The Heaven of Animals

by David James Poissant

  Then, week two will hit, and like clockwork, or something more precise and calculating than clockwork, Aaron will start in on that year’s fear.

  It wasn’t always the end of the world. For a while, Aaron was afraid to leave the house. Those weeks were okay. We’d lie in bed, snuggle, watch TV. One time, we watched Labyrinth three times in a row. By the third viewing, Aaron was sobbing. I shook the pills into his palm, and he drank them down.

  Then there was the year of the bees. Bumblebee or butterfly, it didn’t matter. Aaron would see a bug and freak out. When he was a child, a bee sting put him in the hospital for two days. Now, everywhere he goes, there’s an EpiPen in his pocket. Aaron gets stung, he has less than a minute to plunge the needle into his leg before his throat swells shut. It’s a fear I respect, a fear that makes sense when you’re all the time only seconds away from death.

  He’s only been stung the one time, but twice he’s put himself back in the hospital. “I really thought there was a bee,” he’ll say, EpiPen empty in its little tan tube.

  This year, though, it’s the apocalypse that’s got Aaron in handcuffs. Not the Rapture or any trumped-up Mayan shit, but what Aaron calls the real deal. He doesn’t know how the world will end, only that it will be bad. He doesn’t know when, only that it will be soon.

  “Won’t be long now,” he’ll say, canning fruit or sharpening the blade of a knife. “Won’t be long at all.”

  I blame his parents. Not for the depression—I mean, maybe that’s their fault. Maybe there’s something fucked in their genes that got more fucked up when his dad fucked his mom. I don’t know. I don’t know how DNA works. I only know that his folks bought into the whole Y2K thing, and Aaron’s never been the same since.

  Imagine it: You’re eight years old, all of your friends are partying with their families or up late with other friends at New Year’s Eve sleepovers, and, instead of watching the ball drop with your parents, you’re huddled in the basement watching your mom cry. The basement is stocked with two years’ worth of water, batteries, and green beans. Upstairs, a TV’s been left on, and Dick Clark counts down. Downstairs, you shut your eyes and wait for the end of the world.

  You could say Aaron’s been waiting ever since. I should know. I’ve known Aaron most of his life. In kindergarten he pulled my pigtails, and by high school I was letting him pull down my pants. Neither of us were college material, so, after graduation, he got a job at Arby’s and I got a job down the street at Payless shoes. Sometimes our lunch hours overlap, and we meet at McDonald’s. He smells like old beef and I smell like feet, and we eat our McNuggets and pretend that we’re better than this. Truth is, we’re twenty and we live with our parents, but that’s okay because we have each other, and I’ve come to believe that each other is enough.

  Most nights I spend at Aaron’s. His parents call me the daughter they never had, which is sweet but also kind of fucked up since they must know by now what I do in bed with their son.

  At Publix, I get everything off of Aaron’s list that will fit in the cart. I have a card from my parents to cover food, and, so long as I keep it under two hundred a month, Dad won’t yell. Most meals, I pay for myself so I can stock up on weeks Aaron goes a little crazy. His therapist calls this enabling. I call it love. She says I’m a problem, and I, for one, have agreed to disagree.

  At home, I pop the trunk. It’s got a dozen gallons in it, and I grab the first two. I start up the front steps and almost kick over the jar. This I’m used to. Every few months, we find one, a mason jar fat with amber, lid collared by a yellow bow—a sort of thank-you for ignoring the bees.

  A while back, the woman next door set up a hive. Generally, the bees stay on her side of the fence, though, from Aaron’s backyard, you can watch them rise, a fog of tiny helicopters circling the house. Aaron’s mom called the county, but it turns out there’s no law against keeping bees.

  She petitioned the homeowners association to dub the neighborhood bee-free, but the beekeeper threatened litigation, claiming it was because she was black.

  “I don’t care what color the woman is,” Aaron’s mom said. “I don’t want those things stinging my son.”

  In the end, the HOA let the lady keep her bees provided no one got stung, and, in two years, no one has. The women settled their differences, and now we get honey.

  Aaron meets me at the door.

  “Sweet!” he says. He pulls the jar from my hand, leaving me to juggle the gallons.

