Breed

by Chase Novak

  “I’m frightened,” Leslie says, supine. She is covered in a crocheted blanket; her eyes stare up at the ceiling, at a blotchy water stain.

  “They’ll be back,” Alex says.

  “They don’t know what they’re doing out there. Someone could hurt them.”

  “No one’s going to hurt them,” Alex says. He sits heavily in an armchair that has been covered by a bedsheet to hide some stains left by a hasty meal.

  “I still don’t understand how they got out,” Leslie says.

  Alex bristles for a moment, thinking she might be trying to lay the blame for their escape at his feet. In the past, placing blame was the only really glaring weakness in Leslie’s character. Somehow, phrases like Did it not occur to you and What exactly did you expect to happen? fell trippingly from her sharp tongue. Now, however, that desire to fix blame has disappeared, or perhaps the ability to do so is no longer hers.

  “I don’t understand how they opened the… the whatchamacallit,” Leslie says.

  “The gate,” Alex says, supplying the word, though he has told himself a thousand times over that he ought not to do that. “I think one of them pocketed my key. Probably Adam. Though I wouldn’t put it past Alice. She’s quiet, but she has her ways.”

  Leslie, still lying on the sofa, covers her eyes with her forearm, breathes deeply. “I love them so much. It feels like… crazy weather.”

  “I know.”

  “I love them.”

  “I know, baby. I know.”

  “I love them.”

  Alex gets up from his chair, goes to the sofa, sits on its edge, and strokes Leslie’s forehead. There are a few patches of microscopic stubble where she has pushed back on the boundaries of her hairline, restoring with a razor and tweezers its original shape, but other than that, her skin is soft, and it makes him feel good and useful to sense her breathing begin to calm as he touches her. He covers her brow with his open hand, as if he were checking her temperature. He imagines he can feel her mind, which he pictures as a thing in pieces, glittering but broken, like a crystal goblet that someone has smashed.

  “How did they get out?” Leslie asks, unaware that Alex has just tried to answer that question. Her memory! Once it was an orderly place, filled with names, dates, ideas.… Now those things are still there, but they share the space with smells and sounds, and soon, Alex fears, those wordless memories will take over more and more of the other memory’s domain. It was a wonder she was able to keep her job at Gardenia Press at all, even after voluntarily reducing her workload and her days in the office in the hope that increased time would give her at least a shot at completing her tasks. And it is a wonder that Alex’s own thought processes have not deteriorated as much as hers; at least not yet. At least, not as far as he can tell.…

  Leslie kicks the blanket off and scrambles to her feet. She vigorously rubs her hands over her face as a way of waking herself, making herself ready for what must come next.

  “We go,” she says, and then hears what she has said, which is not always the case, and quickly corrects it. “We should go. We can’t stay here if they are out.”

  “They’re going to come back. Adam was at his teacher’s apartment, but he got away from me. You should see that place. Oh my God, whatever happens to us, however much money we lose and whatever life puts in front of us, we could never live in such a horrible apartment. We still have this.” He gestures toward the ceiling stain, the walls with the paper coming off in long curls and the pale squares where paintings used to hang.

  “We have nothing, Alex. Nothing. And you know it. I don’t even know if I trust you with our children. And I don’t know if you trust me. And I don’t even know if I reserve that trust.”

  “Deserve, honey.” He doesn’t mean to correct her, not now—too much going on. “They’ll be back, Leslie,” he says. “We just have to have faith. And we should be waiting for them.”

  “Should should should fucking should,” Leslie blurts. She sits back down on the sofa, half on the cushion and half on the balled-up blanket. “I want to kill myself,” she says. “I do not want to be alive.”

  Alex nods. “I know.” He moves closer next to her, takes her hand. “But we can’t,” he says, his voice soft and mournful.

  “I know,” Leslie says. “More’s the pity.”

  “Are you at all hungry?”

  She shrugs. “I could eat. What do we have?”

  “Cuban.”

