No Animals We Could Name

by Ted Sanders

  “Why not? Shouldn’t he? I think he should.”

  “Picture it,” I said.

  “I have.”

  I sighed and rolled into her, pressed my forehead against her cool shoulder.

  “Believe me, I have,” she said.

  I said, “He should go to school.”

  We took Rafael in the next day, Wednesday. I took Evan to school first. In the morning, saying good-bye for the last time, Evan said to Rafael, “See you later,” and Sara told him to say See you on the flip side. On the way to school in the car, Evan asked me what flip was, and I had no idea what to say at all, not at all.

  “That’s different for different people,” I told him at last. When I got back home, Sara had Rafael in the bathroom one last time. I couldn’t say what for.

  As it turned out, it wouldn’t have mattered if we’d taken Evan with us to the vet that day; not one of us witnessed the act. With a lizard, you can’t be there when it happens. They don’t let you stay, and here’s why: the moment itself can’t be guaranteed. Apparently, lizard vital signs are so hard to detect, even on a normal day, that you can’t be sure if the lizard is alive or dead. The vet injects the drugs, and then you have to wait—twenty-four hours—to be sure they’ve taken effect. Dr. Kipp had neglected to tell us this. The girl at the counter, the girl with the thick, farmy arms, explained it to us stoically. We asked her her name, like it would help.

  “How do you know if they haven’t?” Sara said to the girl, thick and impassive. She and the girl each had a hand on the shoebox between them, Rafael inside. “How do you know if the drugs haven’t taken effect? If he starts to move, is that how? That’s how you know—he moves?”

  “Essentially, yes,” said the girl. “The animal begins to shows signs of regaining consciousness. It happens very infrequently.”

  “But how do you know twenty-four hours is even long enough?”

  “Twenty-four hours is many times longer than long enough. Twenty-four hours is a precaution.”

  “How could you know?” Sara turned to me. “How could they know that, babe?”

  “This is what they do,” I said.

  “What would happen if he doesn’t die?” Sara said to the girl. “If he’s still alive, what do you do?”

  “Then we administer the drugs again. It happens very infrequently.”

  “You have seen it happen,” I said.

  “It has happened.”

  “Oh my god,” said Sara.

  The girl looked at Sara, back at me. “We could contact you, if you like, but people generally prefer not to know.”

  “I would want to know,” Sara said to the girl. And then, to me: “I want to know, baby.”

  I said, “I don’t think that’s anything we need to know. And it won’t happen anyway.”

  “Extremely unlikely,” said the girl.

  We left him there then. We said good-bye to him first; Sara cried. At school that day, Evan made abstract art out of paper-towel tubes and orange pipe cleaners the size of batons. No one from the vet ever contacted us.

  AND SO ON SATURDAY, A DAY TOO LATE AS IT TURNED OUT, I found myself back at the vet, waiting for the pregnant girl. I stared at the rabbit lady. She gazed back at me, unperturbed. She had let her hand with the carrot fall back at the wrist. Thumper sniffed at his door.

  “My son’s lizard,” I told the lady, clarifying. “His name was Smiley.”

  She raised her eyebrows, smiling with the middle of her mouth and frowning with the ends. “Five-year-olds,” she said. She turned back to Thumper.

  “Yeah,” I said. I got up. I walked around the vet’s waiting room, a strangely big space, full of imitation plants and a busy, barnish smell. Down the middle of the room ran a long row of wooden shelves, filled with bags and cans of cat and dog food, special-diet stuff for chronically ill animals. I thought about what Thumper the rabbit might think of the smell in here, but Thumper was probably all about carrots right now. What could carrots smell like to rabbits? Maybe like steak, or like chocolate cake, or maybe like carrots, only fantastic. I wondered what was keeping the pregnant girl.

  Toward the back of the room I found a small display case of glass and mirrors. On the shiny shelves within, skulls had been laid out in rows. Animal skulls, all kinds, many shapes and sizes, the smallest scarcely as big as a fingertip. They’d been mounted on sloping glass slabs. In front of each stood a trim little placard, giving the names in Latin and English. I squatted and took my glasses off, lifted a hand to shade the glass. I squinted.

