Kingdom of the Young

by Edie Meidav

  At this point I’m bellowing like a ram in heat and stomping all what out but who’s going to hear me out here? No one. And she keeps interrupting her husband whose eyes could be those of a serial murderer to say, you’re under citizen’s arrest, but you want me to call 911?

  You’re not supposed to do this, I say, trying to calm everyone including myself. How it’s supposed to go is you’re supposed to let me free now. Right here you should be signing the check and—

  And he says to her, not even paying attention to me: We’ll just keep him here. The thing they used was surprise, which I’m still feeling embarrassed about given how you’d think basic training plus my current line of work would have prepped me for better, but he’s frying up the beef and I’m sitting there all tied and he’s serving it to me, not with sauce or anything, holding my nose to make me open my mouth and at first I’m just spitting it out onto my lap or the floor, and I’m thinking what kind of justice is this, me forced to eat my own beef, but the more I spit the more he shoves it in so I figure better to just start swallowing.

  If it’s so good, he’s saying, you think we’re rubes or something? People you can just get something over on?

  And I keep eating, it’s okay, not raw or anything, not like desert lizard-flesh I once had to eat, but I can see the Freez-R-Pak of meat on his counter starting its melt, losing value as Tony would say, and I can’t tell which kills me more, the fried meat or the sight of fading profit. My voice is weaker than I mean it to be when I say, Look, you don’t mind, would you please just get those packages in the freezer?

  Because for everything I sell for one hundred and fifty, I’ve had to shell out fifty, so if everything goes bad, I could sell it but I don’t want to get anyone sick with E. coli, that’s not my business, I never volunteered for nerve-gas patrol if you know what I mean. I just don’t want to lose money. I’m thinking of ma at home waiting for me to bring her home a carton of cherry ice cream like I do whenever I make a decent sale, and I’m almost about to explain but the guy’s talking too much, out-tonguing me. Meanwhile the guy’s wife has disappeared right when I sensed she could have been my only hope, something about the way she knew to tie Scout knots.

  Not to go on too long but it started to look like my guys had vanished from outside, worse than steam, showing no loyalty, and I’m sitting there about three hours telling by the folksy-cute kitchen clock that cuckoos in the voice of every different kind of bird. Three hours later, this crazy couple finally decides alright, enough, they’re going to untie me. They’ve made me eat the beef till I retch it up. The guy even says back to me the thing I had said to him, which is that possession is nine-tenths of the law. Being tied up had got me confused and I’d started saying things out of sequence.

  So that was yesterday. At least I got out with my pants on.

  We have enough houses tucked away in the hills that I could be in business for a whole nother year before shifting to another line of work, and it would help ma with her cancer treatments, her stupid doctor who makes her exhale into a breathalyzer just to chart her lungs. None of it makes sense and nothing lasts forever, I tell ma whenever she complains but she sort of chucks me on the head and says, Jimmy you used to be decent, you were good at figures, you were quick in your head. I let her treat me like I’m six because she has gotten some marbles loose and there’s no way I’m going to forget I’m all she has which explains why I’m so steady with the cherry ice cream except for yesterday.

  Not to mention that she has reminded me it’s us two alone together every day since my dad was locked away and me only eight allowed to see him once a month at visiting hours. Which is all a long way of saying I’ve been thinking and I’ve changed my tactics, I’m a reformed man. Which also means I see the world in a new way and look, you gave me your time, it hurts me but I’m just about ready to give it to you.

  CATULLUS

  Tell me it’s not a tragedy humans lack whiskers but please don’t take it personally.

  You came for a wedding that turned into a funeral, I understand, I know all about funerals because look right here, a skeleton of my favorite, a tabby named Loti, she was the first with me when I came after the war, hanging right there next to that pile of dried fish. Which war we say now, which, because the people in charge are organizers who like arranging their little bloodbaths, their spills and mop-ups. So many wars but for me there is just the one that keeps going. That wasn’t the reason I kept you on the landing for a while: it is just I so often get inspectors coming to steal my treasures. Of course I know about treasures. The people who understand best are usually bent from heaving a hoard in whatever satchel officials let you carry but look, it doesn’t really matter which country I came from, you come from one, I another, and here we meet in a third. You knocked at my door, you say something bit your child and does any country ever really help? This is why I keep inspectors out of my home.

