Porn & Revolution in the Peaceable Kingdom

by Micaela Morrissette

  While she watched cross-legged on the floor in front of the couch, Tim stroked her hair and drank another glass of wine, listening to his new favorite album, of coyote calls in the desert recorded by space satellites and mixed with the rhythmic long beats of owl wings in flight. Then Mimi wanted a snack, so Tim had her read all the front-page headlines, feeding her an orange wedge each time she sounded out the words correctly. He sent her into the bathroom to wash the juice off her face, and heard her go from there into her bedroom and begin playing with her workout machine. She liked Shark Yoga the best, and panted out the screechy, keening names of the positions together with the instructor as she leaned and curved, shot forward, arced back on her gel-filled mat.

  By nine o’clock Mimi was yawning, and Tim suspected she’d snuck some of his wine for herself, so he supervised her teeth brushing and they both got into their pajamas. Because Tim had to spend the night immersed in a moisturizing electrolyte solution, she couldn’t sleep next to him, to his perpetual disappointment, but he had erected a little platform with a mattress on it across the foot of his bed, and she nestled there while he tucked her in and kissed her cheek. He turned out the lights, climbed into his sleep-bath, and felt around on the nightstand for his mystery novel, which he switched on to lo-lite. But he was tired, too, and he realized that soon Mimi would murmur him to sleep, as she did most nights.

  “Timtimtim,” she crooned blearily.

  “Mmmph.”

  “Can I have a car?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Can I have a spaceship?”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Can I have a bicycle?”

  “You don’t ride your tricycle.”

  “Can I have an ice cream?”

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “My favorite flavor is red.”

  “I thought you liked butterscotch.”

  “No, my flavor for the car I want.”

  “If you can find a car that tastes like butterscotch, we’ll think about buying it.”

  Mimi snickered. “I want a swimming pool.”

  “The yard isn’t big enough.”

  “It would be if our house could float inside the pool.”

  “Then we’d always be wet. And you hate the rain.”

  “We don’t have to fill it with water.”

  “What else do you want to fill it with?”

  “Gold dust,” said Mimi. “Cake. Flowers, neon. Music, feathers, eyeballs, fire, shipwrecks. Locust shells.”

  Tim thought he caught a hint of dissatisfaction in her tone, but then he heard her breath begin to stumble into a light snoring. He let himself drift away, too, before he could begin to worry.

  When he woke in the night, Mimi was gone, as she always was. On his way back from the bathroom, he poked his head into her room to make sure she’d covered up with blankets in her pink cradle. But the cradle was empty, and so was the big round bed.

  Somehow he knew, even before he went to her window. There she was, on the lawn with Yoyo, their pj’s in a dark heap, a stain on the grass, their bodies sealed together lengthwise, their faces in each other’s crotches, lapping and suckling. Yoyo had his hands clasped around her head as if he might twist it off. Dimly, through the merciful, deafening rush of blood to Tim’s brain, Mimi’s voice leaked in. She was emitting animal noises, bleating, whimpering, and mewling, like a ventriloquist. He returned to the bathroom, where he turned on the cold-water spigot in the tub and held his head under the frigid torrent until his skull was fractured with jolts of clear, clean pain.

  He took a handful of aspirin and turned on his compy. On a site called Bonding Domestically Sexlessly and Meaningfully, he created a profile. On the partner checklist, he clicked female, any species. Any income, any diet. Literate, within ten miles. Pets and adopted offspring okay. The site sent him a Blind Date Super Match for an African Gray parrot named Hannah. She had dull, flat feathers and a chip in her beak, but Tim thought, squinting, nice sad eyes. He put in his credit code and clicked accept. For an additional fifteen credits, the site made a reservation for him and Hannah at a chic cocktails-and-canapés place called Canopy.

  * * *

  Canopy had a rainforest theme, which Tim guessed was why Hannah had put it on her venue list, but when he saw her waiting at the bar, hunched over her coco colada, the glossy leaves, orchids, and serpentine vines that covered the walls and ceiling made her look even dowdier than she had in her picture. Nevertheless, when he walked up and nudged her shoulder, she brightened and smiled, and nipped at her garnish with a rapid nervousness he found appealing.

