The Heaven of Animals

by David James Poissant

  The end of the world? It could happen. No one’s denying that.

  But it’s the end of Aaron that scares me.

  . . .

  I wake. I turn to put my arm around Aaron, but all I get is pillow. The TV’s off, the room dark. It’s still dark outside. I check under the bed. I check the cabinet below the kitchen sink. I check upstairs, then I go back to bed.

  But I can’t sleep. Aaron doesn’t leave the basement, not when he’s like this. This is new, and new is scary, and, after a few minutes, I rise and turn on the lights. I move to his side of the bed. There’s a sock on his dresser, weirdly out of place. Beneath the sock, I find the pills, chalky, deformed, and I wonder how long each stayed tucked under his tongue before I looked away. This worries me, but not as much as what I see next, which is the honey jar empty, licked clean.

  I tell myself no way could he be where I think he is, but, nights like this, I know better than to underestimate Aaron, and I don’t even bother to tie my shoes.

  I’m up the stairs in seconds, out the door and running through the yard in a T-shirt and panties. My laces strike my ankles like the tongues of snakes. There’s a half-moon, and it slicks the driveway in a wet, ivory shine. The garage door is up and the lawnmower’s been pulled out. Gardening tools scatter the driveway like a tornado came and hit just the garage. I run faster, into the neighbor’s yard.

  I’ve never seen her backyard, only the bees that rise from it. The perimeter is a fence of wood planks too high to climb, but an open gate tells me which way Aaron went. I pass through the gate and a floodlight flicks on.

  And there, in the lamplight, is Aaron. And there is the hive. It’s just a white box, a white, wooden box half a coffin in length.

  I don’t see any bees.

  No, what I see is Aaron with a rake in his hands. He’s standing as far back from the box as he can, reaching with the rake in what I can only guess is an attempt to pry open the lid. The rake quivers in his hands and the wide metal fan combs the hive.

  Also, he’s got an EpiPen in each leg. They bob from his thighs like banderillas from the back of a bull.

  I don’t know what a jarful of honey and two shots of adrenaline do to a man, but Aaron doesn’t look good. He shakes, almost convulsing, back heaving with every breath.

  I could call 911. I could run back to the house and pick up the phone, but by then it would be too late.

  “Aaron,” I say, and he jumps.

  “Stay back!” he says. “It’s not safe!” He turns, and his face glistens, soaked, like ten years’ worth of tears just poured out of his eyes.

  I’m a few yards away, and I take a step closer. I don’t want to scare him. I don’t want him making any sudden moves.

  “I wanted to surprise you,” he says.

  “I’m surprised,” I say. “Please, sweetie. Come back to bed.”

  “I’m not tired,” he says.

  His arms tremble and the rake scrapes the box. From somewhere, a bee rises and swims, lazy, in the air around us.

  “Aaron,” I say. “I want you to put the rake down. Now.”

  Perhaps they’re sleeping, I think. Perhaps, at night, the bees go to bed and don’t fly and don’t sting. God, I want to believe it.

  I take another step forward, and Aaron shrieks.

  “Stop!” he says.

  I hold up my hands like a bank teller on the wrong end of a gun.

  “I just want to help you, Aaron,” I say.

  Somewhere in the beekeeper’s house, a light comes on.

  “I ate all the honey,” he says, fresh tears fattening his cheeks.

  “I don’t care about that.”

  “No,” he says. “It’s not fair. You didn’t get any.”

  “I did,” I say. “Remember the pear? I had some. I’m fine. The rest was for you.” I take another step. “I don’t even like honey all that much.”

  The rake slaps the hive and rattles the lid.

  “Don’t lie to me. You love honey. I know it.”

  A bee lands on the rake, then lifts back into the sky. Another circles Aaron’s head.

  I take another step. I’m close. If I lunged, I could grab the rake, but I don’t know about Aaron. He’s little, and I’m thinking I could take him down, but I worry what it will mean if I’m wrong.

  A window opens above us and a head pokes out.

  “You kids crazy?” the woman calls. “Get away from there! Get away from there right now!”

