The Heaven of Animals

by David James Poissant

  “I’m in Benson,” he said. “Remember Ted?”

  “Ted,” Jack said.

  “The Gila monster? The motel outside Tucson?”

  Jack coughed.

  “I’m making the trip,” Dan said. “Just like we made it when you moved out there.”

  Jack said something, and Dan, sure he’d misheard, asked him to repeat it. Only, he’d heard right. Again, Jack said: “Mom?”

  “I’m Dan,” he said. “Your dad.”

  “Mom and me,” Jack was saying, “we rented a truck this time and drove it cross-country and the lizard was there at this motel in a tank with a rock.”

  “Jack,” he said, but how could he tell him? How did you tell someone politely that, at the time, his mother was already dead?

  “And Mom asked if she could touch it!” Jack said. He laughed, choked, laughed again. “A venomous lizard! Can you believe it?”

  “Son,” he said. He needed Jack to remember because, if not this, what? What did they have? Nothing else, nothing shared, nothing from Jack’s adulthood but the van, the stops, their words, three days.

  “How is old Ted?” Jack said.

  Across the room, Dan watched as the pillowcase was lowered over the box. The box rattled back. Margaret stepped away.

  “Fine,” Dan said. “Really just fine. He’s got a new cage, a big one. Lots of room for him to run around.”

  “I’m glad,” Jack said.

  “You should see it,” Dan said, and he had a wild thought. Maybe he could steal his son from the house, bring him here. Or, not here, because Ted was not here, but some right place, a place to make Jack happy. They could go to the beach, see Jack’s seals. They’d have to lose Marcus, and he wasn’t sure how that would go over. He’d have to see the man, size him up. On the phone, Marcus was someone not to be fucked with, but a man on the phone wasn’t always the man in real life.

  “I have to go now,” Dan said. “I’ll be there before you know it.”

  He heard static on the other end, a rustle, then Marcus, his voice a whisper.

  “He’s asleep,” Marcus said.

  “Just like that?”

  “It’s what happens.”

  Dan couldn’t believe it. He imagined Jack muffled, the man’s hand over his mouth. His son, thin, weak, flailed for the phone.

  Marcus began to detail Jack’s condition. He implored Dan to hurry.

  Dan hung up.

  His eyes burned. His stomach ached. Exhaustion foamed at the back of his brain, a bottle opened too soon after shaking. Already he’d bought the room. How easy it would be to check in, to fill up his ears with a shower’s roar, then lie down.

  But he couldn’t do it. He had to move forward.

  The highway unspooled under starlight. Dashes marked his lane. Bone-white, they sailed past his high beams with the regularity of a metronome. Sleep’s tease was strong, but he felt a tug stronger than sleep, stronger than dread or regret, than death. An invisible thread ran over mountains, past rivers and roads, up his bumper and right through the windshield. The thread caught his throat and bound, at the other end, his boy’s heart. A word, the word, for this—it wasn’t Dan’s, didn’t belong to him.

  And so he imagined the pull as the work of water. Blue, the view from Jack’s window, the Pacific a rectangle over the kitchen sink. It was water called him west—the waiting coast, the cold and silver crash of waves.

  . . .

  La Jolla was a city on a cliff, dips and hills, a trapeze flung above the bay. Trees were here, and wealth. Couples in matching ­sweaters walked well-groomed dogs through the crosswalks. Children in sunglasses and name-brand clothes talked into cell phones. Storefronts advertised merchandise that, on sale, cost a month of Dan’s income.

  He’d been a day and a night without sleep. All night he’d driven, stopping three times only. He’d gotten to where he could use the bathroom, buy food, and pump gas in five minutes. The whole way, he’d pushed the speed limit. He hadn’t slowed down, not once, not even for the armadillo he’d sent spinning over the road like a top. Now, his head swam and his eyes, when he blinked, felt sand-filled and asymmetrical, his skull small.

  He sat behind the wheel of the car on the street before a row of blue mailboxes. A box on one end held a quiet surprise: a maiden name—his wife’s. He didn’t know when Jack had changed his name or if it was official. He wondered which name the boy would be buried with, then shook this off. Some things were worth worrying about. His name wasn’t one.

