by Dan Chaon
They’re coming for us, he told Elizabeth, and she looked at him and then away, tiptoeing in an agitated half-circle in the tiny room. They’re going to kill us if they get in, he told her, and he pressed his face against the door, listening.
It was a small room, not immaculate but tidy, chilly black and white tile on the floor, chilly porcelain tub, sink, toilet. A tall cabinet held towels and washcloths. There was a toilet with a fuzzy blue cover on its lid, like the hair of a puppet; there was the sink, a steady trickling drip from the faucet; a toothbrush holder, a medicine cabinet mirror above it. There was a small square of window with its glass textured like ice, Jack Frost designs. Below was the bathtub, clawfoot, deep-basined, the inside of an egg. An orange rust stain ran from the base of the faucet head to the drain.
It was his idea that this was the best place to hide. He remembers this clearly, too, the determination that they should hunker down inside the bathtub to get away from the soldiers that were hunting for them, but there was some difficulty in getting Elizabeth to join him in this plan. He stood in the bathtub and held Elizabeth by her front paws, so that she stood up on her hind legs. He tried to tug her forward, but she didn’t want to come. She pulled away from him, and so he got out of the tub and tried to lift her by her hindquarters, but she was too heavy. He had a hold on the loose skin of her haunches, and he managed to lift her off the ground. Get in! he said, and gave her a hard shove. Hurry, damnit! And she made a sharp sound as he pushed her, as he fell into the bathtub on top of her.
——
He doesn’t really know what happened next. There was a moment, a kind of wave, a blank spot during which the game fizzled away, during which Elizabeth became not-Elizabeth. The two of them scrabbled against the slick porcelain. Perhaps he was trying to hold her down, perhaps he pushed hard against a tender spot on her belly, perhaps she panicked, upended, disoriented, unable to gain a footing. Her thin legs struggled in the air, and her body twisted, trying to right itself, and she made a sound like she was vomiting up a string of yelps. She snapped with her teeth, twisted, lashed, and Jonah felt a spark in his mind that wasn’t really awareness.
The first bite was one of the worst. The long front tooth, the canine, sank into the skin just below Jonah’s left eye and tore in a line through his cheek to the edge of his throat. Blood shot up and stippled the window. The bottles of shampoo on the edge of the tub clattered as Jonah’s feet kicked in a surprised spasm. When he jerked away from her, Elizabeth bit down on his ear and pulled a piece of it off.
Later he would try to think that Elizabeth had gone crazy. People would say that it might have been the taste of blood, that it might have been the noises he was making, the high-pitched sounds that instinctively made her think he was some kind of prey. People would say that attack dogs like Dobermans can be high-strung, that they can lose control of themselves. He didn’t want to believe that she hated him. He didn’t want to think that he was her tormentor, that whatever he’d done to her, she’d finally had enough. That she bit him and liked it, thinking at last.
But she didn’t stop. Her teeth raked through his palms when he held them to his face, trailing through his forearms as he flailed at her, trying to hit. One bite cut through his lower lip as she tried to get to his neck, and another pulled the skin of his torn face into a flap. He remembers trying to press the skin back against his face, like it was a puzzle piece he was trying to fit. When he fell out of the bathtub onto the tile floor, he felt wet. He was aware of Elizabeth’s front paws clawing fast against his clothes as if she were trying to dig a hole into him, her jaws, bites on his scalp, his neck, his chest as he curled and rolled and kicked, smearing blood behind him. I’m sorry, he said. Mom, I didn’t mean to! It was an accident!
Maybe he doesn’t really remember this. Maybe he only imagines it, looking at his body, his naked skin in the mirror. Most of what happened is outside of his memory. He can recall flashes of heat, of pressure, but not pain, exactly. Most people don’t understand what it means to be an animal, to be killed, eaten. A quiet peacefulness settles in. The body relaxes, accepts everything.
——
That was all there was to it really. At a bar, years later, a woman says, Tell me something interesting about yourself and Jonah pauses.
I was dead once, he thinks. That’s the first thing he thinks, though he doesn’t say it. It sounds too melodramatic, too complicated and inappropriate. She is a smooth thinker, this woman, she will look at him skeptically, she will take a piece of ice from her drink and roll it in her mouth.
