Hall of Small Mammals

by Thomas Pierce

  They were watching two polar bears paddle around in a clear blue pool when she leaned too far over the concrete wall for a photograph and fell eight feet down into the water. Simon was too young to do anything but watch as she splashed and screamed, scraping at the wall like a lunatic. A crowd formed. A man dangled his jacket down to her and she grabbed hold of it. Because she wasn’t strong enough to hold on for very long she kept plunking back down into the water. A lady who worked for the zoo ran over with a bucket and tossed fish parts into the pit to keep the polar bears distracted, but one of the bears lunged and bit his grandmother’s leg. When she finally emerged over the concrete wall—dripping wet, bleeding, embarrassed—they ripped away her pants and discovered that the bite wound, thank God, wasn’t life-threatening. Still, all these years later, Simon sometimes dreams about polar bears. They come after him with impossibly large teeth and suffocative fur. They chase him down streets and up stairs—to the perimeter of his dreams. When he wakes he can feel their chilly wet breath on his neck.

  Stupid People Falling Ouch Try Not to Laugh

  A man is on his way to meet a friend for a late drink and stops at an ATM for some cash. His wallet is ridiculously fat—not with cash but with movie stubs, wads of receipts that he will never actually sort, a photo of his wife, a photo of his long-dead basset hound, and all his cards: the Anthem insurance card, the library card, the one-year pass to the contemporary art museum, and of course his many credit cards. The bank is closed for the night. The lights are off in the main lobby. The ATM is not directly on the street but in a small glass anteroom. Accessing it after hours requires that you slide your bank card into the slot by the door.

  The man inserts his card, and a tiny light above it flashes red three times. He inserts his card again and pulls it back out more deliberately. The light blinks red again.

  His name is Marshall, and he manages a nearby stationery shop. He is also an accomplished cellist. He is third chair in the city symphony. His favorite composer is Brahms. Sometimes when he hears Hungarian Dance No. 5 he has a funny feeling that is difficult to explain to others. He’s told only one or two people about it. The feeling involves the possibility of a past life.

  Through the thick bulletproof glass, faintly, Marshall can hear music playing—not Brahms but something else. It’s that Simon Punch song, he realizes, the one from the Julia Roberts movie about beekeepers. He consults the pictogram on the card reader to make sure his card was properly oriented. He rubs the magnetic strip back and forth across his pleated khakis to make sure it wasn’t dirty and then he inserts it again. The red light flashes. Maybe something is wrong with the reader or with the ATM behind the glass. Maybe it’s out of order and the bank forgot to hang up a sign. A woman with jangly gold earrings approaches with clacking cowboy boots.

  “Let me guess,” she says. “Broken?”

  “Might be,” he says, and steps aside so she can try her own card.

  Her card is silver. She slides it in the slot and pulls it back out hard and fast, and when it flashes red, she does it again, hard and fast. Marshall can’t help drawing certain conclusions about this woman. He pictures the woman naked and on top. The light flashes red, red, red.

  “What a piece of shit,” she says. The woman looks to be in her forties. She taps the bottom of the door with her stiff boot toe. She has on way too much mascara. It’s like her eyes are at the back of a dark cave. “There’s another machine around the corner outside a liquor store,” she says, “but it’ll charge you a hundred dollars practically.”

  “If it’s broken, they should have put out a sign,” he says.

  “I only need like ten dollars.”

  If he had ten dollars, Marshall would give it to her. They stand there, peering through the glass for a few more moments, the traffic moving lazily behind them on the street. Marshall imagines throwing something at the glass, shattering it, the two of them stepping through together triumphantly.

  The woman pushes at the door without sliding in her card at all. It opens, magically. The red light was meaningless; the room was unlocked all along. They roll their eyes at each other: Of course it was open! She goes in first, and he waves her toward the machine. He says, “Be my guest.”

  “I’ll be quick,” she says. He waits a few feet behind her. This isn’t a large space, and he could see her screen if he wanted. When the ATM spits out the woman’s money, she turns to him and holds up her receipt, victorious.

