The Heaven of Animals: Stories

by David James Poissant

  He opened the medicine cabinet and pulled down the condoms. He’d bought the box before his last date, but she hadn’t hinted, and he doubted he would have gone through with it even if she had. He pulled one end of the accordion from the box and tore along the perforated line. He had to check the expiration date. They were good for another month. He weighed the packet in his hand, then dropped it back into the box and returned the box to the cabinet. The cabinet rattled when it closed.

  He lowered the toilet’s lid and sat. Lily’s underwear hung overhead, dripping, and he pulled the bra down. The cups were small: 32B. Each cup was the size and shape of the paper masks he used to wear to mow the lawn. He fitted one to his face and breathed in. The cup smelled like chlorine and something else, something floral and inviting. He dropped the bra. Her towel hung from the bar on the wall, and he stood and pressed his whole head into it. He moaned. The tears came and the towel ate them.

  He went back to the room. She’d gotten under the covers, hair on the pillow like a nest for her head. On the floor, crumpled beside the bed, were the clothes he’d given her. She’d pulled the top sheet to her neck, but just on one side, toga-style. One arm rested above the covers, muscled, welcoming, lightly haired. The prosthesis was hidden from view. She’d seemed so comfortable with him, with her nakedness, right up to the moment they’d climbed into bed.

  He stood at the footboard. A foot stuck out from the covers, toes curled, nails unpainted, perfect as pearls.

  He touched the smallest toe, then brought his hand to the back of his neck.

  What was she doing here? How had he let it get this far?

  “Don’t hate me,” he said.

  The girl’s face scrunched up.

  “I want you to promise me something,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Promise me you won’t do this again.”

  She sat up, and the covers fell to her waist. The gecko seemed to have grown, seemed to be scaling her pale hip. The prosthesis hung at her side. Stretch marks radiated from her nipples like the wavy rays of a child’s hand-drawn sun. “From coming in too fast,” Kate had explained. She’d had them too.

  “I’m not a child,” Lily said.

  He wanted to say he was no less a child than her. He wanted to say that adults were just kids who’d made up their minds. Instead, he said, “I know that.”

  “You aren’t protecting me from anything,” she said. “This isn’t my first time.”

  “I didn’t think it was,” he said. But he had wondered. He’d taken her for Lolita, then the arm was in the air, and, catching it, he hadn’t known what to think. Perhaps he’d flattered himself thinking she might want him for her first.

  “You should go,” he said.

  “Jesus,” she said. She threw the covers back, and the fullness of her nudity shocked him anew. Her body was a coil, muscled, marble-smooth.

  “You . . . you look just like her,” he said.

  Lily was quiet a minute. She looked down, taking in the length of herself, then met his eyes.

  “That must be fucked up for you,” she said.

  Brig looked away. He moved to the bedroom window, put his fingers between two miniblinds, and scissored them open. The lot was lamplit. He hoped, any second, to see Boots cross the long shadows of parked cars. He hoped against the double pendulum of head and tail, orange between coyote teeth. But no cat appeared, in or out of jaws.

  He wasn’t sure how long he watched, but, when he turned, Lily stood in the bedroom doorway, her shorts and sweatshirt back on, undergarments balled wet in her hand.

  “I guess I’ll be going,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Hey,” she said. “It happens. I hear it happens a lot to older guys.”

  And he was glad to have the teasing back.

  “I hope you find your cat,” she said.

  He told her he did too. “Those cigarettes,” he said.

  “One for the road?” she said.

  “If that’s okay.”

  She pulled the pack from her pocket and shook one out. This time, he studied the pack, caught the logo and the name. She dropped the cigarette into his open palm. Her fingertips grazed his skin, but the current was gone, burnt out or too diffuse to feel, like in high school physics, the experiment they’d done with electricity. They’d stood in a circle, those brave enough to take part, and all held hands. The first loop, the current passing through them, he felt the pulse. The charge weakened, circling, until six, seven revolutions later, he felt nothing at all.

