When We Were Animals

by Joshua Gaylord

  He watched me emerge from the water but said nothing. He leaned back casually, his palms on the sand. I hated him, but I knew why people followed him. There was some of the follower in me, too.

  “Don’t touch me,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll run.”

  “I’ll catch you. You know I’ll catch you, right? Are you one of those girls who runs just so you can be caught?”

  I went to walk past him up the shore to the woods—but he reached out and caught my ankle. His fist made a shackle, the grip so tight I thought it would snap my bones.

  “Let go,” I said.

  I looked down. His penis was rigid. There was a snarl on his face.

  “Let go,” I said again, “or I’ll hurt you.”

  But he didn’t let go. Instead, he said:

  “A hurt is just a different kind of kiss. You want to bite me? Then bite me. Let’s make each other bleed.”

  That’s when I attacked. With both my hands made into claws, I swiped at his face below me. I shrieked, primal, pure in a different way, like a banshee, like the true spirit of human pith. There was nothing left of the world beside muscle and blood and bone and thirst.

  He pulled my ankle hard, and I fell to the sand. My fingers were wet with his blood and sweat, but I kept striking.

  I wanted to hurt. I wanted to hurt everything. I wanted to cause pain.

  I thought this must be what evil feels like for those who perpetrate it. Desperate thirst. A craving beyond voices. A will to action that has nothing to do with brains or spirits or codes.

  I’d never been so aware of my bones, of my tendons, of how they fit together and stretched—of what a body is really for.

  So maybe goodness is a thing of the mind while badness is a thing of the body.

  I tore at him, and it felt awful and the awfulness felt good, and the goodness of the awful feeling made me crazy.

  He did not move to block me or attack me back. Instead, the skin of Blackhat Roy became the territory of my violence. And he smiled. He did smile. The moonlight showed his teeth, all exposed in a grin.

  I struck at him until I was out of breath, until the muscles in my arms ached, until my fingers were bloody and bruised. I found that I knelt over him, that I had climbed on top of him, lemurlike. He lay back, and I straddled his lower belly. If I leaned back, I could feel the tip of his penis against the base of my spine.

  I breathed. I sniffled and discovered that I had been crying. When I wiped my forearm across my face, it came away with smeared blood and tears.

  Then Blackhat Roy spoke.

  He said, “I’m giving you a count of five. If you run now, I won’t chase you. If you don’t run, something is going to happen. Do you understand?”

  I watched the blood trickle down his cheeks. One red rivulet collected in the whorl of his ear. Like a beautiful shell found on the beach—consecrated or defiled by the runoff of savagery.

  “Do you understand?” he said. “Nod if you understand.”

  My head nodded. My neck was sore, the muscles rigid, my skin jittery with popping clusters of nerves.

  “Five,” he said. “Four.”

  Yes, something would happen. And my body was unclothed against his. And the night was impossibly loud with the chatter of crickets. The blackest kinds of things were exposing themselves. And, far from turning away, I nuzzled against them. Evil was a body thing. A blanket stinking with sweat.

  “Three, two,” he said.

  I looked to the woods. I could run, but I wasn’t running.

  Something would happen. And it might be a thing of horror, for I knew that horrors did happen to those who welcomed them.

  If you do not flee from the altar, that’s when you become wed to the devil.

  “One.”

  I leaped up and ran as hard as I could through the trees. Behind me, I could hear his laughter grow distant and mocking.

  * * *

  I had made a map of our small town, and on the map I had put tiny symbols to mark the houses of all the people I knew so I could see how we stood in relation to each other. I knew where everyone lived. I could have gone anywhere.

  But where I ended up was Mr. Hunter’s house.

  I just wanted to look. It was still before dawn, and all the streets were empty. People were asleep in their beds. And there I was, standing naked and unashamed in the middle of the street under a halo of lamplight, my body dirty and rent from my tangle with Blackhat Roy. I just stood and looked.

  His house was so nice. It was a split-level, like so many in our neighborhood, with the bedroom up over the garage. His was painted white with green shutters. There were tall trees all around the sides and back of it. I knew he wasn’t married, and I wondered how all the various rooms in the house were outfitted. I imagined walls covered with bookshelves, broken-spined volumes piled to reckless heights. I imagined a little Formica table in the kitchen where he drank his black coffee in the morning.

  I stood for a long time just looking at the house, until the black sky began to grow pink at its rim. All of a sudden the street lamps shut off on their automatic timers, and when the reflection of the lights was gone from the glass panes, I could see a figure standing there in a window on the second story, leaning against the frame, gazing down at me. It was Mr. Hunter. He stood still, his head crooked gently to the side, his hands in his pockets. He had not been asleep at all. How long had he been looking out the window—all night?—before I came along and wandered into his view?

  I did not run. Aware as I was of my nakedness, I did not make any move to hide myself. Every one of us is a little calamity. That’s what I felt at that moment.

  He must have known that I could see him now, because as I watched, he raised his left hand and placed his fingertips against the inside of the windowpane.

