Strange Mammals (11 page)
Authors: Jason Erik Lundberg
“What? What the hell’s a chee . . . a chee . . .”
“Qilin,” said the old woman. “The animal that crushed your husband’s car.”
“You mean the Land Behemoth?”
The old woman nodded. “The Qilin only punish the truly sinful. Your husband must have done something terrible to bring on its wrath.”
“How do you know about my husband?” Dale said.
“I know because I was meant to know.”
Dale exhaled. “Look, I didn’t ask for fortune cookie nonsense. Just tell me the truth.”
“That is the truth.” The woman licked at her cone, which was already starting to melt. The quick movement allowed Dale to see how small the woman’s tongue was. “We are all here for a reason, however small. I am here to tell you that your husband did something terrible in his life, and he was karmically punished for his actions. The Qilin are sacred animals, and their decisions are not to be taken lightly.”
“Saying I believe you, what did Kenneth do?”
Another lick. “I am sorry, but I don’t know that. What I do know is that your husband is responsible for his own fate. We can’t escape our karma, none of us.”
The Chinese woman smiled, then turned on her heel and exited the store.
For the rest of the afternoon, Dale thought about the encounter. Allan had left mid-morning for some errand he couldn’t tell her about, actually doing the same for the past few days, so the store was quiet. Dale wasn’t sure what to think. The Land Behemoths were intelligent? And worse yet, they were punishers of bad karma? She couldn’t get past her conception of them as dumb beasts, existing only for transportation purposes; you couldn’t even eat them because their meat was so tough. Was it possible Kenneth had done what the Chinese woman had said? Could he have really done something so bad that it warranted his death?
Dale closed her eyes and massaged her forehead. She couldn’t deal with this right now. There was a small desk in the back room with a rickety wooden chair, and she sat down. Allan had left his ragged library copy of
Best Serbian Short Fiction
on the desk despite finishing it, and she opened it to somewhere in the middle, yearning for escape. She started with a story about a man talking to God but not remembering the conversation later, and kept reading for another three hours, until the sun had set and it was time to close.
As Dale’s hand hovered over the light switch, the adjacent pneumatic tube thunked with an incoming cylinder, and she let out an involuntary startled squeak. She picked up the cylinder, movement inside, a twitching nose, salt-and-pepper fur.
“Pepper?” Dale said. “What the hell are you doing in there?”
She opened the cylinder and the dwarf hamster tumbled gently into her hand. It performed a rapid face-washing maneuver and then sat still, waiting for Dale to carry her home. As Dale looked closer, she saw that the cataract in Pepper’s blind eye had vanished completely.
~
The day before Thanksgiving, nearly a year since her husband had been killed, Dale opened the frozen yogurt store, wondering why Allan hadn’t been there before her. Even when he’d left in the middle of the day, he’d still arrived first, unlocking the doors and getting things ready. She prepped the yogurt and the toppings, and started a batch of Otis Spunkmeyer cookies in the tiny toaster oven.
At noon, Allan burst through the door, an ecstatic grin on his face, resplendent in a pair of vibrantly colored wings. They stretched out from his back, in bright reds and greens and purples, just like the tattoo photo he’d shown her. The overhead ceiling fan caused individual feathers to ripple and ruffle, as if he were already in flight. Dale couldn’t believe it.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” Allan said. The expression on his face was the happiest she’d ever seen on a human being. He seemed to glow slightly.
“Yeah,” she said. “Gorgeous. They really must’ve set you back.”
“Most of my life savings,” he said, stroking the tip of one wing. “They’re exactly what I’ve always wanted. I’ve been working with the avionic artisan the past couple of weeks, but they just got installed this morning. I actually flew over here.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “Wow.”
“I also came to tell you good-bye.”
“Good-bye? Where are you going?”
He shrugged. “Wherever the wind takes me.” The shit-eating grin was infectious. He was just so damn
happy
. “I need a change. Of location, of identity. There’s a flock that congregates in Tallahassee, and I may hang with them for a while. Who knows?”
“What about the store?”
“It’s yours now, kiddo. Take good care of it.”
