by Lydia Millet
She stifled a cry. The lizard regarded her stoically. After a time he flicked out his tongue. He seemed to be drooling.
Rajaputra had informed her of the lizard’s death on the day of its ordering, and she remembered a pang of regret. She had suspected the demise of the animal was her fault, and she had tried to forget it. Yet she was confident this lizard was the same one. Sitting on the foam mattress, feeling a little queasy from the boat’s motion, she had time to study it. It wasn’t exactly cute, but there was something endearing about the big guy, she wrote me later in an email. He had a certain calmness she liked very much. He was sturdy.
She felt grateful he had not been killed. A sense of euphoria washed over her, for both the lizard and herself. She would never complain again, she told herself, would never measure herself against more successful people. Just living was success enough. She was the luckiest woman in the world.
Presently there was a knock on her door and a sailor entered with a plastic tray of food.
“Is it safe in here with him?” she asked, but the sailor only bowed and nodded. He did not speak English.
She put some of her rice noodles in the cage with the lizard, who looked hungry, but he did not touch them.
“OK,” she said, nodding. “I know you’re more of a meat guy. I just thought I’d offer.”
Later another sailor came in. He looked Indian to Sharon Stone, since he wore a turban. He bowed and smiled, then bustled around the cage, checking the door latches and the lizard’s water bowl. But maybe he was not Indian: Did Indonesians also wear turbans sometimes? It was too confusing. And though she felt exuberant in the knowledge of her happy escape, she was still too shy to ask him.
Before this trip she had barely heard of Indonesia, and then last night Yang had told her it was the fourth-biggest country in the world, people-wise. And India was over a billion strong. Along with China, it was about to take over the world, Yang had said, slightly apologetic. In just a few years America would be a minor country, with nothing left of its brief foray into world domination but mountains of plastic and staggering debt. Its national parks and forests would be sold off to richer countries, and what remained of its crumbling cities would be turned into theme parks for foreign tourists. Who knew? She had always thought India was a kind of quaint little place with spicy food, where everyone did yoga and the women drew red spots between their eyes, a shame because otherwise they were pretty. The men had cute accents but bad facial-hair stylings. A good makeup guy could do wonders with the entire country.
“Where is the dragon going? Is he also going to the airport?”
“We’re making a special stop for him,” said the Indian. “He’s being repatriated.”
“How long?”
“Just a few hours. Sorry for the discomfort, Mrs.”
“Well, shit,” said Sharon Stone. “This is nothing. This is great. Try the discomfort of being some crazy freak’s sex slave for the rest of your life.”
“Of course, Mrs. I get it.”
“So thank you. All of you. I mean, you guys are, like, my total saviors.”
“I saw you in The Muse,” said the Indian, and smiled radiantly. “You were absolutely fantastic!”
“Oh. Thanks, but you know. I’m a ringer.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not the real Sharon Stone. I look like her, is all.”
“Ah! Sure. Sure sure sure.”
“No, really!”
“Sure sure. I get it, Mrs. You have my word. Your secret is safe with me.”
“But …”
“I also liked you in Catwoman. Of course, it was not your best film. I will not lie to you, Mrs. Stone. But your performance was exemplary.”
“I mean, thanks, but—”
“Do you know Halle Berry? Is she a nice lady?”
Sharon Stone gave up.
“Very nice,” she said, and smiled sweetly. A little creative license. “If you can get past the bad breath, that is.”
Sharon Stone was allowed to go up on deck when they reached the island. The lizard’s cage was difficult to fit through the door of the storeroom, and it took six men to move it. She watched as they lowered the cage on a hook into a large motorboat; at the last minute she asked if she could go with them.
“We’re just going to leave this fine fellow on the beach,” said the Indian. “This is one of his home islands. Part of a national park just for him and his buddies. It won’t be a long trip.”
“Still,” said Sharon Stone. “I would like to see it. Please?”