  “A human? I thought that’s what we… Oh God, I’m glad Adam and Alice aren’t here. It’s all happening too fast.”

  “We resisted for as long as we could.”

  “Have you resisted? Or have you been helping yourself without me knowing about it?” Leslie narrows her eyes.

  “I have not, and I resent your asking.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In the cellar, with the others.”

  “With the dogs?”

  “In a cage. I think it’s time. Everything inside of me is telling me it’s time.”

  “I’m not ready,” Leslie says, but she can feel her mouth watering.

  “I feel like a teenager,” Alex says. “Just before having sex for the very first time. No force on earth could have stopped me.”

  “Once we do that, there’s no turning back.”

  “Not necessarily,” Alex says.

  “You have done it before, haven’t you. I can tell just by how you’re talking about it.”

  “He looks delicious, Leslie. It’s so horrible and so exciting. I mean, really, think about it. When was the last time we enjoyed ourselves? I mean, really and truly enjoyed ourselves?”

  Leslie cocks her head, listens. And listens some more. Finally, she smiles. “I can’t hear a thing from down there. You did such a good job. I’m proud of you.”

  “We Twisdens don’t do things halfway, my dear. Come. Let’s go downstairs. I want you just to take a look at him. Just a peek, a sniff. Nothing more.”

  He offers his hand and she takes it, allowing him to pull her to her feet. They go down to the first floor of the house and approach the heavy wooden door beneath the staircase.

  “We’re really so terrible,” Leslie says, though she is feeling such intense love for Alex at this moment that she can’t help but smile.

  “We can’t help it, my dear.”

  “What’s with all the my dears? So fancy.”

  “Just trying to hold back the night,” Alex says.

  Leslie shakes her head as Alex takes out the old jailer’s key, large and rusted, and fits it into the top lock.

  “We should be ashamed,” Leslie says.

  “We are. A little.”

  “We should kill ourselves.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, we can’t. It’s simply not in our nature, not anymore. No animal except humans can commit suicide.”

  “What about lemons?” Leslie says, brightening.

  “Lemmings, my dear. And they are not committing suicide. They have no idea what the hell is going to happen when they go off the side of the cliff.”

  “What a bunch of dummies, right?”

  “Right. Total idiots.” Alex turns the key and the lock responds with a deep metal thump. Leslie places her hand on Alex’s arm, hoping to slow things down.

  “Then maybe we can hire someone to kill us,” she says. “You can have it done for a thousand dollars.”

  “We’re not killing ourselves and we’re not hiring someone to kill us. Leslie! What is wrong with you? All this negativity. It just saps the life out of everything.”

  “There is a human being locked in our cellar.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Our children have run away from home.”

  “I once ran away from home too. You probably did as well, at one time or another.”

  “No, no. I did not.”

  “Well, it happens. Kids… run away.”

  “They ran away because they’re a
fraid of us.”

  “You don’t know that. They could have taken off for any one of a thousand reasons.”

  “No, I know. And you know too. They are…” She waves her hand in front of her face the way she does when she cannot think of a word and needs her husband to supply it for her.

  “Afraid,” he says.

  “Afraid of us,” Leslie says. “And they should be.” She gestures toward the cellar door. “And now we’re both scared to death that they’re going to find someone out there and tell the world what goes on in this house and the next thing we know the police are knocking at our door. Right? Isn’t that what you’re really most afraid of? Not that some harm will…” Again, she waves her hand, looking for help.

  “I don’t know what you’re going for here,” Alex says. “Befall?”

  “Yes. Befall. You’re not worried that something will befall them. You’re worried they’re going to tell.” Tears fill her eyes.

  “Are you sure you’re not hungry?” Rodolfo says to Alice. The two of them, along with Rodolfo’s skater crew, are crouched behind a few large boulders, where they have lit a small, smokeless fire. A cowboy hat filled with squirrels sits on the ground; a bit of blood has seeped through the tawny felt. A couple of the boys wait eagerly while squirrels roast in the flame, others have not bothered to wait and are enjoying the raw bounty of their late-night hunt.

