No Animals We Could Name

by Ted Sanders

  “Okay then, James,” she says, and after that we leave.

  We take a cab to the station. I have asked Celia if we can take the train; I thought I knew why. The late winter sun is going down. The air is cool and dark, massive. The streets are loud, the sounds of cars. In the cab, sheets of streetlight glide over us now, and now, and again.

  I tell Celia that I’m a little scared. She tells me not to be. She looks out the window. Celia rears the fingers of her raised hand back, knocks her knuckles against the glass, lets out breath. Cords and grooves in her wrist rise and fall. I have seen her naked.

  I say I would like to see those curtains, and she says yes, but she says it in a way that makes me think she doesn’t understand me.

  “The white ones,” I say.

  “Oh yes,” she says, and then a few minutes later she tells me something else startling, she tells me that she has finally gotten around to painting the kitchen. She says it’s the color she always wanted now. She says this, and I catch a little cup of my own breath in the foot of my throat, let it out like a bird. I can’t recall if this is something we always talked about or not, painting the kitchen, if it is something we always wanted to do. It sounds as if I am to assume so. And what color was the kitchen, if it was, or what color did she want it to be? White, or orange.

  Moving slips of light pass backward over Celia, crossing her. Some of it must be falling into the holes of her eyes, making some shifting shape inside there and some color, some evolving color. Maybe it’s true that just such a color could be preserved in there, held in some unknowable state, the hue of absorption itself, some pooling and immeasurable potential, like the kept blood of the horseshoe crab. Or maybe nothing could ever be untrue in there. What a thought. I close my eyes against it, and against a greater danger, slowly dawning: my suspicion that sight itself could become visible.

  So I don’t ask Celia what color, what color the kitchen is now, but she describes it anyway, and as she talks I begin to understand that no interesting color has a simple name. I don’t listen well, but I hear her talking keenly and I work hard at imagining the kitchen, at imagining her acting in such a way at all, at what it means, whether our mutual interest is a matter of communion or confinement; it’s something I’m going home to, I guess. She talks, her voice through the cab like movement in water. I sit and think richly my threaded living thoughts that go on even after we arrive at the station.

  And now we are waiting, here on the bare edge of the platform along the tracks under yellow lights, and I am looking down at my feet, afraid just standing here thinking, the world big and multipotent around us. Celia stands close on my right, just ahead of me, just slightly turned away, and she squints up into the dark, into the clouded sky. While I am staring at her she spots me out of the corner of her eye, a flicker darting my way, but she doesn’t turn to me. It could mean anything.

  Down the platform to my left, a tall wide woman stands facing us, the only other person here, standing like the long exposed tip of a great stone. I have dismissed her—after a momentary disorienting swell of recognition—as not Theresa. This woman wears a long black rain poncho, the thin cheap kind. It’s dry and dull. You can still see the fold marks making sketchy square planes, no two lit alike, a dozen nearly identical shades of gray. She carries a small green laundry basket filled with neat vertical files—thickly filled, round-bottomed manila folders. Her legs are spread so wide. She holds the basket out in front, between her hands, and it’s weighing her down, her center of gravity. And now she is staring back at me blandly.

  I turn to Celia beside me. She is leaning out, looking down the tracks, away from me. Her toes are into the yellow line at the platform’s edge. Her left arm trails out to her side and back, toward me, and there—did I say this?—she has a weightless hanging grip on the hem of my jacket, just between her thumb and fingers. It pulls me, grounds me; I’m already heavy in her direction. She looks strangely slim-hipped. It’s unsettling, but she must always have been that way. It gives her—barely—the top-heavy carriage of a man.

  I clear my throat. I glance over at the tall woman, back to Celia. I close my eyes, open them. I hear close sounds across my shoulders, tapping: rain.

  “The train comes through here,” I say. Celia turns her head to look at me over her shoulder.

  “Yes, of course it does.”

  “The usual train,” I say, and I mean the one into the city, the one I know.

