Strange Mammals (5 page)
Authors: Jason Erik Lundberg
I turned to P.S. “What . . . what . . ?”
“A catoblepas,” he said, scratching at his nose. “He won’t talk to me or tell me his name. Stupid fucking beast. Cunt!” The wombat ambled out of the bathroom and shouted, “What the shit did you do to this window?”
I sat down on the lid of the toilet and stared at the catoblepas. It emanated waves of sadness along with the stink. It sighed again and said, in a stentorian tone, “Please, close the door.”
I did so.
“What’s your name?” I said, hand over my nose and mouth.
“We don’t have names,” he said. “Only initials.”
“Like P.S. out there?”
“No,” he said, “not like that. His initials stand for something. Mine does not.”
“So what are your intials?”
“D.”
“Just D.?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you so sad?”
“Because I cannot lift my head. Were I to look you in the eyes, you would instantly drop dead, a cruel trick of fate. Catoblepasi are peaceful and compassionate, we wish no harm on anyone, and yet we are cursed to never lay eyes on a single living being lest we cause their death. Does that seem fair to you?”
“No,” I said. “It sounds horrible.”
“All I can do is look down to the ground, avert my eyes, stay out of the way. I have forgotten what the sky looks like. The whole of my vision consists of grasses and insects and rocks, and it fills me with ennui.”
He sighed again. I didn’t know what to say.
“Actually,” he said, “I lied just now. I do have a name.”
“What is it?”
“Mini-Buddha-Jump-Over-the-Wall.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“I thought that was the name of a Chinese soup with lots of ingredients. Shark fins, abalone, ginseng, sea cucumber, dried scallops, dried mushrooms, Chinese herbs, that kind of thing.”
“It
is?”
He sounded as if he might start weeping, heavy breaths hitching in his large chest. “I’m named after
soup?
Oh, when will the indignity end?” And at that, the sobs did come, heavy gut-wrenching sounds, like he just lost his entire family to the bumbling aggression of invading soldiers. I stood and exited the bathroom.
Parasch Zee had stuffed a blanket into the hole in the window; he had also replaced the living room furniture, but none of it was in the right location. The sofa was turned away from the television, toward me; on it sat both the wombat and the ocelot; Edie held a small tub of ice cream between her front paws and nuzzled at the mint chocolate chip inside. I sat down between them.
“What’s wrong with me?” I said.
P.S. snorted. “You want a list?” He jumped off the sofa and waddled back into the bathroom. Edie licked her jowls, placed the ice cream down on the floor, and followed the wombat in. I dipped my fingers into the cold cardboard tub, took a taste, ignoring the ocelot saliva. Not bad. When was the last time I’d eaten this?
I looked up, and the wombat and ocelot had helped the catoblepas out of the bathtub, supporting it under its front legs. It oozed tears onto the floor, leaving a slimy trail on the carpet. Had I a camera I would have taken a photo of the trio. Were they even really there? The air became heavy, syrup for my lungs.
“Sweetie-darling,” Edie said. “I’m afraid it’s time.”
I nodded my head. My tongue felt thick in my mouth, but I didn’t want to say anything anyway. From the corners of my vision on both sides, in crept: a duck-billed platypus, a blue antelope, a brown-and-white striped quagga, a pig-footed bandicoot, a golden lion tamarin, a Javan tiger, several long-tailed hopping mice, a sleek solenodon. A Madagascaran aye-aye crawled into view and pointed its long bony middle finger directly at me.
“Swift as a shadow,” I said. “Short as any dream.”
Edie and P.S. and all of the other strange animals in my living room, with some effort and lots of grunting, hefted D.’s heavy head in my direction. Mini Buddha jump over the wall. Its eyelids pink as its scales, sparkling, beautiful really. And the eyes themselves—
~
I lifted my mountainous head, neck muscles creaking and crackling from disuse. Turn it to the left and to the right, crack the vertebrae. The other animals let go, and my head stayed where it was, though the muscles in my neck and down along my spine quivered with the effort. I drew a deep cavernous breath. Exhale, and the room filled with the scent of plum blossoms and jasmine.
