No Animals We Could Name

by Ted Sanders

  Celia keeps a supply of tiny paper cups on the sink for rinsing. The stack dwindles, recovers; disappears, returns: a lineage of tame mushrooms. I never use the cups; they seem so trivial. And they hold no more water than I could gather in my hands anyway. But sometimes before I get into the bath at night, I find a cup in the dark and I draw icy water from the tap—just enough to set the cup floating upright in the tub. And when I’m in there in the dark, the cup floats around on the quiet currents made by my breathing, or by the thermostatic emergence and submersion of my feet, and it comes near some island of my body—unseen, broadcast first by the tiny chilled cloud it makes around itself—bumps against me and drifts away. At a certain distance from myself, I can no longer feel that the cup is there, a distance that grows small as the water inside the cup warms. I am able to imagine, eventually, that the cup disappears, or is somehow contained.

  I don’t sleep. Because of it I learn something valuable about myself. My itch has subsided, and I lie awake, composed now, my arm beside me on the sheets, and by trying very hard, very quiet, by believing that I can, I begin to hear the quiet electric talk, streaming through the deep flesh of my arm, that forever asks my absent fingernails to grow.

  “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND,” I TELL THERESA. “IT’S A MATTER of potential. I was thinking, right before it happened to me, that it was something I could do. I could’ve, right? I saw my hand on the picnic table there. And I thought maybe if I were to somehow begin, I’d already be finished. Not able to stop, so fast. It scared me to think it.” Theresa is listening to me, she always does, but never too hard. We gaze at each other and I discover that I can’t tell how old she is, I realize I haven’t the first idea; her face is a thick permanent lie. Looking at her I decide it is even possible, maybe, that I am older. I try to fathom it and I find, am surprised, that I would like her to understand me.

  “Actually, I was really fucking terrified, Theresa,” I tell her. “Truly terrified, in a way that changes how you think about the word. I had the maul in my other hand, up over my shoulder.” I show her. What she might not understand is how I had the heft of the maul high up along the handle, the way you do for a short clean stroke. I attune myself to the physics of such things, but Theresa might not. She might not care or understand that a few inches’ difference in my grip on that handle would have meant it couldn’t have happened, that day. And so I just say, “It was already full of that perfect potential, okay? Right here? I judged that if the moment were to arrive—if it were to form—I would barely be able to blink before it was done. I doubted I would blink. And it turned out I was right about that.” I smile. I lay my arms down. I show my teeth.

  But Theresa looks down at the ruined end of my arm on the table, and somehow hers is the face that is like an animal’s. It’s hard to say how, but right now she looks very young to me, so much so that there is that kind of danger about her. She leans into me, that look on her face. She says, “I imagine that moment, you know, James? I try to, I do. That moment you always talk about, or the moment right after it. I wonder what you could’ve been thinking. I wonder,” she says, and she squints at me, and she lays her flat-palmed hand down slow and thick on the table near my arm, so near that the stump of my wrist goes into the open arc between her thumb and forefinger, nearly touching, her hand smooth and heavy like clay, and she is whispering, “What were you thinking? What were you thinking?” She pats the table with her hand. She says, “And you, you’re all calm, James, so calm. You talk like we could share this. As though we were friends,” she says, “who could agree on the nature of such an experience.” She goes on staring at me, and I wait, her voice so substantial, and then there is this painful thing: I begin to feel a constriction there. There just off the end of my arm where her hand is lying. It slowly becomes a curdling burn. A torrid creep of goose bumps blooms down and around the end of the stump, under the bandages, cold and endlessly crushing across my new skin.

  I slide my seething arm from the table, bury it in my lap.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know what you could even mean, calm.” My arm rages between my thighs. “Theresa,” I say.

  She shrugs again, shakes her head. “But you are calm, James. And that’s troubling, I’ll tell you. You talk like complicity were available to you. Like if I agreed, it would be absolution. But really, James, you just lost control. You just lost control. You did a cruel thing to yourself. And this sea of calm all around, it doesn’t help, it just magnifies that loss of control, which for me—for me, James?—is just an imagined thing anyway. And the size of it is only partly gauged by this terrible thing.” She throws a gesture over the edge of the table into my lap, where my hands are. “That blemish, all this perfection. It could be considered frightening. Does this make sense?”