“Certainly, Mrs.,” said the Indian.
She climbed down the ladder and sat next to him in the boat. The bay they were approaching was undeveloped—nothing but a gently curving sandy beach, deserted, and above it dull dirt-brown hills dotted with a few scrubby trees. She looked at the lizard’s hands through the cage, or were they feet? The fingers were kind of fat and wrinkled and the sharp claws gray and dirty. They reminded her of a great-aunt she’d visited in Scarsdale. Mean and crusty. But that wasn’t the lizard’s fault.
She looked at his face and felt a hole in her stomach at the thought of him being left here.
Gone. She would be alone then, she thought.
The feeling persisted as she watched from the boat: The men heaved the cage onto the sand, opened it, and stood back with forked sticks, waiting for the lizard to emerge. Eventually he did, though he seemed to be in no great hurry. She never took her eyes off the lizard as they lifted the empty cage onto the boat again, as the lizard sat solid and unmoving on the sand, facing them as the boat pulled away. She admired the lizard’s posture—even, she thought with a wild puncture of hope, loved it. Her heart beat fast. At once graceful and ugly, humble and pugnacious. She could not explain it to herself, but it was reassuring.
It was this posture, this demeanor, that she would seek out in boyfriends and finally a husband. For the rest of her life she would look for these qualities.
Back on Sumbawa, Rajaputra was told that Sharon Stone had been called away suddenly to tend her sick little son; she planned to return, of course, when the boy was well again, Yang and Suandi told him. Rajaputra nodded sagely and began looking at printouts of pictures from a Britney Spears fansite. Within a few weeks he had forgotten his putative engagement, and Sharon Stone herself was a dim memory.
When a new jacket and two pairs of cowboy boots arrived from Tokyo, made out of what looked a little like snakeskin but was in fact plain old leather, he gave them to a kitchen boy of whom he was seeking favors.
Komo, living a few miles from where he had hatched and climbed his first tree, passed much of his time swimming in the ocean.
Walking Bird
ONE OF THE BIRDS was lame, struggling gamely along the perimeter of the fence. The bird was large, a soft color of blue, and rotund like a pheasant or a hen. Its head was adorned with a crown of hazy blue feathers, which had the curious effect of making it seem at once beautiful and stupid.
A family watched the bird. It was a small family: a mother, a father and a little girl.
The fat blue bird had white tape on one knee and lurched sideways when it stepped down on the hurt limb. The little girl sat on the end of a wooden bench to watch the bird, and the mother and father, tired of walking and glad of the chance for a rest, sat down too.
This was inside the zoo’s aviary, an oval garden with high fences and a ceiling of net. Here birds and visitors were allowed to commingle. Black-and-white stilts stood on straw-thin legs in a shallow cement pond and bleeding-heart doves strutted across the pebbly path, looking shot in the chest with their flowers of red.
The little girl watched the lame bird solemnly as it hobbled around the inside of the fence. There was something doggedly persistent in the bird’s steady and lopsided gait; it did not stop after one rotation, nor after two. The little girl continued to gaze. At first the mother and the father watched the little girl as she watched the bird, smiling tenderly; then the mother remembered a househol
d problem and asked the father about it. The two began to converse.
The zoo was soon due to close for the day and the aviary was empty except for the family and the birds. Small birds hopped among the branches and squawked. Large birds stayed on the ground and sometimes made a quick dash in one direction, then turned suddenly and dashed back.
A keeper came into the aviary in a grubby baseball cap and clumpy boots. The little girl asked her why the lame bird did not fly instead of walking. The keeper smiled and said it was a kind of bird that walked more than it flew.
“But can it fly?” asked the little girl. “Could it fly if it wanted to fly?”
The keeper said it probably could, and then she moved off and did something with a hose. The mother and father talked about flooring.
The little girl got off the bench and followed the lame bird, clucking and bending and trying to attract its attention. It ignored her and continued to walk along the inside of the fence, around and around and around.
