The Heaven of Animals: Stories

by David James Poissant

  Quickly, is how it would have happened, over before she had time to be afraid. Everyone said so, and he wanted to believe them. Wanted to, and didn’t. What had she thought, seeing the guardrail, then going through it, ice rising to meet her, then opening to let her in?

  Had he been the last thing on her mind? Had she blamed him or forgiven him?

  He saved the message and flipped the phone shut. He stood. He could whip the phone into the ocean and be free, but that was just another impulse. He’d long since memorized the message, heard it with or without the phone pressed to his ear. He’d never be free.

  And say he did it, say he managed somehow to forget her words, there were still home movies, photo albums—her picture to stare at and how, accusingly, she stared right back at him—still the old house to drive past. He’d wept to see Lorrie’s flowers dug up, her gardens turned to grass.

  He moved down the beach. At his approach, the campers stirred. The two dancers separated. The woman moved to a sleeping bag on the sand beside the fire, and the man joined another man at the water’s edge.

  When he was close enough to see, Mark stopped. The men were naked.

  One, the man who’d been dancing, was maybe twenty. He had a potbelly and the jowls of a bulldog. He kept his gaze steady on the horizon. The second man was older, tall and thin. His hands were on his hips. His elbows stuck out like trowels. His hair, brown shot through with gray, was long and tied back in a ponytail. The tail touched the small of the man’s back. A beard, tied in a matching tail, hung from his chin. The wind pressed the man’s beard to his waist, a waist not indicated by tan line or pants.

  The older man turned only his head in Mark’s direction. The beard was bunched in places, banded by silver coils.

  “It’s not polite to stare,” he said.

  Mark hadn’t meant to, but it had surprised him, the sight. He’d heard of nude beaches but thought they were a myth, like those highways out west said to have no speed limits. If those highways existed, he’d never seen them.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s the beard. It’s impressive.” This was true. The rest of the man was unimpressive, shriveled, pinkie-sized in a pocket of dense, gray hair. He’d imagined nudists were nudists because they had something to show off, but he guessed not.

  The man nodded. “I have a deal with God,” he said. “I won’t cut my hair until the war ends.”

  “Which war?” Mark asked.

  The man smiled. “All of them.” He brought a hand to his chin, scratched, then ran his fingers down the rope of hair. With its bunched bits, it reminded Mark of sheets knotted together, the kind children in movies tied to bedposts and hung from open windows to run away.

  “If it’s world peace you’re after,” Mark said, “I’m thinking you’ll have that beard awhile.”

  The naked man frowned. “You’re one of those.”

  “One of what?”

  “A man who believes the way things are is exactly the way they’ll always be.”

  The younger man at his side laughed. His belly trembled. But the bearded man turned and shook his head, and, wordlessly, the young man about-faced and made his way up the beach.

  The sky was black, the bridge above brown. There was the rush of cars overhead and the whine of night insects turning on. The nudists, maybe ten of them and in various states of undress, watched him from chairs and sleeping bags around the fire. A topless woman dropped a log onto the flames, and there was an eruption of sparks. Embers feathered, then settled on the sand.

  “That’s quite a shiner,” the man said.

  Mark felt his eye. The skin hurt to touch, and he realized that he was shivering. He was used to cold but hadn’t expected it in San Francisco, hadn’t realized California wasn’t always hot. And here stood this other man, still, at peace. He wondered how, without clothes, the man kept warm. He asked.

  The man smiled. “Cold is a state of mind,” he said. He bowed his head and closed his eyes. A gust of wind grabbed his beard and twirled it about his stomach. The man lifted one leg, drawing his knee almost to his chest. His penis poked forward, a cocktail shrimp from a Brillo pad. His arms stretched behind him until the hands met and his fingers interlocked. The man resembled a heron or else some prehistoric shorebird, long extinct.

  Mark watched the water. The tide was definitely going out. The sand was stained where the water had been, and the surf no longer swallowed the stain.

  After a time, the bearded man opened his eyes. His leg dropped, and he turned to face Mark.