P.S. ambled into my vision and held my gaze. “Fuck me,” he said. An exclamation, not a command.
I closed my eyes quickly, afraid that the momentary look had killed the wombat, the foul-mouthed paranoid annoyance that had led me to salvation. Squeezed my eyelids so tight that it produced elegant spots and twirling amorphous shapes like pulsars dancing. I could hear the rustling of the animals around me, could smell their fear and their wonder, could hear racing heartbeats, could taste their insecurities and ambitions and need for companionship. The last of their kinds, excepting the ocelot and the wombat, and so lonely.
“Hey,” P.S. said. “It’s okay. Open ’em.”
I did and he stood there, still alive, scratching his flank with his filthy claws.
“Was it a lie?” I said.
“Not exactly,” he said, and motioned to the couch. The human, still naked, was slumped down, eyes and mouth wide open, not breathing. His almost skeletal body completely hairless, and I shivered in sympathy, the motion starting at my shoulders and shivering the scales all the way down to my hoofs, a wave, a ripple that dislodged dust and depression and disease and desire from my body. He looked so small sitting there, a candy bar wrapper without its chocolate, and big slimy tears oozed from my eyes.
Edie licked the side of my head, her scratchy tongue a comfort. “Shhh, now. It was what he wanted. He was ready.”
“What about me? Will I be ready when the time comes?”
She sniffed the air. “It’s hard to say. If you prepare yourself, maybe. Maybe not. I’m not an authority on these things, you know.”
“So,” I said, clearing my throat, stretching my vocal cords, testing the deepness of my voice. “What now?”
“Up to you,” P.S. said, placing on a gentle hand on my shoulder. “It was always up to you.”
All the wonderfully weird animals around me, waiting patiently, sitting with stoic silence, my new family, of sorts. Where would we go? What would we do? What adventures could a mythical beast and his motley assortment of mammalian companions get up to? The answers, I realized, were limitless.
The wombat smiled and gave an encouraging slap to my back; I hadn’t known wombats
could
smile, and certainly not this one. “Lay on, monkey man,” he said. “We’re right behind you.”
Through the windows, the evening sky was a patchy purple, dotted with a range of small cumulonimbus clouds, like stepping stones across a velvet lake. How would the world look from up there, I wondered. What did humanity have to offer from such a lofty vantage point? I had been afraid of heights, before. But now— I was eager to find out. Easy as one two three.
I took a step.
I took another.
Screwhead
I would often, when watching the cartoon series
The Tick
, wonder about a certain henchman, the one with a giant thumbscrew for a head. Not fortunate enough to warrant his own super-villain moniker, he is simply named Dean. Gifted with incredible strength used for the bidding of City crime boss Chairface Chippendale, Dean can go toe-to-toe with The Tick, bending a steel ladder around the hero’s frame, or holding him in a bear hug while other villains pummel the Great Blue Hope in the stomach. But Dean is always defeated, usually outwitted or outfoxed, because having a giant thumbscrew for a head is not really conducive to a life of intellectual rigor.
Poor Dean, I would think to myself, trapped in his muscle-bound life, unable to break out of his station by the unfortunate circumstances of his birth. But wait, what about his boss, the criminal mastermind with a chair for a head (and who loves to plot, plan, and devise whilst sitting in the most ornate and expensive chairs imaginable)? No normal head for him either, but his efforts to take over The City or carve his name into the moon are never weakened by this fact. Two men, disabled by unfortunate physical deformities, neither with a proper head, but one possesses the vast intellect of a super-villain whilst the other is relegated to his henchman? How unfair are life’s circumstances then?
What if Dean the Screwhead goes home at night to his wife, exhausted after a long day of henching, muscles aching, longing for a hot meal and a screw ha ha, and she asks him how his day was. He performs a series of hand gestures, a complicated amalgam of American Sign Language and his own communicatory system, and she has learned through many patient years how to interpret these signs, which almost always include something akin to: The Tick beat me up again today.
“Again?” she says, eyes rolling, and though Dean possesses no head, nor eyes to see, he still detects the eye-roll, the disappointed tone of her voice, the empathetic frustration. “Why don’t you just quit?”
