by Ted Sanders
“I thought it was a cat.”
“I’m allergic to cats.”
“Oh. What’s his name?”
“Thumper,” she said, turning back to the cage.
“If I’d heard that, I guess I would’ve known. Thumper. That’s got to be, like, the Rover of rabbitdom. Spot, Boots, Whiskers, all that.” She looked back at me again. I gave her a long pause and she made me think through it all. I shrugged and said, “Mittens.”
“My daughter named him. She’s five.” She said it like a killing stroke.
“My son is five. He named our lizard.”
“What’s your lizard’s name?” She was sitting all the way upright now, intent on burying me in her attention, holding the carrot like an ice cream cone. I glanced at the rabbit, brown and impossibly sleek, eyes almost closed and his nose wriggling, ears pressed like sleeves to his flanks. He had the dullest expression on his face. A bright-red towel with blue and baby blue butterflies on it lined the floor of the cage. It should have been green. I frowned at the rabbit. I wondered how long rabbits live, if you let them.
THE LIZARD COULD’VE LIVED FOR TWENTY YEARS, I FOUND out too late. Twenty years if you let him—longer than a child. Twenty years is a large chunk of life, a sizable fraction of a life. A fraction with a name. If you imagine twenty years forward in a life—or backward maybe, for that matter—you come to a barely believable place, and watching the lizard with Evan I found that I couldn’t picture him at either end. The lizard, I mean: Rafael. He stared back at us, sometimes with two eyes, more often with one. He was a hunter too, but far down the food chain. Far enough to have the telltale wide-set eyes of prey.
Rafael lived in Evan’s room. He stayed there even from Friday to Tuesday when Evan was gone to his mother’s house, and Sara and I kept the door open so he wouldn’t be alone. He had his own cage, of course, but we liked to see him standing tamely at the glass, the thrum of his throat his only motion, and we would go in to speak sweetly to him and be seen by him—though I often felt myself invisible, standing there, the way the curve of the earth is invisible to a man. I made my comforts small. Fingertips seemed to impress Rafael, but smiles were wasted on him.
He was a good lizard. We all liked him. We took him out a lot because he was the kind of lizard you could do that to. We’d asked for that kind. He sat in our hands, not much longer than any of our palms, scenting the air or our skins with his tongue. His toes felt like pencil points, or like blunted pushpins when he climbed your arm. It more than tickled. It felt like it hurt. The cats stalked about nearby, furious. They bristled and quivered insanely whenever we brought him out.
“I think we should name him Smiley,” Evan said, bent over the lizard in his hand. “Because he’s smiling.”
I looked at Sara. She blinked at me. She shook her head.
“I don’t know, buddy,” I said. “I’m not sure that’s his name. He’s sort of dashing. He should have a dashing sort of name.”
“What’s dashing?”
“Like the Three Musketeers. Like Robin Hood.”
“What’s a dashing name?”
“Like D’Artagnan. Like Tristan.”
“Rafael,” Sara said.
“Or Galahad. Galahad is a very dashing name.”
“Yes, it is,” Sara said.
“What’s the one Sabby said?” His name for Sara.
“Which one? Ask her.”
Sara raised her eyebrows. “Rafael?”
“Rafael,” said Evan slowly, picking up the lizard by his hips and turning him.
“Be careful,” I said. “Not by the tail.”
“I know.”
The lizard was the kind whose tail would fall off in an emergency—a lizard emergency. It was supposed to grow back, but from what I could tell, they didn’t ever grow back right; our lizard book had pictures. I read that chapter several times, in the bathroom even. A lost tail might grow back in the shape of a bulbous knob, or a stubby spear, or often in the shape of a head—a lizard’s head. The worst ones were cloven and lopsided, like soft lobster claws.
“Be careful, Daddy,” Evan always said to me, sharing my fear. “Be careful of Rafael’s tail.”
Rafael ate crickets alive, a troubling trait. He was a good lizard anyway. Not including the crickets, he only ever bit someone twice, and both times that was Evan’s mother. She invited herself in a lot when she came for Evan on Friday afternoons. Also she wanted Rafael to like her—craving, I imagine, the casual prestige of being the lizard’s favorite. Sara said it was her way of pissing in our house. After the second time Rafael bit her, she breezily theorized that he must not like the smell of her lotion.