  “There’s more in the trunk,” I say.

  “Those can wait,” Aaron says. “Get the pear.”

  I go back to the car, get the pear, and find Aaron in the basement. This is where he lives. The place is spotless, the way it gets his first week off meds. First he cleans everything, then he lets everything go to shit. The clothes he has on are the clothes he wore yesterday, and I wonder how long it’s been since he slept.

  “Come on, come on,” Aaron says.

  The basement is two rooms. One’s a bedroom. The other’s been converted to a living-room-slash-kitchen. It’s all belowground, setup intended for the Y2K end that never came.

  Aaron’s on the bed, honey jar open between his knees. He balances a plate on top of the jar, and I drop the pear onto it. Aaron likes knives, keeps knives all over the house, and now he pulls one from his pocket, a Swiss Army deal, and unfolds a long blade from the handle. He splits the pear, picks the seeds from the middle, and hands me the plate. Then I watch as he lowers the blade past the open mouth and deep into the jar’s gold, glorious middle.

  The knife rises, and it’s gilded, honey-sheathed. I lift the plate and wait for the drizzle.

  Listen: If your honey comes in a bear-shaped bottle, you’ve never had honey, and if you haven’t had honey, you haven’t lived. Real honey, honey fresh from the comb, is sweet, yes, but it also tastes like clover and sage, like cinnamon and lemon trees. I can’t explain it except to say that, before you die, you owe it to yourself to take a taste.

  We eat the pear and make love, and, when we’re done, I run back to the car and unload the gallons, the rolls of tape, the jerky in its fat, five-pound bag.

  I make half a dozen trips up and down the stairs, carrying water, and Aaron stocks the gallons in his pantry. What he’s got is an old wardrobe, converted, crowded with shelves. Together, we cut a hole in the drywall just big enough to tuck the wardrobe in. You can hardly tell it’s not a real pantry.

  When Aaron gets scared, we stock up. When he comes out of it, we eat whatever we stocked up on.

  I come down the stairs with the last gallon, and Aaron is crying.

  “There’s no room,” he cries. The pantry is packed. “There’s no more room!” He screams it, then sobs.

  I touch his shoulder and he turns, wild-eyed, like a dog touched at the food bowl.

  I hold up the last gallon. “We can slide it under the bed,” I say. “We can put it anywhere.” I should know better. There’s no use reasoning with Aaron when he gets this way, and, today, for whatever reason, he’s decided the only food and water we can keep is what fits on the shelves.

  “Take it away,” he says. “Give it to Mom and Dad. They’re going to need it.”

  Early on in his delusions, this was a sticking point for us.

  “People will want in,” Aaron will say, “but you’ve got to be ready. You have to be prepared to tell them no.”

  “Even our parents?” I’ll ask.

  And Aaron, without a trace of sympathy, will say, “Even them.”

  “Okay,” I’ll say.

  It bothers me, I’ll admit, imagining my mother and father wandering the bomb-scarred wasteland, scavenging for food while Aaron and I get fat on beef jerky and canned corn. But, then, the end isn’t coming, and so my agreeing with Aaron isn’t the biggest of concessions. Compromising your ethics is one thing. Compromising your hypothetical ethics is another. And so I say,
“Okay.”

  That okay, it’s like enabling—another word that, in my mouth, means love.

  I love Aaron. How, you’re wondering. How could she love a man who yells, who cries, who makes her carry jugs of water up and down the stairs? But you’re only seeing Aaron unwell. Aaron at his best is better than you or me, better than anyone I’ve ever known. He’s gentle. He’s kind. But those are just words. Here’s a story:

  I’m twelve. The girls at school have boobs, and I don’t, not yet, and one day this girl, Mandy Templeton, she empties her carton of milk onto my tray and floods my lunch. “What’re you gonna do,” she says, “cry about it?” And then she calls me Baby-tits. “Baby-tits, Baby-tits,” she sings.

  We’re at that age where, at lunch, boys sit with boys and girls sit with girls, but Aaron hears this and stands and walks over. He taps Mandy Templeton on the shoulder, and, when she turns, he punches her, hard as he can, right in the mouth. She hits the ground, screaming, spitting blood.