  “Yes, James, of course. The train.” She means there is just the one, but it seems strange.

  “It looks different.”

  Celia laughs and turns away again. She looks up into the rain, goes on staring down the tracks.

  “Well, I don’t think you’ve ever been to this station before, James.” But she gestures out broadly into the air off the platform’s edge, says, “I guess we would’ve been by here, though.” And she is right. I haven’t been here, of course, though now that I think of it I know I have been just there where Celia gestures, plenty of times, just there out above the tracks, in the empty narrow corridor where the trains run by. I try to gauge it, some unanchored space in midair, and I guess I would have been just there, a few feet up and out in some imagined passenger car. Through a green window. Just there, or there. These things may not mean much, might mean everything. It may not even be true that the sameness of any place ever endures. That thought fills me a little, makes me a little heavy and small, and sad I think, like your reflection makes you sad sometimes. Or sad is not really the word I mean; it might be more like happy.

  The rain piddles around us. I hold out my left arm, twist it so that my wrist is upturned. I try to capture with my eyes the phenomenon of a raindrop passing just through the open air at the empty end of my sleeve. It’s funny, a marvel, a wondrous thing; I feel a giddy choked contraction behind my eyes, down my throat, up from my chest. “Celia,” I say, I think.

  Off to my side the tall woman has the laundry basket down on the ground, is bent over into it, straight-legged, rifling through it intently. She is turning the folders on their sides. They hiss softly and slap. Her head comes up briefly and she looks down the tracks, startlingly alert, like a mantis. She glances at me, goes back to her work. I drop my arm. I hear the train. Celia is talking to me now, and her talk comes up the tracks with that other blooming sound; I couldn’t say what she says. Her brows are together. I step up into her, into the fading yellow stripe, and now my good hand—my hand—is between us, and I flex it by thinking. I work it fine. The sturdy warming tracks lie below and I marvel that their audacious disguise is so intact, that you could dig them up, that they would come up in pieces. They are wet, or shiny. Celia is still talking, saying my name. And there is this: I try but cannot see the opening of my own eye as I look out from myself. Is the outline of that opening blindness? Or maybe it is too constant a sight for me to even perceive it now.

  Celia is here and her shoes are black, there beneath my raised hand. Just beyond her, just down the tracks, the train is nearly here, taking shape behind the glare of growing lights. I feel flattened in its shine; a revelatory compression comes over me, a great breadth given to me. I believe it may be that I can’t move, or that everything is given power to move around me. Celia turns and now her broad narrowing back is before me, the curve of her shoulders beneath her coat. She still has her hand on my jacket, just so. I am not at all afraid. We are waiting for the train.

  The fingers of Celia’s hand begin to curl. I press my own hand against my belly slow as the train closes in, knead my feet inside my shoes atop the platform. I am aware of my weight, coiled in the muscles of my legs. The platform seems very high, a foreign height above the tracks below. I begin to wonder how quickly the moment could go by, how purposeful I will be.

  The Heart as a Fist

  MARTIN CANNOT LISTEN. HE HAS TRAINED HIS HEART TO OBEY.

  Martin sleeps with a woman who tells him that if you speak to your heart, it will begin to hear you. She tells him to breathe, breathe
, and she describes what he already knows, which is that as you fill your lungs, the heart races to harvest. Breathe in, she says, and feel your heart hurry.

  She sits astride him, her feet curled beneath the strung undersides of his thighs, her folded knees cupping his hips. Her hair swings, her breasts.

  Martin opens his hand inside the warm sink water. He feels the water roll across his palm, billowing. He cups his hand slow, and when it becomes an open-topped channel, a space that could almost own the water it holds, he stops to contemplate that body of water, trying to believe in it, how it could be held, and how it resembles a rope, the hot intestine of an animal, the tiny arc of a fluid circuit. He waits until he has learned all he can know now about that water, his fingers like fibers, the weight in his palm finite, and then he briefly draws a fist, lets it fall instantly open again into the same cupped shape beneath the surface. His hand empties, squelching mutely, and then silently refills as it opens. He thinks: water is substance. He makes a fist, releases it, makes a fist. He listens for the sound of his heart in his ear, takes from it its rhythm. He closes, releases, closes, releases. He thinks: fist. fist. fist. He takes and gives, takes and gives.