  I tell her it doesn’t. Even her words don’t make sense—cruel? Her hands are fleshy roots. I say control, control? and my face is twisting from the bone; I say, “Theresa, my arm,” and I lift it from my lap with the other even though the flesh is burning so bad there I am afraid that whatever it is will run and spread. I cup the stump in my hand and rock in my chair. Theresa stands up.

  “Okay,” she says, and she cocks her head. She makes a sound I know, a sound like you make when a curiosity has been satisfied. “All right,” she says.

  THE WOMAN OUTSIDE MY ROOM TWISTS HER HAIR INTO A rope down the middle of her chest. The air inside is still.

  I can tell you, the way Theresa says that word, such confidence: control. It defeats me. And her ideas, her thick skin; what I can’t explain is what makes her word somehow wrong, the measured islands of sense I can clearly recall, like water’s press, the feel of the maul’s handle in my palm, the wet smooth stringy grip of it, a patient weight across my skin.

  Let me admit: fear is heavy, I’m saying it, but then again any substantial burden in my hand runs the danger of becoming so heavy that it turns slick. Maybe this is control, that crushing grip—I can appreciate that. At home I never mow the lawn; this is an example. It makes me uncomfortable, that barely caged blade, the fact that you must walk it. I’m dense with doubt just imagining. And so Celia mows instead, for me. I watch her from the patio when I can. She sways around the mower as it rears through its turns. I watch carefully whenever the mower rises, little clouds of ruin blooming from the underside. The scent of what she does, that scent like thick fruitless juice—the smell of the wet innards bludgeoned from many thousands of blades of grass, it must be—it spills across the lawn.

  And Celia mows barefoot, without the catcher. You can imagine. I suspect—and I don’t know this firsthand, but I wonder how many do—that a shoe wouldn’t do much to stop the blindly chewing blade of the mower. But I guess I don’t know about that for sure; I wish she would wear shoes.

  Celia’s skin, now, it is in my mind a perfection. Maybe this is why I worry. If she mows in the heat her face is flushed brilliant and shining when she is done, the smooth slope below her collarbone wet and long. When she comes up close to me like that, with her hard work still on her, I feel little pieces of a pull like it should be one of those times when I want to lay her down, when I want to water myself with the slick mess her body makes, but instead I drift away. Heat billows off her sickly in fists, like she burns. After, in the cooling bathroom where her leg curls prettily up onto the sink, I see the green ground into and around the cracks in her heel, like a map, a section of a textured globe.

  There are strains in the sound made by the woman outside my room that remind me of far-off mower sounds: sounds that circle the house, waxing into windows, fingering their way through curtains. Celia walking barefoot and bare-legged behind the mower, one or two weak whispers of blood on her shins from wading through the debris hashed out by the blade. I can tell you about that blade, that thick blade, toiling savagely in the dark. If you’ve ever turned over a horseshoe crab on the beach, maybe you will understand me when I say how turning over the mower is always a little like that, and how the mower blade is not
the slashing silver devil you’d imagined, but a brute. A surprising heft of metal, a matter of function, more than a little like the dull-edged heavy maul. The head of the maul is blue, did I say that? And no maul is a blade, not really—not like an ax, which is refined. Don’t call it an ax; an ax is much too purposeful. The maul works implacably through its weight, blind and crushing, a victim of inertia.

  My room goes afternoon quiet. I talk to the woman outside, tell her that I can’t believe I am so difficult to understand. I tell her for example that any of us, standing atop a very high place, might imagine a moment of relaxed vigilance where we could step off the edge into gravity, or where just by letting our legs go briefly soft we could crumple quietly over the rim. It isn’t rational, after all, to ignore the implications of being so near a lethal, irrevocable action. And if Theresa can’t accept this basic human condition, she will never be able to imagine what any such action might be.

  “Or rather,” I say, “she’ll never be able to imagine that inaction could be the cause.”

  The woman outside my room says nothing.

  I say, “Or rather: that inaction is not empty.”