He knows that she wants more for him and from him; she’s long given up talking about potential and dreams and something better in life, though he knows it weighs heavily on her mind. He would love to get out of the henchman business, maybe start up his own shop, a hardware store maybe, but that seems too cliché, so instead he could sell pastries. Despite his bulky frame and thick sausage fingers, Dean is an excellent pastry cook, baking up the most light and fluffy concoctions that anyone in The City has ever tasted. And he loses himself in the process of creating the dough and mixing the fillings, his anxieties evaporating with every knead and squeeze and roll. It’s the closest he’s ever felt to Heaven. The Food Network is his porn.
However, he doesn’t have enough capital to start his own business, nor the necessary job skills to do anything else. He’s big and strong and can take orders, and the one person who has seen any potential in him, other than his wife, is his current employer. No restaurant in The City would hire him as a pastry chef because of his criminal background and tendency to frighten the customers away. So he is stuck, for now, being a strongman, muscle-for-hire. Besides, he knows that Chairface won’t let him go that easily; there are thick file folders in the boss’s mansion, somewhere deep underground, only accessible through secret passageways and multi-million dollar security systems, that detail every crime each one of his henchmen has committed. He has threatened Dean twice with turning this evidence over to the FBI, knowing without a doubt that he and his chair face are clean, that none of it can be traced back to him. Dean could spend the rest of his life in prison, but Chairface would still be sitting pretty in his comfortable exquisite chairs.
It’s not that easy, Dean signs to his wife. They’ve had this fight before, and he’s really not in the mood to get back into it after such a rough day. His right side keeps twingeing if he turns his torso the wrong way, and he fears a rib or two might be broken. His hands throb with the arthritis endemic in his profession.
“Not easy, not easy,” his wife parrots back. “You always say that! Accept some fucking responsibility for your own life!”
Dean edges past her and opens up the refrigerator, no longer patient for a hot meal, just wanting some kind of food to calm his low blood sugar and his shaking hands. Leftovers from the night before on a foil-covered plate: a leg of fried chicken, fat steak fries, bits of tomato. He removes the foil and gobbles down the food right there with the fridge door still open, leaking cold air into the apartment. Dean doesn’t let the fact that he has no mouth stop him from eating, and even I don’t know how he accomplishes this feat three times a day. Finished, he tosses the chicken bone and foil into the trash, and places the plate gently in the sink among three glasses, a bowl, and a clump of forks and spoons. His belly now full, and he turns to step into the bedroom, abruptly sleepy.
“Hey,” his wife says, “I’m not done talking about this.”
He raises one hand, signs: Tired, and lurches onto the bed, the springs complaining under his weight. Unable to sleep, but unwilling to get back up and continue the argument, he just lies there, counting the bumps in the ceiling. Dean feels he
has
taken responsibility for his life, accepted his condition and found a career that suits him. Certainly not legal much of the time, but there are moments when it fills him with joy. Grappling with The Tick, fighting against his equal in strength, he wants to yawp from the rooftops; he no longer has to pull his punches for fear of killing his opponents, or worry whether his strength will leave someone disabled, or paralyzed, or brain-damaged. He can really let loose, and he has never known that kind of freedom before. The Tick has given him a purpose in life, and he would thank the blue bastard if he could, but he doesn’t know how. Maybe he’ll bake up some éclairs and post them anonymously.
Sometime later, Dean’s wife approaches the side of the bed, looks down at her husband, sighs, and sits.
“You’re a real pain in the ass, you know.”
I know.
“I just wish that I wouldn’t have to worry about this stuff all the time.” She reaches up and caresses his thumbscrew, her fingers warm and moist on his metal.
Then don’t, he signs. Let it go. Be a leaf on the wind.
She smiles, reaches up with her other hand, and turns the thumbscrew a quarter-turn to the right. His body shudders, skin flushing, legs kicking uncontrollably for ten seconds or so. He tingles all over.
Do it again, he signs.
She does.
