Breed

by Chase Novak

  Silence. But there are certain silences that betray their own subterfuge, that let you know (even if you would rather not know) that this is not the real silence of absence or emptiness but the false silence of suppression, the tense, quivering silence of someone holding her breath, and that if you switch on the light, or turn around, or feel blindly a foot or two in front of you, you will know for sure that bad dreams do come true.

  But Adam does not need to turn on the light. Leslie does it for him.

  She stands next to the sink. Her hair is disheveled and hangs in front of her face, masking it. One hand grasps the edge of the sink. The other she has placed on top of her head. Towels, soaking wet, are strewn all over the bathroom. The small, enclosed space reeks of flesh.

  “Get out of here,” she says, her voice deeper than he has ever heard it.

  “Mommy.…” Adam’s chest heaves; his eyes fill with tears.

  “Say go.”

  “Go.”

  “Louder…”

  “Go! Get out of here!”

  Leslie recoils a little, lets go of the sink. She is reeling, and for a moment it looks as if she will collapse.

  “Go! Go!” Adam shouts at the top of his lungs while tears course down his face.

  “Adam?” Alice’s voice comes from the bed.

  Leslie claps her hands over her ears. Her grimace shows her teeth. Have they always been so large?

  The next moment, Alice is here, standing next to Adam. They hold on to each other, staring with terror at their mother.

  “How did you get in here?” Adam says.

  “I just wanted to see you. Not to hurt.” She slaps her chest with an open hand. “Just to see. And look. Look at you.”

  “Mom,” Alice says. “Please. You’re scaring us so bad.”

  “Oh… dear God,” Leslie says, starting to wail. “Oh God, oh God, oh please help me, help me please.” She sees her face in the mirror and she rams the heels of her hand into the reflection, sending half the glass into the porcelain sink. A large shard of glass is stuck into her hand, and she looks at it for a moment, with curiosity, as if she doesn’t quite know how it got there. She plucks it out, and a bead of blood bubbles up through the puncture.

  “Go, Mom,” Adam says. “Go away.”

  Leslie nods and gestures for the children to get out of her way. She slows down as she passes them.

  “Go, Mom. Go back to your room.”

  Leslie is hunched over, but suddenly she draws herself up to her full height. “I heard you, Adam,” she says, in her normal voice. “And I must insist that you treat your… mother”—she licks the blood off her hand—“with respect.”

  Adam thinks about the little pizza-place knife in his bag, but he doesn’t dare leave his sister to run for it. He looks around the room for something he might use as a weapon. He picks up one of the wet towels, wraps it around his hand, and shakes his fist at his mother.

  “You go, okay? You go.”

  Leslie nods, as if completely prepared to obey his command. She turns toward the door, but at the last instant she lunges at Adam and picks him up with utter ease, as if he weighs but a pound or two. His towel falls away from him, flutters to the tiles, and in his nakedness his arms and legs are rigid with fright as his mother lifts him up toward her mouth and leans slightly forward as if to take a massive bite out of his belly.

  “How dare you treat me like… an animal. I’m your mother. You came out of my body. I gave you life. Life! I sacrificed. You have no idea. I ruined myself. We both did, your father and I. We gave everything so you might live.”

  With every word, she inches closer and closer to his bare tender flesh, and just as it seems she is going to sink her teeth into him, she stops, straightens herself again, and places him, shriveled and shivering, onto his feet.

  “I’m your mother,” she says, swallowing hard, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “I gave you life. I would never hurt you.”

  She touches his shoulders with her splayed fingers.

  “I better take the rest of those damn pills,” she says. She smiles weakly, weaving back and forth. “Mother’s little helpers.”

  The next morning at nine the three of them are gathered in the lobby and Slavoj comes in, precisely on time. He is dressed as if for a job interview or church, in gray slacks and a blazer, a dark shirt with a wide collar, and a dark green tie whose knot is the size of an avocado. His hair is slicked back, he is freshly shaved, and he carries a long-stemmed red rose, which he presents to Leslie, much to her confusion.