“Maybe he does,” Sara said. “Maybe it smells like crickets.”
“I never thought of that,” Evan’s mother said, looking at Evan. “Who knows what lizards smell?”
“Let me smell,” said Evan, and she did, but if he learned anything from it he kept it to himself. I couldn’t have told him any more; her scent, when I got close enough to detect it, seemed like nothing I knew.
In time, I came to hate crickets. I hadn’t before. Since they had to be eaten alive, we always had crickets at home—livestock for our pet. I tended them like they were chickens—useless chickens. The crickets had their own cage, with their own food and water, and a sparse but functional toilet-paper-tube decor. I replenished their population every week with a bag from the pet shop. I hated them; they stank. They smelled much worse than Rafael ever did, and their behavior was more questionable. I suspected that they ate one another, at times, though I couldn’t be sure. Also, they weren’t supposed to chirp, but every once in a while we’d get one that did—completely maddening.
After the first few weeks, we began to keep the crickets outside. Evan—who at times seemed as interested in the crickets’ miniature ecosystem as he was in Rafael’s—made a place for them, in the pot with the rose of Sharon tree. The tree wasn’t doing much, didn’t have much of a future. It had been withering under the eaves for over a year, waiting for Sara to plant it in the yard. She watered it occasionally—or I assumed she did—but it hadn’t bloomed over the summer, and by then the dirt around the base of the tree had become a little round pasture of brittle leaves. We kept the cricket cage in the pot, in a little hollow Evan shoveled out by hand there. Evan fed fallen leaves through the slots in the lid of the cricket cage. Or at least I think he did.
From there, seven crickets a week went to Rafael. I admit I relished their fate. I tricked them by giving them a special kind of food that fattened them up for Rafael. The woodcutter’s dumber children, Sara called them, trying to disapprove. But she, like us, enjoyed the spectacle of their demise. Rafael’s feeding times were more comical than graphic, full of a mute and alien violence. He struck at the crickets one by one, lunging like a clumsy snake and taking them whole into his mouth. The act itself was eminently fast and bloodless, so pristine that it made me frown to think of the gory fuss raised by beasts like tigers, or wolves. Mammals in general. Nothing savage or even self-aware came into Rafael’s face while he murdered his meals.
And the crickets were always white when they went in, white as popcorn, because I had to dust them with a powder beforehand; Rafael got his calcium that way. I took the crickets from beneath the rose of Sharon tree and dumped several of them into a plastic canister full of the white powder. I shook them up until they were completely covered in the stuff, like chicken breasts in a bag of bread crumbs. Everyone said it was important. For proper maintenance of your lizard’s health.
“Don’t forget to dust them,” said Evan, who knew all about it. When I put the cricket cage back beneath the rose of Sharon tree, he rebuilt the drifts of leaves around its edges.
“I won’t,” I said, and I didn’t. I didn’t mind. I figured the experience was a trauma to them. I shook them maybe more than I needed to.
And so when the crickets went in they were white like mice, beacons against the dark-red sand in Rafael’s cage. I wondered if t
hey knew how they looked. Evan and I watched them scurry, Rafael towering among them.
“They look like ghosts,” Evan said.
“Yeah. They do.”
“Are they dead?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are they dead, after you put the dust on them?”
I smiled and took a breath, rolling the thought around like a taste. What a thing to say, to imagine. I got a sudden revelatory sense of everything he must not understand—a huge and reeling space. I let out a little laugh. “No, man, they’re alive. They’re just white.”
“Oh.” Evan turned back to the cage, his chin on his fingerbacks. I watched him watch the crickets scramble, captivated by his solemn face, suspicious that it stirred from within. Like a sequestered pond disturbed by trickles from an encroaching underground stream.
