The Last Animal, page 6
When the sun rises, they are still there. Something is happening to Lucy. She feels like her mind is trying to clear—as though she has been in a fog for a long while. For the first time, she wonders if Xavier has always known that she does not love him. She has tried to give him the benefit of the doubt; the only way her sacrifice would be worthwhile was if Xavier never knew what she was giving up for him. But perhaps her instincts have been right all along. Perhaps there has been a silent conversation taking place between them: She has told Xavier that she wishes she could leave, and he has answered that he will kill himself if she tries. His ostensible reason for hurting himself has always been something different, of course. But each injury has been a shot across the bows for her. A warning of what might happen if he were ever left alone. She has felt the terrible weight of his life in her hands.
The sun crests the horizon, and the dog rises to his feet, stretching elaborately. The birds begin their riotous chorus. Lucy passes a hand over her eyes. There is an image in her mind of flesh on a table, glistening pinkly in the light. She can name every wound on Xavier’s body, each broken finger and bloodied knee. Each one was a piece of himself he threw away, only to claim a piece of Lucy instead. Her fingers. Her knees. More than once, he has nearly disposed of his own life, just to hang on to hers. It is like being devoured slowly; every so often she will turn around, only to find that another part of her has been consumed. Her sense of humor. Her laughing acquaintances. Her capacity for unadulterated happiness. Xavier’s hunger for her is unending. Each bite he takes leaves her weaker and dumber, and he has come at last to her vital organs. Of course Lucy has never wanted to sleep with him. In some deep and quiet place, where they are not friends and lovers but combatants engaged in a long and bloody war, she has been fighting for possession of something dear to her—her identity, maybe, or her own soul—and if she gave in at this last hurdle, she would have given in completely. She would have nothing left of her own.
In her first semester at college, Lucy moves around the campus like a ghost. She dresses unobtrusively in secondhand hoodies and jeans. She does not bother to decorate her dorm room beyond a few posters of dogs. Her roommate, she is sure, finds her to be quiet, innocuous, a bit dull—unwilling, for example, to gate-crash one of the keggers at the frat house down the street, unwilling to stay up late discussing the cute T.A. in the Literature 101 class the two of them share. Lucy goes to bed early every night. She does not explore the town beyond the insular campus, wandering, as so many freshmen do, into the theatre district or the shopping malls. The phone rings frequently for her roommate, but Lucy does not get many calls—just her mother, now and again, gently checking in, or her father reminding her fretfully to get the oil changed in that car of hers. Between classes, she spends her time at the library, an immense stone building whose interior is as segmented as a hive, packed with shadowed corners. Lucy sits there by the hour, flipping dreamily through her textbooks beneath the drone of the fluorescent lights.
She feels empty. She finds herself without the words to answer the cheerful burble of her roommate, the calm questions of her professors. She feels like a barely-there person, sketched lightly on the air. As she has instructed, her parents do not mention Xavier when they call. They are both baffled by the whole thing, accepting without comprehension Lucy’s decision to disappear so absolutely from her long-term boyfriend’s life: changing her phone number and her e-mail address, asking them not to pass on any messages he might leave with them. Her mother tries, once or twice, to broach the subject in a cozy, all-girls-together sort of way. Lucy responds by hanging up and turning off her cell phone. She has brought nothing of his with her. Her photographs, his letters, their special notebooks, are at home in her childhood bedroom, to be destroyed at some later date. Lucy has not told her new acquaintances about him. She broke down and cried only once, when her roommate, eyeing the posters of dogs above Lucy’s bed with some distaste, asked casually if Lucy herself had a pet. To her own horror, Lucy burst into tears, sobbing with such violence that her roommate backed away, stammering apologies. Eventually, she knows, she will talk about it to someone. But for the moment the wound is still too raw.
