The Last Animal, page 9
“But why did you get in touch at all?” I asked.
“Well!” Cynthia clapped her hands. “When I moved here I wasn’t sure how to find you. I spent awhile, you know, looking around online. And the city is so big! It took me forever.”
“Uh-huh,” I said impatiently. She was smiling at me, apparently done with her story. At last I said, “But why, Cynthia?”
She took a deep breath, looking down. After a moment she said softly, “You’re just like your mother.”
I gripped my glass in both hands.
“I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “I miss him, you know. Even after all this time. I thought maybe we could”—she made a hesitant back-and-forth gesture—“tell stories. Remember him together.”
“No,” I said, louder than I meant to.
She cocked her head.
“It doesn’t help,” I said. “We’ve got to let the dead—” I broke off. “To let sleeping dogs lie. Whatever the expression is.”
“He’s not dead,” she said at once.
I stared at her.
“Of course he’s not dead,” she said. “Mara, please.”
I held up one finger. “The police.” I held up another finger. “Any number of private detectives.” A third finger. “My mother. Cynthia, everyone thinks he’s dead.”
She laughed, a foreign sound, joyful and burbling.
“Oh, Mara, your mother doesn’t think that.” She put a hand over her mouth. “Come on. What mother would think that?”
”At any rate,” I said, gathering my wits. “None of this is why I came. I came to tell you to leave us alone. You did a great deal of damage . . .” I paused, shaking my head. “A lot of damage just by getting in touch. You need to leave us alone now.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” I almost laughed at the absurdity of it—she was watching me like a pupil awaiting a failing grade. “My mother said she already told you that. Didn’t she?”
“Yes, but—” Cynthia knotted her fingers together. She was never still; every emotion seemed to require its own specific movement. “I thought maybe you would be different,” she said. “We’re more the same age, and I hoped that—”
“No,” I said gently. “It’s no. There’s nothing more to say.”
I got to my feet, eager to be out of the warm restaurant, away from Cynthia’s overpowering musk and sweet, shining face.
She followed me to the door. Her whole demeanor had changed; her shoulders slumped, and she fidgeted with the cuff of her sleeve. I opened the door and felt the slap of a cold breeze against my cheek.
“Goodbye,” I said, extending an arm politely.
She took my hand in both of hers, but she did not shake it. She just held on, gazing at me longingly.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “It might be good for you too, to talk about him. You could tell me stories. I’d love to hear stories from you.”
There was an odd comfort in the pressure of her hands. I realized it had been a long time since anyone had touched me. Her black eyes were fixed on my face, and for a moment I felt the urge to open the Jordan file, to pull out the memories I had left and spill them on the table, to let Cynthia pick through them, holding them up to the light.
“No,” I said at last.
I withdrew my hand and stepped into the rain.
In the late afternoon I found myself back at the aquarium. I didn’t want to go home; I had the vague suspicion that Mom would see the taint of Cynthia on me. I went to see Falco instead.
The aquarium was dark, though I heard the occasional scuff of footsteps, and in a distant room someone was laughing. On my way to the tank I ducked into the janitor’s closet and grabbed a broom with a nice, shiny metal handle. At Falco’s pool, I dipped this into the water and waved it back and forth, tracing a figure eight in the gloom. The octopus didn’t have time to turn red; he came flying out of his hole and took hold of the broom with as many arms as would fit. When I began to draw him up, out of the water, he released the handle but did not return to his hiding place, floating curiously in the middle of the tank, his body an ambivalent brown. I dipped the broom in again, and again Falco threw himself on it, grappling with it so furiously I thought he meant to wrestle it from my grasp. It took me three tries to finally draw him into the air. Water streamed from his body, and his skin changed, no longer taut and bulbous but slightly flaccid under the sudden weight of gravity. I was surprised at how heavy he was; I found myself levering him against the tank wall.
Once he was in the air, I held out an arm and stayed still. He tested my palm and forearm with a few wet, delicate suckers. He had never touched a human outside of scuba gear, and I knew he wouldn’t recognize me as the same creature. It did not take him long to decide I was harmless, though, and he climbed from the bright metal into my arms.
