Strange Mammals (6 page)

King of Hearts

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d be far happier without you than with you.

Moss paused in front of the flat’s bistre-hued front door, hand extended toward the stainless steel handle, frozen there as surely as though time had stopped. Where had he heard that sentence? The voice prickled the tendrils of his memory and teased him with its elusiveness even as he closed his eyes and scanned the labyrinthine passages of his inner mindscape in order chase it down, pounce panther-like, ingest it back into his recall centers, and therefore bring back not only who had uttered such a tremendously awful declaration to him, but why, and in what context. However, no matter how long he stood there, arm outstretched, looking for all the world like humanity’s most poorly-dressed mime, the memory would not come to him, evaporating into engrammatic mist, leaving him frustrated, impotent.

Moss snapped open his eyes, glanced furtively around the exterior corridor of the housing block, then completed the gesture, reaching forward to grip the door’s metal handle, strangely cool despite the sweltering tropical climate in which he was immersed, yet had never properly acclimated, continuously sweating through every shirt he owned, his skin as shiny-salty as the dodgy hot dogs rotating on steel rollers at the 7-Eleven downstairs. So unlike the summers of his youth in Chicago, which, although similar in temperature, differed in relative humidity, and, at the same point during each calendar year, ended, giving way to cool breezes and the polychromatic color shift of leaves and the necessity of trousers and long-sleeved shirts and cable-knit sweaters. Not so in this equatorial Southeast Asian nation, where the climate remained steadfastly and stubbornly consistent apart from the occasional rainy season.

The coolness of the handle had the effect of traveling first up into his hand and then along his arm, stopping at the crook of his elbow, as if he had dipped his entire forearm and right hand into ice water, the infection of cold invading down through layers of skin, muscle, fat, to lodge in the marrow of his bones. At the same time, the world around him flattened, as though he were viewing it through a television screen. The air moved sluggishly in and out of his lungs, a medium with the consistency of pudding or tar. With a force of will of which he was uncertain of the source, Moss uncurled the fingers of his right hand from the door handle, and let go. Immediately, warmth and feeling returned to phalanges, metacarpals, radius, ulna. He flexed his fingers, testing them, cracked the knuckles loudly. No serious damage then.

He must get inside the flat, move past the door and traverse the threshold and successfully achieve ingress; the imperative impulse resided as deeply within him as his certainty of the surrounding physical reality or his individual sense of authentic self. And yet. And yet. He looked down at his right hand, the knuckles knobbed and swollen, the skin wrinkled and spotted. Had the door handle in some way aged his hand? But a quick glance at its complementary partner on the left revealed a mirror image. His hands were old, decrepit, and, he quickly came to realize, so was he. Posture slumped as though in the process of slow implosion, white undershirt and navy blue cotton shorts hanging loose on his frame, his overly large feet clad in long black socks within sensibly thick-soled leather sandals.

The two-dimensionality of the corridor, the door, even his own hands and feet, remained, no matter how much he blinked or shook his head to dislodge the irreal impression. He must get inside the flat, but why? Who, or what, held such drastic and dire importance for him within? The door resembled every other door along the concrete linearity of the corridor, nothing special or remarkable, but the impulse remained. His vision tracked upward, past the door handle, past the glass fish-eyed peephole, to a spot near the top of the decorative recessed panelling. Numbers, in dull cast brass, in Copperplate Gothic Bold:
#07-37
. Seven three seven three seven three seven. Moss had always felt an affinity for this numerical pairing, as if three and seven epistemologically
belonged
together, like green and purple, like Gala apples and milk chocolate. But had the numbers been there when he first approached the door? Were the numerals why he had been attracted to this door in the first place? Already he could not recall.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d be far happier without you than with you.

The sentence bubbled upward once again and his stomach quivered with anxiety, pulling inward as though turning itself inside out. In one swift movement, Moss struck out with his hand, gripped the metal door handle, yanked it downward, and shoved the mass of the dark brown front door away from him, revealing the brightly lit interior of a tiled entryway. The door banged sharply against the wall, but stuck fast, vibrating like a plucked string. A furling current of dry conditioned air arabesqued across the threshold and caressed the flesh on Moss’s bare arms, stirring the hairs to stiffening and the skin to pebbling. Moss shivered, hugged himself, and stepped inside.

