Noncompliance, I decided, was my best option.
Last night, I sang, did a little dance. “My milk shake brings all the boys to the yard!” I belted it, gyrated my hips, but that only freaked the guy out. He didn’t even stick around for the cash.
This guy, though. This guy looks like he wouldn’t mind firing a round through your forehead if only you found the right words to provoke him.
“Wallet,” he says. “Now.”
I’m on my knees, the shirt the only thing between me and his feet. We’re in the dark where he grabbed me, but there’s enough moonlight to light up the skull, which isn’t the same material as the rest of the shirt, but something firmer, rubbery, like a kid’s iron-on jersey decal.
I point at the shirt. “One hundred percent cotton,” I sign. English is my first language. My second’s American Sign Language.
The guy looks around. He’s getting antsy.
This is how my father died.
My father was born deaf and he taught me his language, though it wasn’t his language, not for years. In this country’s history, there was a time when sign language wasn’t allowed, when the deaf were taught to speak in tongues, to mouth sounds they couldn’t hear leave their lips, as though all of America was afraid of hands, of what the deaf might do with a language all their own.
My father found happiness with a deaf woman who taught him to speak with his body. She stuck around just long enough to give him a son. He never remarried. He died last year when a man asked for his wallet. Dad kept walking, and the man shot him.
“Couldn’t your father read lips?” people ask, as though the answer to this question determines whose fault it is he’s dead.
A wind kicks up. Shirtless, my skin prickles. The sidewalk hurts my knees.
“Count of five,” the guy says. “Five.”
At the Gap, I read tags until I came to know a material at the touch of a sleeve. Even cotton-polyester blends I can guess, give or take ten percent on the ratio.
My T-shirt between us looks lonely, and I wonder if my father fell like that, whether he folded or crumpled like a dropped shirt.
“Machine wash warm, with like colors,” I sign.
“Four,” the guy says.
I don’t know whether my father misunderstood his killer, whether he saw the gun, whether he walked on knowing what came next.
“Gentle cycle,” I sign.
“Keep it up,” the guy says. His thumb jumps. Something clicks at his end of the gun. He steps toward me, and he’s almost on the shirt. His boots are black lace-ups.
It won’t be long now.
“Three.”
You want to know why I want to die, but what answer could I give good enough for you, you who want to live?
Putting a thing like that into words, it’s like trying to explain what stands between people, what keeps us from communicating—I mean really communicating—with each other.
We move through the days with our hands at our sides, and I believe that whatever holds us back, whatever keeps people at bay, maybe it’s the same thing that left my mother tethered at the neck by an orange extension cord to our attic’s rafters.
Maybe it’s what sings in my ear to follow her.
She wasn’t afraid to do to herself what I’m asking someone to do for me.
“Tumble dry low,” I sign.
If I fall forward, my head will catch the shirt like a pillow. I’m ready.
“Two.”
We talk in our sleep, and so do the deaf. Nights I snuck into my father’s room, his hands worked over his chest, signing. It was the language of dreams, incomprehensible, but it was gorgeous. His hands rose and fell like birds with his breathing.
“One.”
Except sometimes, sometimes, meaning crept in. A transmission. My father, who spent his life missing my mom, that sign: index fingers beckoning, then hands pulling air in the direction of the heart.
I close my eyes, and it’s there, the gun muzzle, ice between my eyes.
I want to cry out. I hold my breath.
I wait.
I wait.
You want to know what my father was saying, and I’ll tell you. It’s what I shout once the gunman’s given up, returned his weapon to his jacket pocket. It’s what I call after his heels slapping the sidewalk.
It’s my voice to the gunman and my father’s hands to my mother in the night, calling: “Come back. Come back. Come back.”
The End of Aaron
Aaron calls to say we’re running out of time, and I know that we’re going to have to do it all over again, the collecting, the hiding, the waiting to come out of the dark.
“Grace,” he says. “Where are you? Where are you right now?”
He’s got that warble in his voice, like he’s just swallowed a kazoo, that and the tone that means business, like in movies when the screen splits and we see the people on both ends of the line, the air traffic controller telling the twelve-year-old girl how to land the plane, or the hero asking the chief which color wire to cut.