  And in the park when the woman speaks, her talk pools around him, a presence he cannot grasp. He is already busy grasping, palming forward his own mysterious machine. How funny to imagine that she might work the same. He hears her voice but not the words, he is too busy listening, talking, he clings handlessly to the grip of her fingers on his shoulder, the ground is flat and near, the world is broad and he is tired, so tired but just beginning he says silently fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

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  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist.

  fist

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  fist

  fist

  fist

  A bird blusters down from its flight at his feet.

  Deer in the Road

  SO HERE IS ME, AND THE MANNER IN WHICH MY CURRENT PREDICAMENT unfolds suggests I’ve got time, though my predicament itself is otherwise. As I launch from the guardrail like a stunt guy who meant to, as I’m into this slow spiral up off of everything and over the edge of the embankment, the whole car and me turning upside down, I see how it’s going to go and I’m calm, I’m potent, filled with a panic so pure it picks apart each instant like you might (if you had the patience, or the time) pull the finer and finer veins from a leaf that’s nothing but.

  This steering wheel in my hands now, for instance. It’s everything I hold dear. By which I mean I cling to it; why wouldn’t I? It’s sick in my grip, wobbly and loose with the slump of tires not used to being pointless. But this is the burden my arms now bear—devoting themselves to the pursuit of straightness while the horizon eats me up.

  My blinker is on. I mean it is on right now, lit. It troubles me because it’s the wrong blinker, though if I keep spinning (if I make it all the way around) that situation will rectify itself. Elements of this entire endeavor resemble situations rectifying themselves. It helps to invent that thought. And the blinker’s got it into my head that I might actually make it all the way around, but frankly I’m skeptical. I drive straight ahead, my arms like posts. My hands at ten and two. And here now: my blinker is off. I wonder if I breathe.

  The one thing I can’t stop thinking is how sorry I am, although that is not at all what I really am thinking. Although I’ve noted the presence of what I am really thinking—the notation its own act of discovery—the thought itself resists unearthing. This unexcavated thought, the one I can’t stop thinking, it resembles a stomach sickness and relates to the absence of everything but this act, everyplace but here. Or it resembles some clean rush of anguish and relates cruelly but prudently to nothing but itself. I can’t say more, or learn more about what I mean. This one thought remains ineligible for dissection.

  Other thoughts do not. For example, I have a palm beneath the thread of every separate sound made around me now. I’m certain that I do. Items of mine, or others that are not mine per se (or maybe forgotten items that belong to no individual so much as to the car itself), these things tumble around me. Each lays down a discrete rosary of sound, and some of these I can name: the prance of a box of tissues; the thump and slither of an umbrella; the jangle of my hanging keys; an explosive bluster that escaped me at first but that I now recognize as the photo albums rumbling from the backseat. Such strange artifacts, these. As strange, but more recent, a new sound has risen into the rest, a faint skittery sound pattering all around me—the floor emptying itself of the loose sand that we never vacuumed out. From the lake last summer, I’m certain of it, I remember as much (although this is not so much a memory as it is a thing I believe in). Memory struggles here against such a lavish experience as this. For example, underneath all these distinct sounds, and others, a handful of more resolute noises persist: the descending roar of the engine, several toneless layers of wind rushing, a stupid and agonal drone I make myself. None of these sounds will stop, all of them so piercingly true, like names or colors I hadn’t known.