There was something intensely familiar about this place, but just as with the harsh deliberately hurtful sentence that even now, possibly months or even years after it had been uttered, brought a rush of blood to his cheeks and his ears and the back of his neck, the entryway in which he now stood would not reveal itself fully through his haze of past experience. It measured only three paces by seven (again, three and seven, again and always), the floor faced with iridescent white marble tiles that caught the light from the warm LED lamps recessed into the ceiling and produced a liquid shifting of pale hues that slid over the marble as he moved his eyes or head or in any other way adjusted his perspective. The interior walls: concrete, like all the walls in this housing block, painted a faded blue-grey. On the far end sat a tall mahogany altar, a porcelain statue of Manjusri at the place of honor, two handspans high even seated, with lit joss sticks planted in two sand-filled bowls in front of the deity, half ash themselves, drizzling upward curlicues of gentle whitish smoke.

Moss removed both sandals and socks, placing them neatly by the door, shivering once again as soles and toes made contact with chilled marble, then stepped from the entryway into the living room proper, from marble to painted white hardwood. An unusual material to be found in the tropics, prone to warping in the oppressive humidity unless properly treated, although this flooring appeared to be constructed from bamboo instead, which, as a grass, tended to behave more than its arborial brothers. The room itself exuded a Zen minimalism, the furniture chosen for its rectilinear monochrome simplicity: three-seater sofa with thin cushions, reclined armchair constructed of a single piece of beechwood bent into the frame’s form, low glass coffee table with cylindrical teak base, corner shelving unit holding: blown glass sculpture, manually shaped figurines of elephants and horses, and the carved ivory Taoist trinity of Fu Lu Shou as a conduit to the gods of good fortune, prosperity, and longevity. Moss stepped up to stroke the bald grinning hypercephalic form of Shou, recalling the cramped Hong Kong shop in which he had bought the small statue, the aisles crammed with what seemed an infinite number of variations on figures from the Taoist, Hindu, and Buddhist pantheons, and how claustrophobic he had felt, hemmed in by rows of crass commercial divinity, biting his tongue to keep from yelling at April to just fucking choose something already so he could retreat to the darkened quiet of their womb-like hotel room—

Wait.

Wait.

His arm dropped, as heavily and suddenly as though catching a fifty-pound weight, his fingers inadvertently pulling the god of longevity downward along their trajectory to spin end over end in a whirl of graceful somersaulting and then shatter upon impact with the bamboo floor into a hundred thousand shards of ceramic destruction, a reaction that progressed to an utter annihilation as the shards shivered themselves into grains, into powder, into dust, into individual atoms, into nothingness. The ringing sharpness of the statue’s breakage hung in the air for a long moment, imbuing the other items on the shelves, the walls, the floor, and Moss himself with inevitability and loss. It was only when the long moment ended and the dizzying tinnitus of his inner ears dissipated that another sound intruded into his perception: a moan—long, sustained, female, provoked unquestionably by lust.

To his right, another dark brown door, identical to the first, the room beyond: the source of the aural ecstasy. As before, at physical contact with the spherical doorknob, the absolute chill crept upward from his fingertips, this time progressing all the way through his arm, shoulder, and halfway across his chest, greedily grasping for his frantically palpitating heart. Moss sucked hard at the air, his lungs stubbornly refusing to work, the sensation akin to the same experienced when he was a small child and he had tumbled backward off of his parents living room sofa, completing an entire rotation before slamming to the floor and rolling hard into the wall more than two feet from the back of the couch, wherein all the breath was forced violently from his lungs and he sat there terrified as his older sister had run to him, his eyeballs bulging forward and his skin prickling all over as if an entire phalanx of fire ants were feasting on his flesh, knowing as he gazed into his sister’s guilty and frightened eyes in those long drawn-out moments before his breath returned that he was dying, just as he knew now that he was dying, that if he could not once again regain enough control over his voluntary motor functions to release his fingers from the knob he would cease to be, his consciousness blinking away in this confusion of an apartment that he knew now with certainty both
was
and
was not
his home, and so he leaned forward with all the remaining strength in his frail old man’s body and shoved his way forward onto the door and then, as it swung inward with a groan that matched the earlier exhalation, into the bedroom to which his momentum led.

