Honey in the Carcase

by Josip Novakovich

  The next morning, David called in sick for the first time on the new job. Beatrice was away at the Sacred Art Music School, giving lessons to preschool children. David wondered whether she was lying to him and having an affair; he was jealous, imagining her making love to a stringy bachelor in a greasy concert suit and a pair of black socks with toenail holes. But the jealousy was only a background disharmony in the jarring melodies of his helpless longing for Laura.

  David circled the phone like a bird of prey circling a rabbit far down on earth. Trembling, he grabbed the receiver and dialed. After two rings, the message machine was triggered: “I am unable to come to the phone right now, but if you leave your message with your phone number, I will call you as soon as I can.” Beep—a tidy, economical, Japanese beep. He hung up. He called again in five minutes and hung up. He poured himself a glass of vodka. With the cold drink becoming warm in his blood, his confidence rose. He left a message.

  “Please, you must see me. I need to see you. You don’t know all about my past—you don’t know what I am capable of. If you don’t—I must see you.”

  The minute he lowered the phone he lifted it again, pressed the redial button, and said into the tape recorder: “I’m sorry about the message. That was a stupid thing to say.”

  He waited the whole morning for a return call. It did not come. He called her.

  “Yes, what? You know that after a message like that, I cannot see you. You are right, I don’t know all about you, I don’t know what you are capable of. I don’t like threats, so I won’t see you again.”

  “I am sorry. I was desperate. I just cannot accept not seeing you at least one more time.”

  “All right, but a security guard will have to be present.”

  “Don’t insult me. I didn’t mean I’d do anything bad.”

  “Those are the terms. We have to sever this relationship. It’s becoming destructive to you and a source of worry to me. So we are getting together one more time, only to make a transition to you standing up on your own.”

  He sniffled the tears in his nose.

  David walked into the Stamford Professional Counseling building, stepping on a quiet carpet of a hazy color; he didn’t know what one would call it. Lavender? Alabaster? Some name that only sophisticated women know. A receptionist smiled at him, a professional grimace that revealed her capped front teeth. Her thin blood-red lips drew a curtain over her teeth as soon as she realized they were exposed; the shyness of her mouth was perhaps a carryover from her ugly-teeth days. With her long red nails, she tapped on the switchboard phone, and in the somnolent voice of an air hostess on a trans-Pacific flight she reported his presence to Dr. Fisher.

  David walked past the receptionist and tucked his shirt under the belt. He tried to suck in his belly and walked self-consciously and awkwardly, despite stepping firmly in his leather shoes with rubber soles. He advanced past several closed doors of other psychiatrists and counselors.

  Hers was open.

  “See, I trust you. We don’t need the security guard. I know you didn’t really mean what you said.” Laura smiled.

  He closed the door. She stood up and opened it. “Let it stay open. It’s more airy that way.”

  “But why should the door stay open? Are you claustrophobic?”

  “Yes, in a way.”

  David laughed. “But this is like a boy visiting a girl in a girls’ dormitory! The door must stay open during the date.”

  “Please keep your voice down.” She sat closer to him so that they could speak in soft voices. She crossed her legs. There was a narrow damaged patch on her thin black stocking above her knee; he wondered whose ragged nail had torn it—hers?

  “I’ve brought you a present. A compact disc of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto.”

  “Oh, that’s sweet of you, but I cannot accept presents. Presents are like investments, they form bonds.” Her skirt slid back as she gesticulated. Flushed, David leaned forward and put his palm down on her knee. She jerked back and shouted: “Keep your hands off me!”

  He leaped to grab her around the waist. She delivered him a sudden blow with her high heels, a karate kick, which took all the air out of his chest. She ran out shouting for security guards.

  When he regained his air, he shrieked like a lonely bull. He grabbed the Gothic hardcover of Doctor Faustus and tore it to shreds. Then he pushed down an entire bookshelf, tore the phone out of the wall, and smashed it on the floor. He growled as he tore through hardcovers one by one. He busied himself so when two policemen arrived.