Within months, Rafael did lose his tail—just as we’d feared. One afternoon just after Evan’s mother had come and taken him away, I found Rafael, his tail half-gone where a clean new wound shone: an open circle of raw, pink flesh. I felt sick, violated, confused. I thought immediately of the pictures in the lizard book, about the worst of the replacement tails I’d seen. Plus the meat he was showing, the actual inside of himself—I couldn’t stand it. I called Sara at work, but she was already gone, so I paced around and waited for her. I walked in and out of Evan’s room and thought about calling him at his mother’s house. But I had never called him before, not him specifically; I didn’t want the first time to be for this. I paced and waited. Whenever I came across the cats, I reminded them they were bastards. Just in case. More than once I looked in Rafael’s cage for the missing length of tail, but I couldn’t find it.
When Sara came home she took it better than I did, at first. I believe she may have had more confidence in the process, like it was a magic trick. But then she discovered that Rafael seemed to be partially paralyzed—below the waist, as it were. She took him from the cage, and when he walked up the throat of her forearm his whole back half simply dragged behind, his rear legs trailing limply. And his tail, of course, with its huge and unapologetic wound. Sara cooed at him sadly. She looked from him to me and back again.
That evening we took Rafael to Dr. Kipp, who we did not know. We called our usual vet, and they referred us to this other place that had more experience with lizards and the like. Also, they had emergency hours. Dr. Kipp met us at the door—he was short and dark, very erect. He unnerved me. He took us in back, where he examined Rafael and then conferred with us solemnly, tapping a forefinger against his black caterpillar mustache between sentences. He called Rafael the young man. He told us that Rafael might simply be suffering from an injury that was pinching a nerve in his spine, causing a temporary paralysis. Dr. Kipp spoke in a way that suggested this was common, though he didn’t specifically say so. The therapy for such injuries, he explained, involved steroids and warm baths. Also digital manipulation. Sara and I looked at each other.
“Massage,” Dr. Kipp said, his hands in his pockets.
“We know,” Sara said.
I cleared my throat. “We were wondering how something like this could happen. The tail.”
Dr. Kipp shrugged. “This is the design of the lizard. It is meant to occur.”
“Yes, no—I know. But I mean, what kind of thing could cause it? How could it have happened?”
“You do not know how it happened.”
“No.”
Dr. Kipp shrugged. “It could have been any number of things. If the young man’s tail became trapped somehow.”
“Trapped.”
“Under a rock, in the lid of the cage.” Between Dr. Kipp and us, on the huge stainless examination table, Rafael bobbed his head and licked his eyes. He looked tiny in the big black shoebox we’d brought him in. Ordinarily such a box wouldn’t have held him, but now he sat motionless, propped up on his front legs while his back half slumped. He looked like a seal. Sara stared at him, chewing her nails, pressing one hand into her mouth with the other.
“I frankly don’t see how,” I said.
Dr. Kipp sighed. “Sometimes even the smallest provocation can cause the autotomic response.” Our lizard book had said pretty much the same thing, almost verbatim, but I resented him using the word like that, a word we weren’t likely to know. I did know it, of course, because of the lizard book. I’d even unearthed the etymology: autotomy, like lobotomy, where the -tomy part means “a removal or a cutting, an excision.” The auto- part means “self.” This is what lizards do, when threatened. Dr. Kipp leaned over the table and peered at Rafael. “And so we may be experiencing some minor swelling in an unfortunate location. This is common. But here: if the young man was truly trapped—if he struggled about during the incident, or had been subjected to violent movement—permanent damage may have been done to his spinal cord. In this instance, he would have to be euthanized. I’m sorry.” He said all this leaning over the shoebox, examining Rafael, like he was talking to him and not us. Dr. Kipp tapped his mustache.
Sara pulled her hand from her mouth. “He wouldn’t survive like this? I mean, just live?”
I found myself nodding. “People are paralyzed.”
Dr. Kipp sighed again and straightened. “Has there been defecation since the incident?”
We looked at each other. “I have no idea,” I said. Sara shrugged and shook her head, her fingers back in her mouth.
“He is likely unable. We will wait and see, will we? It’s difficult to say without knowing how the injury was managed.”
Sara said, “We have a child in the house.”
Dr. Kipp raised his eyebrows. “A small child?”
“He’s five. Rafael’s his pet.”