  A hum has started up in the box, and that can’t be good. It sounds the way a button sounds when it’s come loose from your shirt in the dryer, only multiplied by, like, a thousand.

  “Call 911!” I yell, and the window slams shut.

  “Aaron,” I say. “Aaron, I want you to put the rake down and come inside.”

  He’s looking right at me, but it’s like he can’t hear me, can’t hear past the grim determination to do the thing he set out to do.

  He looks at the hive, and a bee lands on his shoulder.

  My own tears are coming now. I’m no crier, but I can’t help it. Because it’s my fault. Because I shouldn’t have slept except when he slept. Because, finding him missing, I can’t believe I went back to bed. Those five minutes, I think. In those five minutes, I might have found him, stopped him before he left the garage.

  “Once the bombs fall, there won’t be any honey,” Aaron says, his voice garbled and faraway-seeming. There are bees in his hair, bees covering the lid of the box, a patina of bees with fat abdomens and bright wings. Their wings shine like diamonds in the security lights, and I give up the hope that Aaron hasn’t been stung.

  When we were kids, our moms took us to play at a park with monkey bars and swings and a slide. On one side of the playground, a red pipe rose like a snorkel from the earth. It connected belowground to another pipe that rose from the other end of the park. Each pipe was fitted with a megaphone the shape and size of a showerhead and perforated by the same tiny, black holes. I’d stand at one end and Aaron would stand at the other, and, across the playground, we would throw our voices at each other. Our words came out cavernous, like shouts from behind closed doors. We giggled. We practiced cursing. We told dirty jokes. And, one day, Aaron said, “I love you.” I laughed, and Aaron said, “I do, Grace. I love you.” We were ten years old, and we’ve said it ever since.

  “It’s for you,” he says now, and his voice arrives like an echo, like it used to when he told me he loved me before either of us knew what loving the other meant or what it would mean.

  The first sting is in my side. I see the bee caught in my shirt. It wriggles, trying to get free.

  “All of the honey,” he says. “For you.”

  I leap. I knock Aaron to the ground and pry the rake from his hands. I fling it like a javelin across the yard, far from the hive, and I sit on Aaron’s chest, hands pinning his wrists to the lawn.

  A door opens, and a storm trooper steps out. Or that’s what she looks like, our neighbor dressed in white, some kind of beekeeper’s suit and what looks like a watering can at her side.

  Her face is hidden behind something like a mask made for fencing, but, when she speaks, her words pierce the mask, clear and unfiltered.

  “I don’t know what you kids are up to,” she says, “but, for the love of God, please don’t move.”

  They say that, with enough adrenaline, you can do anything. You hear stories of men wrestling torn arms back from alligators and mothers lifting cars off their kids. I’m on top of Aaron, but I see too late that the weight of my body is nothing compared to what courses through his veins, and I see that I’ve failed him again.

  “Please,” I say, and then I’m in the air. I’m flying. I’m falling. I’m tumbling, and I hit something, hard. The hive comes apart, the buzz turns to roar, and the moon, like magic, goes out of the sky.

  I hea
r grunting and turn to see Aaron dragging himself toward me on his elbows. He’s like a soldier passing beneath barbed wire. The woman in the bee suit stands over him, pumping a thin fog from her can into the air.

  I feel a sting, then another. My legs are lightning, and, soon, I can’t even look at Aaron, who’s no longer crawling, but rolling, a man on fire.

  I look up, into the night, into the heart of the pulsing, vibrating ceiling above.

  And then the swarm descends, looking, for all the world, like the end of the world.

  Refund

  The evening began in argument. Luke’s first-grade teacher had called a parent-teacher conference, and Joy and I were expected that night at school. This was not the standard midyear check-in. For months, we’d been getting notes. Luke wasn’t finishing his schoolwork. Luke didn’t play well with others. Luke wasn’t paying attention in class.

  Dinner was over, the table cleared of everything but a cup, a fork, and my son’s plate. On the plate sat a sad mound of boiled-to-death broccoli.

  “No cookies,” Joy said. “No dessert until dinner’s done.”

