Authors: Jason Erik Lundberg
Strange Mammals (15 page)
I was back on the beltline to my apartment when Henry said, “Today is my birthday, you know.”
My hands involuntarily gripped the thin steering wheel. The speedometer circled to the left and was down to 35 MPH before a horn blared behind me and woke me back up.
“Today is my birthday too,” I said, and Henry hopped into my lap.
“That means we are brothers!” Henry tilted his head up and gave my palm a quick lick. He hopped back onto the passenger seat and started cleaning himself.
“Wait a minute, your birthday? You only look a couple of months old. How can it be your birthday?”
Henry stopping licking his shoulder and said, “Bunny time is different from people time,” then went back to his bath.
“Bunny brothers,” I said and smiled. Why not? After everything else that had happened today, why not? “All right, Henry, we’ll stop at a pet supply store on the way home, get you the essentials. I’ve never had a rabbit before but you can’t be too hard to take care of, can you? Plus, you can tell me exactly what you want, instead of me having to guess. Yeah, I think this’ll be cool. What you do you say, Henry?”
When he didn’t answer, I looked down. The seat was empty. Thinking he might be under the seat again, I called his name a couple more times, but he didn’t answer. The car was too quiet. Henry was gone.
I cleared my throat, then gunned the accelerator for home, driving the rest of the way in silence.
~
It was dark by the time I made it back to my apartment. The brutal North Carolina humidity hit me as I stepped from the car, ever-present, like walking through Jell-O. The cicadas whirred in the trees, a massive collective sound like a toy winding down.
Most of the apartment I knew was still there. My couch, my bookcase, a photo of Cory and me at Wrightsville Beach last summer. But the television was different, bigger than the one I owned, and framed art prints I had never seen before decorated the walls. I walked the short hallway to my bedroom, and saw a Queen-sized bed that I would never have been able to afford. I nearly cried when I saw Plymouth on the bedside table.
“What?” I yelled at him. “What do you want from me? Why is this happening?”
“Does everything have to have an explanation?” Plymouth asked. “It’s just happening. It’s your birthday and you’re disappearing from existence. No reason. The universe just sucks sometimes.”
As Plymouth talked, the room changed around me. The dresser grew in width, transformed from pine to mahogany, sprouted a large wall mirror. Ansel Adams prints popped into existence on one wall, a framed diploma on another. My corkboard vanished, and a movie poster for
Swingers
appeared in its place. I looked down at Plymouth and saw that he was changing as well, his horns shrinking, his material turning from orange-brown to green, his body and legs lengthening. I moved to pick him up and strangle him, but the world finished transforming around me, and I was no longer myself.
~
The bedroom was dark, lit only by the moonlight delineated into stripes on the floor in front of the window. Satin sheets on the bed were rumpled and tossed about, the aftermath of strenuous lovemaking. The door was closed and a sliver of incandescence shone in the crack underneath. Muted voices came from the other side of the door, laughing and talking. It was a laugh I had loved in my previous life.
I stood in the corner, a silent sentinel. A conical shade was perched on my head.
The door was thrown open and in walked Cory, clad in her green silk bathrobe. Her hair was gathered in the back and held together with a tortoiseshell clip. She walked over and grabbed the copper chain that hung from my nose. She pulled downward and the bulb in my head lit up.
“Click,” I said.
Cory moved through the room, opening drawers and peeking under the bed. She picked up discarded clothing and looked underneath; she held up a dark purple bra that I particularly liked. After a few moments of searching, a shirtless man walked into the room: Ian, my former coworker. Her lover.
“You find one yet?” he asked in a drowsy tone.
“I’m looking,” she said, and her voice made me feel whole. “I know I have some more condoms around here, but I can’t find them. Did you put them somewhere?”
“Not me,” Ian said, scratching his stomach. “Are you sure they’re in here? Maybe you left them in the bathroom or something.”
“No,” she mumbled, picking up a stack of psychology books and putting them back down. “Last time I saw them they were in here.”
I knew where she had left the box, but of course couldn’t tell her. I was immobile and silent, a discarded soul. I could sense others as well, those unfortunate ones who shared my birthday. I was in contact with a chest of drawers in Nashville, an alarm clock in Charlotte. Henry the bunny was a plastic lawn ornament in Fuquay-Varina. I’d tried to extend my reach several times, but it seemed my range was limited to a few neighboring states. I knew there were scores more, now confined to the inanimate. I was one among thousands.