  He slipped the joint into his pocket. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I never meant to—”

  “Sleep with me?”

  “Change my mind. I never meant to change my mind.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “Next time you want to sniff a girl’s panties, though, there’s got to be an easier way than all this.”

  He was disgusted with himself. He wondered how she could have seen into the bathroom, but then she was laughing, saying, “I’m kidding. Jesus. Lighten up.”

  And then she was at the door, then opening it, then crouching, making kissing noises into the night. He saw the red of her sweatshirt, the alligator’s ridge of her backbone cutting the shirt in two. And then he saw the cat in her arms.

  “She came back!” Lily said. The cat purred and rubbed its muzzle across her middle. Briefly, the head tucked itself into the pocket of her shirt, then pulled back out, shaking, like a dog shaking off water. Lily laughed, and Brig didn’t have the heart to tell her, first, that the missing cat was not his own, and, second, that this was not the missing cat. This cat, a tom, belonged to the Indian couple upstairs. They let the cat out nights to fight and fuck, and it never surprised Brig to see him wandering the complex, a slash down the calico bridge of his nose or one eye oozing, swollen shut.

  The cat hissed when Brig took it.

  “Can I see you again?” he said.

  “What for?” Lily said.

  And Brig saw he didn’t have the answer to that question.

  “Maybe I’ll catch one of your swim meets sometime,” he said.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  They nodded the way people do when they agree to something both know will never happen and, in agreeing, know the other knows.

  The cat writhed in Brig’s arms, and he lowered it to the floor. It moved through the room, sniffing, then rubbed its side along one coffee table leg.

  “I hope you find a way to be happy,” Lily said and, before he could say anything, kissed him on the mouth—once, twice, three closemouthed kisses in quick succession—and then she was out the door.

  He waited for what felt like long enough, then opened the door and threw the cat out.

  Then he moved to his suitcase, pulled his laptop from the front flap, sat on the floor, and flipped the laptop open. He pulled the joint from his pocket. It wasn’t hand-rolled, but neither was it manufacturer-perfect. It was closer to the prerolled cones a friend of his used to pack tobacco into, but it was stamped with a logo Brig had seen somewhere before.

  He searched the name on the cigarette’s side, and things made sense quickly: five medical marijuana dispensaries in a ten-mile radius, and laws loose enough he didn’t doubt a minor could stock up even without her parents’ help.

  He didn’t know her last name, but searching “Liliana Tucson swimmer arm” pulled up the Tucson Weekly, the human interest story, and the truth.

  A snake had seemed a far-fetched way to lose an arm, and he wondered whether the cancer had reached her other bones. He wondered at the rest of what she’d told him, how much was true. Her parents were missionaries, that much the article confirmed. In one picture, Lily stood beside them on the front lawn of a small, brick house. He knew it immediately for one of the ranches in the development down the road. But the neighborhood was huge, houses identical. He could wander the cul-de-sacs and cursive streets nightly and not be sure which house was hers.

  And say he could b
e sure? Finding her, what would he do? Shake her hand? Say Sorry for your cancer? Meet her folks?

  He read “High School High Dive” twice, looking for the words remission and cancer-free and, not finding them, knew what not finding them meant.

  There was another paper, an announcement that needed reading. He could almost see Kate’s face, serene, cheek pressed to the lawyer’s. Or maybe they were smiling, gazing into one another’s eyes. He considered pulling the page up. But he hadn’t looked yet, and he wouldn’t. He didn’t want to see the picture. He didn’t want to know the guy’s name, didn’t want to know which church, how soon, what day.

  He shut the laptop. He stood and returned the computer to his bag. He searched the kitchen drawers until he found a box of matches, then stepped outside.

  . . .