He was dark red now, puffed up, his tentacles coiling wildly at their tips, one fumbling with the collar of my sweater, one still fingering the broom like a lifeline. His eyes were wide and eager as I carried him around the aquarium. I let him put his suckers on the flat of a table, a computer screen, even the clacking keyboard. Out in the hallway his attention was thoroughly absorbed by a fire alarm box, its plastic surface, the handle he couldn’t reach through the glass. I allowed him to trail one tentacle over the dusty carpet. He would not let go of me, and the red didn’t entirely leave his skin, but his eyes didn’t stop roving for a moment and his tentacles were hungry for every new surface. His curiosity seemed to buoy him up, so that he grew lighter as we walked. After half an hour, when I knew he was running out of oxygen, I brought him back to his tank. He went joyfully into the water but did not retreat from view, still watching me with both eyes raised up from his mantle. His tentacles wound around the interior walls, checking to be sure it was all the same.
On my way out of the building I met Roger, about to climb onto his bicycle. He wore his backpack and had changed into jeans with a hole in the knee. At the sight of me he started and looked sheepish. I must have made the same face because suddenly he grinned.
“What were you up to?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Well, then I wasn’t up to anything either.” He took a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, squinting against the sunlight.
“I took the big octopus for a walk,” I said. It made me feel fierce and strange just to say it out loud. Roger laughed, and I realized he had probably been making out with one of the behaviorists—or some other normal indiscretion.
“Where did you take him?” he asked.
“Just around the hallway,” I said, though I had a sudden vision of showing him trees, benches, insects. “I let him touch my computer. They’re smart, you know. I used to have a pet octopus, and she would break out of my tank all the time.”
“I didn’t know that,” Roger said. “You had a pet octopus?”
“Oh yeah. She got all over my apartment. I couldn’t figure out why the carpet was wet, so I set up a video camera and saw her break out. She was a madman. I got to watch her reading my books—just flipping through the pages, like she saw me do from inside the tank. I saw her climbing around on the couch. Once I actually came home and caught her. I found her in the bathtub, trying to pull out the plug and go down the drain.”
“Seriously?”
I tapped my temple. “Smart. She figured that where water went, she would be able to find the ocean.”
Roger lit a cigarette skillfully in the wind, half closing his eyes against the smoke. “I was wrestling with Manny.”
He offered me a drag. The smoke was warm and itchy, very familiar.
“Who?” I said.
“The little dolphin.” I must have looked blank because he added, “The one that keeps beating us up.”
“He attacked you?”
Roger laughed. “No, it was my idea. My boss was talking about moving him into a smaller tank, away from the other dolphins, so they won’t watch old Manny and pick up the behavior.” He shuddered a little. “The guy has a PhD and all. I can’t argue with him. But I couldn’t stand to watch Manny going under. He loves a good fight, so I just went in and tackled him. We wrestled all over the pool. Nearly dislocated my shoulder. He’s bored, that’s all.”
We stood for a moment and the wind grew stronger, battering my hair into my eyes and whipping Roger’s coat open. The smoke went tumbling away from us, heading for the lake.
“What a couple of loons,” Roger said. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”
“I showed Falco the fire alarm,” I said.
“Beautiful!” He kicked one leg over the bike, saluted me, and wheeled away into the wind.
I looked back at the aquarium, full of sea creatures, circling in their tanks, watching the world with their inhuman eyes. Sooner or later, they would figure it out. I wondered if Falco had not already made the connection between who fed and cared for him, and who kept him in captivity. The dolphins were even more intelligent. We were going to come to the aquarium someday and find the wall broken open, the jagged edge still oozing saltwater, and all the cages empty. Already Falco could be tapping in Morse code on the wall of his tank to the electric eels on the other side. The smarter fish would make arrangements for the simple ones who knew only that the ocean had evidently betrayed them and all their food was dead. Falco could carry whole armfuls of dull-eyed mackerel into the safety of the lake. His tentacles would catch the faintest traces of salt, and the dolphins would follow him, herding the others with the help of nurse sharks and ancient sea turtles. They would migrate in the belly of the Great Lakes, stirring up clouds of sand to hide themselves. I trusted Falco to lead them to the distant sea.