  “Your doctor has left town, but my sister says he is in Idrija, and so…” He claps his hands together, smiles.

  “Is it far?” Leslie asks. She glances at the children, who look composed but keep their distance from her. She can’t blame them.

  “Nothing in Slovenia is far,” Slavoj says.

  They follow Slavoj out of the hotel and to his car, which he has left in the care of the hotel’s towering doorman. Slavoj opens the rear door for Leslie and the twins. Before getting in the car himself, he engages in a bit of conversation with the doorman. The banter suddenly turns serious, judging from the tone and the expressions on their faces. The two men shake hands, and Slavoj runs to his door and slides in behind the wheel.

  “To Idrija,” he calls out merrily.

  As he pulls away from the curb and into the street, the doorman bends his knees and tilts his large head so he can see into the car, and there is no question that he is looking directly at Leslie.

  “What did you say to him?” Leslie asks Slavoj. Anger has whittled her voice to a sharp point.

  “I thank him for seeing over my car,” Slavoj cheerfully reports.

  “Right,” Leslie mutters, sinking down in her seat.

  The back of Slavoj’s car is a snug fit for the three of them. Their solitary little suitcase is under their feet; the children keep their backpacks on their laps. Leslie sits in the middle, and both children keep their knees locked together so as not to touch her. She holds on to her purse, with their passports inside it, her wallet, and a small envelope full of loose diamonds. She has a vision of simply pouring them onto Kis’s desk. Let him have it all. What difference does it make? She opens her purse, removes the envelope, and sticks it in her front pocket, taking care not to make contact with her kids.

  Outside of Ljubljana, they pass by farmhouses and gray wintry fields where enterprising cows manage to find bits of nourishment between the stubbled ruts. The motion of the car as they cruise along the winding roads has lulled Alice to sleep. Her head rests against her mother’s shoulder. Her lips are pursed, as if she is about the blow out the candles on a birthday cake.

  “You okay?” Leslie says to Adam, daring to pat his knee.

  “I’m okay,” he says. “Are you?”

  She blinks back tears—the sweetness of her boy is almost unbearable.

  She takes his hand and he laces his fingers through hers.

  The children love her. The beauty and the blindness of the natural order…

  Idrija seems like a series of afterthoughts—a petrol station hastily constructed, a little department store, an ice cream shop, a few cafés… No one is outside. You would think the town was completely deserted except for the smoke billowing chalk-white out of the chimneys in the houses along the road.

  “Whoops!” Slavoj says as he makes a sudden turn off the main road. They are now on a road not much wider than the car, with tidy little houses and ever tidier stacks of firewood on either side. Slavoj squints at his phone and announces, “We are near!”

  “Is this going to work, Mom?” Adam asks.

  “I don’t know,” Leslie says. “I think so. Or hope.” She frowns—the difference between thinking something and hoping something seems quite obscure.

  “Are we going to get shots?” Alice asks, waking up.

  “I did, when me saw him before,” Leslie says.

  “Did it hurt?” Alice says.

  “Yes. It did.”

/>   “This doctor,” Slavoj says, looking over his shoulder as he speaks, yet somehow able to follow the narrow road as it unspools before him. “People come here to have child, and you have two. Maybe I don’t understand too well. But my sister says one day he will be put in prison. Already he is forbidden to travel. In my country that is the first step, after that…” Slavoj makes a clicking noise such as you would use to urge on an old horse and meant to signify someone’s fate being sealed.

  Off to the right, a small château sits behind a high iron gate. The stucco walls are enveloped in vines, which, empty now of their foliage, look like a vast network of exposed nerves. A mixture of snow and rain is starting to fall. A weathervane in the shape of a dragon spins and creaks in front of the house. An old Soviet-era Lada, incongruously mounted on gigantic tractor tires, sits in the driveway next to a mountain bike.

  Slavoj stops the car, jumps out, and tries to open the gate, but it has been chained shut, and the chain is secured by a heavy lock. Nevertheless, he gives the gate a good shake or two before returning to the car and leaning on the horn.

  Leslie rubs her forehead. Think, think, she tells herself. She can pose this question: If he’s not here, then what? But that’s as far as she can take it.

