by Nancy Mauro
For my parents,
Rita and Raffaele Mauro
Monkeys are superior to men in this:
when a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.
—MALCOLM DE CHAZAL
CHAPTER 1
Of the Spine in General
Later, when Duncan teases apart the moments before the accident, splits the seconds with atomic precision, he’ll take some satisfaction in telling Lily that his instincts were good. First, a gearing-down to slow the vehicle without jamming up the brakes. Second, a swerve toward the ditch but not into the ditch. And while there was no way to avoid the blow—the thing had launched itself from the bush—he’d done his best to clip it with the driver’s side rather than take it head-on.
What they won’t talk about is the way Lily’s arm shunted across his chest in an attempt to grab the wheel. To steer their destiny in the space before impact. He’ll later recall this moment as something stretched and precipitous over which he was suspended, eggbeater legs and arms akimbo. Where life didn’t so much flash before the eyes as shear away to reveal the truth; the reality of the peculiar, three-handed tangle on the steering wheel.
Once the car bucks and rears and comes to a stop, Duncan and Lily look at each other without speaking. This is his cue to take action. Lift his hands and respond to the shape of her face in the darkness, adjust her glasses, assure her they’re alive. Of course they’re alive, how could they be otherwise? Dying now, barely in their thirties, would just be indulgent. And if there’s one thing they’ve been able to avoid this past handful of years together it’s indulgence. Instead Duncan turns away from his wife to look at the intact airbag panels and tells himself that there’s nothing he could have done differently. It was an act of animal terror. This thing that charged from the shrubs—and remains lodged under the bumper—came at the vehicle with a suicide will.
Next to him Lily moves. She cracks the passenger door open and the car fills with dim light and a pinging sound. Duncan blinks, knows he has to open his own door, get out there and see exactly what it is that’s crushed under the hood. In the snapshot of headlight he’d seen something the approximate size and shape of a snowblower. Only, with a shagged hide. And tusks. His thoughts move to Jurassic possibilities, to woolly and prehistoric museum pieces. It could still be alive. If it survived the ice age, isn’t there a chance the thing is still alive? An even better chance that it’s angry?
He engages his tongue to say to Lily, Stay in the car, the way a husband should. But as he unlaces himself from the belt and turns he finds her seat empty. The passenger door wide open. His pulse starts to natter away in his head like a little hand drum. A shape moves in front of the vehicle. Duncan leans against the wheel, his chest tender from the lash of the belt.
Lily is out there in front of the car, her hand held up to shield against the headlights, her nostrils curled in disgust.
Drive enough highway road and you begin to divide the animal kingdom into new phylum, organizing creatures by the amount of carnage ruptured and splayed as you pass over them. Duncan remembers road trips as a child where his father could identify any beast by the strum it made against the transmission. That was a blacktail prairie dog, he’d say as they felt the knuckling against the Ford’s muffler. Born last spring, third in the litter, a tick infestation in the right ear. In the backseat Duncan would rise to his haunches to verify the receding mounds.
It was his father who would later teach him to drive the stretch of I-94 outside St. Paul. Duncan, he’d say, straightening the wheel under the boy’s fingers. On the highway you don’t swerve for nothing—you go through. His father guided that Thunderbird over the entire phylum Chordata with ease, without even a glance at the rearview mirror. He was the sort of man who trusted that the miles of highway ahead would work feather and fleece out from the tread of the tires.
Those were the old days of snarling engines, however, when man was King of the Road and large beasts remained screened behind the trees where they belonged. Who would have believed that the slender leg of a deer could punch a hole through a windshield with the accuracy of a pool cue? That hitting a moose was like plowing into a one-ton stilt-walker?
All of these things, accidents. But the thing that’s come at them tonight came with true criminal intent. Against his father’s time-honored advice Duncan had swerved and tried to take most of the blow on the driver’s side. Later, when Lily is clucking at the Saab, its hood crushed like a boxer’s nose, he’ll insist they were lucky. It was trying to grease all three of us, he’ll say.
