When We Were Animals

by Joshua Gaylord

  Afterward I went to the mine. I found my way to the cistern and confessed myself to the inky black of the chasm. I spoke to my mother, because I thought her soul might be down there somewhere in the airy echo of the night, floating free and buoyed on the drafts. I could hear my voice being carried somewhere, and I thought it might be to her.

  I told her of many things. Of my two boyfriends, the dark one and the light one, and how they hated each other but both coveted me for some reason. Of my wee body and how I knew it contained some force larger than itself, and how it hadn’t yet bled, though maybe that was because it needed that blood for the strange and frightening power it possessed. Of the man who said he knew her, who had gone away and changed his name and then come back just to gaze at me with endlessly suffering eyes. Of my father and his goodness, though not of Margot Simons.

  I spoke of many things, and it relieved me. And then I fell asleep, cuddled against a stone outcropping over that depthless shaft.

  I guess I knew then why some people speak to God.

  * * *

  And this, too, is chattering down a well—telling stories to myself in the dark.

  My husband and child are upstairs, and they are dreaming of colorful things. But I don’t sleep well. I rise from the marriage bed like the ghost of a wife. I creep downstairs, haunted. I pour myself a glass of milk and squeeze chocolate syrup into it. I stir it with a spoon that goes tink, tink, tink on the insides of the glass.

  And then I fetch my pages from their hiding place on the top shelf of the pantry, behind the stacked boxes of spaghetti that are no longer used since my husband has become fearful of carbohydrates. I set the stack of pages on the kitchen table, and I add to it, one page at a time. I never knew I had so many words in me. I dust them up, the words, like a good housewife, collect them where they gray the white paper.

  But who am I writing to? To Jack? To myself? Who are you? You are not my mother, who wore orchid gloves on her wedding day. You are not my son, to whom one day, as an acknowledgment of his blossomed manhood, I might bequeath his mother’s lineage. No, not that. You are not the world at large, from whom I seek forgiveness or solace. Never that. You are not even some version of Lumen herself, not future or former or alternative or lost.

  You are no one. And you expect nothing. And your eyes fail you, your head nods in drowsiness. I hope you are happy there in whatever empty, lightless caverns you roam and call home.

  Earlier today, this afternoon, there was a commotion at the park. My son runs to the monkey bars, and I notice all the neighborhood mothers constellated in excited chatter at the edge of the playground.

  Lola is there, too, sitting apart on one of the benches, stretched out and smoking.

  “Did you hear?” she says to me. “The coven caught a bad man.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Some guy. Apparently he was sitting on a bench near the playground, but he didn’t have any kids with him. Oh, also he was listening to music on his headphones, and he wore sunglasses. So we called the cops and had him escorted away. Now we are rejoicing.”

  She flicks the ashes from the end of her cigarette.

  Then Marcie Klapper-Witt spots me and comes over.

  “Ann,” she says, “I’m sure Lola has filled you in on the situation, but I just wanted to let you know that we’ve taken care of the problem. And we’re forming a neighborhood watch to keep an eye on things from now on if you’d like to volunteer. I can order vests—as many as we need.”

  “But what is he said to have done?” I ask.

  “Who?”

  “The man.”

  She shakes her head.

  “Ann,” she says, “what was he doing in a playground? He didn’t have any kids with him. It doesn’t take a genius to spot a pervert. You don’t know—my husband’s cousin is a police officer. The world’s not as nice as you think. Jennifer’s putting together a petition—and I think it’s a good idea that we all sign it—saying that we don’t want any adults without children within a thousand feet of the playground.”

  “A thousand feet,” I say dreamily. “That’s a lot of feet.” Then I say, “Your daughter, she’s about to fall.”

  It is true. Fancy Klapper-Witt hangs upside down by one bended leg from a domed metal latticework. Her frilly blue dress spills over her face, and her polka-dot cotton underpants are exposed.