  Slavoj seems convinced that if he honks his horn for a long enough time, someone will emerge from the house. And his theory is borne out. The door to Kis’s house opens, and a man in a bright silver hazmat suit and knee-high black rubber boots comes out of the house and walks quickly toward the gate, waving his arms over his head as if to warn a driver that a bridge has washed out. But Slavoj continues to honk the car’s horn, forcing the man to walk down the gravel driveway and come to the gate.

  Leslie and the twins sit silently in the back of the car while Slavoj and the hazmat man converse. Soon, their voices rise in volume and intensity, and it is clear they are arguing, though the voice of the man in the hazmat suit is muffled. And it is also clear that of the two, Slavoj is the loudest, and seemingly the most committed to coming out on top in this duel. At last, the man takes off the hood of the hazmat suit. He seems no older than twenty, with platinum hair cut short and combed forward, like a Roman senator’s. He speaks more softly now, rapidly, and Slavoj nods.

  At last, Slavoj smiles and sticks his hand through the bars of the gate to shake hands, but Hazmat steps back, shaking his head. It doesn’t seem unfriendly. He doesn’t want to shake hands for Slavoj’s own good.

  “Not here,” Slavoj says, getting back behind the wheel. “Big mess in the house. Everything polluted and… everything bad. Very bad. Dangerous chemicals. This doctor? Very bad. Are you quite sure you want to…”

  “We have come a long way to see this doctor,” Leslie says.

  “The Department of Public Safety closed this house but still no arrest. The doctor has now new house. Not far.” Slavoj backs his car up and begins his three-point turn, but once he is aimed in the right direction, he stops. “Lady, please, no offense. I like you. You have great…” He gestures vaguely, looking for the right word. “Energy. This doctor’s no damn good. Let’s go back to the capital. I can show you all the best places, not touristic, insider stuff.”

  “How far away is he?” Leslie says in a quiet voice. Her stomach is starting to grumble. She smells the sweet, sweet flesh of her children and the effect it has on her is almost overwhelming, like what it feels like for other people, if famished, to detect the aroma of sizzling butter. She sits up straight, leans forward, putting as much space between the twins and herself as possible. It’s just going to get worse and worse.…

  “Please, Slavoj, take us to him.”

  As Slavoj drives, Adam readjusts his backpack, which he holds on his lap. As secretively as possible, he pulls the zipper down. An inch. And then another. He clears his throat to cover the sound.

  “Are you getting a cold?” Leslie asks.

  “I’m okay.”

  His heart races. His mother returns her attention to the passing countryside, but Adam does not dare pull the zipper any farther. But he keeps his fingers on the tab, in case he has to pull it quickly.

  Kis is residing in a steep, medieval town called Goce, a half an hour away. Vineyards abound and the winds are so strong that every terra-cotta rooftop has dozens of large stones strategically placed to keep the red tiles from blowing away. Today it is particularly windy and the wind howls up and down Goce’s narrow streets. The streets, in fact, are too narrow for Slavoj’s car; he parks it at the high end of the little village, and the four of them proceed on foot. The twins hold their ears against the keening wind.

  There is not a soul to be seen. There are no shops, no parks, no municipal office, nothing public except a Catholic church in the middle of the village, a church that seems to have been built for five times more people than this little jot of a village could ever contain, and which, today, like everything else here, seems deserted. With Slavoj leading the way, they walk the cobblestoned streets, until Slavoj stops in front of a sand-colored old house, little more than a rectangle with a couple of windows and an old oak door. It is at the end of one of the town’s streets. Beyond it lies a vineyard, the thick empty vines forming a long, dark, frozen braid.

  “This is the house,” Slavoj announces.

  An old woman, bundled against the weather, walks by with her dog, an old white terrier of sorts, whose crippled back half is aided by a pair of training wheels. She mutters something at them as she makes her way past them.

  “She knows who lives here,” Slavoj says.

  “What did she say?” Leslie asks.

  Slavoj shrugs. “Devil,” he says. “The old people are still superstitious.”

