The Heaven of Animals

by David James Poissant

  “Maybe I’ll catch one of your swim meets sometime,” he said.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  They nodded the way people do when they agree to something both know will never happen and, in agreeing, know the other knows.

  The cat writhed in Brig’s arms, and he lowered it to the floor. It moved through the room, sniffing, then rubbed its side along one coffee table leg.

  “I hope you find a way to be happy,” Lily said and, before he could say anything, kissed him on the mouth—once, twice, three closemouthed kisses in quick succession—and then she was out the door.

  He waited for what felt like long enough, then opened the door and threw the cat out.

  Then he moved to his suitcase, pulled his laptop from the front flap, sat on the floor, and flipped the laptop open. He pulled the joint from his pocket. It wasn’t hand-rolled, but neither was it manufacturer-perfect. It was closer to the prerolled cones a friend of his used to pack tobacco into, but it was stamped with a logo Brig had seen somewhere before.

  He searched the name on the cigarette’s side, and things made sense quickly: five medical marijuana dispensaries in a ten-mile radius, and laws loose enough he didn’t doubt a minor could stock up even without her parents’ help.

  He didn’t know her last name, but searching “Liliana Tucson swimmer arm” pulled up the Tucson Weekly, the human interest story, and the truth.

  A snake had seemed a far-fetched way to lose an arm, and he wondered whether the cancer had reached her other bones. He wondered at the rest of what she’d told him, how much was true. Her parents were missionaries, that much the article confirmed. In one picture, Lily stood beside them on the front lawn of a small, brick house. He knew it immediately for one of the ranches in the development down the road. But the neighborhood was huge, houses identical. He could wander the cul-de-sacs and cursive streets nightly and not be sure which house was hers.

  And say he could be sure? Finding her, what would he do? Shake her hand? Say Sorry for your cancer? Meet her folks?

  He read “High School High Dive” twice, looking for the words remission and cancer-free and, not finding them, knew what not finding them meant.

  There was another paper, an announcement that needed reading. He could almost see Kate’s face, serene, cheek pressed to the lawyer’s. Or maybe they were smiling, gazing into one another’s eyes. He considered pulling the page up. But he hadn’t looked yet, and he wouldn’t. He didn’t want to see the picture. He didn’t want to know the guy’s name, didn’t want to know which church, how soon, what day.

  He shut the laptop. He stood and returned the computer to his bag. He searched the kitchen drawers until he found a box of matches, then stepped outside.

  . . .

  The night was insects, and Brig cut right through the middle of the roar. The joint was really working on him, so that the cicadas’ rhythmic pulse swelled in his head to the shape and size of a heart monitor. He’d never seen one, a heart monitor, except in bad movies, the kind with the green line and sonar beep that meant the coma patient’s heart was still beating. Stumbling, calling for Boots, Brig waited for the line to fall flat, bugs cut off in a sudden, strangling hush, like birthday candles blown the fuck out.

  He was high.

  And Boots was gone. Or hiding. Or in the belly of some other animal already.

  “She’s an indoor cat,” the woman had said. Pampered, spayed, declawed, the cat had never set so much as one paw out-of-doors. “She’s my little sweetie.” The woman ruffled the cat’s mane with one liver-spotted, skeletal hand. A diamond ring collared her fourth finger, and Brig wondered how long she’d been widowed.

  He wondered now how long she’d had the cat. Divorced, he’d considered a dog for companionship, but work made it impossible. Had Boots perhaps been a dead man’s replacement? Had Brig lost more than a cat? Had he lost a husband substitute?

  The joint burned his fingertips, and he dropped it, stomped it out. He sat and put his head in his hands. He stood. The palm trees spun. He made one more trip around the apartment complex and wound up back at the lamppost where he’d first found Lily. He touched the pole. He shook it, but it was too deep in the ground to move. He looked up. Bugs crowded the light, dive-bombing and circling. A black-shelled beetle head-butted the bulb a half dozen times before hitting the sidewalk. Caught on its back, the beetle squirmed, wings folding and unfolding beneath it, legs pedaling air.