Mom was sitting in the grass outside her house. She’d laid down a blanket over the mess of fallen leaves and had a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. There were four books scattered about her in various stages of reading—book-marked, splayed facedown, held open with the edge of the blanket. She saw me coming and searched the quilt vaguely with her fingers as though she had something to give me. I sat beside her in the cold grass. She looked tired and calm. I had the sense that something vast had been taken out of her, leaving an empty space and a sudden lightness.
“I came by the aquarium,” she said.
“Oh, shit.”
“It’s fine.” She shook her head. “It’s a nice museum, you know, much better than Science and Industry.”
I touched the hem of her blanket and the cover of one of her books. “What are you reading?”
“Oh—” She looked surprised. “I wasn’t, really.”
I took a deep breath. “I went and saw Cynthia,” I said. “That’s why I wasn’t at work.”
Mom smiled. “I know. I went and saw her too. She told me you had been there.”
“Oh, no.”
A cloud came over the sun and we blinked at the haze of shadow. Mom palmed her hair out of her face.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. I just explained it to her. She’s not my daughter. She has nothing to do with me. And if she ever contacts me again, I’m calling the police.” Mom rolled her hair slowly into a fat gray bun. “I’m never going to love her. And I told her that.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Mom nodded. “She told me that she came here partly because we were here. Can you believe it? She has no family, apparently. I said she had better leave Chicago, if that was how she really felt.”
The cloud passed, and suddenly everything glowed—the edges of grass, the flat of Mom’s book, the checked yellow and blue of her blouse.
“And do you know what she told me?” Mom said. “She told me I was the one that should leave.”
“What?”
“She said I had better go look for him, because nobody else is ever going to find him.”
I flinched. If she had said his name I might have cried out. Her face showed nothing but calm, a quiet deadness.
“Cynthia won’t contact us again,” Mom said, but it sounded as if she was asking.
“I told her not to, either,” I said.
She nodded. “So that’s done.”
The sunlight flicked to shadow again. Her hair went the sleepy color of snow.
“Mom?” I said finally. She reached out to touch my arm, and her fingers were cold but familiar, as though she had once touched me like this in a dream, as though we had been family a long time ago.
A month later she was gone. I settled in a new apartment, with a new pet octopus in an even larger cage, and Mom sent me letters from Greece, Spain, the Czech Republic. She soaked the envelopes in purple ink, or traced green loops all over their backs. She sent me strange, rough leaves from tropical plants. She sent me golden earth from Italy that retained its smell when I poured it onto the tabletop. I couldn’t write back to her; she didn’t know from week to week where she would be. Occasionally she called, and we spoke for a few minutes over a line that crackled with static and echoed with other voices. She still didn’t speak Jordan’s name aloud. I didn’t tell her I missed her. She sent me a photograph of herself on a boat deck, waving to me, wearing maroon sunglasses I’d never seen. In the picture she was holding a blue flower and wearing a crimson scarf that had slipped from one shoulder. I pinned the photo to my bulletin board at work. It made my heart ache. Her smile said she wasn’t coming back.
I didn’t hear from Cynthia again, but I knew what I had to do. I waited for the spring, when the snow turned to slush and crocuses pushed stubbornly up through the dark earth. The birds sang with exhausted voices, and the wind came wet off the lake with ice in its stomach. One day in March, I left my apartment wearing a coat I’d stolen from my mother’s closet. A truck turned the corner, rattling and squealing. A dog ran by me with its mouth open. The air smelled of mud, and I walked on the grass, not the sidewalk, crushing the snow to melting beneath my boots. At the mailbox I took the postcard from my pocket and checked it over. I had addressed it to Cynthia at the restaurant. I had not signed it. In fat block letters I had printed the words: I AM ALIVE TOO.