The aviary was not large so each circuit was completed quickly. But the bird did not stop and the girl did not stop. After a while the father remembered his life outside the aviary, his office and his car and his stacks of paper. His presence in the aviary became instantly ridiculous to him. He got up from the bench and told the little girl it was time to go. The little girl said no, she was not ready. She wanted to stay with the bird. The father said that was too bad. The little girl tried to bargain. The father became angry and grabbed the little girl’s arm. The little girl began to cry and the mother waved the father away.
It was several minutes before the mother could fully comfort the little girl. During this time the father left the aviary and opened his telephone. He paced and talked into the telephone while the mother sat on the bench with the little girl, an arm around her shoulders. He waved to the mother and pointed: He would wait for them in the car.
The mother told the little girl her father loved her very much, only he was busy. He had stress and pressure. He did not mean to frighten her by grabbing. The little girl nodded and sniffed.
When the little girl was no longer agitated, her mother wiped the tears from her face and the little girl looked around. She told her mother she could not see her bird anymore. Her mother put away her tissue and then looked around too. The bird was not visible. Through the leaves in the trees came a glancing of light; the stainless steel dishes were empty. The water in them was still.
The mother looked for large birds on the dirt of the ground and did not see them. She stood and looked for small birds in the green of branches but did not see them either.
“Where is my bird?” asked the little girl.
The mother did not know. She did not see the lame bird and she did not see the other birds. She did not even hear them.
And yet time had barely passed since the birds were all there. The mother had barely looked away from the birds, she thought now. She had attended for only a few minutes to her child’s brief and normal misery.
“It’s time to go, anyway,” said the mother, and looked at her watch. “The zoo is closing.”
The little girl said that maybe the birds flew out at night, through the holes in the net, into the rest of the world.
The mother said maybe. Maybe so.
As they left the aviary the little girl was already forgetting the bird. She would never think of the bird again.
There was almost no one left in the zoo, none of the day’s visitors. But the visitors the mother did see, making their way to the turnstiles, were all walking with a slight limp, an unevenness. She wondered if they could all be injured, every single one of them debilitated—but surely this was impossible. Unless, the mother thought, the healthy ones had left long ago, and what she now saw were the stragglers who could not help but be slow.
Ahead of her the limping people went out and vanished.
Along the path to the exit, the cages seemed empty to the mother; even the reeds around the duck ponds faded, and the signs with words on them and images of flamingos. The mother looked upward, blinking. In the sky there was nothing but airplanes and the bright sun.
The mother’s eyes felt dazzled. The sky and the world were all gleaming a terrible silver. How she loved her daughter. Urgently she took hold of the little girl’s hand. She felt a brace of tears close her throat.
Why? It had been a fine day.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the following for their prior publication of these stories. For “Sexing the Pheasant,” Sonora Review 53, 2008, as well Heide Hatry and her book Heads and Tales (Charta Art Books, 2009). For “Girl and Giraffe,” McSweeney’s Issue 22, 2006. For “Sir Henry,” Famous (Electric Literature), Inaugural Issue, 2009. For “Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov,” SEED Magazine, 2006, and also Tin House, The Fantastic Women Issue, 2007. For “Love in Infant Monkeys,” Willow Springs 60, 2007. For “Chomsky, Rodents,” The Columbia Journal Issue 47, 2009. For “The Lady and the Dragon,” Tri-quarterly #133, 2009, guest-edited by Donna Seaman. For “Walking Bird,” Fairy Tale Review Green Issue, 2006, as well as Long Story Short: Flash Fiction by 65 of North Carolina’s Finest Writers, edited by Marianne Gingher, 2009.
About the Author
LYDIA MILLET is the author of six novels, including My Happy Life (2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction) and most recently How the Dead Dream, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2008 and the first in a trilogy about extinction. She lives in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona with her husband and two young children.
Copyright © 2009 by Lydia Millet. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
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