  He watched the beetle a long time. He hated bugs, the grotesquery of mandible and eye, antennae twitching, the threat, always, of flight.

  Come on, he thought. Come on. But the beetle couldn’t get itself turned over. Brig couldn’t leave it, couldn’t touch it either. Grass grew from a crack in the sidewalk, and he plucked a blade. He tried to flip the beetle over with the blade of grass, but the insect was too heavy. He was pushing it across the concrete. He stopped. He worried he’d hurt it, worried he’d torn up the beetle’s wings. Then the legs, searching, hooked the grass, and the beetle turned itself over. For a moment, it rested, then its back unbolted like the doors of a DeLorean, wings flickered, and the beetle lifted off.

  Brig had no idea what time it was. It was still night, no warmth, no sunrise softening the sky. Tomorrow, he had a meeting in Tempe that he’d skip. He’d skip the whole week, maybe. Maybe take a month off. He could make it a month on credit cards, but this would cost him. In the long run, he’d pay twice as much.

  Or not. Every few weeks, in the mail, he got an offer, another card with zero interest on balance transfers for twelve or eighteen months. He knew a guy who’d open an account, move his debt, then, a year later, move what he owed again. It was a migration that had been going on a decade, and, in this way, he’d stayed out of debt. Brig could do this, and he wondered why he hadn’t, why he let his several thousand dollars fester on a three-year-old Visa and an even older MasterCard, both with shitty interest rates. Filling out an application would take ten minutes. Instead, each month, he wrote two more checks.

  His own laziness impressed him—triumphant laziness, laziness in the face of clear, available solutions.

  He pulled his key ring from his pocket and found the neighbor’s key. He crossed the parking lot, stopped at her door, and let himself in.

  Same floor plan, the apartment was a mirror image of his own. The furnishings, however, were exquisite, walls crowded with dressers, bookcases, a desk of dark, carved wood. It was an apartment trying to hold everything once held by a house. Inside, the smell was cat and potpourri. A low table stood beside the door. A lamp stood on the table, and he pulled the chain.

  On the kitchen counter, by the sink, six cat food cans were stacked like hockey pucks. A page of handwritten instructions was weighted down by a manual can opener with rubber grips. He’d never bothered to read the instructions, and now he moved the opener aside to take a look. Printed at the top of the page were three phone numbers. There was the number of the cat’s veterinarian, the number of an emergency vet, and the number where the woman was staying. The first instruction began: Boots is an inside cat. Brig read that and couldn’t read the rest.

  He unstacked the cans and made a pyramid. He turned the cans so the cat on each label faced him, then spun the cans so the cat faced away. He’d hold on to them a few more days, in case Boots came back, but, on the last day, he’d open each can, switch on the disposal, and dump the food. He’d tell her the cat had just run off. That seemed kinder, unless he was only telling himself this because it was easier.

  The only other option was to call. He could beg her forgiveness, ask advice. And, who knew? Maybe this had happened before. Maybe she knew a place the cat might hide. But, looking around the apartment, at the careful placement of furniture in each room, he knew this cat had never gotten out before, knew this just as he knew he couldn’t make the call.

  He hadn’t meant to fuck up, hadn’t meant to make another big, giant m
istake. It seemed unfair—brutally, relentlessly unfair—that certain big, giant mistakes weren’t made so much as begun with smaller, simpler ones: a wrong turn, a pan left too long on the stove, an open door.

  Brig opened cabinets until he found a glass. He filled the glass with water and drank. There was dish soap on the countertop, and he washed the glass, then returned it to the cabinet where he’d found it.

  The woman’s kitchen and main room were divided by the same thin, silver strip that divided his own, and he stepped over it. He crossed the room, then sat with his back to the door. He reached up, pulled the lamp chain, and the room went dark.

  He closed his eyes. He would wait out the night. Eyes shut, he’d listen for a scratch at the door, and he would not sleep. He’d wait through the silence, listen past the silence, until his head hurt from all the listening.