  You might be the kind who might call whatever bit your kid a beast but it is not mine. This you must understand. Mine don’t roam. They stay with me, twenty-two and each with no shortage of personality. Comfortable here, they enjoy it, and who wants anything different? When I used to read philosophy, I liked Catullus talking about the death of his mistress’s sparrow that he wished he could bring back, a man who knew illusions make for dangerous enterprise. The more you think you save anyone, the more you destroy. That right there is the sum of what I learned from my education even if no one here knows this about me. Classical education but they just call me the cat lady. A little knowledge never hurts and trust me, no book taught me how to find whomever bit your child. At four o’clock, most of the company start to arrive behind this big block of human dwellings: I call it where the jungle starts. Like us, cats have teatime and they come sniffing right when dinner inside the buildings starts cooking. So come with me: you have to get down on your knees and sniff too, near the bushes. Do it right and they know you as one of them. Arch the lower part of your spine, angle your head to the side as if you can hear and smell from your heart. Imagine if we saw only one color of the rainbow: this is how narrow we are most of the time. Act as they do and then they’ll show you their colors. Otherwise we need peepholes, but don’t forget you can peek through branches. What our species has in too much weight, it lacks in imagination, toeholds, and tolerance. Look at a soldier’s face in one of those moments you don’t want to recall and then you know exactly what lacking imagination looks like. Your children might understand, acting so shy because one was bit. Humans call shyness common sense but you know a shy scent confuses most species. Surely your big one could account for herself more. You were all inside the apartment mourning your uncle who would have been happier if you’d gathered to remember him outside under the trees. Your girl went outside alone but must have been doing something wrong or you left something missing in her education. Treating another species right means waiting and too many of us lack the talent, the simple act of extending your hand and waiting. We lack patience and then raise our young to lack. I am not blaming you, but get humble on your knees right here in the dirt and they will come.

  When I arrived here after the war, we found this place to live. All these years we have not moved. In the windy season, leaves fall and tell people which living beings matter most. Once the city became safer, I made my first friend with a Persian who had lost her tail. After that, she had babies and then others started bringing me babies to care for because they knew I cared like no one else, I would remember, I would keep even the skeletons safe.

  You came for a wedding but your uncle was so happy to see you he died before your eyes? His wineglass flew out of his hand, his head snapped back. Of course he was lucky, dying surrounded by his family. One of the best ways is to have the heart stop in happiness, that action just as mechanical as the retraction of a claw. A full life that man had, so many grandbabies, a man who liked prowling from one house to another. I never entered your uncle’s home, we never shared a meal, but we chatted politics on the si
dewalk which is where he told me that a street in the capital has your last name, after his dead brother, and that, after a certain television program ended, he always pasted onto the screen this name of a war hero who died young defending the city: your uncle made sure to turn the name inward so modern-day announcers would still know this glory. That was your uncle, so thoughtful, the last on the block to remember the names of Loti and some of my other babies. You see I know your clan!

  And now you still want to catch the one who bit your big child? You’re the one with war on the mind. You want to quarantine the being for ten days and see if it dies of rabies, a terrible thing to do to someone breathing the same air as you. That someone should spend ten needless days in a box? Or spend its last days in that box? If it dies, only then will you give your child the shot? Now I think I have helped you enough. You cannot see the point in letting these babies roam free. Once these hills belonged to them, not any of us. I say, let your daughter have the shot already! And so what if a rabies shot could bring on delirium, hallucinations, nightmares, psychosis? Is reality so very different? But you can’t help yourself, you are one of the others, just as hidden from yourself as the beast you think you will one day find.

  I NEVER HAD ANY PROBLEM WITH YOU

  I grew up thinking there had been a war, and that our soldiers had gone to war to guarantee the democracy. And that there were no disappeared people, that it was all a lie.

  —Victoria Montenegro

  Think about becoming a parent and you consider consequences. When you came into our life, we knew we wanted to teach you the world. Even now, we hold tight to the faith that this document I compose will endure later history which has a reckless habit of making virgins out of everyone, a tendency some call amnesia.

  Never forget you represented such great hope for your mother but since she died when you were young, she remains a memory barely a shred beyond whatever photographs tell you. That said, who among us can see fate? Consider antibodies’ passage through a vein and how we fail to feel such an all-important passage. Or how we view stars, great and mighty yet appearing to us as mere pinpricks. So much of our knowledge operates in this manner, tempting and unreachable, usually irreproachable.

  Did you know dung beetles navigate by the Milky Way? They roll balls of dung before placing on their heads little dung-caps that let them perceive the stars. So many things come down to a person trusting in similar rituals, in magnetism and gravity. Equipped, the beetles make their way as best they can.

  From the beetles’ perspective, their family rites make perfect sense. And of course it also makes sense, in eternal fashion, for the young to regard their parents with accusing antennae. It did not take Freud to invent this trick: generations increasingly turn on forebears with the rage of new life. To summon botany over biology, consider the unbent grass that uses the decomposed as mulch from which to derive greater vigor.

  You are on your way toward becoming a mature young woman and are, moreover, with child, so I thought it important to hand you, our faculties still intact, a sense of what might be important as you become a parent yourself.

