The Last Animal, page 18
There are times when I still find her in my dreams. Through the back halls of the Museum of Natural History I follow her stocky, linen-clad form. My mother is young again—as young as she was when I was a boy, her hair tarnished by just a few locks of gray. Sometimes I catch her, grabbing her by the hand and earning myself an affectionate, if absent, pat on the head, but more often than not I never find her. She is always just ahead of me, the trail of her perfume leading me into the open, high-ceilinged rooms of the Botany Department, past Mineralogy and Entomology, through closets where discontinued exhibits of whale bones and gemstones gather dust. There are times, in these dreams, when I understand that the rooms of the museum are in fact the compartments of my own mind—or perhaps the collective mind of the human race itself—cluttered up with all the lists of things we have insisted on learning. Here we have the carefully identified drawers, each animal consigned to its own species, each pebble categorized in bright, bold letters. Room upon room details our obsession to know and name everything, as though by labeling it we can come to own it, its nature no longer mysterious at all. And yet I am certain—for it brings me a steady rejoicing—that the task will never be finished, that we are up against nothing less than the full, chaotic measure of a limitless world.
LANDSCAPING
I was carrying a son. I knew this because he would not rest, particularly at night, inside my stuffy bedroom. Eloise’s snoring grated on him. He flipped and wriggled inside my womb. He was ravenous, and he drank me dry every night, so that I woke each morning with a parched mouth. I could picture my boy, the strange arrangement of him. He had only just shed his prehensile tail. Soft, fine hairs grew in patches on his skull, like moss on quartz. His skin was translucent, and brown fat was beginning to coalesce in pockets on his fishy body. My womb felt like a foreign sea, with his alien intelligence in the underwater darkness.
One night he would not stay still. His legs weren’t strong enough to kick, but he beat his little body back and forth, sounding me like a drum. I knew what was bothering him. The boy hated to be indoors. I ran my hands over the skin of my belly to simulate the sound of wind.
He spoke to me. He said, “Dig a garden.” His voice was earthy and wet, as though rising from the murk of an underground pool. It was not a dream, because Eloise moaned, rolled to blink at me, and said, “What? What?”
By the time he was born, it had become a rainforest. I planted stalks of grass, fibrous and razor-edged. I planted waxy jades that grew fat, bulbous leaves. I planted petunias and marigolds that bloomed like butterfly wings. I put down paving stones in the clay. I bought whole trees, nearly my height, from the local nursery, their roots bound up in burlap sacks. In the undergrowth these trees stood as tall as prophets, bobbing their bushy heads, as I knelt in my jeans, my hands streaked with mud, making room for wild ivy, crocus bulbs, and shivering ficuses.
I brought the baby into the garden, bundled in his basket. He twitched his skinny shoulders, and I tucked the blanket around him. His head lolled and his fingers curled and uncurled like anemones. I set him under a thicket of fierce grasses. The wind was very cold, and the sun came watery through the leaves of the maples and elms on the edge of our property. The garden burst from the ground. The ivy tumbled over the petunias, which had grown leggy themselves and were rambling beneath the jade. The paving stones were slimy with moss. A tiger lily I had not planted stood aloof by the wooden fence, and it was not the only flower that had arrived, mysteriously, on its own.
The baby made his high, tight cough. I took him into my lap and held him, tumbled in his blanket. He bumped his doughy feet on my thigh. He smelled of flour. I still had trouble differentiating our bodies, and I knew that for him there was no distinction at all between us. I looked at him, and his eyes said, “Bring me a river.”
Eloise, at the prow of the canoe, set a steady pace with her paddle. I sat at the stern and handled the steering and the allotment of sandwiches. My son, three years old, was settled in the middle with the sun in his hair. He had yet to begin talking, but he watched it all with his mouth open. He turned his head to follow each new sound. I could see only his profile, which resembled Eloise’s in its sharpness. He was not, of course, related to her. It had made sense that I should carry the baby—Eloise had been able to keep her narrow flanks and something of her innocence; she had cooked for me and rubbed my feet, and watched with wonder as stretch marks darkened on my belly and my tush swelled, as my moods went wild and I crept outside to eat the earth in the garden.
The water was sluggish, thick and warm to the touch, and alive with glimmering dragonflies. Trees trailed their leaves in our faces. The flowers along the banks were so laden with pollen that they could not be bothered to flutter in the breeze. I saw the slender backs of river rats, the tremble of rabbit ears, and once, when I coughed explosively into my hand, something crashed away from us down the bank. Birds chattered in the branches, and fish leapt and gleamed. I saw mud detach from itself, hop along the bank, and belch a long froggy cry. There were turtles, too, kicking dreamily beneath the surface, brown and silent, stretching their long necks toward the air. An owl dropped suddenly from an overhanging elm and beat its huge white wings without a sound as it dived away from us above the water.
Eloise paddled in a steady rhythm, her neck sunburned, her bun a red tangle. With each turn of the oar, a dimple appeared in her right shoulder. She hummed a rowing song. My son slapped the flat of his palm on the surface of the stream. He shivered and ducked when mosquitoes sang near him. After a while he looked back at me. His eyes were happy and dissatisfied.