  Of course, I’d tumble myself if I weren’t strapped in—and then what a sound I’d make. I’m a little out of my seat as it is, and isn’t it funny how the seatbelt had the sense to lock itself? It digs into my shoulder, my lap, heavy and keen as a tourniquet. But I’m not the only suspended thing, not at all, no, not here. For example: the stuff hung from the mirror—that tiny cloth bag, some beads, a strung stone the color of ice cream—would fall if they knew how to, or even whether to, tethered like they are.

  Here is another disappointment I’ve already discovered. I don’t blame myself, considering, no I don’t. My rearview mirror, spinning with me now, is supposed to be a backward place, I know that it is, but as I look into it (I don’t know why—maybe to spot that deer) I see that the view behind me, faded but still faintly sunlit, spins in the same direction as the one I’m headed into. This spin seems wrong—the mirror disguising its own misdirection—but of course it isn’t. And though I’ve come to terms with it, the normalcy has stolen a little wonder from me. I otherwise feel like the water in a twisted rag, wrung out slowly by the conspiracy of the ends. The side mirrors both give up the same poor view. Also, they are not the kind of mirrors in which objects are closer than they appear. It’s hard to say what I think about that.

  But ahead of me now, there—a damn compelling show. For a little while I’m rapt, I’m glued to the view, I’m part of the action. I’m headed down diving into a concrete creekbed, a sloping shallow V, coarse like a cat tongue and dry with a stain that says I came at the wrong time to find water. Like water would do. The flattened shapes and shadows of all the crap at the bottom sway and leer in the wash of the headlights. I spy thick black weeds groping out of cracks, battered hides of paper and a puzzling sheet of huge plastic, a fine selection of all the things people drink from. I’d wonder how each of them got here but I’m already going over them, mostly I am. I’m going to make it to the far side, which lies like a wall from where I sit dropping out of space. I’ll allow myself this conceit: it’s going to be a hell of a crash.

  I’m close now, and another sound I’ve known but not named becomes clear to me. A heavy something just over my head begins to graze my hair—I suspect I might flinch, of all things. But I know now with clarity that it’s the shoe, the shoe left behind in this old car when we bought it, a single shoe belonging to the car’s previous owner, or the previous. Again, these are facts and not recollections, precisely. Fact: Kathy said let’s leave it there, and we did. Fact: I do not r
ecall her reasons, or mine. Fact: an old man’s shoe, a right shoe, black and broad and round at the toes, and wrinkled at the ball like a neck, the tread worn smooth, the sole walked as thin as skin—the sole having been left behind everywhere it’d been, making black skid marks of itself (or engaging in a more subtle dispersal, unwitnessed). Fact: nonetheless, the shoe as a whole remained substantial. Grown top-heavy over time, full of weight. It hardly matters if I recall this now, or invent it. If I choose, the shoe’s movement can remain the loudest thing around me now.

  But here now, no, none of that will matter for long—no, it won’t. I have my direction and the shoe has its, both of us involved in the natural process of settling. Every moving substance means to settle; momentum is a myth, it’s true. For example, though I’m a bit past straight upside down now (and I wait for a new, giddy sense of rising) I’m either coming down too fast or I’ve got too much faith in my trajectory—I feel like I’m only going round. I won’t make it even close to all the way upright. Fact: I’m sorry about Kathy’s car.

  And now I’m there, I’m there, nearly there. I can’t see or picture what hits exactly first but when it does the offended patch barks resentfully. The headlights swallow themselves and I’m plunged into a startling dark. I imagine the dashboard still glows, but I’m all ears as the rest of the car begins to barrel on into itself where its nose has come to rest, that first chirp becoming another ten, becoming a hundred, becoming a hue. Crueler noises begin to erupt from more vital metal organs. Now little bursts of orange light litter my view, streaking, all I can see (if I’m seeing them at all). The steering wheel lurches and jams, seizing in my still-straining hands. I imagine how the hood crumples toward me, a jagged wave in ruined shallows, looming in my view if only I could see it, but I can’t see it and anyway, maybe, it is not precisely what will kill me. I have a great deal left to discover—facts, I believe.