The Bestiary

by Nicholas Christopher

She put her arms around me, then rose up and kissed my cheek. “I’m glad you’re back safe, Xeno. Thanks for everything.”

  I turned up my collar and walked to the subway. The wind stung when I rounded the corner. Inside I felt empty, but also relieved to be leaving. I was exhausted, physically and emotionally. Mrs. Moretti was right about that. The Morettis were the only family I had; seeing them for Thanksgiving was like an official homecoming—with all the mixed feelings that entailed. I felt as if I had arrived from nowhere and was headed nowhere. In between, it was a shock to be with people who had known and cared about me my entire life. Perhaps that was why my visit with them, like my recent encounters with Mr. Hood and Evgénia, was quickly falling away from me—as if it already belonged to the distant past. Time had become so elastic that a single day could feel like a month, a month like an hour. I didn’t know if this was a product of raw fatigue or an unconscious attempt to put the war behind me.

  Only when I was on the subway did it hit me that, for the first time I could remember, there were no animals—no monkeys, lizards, parrots, not even a cat or dog—in the Moretti household.

  As for the salamander, eventually I learned that it meant “fire dragon” in Greek. Aristotle said that it repelled fire. Pliny claimed it was the only animal that sought to extinguish fires, which was why, in the Revesby bestiary, it was called “the fire-fighter.”

  NATHALIE WORE a red bandanna around her head, Apache-style. Her hair was long now. Three bloodred streaks—war paint—flared off her cheeks, like wings. She was at war. Her scarf was an American flag. Her wraparounds were opaque. Beneath a leather jacket she wore a skull-and-crossbones T-shirt. The seat of her jeans was stitched with multiple patches: the hammer and sickle, a clenched fist, a mushroom cloud, the peace sign, Edvard Munch’s scream. In the twenty-four hours I had been in town, I hadn’t once seen her smile. And that included the thirty minutes we spent in bed.

  We were on the Blue Line, en route to Government Center. The subway cars were packed with people heading for the rally. The city expected a crowd of ten thousand, and forty thousand would show up. Nathalie’s small contingent, the Trotsky Worker-Student Alliance, was going to rendezvous near Faneuil Hall. I was one of five vets opposed to the war who would join them. A former lance corporal named Smoltz had gotten my name from Nathalie and contacted me. I had my medals pinned to my denim jacket. It was the first and only time I wore them. After the rally, everyone was to march across the bridge into Cambridge, first to MIT, then Harvard, to protest their research contracts with the Defense Department and the CIA. Several hundred cops and state troopers had been called in by the mayor. They were in full riot gear, armed with tear gas and rubber bullets.

  As we emerged into the crisp air and the tumult of the crowd—bullhorns, chants, police sirens—Nathalie turned to me. “We need you—I need you—to do something.”

  What she needed me to do was throw my medals onto the steps of the courthouse where the government was trying three antiwar leaders for sedition.

  I looked at her. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

  “Before what?”

  “Before we came down here.”

  “You mean you won’t do it?”

  “I mean I would’ve liked some time to think about it.”

  “You have time.” She glanced at her watch. “Twenty, maybe thirty, minutes.”

  She said this without a trace of irony.

  Smoltz was waiting for us beside a red white and blue van with curtained windows. The curtains were American flags adorned with skulls instead of stars. Smoltz was short and muscular, with a Mohawk and eyebrows that met over his nose. One of his eyes was off, so it didn’t feel like he was really looking at you. He wore a sleeveless leather vest and steel bracelets. His Purple Heart was pinned to his vest.

  His handshake was like a vise, and lasted too long. “Honored, bro,” he said.

  He introduced me to two other vets, a skinny helicopter gunner on crutches named Tomansky, who had a Bronze Star, and a black Marine with a missing ear who said his squad had given him the name Cork “because I floated down the Kang River on a tree trunk.” The fifth vet hadn’t shown up.

  “He’s on a bus for Portsmouth,” Cork said, holding out his arm and mimicking someone shooting up. “His sister’s gonna take care of him.”