  And me, I responded in kind. I raised my hand in a simple, meager salute. We were both travelers, and our destinations were—both of them—very far away.

  * * *

  It was the opening of garage doors down the block that made me suddenly aware of the time. The sun had risen. My father would be up soon.

  I ran. I fled down the streets, feeling the tarmac cold and gristly under the soles of my feet. I leaped over fences and trotted through backyards, never minding the whip and cut of tree branches against my skin. I ran until my lungs burned.

  And this was not the gallop of the free absconded from all chains—it was the panicked herding of the damned.

  * * *

  I was not in time.

  When I came through the front door, my father was there. He saw me, and he was ashamed. There was no hiding my nakedness.

  He looked down at the floor, pretending to have been walking from one room to another when I came in.

  “Oh,” he said. “I was just—um. Making breakfast. How about waffles? Would you like waffles? Uh—right. Good morning.”

  Without looking at me, he went to the door of the den and then remembered he was supposed to be going to the kitchen, so he backed out and fled down the hall.

  Later, when I came downstairs dressed in the most modest outfit I could find, he was standing over the waffle maker. He stared intently at the steam.

  “Ready for waffles?”

  I could see him take a testing glance in my direction out of the corner of his eye, to make sure it was okay to look. Then he smiled widely at me—but he had trouble meeting my eyes.

  “I was, um, going to use bananas,” he said, “but they’re still too green.”

  “I don’t mind a green banana,” I said, trying to be helpful.

  “No, neither do I. But for pancakes and waffles, riper is better. That’s a good rule of thumb.”

  “Okay.”

  “What kind of syrup? Maple or boysenberry?”

  “Boysenberry,” I said. It’s the kind I preferred when I was little.

  He always heated the syrup bottle in a saucepan of water. It was not right, he said, dousing a hot waffle
with cold syrup.

  He had rules for everything, my father, and the life he lived as a result was just a bit more vibrant, more true.

  After we ate, I washed the dishes.

  Behind me, I could hear him clearing his throat.

  Then he said, “Are you okay?”

  I didn’t look up from the sink. I scrubbed the plates until every last remnant of impurity was erased.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You know, you could—you could tell me if you weren’t.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you, um, need anything? A prescription or something?”

  “No. I can take care of it.”

  “Okay. All right.”

  I thought he would tell me he loved me, but I hadn’t heard that from him in a long time. When I was a little girl, he would say it routinely. He seemed compelled to say it. But the declaration had gone the way of tall tale and myth.

  As though the love between a father and daughter were only a childish thing. As though womanhood made obscene that which had previously been precious and perfect.

  And so did we all fall—and in such a way were a million Edens lost.

  * * *

  I went to Peter’s house again, and this time he met me at the door. There was a thick wad of white bandage taped to his neck.

  “Stitches,” he said. “Fourteen of them. Thanks for the note. I didn’t really want to see anyone.”

  In his bedroom, I sat on the edge of his bed, and he swiveled his desk chair to face me.

  “Did you go out last night?” I asked.

  He chuckled a little. “Did you ever try not to?” he said.

  “Where did you go?”

  “Down to the railroad tracks. Watched trains go by. Thought about hopping one of them.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “I’m not afraid of running away,” he said. “But I won’t run away from him.”

  I said nothing.

  “And,” he continued, “also you.”

  “Oh.”

  He looked at me hard, and I blushed.

  I put my hand to my neck, a mirror image of the place where he had his wound.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked.

  “Aches, mostly.”

  “Can I see?”

  “Do you really want to?”

  I nodded.

  He got up from the chair, took off his shirt, and knelt before me. The bandage was right at the base of his neck, where his shoulder began.

  “You do it,” he said.

  With my finger I tugged at the edges of the tape until they came free, then I folded the bandage back.

  The skin was purpled and raw, the laces used to stitch him up blackened with blood and so tight that they pooched the skin up into bumpy ridges. I ran my fingertips over the raised script of his damage to see what might be read there. I had never really thought about stitches as being the same kind of stitches as in sewing—but they were. I thought that flesh must be a pliable and rude sort of fabric, difficult to work with. I pictured an old woman with a thimble pushing a long needle through his worsted, pinched-up skin. Our bodies are craftwork.

  I put the bandage back and pressed the tape back into place.

  He looked up into my eyes, and I thought he was going to say something, but he didn’t. Instead he just leaned forward and pressed his head to my chest. I put my arms around him and stroked his hair.

  * * *

  Back at home, I shut the door of my bedroom, leaned against it, listened to the silence of the house, and felt myself jaundiced, yellowed by life. Strangely, I was relieved to be away from Peter Meechum, whom I loved.

  In school the following day, Polly wanted to talk to me about her new adult preoccupations. I found excuses to escape her.

  Funny: now that all these people were talking to me, I wanted nothing to do with them. Was it possible, I wondered, to be out of sync with everyone else for your entire life? I felt walled up behind bricks. Like holy people, who are also out of sync. It was called immurement—the practice of walling people up—a fact I had discovered when I had done my research on saints and anchorites.