  And even though she’s a girl and Aaron’s a boy and the rules of chivalry sort of demand things like this not be done, because Aaron’s so small, always getting picked on and never—I mean never—standing up for himself, and because Mandy’s known by students and teachers alike for being a bitch, Aaron gets ten days expulsion, and that’s it.

  Mandy’s teeth never looked right afterward, and no one ever messed with Aaron again.

  Here’s another story:

  Junior year, Aaron takes me to prom. We dance. We kiss. That’s all we’ve ever done. The dance is over, and, instead of driving me home, Aaron surprises me with a hotel room.

  We undress and get into bed. We touch each other. Then, just as he’s about to put it in, I say, “Wait. I can’t. I’m not ready.” And, Aaron, he smiles. He strokes my cheek. He says, “Sure, Grace, okay,” and takes me home. No fight, no fuss, not one word meant to make me feel bad.

  I was so grateful I couldn’t get out of the car.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said.

  And then I gave him a hand job. Right there in his parents’ driveway, I gave him probably the best hand job ever given in the history of the world.

  The next month, there was nothing we hadn’t done.

  Point is, high school guys don’t work that way, but Aaron’s always worked that way. And if the trade-off is that, a few weeks a year, he goes cuckoo, then that’s a trade-off I’m willing to take.

  Aaron’s therapist calls him a wounded bird, but, I ask you, who wouldn’t care for a wounded bird? What kind of person sees a bird with a broken wing, cat on the horizon, and walks on by?

  And so I buy the water. I tape the windows. I hunker down with Aaron, and, when I can, I get him to take his medication, knowing that, in a few days, it will kick back in and the man I love will come bubbling up from the ocean floor. He’ll break the surface. Exhausted, he’ll rest his head on my shoulder and say that I deserve better, and I’ll tell him to shut up, and I’ll rub his back and he’ll sleep and I’ll watch.

  I carry the extra gallon upstairs. It’s Thursday, our shared day off, but Aaron’s parents are at work. I wonder whether they’ve noticed the change. Most episodes, they don’t. When it comes to Aaron’s parents and Aaron’s illness, check the sand. That’s where you’ll find their heads.

  I head back downstairs, and Aaron’s still trying to make room for the jug. Finally, he gives up. He pulls the honey jar down from the high shelf, uncaps it, and sticks a finger in. He puts the finger into his mouth. He does this a few more times. He doesn’t offer me any, and I don’t ask. Off his meds, Aaron can be thoughtless, but I try not to make him feel bad. Guilt’s not a motivator when he’s like this. Guilt only makes things worse.

  He fastens the lid and returns the jar to its place on the shelf. He lies down on the bed, and I lie next to him. The sheets are musty, unwashed.

  “It’s going to be tonight,” he says. He shudders. There’s a pillow under his head, and he pulls it up and over his face.

  “How do you know?” I say. I may as well be asking a toddler how the spaghetti sauce got all over the walls, but I have to try.

  “I can feel it,” Aaron says, voice thin through the pillow. “It’s here.”

  “How does it happen?” I say.

  Aaron is quiet so long, I nudge him just to make sure he hasn’t smothered himself. When he jumps, I realize I’ve woken him. He throws the pillow across the room. It hits the TV and falls to the floor.

  Aaron pulls the remote from his pocket and turns the TV on. According to the news, there’s been a strike in Pakistan. Something to do with American missiles. Something to do with the threat of nuclear armament. The anchors theorize. Which countries have the bomb? Which don’t? Tune in at ten to find out—that sort of thing. It’s nothing you don’t see every few days, but it’s all the evidence Aaron needs.

  “If there’s a detonation, even a hundred miles away, the fallout alone will keep us underground for ten years,” Aaron says.

  That’s a lot of bottled water, I want to say. Instead, I tell him that it’s all right, that no bombs are falling, that I’m here.

  I don’t know where Aaron gets his information. Maybe he makes stuff up. Maybe he’s trying to scare me, or maybe he believes what he says. Some of it he gets online. I know from his laptop’s browser history, which is war and death and almost never porn.

