The Last Animal, page 7
The interior space was absolutely still. The bedclothes were tumbled in a heap, revealing bare mattress. Jordan’s surfboard stood in the shower, half hidden by the plastic curtain, and startled me out of my wits. His clothes were crammed cheerfully into his tiny set of drawers. His smell hung about the room. A more thorough search yielded his toothbrush in the medicine cabinet, his wallet in the back pocket of a crumpled pair of jeans on the floor, and his diary buried in the tangle of sheets. A quick flip through its pages told me only the daily weather, with the height and strength of the waves mentioned particularly. I stepped out into the brilliant sunshine, sweaty, bleary-eyed, and still wearing the coat I had needed in rainy Chicago.
Over the next few days I interviewed anyone Jordan had ever mentioned in a letter, anyone who claimed to know him, and everyone told me a different story. Rudy and Mike, his shaggy, furtive surfing buddies, said he had been with them on the water the day he disappeared. His next-door neighbors could tell me nothing except that he’d begun to frighten them—they had heard screaming from his trailer in recent weeks, a woman sobbing, furniture overturned, and the splash of broken glass. The lifeguards at his favorite beach told me Jordan was something of a menace; he tackled the highest waves, without regard for life or limb, and the young boys followed him. The man at the beachside surf shop spat on the ground and said Jordan was never without his slut of a girlfriend, an outrage against everything that was decent and moral. An elderly woman, bedecked by crystals and lace, said she had dreamed he was drowned, gone under while surfing. When I mentioned finding the surfboard in his shower stall, she crossed herself.
At the end of the week I had nothing but questions. My journal was packed with notes like Girlfriend? What girlfriend? My mother would be frenzied; I had not even called to say I’d landed safely, and now I had nothing to tell her. I walked slowly back from the beach. The sky was a hazy orange above me, the wind cool and mild. The rows of trailers gleamed in the setting sun. My mind was full of Jordan’s stripped bed in the shadows, the sweet relief of sleep. But when I reached the trailer, there was a girl on the stoop. She wore a pink bikini and nothing else. She was so thin she looked almost ill. Her hair was as heavy as seaweed.
When she saw me coming she stood up, and warily I extended my hand. She shook it with a hot, damp palm.
“Mara?” she said. “I’m Cynthia. You’re looking for Jordan.”
I nodded dumbly and sat on the trailer stoop, the metal warm from the sun. Cynthia stood over me, printed dark against the sky. There was a peach-colored bruise on her right shoulder, from which I averted my eyes. She waggled a plastic ring under my nose.
“We’re engaged,” she said. “So when he comes back, he’ll call me first.”
I had been living with my mother for almost a month when the postcard arrived. I was not expecting any mail; I was standing in the living room in my stocking feet, flicking through bills as the sun rose behind the trees. I AM ALIVE, said the postcard, in fat block letters. No signature, addressed to me. I yelled for Mom. She was in the shower, though, warbling a little tune over the hiss of the water. The front of the postcard showed only the familiar image of Lake Michigan, dark beneath a scattering of sailboats. My heart began to hammer reproachfully on the inside of my chest. “Mom!” I hollered, and I heard her bellow, “What?” from inside the bathroom. The handwriting in the address was unfamiliar—no distant bells went off. But Jordan’s handwriting might have changed in seven years.
“What?” Mom yelled again. “Mara? Are you calling me?”
She switched off the shower. I folded the postcard in half and put it in my pocket, where it burned. My hands now seemed very empty. There was a clatter in the bathroom, shampoo bottles landing in the tub, and Mom muttered, “Oh, hell.” I remembered I’d made tea, and I hurried into the kitchen to clutch the warm cup in hands that trembled. Mom stomped into the room in her bathrobe, her hair swathed unevenly in a towel.
“What?” she asked, exasperated. “What were you hollering about?”
“You’re going deaf,” I said mildly. “Do you want any tea?”
She narrowed her eyes. “I am not going deaf. You were howling about something.”
“Your turban is coming off.”
“You’re obnoxious.” She adjusted her towel where it had fallen like bangs over her eyes. “I recorded a show for you on eels, did you see it?”
“Eels eat octopuses,” I said. The postcard in my pocket was beating its wings. “I’m going to work.”
I paused in the doorway. She looked up at me expectantly.
“I won’t be home late,” I said.
Mom batted this away with her hand.
At work I unfolded the postcard again. It continued to say I AM ALIVE, now with a crease down the middle. I was late to feed the big Octopus vulgaris, but I took the time to smooth the postcard out and pin it safely to the bulletin board. I could not take it with me into the tank. I could hardly bear to leave it, and I actually considered climbing the ladder to Falco’s pool and just dropping the food in from above, but the thought of demeaning my favorite octopus to the level of a common goldfish got me out of my office and into my flippers and mask.
Falco was the aquarium’s largest octopus, and the most friendly. But today, at the sight of me coming into his tank, he turned first pale, then a dark and furious red. When I reached for him, he sped to the other side of the tank and roughened his mantle to the consistency of coral. At first I didn’t understand, and then I realized he must have been sensing the strangeness of the morning on me. His suckers would pick up a change in my body chemistry. It was possible he didn’t recognize me at all. When I held out a bit of crabmeat, he washed the red from his skin, but there were still black circles painted around his eyes, indicating anxiety. Through the condensation-clouded viewing window of the tank, a small child was watching, his nose smushed against the glass. While I was distracted, Falco stole the crabmeat out of my bag.
