When We Were Animals

by Joshua Gaylord

  My team put me in right field, which was okay. It was peaceful out there. Nothing happened, really. You could look at the clouds and listen to the clamor happening elsewhere. You were a placeholder, and nothing was required of you.

  If the ball was ever actually hit to me, no one expected me to catch it. My teammates shrugged their shoulders. It was a vagary of the game, a blind spot in the field. Nothing could be done.

  But I hated being at bat, hated the moment when our team ran in from the field and I was given a number in the batting order. I couldn’t hit. I swung too soon or too late. I had an agile mind, but not a speedy one—not a mind that worked in harmony with my limbs. And if I were lucky enough to hit the ball, it was a strengthless strike, the softball inevitably making a few bounces to the pitcher, who tossed it easily to first base long before I could ever make it there.

  On this particular day, Rose Lincoln was on the other team, and she played catcher when my turn at bat came.

  I picked up the aluminum bat from the ground, which was muddy from the rain the night before. I stood sideways at home plate and lifted the bat into the air as I had observed the other girls do. But I must have been doing it wrong.

  “I guess you can’t lean into it,” Rose Lincoln said in a voice that only I could hear. “The weight of the bat’ll topple you. Don’t worry—one day you’ll fill out. Maybe by menopause.”

  The ball came at me. I closed my eyes and swung. The weight of the bat twisted my little body around, and I had to do a dance to stay upright on my feet. I hadn’t come anywhere near the ball.

  Somebody called the first strike, and Rose Lincoln threw the ball back to the pitcher.

  “Seriously,” she said. “How old are you?” Then she called behind her to the other girls on my team. “Should we bring out the T-ball thing?” The girls laughed. “It seems only fair.”

  “Be quiet,” I said to Rose Lincoln.

  “Sorry—am I breaking your concentration? Let’s try a slow one!” she shouted to the pitcher. “Right down the middle.”

  I gripped the handle of the bat, liking the heft of it, liking the way it made my palms gristly with dirt. When the ball came, I pictured Rose Lincoln’s laughing face and swung hard.

  Not even close. Strike two. Behind me, I could hear the moans of my teammates. “Come on,” they said to the universe, as though I were a small bit of lucklessness they had stumbled upon by pure happenstance.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Rose Lincoln said and tossed the ball back to the pitcher. “How do you carry anything with those arms? How do you open jars? How do you brush your teeth? Do you have to take breaks?”

  “Be quiet,” I said, gritting my teeth.

  “What was that?”

  “I said be quiet.”

  “Sorry—you need to speak up. Use your big-girl voice.”

  “You’re pathetic,” I said, turning to her. “Pa-the-tic. Did you understand that?”

  Her face changed. This was the confrontation she had been nurturing like a seedling between us. Now her fury had a purpose, a mission. She savored her own delicious rage.

  I turned my back to her and raised the bat for the final pitch.

  Behind me, in a whispery rage, she said, “I’m gonna get you. You’re done. Just wait till the full moon. Just—”

  At that moment something was decided in me, like a door slammed shut by a wind.

  “I’m not waiting,” I said.

  “What?” she said, a quiver in her voice.

  “I said…”

  But I didn’t repeat it. Instead I turned full around and swung the aluminum bat as hard as I ever had.

  She was quick, and it’s a good thing she was, because if she hadn’t gotten an arm up to block the blow, I would have smashed her head in. Instead the bat caught her in the forearm, and I felt a satisfying, liquid crack vibrate through the hollow instrument.

  She screeched and fell to the ground.

  I raised the bat over my head, prepared to bring it down again—but she shuffled backward, one arm limp and useless, until she was huddled against the chain-link fence.

  I advanced and stood over her. She blubbered, and her face was wet with tears. Maybe she believed she would die there.

  I dropped the bat, which made an empty-pipe sound, and I advanced until I stood over her.

  She turned her face away from me, raised her good arm to ward me off.

  Leaning down, I whispered in her ear.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She gurgled an animal howl of pain.

  “Do you want to know how to get through it?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “You have to deserve the hurt, Rosebush. Like love.”

  When I reached out to her, she cringed her eyes closed, as though my touch were death, but I put my hand gently on her head and smoothed her hair.

  Suffering is sometimes a boon. All the creatures of the world hold hands in pain.

  So I touched her head, and I felt we were both alive together, both girls wriggling, hapless, in the rich loam of girlhood. You can be happy at the strangest moments.

  Then the world around us, which had been holding its breath for a number of seconds, exhaled into commotion. The other girls rushed to Rose Lincoln’s aid. Mrs. McCandless, the gym teacher, was there. And Mr. Lloyd, the boys’ gym teacher. He’s the one who took me by the arm so that I could only walk trippingly, and he tripped me to the office, where my father was called and I was suspended from school for one week.

  This was fair.

  All things are fair.

  The world is pretty, and it finds its own balance.

  * * *

  My father did not know how to express his disappointment in me. His daughter having become a mystery he was afraid to solve, he narrated what had happened rather than ask me about it.

