When We Were Animals

by Joshua Gaylord

  “I’m ready.”

  He said it slowly, each syllable a victory:

  “J. D. Salinger.”

  I looked at him for a long time, that pristine boy with his acrobatic teetering between glory and shame. Our faces were impossibly close. We shared the heated air—what he breathed out, I breathed in.

  “Well?” he said. “That’s it, isn’t it? I got it, didn’t I?”

  And I said, “You got it.”

  We live our lives by measures of weeks, months, years, but the creatures we truly are, those are exposed in fractions of moments.

  It was nothing. Three words. Two of them were even plosives, or stop syllables. You got it. Nothing at all. It was a flake of a moment, a fingernail of time—but it was there in that narrow margin between one thing and another that I saw who I really was.

  He placed his hands lightly on my chest as though to encase my lack of breasts and protect them from harm. Just as you do with newly planted saplings.

  The look on his face, beneath features scarred by moonlit nights in the wild, was awfully earnest—and I didn’t think that anything Peter Meechum wanted to do could be very bad. It was a legitimate, daylight thing—it was something done all over the world all the time. It had nothing to do with that ugly, lecherous, queasy feeling in my stomach during the three nights of the full moon. This was something else entirely.

  As an act, it was cool, somber, polite.

  He removed his clothes, and he told me I should remove mine as well. After that, I lay down, and he scooted his body over mine. His chest against me was bony and raw.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you ready?”

  “Uh-huh. Yes.”

  I didn’t know what to expect. There was a pinch, a slight off feeling, as of something being lodged where it shouldn’t be. Like a piece of spinach between your teeth. It hurt a little, but not so much. Peter was very careful and considerate.

  “Okay?” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “You don’t have to keep asking.”

  So he closed his eyes and went about his business. I watched him, a little firebrand of industry, chugging away at his given chore. It made me think of those chain gangs from movies, the prisoners all shackled together, swinging their pickaxes in unison. The idea made me smile, but I didn’t want him to think I was laughing at him, so I turned my head and hid my face in the pillow.

  His face grew a deep red color, and then I knew he was done, because he fell off me to the side and made sounds that suggested pride and relief.

  I felt something leaking out of me, so I went to the bathroom. I took some of the stuff on my fingers to examine it, because it was new to me. It was slippery and a little sticky, and it smelled like pancake batter. I thought about all the invisible, microbial creatures swimming around in it, and it made me a little nauseated, so I washed my hands. But I wished them all well, his little sperms, as I sent them down the drain.

  I wasn’t on the pill, but I was pretty sure you couldn’t get pregnant when you were amenorrheic.

  I was suddenly shy again, so I wrapped a towel around myself before I went back to the bedroom. Peter was still collapsed on the bed, all used up.

  “You have to get dressed,” I said. “Before my father gets home.”

  “Okay, but kiss me first. Come here.”

  He held his arms out, so I went to him. He wanted a long kiss, one of those drawn-out ones from before—but it seemed to me that our sex had changed the kind of kisses called for. So I gave him a quick peck and an amiable pat on the bare shoulder. His skin was flushed and clammy.

  He stepped into his underwear and his pants.

  “Are you getting dressed, too?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want you to see me.”

  “You are aware we just had sex, right?”

  “I know, but still.”

  “Tell you what,” he said, turning to face the closet door. “I promise not to peek. Let me know when you’re decent again.”

  Which I thought was, after all, a very nice thing.

  * * *

  And also: I’m still waiting. With everything that happened after that day—all the things I have done.

  When will I be decent again?

  Chapter 7

  My husband closes the door of his office and turns to look out the window while he eats the lunch I packed for him in the morning. He rotates his head in a small circle, meditatively, as though working out some stiffness in his neck. When he takes a bite of his sandwich, he leans forward, then leans back again to chew it, his eyes squinting at the sunlight coming through the window. With his empty left hand, he taps his fingertips together in sequence—which makes it look as though he’s counting something, but I don’t think he is. Sometimes, between bites, it’s almost as though he has forgotten entirely what he’s doing. He just sits, his eyes gone far out over the land, his whole body very, very still, until he remembers to take another bite.

  I lean back behind the trunk of my tree so that he cannot see me. There’s a sandwich of my own tucked in my purse, and I take it out and eat it along with my husband, taking in the same view he sees. I imagine what it must be like to have an office, a desk, a computer to keep track of your appointments, and people visiting you all day, asking you questions and getting you to put your signature on documents.

  A man who works for the school walks by with a rake. He waves at me. I smile at him but make no gesture. It is what a ladybug would do, I imagine, smiling indifferently at the world and continuing on her way.

  I peek around the tree trunk, and when it is safe, I continue watching Jack. There’s one young woman who visits him frequently—she looks like a teacher. During dinner, he usually recounts his day to me in some detail, but he has never told me about her. She wears her hair in a ponytail and speaks in a very animated fashion and does a funny thing where she sits on his desk while she talks. I wonder if they have had sex, locked in his office after hours or suddenly, fervently, in her car in the deserted parking lot under the buzzing lamplight. She is very pretty, and she laughs easily.

