Large Animals

by Jess Arndt

  Not mine, drilled my body.

  But my hand remained on the blanket. The heat made me cloudy. My fingers had the sensitivity of toilet paper rolls. Fuselage was thick, it left a greasy skid. Didn’t it just mean body?

  “Fifty,” he said again. His ears (too small) broadcasted an overabundant relationship to control, a not-so-secret anal vibe. My brother’s ears were nice, open, large. He was a DJ. I smiled grittily, moved on.

  How was it then that the other me, now completely rogue, was nodding yes as the vendor explained the blanket had been his dead mother’s, was an heirloom, maybe even turn-of-the-century Navajo—moreover that he was about to call it quits, was packing up, I was his last customer?

  “Here’s sixty,” that other me said, waving away the change. I jammed the blanket into a too-small plastic grocery bag.

  Encouraged, he dug out an Altoids box from his jeans pocket.

  “Ever seen a rough diamond?”

  I paused. Did diamonds in the rough actually exist?! I could only picture the shape described—in fact, defined—by “diamond.”

  I bent in, coughing from peppermint dust. The tin was full of splintered safety glass.

  “Windshield,” he admitted, carefully repocketing them.

  The vendor rows fed into a central plaza. To my left: Sky Village concession. Straight ahead, what the red arrows (staked everywhere) had been announcing: Bob’s Crystal Cave. From what I could tell, it was a slumpy dome made of spray foam.

  The blanket would be good, I thought. My girlfriend would like it if she visited. And she had to visit; we had things to discuss. But lately I hadn’t felt like talking. A sharp-edged disc would bob in my throat, would swell into a wet gushy sack—I’d swallowed a water wienie—how were we ever going to make a baby? Leaning from the noon sun into the sheltered overhang between the bathrooms and the Crystal Cave, tears clustered up, I was crying.

  A voice from my side:

  “Would you like to see my joy?”

  Must be Bob, I guessed. White ZZ Top beard, prospector’s garb. His mouth cranked to “smiling.” He had a joy, the other me wanted him to feel good about it. I adjusted my hat so I could wipe my eyes unnoticed.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Pressing flat my freshly made chest, I balanced by making my voice higher: less threatening.

  “I’m beside myself,” I said, gesturing at what was evident.

  “This is my second cave,” Bob said, ignoring us. “When they tried to take Sky Village from me I smashed the first one to pieces.”

  We navigated the darkness of the entrance. Slathered with polyurethane, it had the atmosphere of a mine shaft that brown strings of party goo had exploded over. I kicked—snake patrol—into hot black space.

  “I put everything I have into her,” he whispered, pushing me through a small doorway in the cave’s hump-like frame. He stayed outside, his grip tight. “I’ll lock her so no one else can get in.”

  His joy, his joy. The door clicked. I kept myself from jiggling it. I wanted Bob to feel the force of my support. I breathed the aquarium air. This was a trust act. But regarding the AstroTurf, the chemically nonliving smell, the amethysts glued in every direction across the floor that also contained miniature diorama-style lakes, glades, rivers (made similarly of sad shiny crystals)—I began to sweat. Some bodies needed more space. When I stretched my arms they touched each other in mirror effect, then touched the all-too-cavelike sides.

  I shoved back against the small platform bench. A Plexiglas porthole discharged daylight at the crystals but sitting under it, where the bench was, no one could see me. Leaning over, I tested the door. Stiff and unyielding. Was this where he put them? The kids? A sex offender. It couldn’t be more clear. Dude was an abuser—the worst kind of felon—hiding out there near the Disco Dogs and Agave Slush, in plain sight.

  Toch.

  I’d recently changed my text notification. The sound now a wooden mallet banging a hollow nut. It was my brother. Just his name and my eyes swam wetly.

  I’m locked in Bob’s Crystal Cave, I texted back.

  What??? [alien emoji]???, he typed.

  I know, I said.

  Then followed it (I couldn’t help myself) with my usual, all the phallic signs—the eggplants and bananas and corncobs, the lollipops, cactus, and volcanoes. I was older, was supposed to be the one helping him, but these days the dam had exploded, I couldn’t stop asking him for everything.