  She leaves, and Marshall inserts his card, punches in his number, and selects the fast cash option. The machine buzzes and the money pops out and the receipt curls toward him. He checks it quickly, then looks again. His account balance, it’s very low. Thousands of dollars are missing.

  Susan. This has to be Susan’s doing. She recently moved out. “Temporarily,” she said. It was a total shock. Sure, they argued—about the way he drags his feet when he walks, about who it was that forgot to recork the red wine before bed—but this made them no different from any other couple.

  Susan said she was going to stay at her sister’s place, but he suspects his wife has a lover. That’s the only way to explain it. When Marshall called Susan’s sister, she said Susan was in the bathroom, but when his wife returned his call later that night it was from her cell phone and there was strange dance music in the background. She was at some kind of party, obviously drunk, and all she wanted to talk about were tiny chairs. She could barely hear him. She wasn’t answering his questions. It was infuriating.

  “Enough with the Brahms,” his wife used to say.

  Many years ago he told his wife how he feels hearing Hungarian Dance No. 5, about that hazy cloud that descends, about the cascade of images both familiar and unfamiliar, a long dusty street, a distant flat mountain, ships on a waterfront, white horses and carriages, a ten-story hotel with ornate columns and a large gold clock in the lobby, a bag over his shoulder, a beautiful woman in a maid’s outfit, a bustling kitchen, a pantry with white shelves full of food, the light sneaking under the door, the woman’s dress raised high, her legs spreading to receive him, the flour spilling onto their shoulders, her breath hot in his ear. “That’s not a past life,” his wife told him, “that’s historical porno.”

  Marshall examines the receipt as he turns away from the ATM. His wife, who hasn’t even collected all her clothes from their closet yet, has basically robbed him. He can think of no other word for it. She’s stolen his money; she’s going to strange tiny chair parties; she’s sleeping in another man’s bed.

  Marshall has forgotten that he is enclosed by glass. When he runs into the glass wall, it doesn’t shatter or crack—but wobbles. He falls back onto the floor. One palm lands on the greasy white tile, the other on the dark rubber mat with the bank’s insignia. The receipt is on the ground in front of him. There’s a tiny camera in the ATM and another security camera looking down on him from the top right corner of the room.

  Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Man Falling Down

  Among Thomas Edison’s earliest films you will find footage of zooming trains, electrocuted elephants, boxing cats, and a snuff-induced sneeze. Surely an early documentation of a falling man comes as no surprise. There had to be a first. The footage is grainy, and the frames skip. The man is one of Edison’s assistants. Until they tripped him with a wire, he was under the impression they were making a film called Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Man Jumping Up and Down. Falling down has never been the same. Now we can watch the same fall a hundred times. We can laugh at it. We can study it. We can slow it down. We can speed it up. We can linger on a single frame. We can see the birth of fear and panic in a human face. We can identify that moment when a person suddenly realizes that he is no longer in control of what happens next. But the simple truth is that we are never in control of what happens next.

  Falling down is the universe being honest with you, finally. It’s life as it really is.

  This occurs to M
arshall as he walks home from the bank, his plans canceled, an ugly bump already bulging on his forehead. His wife is out for the night, no doubt, probably having the time of her life with all their money, and he will spend the rest of his evening with a bag of frozen peas pressed to his head, like an idiot. He feels like throwing a rock at the canoodling couple across the street. He wants to kick the cat that darts across his feet on the stoop. That airplane overhead, the little flashing dot of light, he wishes it would come crashing down out of the sky and just put him out of his misery, kaboom.

  People Falling on Snow/Ice Funny!!!

  Twenty-two thousand feet overhead, Beth is on her way out West. When her seatmate leans toward her and says his name is Randolph, she laughs.

  “What’s so funny?” he wants to know.