  Glaucomys sabrinus, flying squirrel. A smaller one was Mus musculus, mouse. Another one, swollen and round, was Agapornis roseicollis, lovebird. Holodactylus africanus, African clawed gecko. Rattus rattus, black rat. Sylvilagus audubonii, rabbit.

  The farmy vet girl returned. The girl who’d taken Rafael. Her name came to me suddenly: Geneva. I could hear her behind me, but only the reflection of her uniform hovered in the glass, white and doubled. She and the rabbit lady murmured. I eavesdropped on the instructions for medicating Thumper as I looked back through the rough reflections at the skulls. I ran my eyes over the tiny cranium of Sylvilagus audubonii. The skull looked so small and so terminally savage, robbed of its adornments—full of secret planes and holes that scarcely admitted the substance, the relevance, of vital structures like ears. I tapped on the glass. I pictured Thumper gagging on a stubby plastic syringe. I thought about Evan, what he would make of these, and I wondered when it is, exactly, that a human skull begins to shed its softness.

  “Mr. Collins?” The pregnant girl stood beside me, fiddling awkwardly with her bulging shirt at the navel. I guessed she would ordinarily be a handwringer.

  “Where’s Rafael?”

  “Mr. Collins?”

  I stood up, turning. A smell came off the girl in a cloud, the essence of some synthetic Victorian flower; it mixed with the bite of the disinfectant in the air all around, pulling my thoughts into vapor. My vision swelled.

  “Oh man,” I said, fading back a step.

  The girl advanced. “Mr. Collins?”

  “Stood up too fast.” I smiled and fended her off. “Where’s Rafael?”

  Her eyes dipped into the rounds of her cheeks. Her mouth curdled, gathering words. A sudden horrible thought came to me, watching her. A wondrous thought. I thought of Evan and felt a little tremor beneath all my skin as it shrank.

  “He’s not alive, is he?”

  “No, no,” she said. “No. No. He was euthanized. It went fine. It was very peaceful. But I’m afraid, when you didn’t come, yesterday, we did accidentally cremate him. We did cremate his remains. I’m so sorry.” All this in a rush. Like she was relieved I’d suspected so much.

  “I called,” I said.

  “You did?”

  “Yesterday.” My voice drifted. I watched over her shoulder as the rabbit lady left without glancing back in my direction. I found myself wishing that her apparent failure to do so was in fact an exertion.

  “Who did you talk to?” the pregnant girl asked.

  “What? I don’t know. A girl. You?”

  “I wasn’t here yesterday.” She looked back at the desk. Looking for Geneva, I guessed, but I couldn’t see her.

  “No, not her,” I said. “She told me her name. I don’t remember it.”

  “I can find out.”

  “No, no. It doesn’t matter.” I rubbed my eyes, took another queasy step back. “About the girl.”

  “I’m so sorry. I really am.”

  “We were going to bury him. My kid is five. We made a stake with his name on it.”

  “Oh,” she said, putting her hands across her mouth. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Collins.”

  “It’s not your fault. I don’t know.” I eyed her slowly, wondering if she was part-time. Back at the front desk, Geneva had rematerialized. She had an ear cocked our way, pretending to look down at a clipboard. I stood there trying to think what to do, or how to do it, and as I did, a strange slack feeling watered from my chest do
wn my arms—relief, I realized after a bit, a shameful little strain of it. Plans I’d only queasily committed to seemed pointless now. I pursed my lips. “He was a good lizard,” I said at last.

  “I’m sure he was. I’m real sorry.”

  “What about ashes? Do you have ashes?” She grimaced. “You don’t have ashes? What do you have?”

  “They only fire the incinerator one night a week, and unless we have an animal where the owner wants the ashes, we do, you know, a group…thing. All the euths at once, I mean.”

  “So you wouldn’t have Rafael the dead lizard ashes—you’ve got, like…petshop holocaust ashes.”

  She frowned. “We do a group burn unless there’s a request. A special request.”

  “Could be a little corn snake mixed in there, then, or some Lhasa apsos. Emu, maybe.”