It was not easy, in the end, to leave him. At first, of course, she couldn’t even think of it—Xavier was a broken bird, more dependent on her than ever before. He was unable to attend the last few days of high school. Lucy flew solo at the homecoming dance and class picnic, slices of watermelon and greasy cake on offer. The rumor mill ran rampant, but only a few people dared to approach her directly and ask her just what had happened in that locker room. Xavier did eventually tell her the story: “Some idiot left his razor on the sink. I was in there by myself for some reason; I guess I wanted to pick up my gym clothes. Then I started to think about graduation and everything. How everybody would be leaving. I picked up one of the blades, and before I knew it—” Listening to him, Lucy could not keep from trembling.
His forearms were heavily bandaged for a while, as though in preparation for a martial arts class. When the stitches were removed, Xavier was fitted with splints; even now, if he were to bend his wrists, the cuts could reopen. A slew of psychiatrists had fixed their beady eyes on him. Though it seemed that he would not, as he had feared, be removed from his parents’ custody, there were still mandatory therapy sessions to attend, some of them lasting for hours. The summer moved along in a blur of bland, airy weather. All over town, there were celebratory parties. Lucy didn’t make her way to any of them—though her imagination did linger on backyards filled with music, an illicit keg in the bushes, hot dogs turning above a bonfire. Xavier would wait for her on his porch each day, gazing down the road for her car. Despite the heat, he wore long sleeves to hide the splints, his body perfuming the day with captured sweat. Both wrists were marked by bright red lines. The doctors had told him he would have scars forever.
One day in July, Lucy drove across town with Dharma, who hung his head out the window, barking at his counterparts on the sidewalk. Xavier met her at his front door, and together they strolled down the hill to the park. He told her how his only fond memories from childhood were in this place, his father pushing him on the tire swing, his mother giving him a few bucks for the ice cream truck. They settled in the grass. The dog rampaged around them, chasing bumblebees. Lucy chatted nonchalantly enough, though she was nervous, her palms sweating, her attention wandering far from whatever Xavier was saying about the latest superhero-themed blockbuster.
She was determined to break up with him at last. Her first, tentative attempts to do so had proved futile. She had tried communicating through hints (“When I go to college, things will be different”), but Xavier had proved immune to this brand of subtlety—he only smiled and concurred. Then she began to induce small separations between them, hoping this fledgling space would widen and widen: She spent the evenings cooking with her mother or researching courses online and did not return Xavier’s calls until morning. And yet it never worked out as she had planned. He was so eager to see her again, so ardent in his affection, that he perceived any estrangement as a simple inconvenience, rather than an act of will. In desperation, Lucy had texted I do not love you, it’s all over into her cell phone, and then erased the message, ashamed of her cowardice. She was running out of time. In a few short weeks she would leave for college—fifteen days, to be precise. She was already packing her things, organizing her books and T-shirts, and still she had not found a way to end things with Xavier. If she wasn’t careful, she would end up married to him yet, walking down the aisle in a big white dress like an automaton, her mind still churning in vain over her carefully phrased but never-voiced words of farewell.
And yet she could not do it, there in that idyllic spot, on that mild summer day. Anyone watching them from the street would have seen young love at work. Xavier tipped his head back, closing his eyes in the sunshine. At the edge of the park, the dog bounded after a bunny, dashing through a clump of bushes. The rabbit froze instinctively, and Dharma was fooled, barreling right past it. Xavier was enchanted by the fact that he, as a human being, could see through the guises that animals used to hide from one another.
It was that night that the idea came to her. Fireflies flickered beyond her window as Lucy sat on the bed, packing her sweaters and coats. Dharma panted his swampy breath into her face. The notion came suddenly, blooming with icy precision, full-formed, as though some secret part of her had been working on it for quite a while. Lucy tried to push the thought away, but it returned at once, blotting out everything else. In order for her to leave Xavier—to really leave him, to end the relationship once and for all—she would have to give him something that would sustain him in her absence. Only in this way could she be free of her burden, her acute sense of maternal responsibility. Only in this way could she guarantee that he would be safe. The plan was a vicious one, as bitter and painful as a slap across the face. But that, too, was all to the good. It was necessary that Lucy herself should suffer in the process. She had known that all along. She would need to be punished, and punished severely, for her desertion. That way nobody, not Xavier, or even Lucy herself, could fault her for it afterward. It would have to hurt like hell.