  “I guess you don’t like to read, do you?” a pot-bellied cop said, looking around at the shredded books.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I cannot say I blame you,” the cop laughed. “But, young man, keep your voice down. These people out there, they are sort of soft, you know. It scares them; you are a big guy.”

  David did have the property of looking much larger in anger than he was otherwise. The cop put some chewing tobacco in his mouth, analyzing the mess. A mustached cop in the doorway said, “Let’s handcuff him.”

  “No, he doesn’t need that,” the potbelly answered from his belly. Noticing how David stared at his tobacco, he offered him a pinch. David made a ball out of it and chewed. Now they all chewed tobacco like some sort of sacrament. Leaning over a soothing-beige garbage bin, they took turns spitting out yellow-green mush. It created a good feeling of camaraderie among them. The cops tapped David on the shoulder as one of their people, stuck with bookish intellectuals who had put him through a bad head trip. They escorted him to the car.

  At a 7-Eleven, the potbelly bought him a pack of chewing tobacco, so he’d have something to chew on while in the psychiatric ward. David had his own room with a phone. His insurance company’s insurance policy would cover eighty percent of the expenses. The remaining twenty percent, considering that he would have to spend at least a week in the hospital, would be a hefty sum. David spit tobacco through the window into the yard, fuming. The worst was that she humiliated him and that he would never see her again. He’d been told the hospital had looked for a therapist for him, but none were eager to work with violent people. The floor was guarded by two big guards who looked like bouncers at a discotheque.

  David was not allowed to leave his floor, not even to take one flight of stairs to the first floor, where he could buy the Globe and the Financial Times. But he did not resent the limitation. For the first time in years, he felt calm. He mostly snoozed. This was his first vacation, so to speak, in three years.

  His boss called. “David, what’s the problem?”

  “I’m in a detox center. I’ve been drinking too much lately.”

  “I sympathize. I went through the same thing several years ago, after my divorce. I’d had it bad. My liver was diseased. It’s still weak. How’s yours, do you have pains?”

  “A little.” David lied to keep the conversation sympathetic.

  “Ah, a little crise du foie! You definitely better kick off the booze. You know what’s the best thing for your liver? Lots of water. Drink it all the time, even when you are not thirsty. Pure spring water really takes away the poison.”

  “Actually, I’ve begun to drink a lot of water quite spontaneously.”

  “Good, you’ve got good instincts. We all miss you in the office. Keep your chin up!”

  This was the first genuinely friendly conversation David had ever had with his boss. It was good to have nothing to hide. It all came out for everybody to see. He could sincerely rebuild his life now; the zero level to which he had fallen was a good turning point. But his obsession with his therapist gave him no peace. He demanded to see her. He claimed he would kill himself if she didn’t see him just one more time. She left him a message through a psychiatrist that if he tried to get in touch with her again, he would be liable for all the damages in her office and would be criminally prosecuted. After reading the message, David hollered in his cell, banged on the door, spat on the wall. His rib cage hurt where she ha
d kicked him. He was sure the pain came from the kick, not from a swollen liver. He screamed that his rib was broken, that it was a bad idea to create Eve out of a rib, that he needed an X-ray. But all he got was more lithium.

  Beatrice visited him. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Your behavior is obscene.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?”

  “You must change or I will leave you. I’ve had enough of your psychiatry. You are addicted to therapy more than to beer. You better straighten out, go to AA meetings if you need to, but now it’s either psychotherapy or me. An hour of good music will do you more good than a month of therapy. At least it won’t do you any harm. We used to enjoy playing together so much, the Spring Sonata, the Kreutzer—and you sold the piano for this?”

  She spoke forcefully. David’s mouth hung open. She made sense. And she looked startlingly fresh with her lips forming a cheerful wave, like an M calligraphically drawn; her thin black eyebrows and long lashes gave her face clarity and tranquil beauty.

  “Don’t stare like that! Now you are listening to me. You are like a bull led around by the muzzle. Don’t you have your own voice of reason to guide you?”