  If you hoped hard enough, you could wish a thing into existence. He’d believed that, once. He wanted to believe it again. Eyes closed, hoping—it was as close as he could get to prayer.

  100% Cotton

  The night is cold. The buildings are tall. The sky, except where it’s starlit, is black. Black like black checker pieces or what’s left of wood after the fire.

  Also, I should mention that there’s a large gun pointed at my face.

  And because there’s a large gun pointed at my face, things speed up the way they do in nature films, how a seed sprouts, turns to stalk, and takes leaves in ten seconds.

  Things here are speeding up just that way. Stars pinwheel beyond the buildings. The moon rises, sets, rises again. And then things slow way, way down.

  “If you don’t want to be caught dead in that shirt,” he says, “you’d best take it off.”

  The guy with the gun’s not fucking around. I don’t know anything about guns, but this is a big one. It looks like the kind that holds a lot of bullets, the kind that leaves your corpse unrecognizable when the cops come, which is okay because there’s no one to miss me, no one left on this spinning planet to faint when the coroner lifts the sheet from my bullet-riddled face.

  The gun’s pointed at me because the guy asked for my wallet and I said no.

  “No,” I said, and he said, “How’d you like to die?” and I said, “Well, I wouldn’t want to be caught dead in this shirt.”

  Which isn’t exactly true. If I hadn’t wanted to be caught dead in this shirt, I wouldn’t have worn it. It seemed fitting for the occasion. The shirt’s black with a skull-and-crossbones emblem on the pocket, what you see printed on bottles, the kind with caps to keep out babies and old people.

  Maybe the skull and crossbones wasn’t an inspired choice, but fuck you. Pick out your own death-shirt.

  The guy with the gun didn’t like my tone. He said, “I don’t like your tone.”

  He didn’t get my smugness, that it was on purpose, so I said it again, the thing about not wanting to be caught dead in this shirt, which is when he told me to take it off. Which pretty much brings you up to speed.

  I pull the shirt over my head. I kneel and fold the shirt on the sidewalk, a rectangle, department-store-perfect. Work five years at the Gap, and you get really good at folding clothes.

  “You’ve never been held up,” the gunman says.

  I could tell him the truth, that it’s my third time this week, that for months I’ve watched the local news in order to pinpoint the Atlanta intersection most likely to get me offed. That I picked this street in this neighborhood and wander it nightly. That I’ve been roughed up, cursed, and mugged. I’ve lost two wallets, a watch, my phone, but not one guy would pull the trigger, because it turns out what they want, really, isn’t blood—it’s money.

  Noncompliance, I decided, was my best option.

  Last night, I sang, did a little dance. “My milk shake brings all the boys to the yard!” I belted it, gyrated my hips, but that only freaked the guy out. He didn’t even stick around for the cash.

  This guy, though. This guy looks like he wouldn’t mind firing a round through your forehead if only you found the right words to provoke him.

  “Wallet,” he says. “Now.”

  I’m on my knees, the shirt the only thing between me and his feet. We’re in the dark where he grabbed me, but there’s enough moonlight to light up the skull, which isn’t the same material as the rest of the shirt, but something firmer, rubbery, like a kid’s iron-on jersey decal.

  I point at the shirt. “One hundred percent cotton,” I sign. English is my first language. My second’s American Sign Language.

  The guy looks around. He’s getting antsy.

  This is how my father died.

  My father was born deaf and he taught me his language, though it wasn’t his language, not for years. In this country’s history, there was a time when sign language wasn’t allowed, when the deaf were taught to speak in tongues, to mouth sounds they couldn’t hear leave their lips, as though all of America was afraid of hands, of what the deaf might do with a language all their own.

  My father found happiness with a deaf woman who taught him to speak with his body. She stuck around just long enough to give him a son. He never remarried. He died last year when a man asked for his wallet. Dad kept walking, and the man shot him.

  “Couldn’t your father read lips?” people ask, as though the answer to this question determines whose fault it is he’s dead.

  A wind kicks up. Shirtless, my skin prickles. The sidewalk hurts my knees.