  The night was insects, and Brig cut right through the middle of the roar. The joint was really working on him, so that the cicadas’ rhythmic pulse swelled in his head to the shape and size of a heart monitor. He’d never seen one, a heart monitor, except in bad movies, the kind with the green line and sonar beep that meant the coma patient’s heart was still beating. Stumbling, calling for Boots, Brig waited for the line to fall flat, bugs cut off in a sudden, strangling hush, like birthday candles blown the fuck out.

  He was high.

  And Boots was gone. Or hiding. Or in the belly of some other animal already.

  “She’s an indoor cat,” the woman had said. Pampered, spayed, declawed, the cat had never set so much as one paw out-of-doors. “She’s my little sweetie.” The woman ruffled the cat’s mane with one liver-spotted, skeletal hand. A diamond ring collared her fourth finger, and Brig wondered how long she’d been widowed.

  He wondered now how long she’d had the cat. Divorced, he’d considered a dog for companionship, but work made it impossible. Had Boots perhaps been a dead man’s replacement? Had Brig lost more than a cat? Had he lost a husband substitute?

  The joint burned his fingertips, and he dropped it, stomped it out. He sat and put his head in his hands. He stood. The palm trees spun. He made one more trip around the apartment complex and wound up back at the lamppost where he’d first found Lily. He touched the pole. He shook it, but it was too deep in the ground to move. He looked up. Bugs crowded the light, dive-bombing and circling. A black-shelled beetle head-butted the bulb a half dozen times before hitting the sidewalk. Caught on its back, the beetle squirmed, wings folding and unfolding beneath it, legs pedaling air.

  He watched the beetle a long time. He hated bugs, the grotesquery of mandible and eye, antennae twitching, the threat, always, of flight.

  Come on, he thought. Come on. But the beetle couldn’t get itself turned over. Brig couldn’t leave it, couldn’t touch it either. Grass grew from a crack in the sidewalk, and he plucked a blade. He tried to flip the beetle over with the blade of grass, but the insect was too heavy. He was pushing it across the concrete. He stopped. He worried he’d hurt it, worried he’d torn up the beetle’s wings. Then the legs, searching, hooked the grass, and the beetle turned itself over. For a moment, it rested, then its back unbolted like the doors of a DeLorean, wings flickered, and the beetle lifted off.

  Brig had no idea what time it was. It was still night, no warmth, no sunrise softening the sky. Tomorrow, he had a meeting in Tempe that he’d skip. He’d skip the whole week, maybe. Maybe take a month off. He could make it a month on credit cards, but this would cost him. In the long run, he’d pay twice as much.

  Or not. Every few weeks, in the mail, he got an offer, another card with zero interest on balance transfers for twelve or eighteen months. He knew a guy who’d open an account, move his debt, then, a year later, move what he owed again. It was a migration that had been going on a decade, and, in this way, he’d stayed out of debt. Brig could do this, and he wondered why he hadn’t, why he let his several thousand dollars fester on a three-year-old Visa and an even older MasterCard, both with shitty interest rates. Filling out an application would take ten minutes. Instead, each month, he wrote two more checks.

  His own laziness impressed him—triumphant laziness, laziness in the face of clear, available solutions.

  He pulled his key ring from his pocket and found the neighbor’s key. He crossed the parking lot, stopped at her door, and let himself in.

  Same floor plan, the apartment was a mirror image of his own. The furnishings, however, were exquisite, walls crowded with dressers, bookcases, a desk of dark, carved wood. It was an apartment trying to hold everything once held by a house. Inside, the smell was cat and potpourri. A low table stood beside the door. A lamp stood on the table, and he pulled the chain.

  On the kitchen counter, by the sink, six cat food cans were stacked like hockey pucks. A page of handwritten instructions was weighted down by a manual can opener with rubber grips. He’d never bothered to read the instructions, and now he moved the opener aside to take a look. Printed at the top of the page were three phone numbers. There was the number of the cat’s veterinarian, the number of an emergency vet, and the number where the woman was staying. The first instruction began: Boots is an inside cat. Brig read that and couldn’t read the rest.