  “Hi!” she said. “Sorry, I’m early.”

  “No problem,” said Tim. “I’m right on time. Pretty boring, huh?”

  They laughed spastically at each other.

  The bartender, a sleek albino boa with pale pink tribal tattoos all over her body, gave them a disdainful smile, and asked if they were ready to be seated. Lurching forward to pull out Hannah’s chair for her, Tim found himself in competition with their server, and they wound up pushing her in together awkwardly, their combined effort a little too forceful, so that her plumage squashed up against the edge of the table.

  “Oof,” said Hannah. “Wow. What service!”

  “I’m incredibly strong,” said Tim, approaching his own chair and scooting it in with trepidation.

  “Ha!” said Hannah. “You’re very funny.”

  “I have it all,” said Tim.

  Feverishly, they regarded their menus.

  “Do you want to hear the specials?” said the server, evidently still standing there.

  “Sure!” said Hannah.

  “Absolutely,” said Tim.

  The server recited the specials like a priest giving last rites to the dying, craning his simian head back and pinching his nostrils as if afraid to catch whatever Tim and Hannah had. They nodded appreciatively to one dish or another. “Astute choices,” intoned the server indifferently, and glided off.

  When he left, Hannah leaned over and confessed, “I can’t remember a single thing we just ordered!”

  “Me either,” said Tim, although he could.

  They said what they did. Hannah taught astronomy at a secondary-level nursery school for goats and sheep. “They couldn’t care less, of course,” she said, “or else they hate it with a passion, but then again, they’re all really good at it. Teenagers!”

  “Hey, that’s really interesting,” said Tim. “Astronomy, huh? You must never be bored with that stuff in your head. That’s great. I’m a stock boy at Wal-Mart.”

  “Sure, yeah,” said Hannah. “It says in your profile that the benefits are great and you have a close bond with your coworkers?”

  “That’s true,” Tim confirmed. He supposed she now realized that he hadn’t bothered to read her profile before making the date. Maybe she thought that was because he was so into her photo.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I love my job. And I have a nice home, and a human. It’s funny how your life just comes together without even trying. Well, you’re trying, but you’re not planning. You work hard in the moment, but you don’t know what lies ahead, and then one day you realize that what lies ahead is exactly what’s happening now. You’ve become this animal who is what he is. It’s so easy. Such a relief. We’re really lucky, I think. You can just trust evolution, these days. No more dead ends.”

  “That’s a really great attitude,” said Hannah, slightly despondent.

  The food arrived, six tiny trays of cunning this and clever that. Tim felt exhausted just looking at them. His appetite had vanished. Hannah leaned forward and immediately began pecking at the bananas cayenne with anguished intensity. Tim placed the end of one of his bulges in a plate of bloodfruit-infused ayahuasca foam and let the fierce little bubbles soak in through his tissue as he waited for the buzz to hit.

  Eventually, Hannah said, “Yup, I really admire how positive you are, Tim. I’d like to learn to feel that way. Sometimes it just seems to me that modern
life is too solitary for me. I guess I’m a throwback! I know that the bonds I have with friends, colleagues, and students are really more reliable and straightforward than the copulatory alliances that animals forged back in the day, but … I don’t know.” She crushed a candied macadamia in one pensive claw. “I guess I should tell you that this is my first date in a long time since my previous relationship ended.”

  Tim looked up, startled. “You had a chaste partnership before?”

  “Uh huh,” said Hannah. “It was a really good experience for … well, for me, anyway, and, you know, it really felt right being protected and also protective. Because people can say all they want that, of course, no one has any natural predators anymore, but the world—the world’s a natural predator, isn’t it? A big natural predator! I mean, time is, and gravity is, and radiation, and ourselves. It’s … for me, it was good to have someone to count on, and to know that I could trust him because I knew that he trusted me, too, that if he were in trouble I’d be the person he’d turn to. But—sorry!” she added suddenly, laughing. Some macadamia sprayed out from her beak over her breast and she preened for a moment, futilely. “Is this probably all a bit much for a first date, or a— Is this a bit much for you?”