  The girl scratched at her forehead with a big crimson nail. She was losing some of her interest in being stricken—because of the emu, maybe. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say,” she said. She put her shoulders up by her ears. Her breasts rolled into each other atop her belly. “There’s no charge for the cremation. I mean, of course there wouldn’t be.”

  “Yeah, well, right. Okay. Thanks. Look, here’s the problem.” I cleared my throat, and it shuddered. I wondered what the stuff was that they gave to Thumper. “My son,” I said. “My son, he felt pretty sure I’d come in here today and Rafael would turn out to be alive, you know? Because of the waiting-to-see thing. He’s five, he doesn’t really get it. I guess I wanted to have…” I paused and looked up at her. She had her head cocked like a bird’s. She reminded me of the kind of owl that has one ear permanently higher than the other on its head, to help pinpoint the tiny sounds of prey. Eyes the size of grapefruits, relatively speaking. Owl grapefruits. I glanced back at the skull case, the girl. She tried to smile at me, but her teeth had gone shy. “I wanted evidence, you know? The evidence. I wanted him to see what dead is. We want him to understand that Rafael isn’t going to be around anymore, anywhere, at all. Ever. He has to get that.”

  “Yes,” said the girl.

  “Look, if I come home without the lizard he’s gonna say maybe he’s still alive and I’ll say no, they burned his body, and he’ll say yeah but maybe he’s really a fire lizard and he flew out the chimney or, Christ, I don’t know. He’s a kid. It’s all cartoons.” I wiggled my fingers through the air.

  “Okay, hold please?” The girl turned and hustled away, leaving me standing there. She wobbled around the corner, disappearing down the hallway. Geneva went after her, leaving me alone. I didn’t know what to do. Maybe I’d caused difficulties; maybe, even, I’d gotten the girl into trouble somehow, and I felt a little bad about that.

  I went over to the hallway. I listened for voices coming through the door at the end, but all I thought I heard was something crying, some animal—a puppy, maybe. Beside the hallway entrance, a huge sagging bulletin board announced the PET OF THE MONTH; yellow schoolhouse letters had been pinned to the board in an arc. The pet of the month was named JEZEBEL. An overexposed picture of a fat gray cat wearing a prairie bonnet hung below. Someone held her, belly up; fat human thumbs had her by the armpits. Beneath the picture a hand-printed list hung:

  JEZEBEL LOVES

  warm laps

  dress-up

  Charlie Chan

  sunshine

  lunchtime, dinnertime, breakfasttime, anytime!

  JEZEBEL HATES

  getting wet

  the neighbor cat

  Venetion blinds

  birds on the loose (squirrels too!)

  industry

  “Industry,” I said. In Jezebel’s picture, a crescent of her tongue stuck out from between her teeth. Her eyes looked wild, one rolling slightly off center to the left. I lifted my glasses and looked closer, as close as I could get. In the background of the picture, a bowl of colored candies sat out on a coffee table, and a green afghan spilled over the arm of a couch.

  I heard the door at the end of the hallway open, footsteps on the floor. Voices murmured low. Both of the vet girls rounded the corner, and the pregnant one stopped and looked around, not seeing me. Geneva headed back behind the counter.

  “Here,” I said.

  The girl jumped and grabbed her belly. “Oh my,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh goodness,” she said.

  “Charlie Chan, what’s that about?” I said.

  “What?”

  I pointed at Jezebel’s list. “Charlie Chan.”

  Geneva spoke up, from way back behind the counter. A computer screen lit her face. “The dog. It’s their dog.”

  “The dog,” I said, and looked back at Jezebel.

  “Mr. Collins?” said the pregnant girl.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I’m sorry too.” She said this earnestly, almost enthusiastically, like we’d just discovered we hailed from the same hometown.

  “You are sorry,” I said.

  “I am. But we talked about it, and…okay.” She set her shoulders and dropped her chin, rolling her eyes up at me gravely. “We do have disposable carriers. I could give you one.”

  “Wait, what?” I said. “You what?”

  “A box, if you want one. A disposable. Doctor puts the small animals in a Ziploc bag, and then we pack the bag in a disposable carrier. A cardboard box. To take home, right? It’s got our name on it. It’s what you would have had, to take home to your boy.” She took a step back and made a game-show gesture, turning and opening both hands brightly toward the reception desk, as though offering me something I’d earned.