  “My state of mind has changed,” the man said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’m freezing my ass off.” He winked. His beard swung. “There’s a place for you by the fire, if you’d like.”

  The man joined the others by the fire, then looked back. He waved. A second hand beckoned, and then it seemed that all of them were waving.

  His pants were the first thing to come off, and then his shirt. His boxers dropped, and the men and women around the fire cheered.

  He wanted to go to them, to warm himself by the fire. But there was a better place for him. He felt the tug and turned to face the bay.

  The water on his legs telegraphed the terrible mistake, but he didn’t stop. He fell forward, and the cold took him. He went under. He pushed against the bottom. His face broke the surface, he breathed, and, soon, the water was warm.

  . . .

  The four of them had shared a Thanksgiving, once, years before. Joshua and Marisa were a new couple when he and Lorrie had traveled to Tucson to see them. Joshua had given them all a tour of the Sonoran Desert, with its fierce, chalky landscape, its cactuses that stood, arms out, like tellers in a bank heist movie.

  On Thanksgiving Day, Lorrie set the table. Marisa made a turkey, and Joshua carved. He cut into the bird, then proceeded to mutilate one of the breasts. Mark tried to help, encouraging Joshua to draw the blade gently over the meat and not to chop. “It’s not a machete,” he said.

  They argued until Joshua plunged the blade into the turkey and sat down. Mark stood, unsunk the blade, and peeled smooth, even slices from the second breast.

  None of which mattered, in the end, as, halfway through, the blade caught and the meat wouldn’t give. The turkey, at its center, was ice. Marisa, it turned out, didn’t do much cooking and hadn’t known to thaw the Butterball before baking.

  The bird was returned to the oven, but, by the time it was done, the meat was dry and crumbed beneath the blade. They ate, the four of them, not speaking, and though Joshua and Marisa would, over the years, invite them often for visits, there would never be another invitation to Thanksgiving, not before the one that came for Mark alone.

  That night, on the foldout couch, Mark and Lorrie argued.

  “You should be nicer to your brother,” she said.

  “I’m nice enough,” he said.

  “You’re not,” she said, and, the way she’d said it, it stuck with him.

  “He’ll kill himself with those cigarettes,” Mark said.

  At this, Lorrie pulled the pillow from beneath her head, held it to her face, and fake-smothered herself.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked.

  “I want you to try,” she said.

  “I’m trying,” he said, but he wasn’t, and he knew it, and he knew she was right when she said, “You could try so much harder.”

  She’d meant more than with his brother, of course. She’d meant with her, with their marriage, which had, just that year, taken an unexpected turn. Mark couldn’t say what had happened. It was as though they’d been piloting a makeshift bicycle built for two. Approaching a tree, they’d veered, each in a different direction, and both been left on the pavement, bloodied, half a bike apiece. They weren’t the people they’d married. Their lives, their time and how they spent it, what they wanted and what came next—they’d changed, and Mark had been afraid.

  “You’re so hard on people,” she said. “One day he’ll be gone, and you’re go
ing to regret every word.”

  But Joshua wasn’t gone, and it seemed a cruel joke now that Lorrie was.

  That night, she watched him a long time. She did the thing he liked, tracing his face, a fingertip over his forehead, across his cheeks and chin, and down his nose.

  She said, “I predict for you a long, unhappy life.”

  And then she fell asleep.

  And then she’d stayed, stayed with him for years, trying to make it work, trying harder than him, trying right up to the second her car went off the road.

  . . .

  It wasn’t the old man or the young man who pulled him from the water. It was none of the nudists.

  Though it was dark and he was too far out to be sure, he thought he recognized the figure moving down the beach, was sure he knew the gait, the frame lit up by firelight. The figure paused by the fire, turned seaward, and Mark knew who it must be, for who else would tear off his shirt like that, who else kick off his shoes and charge and dive?

