Austin Nights

by Herocious

tongue to call her. I say her name when she doesn’t show herself. Where’s my sweet little princess? I know she woke Michael up last night, but she’s a confused cat. I keep trying to tell him that. What has Michael done with her now?

  “There you are, Kitten!”

  I open the sliding glass door. She doesn’t scurry inside like normal. This worries me. I bend down to pet her, but she barely manages to lick my hand. She stays flat on the ground, her legs sticking out as if she dropped dead on her side. And usually she’s so loving when I first get home. What has Michael done to my precious?

  When she doesn’t stand, I pick her up and pet her tiny head. “Honeyed Cat,” I say, “what’s wrong with you? Have you had anything to eat, girl?” She’s limp in my arms, totally inert. I feel how hot her beautiful coat is, as if she has been baking. Even the air coming out of her little orange nose is burning up. I drop a few ice cubes in her water bowl and I place her gently within reach. But she immediately plops to the linoleum and takes a big breath. Her back shakes. Is she having hot flashes? Chills? Doesn’t Michael know Honeyed Cat can’t get sick? He was there when I found out about her condition. He’s well aware of her frail immune system, yet he already did this to her not once, but twice before, with similar results. Doesn’t he remember the last time she was under the weather all week after the guy came to fix our bathtub?

  “Honeyed Cat,” I say, “are you all right, girl? Do you need to go to the hospital?”

  Of course, she doesn’t answer. Michael knocks on the door, or at least I think it’s him since we still don’t have any friends in Austin. His chest glistens with sweat.

  “Lover!” he says, reaching in with his lips to steal a kiss. But I rear back and give him my disappointed face. He gets the message, “What’s wrong? Were you worried about where I was? I guess I should’ve left a note but I figured I’d be back before you.” He’s all worked up. “I ran down to the river. You need to see it sometime. There’s this hill there with a stone jigsaw puzzle of Texas, and it has all the largest cities labeled. Around the stones is carved, ‘DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS.’ We’ll have to run there someday. Austin has a capitol star by it.” He sniffs twice. “Mm, smells good, Lover! What’re you cooking?”

  “I’ve had enough of this,” I say, visibly upset. “What did you do to Honeyed Cat?”

  “Nothing,” he says, “I left her on the balcony so she wouldn’t sleep all day and be up all night. But I left the utility room open for her to stay cool in the shade.”

  “Look at her,” I say, “she’s really sick this time. Do you have any idea how hot it is outside under that fucking sun? You told me you weren’t going to exile her again, no matter what. This is the third fucking time!”

  “But she could sit in the shade if she wanted. I left the utility room door open.”

  I shake my head and make my lips scornful.

  “You can’t change her sleep cycle. She’s a cat, Michael!”

  “Well,” he says, “it’s worth a try. I haven’t gotten a peaceful night of sleep in over two weeks. Every day I wake up on the wrong side of the bed. You always ask why I’m moody. It’s because I can’t sleep!” He looks at Honeyed Cat lying on the kitchen floor, practically dead. “Why’d you let her inside? Look at her, she’s sleeping now. She’ll be up all night again, scratching the door and clawing our bed until I wake up all pissed off.”

  “Why’d I let her inside?” I say, exasperated. “Why’d I let her inside? Are you seriously going to ask me that? You know she has AIDS. She can’t get sick!”

  “She doesn’t have AIDS, Bridget.”

  “Whatever. You know what I mean.”

  Honeyed Cat sneezes three times to emphasize my point. Then she falls dead on her side again, listless.

  “She’s fine,” he says. “She’s tired because she hasn’t been able to sleep a wink all day.”

  “Tired and fried. You should’ve felt how hot she was when I brought her in.” I think about what he said. I say, “Wait. She’s been outside since I left this morning?”

  “Look,” he says, “is this how you’re going to be when we have kids? You can’t always be the good guy and make me the villain. You can’t undermine me like that. Our kids will end up hating me.”

  I can’t believe him. Our kids?

  In a huff, I grab the car keys and lift Honeyed Cat into my arms. She’s still inert, like a small sack of russet potatoes. Poor girl. Everything’s going to be fine, Honeyed Cat. I cluck my tongue to ease her tiny nerves.

  On our way out, I glare at Michael and calmly break the news:

  “I don’t think I ever want to have kids with you.”