  “Nothing,” she says, embarrassed, hand rising to her mouth. She’s never been the giggly sort. Her father used to call her his Gloomy Little Mac-Beth. She wonders if it’s possible her seatmate is having this effect on her. “I’m just excited,” she says. “That’s all. I drank too much water or something. Maybe it’s the air pressure.”

  The man has a white linen pocket square in his sports coat and some kind of gel product in his brown hair that makes it shine. He’s in the window seat and he has his shoes off, one socked tumescence rubbing the other. She tries not to examine his feet. Through the porthole the darkness is interrupted every few seconds by the flashing bulbs on the wing. Sometimes the wings appear to wobble, a fact she finds very disconcerting.

  “Let me guess,” Randolph says. “A ski trip.”

  “Snowboarding, actually,” she says. The trip is an early graduation gift from her mother. Beth is meeting a friend at the airport. In a few months Beth will have her B.A. in sociology. Her thesis is a case study of frequent-flier programs. According to her laptop’s Find function, the term sociotechnical appears in her paper seventy-three times. Though she has studied frequent-flier programs, Beth does not belong to any herself. She doesn’t find this fact ironic, as she has flown maybe three times in her entire life, present flight included.

  “I do development,” the man says. “For a children’s hospital.”

  She nods politely, too politely, and the man unloads about the latest capital campaign, how they’re trying to raise $5.2 million, and how he’s close to getting it—so, so close. Fingers crossed he’s lined up a very famous actor to help raise the last few million. She asks him what actor, and he says he shouldn’t reveal that yet, but then nuzzles close and whispers, Skeet Ulrich. “I’m sorry,” she says, “who?” He gives her a wounded look.

  When the plane lands, they stand up too early, together, and have to hunch beneath the bins. “Well, it was nice to meet you,” she says when they start to move, but then there’s another delay, and he says, “We’re never going to get out of here, are we?”

  “There must be some kind of way out of—” she says but doesn’t finish the lyric because the line is moving again.

  They part ways in the terminal, but she sees him again at baggage claim. Before wheeling away his roller suitcase, he tips an imaginary top hat to her. When her bag shows up, Beth takes a bus to the rental car office. Amy, her friend since grade school, is already there with the keys. The drive to the resort is almost two hours. They talk about the end of school and the drugs they’ve never tried but might still and all their friends who are already engaged and how statistically at least three of those friends will be divorced within five years. They eat gross fast food on the way into town, and by the time they check in to their condo, it’s after ten but feels more like one a.m.

  The next morning, amazingly, she spots Randolph at the bottom of a slope. She taps him on the shoulder and says, “Good morning, seatmate.”

  “What are the chances?” he says. “I’m surprised you recognized me in this getup.”

  His sunglasses are up high on his forehead. He wants to catch the next lift with her: then, he says, they can be liftmates too. The joke seems to embarrass him. Beth doesn’t know where Amy is, but they don’t have plans to meet up, until later at the lodge for lunch. “Sure,” she says, “why not? I can do another run.”

  They ride the lift together to the top of the mountain, the metal parts creaking, their legs dangling over the white. “See you at the bottom,” he says at the top and shoves off with his poles. He skis very fast. He might be showing off for her. She has trouble keeping up with him on the snowboard, cutting back and forth through the powdery snow, but she tries her best. She’s moving faster than she ever has before. I’m a gazelle, she thinks. I’m a gazelle gazelle gazelle . . . She’s moving so fast she can hardly hold on to that one simple thought. She almost collides with another snowboarder but she doesn’t fall on the slope.

  Her fall comes later in the evening as she and Randolph—still together—are descending a short wooden staircase outside one of his favorite restaurants in town. The steps are icy. She comes down on her right knee and right side. Her jeans are wet and grimy now. Possibly her foot is broken. As Randolph helps her stand, his arm under her arm, she sees a kid across the street in a lime green parka, his cell phone’s camera eye aimed directly at her.

  “Try walking on it,” Randolph says. “Just walk a little.”

