The Heaven of Animals: Stories (32 page)

Marcus answered, and Dan made no excuses.

“I’ll be there by morning,” he said. “Please put Jack on the phone.”

“Just be patient with him,” Marcus said. “It’s been a bad day.”

But he didn’t know what Marcus meant. Jack sounded terrific, the best he’d been since the first call came.

“They drained the left today,” he said. “It’s great—I can
breathe
.”

He waited for Jack to ask where he was. He was prepared to tell everything, to exaggerate or lie, whatever it took, only don’t let Jack be mad at him. Except, Jack didn’t ask. If he remembered Dan’s promise to be there that night, he didn’t mention it.

“I’m in Benson,” he said. “Remember Ted?”

“Ted,” Jack said.

“The Gila monster? The motel outside Tucson?”

Jack coughed.

“I’m making the trip,” Dan said. “Just like we made it when you moved out there.”

Jack said something, and Dan, sure he’d misheard, asked him to repeat it. Only, he’d heard right. Again, Jack said: “Mom?”

“I’m Dan,” he said. “Your dad.”

“Mom and me,” Jack was saying, “we rented a truck this time and drove it cross-country and the lizard was there at this motel in a tank with a rock.”

“Jack,” he said, but how could he tell him? How did you tell someone politely that, at the time, his mother was already dead?

“And Mom asked if she could touch it!” Jack said. He laughed, choked, laughed again. “A venomous lizard! Can you believe it?”

“Son,” he said. He needed Jack to remember because, if not this, what? What did they have? Nothing else, nothing shared, nothing from Jack’s adulthood but the van, the stops, their words, three days.

“How
is
old Ted?” Jack said.

Across the room, Dan watched as the pillowcase was lowered over the box. The box rattled back. Margaret stepped away.

“Fine,” Dan said. “Really just fine. He’s got a new cage, a big one. Lots of room for him to run around.”

“I’m glad,” Jack said.

“You should see it,” Dan said, and he had a wild thought. Maybe he could steal his son from the house, bring him here. Or, not here, because Ted was not here, but some right place, a place to make Jack happy. They could go to the beach, see Jack’s seals. They’d have to lose Marcus, and he wasn’t sure how that would go over. He’d have to see the man, size him up. On the phone, Marcus was someone not to be fucked with, but a man on the phone wasn’t always the man in real life.

“I have to go now,” Dan said. “I’ll be there before you know it.”

He heard static on the other end, a rustle, then Marcus, his voice a whisper.

“He’s asleep,” Marcus said.

“Just like that?”

“It’s what happens.”

Dan couldn’t believe it. He imagined Jack muffled, the man’s hand over his mouth. His son, thin, weak, flailed for the phone.

Marcus began to detail Jack’s condition. He implored Dan to hurry.

Dan hung up.

His eyes burned. His stomach ached. Exhaustion foamed at the back of his brain, a bottle opened too soon after shaking. Already he’d bought the room. How easy it would be to check in, to fill up his ears with a shower’s roar, then lie down.

But he couldn’t do it. He had to move forward.

The highway unspooled under starlight. Dashes marked his lane. Bone-white, they sailed past his high beams with the regularity of a metronome. Sleep’s tease was strong, but he felt a tug stronger than sleep, stronger than dread or regret, than death. An invisible thread ran over mountains, past rivers and roads, up his bumper and right through the windshield. The thread caught his throat and bound, at the other end, his boy’s heart. A word,
the
word, for this—it wasn’t Dan’s, didn’t belong to him.

And so he imagined the pull as the work of water. Blue, the view from Jack’s window, the Pacific a rectangle over the kitchen sink. It was water called him west—the waiting coast, the cold and silver crash of waves.

.   .   .

La Jolla was a city on a cliff, dips and hills, a trapeze flung above the bay. Trees were here, and wealth. Couples in matching sweaters walked well-groomed dogs through the crosswalks. Children in sunglasses and name-brand clothes talked into cell phones. Storefronts advertised merchandise that, on sale, cost a month of Dan’s income.

He’d been a day and a night without sleep. All night he’d driven, stopping three times only. He’d gotten to where he could use the bathroom, buy food, and pump gas in five minutes. The whole way, he’d pushed the speed limit. He hadn’t slowed down, not once, not even for the armadillo he’d sent spinning over the road like a top. Now, his head swam and his eyes, when he blinked, felt sand-filled and asymmetrical, his skull small.