  He now loved her throaty voice that came from her chest, from a wellspring of soul deep within, making him shiver as if he were waking up from hazy nightmares to a cool dawn and a beautiful landscape of two glacial lakes connected by a stream. The two lakes were he and his wife and the stream was their marriage; if one lake grew dry, the other would replenish it. He was being replenished even now. He smiled, daydreaming about some future time when his lake rose higher than hers, so he would be the one replenishing her.

  “What’s that idiotic smile on your face?” she demanded, laughing.

  MY HAIRS STOOD UP

  WE COULD LIVE MORE EASILY in the country, but we like to be where the excitement is. We have always wanted to be around humans, to be as close to them as possible, to be their pets.

  We have failed. Humans prefer animals neither as bright nor as capable as we are, with the exception of a few unfixed cats. They keep every imaginable sort of worm, monkey, snake, and marine monster and still would not have us. Oh, some humans keep one variety of our species, guinea pigs. But guinea pigs are nothing more than an inferior breed, and they are treated well by humans because humans are fond of inferiority in others.

  I have always admired humans. What intelligence, what perseverance, what industry! I cannot keep up with their technology these days. I used to be able to enjoy their greasy cogs—if you got hungry, you could always get by around oily machines. Now their machines are greaseless, inedible boxes.

  Even such a simple thing as a snack is dangerous; much of the food that seems to have been casually left over is poison for us. When tired of cement, you used to be able to take a stroll in the park. Now, you must abstain from eating, and what fun is it to spend a sunny day in the park, starving? The streets are even worse: as soon as you are in the open, humans step on you, throw stones, iron, whatever they have in their front paws. Where did they get this urge to kill? Not even cats are like that. Actually, we are too tough for them. But humans kill and kill and it’s never enough for them. They do it neither to feed themselves, nor to enjoy themselves. Killing disgusts them, and yet they take pride in the ingenuity with which they can destroy us. They hate us. I don’t know how else to explain it. They think we are ugly, and yet they keep bulldogs, who are neither as intelligent nor as good-looking.

  Speaking of similarities, I have concluded that humans are similar to us. Humans believe the same thing. Whenever they have questions about themselves, they seek answers with us. If their livers hurt, they test our livers. If their eyes go blind, they test our eyes. The assumption is that if something is harmful to us, it is harmful to them, and that if we don’t understand something, they don’t either. We are siblings, we and humans. They live in walls, so do we. They eat old, burnt food; they even intentionally rot foods in greasy water. I don’t see any essential dissimilarities between us, except that humans are bigger and, therefore, live in bigger holes. Their world is merely our world magnified. And yet, instead of friendship, which we had sought for so long, they feel animosity. We must hide from them, and they need not hide from us, even though they fear us.

  I am not exaggerating when I say that their lives are an antithesis to ours. If they cooperated with us, provided us with clean conditions, we would carry no diseases, and we would create miracles in science together. Of course, now that we are pushed and shoved underground, we run into many health hazards, but most of the diseases we contract come from humans, not the other way around.

  I’ve had some adventures trying to enter one of their new buildings, each one hermetically sealed. You often have to go through sewage, which is risky business because the shit may just pour all over you. But you grin and bear it and let yourself be washed into a broader pipe where you can catch a breath and have another go. To avoid the avalanche, you never go up during the day or evening.

  Once the water shot me up a vertical branch; I took the first horizontal turn and reached a narrower pipe. I thought there would never be an end to it, and my lungs were about to burst, when I was finally shot out of the water. There was poison packed in grated plastic, which gave me enough of a footing to jump out. I slid on the porcelain floor. I rushed to hide behind a smelly metal box, which growled and crunched ice. I tried to climb into the box, lured by the smells of dead fowl. It was too tall for me, and I was curious about other large cubicles.