  He blinks his eyes shut, lowers his head, and breathes a dramatic sigh from his nose. His bare chest isn’t shiny anymore. I just hope he has enough common sense to turn off the oven.

  3

  What’s the value of plot? I hate to put you through this metaphysical rant, but I feel there’s something to be gained if I at least try to live up to my pseudo-intellect.

  Plot gets people involved.

  Plot arouses people’s interest so they stay until the end of the story.

  In terms of plot, there are stories written to perfection, epic stories. These bastions of literature evoke an emotional response from an enthralled reader. They don’t bend the rules because they are the rules.

  I imagine that if I write enough of this memory down, a plot will emerge despite my freewheeling approach. That’s what herded words tend toward. There’s irony in the idea that writing freely, writing whatever comes to mind in discursive orts, will eventually lead to a set of parameters that I have to work within. It’s almost as if freedom, when stretched to infinity, is actually a disguised form of constraint.

  Freedom is constraint. Disorder is order.

  Take the formation of the universe, for example. In the beginning there was nothing, no laws, no substance, only absolute freedom of the kind that will never be again, at least not within the grasp of our Conscious Mind. 13.7 billion years later, concrete laws govern everything down to the empty space between atoms.

  No more freedom: only discovered laws. No more disorder: only math.

  Freedom is constraint. It’s only a matter of giving freedom enough time. When given enough time, freedom tends to destroy itself, or expose its inner hypocrisy.

  0

  On our second night in Dallas, Carla checks in early. She’s tuckered out after having to wake at the crack of dawn to help Cody set up for the Public Artwalk Dallas.

  Due to his role as lead fundraiser, Cody gets to snip the ribbon, christening the event. I take some action shots, which I promise to email, for memory’s sake. In them, I manage to capture the precise moments before and after the snipping. In the former, Cody is focused on making the giant scissors cut after an ineffective first snip. But in the latter, the ribbon is divided and Cody is looking down at his work, smiling.

  We’re camping in the high-ceilinged living room Cody says they rarely use but they’d like to use more. He can’t even remember the last time anyone sat here. There’s a fireplace and lofty lead-paned windows that span from floor to ceiling. We’re gathered around a nice bamboo coffee table. A hardback sits in the center, Bob Dylan’s autobiography:

  We’re just gonna be gone, the world’s gonna go on without us,

  and how seriously you take yourself, you decide for yourself.

  We’re nursing the last of his beer. When the dregs are reached and surpassed, we’re all very quiet as the barley and hops make our brains spin. Cody, perhaps still in the mood of snipping ribbons, breaks the silence with an offer I can’t refuse.

  “You want to smoke, Bum?”

  The next thing I know, Bridget is standing with me on the back porch. Cody is telling us about the armadillo that sometimes snoops around in his backyard. I suddenly have a memory of the last armadillo I saw.

  “It was in Houston,” I say. “I was walking late at night through my parking lot. Where I lived, the bayou ra
n. I always heard wildlife stirring along the bayou, but rarely did I actually see the animals that made these sounds.” I pause here, not for effect but to lightly touch the flame to a verdant corner of the pipe. I say, “That night I saw this fat armadillo digging with its claws. The fluorescent lights really did justice to its bony plates. And what a fucking tail! Segmented.”

  Realizing I’m about to become pointless, I notice that Cody has on a Son Volt cotton tee.

  “You’ve seen them live?” I ask.

  “I have,” says Cody, “a couple times actually.”

  “Nice.” I say.

  “Yeah. I take in lots of live shows,” says Cody. “I don’t go to the movies. I figure, if I’m going to spend 30 bucks on me and Carla, why not go see some live music.”

  “Good point,” I lie.

  Bridget, on the other hand, wholeheartedly agrees. She gets a lot out of live music.

  “Tell him, Cody,” she says. She says, “Every time I want to go see live music, Michael always worries about his ears.” She looks at me, “What do you call it?”

  “I have tinnitus!” I say. Then, looking at Cody, “I have tinnitus.”

  Cody looks at Bridget and deadpans, “Michael has tinnitus.”

  For some reason, the thought of permanent hearing loss makes us laugh until our stomachs ache. Bridget passes the pipe to me. She wears her eyeglasses. She tilts her chin toward a clear night sky and empties her lungs.

  6

  Dear Lord, epiphanies are real, no one can dispute