  Even Rose Lincoln seemed more interested in me since I had stood up to Blackhat Roy.

  “Did you do all the rest to him, too?” she asked, her dark eyes bright. “It’s like a devil got at him.”

  I was a devil now. It was no surprise. And the worst kind of devil is the kind that believes itself to be holy. Like Satan—the morning light, the angel. One’s taste for corruption, it seems, has everything to do with one’s memory of goodness. The inversions braid around each other, and it is too hard not to fall.

  * * *

  It was that same week that Miss Simons, my physics teacher, offered to give me a ride home. She pulled up in her car beside the bike cage. Her hair was still done up, and she still wore her fashionable lipstick.

  “Lumen, would you like a ride?”

  I told her no, thank you. She had never offered to give me a ride before, and I thought it might have to do with her hearing about me going breach. When you were raised by a single father, sometimes women felt the philanthropic need to step in and have surrogate maternal chats with you.

  “Come on. I’d enjoy it. There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.”

  “But my bike.”

  “I’ll help you put it in the back.”

  A previous version of me would have been concerned about being seen getting into a teacher’s car. I mused on that while she and I hoisted my bike into the back and I climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Do you want to know a secret?” Miss Simons said as we pulled out of the parking lot. “I was married once.”

  She paused and glanced over at me to make sure I appreciated the gravity of that revelation. I didn’t know what response would satisfy her, so I said the most innocuous thing I could think of.

  “You were?”

  “That’s right. It was a long time ago, and I was very young. It didn’t last long. Fifteen months total. Almost immediately we both knew it was a mistake.”

  She talked for a little while about her ex-husband, about how he was now an important person on Wall Street, about how she begrudged him nothing, about how she had been single for a long while because she was determined not to make the same mistakes she had made before.

  I listened patiently, wondering why I was chosen for these privileged glimpses into the woman’s past, until finally, while the car idled at a stoplight, she turned to me with great earnestness.

  “The reason I’m telling you all this, Lumen, is that—see, I’m fond of your father. Very fond of him, actually.”

  Oh. So she had a crush on my father. She was asking my advice about how to approach him. Maybe even asking my permission. I was touched by her deference while at the same time determined never to trust her again as long as I lived.

  The red light turned to green, and the car glided forward again. We were just around the corner from my house.

  “Do you think…” Miss Simons began. But she didn’t seem to know how to phrase the next part.

  I wanted to put her out of her misery. It made me anxious to see adults flounder like that.

  “The thing is,” I said, “he’s still in love with my mother. I’ve told him he should try to move on, but he just thinks about her all the time.”

  “No one could ever replace your mother, and that’s not what I’m trying to do here.”

  “I know.”

  Now I was beginning to be confused by the conversation. But we were pulling up in front of my house, and it seemed important to finish things.

  “Anyway,” I said. “You’re very nice, but I don’t think he’d be interested in dating right now.”

  She looked at me, and she seemed confused. Then something occurred to her.

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m afraid I’ve messed this all up. I just wanted to do right by you.”

  Just then the door of the house opened, and my father emerged
. It was a strange thing, because he was not usually home at this time of the afternoon. Also, he did not seem surprised to see me sitting in my physics teacher’s car, nor did he come down the path to meet me.

  “I asked him,” Miss Simons said, “your father. I asked him if I could be the one to talk to you about it.”

  I felt sick to my stomach in the way that you sometimes do at those moments when you realize the world has been playing tricks on you.

  Miss Simons had not been asking my permission to see my father—she was telling me that they had already been seeing each other behind my back. She was not the petitioner but the executioner.

  I opened the car door and pushed myself up and out.

  As I passed him on the way into the house, my father called after me in a voice that expected no response:

  “Lumen. Lumen.”

  I walked out of his voice. That’s what it felt like. I opened the door in the room of my father’s voice, stepped outside, and shut the door behind me.

  * * *

  They had been seeing each other since the fall—but I was only told about it after the fact, perhaps as a punishment for my having succumbed to the corruptions of adulthood. Everyone was dirty now. We might as well bare it all. It soon became a habit for Margot Simons to spend evenings with my father and me at our house.

  She was maybe ten years younger than my father and very pretty in an angular way. Her lipstick always looked like it had been recently applied, and her brunette hair was trimmed perfectly along her jawline. Her purse rattled with tubes of mascara and clamshells of powder and tortoiseshell combs and an assortment of clips and fasteners to hold her comeliness in place. She wore jeans when she came to our house, and the first thing she did when she arrived was take off her shoes to expose whatever playful color her toenails were painted that day. Her feet were bony, and she folded them up under her when she joined my father and me on the couch for our regular Saturday evening viewings of black-and-white movies.

  She would yawn and rest her head on my father’s shoulder, and I hated her.

  Her attempts at befriending me did not help. She promised she would take me shopping at the mall the next county over. When she said it, my father chuckled uncomfortably and shook his head. He knew I was not a typical teenage girl, one who gets giddy about shopping for dresses at the mall. I glared at him.