The Time Traveler’s Son
It was Wade’s seventh birthday. There were cake and ice cream and presents in the backyard, and a colorful piñata shaped like a donkey, and twenty of Wade’s friends from school, and his mom had even hired a clown, a lazy clown, and Wade could smell alcohol when the clown bent down and breathed, “Happy birthday.” Crap at balloon animals, he was winded after blowing one up, and upon failing to twist or turn or knot it into a dog or giraffe or something, he would present the sausage of air and latex with a weak flourish, “It’s a snake!”
Upstairs, in the house, Wade’s dad finished packing. The lame clown forgotten and left to wheeze on a lawn chair and nip from a cheap silver flask, Wade asked his dad where he was going, why he wasn’t down at the party.
“Important business, kiddo,” said his dad. “Time traveling business. My first mission.” He closed the suitcase and pointed out the window to the ’84 Chevy Celebrity, bandage brown, rusted through, the fabric inside the roof coming unglued, hanging down, a drapery of obscuration.
“That’s our car,” Wade said.
“Oh no, kiddo, it’s my time machine. I can chat with Marie Curie, or punch Hitler in the face, or have tea with an archaeopteryx. I can go anywhere I want, and any
when
.”
“All your stuff is packed inside.”
“It’s a long trip. I may be gone for a while.”
“But if it’s a time machine, can’t you return to right after when you left?”
Wade’s dad ruffled his hair and smiled. “My son, the genius.”
“So why was Mom yelling at you and calling you names?”
“Oh, that. She’s . . . just upset because I’m leaving, kiddo. She wants me to stay. But I can’t. I’ve got some big responsibilities now, saving-the-world kind of responsibilities, and I don’t want to shirk them.”
“When will you be back?”
“Two weeks from today,” said Wade’s mom from the doorway, appearing from nowhere, a better trick than blowing up non-existent balloon animals. “Like it says in the custody agreement.”
“Right, right.” Wade’s dad distracted, lost in his thoughts. “Well, I suppose I’ll be off then. Dinosaur hugs.”
Wade gripped his dad’s head, and vice versa, and they clonked foreheads, both saying, “Clonk!” at the same time.
“Happy birthday, kiddo,” said Wade’s dad, and he grabbed his suitcase. Out the door, in the car, and it sputtered and farted blue smoke, and then it was around the corner and his dad was gone.
~
It was Wade’s twenty-first birthday. He sat in a bar called the Café of the Asphyxiated Borough, a hole-in-the-wall near campus, decorated by a woodcut of two disembodied hands strangling a donkey, he sat on a stool made of cracked leather and got legally drunk for the first time, with his father. Splitting a pitcher of watered-down lager, eating peanuts with way too much salt, they talked about Wade’s future. A television bolted to the wall played a baseball game that everyone ignored.
“So you’re really going to be a vet, huh?”
“Yeah,” Wade said. “That’s the goal. Graduate school first, though.”
“All kinds of animals, even the little ones?”
“Especially the little ones. Even hamsters. I don’t want to be sticking my hands into cows and horses forever.”
Wade’s dad began to sing, “A horse is a horse, of course, of course . . .”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“What?”
“You’re doing it again.”
Wade’s dad smiled and signaled for another pitcher. “Yes, I always seem to be embarrassing you, don’t I?”
“Not all the time,” Wade said. “Just most of the time.”
“Like the time I took you to the natural sciences museum, and knocked over that display of stuffed birds?”
“Yeah. Like that.”
“Or the time I was in the stands at your little league game, and spilled beer all over my pants, so it looked like I peed in them?”
“You know, you really shouldn’t have had beer at a children’s baseball game in the first place.”
“Or the time I took you to the steakhouse and you told me you were a vegetarian.”
“I was a vegetarian. Am.”
“You know, I was kind of hoping you’d go into the family business.”
“Well, lawyering is all right for Mom, but it’s not really my—”
“No, no, I wasn’t talking about Mom.”
“Oh, not this again.”
“Come on! You’d get to see the world. Experience history for yourself, feel like you have purpose to your life.”
“Dad, would you cut that shit out? I’m not seven anymore. It’s just a story. A dumb story.”
Wade’s dad looked into his beer. Wade had never seen him look so old, so worn down, as if he’d already lived several lifetimes, his hair a shocking white, the crow’s feet and laugh lines etched into skin by chisel and time.