In the morning, she was ready. She took Dharma for such a long walk that her legs grew sore. She let him linger beside each enticing smell; she let him roll in garbage, and afterward, she washed him tenderly (which, unlike the rest of his species, he adored, splashing around and trying to bite the stream of water coming out of the faucet). Lucy clipped his toenails. She took a packet of chicken out of the fridge—its presence there had been causing him a certain amount of angst—and served it up for him on a bed of dog food and rice. Her parents were out for the day, visiting friends from her father’s hospital support group, and Lucy was glad. She tried to think of what she would say to them later on—that Dharma had run away, that she had left him with friends for the duration of her first few semesters at school, that he had been killed, maybe. It was best that she did not have to face them just yet. In the car, on the way to Xavier’s, she touched the dog’s crumpled ears, the broken tooth at the front of his jaw, the black patch at the end of his tail.
But there her memory stops—the day burns away into a humming blank. Lucy is aware of what she did and said, standing in the sunshine outside Xavier’s house. She knows that she handed over the dog’s food bowl and chew toys. She had even printed out a sheet of directions for Dharma’s care, just as she would for a house sitter, detailing how to brush his fur and cope with his dental hygiene. Perhaps she and Xavier fought. Perhaps she gave in and cried. She doesn’t remember; the afternoon is broken into shards, and she has retained only flickers of the moment. Dharma darting after a butterfly. Her own heart pounding determinedly. A gleam of sunlight reflecting from an upper window. She knows that when she gave Xavier the leash, he took it quizzically, and the dog shifted obediently, plopping down beside Xavier’s feet, gazing up at Lucy with his eyebrows raised. This simple act caused her to moan a little. She knows that at one point she saw Xavier’s expression change, as at last he began to grasp her intention. But for once she was more absorbed in her own pain than his. She knows that she patted Dharma’s head, and he looked up at her with his customary expression, hopeful, adoring. There was simply no way to say goodbye to a dog. She knows that, in the end, she drove away.
In autumn the campus grows rainy and dark, the flagstones glimmering with wet. Lucy crosses the quad wrapped up in a scarf and hat. She buys a college sweater. Now and then she lets her roommate drag her out for coffee. She goes to see a few movies in the evenings. She begins to take long walks again, striding past the library, down the hill, and into the rose garden, which opens into a quiet wood and a slow, winding river, weighted down with mud.
One day she is seated in her Indian History course, her desk catching the last rays of waning sun through the window. With a jolt, she comes across Dharma’s name in the footnotes of her textbook. The classroom fades away, the teacher’s voice receding. Turning avidly to the right page, a lump in her throat, Lucy reads for the first time about the origin of her dog’s honorific. (She does not think of him, does not let her mind dwell on whether Xavier is letting him sleep in the bed, whether Xavier remembers the way to rub him just so behind his sore left ear. She does not wonder whether Dharma has forgotten her by now, or whether he still waits, languidly in the morning, anxiously in the afternoon, his ears perking up at the whine of a car engine like hers, his golden head turning to follow the smell of her lavender shampoo when it drifts from another woman’s hair.) Lucy hoists the book up off the desk. She reads that in the Epics, the great stories of Indian lore, it is written that King Yudhisthira and a party of cohorts climbed the Himalayas. This group braved ice, snow, and the thinning air, but one by one they capitulated and fell away, so that by the time the king reached the home of the gods, all his companions had succumbed to weakness and deserted him—except for his faithful dog.
Lucy sits up straight, tucking her hair back from her face. Her nose nearly touches the printed page. She reads how the gods welcomed the weary king, asking him to come in and join them. But he refused to enter if it meant abandoning his dog there on the mountaintop. This turned out to be the right choice. The gods allowed the dog in as well, and when the two of them had passed through the gates together, the animal’s shape suddenly changed. He transformed before the king’s eyes into the god Dharma. Blinking away the tears, Lucy trails her finger down the list of his divine attributes. The principle of cosmic order. Righteous duty and virtue. One of the fundamental elements that make up the world.
