The Heaven of Animals

by David James Poissant

  Miss Morrell leaned forward. She uncrossed her arms, grabbed the lip of the desk, and squeezed her knuckles pink.

  “Mr. Davis,” she said.

  “Call me Sam,” I said.

  “Sam,” she said, “I don’t doubt you’re smarter than a first grader. But I will tell you that if Luke’s development is allowed to proceed uninterrupted, if his intellect is properly nourished, then his mind will surpass everyone’s in this room. And I don’t mean by a little.” She let go of the desk. She leaned back, looked at us like we were a couple of assholes.

  I knew what she was thinking. Here was the mother who sold makeup and the father who got by in telemarketing. Like our house, we didn’t look like much. And here she was thinking of the apple, how it sometimes falls far from the tree. Except that, like I said, we weren’t idiots, Joy especially, just underachievers, people who’d settled into the steady income of easy, after-college jobs, then, getting older, let our chances at better work pass us by. I won’t defend our choices, but I won’t apologize either.

  On the floor, Luke had assembled his wooden set into a circle. One train waited on the tracks while he added an engine and caboose to another. The assembly was taking longer than usual, maybe because he’d been listening, maybe because he was wallowing in his puffy winter coat. Sitting there, fitting together toy trains, he didn’t look all that special.

  “You have to understand,” Miss Morrell said. “Most parents would kill for a kid like yours. Parents beg me to place their children in the gifted program. I’ve turned away bribes.”

  Joy and I knew these parents. At fund-raisers and picnics, on skate nights, conversation invariably turned to the kids: which children were walking by one, potty-trained by two, reading by four. When Luke was reading at three, I wanted to be thrilled the way Joy was, but what I wanted, really, was for my boy to be normal, to be like me.

  “I’ve always known Luke was special,” Joy said.

  Miss Morrell nodded. She’d found her ally. Already I could see her joining Joy in the fight, and I hated this woman for it. I hated the way she looked at me. I hated her hair, those bangs like a black gash opening up her pale forehead. But mostly I hated how she talked like Luke wasn’t in the room.

  I turned to the window. From the fourth floor, the view of midtown was striking: River Run Heights’s cluster of homes and the tall buildings beyond, the city blued by night. All the world was ice. I imagined Miss Morrell pushed out the window and flailing the way villains do when they fall from high buildings in bad movies.

  “We owe it to Luke to see that his potential is reached,” Miss Morrell said. She spoke slowly, succinctly, eyes and bangs blazing. “We’ll do everything we can for him at school, but you two . . .” She paused, watched me, resumed. “You need to create an environment in the home that fosters learning.”

  “What does that mean?” I said. I knew, but I was tired of playing along.

  “It means,” Miss Morrell said, “that you do whatever it takes.”

  On the floor, Luke brought two trains together in a head-on collision. He pulled an engineer from the cab of one and pantomimed a spine-crushing dive to the tracks below.

  “I’m on fire!” he yelled. “Help! The pain! The pain!”

  The other engineer joined him, screaming, “Stop, drop, and roll! For the love of God, man, stop, drop, and roll!”

  The plastic men were spun up and down the tracks. They muttered in fiery agony.

  “Look, Joy,” I said. “Our boy’s a genius.”

  . . .

  I made my money on the phone. At work, I was given products to sell and the telephone numbers of those to whom I should try to sell them. A bad job for someone with my disposition. People swore at me. Most hung up within seconds. The danger of such work is that you get used to this. You start thinking everyone on earth’s awful when only most everyone is.

  Joy worked part-time at Lenox, Atlanta’s fanciest mall. Her job was selling cosmetics to average-looking women who left her counter looking like supermodels. “This lip liner,” she would say, “will change your life.” She talked and women listened. Her targets were the sad, the disenchanted, those desperate to believe in the restorative power of an eyebrow pencil. These women surrendered startling sums of money, unaware that, at home, they’d never be able to duplicate what Joy had done.

  “They don’t know it’s not the makeup,” Joy said. “It’s me, these hands.”