  “I love you,” I say.

  Aaron changes the channel. More Middle East, more death.

  The pill bottle is on the dresser by the bed. I uncap it. The next part, I have to be careful.

  “How about some medicine, sweetie,” I say, and Aaron knocks the bottle from my hand.

  I’m on my hands and knees, picking up the little white pills, when Aaron says the country’s started testing new poisons on its own people. “They drive them out to New Mexico and gas them,” he says.

  “I’m sure that’s not true,” I say.

  The first pill’s the hardest, but it’s only the beginning. They’re antipsychotics, not miracle drugs, and sometimes it’s a week before they kick in. Even if I can get this one into him, I have a long road ahead of me.

  “It’s totally true,” Aaron says. “I saw footage.”

  I let it go. I pick up the last pill.

  “I’ll make it worth your while,” I say.

  I stand and pull off my shirt.

  “We just did that,” he says, and I point out that we didn’t do everything.

  Aaron pops the pill, and I go down on him.

  Do I feel bad? Bad for using my wiles to get a pill into Aaron’s gut? I do not.

  He groans. He’s just been inside me, and I don’t even want to think about what I’m tasting, and, before I know it, it’s over.

  There’s no basement bathroom, so I brush my teeth over the kitchen sink. When I move back to the bed, Aaron’s asleep.

  . . .

  It’s almost midnight when he wakes. I’m watching a TV movie, and Aaron puts his hand between my legs.

  “Not now, sweetie,” I say. I’m tired. I’m worried. I turn the TV off.

  “For me?” he says.

  I tell him to take another pill and we’ll talk. He takes the pill and pulls down his pants.

  “Not until you wash it,” I say.

  He sighs and moves to the kitchen. I laugh, watching him from the bed, his little butt flexing as he stands on tiptoes, trying to get himself stretched out over the sink. He gives up, goes upstairs, and, when he comes back down, he’s already hard.

  I’m in no mood, but a deal’s a deal.

  I get to work, he comes, I clean up, then I roll onto my side.

  “I love you,” he says, and I hear him move to the pantry, hear the honey jar lid come unscrewed followed by a quiet, occasional slurping.

  “Wake me up for the end of t
he world,” I say, and Aaron says, “Don’t worry, I will,” no trace of irony, sarcasm, any of it.

  He’ll laugh when I tell him. When he’s well, we’ll have dinner someplace nice. We’ll celebrate another episode overcome. I’ll repeat the things he said, and he’ll shake his head, embarrassed, but also amazed.

  “I don’t know,” he’ll say. “I don’t know what gets into me.” And he’ll reach across the table and take my hand and squeeze.

  The TV comes on and Aaron turns the volume down low. I feel a hand on the back of my head, and I hope it’s not the one covered in honey. He smooths my hair, and I think how this is maybe going to be an easy one. In March, Aaron and I spent an afternoon under the bed. In May, he stayed in the basement, lights off, for a week. I’d leave for work and come home to cups brimming with piss. At the end of the week, it took a day’s worth of laxatives to empty him out.

  In the morning, I’ll call Arby’s. Aaron’s boss knows the drill and, to date, has been surprisingly accommodating. Aaron has five days paid vacation left for the year, but I’m hoping to get him back to work in a day, hoping one of these years, by the end of the year, Aaron will have some days left and we’ll go somewhere the way people go places when they’re young and in love.

  “Aaron,” I say. “I need you to take your medicine.”

  “I will,” he says, but his hand stops smoothing my hair.

  “Promise,” I say. “Promise me that in twelve hours you’ll take another pill.”

  “I promise,” he says.

  Here’s what I know: I know that, one of these times, it’s not going to be so easy. One of these days, no matter what I do, I won’t be able to get Aaron back on his meds. What I don’t know is what comes next. This is my fear, the fear of the unknown.

  And, in this way, maybe Aaron and I aren’t so different—two people afraid of things beyond our control. Except that, in the end, I have a pretty good idea whose nightmare is destined to come true.

  The mercury’s rising, ice caps flattening into the sea. We’ve got dams collapsing and power plants blowing sky-high, plus enough bombs to make the earth’s surface match the surface of the moon.