  Nathalie’s group was assembling around us. They wore red arm-bands. A girl in a trench coat and beret wore a skull mask. Her boyfriend, whose hair was even longer than Nathalie’s, had painted UNCLE $AM across his bare chest. Off to the side, a pair of middle-aged men in tweed jackets and flannel shirts stood tensely, conversing with Nathalie. They were the real Trotskyites, hard-core organizers from a splinter branch of the American Communist Party. That was as far left as you could go in the antiwar movement, and I wondered how Nathalie had arrived there so fast. Just a year earlier, she had preferred staying in bed all day, sipping her hookah and perusing ancient maps. When I asked her about it, she grew testy, insisting she had always held strong political beliefs. Perhaps remembering who she was talking to, she added that her sister’s death had been a brutal wake-up call. Then she reverted to the rote sloganeering I had been hearing from her all day: “The only lasting action is political action.”

  Around us the action never let up: speakers on a rickety stage exhorting the crowd in two-minute bursts; a band jamming on a flatbed truck; Hare Krishna initiates ringing bells; “bikers for peace” revving their engines. Some divinity students released 44,000 bloodred balloons—one for each American soldier killed in Vietnam—into the piercingly clear sky. Everyone looked up, except the police. Visors down, they squeezed their batons and scanned the crowd. The state troopers were lined up on side streets, ready to converge on the square. Barricades had been thrown up. Instinctively I checked them for a way out of there if things turned ugly. I didn’t see any way out.

  From behind one barricade vitriolic counter-demonstrators were taunting the crowd: America—Love it or leave it. They were buttoned-down pro-war students who didn’t want to fight themselves. Young Americans for Freedom, they called themselves. I hated them when I was in college, and I hated them even more now.

  Nathalie sidled up to me. “Well?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You won’t do it?”

  I shook my head.

  “What the fuck is the matter with you, Xeno? You told me yourself you hate the war.”

  “I do.”

  “And that those medals don’t mean a goddamn thing to you.”

  “They don’t.”

  “So?”

  The balloons were still visible, sailing in the wind toward the river. I was thinking about Murphy, torn in half in that forest.

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Jesus.”

  “The answer is no. I’ll march. I’ll sing. But not that.”

  She turned on her heel and returned to the men in tweed jackets. A stocky man with a black beard, my age, joined them. He was wearing a lumberjack shirt and combat boots. Grimacing, stoop-shouldered, he seemed to be carrying a tremendous weight. Nathalie spoke hurriedly to the three men. They glanced at me, and the bearded man’s grimace turned to a scowl. Then he turned his back on me, and Nathalie did the same.

  I should have left right then—not the rally, but the company of Nathalie and her friends. I wanted to be at the rally, to express my anger about the war. I had no idea what Murphy and the rest of my late comrades would have wanted me to do about the medals. I didn’t care. But whatever I did, it would be on my own terms. This could have been my big chance to purge myself of Operation Phoenix, but I didn’t see it that way. My shame over the medals was a private matter: I wasn’t going to try to exorcise it with a public act. The other vets could deal with their demons, and ghosts, as they saw fit.

  Nathalie’s bearded friend took the podium. His voice was high-pitched, his gestures broad. “I’m Tannen,” he hollered. No first name. After a rambling diatribe about the judge in
the sedition trial, he introduced the other vets, who one by one ascended the courthouse steps and tossed their medals at the door, Tomansky slow and solemn on his crutches, Cork and Smoltz pumping their fists.

  After a few more speeches, the crowd marched across the Memorial Bridge into Cambridge. I dropped back and walked beside a group called Doctors for Peace. At MIT, several hundred students broke away and surrounded the physics lab. They broke windows and hurled paint, chanting MIT, CIA, how many kids did you kill today? The cops moved in, but just when it seemed the students would disperse—a moment that yawned wide, then snapped shut—they stormed the building instead.

  Some marchers hung back, roaring in solidarity, but most of us surged on toward Central Square. Behind us we heard police whistles and sirens. Then tear gas wafted up the avenue, burning our eyes.