  The one thing I know for sure is that there is a supple, roaring element inherent in danger, rich with a tigerish allure, thrumming with a deadly dark power, and that power can get in you, by you. What I know is that the weight of all that danger, all those consequences, all the murmuring threat, maybe even the very constraints of the path that does not lead to disaster—all of these things enclose and define the shape of the very thing you hope never happens to you, and maybe in a moment of perfect concentration about the matter, the action itself comes forth. I try to explain, but the words are too simple, or too complex. I try to explain how it happens so fast.

  “It happens fast,” I say.

  IT TURNED OUT TO BE MESSY. NOT MESSY LIKE A GLORIOUS movie spill, but messy like things are. The maul missed my wrist where it was aimed and instead went through the back of my hand about a third of the way up to the knuckles. I’m not usually comfortable talking about it except that I will say I miss my thumb. It was the only thing still attached, right after. I remember I knew I could move it, and I did move it before I collapsed; I curled it up against the head of the maul, buried in the top of the picnic table there. The metal was cold. I told the doctors about it, later that day, before the surgery. I told them I could still move my thumb and they said, I’m afraid that’s not possible, Mr. Linden. Anyway, it’s gone now.

  They cleaned it all up, my mangled hand, trimmed me down to the wrist where I’d imagined the maul would strike me anyway. So I guess that worked out. I don’t know what they did with what they took from me, or with what I left behind in the yard, but probably the paramedics took that. Celia may have cleaned up the rest herself; I never asked her. She never says. I wonder a lot about this stuff, the aftermath I was absent for, I guess just because I’m a practical-minded man. The picnic table and the maul are gone, I’m sure. We had an old hatchet, too, but I never used it, not for anything. Parts of these things must persist in some form, the metal bones, at least. They are somewhere. If you knew enough, you would even be able to discern how far they are from me now.

  But anyway for me the aftermath was different, narrow: a lot of pain, pain like icy saltwater, but because it didn’t come for a couple of seconds, there was this brief lethal clarity right after it happened, a clarity like when you glance at someone you desperately love and just for a moment, this sad beautiful moment, you have the entire deep delicate structure of her soul in your hand. I saw my fingers on the table. They were living, if not alive. Exquisite. They had been curling over slightly and maybe still were, just barely, the tips trying to dig into the wood, such dear relics. I felt the blood pouring from my arm as it emptied, pressure equalizing. It ran from me, and I thought how perfect an action it was, so integrated, like pouring water from a pitcher that was myself. And it was just as I was beginning to feel the immensity of the moment that had brought my fingers and my open hand to this place, as I was feeling the cold rough head of the maul against my thumb and was recalling the vicious baritone chuff of the maul as it came to rest and how it was not something I’d expected or considered at all—and what had I considered?—it was at just this moment that the pain came like a birth, a hot electric hurt pumping from nerves I hadn’t before fathomed, and my right hand peeled away at last from the maul handle rising erect from the table, and I was down on the ground forgetting, where my blood was growing, black in the grass.

  CELIA COMES TO SEE ME, BLESS HER. EVEN IF I DIDN’T GET TO talk to her, I would still appreciate her presence, especially here. She is very pretty. Her coming here is a warm transcendent novelty, like a lit candle drifting along a seafloor. She is a broad constant for me, appearing every so often as she does. She endures, persisting through hours, days, when I scarcely think of her, and I admire it. Not that she perseveres, just that she exists. It must be a terror for her simply to be. She goes on through her long absences, when her path becomes a mystery to me, orbiting me like a strolling sun.

  She talks when she comes, about work, about the house. I devour her. She tells me she’s hung new curtains in the third bedroom, a revelation. I make her tell me about them; I open a space for every detail. The curtains are white, translucent, littered with a handful of haphazardly placed sheer squares that hold simply stitched wildflowers, prettily plain. This is not how she describes them, exactly, but it amounts to that. I think they’re lovely. I learn how she hung them, how the curtain rod is black-washed wood, how she kept the red corduroy curtains for scraps. I can picture how the light must be now in that room, the winter sun in those windows turning the room the color of novice ghosts, but I have her tell me anyway. She says it’s brighter now. I feel sick, like I should smile.

  Celia makes a puzzled face. She tilts her head. “You’re so interested,” she says.