  When Alice first realized what these boys and girls were going to do—as they climbed the trees, shook the branches, and pounced on the awakened, frantic creatures when they hit the ground and scurried hopelessly to escape—she was horrified, but she has quickly gotten used to this new reality, though not so much that she will allow herself even a bite of squirrel meat, no matter how hungry she is.

  Rodolfo is crouched next to her, and to be polite he covers his mouth with his hand while he chews. Alice is relieved to see he has at least chosen the meat that’s been cooked.

  “You’ll see,” he says to her. “You’ll get used to it. One day you’ll like it way more than a fucking Big Mac. Oops. Sorry for the swear.”

  “I don’t care about swears,” Alice says.

  “You want me to take you somewhere so you can get some indoor food?”

  “I just want to find my brother.”

  Rodolfo nods. “Yeah. I know.”

  “Adam.”

  “How old is Adam?”

  “We’re twins.”

  “Yeah?” Rodolfo smiles. He has a beautiful smile. Light from the fire brightens his eyes. “A lot of us are twins. We’ve got triplets, and Jeff, Louise, Marcel, and Adrienne are… what’s it called? Foursies.”

  “Quadruplets,” Alice says.

  “Yeah. That’s right. Quadra. Quadrapal…”

  “Quadruplets,” Alice says.

  Rodolfo slaps his forehead and sticks out his tongue and rolls his eyes, laughing at his own impression of a mentally challenged person. Suddenly serious, he asks, “So, you go to school?”

  “Yes!”

  Rodolfo shrugs and says, “I tried. Sort of. I guess.” He makes the cartoon-stupid face again and stands up quickly, offering his hand to Alice. “Come on, I’ll get you the kind of food you’re used to.”

  “I need to find my brother.”

  “I won’t let anyone hurt you. Come on.” And then, in the voice of the guy who announces the baseball games on TV, he adds, “Let’s do it!”

  Rodolfo summons the others with a whistle, loud and piercing. They obey him without question or hesitation. After stamping out their little fire, they dispose of the squirrel bones, heads, and tails. Afterward they march in a kind of rough formation, following Rodolfo and, by extension, Alice through a thickly grown part of the park until they emerge near the running track circumnavigating the reservoir. In the warm months, this oval of blue water, as bright and blue as a child’s eye, is home to ducks and geese, a geyser of water shooting up from its middle at all hours to keep the water clear. Now, however, the reservoir is covered in a thin sheet of ice, the eye of an old man, gray and clouded.

  “We’re going in!” Rodolfo announces, lacing his fingers through the fence that has been put up to prevent just such a thing from taking place. A cheer of unanimous agreement rises up from his troops—except for Alice, who at first thinks he is just joking around. But when she sees the mass of them kicking off their shoes and resting their skateboards against the fence, she realizes that Rodolfo is not kidding.

  He sees the look of incredulity on her face. “Come on!” he says, as if only a fool or a very strange person indeed would think twice about plunging into the reservoir’s icy water on a cold November night.

  “No way. It’s freezing.”

  “Only at first.” He puts his hand on her shoulder. She shrinks back until she realizes his touch is friendly, gentle.

  “I’m not doing that.”

  “Just come in with us, Alice. I promise.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll like it.”

  “I’ll catch cold and die.”

  “You’re more safer here than you have ever been.”

  She’s not sure what he means by that, but there is something about it that feels true.

  Some of the boys and two of the girls have taken off their jackets and their shirts, and one boy—Alice gasps when she sees this—has stripped all his clothes off, and now they all scramble up and over the fence with no more effort than a group of kids mounting the steps of a front porch. In ones and twos they break through the thin sheet of ice—little more than sludge, really, with the consistency of cake batter—until, except for Rodolfo and Alice, all of them are in the water, as seemingly carefree as seals, plunging in here and reappearing there, splashing one another, grabbing, laughing, dunking, their voices a din of unfettered youthful energy rising up from the reservoir with so much force that Alice could imagine it carrying all the way up to the distant, hazy moon.