Oh, really, she’ll say, after a moment. So what’s that like? Being dead?
——
And he doesn’t know, exactly. He is aware of a feeling of rushing forward. It is not unlike the way it felt on the expressway when suddenly, at sixty-five or seventy-five miles per hour, a pair of semi-trucks framed his car on either side, the rushing walls of their trailers creating a tunnel he was hurtling through. Ahead, a rattling garbage truck drifted into the lane in front of him; behind, a woman in a minivan pushed impatiently toward his bumper, sealing him into a coffin of velocity. Enclosed and yet hurtling forward.
At that moment, he felt a memory spin through his insides. The dog’s teeth. The yellow house, the wide plain, seen from above. The skeleton key, the baby in the basket, the lady who said Please don’t touch, your hands are dirty.
——
He was dead, or almost dead, when his grandfather broke open the bathroom door. He doesn’t remember this, he just knows. He is aware of the blood, his own blood, all over everything. He feels the door splinter and fall open. He hears the sound of his grandfather’s raw, smoker-voiced moaning. His grandfather caught Elizabeth by the collar, pulling her away, and then his grandfather began to kick her in the ribs and the head.
In the movie, the bathroom would seem to float in space, white and glowing fluorescently. In the movie, the ambulance men bend over him, the corpse of a small boy laid out on the bathroom’s black and white tiles. The men are silent and gentle and godlike. He pictures them as kindly aliens, with round, interchangeable heads and large eyes. His grandfather must be there somewhere, off to the edge of things, but he can’t see him. By this time, Elizabeth is dead. He can picture her, not far from where he is lying, Elizabeth on her side, her legs limp, paws turned inward, mouth slightly open, eyes staring as his own eyes are staring. A line could be drawn between their two eyes, his and Elizabeth’s—two points, A and B, beginning and end.
——
Jonah’s grandfather used to tease him all the time. It wasn’t mean-spirited, he didn’t think. Just something his grandfather did to amuse himself. He remembers the day before he died, the day before Elizabeth attacked him, an ordinary after-school afternoon, not long before his mom got home from work, when his grandfather called to him. Jonah! he called, in his wry, raspy voice. Come quick! Come and look! And Jonah had stood there eagerly as his grandfather pointed out the back window, toward the railroad tracks, where some boxcars were parked. I see the carnival came through here last night, he said. Look at that! They left an elephant!
Where? Jonah said, and tried to follow his grandfather’s finger.
There! Don’t you see it?
No.
It’s right there—where I’m pointing. You don’t see it?
No . . . Jonah said doubtfully, but he craned his neck.
You mean to tell me you don’t see an elephant standing there? Jonah’s grandfather demanded.
Well . . . Jonah said, not wanting to commit himself. Well . . . he said.
Jonah scoped along the lines and shapes outside the window again. He didn’t see the elephant, but then, after a time, it seemed that he did. In his memory, there is still the figure of an elephant, standing at the edge of the train tracks. It curls its trunk, languidly, thoughtfully, and brings a piece of hay to its mouth.
2
Spring 1977, Spring 1978
Around the time that Jonah was being brought back to life
by the paramedics, Troy Timmens was reclining in a beanbag chair in a trailer house on the outskirts of St. Bonaventure, Nebraska, watching some teenagers smoke marijuana. It was late afternoon, about five o’clock, but with the curtain drawn it could have been any time at all. Troy leaned back, settling more deeply, aware of the satisfying crunch made by the Styrofoam pills inside the beanbag chair as he applied his weight to them. He supposed that he was fairly content.
The trailer house he was sitting in belonged to his cousin Bruce and Bruce’s wife, Michelle. Troy had gotten into the habit of stopping by their place after school, staying until dinner or beyond, staying until well past his bedtime. If she asked, he told his mother that he had been baby-sitting for Bruce and Michelle’s two-year-old son, Ray, and often that was true. It didn’t matter. Troy’s parents were engaged in the final stages of falling in hate with each other, a stretch of many months that was leading toward their divorce, and everyone involved was pleased to have Troy elsewhere.