  Once I had a lover. I hope this recollection does not embarrass you, now that you are of age, since what child fails to cringe at what an old fuddy-duddy does with his unit after the military dress has been retired, so to speak, a jolly roger brought forth mainly for special occasions, but I have always been proud of how you have conducted yourself, both as a student and at home, not to mention as a blossoming young woman, and hence believe I can speak honestly. Why? From early on, I knew you were a prodigy, most especially at the harp but in so many other domains: you a daughter whom I could press forward to my associates and have you read aloud particular words at one of the many parties your mother and I loved to have, parties filled with associates and colleagues—and what beautiful words those are, words that vibrate around a person enough so that he starts to exist all the more.

  To you, our colleagues and associates may have been insects stretching forth long scratchy arms from one of our many overstuffed armchairs, aiming to tug you close to their cobwebs—you told me once you hated the visuals of nose hair, the aromatic spoor of wet dog—but to us our colleagues were cherished company.

  For them, and blame me for this still, I would sometimes press you to play the harp. You say now you winced as your wrists turned one arpeggio after another. Yet to me you had the face of an angel, always so good at reminding us of simpler times. When no harp was handy, to our colleagues, it is true, I might say: Ah, look what sophisticated words our daughter can read, how proficient she is. Often, it is true, I’d pick up a random book and there you would be, a shock to the system. You told me years later you hated this as well: how I made you feel like a performing monkey, but who would not be proud of an eight-year-old pronouncing such challenging words as argillaceous, your very first sign of being able to master an original difficulty, your voice carrying such strange and great authority? Your command surprised all of us.

  Mellifluous. Autochthonic. Erumpent.

  Your eyes flashed afterward, rating your audience. Since you could read any word from whatever technical book I happened to have handy, it is natural you wished to gauge whether we were worthy.

  Were we? What I can tell you is that at a young age, you happened to be proficient. I do not share this merely to inflate your ego. Of course not! Nor do I preach speed for its own sake, the burden of the prodigy. Of what use is it to arrive at an end sooner than others? Are we not in trouble because so many leaders appreciate the expediency of future production as a way to avoid acknowledgment of the past? Nor should we disguise the fact that your mother and I were proud, I most especially, that you could take in the advanced ideas of the past and future at such a jejune age.

  Of course later you blamed us for having encouraged you to skip a grade, swallowing time, as it were, but what were we supposed to do with you showing cleverness back in kindergarten? The teacher with the mole and slit skirts told me she often left the classroom with you in charge, reading to your fellow pupils. To that kind of child, what does the mundanity of first grade offer? You charge us for how you hold your pencil, never trained in banal cantilevering. And accused us for the meekness in your second-grade classroom that made you find it less embarrassing to sit in your seat and urinate, a small puddle spreading its shame, rather than leaving to sign your name outside the bathroom which both boys and girls used. That you were timid about signing your name stunned me. This was hardly a trait associated with my family line or the daughter I knew, the one with whom I now share so many fond memories, the one with whom I never had any trouble. How surprising then to learn that you carried your wet balled-up underwear back and forth in your satchel for weeks before stowing it in the back of some drawer marked miscellaneous, a word you pronounced with such lisping sweetness, a mark of your advancement.

  But to return to the point, once I had a lover, before I was with your mother, of course, for all that your mother liked to say I was a great admirer of others, to which I ask are women not set down around us? Would you tell someone in a rose garden to close his eyes or at the seaside to stop breathing salt air? Everyone ends up with a particular menu of tastes. My own point here is that this lover to whom I refer liked me to slap her a bit and also to yank her hair once we were between the sheets. I suppose I should say when we made love, since your round belly shows you, too, have arrived at an unblushing stage, having disported with one of the young men with whom I have spied you, boys with such large Adam’s apples it is clear you must have, as a girl growing up, appreciated one of your neighbors, one of those gangly boys for whom all energy collects at the throat.

  To return to the point: I concur, making love is no blushing matter. Of course in my era we were idealists. In folk songs, girls and women were flirty but during our meetings so impossibly earnest, and how hard it was to understand these two aspects living together. Suture together a red-hot wriggly bonobo bottom to the bespectacled head of Karl Marx
and you can imagine how we boys felt. If we rookie surgeons managed the suture, we enjoyed what came once we had executed enough healing on that pesky mind-body dialectic, making our subsequent wriggling a healthy part of the new philosophies with which we stuffed ourselves.

  At such times, if one coupled with a flitty girl who turned out to be capable of earnest delivery, one felt oneself a lion of the nation, the loin of its future. If you didn’t live through our times, this line of reasoning may be hard to understand. But our flutes and guitars, the fitful gyrating along with our chatter about the new world order, all of it served as a vine up toward the bedroom and let us know we helped a good system ascend toward its historically inevitable triumph. Not to linger on this point too much but say you were a man with full-blooded sympathies, it is natural that after you lay with enough Trotsky admirers, you knew you formed part of the national pride, so admirable and sporting. To any female you needed promise little, each a fertile seedbed into which you might bequeath the pearl of patrimony while also trusting no seedbed or pearl would betray our collective good faith, none of us thinking that one day we might have to become individuals all over again, knowing the pain of the adolescent forced to take matters into our own hands.