  For years, she’d tried to persuade me to sit for her.

  “Men’s makeup,” she said the last time. “It’s never really taken off, but you’d be amazed. You can’t even tell. No one would know you’re wearing it.” With men, she explained, it wasn’t about accenting. It was about concealing. “Just imagine,” she said. “Blemishes. Broken capillaries. The creases at the corners of your eyes. All of it: gone.”

  “Never going to happen,” I said. “No guy wants that.”

  “I could make you look twenty again.” She studied my face, sighed. “Twenty-five.”

  In the end, the work I did and the work Joy did wasn’t so different. We caught customers unaware, at the dinner table or walking through the mall, then we pressed our merchandise upon them. Difference was, Joy was good at what she did. That, and her clients loved her.

  She’d finish, turn the mirror, and they’d sigh. And she’d buy into it, sure she was destined for something better than the mall and the life she had. Some nights, she’d come home talking about how if she’d only gone to grad school, if she’d only started showing her art young, as though she’d picked up a paintbrush in ten years. In the garage, her canvases leaned in a dusty stack.

  “Go back to school, then,” I’d say, knowing she wouldn’t.

  Joy was talented and she was smart, but she was also afraid the way we’re all afraid. What happened if she put herself out there, studied, painted, cast a line and nobody bit? And so she’d settled. She’d settled on me.

  . . .

  The next night, Joy got home late laden with yellow bags. Each bag sported a blue label that read BABY GALILEO. Joy dropped the bags and joined me at the kitchen table.

  “I stopped at the education supply store,” she said. “It’s where teachers shop. Miss Morrell recommended it.”

  “Okay,” I said. I stared at the bags. There were six of them, each overflowing. “But what’s all this?”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about Luke’s learning environment and how we can foster it.” She pulled items from the bags. Picture books, workbooks, thick tomes on parenting: Your Special Child and Pick My Brain. I picked up Pick My Brain. On the cover, a well-adjusted-looking boy, hair stiff with hairspray, overalls starched, sat in a chair and puzzled over a Rubik’s Cube. He wore sensible shoes and an expression that said: This is all well and good, but my real passion is long division.

  I flipped to the author’s bio.

  “MD and PhD,” Joy said quickly.

  “Then we’re in good hands,” I said.

  The corner was torn from the dust jacket, the place where, in small black print, the price would have appeared. I set the book on the table. I reached into a bag and pulled out a shrink-wrapped bundle of CDs.

  “Music,” Joy said. “Classical. For the synapses.”

  “Synapses?”

  “They’re stems, like these little hairy carrots in the brain. If they don’t connect, Luke won’t be able to learn a foreign language. The lady at the store explained it.” In case I still had doubts, she added, “It’s scientific.”

  “That may be,” I said, “but we have libraries. We have the Internet.”

  I moved to the floor. Spilling the contents from the remaining bags, I was surrounded by shiny, pricey merchandise: Maps (geographic and constellation) slipped from their long plastic cylinders. DVD cases advertised happy children. A small, heavy box marketed itself as the first safe, child-frien
dly chemistry set. NO ACID, NO GLASS, the box bragged in splashy red letters.

  “Christ, Joy,” I said.

  “I knew you’d do this.” Already Joy was standing. “I knew you’d take one look and make me the bad guy. Well, excuse me. Excuse me for caring.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said.

  Joy ripped into a green box. “I want what’s best for our son.”

  “This is our entire holiday budget.” I lifted a bag and shook it. “Right here. You think, Christmas morning, Luke wants to unwrap Mozart?”

  Joy dropped the box. It hit the table, and beads spilled out, hundreds of them. They dropped to the floor and scattered like insects, small and scared and black.

  Joy’s thumb traced the hem of her shirtsleeve. “He might like Mozart,” she said.

  “Oh, bullshit.”

  “You’ve never appreciated how smart he is.”

  “That’s not true. I just want the kid to have fun, to get a few toys at Christmas.”