“Publix,” I say. “I’m at Publix.”
“Perfect,” Aaron says. “I want you to get ten—twenty—gallons of water, eight rolls of duct tape, five pounds of jerky, and a pear.”
He still calls it duck tape, like the bird. Last time I corrected him, he didn’t talk to me for two days, so I let it go.
“Why the pear?” I ask.
“I like pears,” Aaron says, and it’s like he’s saying: Just because the world’s ending, I can’t get a pear, goddammit?
Except that, for Aaron, the world is always ending. It’s the third time this year, and it’s only July. I’m thinking last night’s fireworks set him off, but there has to be more to it. Probably he’s off his meds. Aaron loses it, and, nine times out of ten, it means he’s gone off his meds.
Used to be, he’d warn me. “I’m just going to try,” he’d say. “Just for a week or two.”
When I stopped supporting these experiments, he stopped telling me. Now, I have to guess, which isn’t hard given the things that come out of his mouth. The trick is figuring out how long he’s been off.
First day, he’ll feel nothing. By the end of the first week, he tends to claim a clarity and empathy he hasn’t felt in years. “I want to fuck the world!” he’ll say, pulling me onto the bed.
Then, week two will hit, and like clockwork, or something more precise and calculating than clockwork, Aaron will start in on that year’s fear.
It wasn’t always the end of the world. For a while, Aaron was afraid to leave the house. Those weeks were okay. We’d lie in bed, snuggle, watch TV. One time, we watched Labyrinth three times in a row. By the third viewing, Aaron was sobbing. I shook the pills into his palm, and he drank them down.
Then there was the year of the bees. Bumblebee or butterfly, it didn’t matter. Aaron would see a bug and freak out. When he was a child, a bee sting put him in the hospital for two days. Now, everywhere he goes, there’s an EpiPen in his pocket. Aaron gets stung, he has less than a minute to plunge the needle into his leg before his throat swells shut. It’s a fear I respect, a fear that makes sense when you’re all the time only seconds away from death.
He’s only been stung the one time, but twice he’s put himself back in the hospital. “I really thought there was a bee,” he’ll say, EpiPen empty in its little tan tube.
This year, though, it’s the apocalypse that’s got Aaron in handcuffs. Not the Rapture or any trumped-up Mayan shit, but what Aaron calls the real deal. He doesn’t know how the world will end, only that it will be bad. He doesn’t know when, only that it will be soon.
“Won’t be long now,” he’ll say, canning fruit or sharpening the blade of a knife. “Won’t be long at all.”
I blame his parents. Not for the depression—I mean, maybe that’s their fault. Maybe there’s something fucked in their genes that got more fucked up when his dad fucked his mom. I don’t know. I don’t know how DNA works. I only know that his folks bought in
to the whole Y2K thing, and Aaron’s never been the same since.
Imagine it: You’re eight years old, all of your friends are partying with their families or up late with other friends at New Year’s Eve sleepovers, and, instead of watching the ball drop with your parents, you’re huddled in the basement watching your mom cry. The basement is stocked with two years’ worth of water, batteries, and green beans. Upstairs, a TV’s been left on, and Dick Clark counts down. Downstairs, you shut your eyes and wait for the end of the world.
You could say Aaron’s been waiting ever since. I should know. I’ve known Aaron most of his life. In kindergarten he pulled my pigtails, and by high school I was letting him pull down my pants. Neither of us were college material, so, after graduation, he got a job at Arby’s and I got a job down the street at Payless shoes. Sometimes our lunch hours overlap, and we meet at McDonald’s. He smells like old beef and I smell like feet, and we eat our McNuggets and pretend that we’re better than this. Truth is, we’re twenty and we live with our parents, but that’s okay because we have each other, and I’ve come to believe that each other is enough.
Most nights I spend at Aaron’s. His parents call me the daughter they never had, which is sweet but also kind of fucked up since they must know by now what I do in bed with their son.