  At Harvard Square the cops were waiting for us. They were spooked by what had happened at MIT. Behind Plexiglas shields, they had encircled the Square. Reinforcements in rigid columns appeared on Brattle Street. An amplified voice ordered us to break up at once. Until then, the crowd had been restive, but unafraid; now panic set in. People at the center tried pushing their way to the periphery. Brandishing a permit, one of the march organizers approached a police captain. The captain threw the permit to the ground. The organizer started cursing him out.

  What happened next was reported in the newspapers as a riot. From where I stood, it was the police who rioted. Batons whirling, they charged the crowd. People ran in all directions. They were clubbed and kicked, some were trampled. Most poured into Harvard Yard, or rushed screaming into the MTA station, but I ducked down Plympton Street. I saw a girl dragged by the hair. A man on crutches thrown against a wall. Another girl with a bloody face. Then I saw Nathalie. A big cop had her cornered by the steps to a basement apartment. He was swinging for her head and she was barely dodging the baton. She didn’t see me come up behind the cop until the last moment—and he didn’t see me at all. I shoved him and he plunged down the steps headfirst, hitting some trash cans, making a terrible racket. I grabbed Nathalie’s hand and we ran, never looking back, across Mount Auburn Street, down an alley, through a parking lot, to the river. Following the cinder path, we stopped to catch our breath near an old boathouse.

  “Thanks,” Nathalie said, leaning against a tree. Her war paint was smeared, her bandanna was down around her neck.

  “Are you okay?”

  She nodded. “I couldn’t believe you were there. That was quick thinking.”

  “I wasn’t thinking. We’re lucky another cop didn’t see it.”

  “He was a pig. They’re all pigs.”

  I thought maybe the cop had broken his arm or leg.

  “Maybe he broke his neck,” Nathalie chimed into my thoughts. “It’d serve him right.”

  I looked at her. “Then your Trotsky pals could add another medal to my collection.”

  “You don’t seem upset about it.”

  “I’m not.”

  She refastened her bandanna. “I guess you learned to do that in the war.”

  “Do what?” I asked, but I knew what she was saying.

  “Go after people. Fight.”

  “I went after him because he was going to hurt you. We should get out of Cambridge. Are you going home?”

  She shook her head. “After the march, we planned to drive out to Walden Pond for a candlelight vigil.”

  “You think people will show up?”

  She stiffened slightly. “Everyone who can. Will you come with me?”

  I was surprised. “I don’t think so.”

  “Come on.”

  “Because I helped you out?”

  She took my hand. “Because I want you to.”

  In bed that morning, we had turned away from one another, Nathalie curling against the wall while I stared out the window, down the narrow block of brownstones, parked cars, and spindly trees. I felt as if I had been away forever. The entire city seemed smaller, alien and self-contained: as if I were looking into a diorama. Nathalie’s studio was sparsely furnished. Cheap curtains, no rug. In the fridge, there was skim milk, cornflakes, and a tin of coffee. After dressing in silence, we ate some cornflakes.

  Now, as we walked back to the bridge, I put my arm around her. The encounter with the cop had brought us closer than making love. But only on the surface, and not for long.

  We headed north on Route 1 in her old Saab. Dusk was falling. Between clusters of suburban houses, the woods were dense. As always, Nathalie drove hard, weaving through traffic, chain-smoking. We had lapsed into silence again. Nearing our destination, she turned to me suddenly.

  “I don’t know why you wouldn’t throw your medals, but I’m sorry I sprang it on you.”

  “Forget it.”

  She hesitated. “Would you throw them now—after what just happened?”

  “I’d do exactly what I did before.” I lit a cigarette with the dashboard lighter. “It has to do with me, not you. Not politics. I have to deal with it in my own way.”

  We followed a winding road through the Lynn Woods to Walden Pond. Among the few cars in the parking area was Smoltz’s van. Neither he nor any of Nathalie’s other comrades had been arrested. A few dozen people were milling in a picnic area. There were lighted candles on a redwood table, but no vigil. Joints were being passed, and bottles of wine. Cork was sitting alone, sipping from a flask. The girl with the skull mask was arguing with her boyfriend, who had a black eye. Someone else’s blood was spattered on her trench coat. Tannen was holding court beside a statue of Thoreau. People were agitated and loud, but his high-pitched voice was the most audible.