He nodded and shrugged again. “Boys,” he said. Sara bent and began to murmur into the shoebox.
Dr. Kipp gave us five days. He sent us home with a plastic syringe and a tiny supply of steroids. Sara took care of all of it. She squeezed Rafael’s delicate jaw open—the way you do with any animal, only on a tiny, fragile scale—and squirted the medicine down his throat. Every night, she ran a tiny bath for Rafael in the bathroom sink, a puddle of warm water just about chest deep. Chest deep on a lizard. Each evening she fussed over the water’s temperature. She palmed water across Rafael’s back. She tiptoed her fingertips up and down the length of his spine, talking quietly to him. She knelt on the floor, the counter edge pressed into her armpits. She squeezed the gruesome stub of his tail.
“He likes it,” she said to me as I watched. “It helps him.” And he did seem to like it. His eyes went to slits, and he lifted his chin. “Look at him,” Sara said, letting water drop onto his head from her fingers. “Little baby,” she said. “Poor young man.” The cats, shut in the bedroom across the hall, mewed and pawed at the door.
By Monday, Rafael still wasn’t better. Sara gave him two baths that day. After dinner, I leaned in the doorway as Sara hummed in the bathroom, splashing softly in the sinkwater, humming to Rafael. Evan would be back the next day. I hadn’t called him, hadn’t told him or his mother anything about Rafael, about what had happened; I’m not sure why. Rafael wasn’t getting better. He hadn’t crapped. We couldn’t tell if he’d eaten or not. The crickets’ whiteness faded with time, and after a few days they became hard to find.
I said to Sara, “Tomorrow’s the fifth day.”
“Fourth day,” Sara said, not even looking up. “You’re always doing that.”
I counted in my head, mouthing the days, discovered she was right. I left the room, closing the door behind me. I released the cats. They smoked around my ankles and slid into the living room, heads hunkered stealthily down.
On Tuesday, on the drive from his mother’s house, I told Evan about Rafael, about him getting hurt—that he was going to die. I assumed he knew nothing about it. In the growing dark in the car, I told him about the accident—about the autotomy, although I didn’t use that word. I told him about the paralysis, Dr. Kipp, Sara’s baths. After hearing it all, Evan didn’t ask me ho
w it happened. The accident, I mean.
Once we got home, Evan and I sat on his bed, across the room from Rafael’s cage, across from Sara sitting on the floor, curled over her knees. We’d taken Rafael reverently from the cage so Evan could see, then returned him.
“Maybe he will poop tonight,” Evan said.
“I don’t think so, buddy. I don’t think he can do anything back there.”
“Maybe he’ll get better when we put him to sleep.”
“No, buddy, he’s going to die. We’re going to help him die.”
“Euthanasia.” The word I’d put there crawled out of his mouth.
“That’s right.”
“And what’s euthanasia?” Sara said. Like it was a quiz.
“Um, it’s when he’s going to die, and we help it.”
Sara laughed to herself and began to blink fast through something—some kept thought. I didn’t know what it could be, but then I think she said, kind of soft up into the air: “That’s any damn thing.”
I said to Evan, “We make it more peaceful.”
“More peaceful.”
“Yes.”
“I hope he will be better then.”
I stared into the cage. A couple of crickets, at least, still haunted the place, but I couldn’t see them. Rafael himself was out of sight as well. We still hadn’t found the rest of his tail.
“What are you thinking?” I asked Evan, not looking at him.
“Nothing.”
“I was thinking I wish we knew how he got hurt.” I looked at Sara while I said it. She had her eyes on Evan.
“Well,” Evan said, and he paused. “Well,” he said, “I was thinking, I do think he will be better.” He swung his hanging heels against the side of his bed—thudud, thudud.
“You never know,” Sara said to me.
Hours after bedtime, in bed ourselves at last, Sara asked me if we couldn’t keep Evan home from school the next day, so that he could be there at the vet when the euthanasia took place. I thought about it, about the act—I imagined a syringe bigger than Rafael himself, his skin wrinkling beneath it, his soundless thrash.
“I don’t know that I want him to see that,” I said.