At Publix, I get everything off of Aaron’s list that will fit in the cart. I have a card from my parents to cover food, and, so long as I keep it under two hundred a month, Dad won’t yell. Most meals, I pay for myself so I can stock up on weeks Aaron goes a little crazy. His therapist calls this enabling. I call it love. She says I’m a problem, and I, for one, have agreed to disagree.
At home, I pop the trunk. It’s got a dozen gallons in it, and I grab the first two. I start up the front steps and almost kick over the jar. This I’m used to. Every few months, we find one, a mason jar fat with amber, lid collared by a yellow bow—a sort of thank-you for ignoring the bees.
A while back, the woman next door set up a hive. Generally, the bees stay on her side of the fence, though, from Aaron’s backyard, you can watch them rise, a fog of tiny helicopters circling the house. Aaron’s mom called the county, but it turns out there’s no law against keeping bees.
She petitioned the homeowners association to dub the neighborhood bee-free, but the beekeeper threatened litigation, claiming it was because she was black.
“I don’t care what color the woman is,” Aaron’s mom said. “I don’t want those things stinging my son.”
In the end, the HOA let the lady keep her bees provided no one got stung, and, in two years, no one has. The women settled their differences, and now we get honey.
Aaron meets me at the door.
“Sweet!” he says. He pulls the jar from my hand, leaving me to juggle the gallons.
“There’s more in the trunk,” I say.
“Those can wait,” Aaron says. “Get the pear.”
I go back to the car, get the pear, and find Aaron in the basement. This is where he lives. The place is spotless, the way it gets his first week off meds. First he cleans everything, then he lets everything go to shit. The clothes he has on are the clothes he wore yesterday, and I wonder how long it’s been since he slept.
“Come on, come on,” Aaron says.
The basement is two rooms. One’s a bedroom. The other’s been converted to a living-room-slash-kitchen. It’s all belowground, setup intended for the Y2K end that never came.
Aaron’s on the bed, honey jar open between his knees. He balances a plate on top of the jar, and I drop the pear onto it. Aaron likes knives, keeps knives all over the house, and now he pulls one from his pocket, a Swiss Army deal, and unfolds a long blade from the handle. He splits the pear, picks the seeds from the middle, and hands me the plate. Then I watch as he lowers the blade past the open mouth and deep into the jar’s gold, glorious middle.
The knife rises, and it’s gilded, honey-sheathed. I lift the plate and wait for the drizzle.
Listen: If your honey comes in a bear-shaped bottle, you’ve never had honey, and if you haven’t had honey, you haven’t lived. Real honey, honey fresh from the comb, is sweet, yes, but it also tastes like clover and sage, like cinnamon and lemon trees. I can’t explain it except to say that, before you die, you owe it to yourself to take a taste.
We eat the pear and make love, and, when we’re done, I run back to the car and unload the gallons, the rolls of tape, the jerky in its fat, five-pound bag.
I make half a dozen trips up and down the stairs, carrying water, and Aaron stocks the gallons in his pantry. What he’s got is an old wardrobe, converted, crowded with shelves. Together, we cut a hole in the drywall just big enough to tuck the wardrobe in. You can hardly tell it’s not a real pantry.
When Aaron gets scared, we stock up. When he comes out of it, we eat whatever we stocked up on.
I come down the stairs with the last gallon, and Aaron is crying.
“There’s no room,” he cries. The pantry is packed. “There’s no more room!” He screams it, then sobs.
I touch his shoulder and he turns, wild-eyed, like a dog touched at the food bowl.
I hold up the last gallon. “We can slide it under the bed,” I say. “We can put it anywhere.” I should know better. There’s no use reasoning with Aaron when he gets this way, and, today, for whatever reason, he’s decided the only food and water we can keep is what fits on the shelves.
“Take it away,” he says. “Give it to Mom and Dad. They’re going to need it.”
Early on in his delusions, this was a sticking point for us.
“People will want in,” Aaron will say, “but you’ve got to be ready. You have to be prepared to tell them no.”
“Even our parents?” I’ll ask.
And Aaron, without a trace of sympathy, will say, “Even them.”