Troy was happy at Bruce’s place. It was comfortable and exciting, a world he connected vaguely in his mind with California and rock stars. He loved the things they owned: the black-light posters with their pictures of wolves and skulls and lightning bolts, the stacks of record albums and tapes, the beaded door that led to the kitchen, the refrigerator with an automatic icemaker built into the door, a possession Troy admired, along with stereo systems and microwaves and Corvette automobiles. They always had the newest kinds of chips and snacks that Troy had seen advertised on television, and he was welcome to eat as much as he liked. And the living room, he thought, was breathtakingly luxurious. There was the smell of incense sticks, drifting up from the glass-topped coffee table, and furniture you could sink into—not only the beanbag chairs but also a big sofa with giant pillow cushions. The living room carpet was a thick, brownish-gold shag that covered not only the floor but the walls as well, all the way up to the ceiling. Best of all was a beautiful fish tank, where dwelled an angel fish and a pair of kissing fish and a tiny frog, along with many, many black and orange mollies that constantly gave birth to amazingly tiny babies—babies that, to Troy’s fascinated horror, the kissing fish often ate, breathing them into their large puckered mouths. But his favorite thing in the entire house was the plastic skeleton at the bottom of the fish tank, a sunken pirate who clutched a ship’s wheel in his bony hands; beside him, a treasure chest belched out bubbles of air. Troy was the sort of child who spent a lot of his time at school drawing pictures of skeletons on his notebooks and onto desks—skeletons with sunglasses and Afros, skeletons laughing happily as they rose out of cartoon graves, skeletons piloting airplanes or driving cars or wielding machine guns.
He was sitting near the fish tank on that day, staring at the little underwater world, mesmerized by the way the pirate skeleton’s arms fluttered in the current of air bubbles. He was pretending to be uninterested in the marijuana smoking, though in fact he was watching surreptitiously as a few older teenagers—friends of Bruce and Michelle—drew smoke into their mouths from the lip of a glass water pipe. They were all listening to a comedy record by Cheech and Chong, which was very funny. Everyone was laughing, and Troy leaned back, a bit shocked by the language the comedians were using. His eyes narrowed in the cloud of smoke that hung in a thin layer above their heads, but he was unobtrusive, smiling shyly. He was ten.
——
But he was different from most ten-year-olds. People at Bruce and Michelle’s place always told him so. They said he was like a teenager—an honorary teenager, someone once said, which made him proud. No one minded having him around. He was never any bother.
And maybe it was true that he was unusually mature. There was an aura about him, Michelle told people, though she couldn’t put her finger on it. Old-souled, Michelle said, and ran her hand through his hair gravely. Something about him, something in his manner and his face and even the way he carried himself that seemed eerily unchildlike. It was those pale blue, malamute eyes, the oddly alert, wary posture. It was the shy yet somehow wolfish grin he’d beam out sometimes, a grin that those teenaged girls seemed to think of as pre-sexy, imagining that in a few years it would evolve into something horny and devastating. And that deep laugh—a laugh that made the stirred-up girls lift their heads and stare for a moment. Troy didn’t laugh often, but when he did, it wasn’t like the laughter of any ten-year-old boy they’d encountered. He sounded like he was more experienced than he was—a whisper of male prowess, cockiness tinted at the edges with something like melancholy, and they flicked their eyes at one another, amused and yet uncertain: Where had he learned to make a sound like that? They exchanged private looks—suppressed turns of the mouth, slight widening of their eyes, almost imperceptible movement of brows. Troy noticed this, but didn’t know what it meant.
There were three of them that day, three high school girls, along with a wiry mustached boy of about nineteen who was their leader, who had brought them to Bruce’s place. Troy was aware of the subtle attention the girls were paying him, and it made him even more resolutely quiet. He observed them from his corner by the fish tank, thinking that maybe they were making fun of him for some reason, and he carefully glanced down to make sure his zipper wasn’t open. He ran his hand across his hair, stroking it flat, and tried to listen seriously to what the comedians on the record album were saying. They were talking in funny accents about eating shit.