  “No, no,” said Tim. Hannah depressed him unutterably, but he did want to know more. He had met so few animals who had domestic alliances at all, and he’d never known anyone whose alliance had failed. It had not even occurred to him that that might happen. “Did you two have adoptees?”

  Hannah shook her head. “I wanted to, but we never got that far. We had a human, but he took her when he went.”

  “What happened?” asked Tim. He was vaguely aware that his questioning was more ruthless than sympathetic, but he couldn’t help it, or, he acknowledged, he didn’t much care.

  She sighed, and the ruff of down around her neck fleeced out as her head sunk slightly into her chest. “I don’t really know,” she said, gesturing weakly. “I don’t think he liked the idea of my depending on him, and I honestly don’t think that if anything bad had ever happened to him that it would have even crossed his mind to come to me for help. He was a pig, and very cerebral and self-reliant and self-contained. And, well … you know, I think he was just bored, living with me. Living alone, you know, every day after work could be different for him. One day he could be a film buff, and the next day he could go for a long run around the lake, or he could cook up one of the experimental chilis he used to make when we were first dating, or he could hunker down with a book and a whisky, or he could be this rambunctious guy out hitting all the bars: anything. With me, if he didn’t come home as usual, I’d worry, and if he wanted to cook he might find I was already busy in the kitchen, or I might not like the movies he queued up, and we only had the one compy, so we couldn’t watch different things—but, I guess, more than anything, it was just that I was always there. And that was boring. So he left. And he took our little human girl, which I didn’t understand, if he didn’t want to be tied down … And so. It was hard for me. I pulled out all my feathers and I wasn’t eating, and then I had a hysterical pregnancy and became egg-bound. It’s been a rough couple of years. But. I just wanted to be honest about that. And I don’t want to freak you out! Because I wouldn’t be dating again if I didn’t believe that I was ready for it. But I also think, I guess, that I owe it to you to let you know what I’m looking for. I don’t just want someone to take me bee-dancing or whatever. I want someone to make a life with.”

  Tim realized he still had his bulge in the sticky ayahuasca tray. He took it out. His whole top-right nodule was numb. “I didn’t mean to eat all the ayahuasca,” he apologized. Then he added, “I already have a life. I’m sorry.”

  He could hear the scratch of Hannah’s nails as she curled her claws around the edge of her seat. For a moment, he knew exactly the little rush of misery that was dizzying her. “You have a nothing life, Tim,” she said. “I’m not trying to be revengeful or anything, I just want to say. You’re looking for someone to just walk in and fill the empty space you’re troubled by? That’s not how it works, you know. You have to start all over again from scratch with your soul-animal, and build together from the bottom up.”

  “With respect,” said Tim, “you don’t actually know me.”

  Hannah shrugged and got up. “What’s awful is how bad I feel about this,” she told him. “I could see the minute you walked in here that you weren’t right, you weren’t ready, that if things did go any further with you they’d end terribly. And I still tried to make you like me! I was ready to deceive myself, and set myself up for all kinds of heartbreak all over again. Because even that would be better than being alone. I don’t believe for a minute that you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  Tim stared down at this lap and began melting two of his nodules into each other. “I’m sorry you didn’t have a good time, Hannah,” he said. “But let’s face it, nobody ever knows what anybody’s talking about.”

  “See?” she said, putting her bag over her shoulder. “You’re lonely, too.”

  Tim tried to pay, but the maître d’ told him the lady had taken care of it already. On the bus, the coco colada and psychotropic foam hit him at last, and he leaned his head against the window, so woozy that his cheek began to drip down the glass, leaving an ugly grayish smear. When they reached his stop, everyone on the other side of the bus began to laugh and point, and when he got off, he found Mimi copulating on the hood of the neighbors’ car, not with Yoyo this time (instead, Tim observed him behind the windscreen, masturbating in the navigator’s seat), but with a naked, scabby, tangle-haired, filth-encrusted human who must have been living in the nearby park. The wild male had Mimi facedown, his penis fully inserted, and a finger jerking in her anus; and she, gasping and writhing, appeared to be pissing herself. That must have accounted for the passengers’ hilarity, thought Tim. Without a word, he grabbed her by the hair and yanked her out from under the stray, dragging her into the house, her ankles and calves scraping painfully along the concrete driveway as she struggled for footing.