“Fine,” his dad said. “Let’s just drop it. Happy birthday, kiddo.”
They finished the pitcher, and then went their separate ways, Wade to his dorm room by campus bus, and his dad by cab to a roach-infested apartment downtown.
~
It was Wade’s wedding day. He was marrying a pretty Chinese girl named Xiaxue. His mother had planned the event to perfection, driving him a bit crazy with it all actually, and his fiancée too, with the flowers and the catering and the venue and the band and the minister and the dress and the cake and all the minutiae. Wade and his fiancée wanted a small affair, but it ballooned from thirty people, to sixty, to a hundred fifty, to two hundred, and Wade didn’t even care anymore, he just wanted it all over with so he could start a life with his new bride. His mother, wanting to include Xiaxue’s family in the celebration, since they were flying all the way from Hong Kong, had decorated the Wegener House with Chinese lanterns of red and gold, some labeled “love,” some “happiness,” some “prosperity,” and the flowers were all different vibrant colors, no white because white was a bad luck color, and they were serving green tea and egg rolls alongside the numerous other heavy
hors d’oeuvres
. Xiaxue’s family seemed pleased with the references to their culture.
The ceremony over, and Wade didn’t trip over his shoes at all, and said all the right things in all the right places, and smiled a big smile after kissing his new bride on the lips, even slipping her a little tongue, and they walked back into the house from the courtyard and prepared to meet and greet the two hundred guests. Dozens of “It’s so good to see you,” “Thank you for coming,” “I’m glad you enjoyed the ceremony,” “Yes, we got the fondue pot you sent,” “I’m sorry, I don’t know where the bathroom is” and “The food is right through there.” There was hardly time to eat because everyone wanted to talk to him, or give him advice, or ask where they were going on the honeymoon (Greece). Relatives, friends, or strangers continually put drinks in his hand, and the quantity of alcohol and lack of food were producing vertigo, a spinning room, a loss of equilibrium. And so Wade didn’t notice his father approach the table and start talking to his new wife.
“So you own a clinic?”
“Yes,” she said, “Wade and I are going to run it together.”
“You two met in veterinary school.”
“That’s right.”
“Pets?”
“Mostly pets. Dogs, cats, hamsters. The occasional turtle or rabbit. We have an iguana in a terrarium in the waiting area who likes to sun himself all day under the heat lamp.”
“You’re from Hong Kong?”
“Yes,” she said.
“So you know all about the exotic medical treatments over there?”
“Like?”
“Like dried oviduct fat of a Chinese forest frog for its curative powers,” said Wade’s dad.
He said, “Ground-up deer antlers or shark bone powder to boost vitality.”
He said, “Desiccated tiger penis.”
And without the slightest hesitation, she said, “Yes. I know about all of those.”
“Have you ever used any of them?”
“No. My grandparents will sometimes use the frog, but that’s about it. And since deciding to become a vet, it’s hard for me to use any animal products now. The closest would be tiger balm for sore muscles, but that’s not made from tigers.”
“Tiger
blam,”
Wade said, and the husband and wife smiled at a shared joke.
“It looks like you’ve picked a winner, kiddo,” said Wade’s dad. “You make sure to hang on to this one.”
Wade smiled, lightheaded, and burst out laughing.
“You know what story this man used to tell me when I was a kid?” he slurred.
“Wade,” said his dad, “I don’t think this is the time—”
“He said he was a
time traveler!”
“Wade,” said his new wife, “honey, are you feeling all right?”
“A
time traveler!
Can you believe that? He didn’t want to admit to being a bad husband and a bad father and so he made up this story about trekking up and down the space-time continuum, making himself all important and not accepting any responsibility for hey let go o’ me!”
Wade jerked his arm away, and the contents of his champagne glass splashed over the front of his father’s ill-fitting and flyblown suit. Hushes from the crowd. The band even stopped playing “Night Train” in mid-bar.
Wade’s father looked down at the slowly spreading stain and said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”
Wade sat down, not quite sure what had just happened.
“I’ll leave,” said Wade’s dad.
“No, please,” Xiaxue said. “Please don’t go. We’ll get some club soda for it.”