The beast is quilled hide stretched over a humped spine. Something best used to scrape soot from chimney flues. Its stout hindquarters are wrapped around the tire while its forelegs stretch out from under the grille. The side of skull that hasn’t collapsed under the bumper evokes the skull of a pig. But a pig transmogrified, reverted to ancestral proportions, a fossil in loose fur. Each side of its long snout is decorated with a curled fang, and the one good eye, shut in sudden death, has lashes thick as a hairbrush. Duncan can hear the patter of either blood or transmission fluid on the road.
Lily crouches near the tire. “It’s a wild boar,” she says without a hint of astonishment in her voice. As though collisions with feral swine are common enough along the Hudson.
Duncan looks up and down the country highway. “That’s impossible.” He watches the nature channel. Knows a bit about which creatures are indigenous to North Africa versus upstate New York.
At his feet his wife is positioned too close to the animal. Should he yank her away by the shoulder? At least place himself between her and the car? What if the thing’s rabid? It’s a possibility; there’s a rim of lather around the snout. Although that might just be the foam of death. But what if it’s not dead? What if it rouses itself, untangles that broken body from the all-season radials in order to charge them one last time? You hear about things like this happening. Lily is definitely too close.
But Duncan doesn’t move. Doesn’t risk putting a hand on her shoulder lest she brush him off.
In this moment, the moment in which he chooses not to act, the creature opens its eye. It’s an eye filled with milky fury and as it scrolls down the length of snout, the pig’s front quarters start to twitch and heave.
“Christ, Lily. Get the fuck back.” He steps out of the high beam himself as the boar lifts a cloven hoof and begins to paw at the road, attempting to free itself from the weight of the vehicle. Lily tips herself back and gets to her feet. She moves quick, comes to stand behind him in the darkness. He can hear her breath like hard flaps.
“Where did it come from?”
And then, the antiphonal response. The animal’s mouth falls open, releasing both a pool of fluid Duncan knows has nothing to do with the transmission and a sound that will certainly make him rethink ham. It’s the screech of speedway racing, he thinks. The ululation of bush women, the yowl of coyotes tearing into a sack of kittens—
He starts to share this idea with his wife, to repeat these three clever metaphors, but he realizes she’s no longer standing behind him.
“Lily?”
The trunk slams and a moment later she reappears in the shaft of headlight holding a tire iron. More specifically, she holds the tire iron out to Duncan.
“Finish him off.”
“What?”
“Cell phone’s dead. We can’t just leave it on the road.”
“I can’t kill it.”
Lily looks between him and the carnage, creating an arc of irony in the air.
Here’s Duncan, then. Thirty-two and cobbled together from what he was handed, improved by bottled water and corporate slow pitch, a weekly exfoliating cleanser he stocks in the bathroom cabinet without shame. A strong thatch of hair
still. Blue eyes muffled and comfortable like old shirts that will no longer snap on the line and nothing in those eyes that you’d call dispassionate. For these reasons, or despite these reasons, he cannot bring himself to take the tire iron from his wife. There are eight good seconds—he can count them—in which she stands offering it to him and he stands looking north where the highway unfurls like a wet tongue toward the house waiting for them in Osterhagen. And he knows he’ll always think that Lily has short-changed him; that given two more seconds, simply nudging the total to ten, he might have made another choice. But the buzzer sounds at eight and when he looks back at the tire iron, Lily herself brings it down with a batter’s crack against the base of the animal’s skull.
CHAPTER 2
The Spleen
So that he won’t spot them quivering, she slides her hands between her thighs the rest of the way. As they pull up alongside the old house Lily uses her sneaker to pin the tire iron to the car mat, the same way one might put a foot to the scruff of a dog who’s done a terrible thing. She’s never killed a creature before. Nothing with a spinal cord and flesh, an animal that protested. Mercy or not, she thinks, her hands are now the hands of a killer.