  Mimi screeched and scratched at him. “Tim, what’s wrong?” she yowled. “Stop it, let me go!”

  Tim locked her in her room without a word, went to the bathroom, threw up his tropical canapés, took three sleeping pills, deleted his dating profile, and oozed into bed.

  * * *

  In the morning Tim said nothing to Mimi, but he could not help being stern and cold in his manner, and she ate her pancakes sulkily, not bothering, as she usually did, to wheedle him for a cup of coffee. Tim’s head still hurt, and he was dizzy and faintly sick from the sleeping pills. In the train on the way to work, though, compunction struck him. Poor Mimi, who couldn’t be blamed for anything. He, Tim, was a thoughtless tyrant. Not only did he hold her natural human urges, the very things that endeared her to him, against her; but he was failing to provide her with a stimulating environment. Probably she wouldn’t be constantly coupling in the yard with Yoyo and every other vagrant in heat if she had the things that would keep her amused, a toy car and a swimming pool and new, unheard-of flavors of ice cream. Tim resolved to make it up to her. He would use some of his personal days. They would take a trip together. For a moment, he felt like himself again, steady and safe.

  But at Tim’s beloved Wal-Mart, things were wrong. As soon as the tubes sucked him through the entrance, he heard Edwina yelling, strident and harsh, and the gluey, flat tones of their octopus supervisor, Nestor, dripping with malice.

  All animals were equal, sure, but much as bacterial hives like Sunny were precious and different and almost sacred to Tim, octopi made him and Edwina and countless others shrink away in xenophobic horror. Tim was ashamed of this feeling and behaved with extra bootlickingness to Nestor on account of his bad conscience. Edwina’s hatred of Nestor was pure and uncomplicated and had her constantly on the verge of summary termination. Sometimes she claimed that octopi were overlords from another planet, sometimes she argued that they were e
xperiments in genetic engineering from humantimes, and sometimes she hissed to Tim with fierce delight that the humans themselves were biopuppets of the octopi, the unconscious tools of a vast squid conspiracy that no animal had even begun to comprehend.

  Today she was right up in Nestor’s face, snarling at him about corporate brainwashing and informed consumerism.

  “What’s going on?” Tim whispered to Marcus, a big muscly Norway rat who, according to the all-female team of greeters, had pheromones whose potency could not be diminished even by a century of clonic reproduction.

  Marcus was clearly thrilled to be asked. “Your girl Edwina is losing her shit,” he informed Tim. His whispers quivered with subversive excitement. “Nestor sent one of the sleepers through the checkout. Five-x-three credits in purchases! And then straight through the suctions into the parking lot, still snoozing like a baby. Oh, man. Probably gonna get plowed by a bus out there. And better that than waking up human brained in the middle of the city, no idea what her name is, with thirteen bags full of flashlights and nasal spray and not a dime in her pocket.”

  Tim’s stomach lurched. “Who was it?” he said urgently. “Who was the sleeper?”

  Marcus shrugged. “Some hot little fruit bat,” he said. “Sweet sticky proboscis; been here two, three weeks.”

  Relieved but not yet released from his tension, Tim kept up his anxious questioning. “I don’t get it,” he told Marcus. “What about company policy? Did the sleeper stop moving?”

  “Nah,” said Marcus, sticking out his front teeth contemptuously. “But today’s forty percent off pollutants, and she got caught up in register four’s long line of juiced-up multisex amphibia.” He shuddered. “Buncha freaks. Nestor said there was nothing in the policy about letting the sleepers pay for their purchases and vamoose. So he helped her through—helped, mind you—and now she’s a lost soul in the world of the waking for sure.”

  Tim went in search of Sunny, somehow still anxious for her well-being. He found her in toys, jostling a squeaky ball into her cart. As ravishing as ever, her phosphorescence seemed to Tim nonetheless a shade duller and murkier than it had been before. At lunch he crept into the utilities closet and dimmed Wal-Mart’s beautiful fluorescents, then climbed to the employee lunchroom on the mezzanine. Peeking out over the railing, he saw Sunny’s glow, strong again in the gloom, and felt better.