  Luke had never been big on vegetables. Even as a baby, he’d spit out anything green.

  “Broccoli’s good for you,” my wife said.

  “Not like this,” Luke said. “Boiled vegetables have no nutritional value. That’s what turns the water green, the vitamins and minerals. What’s left is fiber. And fiber just makes you poop.”

  My son, six years old.

  Joy sighed and shot me a glance. “C’mon, Sam, back me up on this.”

  In the pantry, the Oreos waited, their torn cellophane and the stale ones I always skipped on my way down the row to the cookies that still snapped when halved. I said nothing. A limp stalk hung from Luke’s fork, wet and terrible, and all I could think was how I hadn’t eaten mine.

  Luke didn’t whimper. He didn’t whine or cry. He was a quiet kid. If he had complaints, he kept them mostly to himself. His fork rose, pushed the pale, little tree past his lips and into his mouth. He chewed, eyes closed, hating it.

  “Let the kid have an Oreo,” I said.

  Joy’s look let me know that, once again, I’d fucked up. We were supposed to be a team, to put up a unified front. But we both knew who was Abbott in this marriage and who was Costello, who looked like the idiot and who called the shots. And, even if I got the boy’s laughs, it was Joy who got the last good-night kiss, the first hug home from school.

  Luke shoveled what was left on his plate into his mouth, chewed, and chased the broccoli down with milk from a coffee cup, the blue one with the steam engine circling the side.

  “Very good,” Joy said. She pulled the Oreos from the pantry. Our rule was two, but, because he’d been such a good boy, Joy gave him three. Luke beamed and squeezed her arm. That I had been his Oreo advocate had, it seemed, slipped his mind.

  Joy was always doing this, stealing the moment. Just that morning, I’d surprised the family with breakfast, only for Joy—Luke stumbling, sleepy, into the kitchen—to cry, “Look, honey, pancakes. We made you pancakes!”

  There was no we about it as Luke pushed his face into Joy’s hip, hugged her leg. Then she got to sit with him, butter his cakes, and ladle warm syrup to his liking while I was stuck, sweating, behind the griddle. My fear was that she would leave me, and, that morning, it was as if I was out of the picture already, pushed past the mat, past the frame.

  Luke was now on Oreo number three.

  A man shouldn’t marry someone smarter than him. He does, and he’ll spend the rest of his life feeling like something less than a man. Joy was smart. She’d gone to college, graduated debt-free on her parents’ dime. I’d done college too, but Joy was crazy-smart. And, any argument she couldn’t win with logic, she’d win by riling me up.

  “I’m going for a walk,” I said.

  “Hmmm?” Joy said, ignoring me and . . . something else. Was she? She was! Slipping Luke Oreo number four. Motherfucker!

  “I said I’m taking a walk.”

  “In this weather?” Joy said.

  I slipped on my jacket, my hat and shoes.

  “Well, hurry,” she said. “We have to meet Luke’s teacher in an hour.”

  . . .

  Walking the neighborhood’s what I did when I was angry, when I was tired but couldn’t sleep, when I was bored. But mostly when I was angry.

  And so I walked. In rain, I walked. In rain and tornadoes. In ice storms. Around me, the houses of River Run Heights huddled for warmth, rooftops licked by moonlight. Icicles hung from rain gutters and made mouths of windowsills. Driveways glowed gray beneath streetlights.

  Across the street from the neighborhood stood the school. Tall and boxy, it rose into the stratosphere. Who’d ever heard of a four-story elementary school? But Atlanta land was at a premium. Desperate architects were reaching new heights of creativity and whimsy.

  That week, we were in the grip of an ice storm, the city’s first in two decades, and so the windows of River Run Elementary hovered in suspended animation, frosted, opaque. Standing on my front lawn, I watched the school awhile, my breath coming out in clouds, then I turned and made my way, cautiously, down the driveway to the sidewalk and into the neighborhood.