  Beyond the sidewalk and up a hill, the building waited. Houses rose on either side, so close a man might stand between, reach out, and touch two walls. The buildings, a street’s worth, stood white and red, stucco and brick, brightly shuttered, with Spanish tile on top. The sun, just up, painted the clay roofs pink.

  For too long, he’d sat, trying to catch his breath. Now he stood and swung the car door shut. No matter what awaited him, no matter what looked back at him from the bed, he would smile. That was the first thing he would do. He would smile, and he would not cry. He would kneel, and, if Jack let him, he’d open his arms.

  Jack’s door hung orange inside the white frame. A brass ring marked its middle. It was only a staircase away.

  Dispensation. Was that the word for what he wanted?

  And how long would he wait before he begged?

  He’d tried this once before. Long ago, after he’d served his time and sobered, he’d driven to Baton Rouge but been turned away at the door. He’d stood a long time at that door too, stood, then knocked, then waited, then knocked again, only for the door to open to Lynn’s scowling face. He’d never learned whether Jack knew he’d come.

  This door, though, when he moved to knock, stood ajar. Dan leaned and the door opened. Inside, a kettle’s curve on the stove, dishes overflowing the kitchen sink, and, rolled at the wrist, a single latex glove. Thumb tucked under, fingers splayed, it hugged the floor like shed skin. Against the linoleum, two fingers gleamed red up to the knuckle.

  Beyond the kitchen was the main room. Against one wall stood an enormous saltwater aquarium, and, circling inside, a pair of striped, spine-covered fish. Their bodies glimmered brown and white in the yellow glow of the tank light, their fins silk-webbed and see-through.

  The first step, once he took it, set him moving fast. He moved through the kitchen and past the room with the fish, down a hallway and toward the two bedroom doors. One door stood open, the room a study. The walls were bookcases, the shelves spilling over into piles on the floor. Among the mounds was wedged a blue blow-up mattress, its black tail plugged into a pump the size of a cinder block. A duffel bag yawned at the foot of the bed, a red sock sprung like a tongue between unzipped teeth.

  The other door was shut. He remembered to breathe. He pressed his palm to the wood, hesitant, as though to feel for fire inside. He waited.

  And pushed the door open to an empty bed, the sheets strangled into a rope that stretched to the door. Beside the bed stood an IV stand and a cluster of gray-faced, many-buttoned machines. Wires and tubes hung disconnected along the floor. In one corner, a wheelchair lay on its side.

  He felt a need, just then, to go to the chair, to right it, as though it lived, as though to lift the thing might save its life. The chair, once he had hold of it, was heavy. He tipped it up, tried to make it roll, but someone had set the brake. The floor’s planks pushed back at the wheels with a sneaker’s squeak.

  He moved to the bed. He sat, ran his hand over the mattress. Stains the shapes of continents stared back through the scrim of the fitted sheet. His knees found his chin. His head found the pillow. It was soft, and he took one corner into his mouth. He tasted salt. He pulled the pillow over his head.

  He wasn’t sure how long he slept before a door’s slam echoed down the hall. From beneath the pillow, he could see a sliver of floor, then shoes in the doorway. They were
red with white laces, a white cap on each toe, the kind he’d worn as a kid, played basketball in. He didn’t have to look up to know whose shoes.

  “Don’t say I almost made it,” Dan said.

  Marcus said nothing. The feet were planted far apart.

  “Just, please don’t tell me how close I was.”

  “He died last night,” Marcus said. “You weren’t even close.”

  . . .

  In the kitchen, Marcus boiled water. He was tall, thin and tan, his hair dark, cropped close along the sides of his head. His sideburns touched his jaw’s hinges, and his face wore stubble’s mossy mask. Black crescents cradled his sockets like the bottom halves of punched eyes.