At the end of the drive, the house stands like a great, armless thing. Of the few times she’s seen the place, its cantilevered gables and overhanging eaves put her in mind of a bucktoothed mouth. All shingles and brickwork and somewhat too narrow for the sprawl of country lot surrounding it. Up above the house the old moon has been chewed down to the rind. Still bright enough, though, to illuminate a yard of boxwood trees, the triple-pitched roof, a crown of spires. Some of the Victorians left along the river valley are tipped with a weathervane cock, or an iron pineapple of welcome. This house, though, is undecorated.
How to walk past the front end of the car without looking? Lily wants to bend and inspect but knows this action will appear incriminating. Duncan will tell her there’s no use in wincing at damage in the moonlight. He’s already unlatched her bicycle from the rack and is starting on their bags. Lily’s got a few seconds here to sneak a look, make out what she can of the ruined grille. Duncan might be able to act as if his continuous motion will unbend metal, but she needs a moment to agonize freely. She slides along the fender, is about to lean over the hood when she’s interrupted by a sound. A noise from above like a wet sheet snapped by two pairs of hands. It focuses her attention away from the vehicle and into the sky. A column of fog roils just over the trees. Edging back toward the passenger door she can make out a stream of bats, backlit over the boxwoods and spit up as if by some centrifugal force. The urge to cover her head is impossible to resist.
A million fucking bats. The words, although hyperbolic, are on her tongue. Probably closer to hundreds of fucking bats. Lily shrinks under the cradle of her arms, chin in the bracket of her clavicles, and watches as the colony passes over the trees.
“Do you see it?” she calls back to Duncan. “We’ve got bats now.”
With a preternatural sense of geometry, the swarm flattens itself into a single plane, performing the same wheel-and-swoop maneuvers as a flock of birds. Yes, same as birds. Same as the human wave at a stadium.
“Are you getting this, Duncan?”
But he’s pulling their belongings from the backseat. His only reply a groan as each bag hits the ground.
Which is probably just as well. She takes her hands away from her head; really, after a wild boar, the danger posed by bats is negligible. Lily turns back to the house instead, to gaping porch and front door. To the prospect of their summer.
While he was dragging the hog into the ditch, Duncan had an idea. Instead of stopping at the house in Osterhagen, he’d continue north alongside the railroad tracks. Drop Lily off at the side of the road somewhere and then disappear under the peaked ceilings of the central Catskills. Become a mountain man. Eat things he’d caught and skinned himself.
Instead he sorts through a bundle of keys, trying to match the appropriate one to the lock in the door. Lily is still muttering something about bats, about the collective flapping of wings. And, Jesus, what if they’re roosting in the attic?
The only answer he gives is to get the door open. Get them in, get them on to the next disaster. First is the cloying smell of a sealed house. And then, as he enters the foyer, the sound of the floorboards. Articulated moans and protests. Duncan’s hand goes to the wall immediately to the right of the door; his fingers tracing and tapping for the light switch. Behind he hears Lily approach, her nostrils working to identify the fusty odor. Molasses and smoke.
No light switch.
He can see a staircase leading up from the foyer, but the landing is lost in a scrim of darkness. He plays with the idea of driving the car to the front door, angling the headlights to illuminate the entrance. Then remembers the grille, the one headlight sunk and askew in its socket. He starts patting the wall to the left of the door instead. Lily moves past him into the hall. Duncan’s beginning to think he should have worked out the details of the summer a bit more. The house had only recently fallen through a latticework of inheritance laws to land on Lily’s branch of the genealogical tree. And while they’d made the odd day trip, sometimes with Lily’s parents down from Albany, it now seems he hadn’t fully considered the snags and realities of the hundred-mile drive he’s agreed to undertake on Thursday nights to join her here. And then repeat on Sundays to get home. In the city, where he was always nose to screen, rustic and historic weekends sounded good. He’d envisioned “upstate” as the antioxidant to neutralize the free radical anguish of his office life. Now he wonders, with a certain amount of terror, how he will uphold his end of the bargain.