  Later, when I go to pick my son up at school, the children are all running to and fro on the playground. My son is being chased—or he is chasing, it’s impossible to tell—and as I watch, he trips and falls and begins to cry. He sits up and raises his scraped palms to the air. I can see that they are streaked sooty black and pocked with gravel, and they are bleeding a little. Hands are things that never stay undamaged for very long. They go everywhere, and they feel the suffering of all the tactile world. That’s why people use fingerprints to identify you—the scarred record of everything you have touched.

  My boy cries, as children do when they are in pain.

  His teacher, Miss Lily, is suddenly beside me.

  “Mrs. Borden,” she says.

  “Yes?”

  “Marcus,” she says, pointing. “Your son.”

  “Oh, yes,” I say and go to fetch Marcus and tend to his bloody hands. We wash them in cool water, and I tell him about mountain streams and all the animals that cool their paws in them.

  He asks me have I ever been to a mountain stream, and I tell him I have.

  He asks me have I ever had my hands scraped like his. I tell him I have, indeed, had that—and much, much worse.

  * * *

  We all prepare faces to go outside. The world at large does not see us for who we really are, does not see the version of ourselves that’s exposed maybe only in front of mirrors in our tiny bedrooms. So we look out our windows, and we dress ourselves for the day, and we put on our masks, and we become the performance of an hour or two—before we can find a place to be alone and breathe again, just for a moment.

  Somewhere along the line, we are taught to restrict ourselves for the benefit of the outside world and to be only truly free behind closed doors. Somehow the outside and the insi
de reverse themselves.

  But what if it didn’t have to be this way? What if upon stepping outside we shed everything that was not ourselves? We might feel our skin pressed up against all other skins. Discover how meager are the boundaries between our flesh and the flesh of others, the pulpy flesh of trees, the gritty flesh of soil, the tarry flesh of tarmac cooling after collecting a day’s worth of sunlight. What if we clambered roughshod over the surface of the earth? Wouldn’t the world be our true home?

  * * *

  I became, after that first moon, a creature drawn to dark, enclosed spaces. The maps I drew were now heavy with ink, cut through with narrow paths of white. After school, I would sometimes sit in the very back row of the darkened auditorium, watching Mr. Hunter and the drama club rehearse for the school play. I didn’t know what the play was—something about union workers in the oil fields.

  Mr. Hunter paced back and forth below the stage, trying to explain the significance of the oil. He spoke of the blood of the land—faces gone black with crude, raised to the grimy rain of the stuff. He urged them to think about their own connection to the land, those reveled-in, mucky parts of themselves.

  He always seemed to know I was there. He would come to the back and sit next to me, and we would watch the actors declaiming.

  “They don’t get it, do they?” he said to me. “How can they not get it?”

  “They might be a lot of different things,” I said, “but they can only be one thing at a time.”

  He gazed at me with eyes that were accustomed to the dark, and I looked away, embarrassed.

  I found myself returning to the quarry—the place where, two years before, Hondy Pilt was chased from the mouth of the mine by a possum. I liked the definition of the place, the artful ridges, the geometrical clefts, the shaved planes of earth—like God’s precise fingerprint. I bundled myself up against the cold and lay flat on the frozen earth at its very lowest point.

  Once I heard the approach of others and fled to the mouth of the mine, where I watched in darkness a boy and a girl kissing each other on the berm, creating little landslides of pebbled stone. It was an hour before they were through. To keep myself occupied, I felt my way deeper into the mine, one hand flat against the wall, one directly in front of me so I wouldn’t run into anything in the pitch black, my feet moving an inch at a time so I wouldn’t tumble into an unseen shaft.

  I liked it in there. The closeness. The dark. The feeling of being inside out.

  What I did was I started mapping the mine.

  In our garage, I found an old lantern, which I revived by cleaning the contacts and loading it with fresh D batteries. This was preferable to a regular flashlight for exploring the mine shafts because its light shone in all directions at once. I also carried a penlight in my pocket and held it in my teeth when I paused to inscribe some new part of the map in my notebook. I drew the map as I went. If I reached the edge of a notebook page, I continued on another page and coded both pages with letters and numbers that identified the sequence. I measured distances by my paces and noted those as well on long, straight passages. I drew in features of the mine as place markers. I knew to go left at the overturned mine cart because right was a dead end. I drew a picture of a collapsed wooden frame that looked like a crucifix because it marked the passage to a three-way split in the tunnels. For places where there were no natural markers, I brought along a hammer and nailed ribbons into the ground. The different colors of ribbon meant different things, and I wrote codes on them in marker that referred to the codes in my map notebook.

  I carried a baggie of trail mix, too, for when I got hungry. And a stick to scare away possums and rats.

  It was cold underground, and damp. The walls were wet with icy water, as though the thaw of spring had not penetrated to this stratum of the earth. I wore a plastic slicker, because sometimes the caverns rained on me, the water droplets echoing loudly in the confines of stone.

  I was frightened each time I went—and I thought that I might die. People did die all the time in old mines. There were wide vertical shafts of pure black that seemed bottomless when I listened for the sound of the stones I dropped in them. But it was also peaceful there. And living and dying were not everything to me then.