He had met these girls before, in a vague way. There was one named Chrissy, who had straight blond hair and a natural tan that made it seem as if she spent a lot of time on a tropical beach; another, Kim, was very skinny, and wore a tight T-shirt that said “I’m With Stupid,” with an arrow that pointed in a general way toward whoever happened to be on her left—in this case a girl named Carla. He had seen this girl at Bruce and Michelle’s a few times, and he remembered her: Carla. She was sixteen years old, a small, round-faced girl not much taller than Troy himself; she had large blue eyes, thickly surrounded with black eyeliner and mascara, and enormous breasts. She wore a scoop-necked T-shirt, and Troy could see the beginning of her cleavage, a slope of moled and freckled skin. He was aware that there was something about Carla’s breasts that made them different from other girls’, but he hadn’t yet figured out that they looked different because Carla wasn’t wearing a bra.
There were a number of important things he hadn’t figured out yet, though he would before too much longer. For example, he did not know that his cousin Bruce was a drug dealer, and that these girls were customers. He didn’t know that Michelle felt uncomfortable about him being there, watching these transactions, that later she would argue with Bruce about it. He didn’t know that Bruce and Michelle were young—both of them twenty-four years old—or that they’d already begun a friendship with cocaine that they would spend a good portion of their later lives trying to escape from. In retrospect, of course, there was the way Bruce was fidgeting, his thumb and forefinger tapping against each other like anxious pincers; there was the nervous, walleyed gaze that Michelle fixed on him.
“Troy, Hon,” Michelle said. “Would you do me a favor? Would you go check on Ray and see how he’s doing?”
“Oh,” Troy said, and straightened up as if he hadn’t been paying attention. “Sure,” he said, importantly, and clambered out of the beanbag chair as the teenaged girls observed him.
This was his job when he was at Bruce and Michelle’s place—he was supposed to watch the two-year-old Ray. He was supposed to make sure Ray was occupied, that his diaper was clean, that he wasn’t sticking his fingers into electrical sockets or drinking from the bottle of pine-scented cleaner under the bathroom sink. It wasn’t work exactly. Troy liked babies. He liked to take care of them, he liked their little toes and their soft, fleshy cheeks. Besides which, he was still young enough that he enjoyed playing with Ray’s toys, the building blocks and the See-and-Say and the plastic yellow school bus with the miniature Weeble children that fit inside it. He still felt warmly toward the Dr. Seuss books that
he read aloud to Ray. He didn’t mind constructing games of pretend or hiding that Ray would find deeply involving. It was easy.
Nevertheless, Michelle was grateful to have him around. When he left the trailer at nine or ten at night and headed back to his own home, Michelle would often give him money. Five, ten, twenty dollars. “Thanks for coming by, honey,” she would say, and as she tucked the bills into his hand, their fingers brushed in a way that made him wish that she were his older sister, or his mother.
The high school girls watched him as he sloughed out of the beanbag chair he’d melted into, and the older boy made a face. Troy saw the boy raise his eyebrows in a not-quite-friendly way, making an “O” with his mouth as he centered his lips over the bong. Get lost, kid, the look said.
But the girl named Chrissy called after him. “Hey,” she said, and as he got up he turned to look at her again. “Troy . . . is that your name?” He paused, awkwardly, and nodded.
“You’re cute,” she said. The other girls shifted their significant glances toward her, smirking as if she had made a mean joke. And then they broke into laughter.
——
That day was not a particularly important one in Troy’s life, but it was part of a series of events that he thought of sometimes, part of the continuum of his life with Carla, those early days in Bruce’s trailer when the two of them couldn’t have ever known that they would eventually get married, that they would have a child together, that they’d end up years later separated and then divorced and yet, he thought, forever trailing this history behind them.
Twenty years later, when Troy was thirty and trying to decide whether or not he was still in love with her, he thought of that time in Bruce and Michelle’s trailer. Carla had left him, was living with another man, their marriage was finished. Nevertheless, he had driven from Nebraska out to Las Vegas at her request, at the prompting of her late-night calls. “I just need you to come,” she’d said, and he’d gotten into his car and driven for two days. “Will you please, please, just do this one thing?” she whispered, her voice raw and slurred, and he did as she asked, not least because of those long ago days at Bruce and Michelle’s, when he’d stared at her chest.