  At the kettle’s whistle, Marcus tipped the water into a glass. The glass was beaker-shaped and tapered at the mouth like a vase. Coffee grounds waited at the bottom. The stream hit the grounds, swirled, and steamed. Together, they made mud, and the mud rose, bubbling. Marcus fastened a lid to the lip of the glass, and the two of them watched the brown water. In the other room, the fish tank bubbler hummed. Dan imagined the fishes’ gill plates going in and out. Then Marcus pushed a kind of plunger into the mix, and a silver disc separated the grounds from what had been brewed.

  It was a miracle, a horror—the world, and his son gone, blinked from existence. How a body, breathing, turned to lungs. He pictured them, sticky, deflated, gray balloons trampled into a wet sidewalk. And still the march of days, still sunrise and weather and water for coffee. Jack dead, and still beans would be dried and crushed, strained through water, and men and women would raise their mugs and read the day’s news and make grocery lists and worry over coupons and wonder whether their tires were in need of rotation.

  Marcus was talking oxygen, how everyone went by oxygen in the end. Oxygen or water, and, anyway, water was one part oxygen. Too little, too much, these were what killed you. You suffocated or swelled, dehydrated or drowned. Life was balance—imbalance, death.

  Proportion. Equilibrium. A needle in the arm had kept water in Jack’s body. A needle in the lung had kept it out. In this way, they’d kept Jack alive. In the end, his lungs had filled up faster than they could be emptied out.

  Marcus poured coffee into cups and joined Dan at the kitchen table. He looked calm, and Dan couldn’t stand it, how matter-of-fact he acted, as though every day your lover died and you sat and sipped coffee across the table from his father. Marcus watched the table, and Dan watched Marcus, wanting to throttle the calm from him.

  “You have it too?” Dan asked.

  Marcus started. Then, his face collapsed into something approaching amusement.

  “Not all of us live with AIDS, Mr. Lawson,” he said. “Some do. Some live with HIV. But most of us just . . . live.”

  “I only thought—the two of you.”

  “Friends,” Marcus said. “It only seems like more because I was here at the end.”

  Dan thought of breaking the man in half. What held him back was need. Marcus alone knew Jack’s final hours, his words, the last look on his face.

  “Did Jack—”

  “—say anything?” Marcus laughed. He seemed to Dan a man who, in this life, had enjoyed very little power, a man who now relished his dominion over the last half day and what had gone on in it. Marcus was smiling into his cup, but, when his eyes lifted, his expression was humorless.

  “You want me to tell you he had some special shit saved up just for you, but no such luck.” Marcus spun his mug in his hands. The steam rose in ribbons. “The magic words were supposed to be yours. Your words. Not his. This was your last chance, and, let’s face it, you blew it.”

  Dan brought his mug to his mouth. The rim was chipped, the coffee strong.

  “How much did my son tell you?”

  “Enough for me to know what you were to him.”

  “And what was that?”

  “A curiosity,” Marcus said. “Last century’s last holdout.”

  The mug was hot in his hands, but Dan would not put it down.

  “I was trying to get used to the idea,” he said.

  “Try harder. The country’s growing up. Before long, no one will be left, no one to accommodate what you call love.”

  Dan stood and launched his cup across the room. It hit and exploded. Coffee streaked the wall.

  He moved to the door. One boot was on the stoop before Marcus’s voice reached him.

  “Squirrels,” he said. “I don’t know if that means anything to you, but, at the end, it’s all he talked about. Squirrels in the bed. Squirrels running up the walls.”

  “Squirrels,” Dan said. He gripped the doorframe to keep steady. His knees locked.

  “The morphine,” Marcus said. “That’s probably all it was.”

  “Morphine,” Dan said.

  Marcus’s shoulders heaved. His head dropped. His brow touched the table.

  Dan winced. The fish was there again, set loose in his gut, writhing, careening to get out. He stepped inside.

  Beneath the kitchen sink, he found a roll of paper towels. He wet one. He wiped clean the spot on the wall, then picked up the china fragments from the floor. He moved to the kitchen sink. He stacked the dishes, the trays, the pans caked with burnt food, all of it, onto the counter. He let the sink fill with soapy water and dropped the dishes in. And then—because what else could he do?—he began to scrub.