CAPTIVITY
At the age of thirty-one, I moved in with my mother. This was not entirely my fault. My apartment building was about to go condo, and I could no longer afford the rent. My lanky, bookish boyfriend took a job in Florida and unexpectedly moved away. My pet octopus caught a mysterious virus and died; I came home from work and found her bobbing sadly on the surface of her tank, her skin washed clean of color. The combination of all these factors left me listless. I could not cope with the hassle of moving, much less finding a new apartment within my price range, in a good neighborhood, within a matter of weeks. It was much easier to pack everything I owned into boxes and ship it all into storage instead. I liked the feeling of shedding my belongings; it seemed as though the objects that had pinned me to the ground were lifted one by one, rendering me weightless. It seemed as though my own personality could similarly be purged of excess baggage and rendered new.
And so I moved in with my mother, half a mile away in northern Chicago. She put me in my childhood bedroom and didn’t have to ask why I began to spend all my time at work. During the first week of living with her, I managed to stay at the aquarium for three days straight. It became a joke in the cephalopod wing. I tested the water samples, cleaned the tank of algae, and donned scuba gear to feed the big Octopus vulgaris before a crowd. I had never needed much sleep and now subsisted on next to none—a few minutes with my head down on the desk, and I was good for a couple more hours. Even my boss told me to go home, though I thought the octopuses and cuttlefish seemed comforted by the constancy of my presence. When I could no longer focus on my own work, I visited the dolphin boys. They were young, strange men, unfazed by broken femurs and smashed hands, a set of top teeth knocked clean out by a playful flick of the tail. I talked with the sea horse behaviorist, who was concerned about a fungus killing the algae and plants; it was either caused by the animals or else was dangerous to them instead. I wandered down to take my break with the sea otter crew, who all trooped outside every hour on the hour to smoke cigarettes and discuss exactly how Mickey the sea otter had got hold of Charley the trainer’s hat. And then I went home and found photographs of my brother Jordan scattered all around my mother’s house, and she and I looked at one another with a terrible politeness.
There was even a photograph of him in my bedroom, though I quickly moved it into the living room, where Mom must have noticed its sudden appearance on the end table. It showed Jordan at the age of five, wearing a purple baseball cap and making his picture smile, a grin so wide it hurt his cheeks and nearly closed his eyes with squinting. In the photo his feet were blurred; he was drumming his heels on the legs of his chair, as though the energy required in so fierce a smile had to shoot out of his body in other ways. It was not my favorite photograph. He looked manic and distressed.
I missed my mother more, living under her roof, than I had when we were on opposite ends of the same city. I knew her so well that I could predict, as she sat in the evenings flipping through the paper, when she would crack her knuckles or tilt her head back in a yawn. She was a fascinating woman, her hair silky and shot through with white, her eyes crackling with energy. She dressed like a gypsy: bright shawls, swingy skirts, and hoop earrings. At the age of sixty she still worked at the bookstore down the street from her house and loved to rattle off Einstein’s reasons for supporting the creation of Israel or to calmly drop the fact that Maurice Sendak had once claimed all his books were written about the Holocaust. She often returned home with a resigned smile and a grocery bag full of brand-new books, saying, “Well, I just lost it.” It broke my heart that two such interesting women found silence easier than speech, standing side by side in the kitchen as she grated cheese into the pasta and I chopped the vegetables, or watching television together with our heads cocked at the same angle.
Seven years earlier, my brother Jordan had disappeared. One day he was living in his trailer on the California coastline, and the next day he was gone. I flew out to San Francisco, frantic, unshowered, and mumbling to myself, while my mother stayed in Chicago and called everyone from the FBI to Jordan’s ninth-grade girlfriend. The sun was dazzling in my brother’s trailer park. I had visited him there before, but in my panic, my navigational skills deserted me, and I quickly grew bewildered. The trailers themselves were numbered according to no particular system. Jordan’s neighbors had mischievous faces and sent me down several sweeping tracks that did not lead to my brother. At last I found the right trailer. The door swung open on a faulty hinge.