He folded the wings, walked out the door, extended them once more, flapped twice, hard, then lifted up into the air. Dale leapt over the counter, rushed out the door, leaving it wide open, and hopped in her Prius. She peeled out of the parking space, and sped onto the main road, her head out the window. Allan was clearly visible, his wingspan out to its fullest, flapping, gliding, and she could hear a faint whooping, a joyous yawp. She followed him as quickly as she could, speeding through red lights, narrowly avoiding other cars. A flurry of angry honks followed in her wake.
She was abruptly envious of Allan, up there soaring through the skies. He was exactly who and what he wanted to be.
His flight took her onto Highway 401, past the Anheuser-Busch bottling plant, and the adult video store, and the car dealerships. This stretch always felt so empty to her, the spaced-out buildings appearing lonely, though there was never any lack of human activity. The grass along the median was dead and brown.
Allan abruptly swung one hundred eighty degrees, and Dale was forced to take a U-turn at a break in the median. She laughed out loud when she realized where he was leading her. She even sped up. With the barest of movements, she nudged the steering wheel onto the left-side exit ramp of Fairview Road. Allan, above, seeming satisfied she was now heading where he wanted to bring her, flapped powerfully, and disappeared into the clouds, leaving behind no trace he had ever been there. Dale pulled her head inside the car, that familiar ache under her ribcage as she laughed, releasing a year’s worth of tension, unable to stop, stitches in her sides. Fairview Road rolled by, older houses, houses with character, a series of duplexes, Mom and Pop stores selling antiques or designer paper or blown glass sculpture, and all the while Dale was laughing, lost in apoplexy, wanting to somehow thank Allan but knowing she’d never see him again, laughing as she explored the unknown surroundings, her eyes filling with saline, threatening to spill over, dangerously on the edge, on the cusp.
Jimi and the Djinn
On a balmy evening in March 1967, Jimi Hendrix stepped into the British Museum. An off-night on his relentless UK tour, and needing some time to escape from his bandmates and hangers-on, he decided on high culture for a change. After an hour of wandering, he came across an exhibit of Southeast Asian sculpture and pottery. He was drawn to a glass container the size of a vase, frosted and etched with runes and symbols. It pulsed gently with mesmerizing blue light, an effect he put down to the shrooms he’d been given by Pete Townshend earlier in the day. Totally alone in the gallery, and so he lifted the glass container off of its display pedestal. It was warm.
“Man, I bet I could make a righteous bong out of this thing,” he said, before it jumped from his fingers and crashed to the floor, shattering into a hundred thousand shards and releasing the djinn trapped inside. The creature roiled up into a confusion of blue smoke, and roughly assembled itself into the shape of a man with glowing red eyes.
“My thanks,” the djinn said, its accented voice rumbling out from the center of the smoke. “I have been imprisoned for a very long time.”
“Really?”
“Yes, first by a Malayan witch-doctor who tapped into my power for use in her
bomoh
potions and thaumaturgical spells. And then by the wife of a naval captain who used me to adorn her dining table.”
“Oh, hey, no problem, man. So do I get three wishes or something?”
“No. But I will offer you two pieces of advice.”
“Lay it on me, baby.”
“Be wary of your dependence on chemical entheogens.”
“The LSD? Don’t know about that, but we’ll see. What’s number two?”
“They will love you for your music, but they’ll remember you for your fire.”
One of the djinn’s eyes closed as if in a wink, and then the cloud of smoke dissipated into the air, disappearing as completely as if it had never been. Jimi briefly wondered if he’d merely hallucinated the entire encounter, and found that it didn’t really matter one way or the other.
Later that month, Jimi played the London Astoria Club, and at the end of his set, to the great surprise of both the audience and his bandmates, lit his guitar on fire. He summoned the flames up with his fingers, as if drawing a primal spirit out of his instrument, and burned his hands when they got too close. At the hospital, Jeff Beck asked why he’d done it.
“Just freeing the smoke, man.”
“You going to do it again?”
“Shit, yeah. Practice makes perfect.”
Multifacet
We’d been married for three years when it happened. No warning, no build-up, just pow. One of those unexpected things that changes your life forever. Maybe Ruby had wished on the right star, or just wanted it bad enough. That happens sometimes, right? It certainly surprised the hell out of me, waking up one morning to find that my partner in life had split into five versions of herself, each with a different function, all of whom looked like the woman I’d said “I do” to. It certainly took some getting used to.