“Well, shit,” Cory said, standing back up. “I can’t find them. We’ll just have to go out to the drug store. I’ll drive.” She dropped the robe, once more showing me what I could no longer touch. Her curves filled my vision, blocking out all other thoughts. She threw on a shirt and some sweatpants and walked up to Ian. “I’m ready to go.”
“Aren’t you going to turn the light off?” he said, motioning to me with his head.
As Cory walked back over to me, he said over her shoulder, “That lamp is creepy, Cor. I don’t know why you still keep it. I always feel like it’s looking at me.”
“I don’t know,” she said, smiling at me. “There’s just something about it that makes me feel . . . safe.” She reached up and pulled on the chain from my nose again, plunging the room back into semi-darkness.
“Click.”
Solipsister
“Solipsism is such an interesting concept,” Kelly said. “I can’t believe you’ve never heard of it before.”
“Yeah, well,” Raymond said. He drummed his fingers on his left leg. His stonewashed blue jeans screamed of wear: holes in both knees, color faded almost into white, cuffs frayed into little denim mustaches around his ankles. Kelly sat next to him on the courtyard bench in the bright afternoon, and wore the same things she always did: khakis, a button-up striped shirt, and a red vest. Raymond thought she wore the vest to bed.
“I mean, the whole idea that you’re the center of the universe and every single person, place or thing is there just for your benefit, all figments of your imagination . . . it’s fascinating, yeah?”
“I guess,” he mumbled.
“Say I was a solipsist. You would be nothing more than a phantom created for my amusement, not really there, just kind of floating in my mind like some vaporous ghost.”
“Sounds egotistical to me,” Raymond said.
“Ah, I got you talking,” Kelly said, smiling. “Yes, it does sound egotistical; that’s why I don’t completely subscribe to the theory. But just think of it! You could do anything!”
Raymond laid his head in his hands and massaged his temples. Kelly’s enthusiasm gave him a headache sometimes.
“If you think about it, all little kids are solipsists. Whenever they play peek-a-boo, the person they’re playing with is momentarily gone, appearing seconds later. Like if I believed in solipsism, if I turned away from you, you would no longer exist. You would only become real when I believed that you did. Let’s try out the theory; close your eyes.”
“What?”
“Go ahead, close your eyes.”
“What if I don’t want to close my eyes?”
Kelly exhaled. “Jesus, Ray, just play along. Why do you have to make everything so difficult?”
“All right, okay, I’m closing my eyes, see?” It was a sunny afternoon, so the darkness was not complete behind his lids. Little spots of black danced and streaked in front of him, like when he would rub his eyelids too hard before going to sleep at night. Several long moments passed before he realized it was quiet.
“Kelly?”
There was no response, and the hair at the base of his neck stood on end. Rationally, he knew Kelly was just talking nonsense again, but what if she was right? What if he had just erased her? He opened his eyes and saw the empty bench next to him. Some birds chirped in the oak tree nearby, and the bushes behind him rustled, but Kelly was nowhere to be seen. Raymond jumped off the bench.
“You’re starting to freak me out.”
The bushes giggled and rustled again. Kelly popped up with her crooked smile and laughed. Raymond sat back on the bench and Kelly joined him.
“Oh, Ray, that was the funniest damn thing. You should have seen your face.”
“Yeah. Hilarious.”
“Oh, don’t be mad. All right, now it’s my turn.”
Raymond got ready to spring off the bench when Kelly closed her eyes, to take off running and not stop until he got back to his dorm room, to leave her there by herself. That would show her. He tensed his legs in preparation, but as her eyelids closed, time seemed to slow and then stop, and objects lost their color, and then their shape, with Kelly and the bench and the trees and the entire courtyard losing all detail and blurring into nothingness, and then the entire world brightened to a luminous white which surrounded him on all sides. Raymond tried to look down at himself but discovered that he had no body. Reality had just been obliterated. Or maybe he was dead.
This was a situation that would normally have panicked him, or perhaps driven him insane, but there was something soothing about the whiteness. It had a comforting womb-like quality; he felt warm and loved. Time seemed to have no meaning in this place, and Raymond was content to exist here forever.
A streak of grey flashed across his vision, and he momentarily thought it a hallucination or a remnant of his imagination, but soon another followed, then another. The streaks gathered and formed shapes, first circles, then large stars which spun erratically. The whiteness darkened to grey, while the stars glowed orange and then yellow. Raymond felt pressure against his eyes, surprised at the sensation, and realized that the jumping and spinning stars were once again the result of him rubbing his eyelids too hard. He could feel his fists being removed from his face, and his arms lowering to his sides. He opened his eyes.