  “We can still get him toys,” Joy said, but, when she nudged a Baby Galileo bag with her toe, I saw she knew that we couldn’t. She looked up and admired the ceiling, a practiced move for keeping tears from spilling over.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We can return these and use the money to buy normal toys.”

  “That’s what you’d like?”

  “That’s what I’d like.”

  “For Luke to be normal?” she said.

  “Luke is six,” I said. “I don’t care how smart they are, when it comes to Christmas, kids who are six want baseballs, they want bicycles, not”—I pulled a box from a bag, held it up—“not ‘Kiddie Accountant: The fast-paced coin-counting game that’s fun for the whole family!’”

  “We can’t deny Luke the mental stimulation he craves.”

  “Craves?” I said. “Where’s craves? I see a kid who enjoys a steady diet of Play-Doh and crayon wax, but I don’t see craves.”

  “I won’t let you hold him back.” Joy took a deep breath, exhaled, sat. She put a hand on my knee, and a shiver ran down my spine. It was the most intimate moment we’d shared in weeks.

  “Haven’t you noticed that Luke has no friends? None. He’s not like other kids. He needs to be challenged.”

  “Great,” I said, “then we’ll get him friends, gifted friends, and they can all play abacus together.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. I’ll find the kid friends. When I’m finished, he’ll have so many friends it’ll be a fucking sitcom.”

  “I’m done,” Joy said.

  She stood and left the room. I heard her move through the bedroom we hadn’t shared in months to the bathroom that, out of convenience, we shared still, heard her shower, flush the toilet, brush her teeth.

  I rose and made the rounds, extinguishing lights and locking doors. Then I returned to the kitchen. On my hands and knees, though, picking up beads, I couldn’t stop thinking about Luke’s synapses.

  For the first time, I was worried about the welfare of my son’s hairy carrots.

  . . .

  I was determined to find children like Luke, and, in the end, the neighbors did the work for me. Not forty-eight hours had passed before the phone rang.

  It was Devon Tweed, the Englishman who lived four doors down. “The house with the purple wreath hanging from the portico.”

  “Yes,” I said. I did not say that I had no idea what a portico was.

  As it turned out, there was already a group dedicated to the gifted youth of River Run Heights. The children numbered five and gathered on Friday evenings. While the kids played, the adults enjoyed card games and wine.

  “We meet fortnightly,” Devon said.

  I rolled my eyes, but, for Luke’s sake, I would make a good impression. Still, something troubled me.

  “How did you hear?” I asked. “About Luke.”

  Devon let loose a throaty laugh.

  “This Friday,” he said. “It’s the last gathering before the holidays. Do come.”

  I waited for him to say “Ta-ta” or “Cheerio.” Instead, I got only the click of a cradled receiver. It was a sound I was used to.

  Joy was beside herself. “What do we wear?” she said.

  “Clothes, I imagine. Unless they’re beyond all that. Clothes,” I said, trying on my best Devon Tweed, “clothes are the coverings of peasants and vagabonds.”

  Joy shook her head. “Don’t mess this up for Luke.”

  “Skulduggery,” I said.

  “I’m not kidding,” she said. “I’ll leave you.”

  Those words, she’d glared them and stomped them and slung them with the slam of a shut door, but she’d never spoken them out loud.

  “Don’t threaten me,” I said.

  “It’s not a threat,” Joy said. “I’m serious as fuck.”

  “You can’t take my son from me.”

  “Don’t mess this up,” she said, “and I won’t.”

  I walked. Oh, that night, how I walked.

  . . .

  When I got back, Luke was in bed reading from a picture book called If It Runs on Rails. According to Joy’s parenting books, obsession was a common trait among the gifted. Obsession was not the word the books used, but obsession is what it amounted to, the tendency of the gifted to cling to things, to identify themselves as experts in a chosen field. Among the young, common interests included dinosaurs, horses, and space exploration. Luke’s thing was trains. He couldn’t get enough of them.