  Marcie Klapper-Witt runs and catches her daughter in the holy safety of her arms.

  Later in the evening, after our boy has been safely enveloped between the sheets of his bed, I tell Jack about Marcie and her neighborhood watch and the man in the park.

  “Well,” he says, “I think a neighborhood watch is a good idea. I’m glad they got him.”

  “You are?” I am surprised.

  “Ann, what’s a guy with no kids doing hanging around a playground?”

  “That’s what Marcie said.”

  He comes up behind me and puts his arms around me. We are in our nightclothes, preparing for bed, but the gesture is unsexual. His penis, flaccid in his pajama pants, is pressed soft and benign against my bottom.

  “It’s how you’re supposed to feel,” he explains, “about your family. I never want anything bad to happen.” I can feel his sincere breath on my neck and ear. It tickles, and I writhe out of his grip.

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” I assure him. It isn’t a lie. I am quite sure of it. Every day I am quite sure of it.

  Nothing is going to happen.

  The world will keep spinning within its margins.

  He cuddles against me, curled up like a baby in a bassinet, until he falls asleep. I listen to his breathing for a while, so placid and secure, in no way fearful—and then I come downstairs.

  I sit at the kitchen table. I drink my chocolate milk. Soon the sun will rise, and the man who delivers papers will toss one from the window of his car onto our front walk. I will fetch it barefoot so I can feel the dew on the soles of my feet.

  And in my ankles, and all up and down my calves and thighs, there will be the long-suppressed instinct to run.

  Chapter 11

  Cordial Moon came at the end of May, and I had been waiting for it. The first night, I sat at my window and kept myself from climbing out as long as I could. I wanted to feel the force of it, and I wanted that force to be excruciating. Sometimes these are the games we play with our own minds. I gripped the window jambs, and the tips of my fingers turned white. The smell in the air—I became desperately afraid that I would miss it. It was impossible that that spring nighttime should exist without me in the middle of it. I clamped my jaw on the skin of my upper arm—I bit down hard. I stopped short of breaking the skin—because I wanted the dull ache of compression rather than the sharp sting of pain. I chewed at my skin until it was slobbery wet and bruised purple.

  And then, when it was all too much to bear, I flung myself out the window into the night.

  Earlier in the day, my father had approached me. Did I need anything? Would I be careful when I went out? Did I want pancakes for breakfast when I returned in the morning? The questions embarrassed both of us. Finally he gave them up and went to read the newspaper in the living room with a mug of coffee. When next we spoke, he was jolly and amiable, everything having been tamped down neatly into place between us.

  And now such exchanges seemed all the more ridiculous to me. There was nothing to talk about. There were only wildernesses to breach.

  * * *

  Do you know what it is to run wild? To lie naked on ordinary ground? To feel against the bare soles of your feet the force of the sunlit day disseminating from the concrete sidewalk? To be neither cold nor ashamed but rather luxuriant in empty space? It is a membership in something greater than yourself, a merging with the populace of insomniacs. There are two worlds, you realize, and you might leap between them and find yourself at home in both.

  We are many things all at once. We mistake self-denial for character—or else why not join yourself to every and
all custom?

  Boys, too. A menagerie of different species, and yet you could love them all. There were the kind boys, like Peter Meechum, who did not peek at you while you dressed, who were pretty and noble, who made love to abstract futures. You could follow them and build skyscrapers on horizons of goodness and truth. And there were awful boys, like Blackhat Roy, who did not fear filth, even the filth you sometimes thought you were, who seemed to see darker truths and did not shrink from them. You could follow them and be on the thrilling, shivery edge of wrong until you died.

  Truly was I inexplicable. I wanted others to tell me who I was so I could write it down and know myself true and inscribed. But words were not their medium, so I tried to read their appraisal of me in the bruises on my neck and wrists. My scars would be the palimpsest of my life.

