda picks them up from the stool, and carries them deep inside the room. They shout, no Deda, no Deda. At two, their grammar is a bit shaky. Being bilingual doesn’t help. At least not now. 

He deposits them in the far corner and goes back to turn on the lights. It’s getting dark now. He trips over the gravity device cord, and pulls it out of the socket. He falls. It takes him forever to reach the floor. Enough time to think about eternity, invent a machine to prevent the cord from being pulled out of the outlet, write a poem about free fall, take a picture of the approaching floor, and to ponder over a legally and ethically hairy question of which twin is his senior heir. Not enough time to protect his face.