“Okay,” I’ll say.
It bothers me, I’ll admit, imagining my mother and father wandering the bomb-scarred wasteland, scavenging for food while Aaron and I get fat on beef jerky and canned corn. But, then, the end isn’t coming, and so my agreeing with Aaron isn’t the biggest of concessions. Compromising your ethics is one thing. Compromising your hypothetical ethics is another. And so I say, “Okay.”
That okay, it’s like enabling—another word that, in my mouth, means love.
I love Aaron. How, you’re wondering. How could she love a man who yells, who cries, who makes her carry jugs of water up and down the stairs? But you’re only seeing Aaron unwell. Aaron at his best is better than you or me, better than anyone I’ve ever known. He’s gentle. He’s kind. But those are just words. Here’s a story:
I’m twelve. The girls at school have boobs, and I don’t, not yet, and one day this girl, Mandy Templeton, she empties her carton of milk onto my tray and floods my lunch. “What’re you gonna do,” she says, “cry about it?” And then she calls me Baby-tits. “Baby-tits, Baby-tits,” she sings.
We’re at that age where, at lunch, boys sit with boys and girls sit with girls, but Aaron hears this and stands and walks over. He taps Mandy Templeton on the shoulder, and, when she turns, he punches her, hard as he can, right in the mouth. She hits the ground, screaming, spitting blood.
And even though she’s a girl and Aaron’s a boy and the rules of chivalry sort of demand things like this not be done, because Aaron’s so small, always getting picked on and never—I mean never—standing up for himself, and because Mandy’s known by students and teachers alike for being a bitch, Aaron gets ten days expulsion, and that’s it.
Mandy’s teeth never looked right afterward, and no one ever messed with Aaron again.
Here’s another story:
Junior year, Aaron takes me to prom. We dance. We kiss. That’s all we’ve ever done. The dance is over, and, instead of driving me home, Aaron surprises me with a hotel room.
We undress and get into bed. We touch each other. Then, just as he’s about to put it in, I say, “Wait. I can’t. I’m not ready.” And, Aaron, he smiles. He s
trokes my cheek. He says, “Sure, Grace, okay,” and takes me home. No fight, no fuss, not one word meant to make me feel bad.
I was so grateful I couldn’t get out of the car.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be sorry,” he said.
And then I gave him a hand job. Right there in his parents’ driveway, I gave him probably the best hand job ever given in the history of the world.
The next month, there was nothing we hadn’t done.
Point is, high school guys don’t work that way, but Aaron’s always worked that way. And if the trade-off is that, a few weeks a year, he goes cuckoo, then that’s a trade-off I’m willing to take.
Aaron’s therapist calls him a wounded bird, but, I ask you, who wouldn’t care for a wounded bird? What kind of person sees a bird with a broken wing, cat on the horizon, and walks on by?
And so I buy the water. I tape the windows. I hunker down with Aaron, and, when I can, I get him to take his medication, knowing that, in a few days, it will kick back in and the man I love will come bubbling up from the ocean floor. He’ll break the surface. Exhausted, he’ll rest his head on my shoulder and say that I deserve better, and I’ll tell him to shut up, and I’ll rub his back and he’ll sleep and I’ll watch.
I carry the extra gallon upstairs. It’s Thursday, our shared day off, but Aaron’s parents are at work. I wonder whether they’ve noticed the change. Most episodes, they don’t. When it comes to Aaron’s parents and Aaron’s illness, check the sand. That’s where you’ll find their heads.
I head back downstairs, and Aaron’s still trying to make room for the jug. Finally, he gives up. He pulls the honey jar down from the high shelf, uncaps it, and sticks a finger in. He puts the finger into his mouth. He does this a few more times. He doesn’t offer me any, and I don’t ask. Off his meds, Aaron can be thoughtless, but I try not to make him feel bad. Guilt’s not a motivator when he’s like this. Guilt only makes things worse.
He fastens the lid and returns the jar to its place on the shelf. He lies down on the bed, and I lie next to him. The sheets are musty, unwashed.
The Heaven of Animals: Stories Page 7