  “Count of five,” the guy says. “Five.”

  At the Gap, I read tags until I came to know a material at the touch of a sleeve. Even cotton-polyester blends I can guess, give or take ten percent on the ratio.

  My T-shirt between us looks lonely, and I wonder if my father fell like that, whether he folded or crumpled like a dropped shirt.

  “Machine wash warm, with like colors,” I sign.

  “Four,” the guy says.

  I don’t know whether my father misunderstood his killer, whether he saw the gun, whether he walked on knowing what came next.

  “Gentle cycle,” I sign.

  “Keep it up,” the guy says. His thumb jumps. Something clicks at his end of the gun. He steps toward me, and he’s almost on the shirt. His boots are black lace-ups.

  It won’t be long now.

  “Three.”

  You want to know why I want to die, but what answer could I give good enough for you, you who want to live?

  Putting a thing like that into words, it’s like trying to explain what stands between people, what keeps us from communicating—I mean really communicating—with each other.

  We move through the days with our hands at our sides, and I believe that whatever holds us back, whatever keeps people at bay, maybe it’s the same thing that left my mother tethered at the neck by an orange extension cord to our attic’s rafters.

  Maybe it’s what sings in my ear to follow her.

  She wasn’t afraid to do to herself what I’m asking someone to do for me.

  “Tumble dry low,” I sign.

  If I fall forward, my head will catch the shirt like a pillow. I’m ready.

  “Two.”

  We talk in our sleep, and so do the deaf. Nights I snuck into my father’s room, his hands worked over his chest, signing. It was the language of dreams, incomprehensible, but it was gorgeous. His hands rose and fell like birds with his breathing.

  “One.”

  Except sometimes, sometimes, meaning crept in. A transmission. My father, who spent his life missing my mom, that sign: index fingers beckoning, then hands pulling air in the direction of the heart.

  I close my eyes, and it’s there, the gun muzzle, ice between my eyes.

  I want to cry out. I hold my breath.

  I wait.

  I wait.

  You want to know what my father was saying, and I’ll tell you.
It’s what I shout once the gunman’s given up, returned his weapon to his jacket pocket. It’s what I call after his heels slapping the sidewalk.

  It’s my voice to the gunman and my father’s hands to my mother in the night, calling: “Come back. Come back. Come back.”

  The End of Aaron

  Aaron calls to say we’re running out of time, and I know that we’re going to have to do it all over again, the collecting, the hiding, the waiting to come out of the dark.

  “Grace,” he says. “Where are you? Where are you right now?”

  He’s got that warble in his voice, like he’s just swallowed a kazoo, that and the tone that means business, like in movies when the screen splits and we see the people on both ends of the line, the air traffic controller telling the twelve-year-old girl how to land the plane, or the hero asking the chief which color wire to cut.

  “Publix,” I say. “I’m at Publix.”

  “Perfect,” Aaron says. “I want you to get ten—twenty—gallons of water, eight rolls of duct tape, five pounds of jerky, and a pear.”

  He still calls it duck tape, like the bird. Last time I corrected him, he didn’t talk to me for two days, so I let it go.

  “Why the pear?” I ask.

  “I like pears,” Aaron says, and it’s like he’s saying: Just because the world’s ending, I can’t get a pear, goddammit?

  Except that, for Aaron, the world is always ending. It’s the third time this year, and it’s only July. I’m thinking last night’s fireworks set him off, but there has to be more to it. Probably he’s off his meds. Aaron loses it, and, nine times out of ten, it means he’s gone off his meds.

  Used to be, he’d warn me. “I’m just going to try,” he’d say. “Just for a week or two.”

  When I stopped supporting these experiments, he stopped telling me. Now, I have to guess, which isn’t hard given the things that come out of his mouth. The trick is figuring out how long he’s been off.

  First day, he’ll feel nothing. By the end of the first week, he tends to claim a clarity and empathy he hasn’t felt in years. “I want to fuck the world!” he’ll say, pulling me onto the bed.