All day long, the postcard clanged like a bell in my brain. Cleaning algae from the tank, feeding the morose cuttlefish, sitting in an all-cephalopod meeting, I found myself lost in time, mouth open. It was as though I walked around with the postcard an inch from my eyes. Why an image of Chicago? The one private detective who had claimed to have word on my brother (the others eventually told us all clues pointed to dead) had placed him in northern Italy—and that was three years ago. I imagined my brother seated on the shores of Lago di Como, bearded, shaggy-haired, and alone, pulling from his pocket the one dusty picture he had kept all this time: a postcard of the old skyline. The postmark, however, was local. Perhaps Jordan had crept into the city in the dark of night, chuckling to himself as he attached the stamp and fumbled with the latch of a mailbox. Perhaps he was in the neighborhood even now.
The postcard had to be from Jordan. I had been fooled a thousand times before, by letters from friends with handwriting like my brother’s, countless wrong numbers from men with similar voices, a note left by accident on my doorstep, intended for some other woman, people waving from cars, too far off to be identified—and even by a heart someone had sky-written above the Sears Tower. But this was the real thing. It had to be. It had my name on it.
By evening my head was aching, my eyes burned, and I could not work or rest. The time had come to talk to someone. I reached for the phone, dialed Mom’s number, and hung up promptly. Then I called her again and let it ring.
“It’s me,” I said.
“I had a feeling. Something wrong?”
“Shit,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“I see.” She took a sip of something. “Well, I had an awful day.”
Her voice was tired and sad. It was the wrong time to hit her with this particular surprise, especially over the phone.
“Me too,” I said cheerfully. “I forgot to eat lunch. Then I forgot to eat dinner.”
“Jesus, Mara. Isn’t there a food court right there in the aquarium?”
“Really? Since when?”
She took another sip of her drink. A little silence formed and I said, “I’ve got to go.”
“Fine.”
I took a deep breath. “Why did you have an awful day?”
She laughed. “Never mind, babe. It’s nothing.”
Night had fallen when at last I left my office and wandered down to the dolphin pool. The enormous room was dark except for one small lamp on a corner table. Through the windows, the skyline appeared, glittering and pristine. One of the dolphin boys knelt by the water. For a mind-numbing instant I thought it was my brother. But when he glanced up, I saw it was Roger with his narrow face and strong, square jaw. He would be fighting with his girlfriend again; nothing else kept him at the aquarium so late. When he saw me coming he laughed and said, “You look like hell.”
I knelt beside him. The dolphin tank always seemed to expand and deepen when the lights were off. The black water was very still. The dolphins were hiding. Roger and I peered into the depths, and after a moment I made out the underwater silhouette of the fake stone cliffs that had been built to mimic the dolphins’ original coastline. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw the pale curve of the bottom. Then a shadow flicked across it.
“They’re mating,” Roger said. “For a change. That’s all they do. Apes, humans, and dolphins are the only animals that mate for pleasure, did you know that?”
I shook my head.
“True,” he said. “Just think if you locked seven people in a house together for the rest of their lives. What would they do all day? I’m amazed that the viewers don’t notice it. The big alpha will zip right by the window with an enormous boner, and they all just go, ‘Aww! How cute!’”
I laid my hands on the cold surface of the pool. Up close, the smell of saltwater filled the air.
“You fighting with the little woman?” I asked.
He glanced at me. “Yeah, what’s your excuse?”
“Make them do a trick. Show off for me.”
Roger grinned and slapped his hand three times on the surface of the water. The skyline was reflected in patchy cubes of light; the ripples from his splash broke the image into shimmering snow. Before my eyes, one of the dolphins glided upward, ominous and sentient. Roger sounded two beats, and the dolphin kicked its tail and crested the water with just its dorsal fin. Roger hit the water with the flat of both hands and the dolphin leapt as though he had knocked it clean out of the pool. It didn’t jump far, not nearly as high as it could; it hung for a moment, streaming water as thick as blood, and then landed on its side with a rolling splash.
“Ah, the little meathead,” Roger said. “We’ve got to do something about him. He’s getting aggressive. Bonking the aquarists on the head when we’re cleaning the algae off.”
“Bummer,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow. “What’s funny is trying to make people believe it. Dolphins? Never. These guys save shipwrecked sailors, man. It’s like you’re talking about an attack of killer bunnies.”
“Has anybody been hurt?”
“No,” Roger said, but his face clouded over. “Well, bumps and bruises. But I’ve been doing some reading. Certain dolphins will get aggressive in captivity after a few years. Usually the smartest ones. I don’t want to think about what’ll happen if he starts to get really violent.”
He reached into a bucket beside him, lifted out a silver fish, and tossed it into the water. At the splash, a black nose broke the surface and snorked down the tiny meal.