  When the moon was out, you could be aware of all the pieces of night—you could see all the things you didn’t see during the day, all the subtle little fragments that the world uses to join its wholes. The ladybugs hidden behind the bark of trees, the breath of the daffodils over the dew of a cut lawn, the hum of a power box on a traffic-light post, the gritty taste of rust from old patio furniture, a fawn standing still on a deserted highway. You could see it all—the patterns the lake made and the lightning in the clouds, the patient settlements of dust and the groaning fissures of the earth, the slumber of a whole town and its heartful waiting for dawn. You could fall in love with it all—and you could want, finally and truly, to set a match to it.

  I ran to the mine, to the tunnels that twisted this way and that, and I felt my way through them, liking the cool unknown of the inky dark. Maybe I would get lost—I grew out of breath thinking that I could lose myself in those caverns and stay there forever. I could starve to death, pressed tight between worlds, living out my days in darkness, with nothing, with no one.

  I could burn the whole world down, because there was some honor in destruction, which was why the Vikings immolated their noble dead.

  Then I doubled back to my cistern and uttered no words of prayer or remorse or wishfulness as I watched the sky grow pink with morning through the opening at the top of the cave.

  It was not a night for the decencies of language.

  * * *

  That was when everything came apart.

  First, it was during the Cordial Moon that Hondy Pilt stopped breaching. So many fallen. So many rescued. He would become, in time, the same person he had been before the breaching. He would fade back into obscurity—no longer a noble leader of wildings under the moonlight, just a lonely explorer in the vast, unpopulated cell of his own mind. And so are we all, I suppose.

  I had always wanted more from him. We all did. Maybe we mistook his deep, abiding interest in the universe for an interest in us.

  There are times in your life when you project yourself against the sky—you see yourself everywhere, even in the configurations of stars, and you think, “How could anyone fail to notice me there, all my desires and haunted dreams in the nightly patterns of God, who loves me and knows me to be special?”

  Me, too. I was guilty of such things.

  I was a runner of caverns. I skittered and leaped my way through abandoned mine shafts. I knew where the floor opened up onto bottomless depths. I knew where to duck under the collapsed ceilings. I saw nothing. I moved by feel.

  The other thing that happened was that Blackhat Roy followed me into the tunnels. Nobody else would dare. Even in their most primitive states, they feared the dark, the dangers they could not see. Breachers were made for moonlight—they relied on sight, to look and be looked at. Me, I disappeared into the darkness, and they snarled after me. When I emerged again, they crouched and gazed at me through the sides of their eyes. They did not trust me. They did not like outliers. But they did not attack. They knew me to be creatured to some darkness different from their own. I was littler than all of them, but they were afraid.

  And Roy followed me all the same. He followed me just to the place where it was lightless and the air was musty with age. I could hear him, breathing hard in the dark, groaning after me, stumbling around. He was an echo in my caverns, an echo in my brain. So I stopped and turned and waited for him. When he caught up, his fingertips reached out tentatively and touched me. I let them rest there on my skin for a few moments, and we held our breath. Then I withdrew, and he was lost again. My bones ached.

  He followed me, but it didn’t feel like hate. It felt like desperation. It felt like I was large in his mind. That I could ruin him. Ruin myself.

  Poor boy! He was tortured by the abstract. Love and peace and relief came from places as far away as Tibet. Maybe he would see them one day, if he became a traveler. How did others locate such things so easily? How did Peter Meechum produce love the same way a magician would draw out an endless handkerchief?

  Roy said, in the dark, “I don’t know where I am.”

  So I took him by the hand and led him back outside, where the moon caught him up in its spectral light.

  They were out there, the others. They paced back and forth, and their eyes glowed.

  * * *

  Peter Meechum was waiting in my front yard when I came home from school the next day.

  “I saw you,” he said. He looked angry. He had been pacing back and forth before my gate when I rode up on my bike.