  “She provoked you,” he said. “The other girls heard. That’s why it’s just suspension—that and your good standing at the school. The girl’s parents aren’t bringing charges. I’m helping with the medical bills. You’ll apologize, in writing.”

  So I wrote her a note of apology, which went like this:

  Dear Rose,

  I’m sorry for hitting you with the baseball bat and breaking your arm.

  I remember when you were called Rosebush, and I thought I would like to have a name as pretty as a flower instead of something so scientific and technical as Lumen. I thought you were lucky. My whole life, really, I thought you were lucky. It seemed like you could touch things and make them your way.

  Is that true? Can you touch things and make them your way? It wouldn’t surprise me. Do you know the story of King Midas? If you don’t, I’ll tell it to you sometime.

  Somewhere while we were growing up, things got strange. I stopped being able to recognize things for what they were, because the closer I looked the more things changed into something else. Do you ever feel this way, or is it just me?

  I remember in the third grade you could draw perfect pictures of fashion-plate girls in all kinds of different outfits, and they all looked beautiful, like runway models. I was jealous, because the only thing I could draw were maps, and they weren’t pretty at all—just practical and informational.

  Also, I miss my mother, even though I never knew her. I wonder what kind of girl I would have been if she had been here. Maybe the kind of girl who wouldn’t have ever broken your arm. Maybe the kind of girl who would have been your best friend and brought you flowers and cupcakes when some other girl took to fury and broke your arm with a baseball bat. I could picture that. I can picture lots of things.

  So I’m very sorry. Sorry for this and for so much else, stuff that doesn’t even have to do with you. There aren’t enough sorries in the world for how I am.

  Yours truly,

  Lumen

  I enclosed the letter in a white envelope and put a red tulip sticker, which was the closest sticker I had to a ros
e, over the back flap.

  I wondered if during the next full moon there would be some retaliation for my assault on Rose. But as it turned out, Rose’s body had finished its breaching. When June’s full moon came, she was not among those who ran. All of a sudden, she had grown up.

  I wondered, in my most dreamy states, if I had had something to do with her being weaned from the breach. Had I clobbered her into adulthood? The body had its own magic after all.

  The other thing I wondered was this: Would I ever grow up like Rose and like Polly and like all the others before me? Or, having never been a real breacher, would I never fully graduate from breaching?

  There were so many beautiful, dark, and lonely ways in the sunken corridors of adolescence—how did everyone else manage to make it through without a map? Were they not tempted, as I was, to linger?

  * * *

  Having disclosed myself to Rose Lincoln, I found there were things I wanted to say to Blackhat Roy as well. I had spent too much of my life reacting to people. Now I might be the one other people reacted to. I was ready to be someone who did things.

  I rode my bicycle to his home—a place everybody knew about but where nobody went. It was an old house on a dirt road down near the bottling plant. I stood for a long time outside, holding onto the handlebars of my bike, just looking at the place. There was a wraparound porch on the house, but it was filled with rusted sewing machines, stacks of sun-bleached magazines tied together with string, old fishing rods leaning in a huddle against the house, a plastic kiddie car collecting dead leaves, rainwater, and mosquitoes in its seat, chipped wooden frames with no pictures in them, planters spilling over with withered creepers. There was a wooden swing suspended from the porch roof, but seated on it was a stuffed and mounted black boar, its fur coated with dust, its tusks yellowed with age.

  I couldn’t stop looking into the glass eyes of that snarling boar, even when the screen door slammed open and Roy appeared in the doorway.

  “The fuck are you doing here?” he said.

  I looked at him, but I found I could say nothing. It was a good question. What was I doing there?

  “This is my goddamn home,” he said.

  Again I said nothing. I gripped the handlebars tighter and gazed at him, at this place. I could not muster a response.

  Then his demeanor seemed to relent a little. His body shifted sideways.

  “Well,” he said in a lower voice, “come on if you’re coming.”

  So I let my bike drop to the ground and followed him inside.

  The interior of the house was like the porch—the same disarray of aged artifacts—but what was most remarkable was Roy’s comfort with it all, the way he moved through it with a strange kind of ease, as though he were on intimate terms with all the lonely jetsam of the world. He performed a kind of ballet through crusted plates of old food and teetering pyramids of empty beer cans. Where I twitched and fumbled, he shifted. Saying nothing, he led me back to his bedroom, where, pushed up awkwardly against one wall, was a simple iron-frame bed, the mattress, without sheets, skewed a little off the box spring. There was an unzippered plaid sleeping bag bunched up like a quilt on top of it.

  On the wall was a framed photograph, crooked, of a man. I wondered who the man was, if it was Roy’s father, but when I reached out to straighten it, Roy growled, “Stop. Don’t touch anything. You shouldn’t’ve come here.”

  I turned to him, reminded of my purpose.

  “I brought you something,” I said. I dug into my bag and pulled out the book. It was The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I held it out to him.

  “Jesus Christ,” he hissed. “The fuck do you think you’re doing?” His eyes dropped to the book, and I thought I saw something open in them for just a second—but then disdain smeared his features. “What are you doing here, anyway? You come here to make me into a better person? You want to save me? From all this shit? You gonna lift me up? All your fucking decency.”