He sat behind the wheel of the car on the street before a row of blue mailboxes. A box on one end held a quiet surprise: a maiden name—his wife’s. He didn’t know when Jack had changed his name or if it was official. He wondered which name the boy would be buried with, then shook this off. Some things were worth worrying about. His name wasn’t one.

Beyond the sidewalk and up a hill, the building waited. Houses rose on either side, so close a man might stand between, reach out, and touch two walls. The buildings, a street’s worth, stood white and red, stucco and brick, brightly shuttered, with Spanish tile on top. The sun, just up, painted the clay roofs pink.

For too long, he’d sat, trying to catch his breath. Now he stood and swung the car door shut. No matter what awaited him, no matter what looked back at him from the bed, he would smile. That was the first thing he would do. He would smile, and he would not cry. He would kneel, and, if Jack let him, he’d open his arms.

Jack’s door hung orange inside the white frame. A brass ring marked its middle. It was only a staircase away.

Dispensation
. Was that the word for what he wanted?

And how long would he wait before he begged?

He’d tried this once before. Long ago, after he’d served his time and sobered, he’d driven to Baton Rouge but been turned away at the door. He’d stood a long time at that door too, stood, then knocked, then waited, then knocked again, only for the door to open to Lynn’s scowling face. He’d never learned whether Jack knew he’d come.

This door, though, when he moved to knock, stood ajar. Dan leaned and the door opened. Inside, a kettle’s curve on the stove, dishes overflowing the kitchen sink, and, rolled at the wrist, a single latex glove. Thumb tucked under, fingers splayed, it hugged the floor like shed skin. Against the linoleum, two fingers gleamed red up to the knuckle.

Beyond the kitchen was the main room. Against one wall stood an enormous saltwater aquarium, and, circling inside, a pair of striped, spine-covered fish. Their bodies glimmered brown and white in the yellow glow of the tank light, their fins silk-webbed and see-through.

The first step, once he took it, set him moving fast. He moved through the kitchen and past the room with the fish, down a hallway and toward the two bedroom doors. One door stood open, the room a study. The walls were bookcases, the shelves spilling over into piles on the floor. Among the mounds was wedged a blue blow-up mattress, its black tail plugged into a pump the size of a cinder block. A duffel bag yawned at the foot of the bed, a red sock sprung like a tongue between unzipped teeth.

The other door was shut. He remembered to breathe. He pressed his palm to the wood, hesitant, as though to feel for fire inside. He waited.

And pushed the door open to an empty bed, the sheets strangled into a rope that stretched to the door. Beside the bed stood an IV stand and a cluster of gray-faced, many-buttoned machines. Wires and tubes hung disconnected along the floor. In one corner, a wheelchair lay on its side.

He felt a need, just then, to go to the chair, to right it, as though it lived, as though to lift the thing might save its life. The chair, once he had hold of it, was heavy. He tipped it up, tried to make it roll, but someone had set the brake. The floor’s planks pushed back at the wheels with a sneaker’s squeak.

He moved to the bed. He sat, ran his hand over the mattress. Stains the shapes of continents stared back through the scrim of the fitted sheet. His knees found his chin. His head found the pillow. It was soft, and he took one corner into his mouth. He tasted salt. He pulled the pillow over his head.

He wasn’t sure how long he slept before a door’s slam echoed down the hall. From beneath the pillow, he could see a sliver of floor, then shoes in the doorway. They were red with white laces, a white cap on each toe, the kind he’d worn as a kid, played basketball in. He didn’t have to look up to know whose shoes.

“Don’t say I almost made it,” Dan said.

Marcus said nothing. The feet were planted far apart.

“Just, please don’t tell me how close I was.”

“He died last night,” Marcus said. “You weren’t even close.”

.   .   .

In the kitchen, Marcus boiled water. He was tall, thin and tan, his hair dark, cropped close along the sides of his head. His sideburns touched his jaw’s hinges, and his face wore stubble’s mossy mask. Black crescents cradled his sockets like the bottom halves of punched eyes.