  “Whose idea was this?”

  She dropped her arms. “Doctor’s. And—oh!—also he said not to charge you for anything. I mean, we’ll take care of the euthanasia. Because of the oversight.”

  “Dr. Kipp.”

  “Yes.”

  “You would do that?” I said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You think I should take a box. An empty box.”

  “I’m sure, Mr. Collins, that it’s not my place to say.” She clasped her hands together beneath her belly and gave a tiny bow. She was very pretty. I thought of sailors trapped in the stomachs of broken ships. I looked at Jezebel’s picture again, her fat-handed owner and the M&Ms, Charlie Chan somewhere out of sight back there.

  “I could do that,” I said to the girl. I followed her to the desk and waited while she slid a folded-flat box from a shelf and popped it into shape—a white box far bigger than Rafael would have needed, but the smallest they seemed to have. It was about the size of Evan’s head. The girl took it to a table against the back wall. Geneva stopped what she was doing and leaned back alertly in her chair, looking on.

  “Your name’s Geneva, right?” I said to her.

  She glanced at me. “It is.”

  “I remembered that.”

  “People tend to.”

  “I didn’t, almost,” I said.

  “I was there with your lizard,” she said. “It was painless.”

  We watched as the pregnant girl packed the box full of loose paper towels, plain white ones as blank and purposeful as her face while she worked. She laid a dozen or more single sheets into the box, one at a time. She closed the top of the box, where it came together into a handled peak, held shut with cardboard tabs that she thumbed into place. It looked like a little house. The girl put a white sticker on the front of the box and brought it to me, smiling. Geneva had turned back to her computer.

  “There you go, Mr. Collins.” As though it were all right. I spun it around to look at the sticker she’d attached. It said LOT#1367-GL. She’d put it on crooked.

  I shook the box. The girl flinched. I couldn’t get the paper towels to make any noise, but I thought I might be able to discern one, sometime, in a quieter place, and wondered what it would be like. The box did have the name of the place on it, like she’d said. A logo stretched around two sides, and I recognized it as a bigger version o
f what was on their business cards: an ascendant parade of silhouette creatures treading a thick line the same shade of blue as themselves. Some little rodent led the way, followed by a chinchilla, a cat, a dog, and a woman with a bird on her shoulder. The cat straddled the corner, longer than it should have been. The bird brought up the rear, holding its wings aloft and looking as though it meant to make off with the woman. The rest of the animals seemed unaware of the danger. I held the box at arm’s length.

  “The chinchilla looks funny,” I told the girl.

  She looked at the box in my hands.

  “That’s a turtle,” said Geneva, and when I looked at the box again, I wondered what I’d been thinking. I tried to recall if I knew whether chinchillas were rodents or not, and then for a second I couldn’t remember if turtles were reptiles or amphibians. I started to rotate the box in my hands, putting the procession into motion. I went at turtle speed.

  “Raaaaah,” I breathed when the bird came around the second time.

  “Mr. Collins?”

  “No, I was just—the bird. Birds on the loose.” The girl frowned, gave her shirt a pluck. “I will take this,” I told her. I went on holding the box out between us. “Thank you. We’ll see.”

  “I’m sorry about our mix-up,” she said. “I’m sorry about the loss of your pet.” And because I’d never heard anyone say that before, I thought—for a second—that she meant that Rafael had lost something.

  “No, he didn’t,” I started to say. I fumbled stupidly through some words. I said thank you again and started to leave. The girl seemed to be waiting for it; she waved as I backed out the door. Geneva frowned from her chair, gazing vaguely off to the side.

  I carried the box to the car, cradled in my arms. I couldn’t bring myself to use the handle; I don’t know why. I settled the box in the passenger seat. I started the car but didn’t go anywhere. Instead I sat looking at the box. I sat there doing that for a while, and then I reached over and upended the box. I drove all the way home like that.

  “OH GOD,” SARA SAID, MAKING A TENT WITH HER HANDS and covering her eyes. “Is that him?”

  “Not really, no,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”