  He struck the book out of my hand and sent it flying across the room.

  And that’s when I did something. I took a step forward and stood in front of him, craning my neck to snarl upward at him.

  “What are you doing?” he said, and his voice was different now—surprised—as though he were speaking to a different person entirely.

  I dared him. I would dare him.

  “It’s not full moon,” he said.

  My hand reached up and slapped him. He did nothing. My hand slapped him again, harder. It would numb itself on his face. It would draw out the taint, but not for me to cure. I wasn’t there for purity.

  My hand drew back again, but it didn’t have time to strike. He grabbed my arm, way up by the shoulder, gripping it with one thick hand, which encircled it completely. He pulled my face to his, but we did not kiss. This was not about kisses. We breathed each other’s air, hot and salty.

  Then he took me down to the gritty braided rug that covered the wooden floor of his room, still gripping my arm. My choice was to go with him or have my frail limb pulled from its socket. There would be bruises.

  He surveyed my body as though he hadn’t seen it before. It wasn’t the same as before. The full moon had made things different. Now there was clarity in his eyes, and disgust, and worship.

  Something swelled in me, in my chest and stomach. Something awful grew there, I knew. I could feel the tears coming. Using all my strength, I turned him over, climbed on top of him, and bit at his neck and arms. He tried to push me off, but I bit harder, digging my fingers into his clothes and skin. I would not release. He must’ve known I would not release.

  “Stop,” he said.

  But I did not stop. The room stank.

  He tried to fling me away, but he only succeeded in rolling over on top of me again. I felt the buttons and zippers of his clothes chafing against my skin. He seized one of my wrists and then another, got them both in his left hand, and held my struggling hands down against the floor above my head.

  He had me pinned, and then I felt I could breathe for the first time. I breathed. I licked my lips.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  I grunted.

  “What?”

  “Stop it,” I said.

  “I’m not doing anything.”

  “Me. I want you to stop me.” And then there were tears. I could feel them on my cheeks. My body shook with fury. I craned my neck to bite his face. I would have gnawed off the skin of his face had I gotten it between my teeth.

  With his free hand, he grabbed me by the neck and forced my head back down. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe at all—and that felt all right, too. Then he let up.

  “You stop you,” he said.

  “I can’t. Hurt it.”

  “Hurt what?”

  “The thing that’s wrong, inside me. Hurt it. I hate it, and I want it to hurt.”

  Then maybe he understood. Because he was using one hand to unzip his pants, while I writhed there on the ground, my body convulsed in a furious paroxysm. Like an epileptic, I arched my back and bit at the air with my jaw.

  And I couldn’t move at all, because his weight was like a sack of iron ingots, pressing me down, and my arms were pinned, and my legs were growing numb, and I said, “Do it, do it,” and it was safe because my body was leashed, finally leashed, and I could even feel beautiful and pure and light again because he was beating away all the ugliness in me, hammering it down into a safe little knot that couldn’t hurt anyone, and none of it was my fault, it couldn’t be my fault, because I had grown wrong and I would pay for it, I would pay for it happily, I would pay for it and breathe again because you had to control wrong things, you had to choke them until they were still and everything was quiet, make me still, make me quiet, make me be still.

  And Blackhat Roy pushed himself inside me, deep, to the core of it all, and I thought I must be depthless. He battered my body with his. It hurt between my legs, hurt in a way I could relish in the dark, secret parts of my mind.

  Because ther
e was a voice in the room, the low, sickly whine of an animal in pain or in thrall, the throaty mewl of gross instinct, and I heard the voice filling the place and oozing down the walls. It was my voice, I realized. It was a voice to curl all the pages of my books.

  This had nothing to do with love or faith or play. It was ugly and selfish. It burned.

  And I wept. I knew because I could feel the wetness in my ears. I cried and wailed. I moaned there in the dusty afternoon, and outside the woods went silent and all the tree toads and the crickets muted their song out of dumb respect for me. I was an animal of pain, and the forest listens for such things.

  And then he hushed me. I remember it, even now. It’s a thing beyond forgetting. He clamped a palm down tight over my mouth, but the sound still came from the organ of my throat, and he didn’t know what to do. So with his other hand, he covered my eyes. He blinded me.

  And then did I hush truly. Like a horse blindfolded to keep it from spooking, and, too, my breathing, like a horse’s, huffing rapidly through my nose, the smell of Roy’s sour hand on my wet mouth.

  You can only noise yourself for so long. And I felt small again, blissfully, tranquilly small, the ember of my mind cultivated true in the silence and darkness of my bound body. Mute and blind and immobile, the ache of my stubborn muscles, the searing of my bare skin—it was all far, far away, and I was at peace somewhere deep in the lost or abandoned corners of my brain. I was lost and gone, fallen down the deepest of wells, singing myself to sleep while my body burned itself to cinder and ash.

  Roy shuddered silently against me.

  His breathing slowed. His hands went away, first the one on my mouth, then the one on my eyes. His body rolled to the side. Cool air blew over me, and my skin tingled with the shock of it. I did not open my eyes.

  But I was at peace. I was hushed everywhere inside.

  * * *