  He saw us, but didn’t return Nathalie’s wave.

  She fell into conversation with a furtive woman named Deirdre who was speaking into a portable tape recorder. Deirdre had recorded a running commentary during the riot, of which this was the coda; later, she would transcribe and publish it in the Boston Phoenix.

  I wandered off by myself. Night had fallen. The wind was cold. Familiar scents washed over me—soil, foliage, timber—but, like the sights and sounds of Boston, they seemed a part of the distant past. I climbed a slope behind the picnic area and peered through the trees at the pond. It shone silver beneath the moon. The shadow of an owl slid across the surface. Pines were reflected, inverted, along the far shore. After a few minutes, someone came up behind me, the dry leaves crackling underfoot.

  It was Tannen. “You’re not welcome here,” he said, stepping up close.

  I just stared at him.

  “Did you hear me?” He reached out suddenly and jiggled my medals. “How many people did you kill for these?”

  I slapped his hand away.

  “How many?” he demanded.

  I felt a hot rush up my spine. “Fuck you.”

  “Get out of here!” he shouted, pushing me in the chest.

  I grabbed the front of his jacket and backed him into a tree.

  “Let go of me,” he cried.

  I pressed my forearm into his throat. “You want to know how many? Thousands—tens of thousands! If you touch me again, I’ll kill you.”

  His face was red, his eyes bulging.

  “Stop it,” Nathalie screamed, hurrying up the slope. Smoltz was right behind her, and then Deirdre, recording everything.

  I released Tannen, and he stumbled, gasping.

  “You’re an animal,” Nathalie said through her teeth. “They made you into an animal.”

  Our eyes locked. “That’s right,” I said, walking past her, past all of them, across the slope into the woods. Within minutes, their voices were swallowed up by the darkness.

  I walked on, into deeper forest. I skirted a ravine filled with brush. I crossed a shallow stream where many animals—raccoons, a fox, a bobcat—had left tracks when they came to drink.

  I had no idea how much time had passed, or how far I had gone, when I stopped to rest beneath an enormous pine. The moon lit up the passing clouds. The wind had died down, and my own bre
athing filled my ears. I remembered as a child, in bed, listening to my breathing and feeling there was nothing more to me than that. As if my body had slipped from this world and left my spirit behind—perhaps to join those animal spirits that my grandmother said filled our apartment. I had wished I could remain that way, weightless, invisible, freed from shame and fear.

  Years later, I learned that among the Seminole Indians, when a woman died in childbirth, the infant was held over her face to receive, from her final exhalation, her parting spirit, to protect him from within. On the Hawaiian island of Niihau when a woman died in those circumstances, a bird named makuahine ‘uhane, “the mother’s spirit,” flew out of her mouth and alighted on a tree, to watch over the baby and give it courage. I hoped maybe that was the bird whose shadow appeared in my mother’s photograph, and that though I never saw it, it was watching over me.

  The moon rose higher and stars filled the sky. I listened to the owls’ hooting. And the sharper cries of the ravens. I unpinned my medals and hung them from their ribbons on a pine branch. The Silver Star glinted and the Purple Heart spun in the breeze. Then I set off again, toward a clearing visible through the trees.

  Those woods were filled with ravens. I knew that ravens adorn their nests with bright objects. And that on the fortieth day of the Great Flood the raven was the first bird Noah dispatched from the ark, to bring back some sign of land. Soon he did the same with the dove, who first returned with an olive leaf, and the second time it was released didn’t return at all, which meant the earth must be dry.

  The raven is never mentioned again. Its fate is left ambiguous. But to me it’s clear: the raven kept flying as long as it could, and then drowned.

  4

  I WALKED OUT of the cypress grove in the Parc Montsouris onto the rue de la Santé. It was hot, and the trees on the sidewalk barely deflected the noonday sun. Following the rue Saint Jacques back to the Seine, I crossed the Pont d’Arcole into the Marais and circled around to my apartment off the rue Perrée. I stopped first to buy fruit and a bottle of wine, then went into a café for an espresso and called France Telecom from a pay phone to find out why my home line still hadn’t been activated.