  I came in, and he sat up, his locomotive comforter bunching at his waist. He wore a Thomas the Tank Engine shirt.

  “Dad,” he said, “I bet you can’t guess the top speed of Japan’s fastest bullet train.”

  “Bet I can’t,” I said.

  “Come on,” Luke said. “Try.”

  “Hundred miles an hour.”

  “Ha! Try twice that.”

  I sat on the bed. Luke pulled the comforter aside and scuttled into my lap. “Look,” he said. He held out the book, and I took it. In the picture, a train traversed the Asian countryside. Trees traced the track. Mountains rose, majestic, in the distance. The train was a blue-gray blur. I admired the picture for what seemed an appropriate amount of time, then put the book down.

  “Listen,” I said, “I have good news. You know how Miss Morrell said you get to be in a special class?”

  Luke nodded.

  “Well, you get to be in a special club too.”

  “A club?” Luke said. He frowned and his brow furrowed. He had remarkably bushy eyebrows for a child. It was the single feature we shared, the thing picked out by anyone who saw a picture of me as a kid.

  “A special club,” I said. “With special kids like you. Kids from the neighborhood.”

  “Will Marcy Jenkins be there?” Luke said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Because she kicks me,” Luke said. “On the bus.” He lifted the cuff of one pajama leg to show me his shin, the two green-brown bruises there.

  “Maybe she likes you,” I said. But the bruises, they looked fierce.

  “No,” Luke said. “I know what you’re talking about, but not Marcy. Marcy pretty much hates my guts. She calls me Butt-Face.”

  Bitch, I thought. I pictured a girl run over, pigtails flattened, face black with the latticework of fat school bus tires.

  I rubbed my son’s legs. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sure she won’t be there. This is a club for good kids, like you. So, what do you think? Want to give it a shot?”

  Luke thought it over. A night-light the shape of a steam engine dusted his face gold. He left my lap and crawled back under the covers.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll give it a shot.”

  “That’s my boy,” I said. I stood, then bent and kissed his forehead. “Good night
.”

  “Oyasumi nasai,” Luke said.

  “What?” I said.

  “That’s how they say good night in Japan.”

  I moved to the doorway. I watched Luke for a minute, and, watching him, I saw him for the first time not as a father does but as another first grader might. He was puny, and his brown hair, cut in the shape of a bowl, stuck up in back. His front teeth betrayed a gap that would one day need braces. And his glasses, resting in their plastic case on his bedside table, were too big for his face.

  “Luke,” I said. “The kids at school, do many of them pick on you?”

  Luke studied the wall. He seemed to consider the question, then he turned his head, looked me in the eye, and said, “Yeah.”

  Before then, I hadn’t recognized it, the power of a single word to make you suddenly, unaccountably sad.

  “Everything’s going to get better,” I said. “No more bullies from here on out, I promise.”

  I was a liar. I was a man spinning promises from sadness, the kinds of promises life’s least likely to let you keep.

  . . .

  A week before Christmas found us shivering on the front stoop of the Tweeds’ massive brick house, Joy and me, Luke between. The purple wreath hung, as promised, from the ledge above the front door.

  “You know,” I said, running my hand along the ledge, “in ­England, they call this the portico.”

  Luke and Joy stared at me. Through the O in the wreath and a window in the door, I saw a fireplace and a fire and a number of people milling about, dressed up, drinks in hand. Joy licked her palm and smoothed Luke’s hair, running her thumb along the part. She wore her best coat and a dress she’d sworn wasn’t new but which I’d never seen before. I’d agreed to a blazer but drawn the line at a tie. Ties were for weddings or when someone died. Even at work I didn’t wear one.

  Before I could knock, the door opened to a tiled foyer and a wide staircase and a girl. Judging by the look on Luke’s face, I knew exactly which girl this was.

  Marcy Jenkins was not cute with blond pigtails. Marcy Jenkins was wide of body and forehead, a young linebacker in training. Her lips were puffy. Her eyes bulged. The gap between her teeth was more spacious than my son’s.