  “Do me a favor, Slavoj,” Leslie says. “Bring the kids back to the car and wait for me.”

  “Mom,” Adam cries out.

  “I think we better all stay close together, Mom,” adds Alice.

  Leslie crouches a little so she and the twins are eye to eye. “Listen, you two. You wait for me while I talk to the doctor. He’s going to give me something that’s going…” She takes a deep breath. “I want to be your mother. I want to be a good mother.”

  “You are, Mom,” Adam says.

  “We love you, Mom,” says Alice. “We’re sorry we ran.…”

  Leslie’s eyes fill with tears. She has not felt like this in years, so tender, so grateful for her children, so calm, so human; it’s almost as if Kis has already worked his reverse magic on her.

  “But he has to make us better too,” Adam says.

  “There’s nothing wrong with us,” Alice says.

  “You want to end up like Rodolfo and those others?” Adam says to her, his voice rising.

  “I’ll go first,” Leslie says. “We’ll get you two in after that.”

  Slavoj leads the children back to the car, and Leslie takes a moment to compose herself in front of Kis’s door. She is about to knock but thinks better of it and instead tries to let herself in. She notices that a little whatchamacallit camera has been set up above the door and its one glassy ignorant eye is staring down at her. Below the camera is a red light that beats off and on like a tiny heart. As soon as she touches the door it opens an inch or two. Startled, suspicious, Leslie steps back. The surveillance camera peers down at her. The lens catches a bit of sunlight from somewhere and a prism of colors shimmers across its surface, like a trace of oil in a puddle.

  Leslie pushes the door open wider and walks in. She is in a small room, damp and dark, and redolent of the centuries. A small sofa is the only furniture, and hanging above it is a medical drawing of the human reproductive system. Opposite the sofa is a rather large aquarium, the water murky, but with no fish in it. At the end of this room there is a door, painted dark blue. Long scratches have scored some of the paint. A thick blanket of silence covers the place; all Leslie can hear is her own breathing. She takes a tentative step forward. The old floorboards creak and she stops, paralyzed for a moment.

  Suddenly, she hears footsteps rushi
ng her way, and the scarred blue door flies open, revealing Dr. Kis, very much aged from the last time she saw him. He is wearing shapeless brownish-gray pants held up by suspenders, and a baggy T-shirt. His hair is a thin white tangle. He is unshaven. She can smell the alcohol on him, his breath, his skin. He is holding a walking cane over his head, wagging it back and forth, as if his greatest desire is to strike someone with it. He slurs something at her in Slovene.

  “My name is Leslie Kramer, Dr. Kis. I have come a long way because I need your help.”

  “No more. There is nothing more for you or for me or for any other person. Nothing can be done.”

  “But you said there was a way back, Doctor. You said you could reverse—”

  “Closed for business,” Kis says with a cruel, crooked smile. “Everything finished.” He looks around, as if to make certain Leslie is alone. “Who let you enter?”

  “The door was open. Now listen, please—”

  “You tell me to listen? You steal into my house to give me orders?” He takes a wild swing at Leslie with his cane, but her reflexes are very quick and she catches the walking stick mid-arc and wrests it out of his hand.

  “You ruined my body,” Leslie says, tossing the cane across the room. It rattles its way under the sofa. “And everything else.”

  “I don’t know you,” Kis says, trying to regain his dignity. He stands a bit straighter, folds his arms over his chest.

  “Please, Dr. Kis, I am begging.”

  He purses his lips, shakes his head. “Okay, follow.”

  He turns. The outline of a pint bottle bulges in his back pocket. Leslie follows him into the next room, which is a makeshift examination room. There is a table with stirrups, a glassed-in case holding medical supplies, a scale, a blood pressure cuff. The walls are covered with snapshots, hundreds of them, showing babies, toddlers, children, young teens, some standing, some running, some dressed for church, some for football, some with their proud parents on either side of them, some with their twin, or their two triplets. It could be the cover of a UNESCO pamphlet—children from all over the world, radiating joy, parents beaming, the great symphony of life at its most stirring crescendo.