  He unstacked the cans and made a pyramid. He turned the cans so the cat on each label faced him, then spun the cans so the cat faced away. He’d hold on to them a few more days, in case Boots came back, but, on the last day, he’d open each can, switch on the disposal, and dump the food. He’d tell her the cat had just run off. That seemed kinder, unless he was only telling himself this because it was easier.

  The only other option was to call. He could beg her forgiveness, ask advice. And, who knew? Maybe this had happened before. Maybe she knew a place the cat might hide. But, looking around the apartment, at the careful placement of furniture in each room, he knew this cat had never gotten out before, knew this just as he knew he couldn’t make the call.

  He hadn’t meant to fuck up, hadn’t meant to make another big, giant mistake. It seemed unfair—brutally, relentlessly unfair—that certain big, giant mistakes weren’t made so much as begun with smaller, simpler ones: a wrong turn, a pan left too long on the stove, an open door.

  Brig opened cabinets until he found a glass. He filled the glass with water and drank. There was dish soap on the countertop, and he washed the glass, then returned it to the cabinet where he’d found it.

  The woman’s kitchen and main room were divided by the same thin, silver strip that divided his own, and he stepped over it. He crossed the room, then sat with his back to the door. He reached up, pulled the lamp chain, and the room went dark.

  He closed his eyes. He would wait out the night. Eyes shut, he’d listen for a scratch at the door, and he would not sleep. He’d wait through the silence, listen past the silence, until his head hurt from all the listening.

  If you hoped hard enough, you could wish a thing into existence. He’d believed that, once. He wanted to believe it again. Eyes closed, hoping—it was as close as he could get to prayer.

  100% Cotton

  The night is cold. The buildings are tall. The sky, except where it’s starlit, is black. Black like black checker pieces or what’s left of wood after the fire.

  Also, I should mention that there’s a large gun pointed at my face.

  And because there’s a large gun pointed at my face, things speed up the way they do in nature films, how a seed sprouts, turns to stalk, and takes leaves in ten seconds.

  Things here are speeding up just that way. Stars pinwheel beyond the buildings. The moon rises, sets, rises again. And then things slow way, way down.

  “If you don’t want to be caught dead in that shirt,” he says, “you’d best take it off.”

  The guy with the gun’s not fucking around. I don’t know anything about guns, but this is a big one. It looks like the kind that holds a lot of bullets, the kind that leaves your corpse unrecognizable when the cops come, which is okay because there’s no one to miss me, no one left on this spinning planet to faint when the
coroner lifts the sheet from my bullet-riddled face.

  The gun’s pointed at me because the guy asked for my wallet and I said no.

  “No,” I said, and he said, “How’d you like to die?” and I said, “Well, I wouldn’t want to be caught dead in this shirt.”

  Which isn’t exactly true. If I hadn’t wanted to be caught dead in this shirt, I wouldn’t have worn it. It seemed fitting for the occasion. The shirt’s black with a skull-and-crossbones emblem on the pocket, what you see printed on bottles, the kind with caps to keep out babies and old people.

  Maybe the skull and crossbones wasn’t an inspired choice, but fuck you. Pick out your own death-shirt.

  The guy with the gun didn’t like my tone. He said, “I don’t like your tone.”

  He didn’t get my smugness, that it was on purpose, so I said it again, the thing about not wanting to be caught dead in this shirt, which is when he told me to take it off. Which pretty much brings you up to speed.

  I pull the shirt over my head. I kneel and fold the shirt on the sidewalk, a rectangle, department-store-perfect. Work five years at the Gap, and you get really good at folding clothes.

  “You’ve never been held up,” the gunman says.

  I could tell him the truth, that it’s my third time this week, that for months I’ve watched the local news in order to pinpoint the Atlanta intersection most likely to get me offed. That I picked this street in this neighborhood and wander it nightly. That I’ve been roughed up, cursed, and mugged. I’ve lost two wallets, a watch, my phone, but not one guy would pull the trigger, because it turns out what they want, really, isn’t blood—it’s money.