  She hobbles around in a circle. It’s not as bad as she thought it was. It might just be a sprain. She has her arm draped over his shoulder now. They go inside together. He’s made a reservation for two. After sharing a dessert, both of them a little tipsy from the wine, he confesses that Randolph is actually his middle name, and if she’d rather, she can call him Arnie.

  “Hello, Arnie,” she says, and giggles again. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m laughing. I’m not usually like this. I’m not. I think it’s possible that I’ve been overserved. Is that possible? I’ve lost track.”

  Funniest Thing You Ever Seen—Drunk Guy in Convenience Store

  Lots of people fall down drunk.

  Marshall, the cellist, is in the 7-Eleven next door to the stationery shop that he manages. It’s a little after midnight. The bump on his forehead healed a few days ago, but his wife, Susan, hasn’t been home in all that time. She won’t even return his calls about the missing money. He roams the aisles in search of snacks and cheap wine, dragging his feet, in a daze. He slips in front of the fridges.

  “You all right?” the cashier asks, worried he might have left a puddle with the mop, worried about a lawsuit.

  The cellist grabs the fridge door and pulls himself off the sticky floor.

  “Where’s the Big League Chew?” he asks.

  The cashier points to the next aisle. Marshall hasn’t chewed any Big League chewing gum since he was in grade school. He buys two pouches of it and takes it home. He sits at the kitchen table alone, tucking grape strands between his gums and bottom lip. He puts on a record.

  The gum doesn’t taste at all like he remembers it, and Susan is never coming back home. He drags all her clothes out of their closet, wire hangers bouncing across the carpet, and dumps them on the bed with the intention of bagging them for donation. Near midnight he wakes up, sprawled across a mountain of her dresses and sweaters, his lower back throbbing. He swallows a few chalky white ibuprofens in front of the bathroom mirror and calls Susan’s sister again.

  “Stop leaving messages here,” she says. “I refuse to be a part of this. I refuse to be the go-between.”

  “Just put her on the phone,” he says. “Please.”

  “I’m not going in there. No way.”

  “Going in where? Is she with someone?”

  She takes a deep breath. “Marshall, let’s not do this. Besides, it was more hers than yours anyway, wasn’t it?”

  “What was more hers?” he asks—the money or the marriage? But she’s hung up. Marshall, groggy, digs for his pants under all Susan’s clothes. He grabs his fat wallet off the dresser. He’s halfway down the block when he r
ealizes he’s forgotten his keys and locked himself out.

  Funny Blooper TV News

  A reporter for CNA29 News stands in front of the camera with her microphone, preparing for a live stand-up. Her bangs are like cartoon puffs of blond smoke, and she’s wearing a teal jacket with brass buttons and monstrous shoulder pads. Behind her, across the street, is a blue two-story house. All around it a maze of yellow police tape wraps through the lean pine trees.

  A man was murdered in the house last night. Jealous lover situation, one officer said earlier. At this point there is very little to report about the murder but because it occurred in a nice part of town the reporter’s producer thought they should probably cover the story anyway. Why she needs to introduce her story live in front of the house, the reporter isn’t quite sure. It feels indecent somehow.

  She never used to flub her lines but lately she’s been having issues—skipping words, mixing up clauses. Once upon a time her producer called her One-Take Tammy, but she’s been so distracted recently. She shouldn’t even be here, she realizes, but at the hospital with her mother. “I’ll haunt you forever if I die in this hospital alone,” her mother said yesterday. Why would any mother say such a thing to her daughter?

  When she was growing up, her mother was always bringing around different boyfriends. When Tammy was sixteen, one of the boyfriends lumbered into her room around midnight. He climbed into her bed and grabbed hold of her, and when Tammy squirmed loose and flipped on the lights, the boyfriend pretended to have been confused about which door was which. If Tammy’s mother dies, so much will have gone unsaid between them. Tammy should be the one haunting her.

  Last night Tammy slept in the hideous recliner beside her mother’s hospital bed. Around two a.m. her mother turned on the television.