The first thing he realized was that he was lying on his back, staring up at a vaulted cabin ceiling with exposed rafters. A cool breeze drifted over him from an open window. The floor underneath his back was hard, and he was developing a small ache. Raymond could smell apple pie, but could not explain how he knew it was cooling on the sill of the open window that was admitting the breeze. A man abruptly entered his field of vision, looking down at the supine Raymond with some dissatisfaction.
“Back again, eh?” the man said in a slight British accent and harrumphed. “Thought you’d last a bit longer.”
Raymond pulled himself off the floor and stood up straight. The cabin around him looked like it had been built fifty years ago. The appliances and furniture all had that Ozzie-and-Harriet feeling to him, as if they were designed before people had good taste. He stood in a combination open-plan kitchen and living room, with another room down a short hallway, presumably a bedroom. Everything had a rustic feeling, and Raymond could see a sprawling forest out the window, and, yes, a freshly baked apple pie cooling there at the sill.
The British man leaned against the kitchen sink in a full tweed suit, thin-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose. A woman stood next to him in a charcoal pantsuit, wiping her hands on a dishrag. They stared at him as if they knew him, and exuded disappointment.
“Have we met?” Raymond said.
The man sighed loudly. “We go through this
every time,
and frankly I’m getting a bit sick of it.”
“Now Reginald,” the woman said, placing a hand on her husband’s arm. “Take it easy on the boy. He obviously doesn’t remember.”
“That’s exactly the problem! He never remembers! Why do you and I have to be the only ones to welcome these poor bloody bastards every single time they return?”
“Because we’re the parents, dear. We’re expected to play host.”
“Excuse me,” Raymond said. “But could you maybe tell me what’s going on? What is this place?”
The man called Reginald threw his hands in the air and stomped out the door of the cabin, muttering obscenities under his breath. The woman turned to Raymond and smiled. “Please excuse my husband. He doesn’t have the patience that he once had. You’ve been here many times, but never recall the experience. My name is Rachel, by the way. I’m Kelly’s mother.”
Raymond shook her hand and said, “Where am I?”
“We’re not exactly sure. It could be a metaphysical plane of existence, or perhaps just a tiny fragment of Kelly’s upper brain function. This is the holding area, where we wait until she brings us into existence.”
“So hang on, you mean all that stuff she was blabbing about being a solipsist, that was
true?”
Rachel nodded. “I’m afraid so. We only exist because she thinks us up. Sometimes we wait here for years to be called. There’s no telling when you’ll go back.”
“Won’t it be when she opens her eyes again? That can’t be more than a few seconds, right?”
She shook her head. “Time runs differently here. You can understand why Reginald was so upset with you; he was hoping that the discussion about solipsism might make her realize how she has made us all prisoners here. And since we forget everything about this place once we pass the threshold to Kelly’s world, we have relearn everything when we come back. It really is not a happy life.”
“How did you know we were talking about solipsism?”
Rachel smiled, and said, very slowly, as though she were talking to a child, “Dear, we’re her parents. We know everything.”
Raymond sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. “This a lot to take. So how long has it been since you’ve seen her?”
Rachel thought for a moment, then said, “A very long time. Since she went away to college, we’ve seen her less and less.”
“Are we the only people here?”
Rachel laughed, a high musical sound that made Raymond feel immediately at ease. “Oh, no, dear. The holding area is quite vast; Kelly has quite an active imagination and has created many different worlds and literally hundreds of thousands of people to populate them. You could live for a billion years and never discover it all.”
“So if you’ve got such a huge reality to explore, why are you unhappy?”
Rachel sighed and looked to the ceiling. “Think of it this way: you’ve been told you’re going to die sometime soon, but not when or how. You’d be constantly looking over your shoulder, jumping at every unexpected noise, terrified that any moment could be the one in which you go. Being called back to Kelly’s world is death of a sort, and it pretty much takes the fun out of our time here.”
“So what do you do to pass the time?”
“Reginald and I used to travel quite a lot. But lately, we’ve taken a liking to Ombre. Would you care to play?”
He nodded. Rachel sat down at the opposite side of the circular kitchen table and dealt the Tarot-sized cards from the pack laying there. Raymond looked out the window and wondered what he would find, what Kelly’s remarkable imagining had cooked up. But he would have plenty of time for that later. He picked up his hand, and Rachel began to tell him the rules of the game; it was unlike any card game he knew, but he would have a lifetime to master it.