Moss staggered to a halt, still gripping the doorknob, now returned to room temperature once he had penetrated into the dim bed chamber, the light filtered through the Roman blinds obscuring the room’s sole window, thin strips of bamboo, but unpainted. On the bed, a sight he found himself unable to reconcile in his mind, an impossibility, an unprobability, a vision so dysfunctionally anti-real that he merely stood there, gripping his knob, muted in shock. Both brain and heart broke simultaneously, with the effect of bringing the vision into all its awful clarity: his April, wife of more than thirty years, no, wait, that wasn’t right, it was seven years, they’d been married itchily for seven years when he’d discovered her in this scene of iniquity and betrayal, his April, hair wilder than she’d ever permitted during waking outside hours, skin emitting a combination of jasmine, sweat, and uninhibited carnality, embracing another man, a Caucasian like him, but Australian rather than American, his bleached blond hair cropped short yet standing stiff with his own sweat, his pale skin a contrast with April’s yellow-toned epidermis, their bodies slick and giving and open only to each other, a tangle of limbs and tongues and erotic cleaving.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d be far happier without you than with you.

And so utterly broken and plunged into despair was Moss that he flung himself forward in an arc of predatory rage, fingers extended into claws, teeth bared, a primal scream erupting from his rusty throat, no coherent thought in his head apart from the overpowering need to rend flesh, to make his betrayer feel as ineluctably destroyed as he felt in that moment, to exact punitive judgment, to feed his bloodlust and retribution for every time she had humiliated him with a cutting remark, belittled his passions, or slapped down any suggestion or attempt to help for the simple reason that such actions had come from him and no one else. Yet as he leapt toward the copulatory apotheosis of hurt before him, an impermeable barrier sprang into existence and separated him from the lovers, the air becoming transparent film that resisted his kinetic advance as quickly as a sheet of cling film, equalling the force he exerted upon it so that he became frozen in his pose of attack and the vision distorted under reality’s defense of his treacherous wife.

A hand upon his shoulder, a gentle voice, and the world around him dissipated to a featureless grey, devoid of detail, the bedroom and the blinds and his unfaithful wife gradating to nothingness before his eyes: “Dad.”

Moss stood on his own feet once again; he turned. Next to him: a young man in his early thirties, Eurasian and fiercely handsome, expressing all the best characteristics of his Caucasian father and Cantonese mother. He was dressed casually in a button-down maroon shirt and black chinos, but the clothes hung on him as perfectly as if they had been tailored. The young man removed his hand, the corners of his mouth pulling up into a smile filled with sadness and disappointment, his eyes glassy with weariness.

“Dad, you can’t keep coming here.”

“Alex?” The name felt right in his mouth, so he said it again. “Alex? Is that you?”

“Yes, Dad, it’s me. Look, I know it’s hard to remember to forgive. When Lainie cheated on me with that Malay banker, it nearly destroyed me. But do you remember what you told me?”

Moss searched his memory labyrinth once again, but the pathways had conspired against him, forming new patterns, obfuscating the eld ones, closing them off with dead ends. He sighed, feeling older than ever. “No. I’m sorry, son, I don’t.”

“You told me that anger and vindictive thoughts were a poison that would slowly kill me. I would not be able to enjoy or appreciate life, or trust another human being, until I could forgive Lainie, until I could find that spark of equanimity that would remind me how much I wanted her to be happy, regardless of whether it was with me or someone else. At first, I hated you for saying it, but you were right.”

“That doesn’t seem like something I would say,” Moss mumbled, but doubtfully. At this point, he couldn’t be sure of what he would or wouldn’t say in any given situation, and the uncertainty gnawed at him.