“What do you want?” I asked him. But it was clear what he wanted. Eloise laid the oar across her thighs, stretched both arms high over her head, and unwound her hair, letting it loose over her shoulders.
“What does he want?” she asked without turning.
“A mountain,” I said. “Do you need another sandwich?”
“I’d love one.” She kicked both feet over the edge of the canoe and sank her legs mid-calf into the river. She rolled her hands on her wrists. “Hey, kiddo,” she said. “Say something, baby.”
“A mountain,” I repeated.
She picked up her paddle.
We took him to the Rockies. My son was seven years old, small for his age, with a round, buttery face and a bit of the marionette in his walk. He smashed mushrooms beneath his boots and picked up spiky caterpillars. When we set up the tent, he would not stop circling its orange dome. My son was autistic—the doctors had stamped that term on him. It meant that he would never speak a word. If I laid a hand on the toy he wanted, he would shift my fingers without once glancing at me, as you might move a fallen leaf that had landed on the page of your book. He did not know my name. He did not know his own. My son lived in a realm of color and sound; his senses were so heightened that every breath was an awe-inspiring experience. Sometimes he had fits of ferocious anger, and I was marked with scratches down both my arms, my calves ringed with bruises. Storms of feeling moved across him. Earlier that month he had put his foot through a sliding glass door, and the doctors had recommended we find a home for him. But I would not. I brought him to the mountains instead.
Eloise laughed more in the high, clean air. She woke at dawn, when the sun made the vinyl walls of the tent echo with light. She had brought an elaborate rubber gizmo with tubes that she lowered into the stream to pump and purify the water. She had brought a walking stick. The sun turned her skin to copper, spattered with constellations of freckles. When we entered areas that were heavily wooded, Eloise did as the guidebooks had told her, whistling through her teeth and crying, “Hey, bear! Coming through, bear!” She dropped her pants and peed in the grass. She kissed me hard and bit my mouth in the tent. She tromped around in hiking boots and seemed almost pleased when an overhanging rock scraped her shin to bleeding.
One night I woke to the sound of an owl. The little pillow beside me was empty. I sat up and found my son standing against the tent screen, silhouetted, with the moon between his fingers. He leaned against the mesh, rolling his head in the fabric and pushing with both hands. His face wore its usual curious, detached expression. He was working methodically away, but he would never be able to push his way out.
At home, from under the weight of dreams, Eloise knew she was dying and grabbed my arm. Her heart was near stopping. An aneurysm in her aorta had ruptured—I learned later on—and her heart suddenly swelled, full of blood and life, too big for her narrow ribs. I tossed the blanket off us both. She gripped my elbow.
“Get the kid,” she said thickly.
I shook my head.
“I want to see him,” she said. “Let me say goodbye to him.”
“He won’t understand,” I said. The boy was nearly a teenager, tall and brawny, with Eloise’s stillness and my unruly curls.
“He will this time,” she said.
“He doesn’t know you.” I touched her face.
“The ice,” she said. “Oh, God, the ice.”
Her spirit did not leave easily. It took the shape of a bird and rattled around the room, banging off the windows and upsetting the lamp. It landed on Eloise’s chest and screamed in agony, and then it cleaned its beak, forgetting it had ever been alive. It looked at me with inky eyes. I got up cautiously and opened the window. The bird flexed its wings and fanned the broad feathers of its back. I opened another window. The air smelled of rain. I opened all the windows in the bedroom, and the bird folded one scrawny foot beneath its torso and flapped onto the bureau. I heard the first patter of a drizzle outside, and then the sky opened suddenly, dropping a collision of water on the tender plants. The bird screamed again. It opened its wings and flew straight through me, its beak in my heart, its feathers tearing my chest open. It passed into the storm.
I woke on the carpet. I was sorry to wake. My son was standing over me, his chin lifted in the morning light.
I cared for him until I died myself and was buried in the earth next to the body of Eloise. Then my son wanted the moon, and since I was not there to give it to him, he walked on his own, step by step, across the black and empty miles. The open space felt good on his bare feet. He tumbled onto the lunar surface, and his fall echoed against the spires of the mountains. The sky was always dark, and sometimes the ground was dark as well, and he walked in a dream without light, following the marbled disc of the rising earth. The moon smelled of pepper and ash. My son crossed over the knife-sharp mountains and into vast, gray seas, littered with salt deposits and drifts of shale. He passed through bony deserts, where the humped surface shone like snow. He felt the icy wind from the cliffs and heard the splash of stars. The moon matched him in his silence. My son lived his life clean of love, troubled only occasionally by the distant flight of a small, white bird; and that was me.