  It was clear that no one had gone deep into the mine in a very long time. The ground up to the first intersection was cluttered with empty bottles, flattened potato chip bags, torn sweaters, tin cans that had been shot through with holes or fashioned into marijuana-smoking devices, even a rotted teddy bear half buried in the packed dirt. But beyond that first intersection the atmosphere was thick with dust, and with my stick I had to brush away spiderwebs that quivered to and fro in the currents of stale air. Once I accidentally dislodged a rock and found a swarm of white spiders that ran off every which way and hid themselves in other fissures of stone.

  What was I looking for? What did I seek?

  I fantasized about finding some ancient miner who had lost his way in the caverns and never found his way out. He would have set up house somewhere deep underground, a pretty little cave of a living room lit by torches, a patchwork area rug made of discarded miner’s clothing.

  He would greet me, knowing me on sight, of course, as a fellow dweller of the substrata. We would speak in the secret language that I knew must exist between travelers in the dark.

  Sometimes I hummed as I went, and my voice in those caverns was like the sound of my voice in my own head when I closed the flaps of my ears.

  I was accustomed to being alone.

  I had been spelunking empty caverns my whole life. What I sought were the tunnels that led back underneath the town, the ones that would disclose all the buried truths of the place. There might be whole cities under the surface of the earth, populated by wise men who could see in the dark and who knew, better than I or anyone, how the secret gears of the world worked. And I could speak with them. And they would love me and call me their little light from above, and they would take me in as one of their own.

  I had grown sick with questions—and what I searched for was a kingdom of answers.

  * * *

  Routine is important for people like me. It keeps us anchored in reality. It’s how we keep from spinning off into the ether.

  After I went breach, I did my best to establish a new set of routines to accommodate the disturbances my life became subject to—to diminish their significance by making them normal. Every morning before I brushed my teeth, I examined the sheets of my bed. I knew I would find no blood, but the checking itself became the point. I made my demon disappointment into a simple pattern and so exorcised it. That’s how you keep things safe.

  Peter started coming over regularly after school, three afternoons a week—three because that is a fairy-tale number and because I liked putting symbols on those days in my calendar to anticipate and memorialize them.

  We had sex on those three afternoons every week. We never said much—never said a thing afterward. The act was bigger than words. I was illiterate in the language of bodies, so I abandoned myself to it, and it was lovely not to think so much—simply to feel the firecracker spark of nerves starting in my toes and skittering up my legs.

  When it was done, we were diligent about our homework.

  I was frequently embarrassed. I knew what we were doing was natural—but not all nature was the same. The stars didn’t care about sweat and kisses and panting. They glistened prettily way up there in their heavens. They beatified the sky with their cool, gemlike indifference.

  So why shouldn’t I?

  * * *

  January’s Brittle Moon came.

  I didn’t want to see anyone else, so I didn’t go to the woods. Instead I ran in the other direction, to the center of town. In a parking lot, I found a woman still out after dark. I stood watching her, naked, unashamed. I felt as though I could hurt her. The town, it was mine. The parking lot was mine. She saw me in the distance. What I must have looked like—the tiny, pale-skinned naked girl with her
little fists clenched! The woman ran. When she saw me, she ran to her car, fumbled her keys, dropped them to the ground, picked them up again, finally got the car door open, launched herself inside, and closed herself in.

  I twitched for wanting to claw at her face. I wondered when was the last time her skin was opened up.

  Two thoughts occurred to me simultaneously:

  Why was this woman afraid of me?

  Why wasn’t she more afraid of me?

  I went to the town square, where there was a clock tower, a monument to the soldiers of some war, a gazebo surrounded by grass and trees and shrubbery. It was the place where, last month, the breachers had attacked the girls and boys from the next town.

  I trampled over the grass, the frost crystals tickling my toes. The storefronts were all lit up by buzzing street lamps. In the far distance I could hear the low, tidal hiss of the freeway that carried traffic past our little town. But there were no cars going by on the streets around me. No one drove on the three nights of the full moon. Adults lived in dread of running over the wild breachers bounding across dark streets.

  Also, they didn’t want to see. Once, out of curiosity, I crept up on a house down the block from where I lived. The lights were on in the front room, and I could see someone in there, sleeping on a recliner in front of the television. I put my face against the pane of glass and even tasted it with the tip of my tongue. It was metallic, cold. Then, as though he could sense me there watching him, the man woke suddenly and turned to the window. Our eyes met. I recognized him. We’d never spoken, but I knew him from the neighborhood. He wore a straw hat when he watered his lawn and always smiled at me when I passed by on the way home from school.

  Now, seeing me, he looked at his watch and clambered up from the recliner. For a moment he seemed undecided about what to do. I was surprised, standing naked before his window, that I wasn’t more self-conscious. But I wanted to see him for what he truly was. I wanted to watch. Finally he came to the window. We looked at each other again, but then his eyes dropped, as if in shame or modesty—and then, very slowly, so as not to incite me, perhaps, he drew the curtains closed.