Ruby Number One was the programmer, hard-coding database apps for non-profit organizations. Ruby Number Two was the illustrator, painting in varied media for creative commissions that arrived via email. Ruby Number Three was the activist, scouring the Internet for political news, and blogging on events through her progressive viewpoint. Ruby Number Four was the master chef, creating culinary masterpieces for every single meal.
Ruby Number Five was an enigma. She was a permanent presence in our bed; it could be that she slept for all five of them, as they never seemed to stop working.
Our apartment had changed as well. It might have seemed that with all these Rubys, our small duplex would quickly devolve into a series of jostlings and bumpings and excuse-me’s and hey-watch-it’s, but it didn’t work that way. Dimensionality warped the physical space, in which six people could comfortably co-exist. When Ruby (the original Ruby, the one and only) and I had first moved into this apartment, its area contained only 625 square feet, but the strange geometries of our home now gave the impression of a space at least twice that size.
Every morning it was the same old routine, yawn stretch shit shave shower, then into my own front office to copyedit. The advantage of a three-bedroom, my own little refuge. Every so often I heard footsteps, but it was mostly quiet. I sometimes missed the whole Ruby, but she seemed to be getting much more done this way.
My current freelance project was a horribly dry PhD dissertation concerning the effect of traffic roundabouts on automobile and pedestrian patterns, and my eyes glazed over, my attention wandering. The author was not a native English speaker, and though his absence of the definite article or improper subject-verb agreement would normally be enough to hold my focus, I was distracted. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a decent conversation with my wife; we used to stay up until the wee hours discussing politics or philosophy or art. Her intellect was one of the features that had originally turned me on to her, but it was so internal now, so withdrawn.
I stood, walked to the hallway closet, extracted my jacket. “I’m going for a walk,” I said to the apartment. No response.
The air was just turning cold, the first kiss of autumn. Leaves breezed by on the sidewalk. My neighbor, the failed musician, fed himself to his Mustang, twisting this, ratcheting that, jeaned legs visible underneath the raised hood. The punk couple on the corner, still in college or fresh out, sat on their stoop, smoking dark cigarettes, tattoos peeking out from sleeves; one of them mentioned Derrida as I passed by. I didn’t know which one.
The neighborhood was mostly empty, folks at day jobs or other places, the succession of duplexes a graveyard of monotony. A khaki-colored Karmann Ghia rolled down Grant Avenue, its driver inexplicably tall, knees bunched up to his shoulders, a mystery as to why he would purchase such an uncomfortable conveyance. The smell of french fries in its wake, engine converted to biodiesel, a friend to the environment. I saluted the driver, but it was unclear whether he saw me in his rear view.
Several more minutes of walking, then I headed back to the duplex, resigned to time-wastage, aimless Web surfing, looking up my own name. Through the front doorway, over the threshold, and the world spun,
equilibrium unbalanced,
the walls on the floor and the floor on the ceiling and everything too big or too small or too adjectival or too
there
. The doorknob in my grip, holding me up, now I was hanging from it, now I was lying on it, and now the doorknob was inside and I was outside, the doorknob holding firm to
me
for support. Apartmental geometries whizzed through the air, slicing and separating and dismembering and reducing and redefining and then reassembling and reattaching and making whole, and then, with a slight
fwump
of displaced air that cleared my ears, I was upright again, and objects were once again their conventional selves, and the walls and the ceiling and the floor were in their proper places, and the interior of the duplex appeared smaller somehow.
I stepped inside, closed the door, slight headache. The air smelled fresh, as if the windows had been open all morning. From the back office stepped Ruby, but I couldn’t tell which one. She approached, radiant, sparkling, gripped me in a bear hug, kissed me on the tip of my nose.
“I’ve finished,” she said.
“Finished?”
“Yes. The project I’ve been working on. The design, the content, the artwork, front end, back end, all done. Didn’t think there would be enough hours in the day, but, well, you know.”
“So you’re really back? No more five? Just one?”
“Just one: all me, baby.” She stretched and popped and groaned. “Far too long since I’ve done that. Want to go out? I’m craving Vietnamese food like you wouldn’t believe.”