  Is anyone with you?, he said. Sister?

  I glanced in front of me at the crystal river. Water flowed down but it seemed sulfurous, “off.” I hated the smell. I was sure nothing was living here, the crystals least of all. Sperm, on the other hand, were tough—had an epic life span, could swim for days. Moreover, in any given ejaculation, each of the millions of tadpoles had been growing for an entire three months, doing what I couldn’t do. Becoming.

  “Baby, are you there?”

  I sat up, unflattening a minuscule forest. My legs felt sodden.

  My girlfriend, who’d been in LA all morning, was outside the Crystal Cave. Her jade eyes, her voice. Wasn’t there another word? Jadite? Green. Impressed, someone had recently told her that.

  “Yeah.”

  I thought they were jade too but had always been too embarrassed to say it.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “You’re here.” I rubbed my arm where a finger-shaped bruise was surfacing.

  “Ummm some guy Bob,” she said, “he’s at the med tent asking for Band-Aids.”

  Good! I thought. I imagined horrified fathers or raging mothers with baseball bats.

  “Your brother called.” Her voice was muted by the foam. “Baby? You’ve been in there for hours?”

  A Disco Dogs wrapper and two wadded cans of Pepsi lay on the patch of floor, on top of the blanket I had apparently unrolled.

  “Do you think you might want to come out?”

  Had that been me, some hours earlier, rejogging the door? The lock was swollen but it opened. Then exiting into the brutal heat of the afternoon. I’d stretched—free!

  Bob—founder of Sky Village Swap Meet and outsider desert art icon—was kneeling near the pavement spraying foam from a canister, his suspenders stretched across his thin back.

  It was too hot for flannel. But under the flannel shirt, a spine. And under that?

  There was so much to conceal it made me sick.

  “Pervert!” I’d said, socking my foot into the pouch of his hip, as close to his groin as I could reach. It was soft. I retracted, weak with something adrenaline-like. He burbled quietly and clutched toward my leg. I pushed him away. As he fell, a small red splotch—juice?—popped from his mouth.

  “Pervert,” I’d repeated, but with less assurance. It seemed like no one had seen. Did anyone ever see anything? I fumbled with the textured door of the cave, panting. Then pulled my selves back in.

  “You always put yourself through stuff like this,” my girlfriend said through the door, “trying to write.”

  While working on a story everything was at play, I found it very painful. Even when editing, for instance, if I wanted to change a word I tried to keep as many of the original letters on the screen as I could, fitting them into their replacement so they wouldn’t lose their place, get infinitely lost.

  “This isn’t about a story,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  The other me lounged near the tiny calcite lake. The me who believed I was only an imprint of another. That met with the flesh-and-blood world of real dicks and vaginas, I’d disappear.

  Completely empty like this, she’d have to leave me.

  “I bought a blanket,” I said.

  When my girlfriend and I fought she went away somewhere, eons away, I couldn’t reach her. But on good days, we were together in a bright world and she’d tell me things I’d misremember or get purely at their surface valence but nonetheless love.

  Like how my earlobes were long, Budd
ha-like, she said. Or what it meant that among all life-forms, humans alone were defenseless—vulnerable blobs clothed solely in skin.

  The idea of anyone else’s biology entering her made me crazy.

  “Ever seen a rough diamond?” I said.

  I bent down. Breaking crystals from the gluey cave floor, I forced their purple saws into my pockets. I couldn’t decide. Had the protective mechanism coiled away inside us somewhere or is it true? The possum has its death, the Mojave snake its bridge, the squid its inky cloud, the Texas horned lizard even shoots blood from its eyes, while we, most evolved—need nothing.

  Large Animals

  In my sleep I was plagued by large animals—teams of grizzlies, timber wolves, gorillas even came in and out of the mist. Once the now extinct northern white rhino also stopped by. But none of them came as often or with such a ferocious sexual charge as what I, mangling Latin and English as usual, called the Walri. Lying there, I faced them as you would the inevitable. They were massive, tube-shaped, sometimes the feeling was only flesh and I couldn’t see the top of the cylinder that masqueraded as a head or tusks or eyes. Nonetheless I knew I was in their presence intuitively. There was no mistaking their skin; their smell was unmistakable too, as was their awful weight.