  We belonged to the neighborhood and we did not. The land behind us had been bought up once we moved in. The developer offered good money for our lot, twice what the house was worth, but Joy and I were newly married and very much in love. Which isn’t to say that we finished each other’s sentences. It is to say that we didn’t need words, as though whole conversations were exchanged—whole worlds erected and razed—with a smile, a wink, a nod. The implications, of our first home wrecking-balled into oblivion, we found unsavory and metaphorically problematic. That was then. Now, I’d have traded the house for the cash were it not for the school, a good one, the kind of school Joy wanted for our son.

  So, we’d stayed and were accepted, reluctantly, into the development. Our neighbors didn’t hate us, though most kept their distance. We were enemies of symmetry. We’d thrown off the development’s feng shui, imperiling property values. In the end, we scored free lawn service, plus access to tennis and two pools. In exchange, a concrete marker the size of a compact car was lowered by crane onto our lawn. In imitation marble, it read: RIVER RUN HEIGHTS. And, below this: A KEN BUTLER PROPERTY.

  I circled back, down side streets and past houses with turrets, until I came to a small, white house leaning into the wind. The house was not like the others. It was old and without brick, and it was ours. With its mossy shingles and peeling paint, our house failed to advertise River Run Heights’ grandeur, just as the neighborhood failed to live up to its namesake: Amid the property lines and cul-de-sacs of the developer’s wet dream, there was not now—nor had there ever been—a river. Instead, there was a dry creek bed that, come spring, trickled runoff approximating, in both color and odor, the pleasures of raw sewage.

  Inside, my family waited for me.

  All I had to do was open the door. Then we’d bundle our boy in his warmest coat. I’d sling his train bag over my shoulder, we’d each take a hand, and, with Luke between us, Joy and I would cross the street. We’d take small steps.

  . . .

  The elementary school was well-lit and clinically clean. We followed our son up three flights of stairs, Luke bounding the whole way, Joy and I pausing at each landing to catch our breath. The stairwell smelled like paint and character education. Each wall was plastered with artwork, the deformed dogs and amputated cats of childhood rendered in finger paints. Everywhere were smiling suns and happy rabbits. On a wall left over from November, Native Americans and Pilgrims enjoyed a smallpox-free feast.

  Miss Morrell met us at the door. She was a stern-looking woman, tall, in her thirties, with dark eyes and dark hair that hung to her shoulders. Her bangs had been cut to fall in a sharp line across her forehead. Th
e line seemed to balance on her eyebrows. She led us to her desk. A pair of chairs faced the desk, and we filled them. Joy emptied Luke’s train set onto the floor. He sat and began fitting track together.

  “Well,” Miss Morrell said, “you must be very proud.”

  Joy and I looked at each other. Then Joy nodded, though neither of us knew why she was nodding.

  “You got my memo, yes? The yellow sheet in Luke’s Friday folder?” Miss Morrell drew in an exaggerated breath. “Okay,” she said. “The reason you’re here is that we would like to enroll Luke in River Run Elementary’s Gifted and Talented Program. It’s not curriculum replacement, but it is enrichment, enrichment that we believe Luke needs.”

  There was a long pause before Joy asked, “So, he’s not in trouble?”

  Miss Morrell returned our look of confusion with one of pity. I recognized the expression. It was the one Joy gave the Kroger bag boy, Down Syndrome Doug, whenever he bagged meat with bleach or lowered a melon onto our bread.

  “You may have noticed that Luke isn’t like other boys his age,” Miss Morrell said.

  Joy nodded, and I knew that, later that night, I would get the ­I-told-you-so talk of the century. From infancy, Joy had speculated that Luke was unique. I figured he was but hadn’t wanted to give Joy the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten more of her genes than my own. Now, she had the confirmation she needed.

  “The first graders take IQ tests,” Miss Morrell continued. “Luke’s score is several standard deviations above the mean. He fell into the hundredth percentile.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Joy said.

  “It’s beyond wonderful,” Miss Morrell said. “I’m not saying he’s bright. I’m saying that your son is effectively smarter than ninety-nine percent of his first-grade peers. Nationwide.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms, as though to let that sink in.

  “Well, so is everyone in this room,” I said. I reached down and ran a hand through Luke’s hair. He was intent on his trains. He didn’t look up.