  And, then, he was there, waving and hollering, and Mark couldn’t say how long it had taken. Things had slowed—the water’s slosh, his brother biting the waves—everything a syrupy, bubbling churn. Joshua’s teeth flashed. His words were roars. Then his hands were on him and Mark was in a headlock, his body trailing while Joshua reached one-armed toward shore. The water surged, and the arm at his neck loosened and tightened with every wave.

  He’d been unprepared for that, for the force of the waves, the current and the cold. Onshore, the water had seemed a gelatin with a rippling skin. But, once you were in it, well, it was everything his brother had warned him it would be. How many bodies, he wondered, had this bay claimed, not only those who leapt from the bridge made famous for all the leapings but those, like him, who let the current carry them out and out?

  But he couldn’t take his brother with him. Joshua would go under before he let go, and so Mark would have to swim.

  He yelled. He struggled and was not released. He swung and the fist met Joshua’s jaw. Then he was free, and he swam. Joshua cut a path through the water, and Mark followed, followed until sand squeaked underfoot. He gave in at the end, gave himself to the cold and let Joshua pull him ashore, over sand and up the beach to the waiting fire.

  But the fire wasn’t enough. Stretched on a blanket by the flames, he felt nothing, his body an unmoving blue. The fire was a tangle around which bodies bobbed and spun. Joshua’s voice was there, then a heaviness. Arms wrapped his chest, and he knew that the body was his brother’s.

  “Come on, people,” Joshua called, and then there were bodies on all sides, bodies and hair, bodies and fat, bodies on bodies, until the numb turned to itch, the itch to pain—the worst pain of his life. Pins, trillions of them, needled his flesh. He shook, convulsed. The spasms, he couldn’t hold them back. His teeth chattered until he could taste, and, when he could, he tasted blood.

  In time, the chattering stopped. The shaking turned to shivering. The bodies pulled away, and then there was only Joshua at his back, Joshua shivering too. There was presence of mind now, enough to know that he was naked, he and his brother with him, enough to know and not to care. The heat came, and his body took all it could.

  . . .

  A light glowed in the apartment stairwell, and Mark watched a moth crash into it.

  On the stoop beneath the light, without letter or explanation, sat his suitcase. A yellow ticket was bungeed to the handle. The black piping that hugged the zipper’s track had been coming loose, and now it hung, a rubbery cord that curled like a pig’s tail along the ground.

  “I told you they’d find it,” Joshua said before saying, “I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean ‘I told you so.’”

  Mark felt himself swaying. His feet throbbed and his arms ached. The cold had emptied him of sentiment, of longing of any kind. He wanted nothing more than to lie down, to be warm, and to sleep a good long while.

  He owed Joshua an explanation. He couldn’t say why he’d jumped in or what he’d been after, only that he’d never meant to get so far out. Except that, in the end, when he’d come that close to it, when he’d held up his hands, seen the shore and calculated the space between—when he’d known for sure he would sink before making it back—he hadn’t been afraid.

  “I’m sorry about the eye,” Joshua said.

  He nodded. “Sorry about the jaw.” Joshua’s face, where he’d hit him, was purpling, the jawline swollen, puffy fruit. “And the television.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’ll buy you another one.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Joshua said. He lit a cigarette.

  Mark held out two fingers. He hadn’t had a cigarette since college, had never really been a smoker. Joshua looked surprised, then looked as though he were trying to appear unsurprised, then passed the cigarette. Mark took a drag and coughed. His throat burned, lungs too, but he felt buoyant, untethered in just the right way.

  Joshua lit another cigarette, and together they filled the stairwell up with smoke.

  Overhead, more moths rattled the bulb.

  Joshua dropped his cigarette and ground it out, and Mark did the same.

  He wondered what waited inside. Marisa—he wouldn’t know what to say when he saw her. But already Joshua had his bag in his hands and was moving through the open door.

  They found Marisa on the floor, legs crossed, a screwdriver in her hand, a table leg in her lap. She stood at the sight of them, and Mark could only imagine how they looked to her, their busted faces, their salt-slicked hair. She might have demanded an explanation, and Joshua might have given it, but she didn’t ask and Joshua didn’t offer. Another something better left unsaid.