  During these nights (the days seemed to disappear before they even started) I was living two miles from a military testing site. In the early morning and throughout the day the soft, dense sound of bombs filled the valley. It was comforting somehow. Otherwise I was entirely alone.

  This seemed a precondition for the Walri—that I should be theirs and theirs only. On the rare occasion that I had an overnight visitor to my desert bungalow the Walri were never around. Then the bears would return in force, maybe even a large local animal like a mountain lion or goat, but no form’s density came close to walrus-ness. So I became wary and stopped inviting anyone out to visit at all.

  The days, unmemorable, had a kind of habitual slide. I would wake up with the sun and begin cleaning the house. No matter how tightly I’d kept the doors shut the day before, dust and sand and even large pieces of mineral rock seemed to shove their way inside. I swept these into piles. Then the dishes that I barely remembered dirtying—some mornings it was as if the whole artillery of pots and pans had been used in the night by someone else—then the trash (again always full), then some coffee. Eight o’clock.

  This work done, I sat in various chairs in the house following the bright but pale blades of light. I was drying out. Oh, an LA friend said somewhat knowingly, from the booze? But I had alcohol with me, plenty of it. It wasn’t that. I moved as if preprogrammed. Only later did I realize that my sleep was so soggy that it took strong desert sun to unshrivel me and since it was the middle of winter and the beams were perforce slanted, I’d take all of it I could find.

  For lunch I got in my car and drove into town, to the empty parking lot of Las Palmas. There were many Mexican joints along the highway that also functioned as Main Street. I hadn’t bothered to try them out. Las Palmas, with its vacant booths, dusty cacti, and combination platter lunch special for $11.99 including $4 house margarita, was fine.

  A waitress named Tamara worked there. She seemed like the only one. She wasn’t my type—so tall she bent over herself and a bona fide chain-smoker. Sometimes to order you’d have to exit your booth and find her puffing outside. A friend who had borrowed the bungalow before I did told me about Tamara and so if I had a crush at all it was an inherited one that even came with inherited guilt—from having taken her on once he could no longer visit her. Regardless, we barely spoke.

  I had things I was supposed to be doing, more work than I could accomplish even if I duct-taped my fists to my laptop, but none of it seemed relevant to my current state. In the afternoons I drove back home slowly, always stopping for six-packs of beer at the Circle K. I enjoyed the task. The beer evaporated once I stuck it in my fridge—it was there and then, it was gone.

  My sleeping area was simple: a bed on a plywood platform. A wooden dresser. Built-in closets and a cement floor. At first I would wake up in the night from the sheer flattening silence of the desert. It was impossible that the world still existed elsewhere. After that initial jolt, relief.

  Don’t you miss it? my same friend said during our weekly telephone chats. But I couldn’t explain the euphoria of walking up and down the chilly aisles of Stater Bros. in week-old sweatpants if I wanted, uncounted by life. Would I buy refried or whole beans? This brand or that? It didn’t matter, no one cared.

  It was in these conditions that the Walri arrived.

  * * *

  I’d slept as usual for the first few hours, heavily, in a kind of coma state. Then had woken, I thought to pee. But lying there with the gritty sheets braided around me, the violet light that was created from the fly zapper, the desert cold that was entering through the gaps and cracks in the fire’s absence—I

  felt a new form of suffocation.

  It wasn’t supernatural. I’d also had that. The sense of someone’s vast weight sitting on the bed with you or patting your body with ghostly hands. This breathless feeling was larger, as

  if I was uniformly surrounded by mammoth flesh.

  Dream parts snagged at me. Slapping sounds and hose-like alien respiration. I felt I was wrestling within inches of what must be—since I couldn’t breathe—the end of my life. Now the lens of my dream panned backward and I saw my opponent in his entirety.