SILENCE
On the morning of the first frost of winter, Jesse walks to the barn with the ground crackling beneath his feet. In one hand he holds a spokeshave, in the other a bucket of varnish. His breath glazes the air. The sun has barely risen, outlining the high clouds in gold. Jesse can hear that the neighbors’ children are awake. They live down the long hill, but their flutelike voices carry on the breeze. He hears them arguing and slamming the car door; presumably they are getting ready for school. Jesse has rarely seen them in person, but he knows the tones of each member of the family. They speak in English and some foreign tongue, maybe Russian. This bothers him. The great wave of immigrants has crashed against American shores and washed inland, casting its dross into every crevice, even here, in rural Maine. People ought to stay put. They ought to stay where their ancestors are planted like bulbs in the dark ground.
Jesse tugs open the door to the barn and stands for a while, looking at his creation in the half-light. The airplane is a glorious thing, almost finished, lurking beneath the rafters like an insectoid relic from the dinosaur age. It smells of sawdust and oil. One long amber wing nearly brushes the wall; the other sags slightly, since Jesse has not yet put in the struts to support it. For a year he has been building his own version of the Wright brothers’ plane, the first ever to complete a successful flight. He is making it from scratch, with hand tools and a series of diagrams laid out on the worktable. The sun pokes its fingers through one window, catching the dusty beams of the ceiling. Jesse picks up a brush and begins to varnish the exposed flank of a propeller. One of the angles in the fuselage needs to be realigned. He checks the rudders too, which will allow him to change the yaw while airborne.
Presently the sun rises high, and the room brims with light like the interior of a wood stove. Jesse works until his right hand goes numb, and he drops the spokeshave he is holding. This is the cue to break for lunch.
Around noon the doctor calls. Jesse is eating cold beans from a can in the kitchen. He knows how to cook—women taught him long ago—but he rarely bothers. It seems pointless to cook for one, especially when the one in question has lost his sense of taste completely and never cared much for fancy food to begin with. Besides, in a house like this, where frost decorates the windows, where Jesse has had to break the ice on his bath now and then, washing dishes would be tricky—waiting for the water to get hot, trying to thaw out the liquid soap. The telephone rings beneath a heap of newspapers and Jesse eyes it for a while, deciding whether he ought to answer.
It turns out to be his neurologist, just as he expected. That ripe, genial voice, slightly clinical. Jesse sets his can of beans aside, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. The doctor is worried about him. Jesse missed his appointment this morning, though the MRI was all ready for him. Is Jesse all right? Has he been suffering from mental confusion? Seizures? Any more weakness in that right hand? He needs to come in right away. He must have his blood, electrolytes, liver function, and coagulation tested. All these things were lined up for him hours ago.
“I plumb forgot,” Jesse says untruthfully. “I’m sorry, doc.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Miller,” says the neurologist. “But you’ve got to come in this week. How about tomorrow?”
“Well, now.” Jesse scratches his cheek with one dirty fingernail. “I’m just not sure. How about I take a look at my schedule and call you back?”
“That’s fine. That’ll be fine.”
Jesse spends the afternoon in the barn, adjusting the tensile strength of the cables. He measures out the pieces of wood he will need for the elevators at the front of the plane. The motor will arrive by airmail one of these days. From the house, across the cold, pine-scented air, he hears the telephone ringing again. The doctor, no doubt, or one of his nurses, dispatched to nail Jesse down for another appointment.
There is a tumor as big as a lemon in his brain. It makes him smile, the way they think of some nice, friendly object to give you a sense of the size—he now pictures a yellow piece of fruit nestled in the meat of his head. Too deep in for surgery. All they can do now is watch it and try to palliate some of the symptoms. Jesse knows how it will progress. The doctor laid it all out for him. The weakness in his hand will spread. He will have clumsiness, maybe difficulty walking. His ability to taste has been taken from him—he may lose more, smell, touch. The headaches have already begun, with occasional bouts of vomiting. Eventually he will be unable to concentrate. His memory will go, his alertness. He will become stupid, or “numb,” as his father, a Maine native, used to say. Then he will die.