FIRE BLIGHT
After midnight, Cosmo found himself in the baby’s room. The crib was half assembled, missing its front panel and the carved headboard. A mobile of paper flowers hung from the ceiling. The diaper pail was already in place, gleaming beneath the bare bulb. Cosmo had brought a trash bag. He set about gathering up the stuffed animals and tossing them into the depths. His instructions had been specific—everything was to be thrown out, none of it given to friends or donated to charity. His wife wanted these things removed from existence; she did not want to think of the sturdy cardboard books and Earth-friendly pacifiers she had shopped for so carefully being used out in the world somewhere, treated as though they were ordinary, handled until they broke or were discarded. Cosmo would strip and repaint the walls, which had been papered on two sides with ducks and bunnies. He would take down the yellow curtains his wife had hemmed. Elaine had been firm.
She had asked this of him as he had helped her down the walkway from the hospital to the car. She was out of danger then, but still weak, her face shadowy and wan. Her hands had trembled where they gripped his shoulder.
“It’ll take a few days to get all that done,” Cosmo had said.
“Fine,” Elaine said at once. “I’ll go away while you’re working.”
But he could not manage it—not tonight, anyway. After a while he headed down to the garden. The wind was cold, and Cosmo zipped up his coat as he waded among the zinnias, searching for any hint of slugs. He had been waging war against these creatures for several months now. First he had placed beer cans around the flowerbeds—an odd little trick he had read about in a magazine—but though some of the slugs had been drawn to the smell, fallen in, and drowned, it had ultimately done more harm than good. The cans blew over in the wind and got knocked down by inquisitive birds, so that the whole yard stank like a pool hall for a while. Then Cosmo had tried to achieve détente. He knew that slugs were essentially a mini-recycling center, and he had gone so far as to put edible flowers in his garden, off behind a bush where Elaine did not have to see them sitting there sadly riddled with holes. But the slugs were not satisfied. They were encroaching again. In the moonlight, the silvery network of their slime trails showed up clearly on the leaves.
In the redwood forest, Elaine woke to the sound of an owl. Her first thought was for her physical person. Was her lower back aching? Did she have pressure or pain? It took her a moment to get her bearings. The tent was rustling in the wind. Indeed, the cacophony of unfamiliar noises around her seemed loud enough that it ought to have woken her long ago. Tree branches creaked far overhead. In the distance, a bonfire was crackling. There were crickets and frogs, their disparate songs meshing in a staccato, high-pitched chorus. Elaine lay still. She was perfectly well. Mentally she ran a finger down the list of possible symptoms, ticking them off one by one. She had not been suffering from nausea or dizziness. The infection had passed over without trace, and her surgery had left few visible scars. There was, perhaps, a little soreness, but that could easily be all in her head. It was tempting, she knew, to prolong the somatic side of things, fixating on any small twinge and even calling up phantom pains in order to have something concrete with which to cope—something that could be managed with a few pills—something that would heal in an orderly, measurable way.
Elaine remembered the look her husband had given her as she had stood on the front stoop, her suitcase in one hand. She had unearthed the old tent from her college years. She still had a few sick days left at work; they would not expect her back yet. Cosmo had offered to come away with her—he spouted a few facts about the redwood trees, looking excited—but Elaine shot him down. Even in the moment of parting, she had stood away from him, unwilling to let him touch her.
“You will come back?” he had asked at last.
“Yes,” Elaine said. And then, annoyed by his naive hopefulness, unable to stop herself, she added spitefully, “I’m sure the redwoods will make everything better. I’m sure I’ll come home cured.”
But her husband had nodded, as though satisfied.
The phone rang just before dawn. Cosmo was flipping through a gardening magazine, avoiding his wife’s empty side of the bed. He was pricing out copper edging, which, if used to line the flowerbeds, would keep the slugs away entirely—they could not cross it without receiving a small electric shock. When his cell phone rang, Cosmo glared at it. It was not hard to guess who might be calling. He ran a gardening hotline, and his more obsessed clients tended to seek his advice at all hours. They phoned in the early morning, before heading off to work, to ask him how to get rid of snapdragon rust. They called while driving down the highway to describe in detail the waterfall they were thinking of buying. They called after midnight, having spotted something that could be a shrew hole among the marigolds.
Cosmo hefted himself up and took his time fishing a T-shirt from the closet. He caught up the phone and shuffled down the stairs.
“Cosmo? It’s Art,” said a man’s deep voice.
“Ah, yes. Morning, morning.”
Art was one of his regulars, a sweet-tempered neurotic who called on an almost daily basis—and whose garden Cosmo could now picture intimately, from the weathered paving stones to the pear and quince trees by the fence.
“Listen,” Art said. “I’m about to leave for the office, but I’ve just stepped outside to take a look at the orchard. There’s something really obscene going on over there.”
“I see,” Cosmo said. “How upsetting.”
“I don’t know exactly how to describe it. At first I thought it might be aphids. I have to tell you, that would be bad enough.”
Art went on, rattling through a list of possible dangers. Cosmo reached the kitchen, and his mood soured. There was no warm smell of coffee. Elaine—who typically rose even earlier than he did—usually brewed a pot before heading out to the city, and he was accustomed to being greeted by that friendly scent, the sense of being cared for. The kitchen was silent, too. His wife usually left the radio on, quite accidentally, so engrossed in NPR’s morning report that she forgot to switch it off before stepping out the door.