  When I did not respond, he came and stood close to me—so close I had to crane my neck to look up at him. His eyes were raw, and his breath was hot. I felt sorry for him—all that fury and nowhere to put it. I thought it must be difficult for him, for boys. They get temperamental when they can’t shape the world into what they want it to be. It’s easier for girls. Girls are raised knowing that the world is unshapable. So they know better than to fuss.

  “I saw you with Blackhat Roy,” he said. “What did he do to you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Stop it, Lumen. At the quarry. The mine. I saw you come out with him. He hurt you.”

  “Everybody hurts everybody.”

  “No.”

  He said no, but I wondered how could he not see that.

  Cruelty is the natural order of things. Through algorithms of brutality does mankind build its greatest monuments. It’s when people begin to see violence as personal that they struggle. It had nothing to do with Peter Meechum. For that matter, it had nothing to do with Blackhat Roy. Goodness and badness had nothing to do with anything.

  But Peter let it get to him. He was a believer in the meanings of things. If I was hurt at the hands of Blackhat Roy, well, according to Peter, that was different from my being crushed by a toppled tree. I realized that I once used to think that way, too.

  “I’m sorry, Peter.” But, in truth, I wondered what I was sorry for. Maybe for him and the conception of the world he carried in his honorable brain.

  “But I love you,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “But why?”

  “You know why. Because you’re better. You’re better than everybody.”

  I wondered where he had gotten that notion. I wondered, for the first time, if that was the impression I gave—if somehow that was one of the things that kept me separate from others.

  “That’s just something to say,” I told him. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “No—it’s true,” he insisted. “You are better.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m worse. Your love, it’s beautiful—but it isn’t true.”

  He looked appalled.

  “But he’s a monster,” he said.

  “I know.”

  He waited for me to say more, but there was really nothing left to say.

  “I’m going in,” I said and stepped around him.

  But he called after me.

  “How can you be that way? You didn’t used to be that way.”

  I had gotten to the front door, had my hand on the knob, but I turned back to him. He looked small there on my lawn. I wished for a moment that I could see him as I had seen him in grade
school. I wished to have once more so simple and pure a longing.

  I shrugged.

  “I used to picture us getting married one day,” I said. “You and me. I mean, when I was little. I wrote my name over and over as Lumen Meechum. But it doesn’t sound right, does it?”

  I looked at him sadly.

  “Lumen,” he said, and there was a reaching in his voice.

  But I didn’t reach back. I went inside and shut the door behind me.

  * * *

  I was losing friends, of course. Voids opened up everywhere around me.

  Polly and I no longer had much reason to speak to each other. Her disapproval was polite and absolute. I didn’t know what, exactly, she disapproved of in my behavior—I didn’t know what stories she had been told or whether they were true. But it didn’t matter. Her disapproval was right and proper—the common way for two friends to grow apart. It was not for me to get in the way of a natural progression of events.

  Peter Meechum was through with talking, but he still watched me from a distance. He was afraid of me, but some part of him must have believed I could still be his. Boys are the most romantic of creatures—their faith is as pure as it is ridiculous.

  Rose Lincoln, on the other hand, became increasingly aggressive toward me in school, doing a lispy, babyish impression of the way I speak and throwing old bras at me in the locker room during gym. She didn’t like it that I had become the focus of so much boy attention.

  I felt for her. I really did. The smallness of her spite was growing pathetic and tiresome to those around her, and there was no other version of Rose Lincoln to fall back on. What happened when your whole identity went out of style? What happened when the boys you used to fascinate were now more interested in some awkward polyp of a girl who had done nothing to invite their affections while you felt yourself growing indistinct against the dusty backdrop of the world? What did you do then?

  For one thing, I suppose, you went on the attack.

  It happened during gym class on the field, where the girls were playing softball now that the weather was getting warm. We wore brown shorts and yellow shirts, the school colors. The shorts were tight on some of the girls, who stuck out their behinds with proud vulgarity. On me, the shorts hung like a loose sail in the doldrums, the twiggy masts of my legs pale and meatless.