  If she’d spoken of the kiss, his brother had dismissed it. But, seeing her, Mark knew she hadn’t, knew too, right then, there’d be no motel room, no Chinese takeout. They’d pass through this, all of them.

  From his neighbors, he knew the sign for thank you, a hand brought to the mouth and the arm tipping, unfolding from the body like a wing. His fingers found his lips, and Marisa smiled. He was absolved, forgiven before his hand left his face.

  The Baby Glows

  There is nothing else about the baby that one might call unusual, nothing uncharacteristic of other babies. The baby does not skip rope. The baby does not levitate. The baby cannot line up dominos across the kitchen counter with his mind. The baby just glows.

  The baby is not bright like a fire or a star. His light is soft as a glow stick’s, the kind you buy at a carnival and snap to make shine.

  LUMINESCENT BABY SHOCKS WORLD! one headline reads. Another: FIRE BABY HOT TO MOTHER’S TOUCH!

  The baby’s body temperature is 98.6 degrees.

  It startles the mother to open the nursery door to a radiant cloud over the crib. Then, she remembers, takes him in her arms, and holds him the way any mother would hold any baby.

  The baby does not glow sometimes. The baby is always glowing.

  It’s only unusual because it hasn’t happened before. Stranger things have happened: Babies born with tails. Babies with extra arms or eyes. Pairs of babies born sharing a stomach. This baby has no extra parts.

  The baby is not magic.

  A glowing baby comes in handy. Cradling the child, the father will travel downstairs in the night, finish laundry, search the pantry for snacks without flipping a switch. The mother doesn’t like when the father does this. “The baby,” she says, “is not a lightbulb.”

  Nothing else about the baby glows. The baby cries normal tears, drools normal drool, and—it must be said—poops normal poop.

  And what becomes of a glowing baby? Will he grow into a glowing boy? Will he become a man who glows on his way to work, who confuses pedestrians at traffic lights? Will he marry, and, if he does, will his husband or wife wear a blindfold to bed?

  He will require exclusive showings at movie theaters. He will cause headaches at airport security. Common sense says he’ll never be eligible for the draft.


  Some think that the older he gets, the brighter the baby will be. Some say his luminosity will fade with age, like childhood allergies. Others wager he’ll beam at this relative wattage until, until—

  One doesn’t like to consider it, but the baby will die. One day, the baby, whether baby or man or boy, will be laid into a casket, the casket lowered into the ground. By then, one imagines, the light will have gone out. But one never knows. Perhaps he’ll glow past his last breath, the way hair is said to grow for days from the dead. Perhaps.

  Do you see him there, glowing belowground?

  See the grass that grows from the baby’s grave. See it sparkle. And a new species of incandescent worm to be discovered not far from the cemetery. And the moles that feed on these worms, their noses stars already.

  There they go, tunneling, rocketing through earth, chasing those tender, smoldering fingers of snout, clawing their way up and up, and out, and into light.

  The Disappearing Boy

  The summer before sixth grade, we both hoped we’d turn into superheroes. When it was just the two of us, we went by our code names. I was Quicksilver, after the Marvel hero, a poor man’s Flash. I was a born runner. Since the first grade, I’d always been the fastest kid on the playground, a fact undisputed at River Run Elementary, though, soon enough, middle school would find me in competition with older boys whose legs, dark with hair, would carry them at speeds I’d never match. Jason’s moniker was more original. He dreamed of being invisible, but the only invisible hero we knew of was the Fantastic Four’s Invisible Woman. I said he could be the Invisible Boy, but Jason said that was gay and dubbed himself the Disappearing Boy. We had our own gang too. Jason was the leader and I was his sidekick. We called ourselves the Silver Surfers, after another one of our favorite comic book characters. There was no one else in the gang.

  It was a strange time in our lives, a difficult time. It was the summer we competed with one another for no good reason, seeing who could swim the most laps holding his breath underwater. By mid-June, Jason could do one lap and I could do two, the length of the public pool, down and back. I clawed at the water, kicked like a frog until my lungs screamed and fireworks went off in my head.