The lights go on. Lily is down the hall, glasses perched high on her nose. She stands for a moment with her hand on the switch, letting him know she’s accomplished what he could not. He looks up to the light source, a chandelier of glass lamps and brackets, sprigs of metal daisies. The hallway itself is like a great paneled throat with lofted ceilings pinched tight by crown moldings so that he has to turn sideways to pass through with their bags.
At the foot of the stairs, Duncan drops their belongings to the floor and stretches his shoulders. It’s that wild boar, he thinks. It’s the long drive with its ruinous ending that’s made him feel peevish and crabbed. It would be simple just to foist the blame on her, repack his bag, and follow the thruway back to the city. But he’s got to trust that things will look different in the morning. After all, it was his own steady hand that blocked off a summer of Fridays from his office calendar, believing this division of the week might just be salvation for a man who couldn’t decide what he wanted more: to escape his work or to escape his wife.
As if to reassure, Lily comes back down the hall, snapping on lights. Around him, the house flickers and hums.
“It’s perfect,” he says, touching a blistered spot of wallpaper.
Lily shuts the front door. “You would say that.”
After poking through each of the open rooms on the second floor, she chooses the bedroom at the end of the hall. The mattress here is soft enough, although when she sits there’s a musical response from its arrangement of coils. Around door frames and moldings, wallpaper flakes away and reveals older designs below. Lily tugs a strip under the dormer window. Several generations of paper come away like onionskins in a light, drywall dust. She blows the powder from her fingers, imagines she could peel right down to the stud boning if she tried.
Duncan carries his bag in and puts it next to the bed. She feels a contraction in her chest as if her ribs are steepling together. The room is too close for the sudden imposition of his body.
“So we set up camp here?” He looks down at her on the mattress. Something odd comes over his face; he’s illuminated by perspiration. Lily is embarrassed by her splayed position on the bed and by him above. Hard to believe she once desired only this, only nightfall and him. The weight of this man on top of her. Duncan’s eyes are strange, blinking, fixed on her mouth. It annoy
s her, this uncharacteristic watchfulness. She wants to tell him to wipe his sweaty forehead and quit it. Instead she taps his bag with her sneaker and tries to distract his gaze.
“It’s too hot to sleep together.”
She has a mustache. His wife. Not just a silkiness above her lip but a tuft of hair that grows thicker toward the corners of her mouth. It seems impossible that he has missed it until now. How much time has passed since they’ve been up close? Face-to-face? Lily reclines on the bed, an arm span away from him, her head cocked up to the light, and he thinks, the woman I married has a mustache. Where had it come from? Lily’s imperfection startles him, makes him feel as though he’s found a stranger in the bedroom, a tarantula in the folds of the linen closet. He recoils, but does so on the inside; a trick involving the contraction of the diaphragm and a scratch between the eyebrows to hide astonishment.
But why should he recoil from his wife? When you sleep beside someone, fuck her for years and years (five years, she made him wait until they were married), you have to expect some turn at unpleasantness. Like that sprinkling of pimples on her ass last year. He didn’t get spooked. Just told her and she took care of it and eventually they dried up and disappeared. So what is it about her upper lip that fills him with a sudden sense of futility? That she would allow this—or worse, be unaware of it—somehow undercuts all that he admires about Lily. And the fact that he can’t bring himself to tell her makes the gap between them all the more evident.
He can’t speak. Has he not spent a thousand nights with this woman? With his head docked in her lap and her fingers in his hair? She had a pretty laugh, that Lily, and a soft touch. But now she’s watching him with her forehead clinched in irritation and he thinks, surely there was a time when they were happy with each other? A time when the pace of their dealings was characterized by patient energy, a simple matter of telling one another what worked, what had to go? For instance, she used to hold the bathroom door open with one foot while sitting on the toilet. I got my Beaver Canoe, Duncan! She’d announce with great relief, You can relax now. As if he was worried. Duncan, lying in bed one morning and certainly unworried (but annoyed by her fond appellation), had said, Lily, don’t call it that. Something about an amphibious rodent paddling its way out from between her thighs. And she had listened because back then they believed in an institute of free exchange.