“My brother,” I began, and paused. “When I started working here, he was furious with me. Mostly because of the dolphins. Unconscionable, he said. We had a big fight about it. I told him that at least they were alive in here. Out in the wild, they could be tuna.”
Roger cocked his head at me. “Something on your mind?”
“Tell me to go home.”
“Mara, go home.” He rubbed his nose and added, “For Christ’s sake.”
“I don’t want to,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” he said wearily.
On the El I sat curled in the handicapped seat and knocked my head gently against the window. The sky was still soaked with colors from the sunset, and I struggled to glimpse Lake Michigan between the buildings. I had the postcard with me, just in case the janitor somehow mistook it for garbage, removed it from the bulletin board, and burned it otherwise.
There was no right way to bring it up with Mom. The last time she and I had talked about my brother—almost two years ago—it had been a train wreck. The conversation began when I mentioned an article I’d read about amnesia and wondered aloud if that could be what happened to Jordan. Unexpectedly, Mom had thrown a plate at the wall. She screamed that he was dead. She screamed that she was living out her greatest nightmare, that of losing a child and having to go on, perpetually stunned that a human being could survive such an injury. And now, she had bellowed, looking crazier by the second, her remaining child appeared to be laboring under some fairytale expectation of a miraculous resurrection. I had never heard her shout like that. Finally I lost my temper and hollered back. I told her that my brother was alive. Perhaps we would never see him again; I was resigned to that, as much as anyone could ever be. But he was not dead. He could not have passed out of this world without my knowing it. Then I gathered up my coat, scuttled from her house, and shipped to Seattle for six weeks of field research.
There were giant octopuses in the cold Pacific sea. I spent my time chasing them along the ocean floor, watching their huge bodies outpace their undersized lungs; they would zoom ahead of me for a while on a cloud of looping tentacles, but gradually they would run out of breath and stop, eyeing me anxiously. I could not get used to their thirty-foot wingspans. I could not get warm. I returned home without having called my mother once, and she and I took up a tacit truce of strained good manners and careful conversations. We had not spoken of Jordan since.
Mom was still awake when I let myself into her house. She was sitting at the countertop with a glass of wine beside her, apparently waiting for me. I found I couldn’t meet her eyes. I knelt in front of the fridge and began rummaging.
“I can’t sleep for shit,” she said. “They tell you this about getting old, but I never really believed it.”
“I can’t sleep either these days,” I said, sniffing a pack of cheese.
“You never slept, though.” She sipped her wine. “I couldn’t make you take a nap to save my life. These other mothers would tell me how their kids slept eight, twelve hours a night, and I wanted to throttle them all.”
I found a promising container in the crisper and sniffed its contents. “How old is this pasta?”
“Listen,” she said. “Something happened today.”
“Tastes fine,” I said with my mouth full. “You look troubled.”
“I am troubled,” she said. She was avoiding my eyes too. “Cynthia called me this afternoon.”
“Who?” I asked, opening the fridge again.
There was a long, icy pause, during which I looked up and saw anguish on my mother’s face. The feeling hit me before the realization—a sinking sensation, as of hope deflating. I set the pasta carefully on the countertop.
“Cynthia,” I echoed. “You mean—?”
She nodded. Neither of us spoke his name. Flooded by memory, I sank onto the kitchen floor. The girl in the pink bikini, with waves of greasy hair. Just the thought of her made me wince.
“My God,” I said. “What did she want?”
Mom was fidgeting with the hem of her dress. “I’m not certain. She’s quite an odd woman.”
“Yes,” I said. “She was.”
“I believe—” Mom cleared her throat. “She wanted to take me out to lunch. She lives here now. I got the sense that she’s one of these young imitation hippies, you know, with the all-too-peaceful demeanor, who thinks that clarity of speech is a construct of the Man.”
I laughed and brushed a hand across my face. After my one and only meeting with Cynthia—in the sleepless days and weeks that had followed, as it became clear that Jordan was well and truly gone—I had occasionally brooded over his dizzy girlfriend and her ludicrous, plastic, little girl’s engagement ring. I had stayed up nights glowering and dreaming up a list of cutting retorts I should have given her. (My mother, when I told her the story, had grown almost apoplectic with rage at the silly girl’s presumption and cruelty.) Eventually, though, I came around to pitying Cynthia. She had clearly been a fling, one of many thin, neurotic women to pass in and out of Jordan’s life, but however transitory her relationship with him had been, she had lost him too. In the end, the only thing that kept her stamped in my consciousness at all was her proximity to his disappearance—the way the face of a bystander might linger in the brain of a witness at the scene of an accident.
And then I thought of the postcard. A spasm of pain went through me. It was still tucked in my pocket; I laid a hand on the place without thinking. My mother was watching me with concern.
“Oh God,” I said. “This was today? She called you today?”
Mom nodded. “Yes.”
“And she wanted to see you?” I struggled to my feet. “She wanted to take you to lunch, to be a part of our lives? That’s why she got in touch?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Mom said. “But I made it clear that contact with her would not be welcome. I don’t think she’d dare to call me again, and I can’t imagine she’d go so far as to bother you. I just thought I should warn you—” She broke off, staring at me.