  And then—have I mentioned how I will miss clapping? You should think about it now, while you can. It’s a devastating impotence I never imagined. There is a man here whose name I don’t know and he claps when he laughs, brutal and slow. His thick hands like cattle, rough mating beasts, a herd of two. Sometimes when Theresa is talking to me I hear this man clapping heavy, out in the hall, at the end of the common area, and because his claps sound like some great hydraulic piece of hammering machinery, or because his claps sound at all, I don’t hear anything else. I don’t hear what anyone says to me after. I can’t help it; talking seems so delicate, so impalpable, so ponderous.

  Theresa asks me about Celia. I tell her about the curtains, about what Celia has said to me.

  “And so, are you interested?” Theresa says.

  “About the curtains,” I say, asking. Theresa shrugs her thick shoulders, a massively mute gesture, full of an alien portent. Something an elephant would do.

  “You know, your absence,” she says. She fingers her wrist. “Something going on that would otherwise be so near to you.”

  We sit not talking for a while and then Theresa asks me, right out, if I ever worry that I will hurt someone else. I’m not sure I hear her right. It’s the first time she’s asked me this, and she lays it out so placidly, so heavily, that I’m almost caught up in the sheer inertial implication. I almost say of course, which is not exactly what I mean at all.

  I wave her off. But I find that I have no answer for her because—and this is true—it hasn’t yet occurred to me that I might hurt someone. But we sit and I warm myself to it, and at last I ask her if she means directly.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Because, I mean, Celia was hurt,” I say. “I hurt her. She was there, right after. And still, now, after all this time.” I look broadly up and around us, motioning for her around the long green-gray room where we are.

  “I don’t mean like that,” Theresa says. “I mean, you know,” and she lifts her hand and makes a swift chopping motion in the air. She says, as she does it: “Cha.”

  I pick at my bandages.r />
  I say, “So I shout for Celia, and she finds me in the grass, and the grass is all going dark, and her face is rushing in, getting big, but kind of swimming away? And she comes down over me where I am, and I’m like fading on fire but not too far gone to know my place, and I wait for her to ask me what happened. I even think, for one foggy second, that she’ll ask me who did this. I’m sure she’ll say it: Who did this to you, James? But there’s only this look in her eyes, this look of like, soft stone.”

  Or what I say is: “I read somewhere that—the horseshoe crab? You know?”

  “Yes, horseshoe crabs,” Theresa says, and she carves the quick shape of one on the table with the tips of her index fingers.

  “Yeah, they have—their blood is blue.”

  “Hunh,” says Theresa. She says, “I didn’t know.”

  I nod but don’t tell her the rest, which is that they tell you the blood of the horseshoe crab turns blue only when exposed to air. To eyes, I guess. I have seen pictures, and I can tell you it’s a startling shade of blue, between a cornflower blue and the blue of a robin’s egg, a modest dreaming blue like the edges of the sky at noon. But I don’t tell Theresa these things. I keep this to myself. You never know; she could surprise me. She could, for example, ask me what it is before it’s blue.

  Theresa is looking at me still, and we sit there a while longer, and maybe she has nothing to say about the horseshoe crab, or maybe I could talk to her forever before I learned all she might know about color. The gray-green walls of the common area are around us.

  THERE IS CELIA PAINTING THE KITCHEN ORANGE. I GUESS I will like it. She would say it’s not the fruit orange, it’s that harvest orange, a warm orange of welcome and comfort, and I determine for myself that the trim is an edible brown. I’m surprised by it all, and a little rattled by the sounds of her work carrying to me where I am, and I’m a bit bemused by how much tape she’s used to protect the edges of everything. She taped everything at once. The room is a sketch. I try to think if I know of a noise as distinct as the harsh sound of new masking tape coming free from the back of itself, if all such sounds become so tiresome. I possess a clear sense of that sound, more suitable for memory than any voice could be. I don’t help Celia with the painting. I haven’t and I won’t start now. She doesn’t mind. Or sometimes she does, maybe, and I could stand in the doorway and watch her because she likes when I talk to her, or listen to her, and, speaking of listening I find that the frisssh of the brush along the wall isn’t so bad when I watch. Sometimes, maybe, I watch her when she doesn’t know.