“No no, this was a mistake.” He turned. “Congratulations, son,” he said, and left.
~
It was Wade’s dad’s last day alive. The hospital stank of industrial cleanser and urine and death. The terminal ward, where his dad was kept, was a fog of depression, the air itself bringing you down. All around were the sniffles or muffled cries of the soon-to-be survivors, those left behind when loved ones passed on.
Every so often a doctor or nurse would come in, check the chart, inspect the beeping machines, do something with the I.V. Wade saw a detachment in their eyes, a coldness, a defense mechanism for the pervading climate of death they had to face every day. The candy stripers were the only perky visitors, though they had nothing of substance to say.
Diagnosis: a worn-out heart. The doctors couldn’t figure it out. “It’s like his organs are twice as old as they should be,” they said. “He’s sixty-two, but his heart shows the strain of a centenarian.”
Jet-lagged from the twenty-five hour flight from Hong Kong, Wade barely noticed when his father awoke from a deep sleep.
“Kiddo?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“When’d you get here?”
“About an hour ago. Right from the airport.”
“Where’s your lovely wife?”
“The doctors said she shouldn’t fly at eight months. It could hurt the baby.”
“Right, right.”
“She wanted to be here.”
A weak smile. “I bet she did. Give her a kiss from me when you get back.”
“I will.”
“Sorry I won’t be around to see that new baby of yours.”
“Dad, don’t talk like that.”
“But it’s true. I’ll be surprised if I last the day.”
“Dad . . .”
“What do you think happens?” his dad said. “You know, when we go?”
“I don’t know.”
“I read up a lot on the afterlife, even talked to some theologians and philosophers in my travels. No one seems to agree.
“There’s the Christian Heaven, or Hell, where either you have paradise and get to see your family again, or little men in red pajamas poke you with pitchforks. But then I think, what if I get to Heaven and my really annoying relatives are there, and they won’t leave me alone, and I can’t go anywhere else because, well, it’s Heaven. I’d almost prefer pitchforks to that.
“There could be Buddhist reincarnation, which I like a lot. They don’t see people as having souls, but more of a collection of sensory inputs, and that you never truly die, but change from one form to another, just like you’re not the same person as you are when you’re six years old as you are when you’re sixty, it’s the same with becoming a new person. We are reborn every day, if you think like this, with your cells constantly dying and being replaced, every seven years you’re a whole new person, and so it’s not much of a leap. Your karma determines your new body. With my luck I’d probably become a snail.
“Or there could be nothingness, annihilation. All your experiences, all your memories, gone, poof, just like that, the void of emptiness. Your body returned to the earth to feed the worms and enrich the soil, but your soul, your identity, is just gone, lost forever.”
Wade started to cry, unable to hold it in, the exhaustion and the sadness of this place and the discussion of the afterlife just too much. He covered his face with his hands. He thought of the helpless ignorance of what lay beyond, that undiscovered country, that awfully big adventure. He rested his head on the bed, and his father patted his head.
“Shush now, don’t be sad. If I come back as a snail, I’ll visit you every day.”
“I’m sorry I called you a bad father.”
“Oh don’t worry about that. I wasn’t the best father, though I tried.”
“I know you did.”
“Besides, I’ve seen you, with your family, years from now. You speak Cantonese and your son grows up into a handsome man, a book publisher, and he visits every other weekend with his girlfriend, who becomes his wife, a beautiful woman, who looks like she should model lingerie but she’s a physicist. You and your wife grow happy and content, running the animal hospital even into your old age, revered by your community as the vets who are truly there for their patients. Your grandson, the piano prodigy, he has his father’s eyes, your eyes, my eyes, the eyes of every male in our family line. It’s the eyes, Wade, the eyes, the eyes . . .”
His father’s words drifted away as if caught on a breeze, and his chest raised and lowered several more times and then went still. Wade’s cheeks and ears burned, hot enough to steam the air. The room, the ward, became instantly quiet. No squeak of shoes, no hiss from ventilators, no hum of life-monitoring electronics. No inhale of breath. The clock on the wall, analogue, ancient, spaded hands wrought of centuries-old iron, still, unmoving, halted. To tick no more.
Time stopped.