  “They’re going to get in trouble,” Alice says. She cannot tear her eyes away from them. She is filled with admiration and horror, envy and scorn.

  “We don’t care.”

  “You better care, mister,” Alice says, hearing her mother’s voice within her own.

  “We’ve already faced the worstest,” Rodolfo says. He sounds sincere, and he also sounds as if he is boasting. “What can anyone do to us that would be worser? Sure you don’t want to go in? It’s really fun.”

  “No way,” Alice says.

  “No probs,” says Rodolfo. He pats her reassuringly on the shoulder and reaches into the pocket of his Levi’s jacket and plucks out something to eat, which he quickly pops into his mouth.

  What’s that? Alice wonders. It is red and kind of moist-looking. He can’t offer her one because it is a freshly harvested heart, plucked like a little red egg from the nest of fragile bones in the chest cavity of a squirrel.

  “Before we go downstairs, I want to show you something,” Alex says to Leslie, leading her by the hand to the wreck of a room that he has been calling his study—the hope had been that the nomenclature would impose a kind of order on the room, make it a place where work was actually done, tasks completed, dollars earned, and dignity preserved. But slowly and inexorably, this room has fallen into horrid disrepair, as have all the other rooms. He cannot even remember when he last did a lick of legal work at home. The best he can manage is to keep track of the sale of family heirlooms, but even this sad bookkeeping has descended into chaos, with sales and money still to be collected jotted down on stray scraps of paper that have been absorbed into great heaps of similar scraps of paper, many of them rendered illegible by the various spills and smears engendered by the frequent snacks he brings into this room, snacks that in his former life would have been unimaginable: hunks of raw meat, giant cans of chicken broth, rawhide chews manufactured for rottweilers and that both Alex and Leslie have found ideal for easing the extreme jaw tension they so often feel—if every love affair must share at least one joke that no one but the couple would find funny, t
heirs is the rawhide chews.

  In the middle of Alex’s desk is his laptop computer, which he has struggled mightily to keep clean and thereby distinct from the room’s general grunginess and dishevelment. He keeps the case closed, and to further protect the computer he drapes an old shirt over it—the sight of that beautiful broadcloth sometimes gives Alex a pang of sadness, a wash of nostalgia for his former life, when he argued cogently and ate at impeccable tables, when even time itself seemed rich, as it inevitably does when you are billing clients more than a thousand dollars for every hour that ticks by. This computer has been a kind of pit into which he has frequently fallen; time he means to spend here getting his life in order has often been completely wasted playing inane computer games or chasing down the flimsiest notions in a kind of pretend research. Between eBay, pornography, and watching animal videos on YouTube, hours go by in which Alex exists in a kind of fugue state from which only the sudden onset of hunger can arouse him, and now, though he still attempts to keep his computer separate from the mess that surrounds it, he has come to view his Toshiba as yet one more dysfunctional thing in his life, and there are even times when he considers picking the thing up and smashing it to pieces.

  “What are we here for?” Leslie asks as he guides her toward his desk.

  “Sit down and watch this,” Alex says. The machine’s welcoming chord plays as the computer powers up, the screen fills with blue light, and then his wallpaper picture—an adorable fawn with its head tilted to one side—comes into view. The keyboard is smudged and there are more than a few hairs on it, but neither Alex nor Leslie notices. With a few vigorous keystrokes he enters the YouTube site and starts a video.

  It’s Dr. Kis, looking as if not ten but thirty years have passed since they were in his office. The YouTube heading over the video reads FLESH AND BLOOD! Kis is staring at the camera as if he were being photographed following an arrest, unable to look away or disguise himself and hoping that by over-opening his eyes, pressing his lips together, and slightly dilating his nostrils, he can somehow alter his appearance, transform himself.