  He lay (if that’s what you could call it) on my bed, thick and wrinkled, the creases in his hide so deep I could stick my arms between them. His teeth were yellow and as long as my legs.

  “I’m sexually dormant,” I said aloud to him. “But I want to put my balls in someone’s face.”

  Then somehow light was peeling everything back for dawn.

  About a mile from my house there was a Fraternal Order of Eagles club. I knew nothing about their organization except that they also functioned as the town library, with books you could check out and an Internet connection that was less dubious than most. “The Aerie” was small and bundled in fake wood paneling—it had first been a prospector’s cabin, or what was around here known as a jackrabbit homestead. From what I could tell this meant squattish buildings with cinder block walls and flat, shed-style roofs that you could claim for cheap.

  Sure enough, they had a dusty Mac sitting on a Formica table. I waited as a Wrangler-sheathed man signed out of his

  EarthLink account. “Okay?” I said. I jumped at the creaky boom of my voice. He nodded. I typed madly for what seemed like an hour. But nothing could explain the mystic weirdness of the night before. And besides this phrase, “the walrus sucks the meat out by sealing its powerful lips to the organism and withdrawing its piston-like tongue,” only one thing of note: Walri, unlike most marine mammals—seals or sea lions or even manatees—were not entirely fluent in water. They had to sleep on land.

  I pictured walruses dragging themselves up out of the sea. It seemed risky, wholly exposing. And then what? One day grow feet? There was that YouTube video of a walrus giving himself a blow job. He didn’t need land for that. Each time he grabbed the tip of his head he sunk down with pleasure, never up.

  I drove back home. Even though I was no longer new here, I was still unnerved by the perpetual pedestrian traffic on the highway. How in the middle of a stretch of otherwise desolate road, where cars and trucks, even semis pushed one hundred, a figure would suddenly materialize from the sagebrush or the sandy shoulder and stroll across the four cracked lanes like a featureless blot.

  * * *

  At home I stood in the shower. Out here, even the water smelled dry. I brushed my teeth and watched my gums bleed down into the drain. The phrase “everything was bothering me and nothing was right” ricocheted around in my head. Was it from a recent novel? It seemed like it must be but I couldn’t place it. Anyway, I’d been off reading since I’d arrived.

  The phone rang. I had to search around to find it.
“This is the FOE,” said a guy on the other end.

  “The who?”

  “The Fraternal Order of Eagles, the FOE,” he said. “We noticed you here earlier, and wondered, would you like to be jumped in?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I swatted, killing two flies on my arm. “What does that involve?”

  “Oh, it’s your standard, roughhouse initiation. You know, we’ve been around since 1898.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, hanging up.

  Outside, it was already starting to get dark. I hadn’t eaten. The day was shifting and formless but in a way that felt oppositional to my usual lack of structure. I changed my clothes into newer jeans and an indigo shirt—“Canadian tuxedo,” I said aloud. Back in the car, I let my eyes blur on the horizon. The flat desert dipped up to my left, toward a broken ridgeline. Prehistoric rain had smoothed the saws of rock and now, as the shadows fell, I couldn’t budge the feeling that the entire hillside was walrus-like, the dark creases and clefts rippling and stretchy like skin. Even the plain itself, as it ran to meet the rise, seemed to be brown but as sea—a color I’d seen in the shallow pan of San Francisco Bay. Every now and again a trailer home or Airstream winked out from under a swell, but far off. I rubbed my eyes, the image stayed.

  I took my usual booth at Las Palmas but was later than usual and Tamara was just getting off. Something was nagging me. A voice again: “Animals are only animals because they are observed.” I guessed that was right: the zoo, the aquarium—even the wildlife park. Out here there was nothing to watch, nothing, at least, that let you watch it.

  “What are you doing later?” I asked Tamara. She was transferring my check.

  “Nothing much,” she said. “I’ll probably just walk along the road.”

  “Huh?” I said. “Is that safe???”

  “Doing laundry?” she said. “I think so.”

  I had been going to ask her if she wanted to sit down for an after-shift drink but I was rattled by what she’d said or what I’d heard.