At the kettle’s whistle, Marcus tipped the water into a glass. The glass was beaker-shaped and tapered at the mouth like a vase. Coffee grounds waited at the bottom. The stream hit the grounds, swirled, and steamed. Together, they made mud, and the mud rose, bubbling. Marcus fastened a lid to the lip of the glass, and the two of them watched the brown water. In the other room, the fish tank bubbler hummed. Dan imagined the fishes’ gill plates going in and out. Then Marcus pushed a kind of plunger into the mix, and a silver disc separated the grounds from what had been brewed.

It was a miracle, a horror—the world, and his son gone, blinked from existence. How a body, breathing, turned to lungs. He pictured them, sticky, deflated, gray balloons trampled into a wet sidewalk. And still the march of days, still sunrise and weather and water for coffee. Jack dead, and still beans would be dried and crushed, strained through water, and men and women would raise their mugs and read the day’s news and make grocery lists and worry over coupons and wonder whether their tires were in need of rotation.

Marcus was talking oxygen, how everyone went by oxygen in the end. Oxygen or water, and, anyway, water
was
one part oxygen. Too little, too much, these were what killed you. You suffocated or swelled, dehydrated or drowned. Life was balance—imbalance, death.

Proportion. Equilibrium.
A needle in the arm had kept water in Jack’s body. A needle in the lung had kept it out. In this way, they’d kept Jack alive. In the end, his lungs had filled up faster than they could be emptied out.

Marcus poured coffee into cups and joined Dan at the kitchen table. He looked calm, and Dan couldn’t stand it, how matter-of-fact he acted, as though every day your lover died and you sat and sipped coffee across the table from his father. Marcus watched the table, and Dan watched Marcus, wanting to throttle the calm from him.

“You have it too?” Dan asked.

Marcus started. Then, his face collapsed into something approaching amusement.

“Not all of us live with AIDS, Mr. Lawson,” he said. “Some do. Some live with HIV. But most of us just . . . live.”

“I only thought—the two of you.”

“Friends,” Marcus said. “It only seems like more because I was here at the end.”

Dan thought of breaking the man in half. What held him back was
need
. Marcus alone knew Jack’s final hours, his words, the last look on his face.

“Did Jack—”

“—say anything?” Marcus laughed. He seemed to Dan a man who, in this life, had enjoyed very little power, a man who now relished his dominion over the last half day and what had gone on in it. Marcus was smiling into his cup, but, when his eyes lifted, his expression was humorless.

“You want me to tell you he had some special shit saved up just for you, but no such luck.” Marcus spun his mug in his hands. The steam rose in ribbons. “The magic words were supposed to be yours.
Your
words. Not his. This was your last chance, and, let’s face it, you blew it.”

Dan brought his mug to his mouth. The rim was chipped, the coffee strong.

“How much did my son tell you?”

“Enough for me to know what you were to him.”

“And what was that?”

“A curiosity,” Marcus said. “Last century’s last holdout.”

The mug was hot in his hands, but Dan would not put it down.

“I was trying to get used to the idea,” he said.

“
Try harder
. The country’s growing up. Before long, no one will be left, no one to accommodate what you call
love
.”

Dan stood and launched his cup across the room. It hit and exploded. Coffee streaked the wall.

He moved to the door. One boot was on the stoop before Marcus’s voice reached him.

“Squirrels,” he said. “I don’t know if that means anything to you, but, at the end, it’s all he talked about. Squirrels in the bed. Squirrels running up the walls.”

“Squirrels,” Dan said. He gripped the doorframe to keep steady. His knees locked.

“The morphine,” Marcus said. “That’s probably all it was.”

“Morphine,” Dan said.

Marcus’s shoulders heaved. His head dropped. His brow touched the table.

Dan winced. The fish was there again, set loose in his gut, writhing, careening to get out. He stepped inside.

Beneath the kitchen sink, he found a roll of paper towels. He wet one. He wiped clean the spot on the wall, then picked up the china fragments from the floor. He moved to the kitchen sink. He stacked the dishes, the trays, the pans caked with burnt food, all of it, onto the counter. He let the sink fill with soapy water and dropped the dishes in. And then—because what else could he do?—he began to scrub.

.   .   .

The water, when his feet finally found it, was cold. His socks were balled up in his boots, his boots lassoed by their laces and slung over one shoulder. The cold climbed his legs, and he walked until the water reached his knees.