  . . .

  The water, when his feet finally found it, was cold. His socks were balled up in his boots, his boots lassoed by their laces and slung over one shoulder. The cold climbed his legs, and he walked until the water reached his knees.

  He had worked steadily for an hour. When the kitchen was clean, he’d stepped outside, his stomach still writhing. He could see the beach, and he walked to it.

  He’d left without a word, Marcus collapsed at the table, a sentry over the dead.

  Dan pushed through water, following the shoreline. The beach was not like the beach back home. The gulf ran to sand, but, here, the shore was crowded with stones, outcroppings of rock and reef. He walked until he hit a rock wall, the water too deep to go around. Steps were carved into stone, and he followed them to a ledge where he found megaphones and signs and people gathered.

  “Save the seals,” one woman shouted. And a man: “Let them live in peace.”

  Dan pressed through the people, past a brass plaque that announced his arrival at THE CHILDREN’S POOL, to an iron banister skirting the ledge. The towering rock on which he stood reached into the ocean where it met a concrete wall, the wall an arm, the arm beckoning water into bay. Below, a sandy cove lay carpeted with seals.

  The seals numbered fifty. He counted them, then he counted them again. Half of the seals dozed. The others rubbed their sides and snouts with flippers or raised their heads to watch the waves. Their hides were white and black and brown, cloudy, the colors running together. Just like marble. Just like Jack had said. They were small, the seals, each no bigger than a sleeping child, and their bodies threw long shadows over the sand. A boy and girl, teen­agers, sat, legs crossed, not far from the seals and holding hands.

  A staircase traced the ledge and wound down to the cove, but, at the first step, a woman blocked his way. The woman wore a T-shirt, white with a blue seal silhouette across the chest.

  “What’s the cost?” he said.

  The woman laughed, and he saw all of her fillings.

  “Only your soul,” she said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’m not charging admission,” she said. “I’m telling you why you need to leave the seals alone.” Her hair was long, held back in a thick braid that swung when she spoke. “One foot on that beach, and you break nature’s contract.”

  Dan looked down. Beyond the seals, following the wall, footprints crossed and recrossed the beach, the autograph of an impossible dance.

 
“We need to preserve nature’s delicate balance,” she said.

  He hadn’t meant to make her flinch, but now Dan found his hand on the woman’s shoulder. He squeezed the shoulder gently, then brought the hand to his side.

  “Sweetheart,” he said. “Nature has no balance. You can stand here all day. You can keep as many people off that beach as you want, but, one way or another, those seals, all of them, are going to die. You and I are going to die. Because, you know what? You know what nature is?”

  The shake of her head was so slight, the braid hung still.

  “Nature is a fucking monster.”

  The woman hugged her chest. She stepped aside, and Dan made his way down the stairs and onto the beach. The couple holding hands looked up, then returned their attention to the seals. Twenty yards away, the animals yawned and turned in the sand. One of the largest watched the sky, its head bobbing, as though forcing something down its throat.

  Jack had said how sometimes seals swallowed stones. “For ballast,” he said. “The way a diver wears a belt to keep him down.” Weight controlled a dive. Men weighted belts with lead. Seals ate stones. In this way, buoyed otherwise by fat or air, both animals sank.

  Dan imagined filling up his gut. He’d start small, grains of sand, pebbles polished ocean-smooth, before he wore his teeth down chewing rocks. He’d obliterate the interloper, fill himself so full of stones the fish inside him would have no place to swim, then he’d swallow more—just watch, just wait and see—more and more, enough to grind the motherfucker out of existence. Then no more churn, no fiery, twisting thing.

  He watched the seals, the couple on the beach. The girl stood, and the boy brushed sand from her pants. Then the boy stood, and, hand in hand, they climbed the stairs.

  Dan watched the seals awhile longer, then looked past them to where the water met the sky. A line, pencil-thin, marked the place planes touched, so faint it almost wasn’t a line at all. The end, the way he saw it, would be when that line lifted and the two halves crashed, a cosmic collapse. It would come, the end, when blue met blue.