  It was one of those modern buildings where it’s hard to bite your way through. I prefer the old ones of cement and wood. Biting through wood is very good for you: it keeps your jaws strong, sharpens your teeth, relaxes you, and cheers you up. We take turns on a project of occupying a building, making networks of holes as corridors. Wood spurs you on into artistic playfulness. Having crisscrossed hundreds of old buildings, I found this new one, though less to my liking, tremendously mysterious. Still, in a large space, the first thing I rushed to was a large old crate, stretching to the ceiling. The crate was filled with thin vertical papers bound by thick paper and cloth. I took a brief snooze, my twenty-first nap. I nap a lot and count time accordingly.

  Sunlight woke me through a crack. I was surprised that the new building, nearly hermetically sealed, would have wooden boxes with cracks, but I’ve heard that humans grow sentimental and wish, as they go into the future, to be able to go into the past at the same time—that’s greed for you. So they get all kinds of boxes from dead humans, who got the boxes from other dead humans, and the more generations a thing has lasted, the crazier humans are about it.

  I peeked out of my crack. Several humans of varying sizes sat at a horizontal plank of wood on four sticks, and walked between the elevated plank of wood and a big white box where they keep winter. They cracked and sucked some eggs they had stolen from chickens, drank black steaming water from burnt beans, squealed and growled a bit, and then walked out of the cubic space.

  I took a couple of bites from the bound paper just to play down my hunger. Maybe you could live on that paper; there must be something nutritious about it: probably those dark things running one after another in lines, looking like the droppings of flies. The lead-smelling shapes are squeezed into squares—a mark that humans have arranged them. I like the taste of leaded cellulose, though I am not exuberantly fond of paper.

  Having grown certain nobody was in the large cubic hole, I crept out for a stroll. I didn’t feel quite safe, as if something might hit me from behind, so I did my walking against the walls quickly, and actually, it must have looked more like running. Well, I admit it, I was kind of running.

  I crawled into a white box, where they keep summer with the sun in zenith. Actually, it can be so hot in those boxes that I think they keep hell there. I crawled in through a hole against the wall, climbed through a narrow passage and to another hole into the centre cubicle, the baking chamber. It still smelled of various animals that had been broiled for
human pleasure. It raises the hair on my tail to think how humans put innocent creatures into the gas chambers to burn them! After my tour through the hell box, I returned to the lead paper and took an intoxicating snooze.

  The noise of humans woke me up. Through the crack, I saw one human opening the hell box and another sliding into it a metal board with a large animal carcass on it. I couldn’t tell at first what animal it was—it had only two legs, without feet, sticking up, and it had no fur or feathers, and was much too large to be a chicken. I thought it could be an infant human. They gazed languidly at the carcass in the hell box. And then again, nothing, except smells of burning flesh. I spent a lot of time sniffing the lead on the paper, snoozing more than normal and not daring to leave the crate. Later on, humans gathered around the elevated plank and squatted on smaller planks of wood around it. With their front paws, they held up thin transparent stones filled with liquid, knocking them against each other and gazing longingly at each other, then gulped the pale liquid cautiously. Then they ate some grass. After a while, one of them opened the hell box. The smell of burning flesh ignited my adventurous bone. They pulled the flesh out and let it sit on top, then disappeared again.

  I was not brave enough to leave my shelter right away. But when I sensed they would be gone for a while, I crept out of my shelter and climbed up to the flesh container. I worked my way through the heat into its center. Oh, Dracula, how hot it was there! I sneaked into the animal to protect myself from the heat. The inside of the animal was large and spacious—I could have easily lived in it with a whole family, scrabbling around in muddy wheat. What better than to have living space with edible walls! I was so groggy I couldn’t move.

  Only vaguely did I hear the people return. I was presently being rocked left and right and lifted up. I surmised that the board and the animal were being placed on the elevated plank of wood. The walls of the turkey—I had noticed atrophied wings on the side of the body and I had concluded it must be a turkey—shook, and I heard a dull sound. When streaks of light penetrated my chamber, I realized that the humans were tearing the flesh off the turkey with their long iron claws.