We the Animals (9 page)

"He made me!" I screamed.

"I'm made!"

DEEP NIGHT

T
HEY WERE GATHERED
in the front room, and the air reeked of grief. The force of their eight eyes pushed me backward toward the door; never had I been looked at with such ferocity. Everything easy between me and my brothers and my mother and my father was lost.

My brothers were still in their jackets, their hair slick with wet, Paps was dressed and shaven, and Ma looked up at me with mascara tiger-striped down her face, raw eyes, hands in her hair—how many times had I seen her like this? She spoke, but I didn't catch what she was saying because on her lap sat, impossibly, my journal.

In bold and explicit language I had written fantasies about the men I met at the bus station, about what I wanted done to me. I had written a catalog of imagined perversions, a violent pornography with myself at the center, with myself obliterated. And now there it was on my mother's lap.

For a moment my thoughts and fears dimmed to black, my vision blurred—an avalanche began, my gut dropped, my sex dropped, my knees gave way, and I fell onto them, hard.

I knelt, just inside the door, and when I spoke to Ma my voice was calm and assured.

"I'll kill you," I said.

Paps lunged, and my brothers, for the first time in their lives, restrained him. But that restraint shifted before my eyes into an embrace; somehow, at the same time that they were keeping him back, they were supporting him, holding Paps upright, preventing him from sliding to the floor himself, and in that moment I realized that not just Ma, but each and every one of them had read the fantasies and delusions, the truth I had written in my little private book.

Two hours later, I am packed into the car and taken to the psych ward of the general hospital, where I will be turned over to the state and institutionalized. Even later, I will come to doubt whether I ever really believed such a book would not be found—maybe my words were all for them, that they might discover themselves, and discover me.

But before all that, before being strapped to a gurney, before the sedation, before the neutered hostility of the nurses and doctors, let us look at me kneeling on the living room floor: my soft curly black hair, days unwashed; my skin marked with acne, but still burning a youthful glow; my arms extended on either side of me, palms up; my slender fingers, the fingers of a piano man, Ma said; my chin lifted, my eyes on my family, who froze before me like a bronze sculpture of sorrow. Paps had his arms around my brothers' shoulders; he leaned into them, and they kept one hand each on his broad chest; they had grown as tall as he; their bodies were whittled-down versions of his own, our common face; and Ma had risen from her seat; she too had moved over to calm Paps, to place a hand on his chest, to lend her support. Each was radiant, gorgeous. How they posed for me. This was our last time all five in a room together. I could have risen; I believe they would have embraced me.

Instead, I behaved like an animal.

I tried to rip the skin from their faces, and when I couldn't, I tried to rip the skin from my own.

They held me down on the ground; I bucked and spat and screamed my throat raw. I cursed them: we were, all of us, sons of whores, mongrels, our mother fucked a beast. They held me, pinned. At first they defended themselves, cursed me, slapped my face, but the wilder I became, the more they retreated into their love for me. Each of them. I chased them down into that love and challenged it—you morons, you sick fucks, I bet you liked reading it, I bet it excited you. I let the spit fly, nostrils wide—my body spasmed in their grip. My voice spiraled up into coughing hysteria.

I said and did animal, unforgivable things.

What else, but to take me to the zoo?

DAWN

L
OOK, A FATHER
gently lowers his son, fully clothed, into a tub filling with bathwater. The bathroom is small, no window to the outside, stale air. A mother stands in the doorway like a silent movie actress—she has eight fingers in her mouth and she trembles all over. The father turns to her, places his hands on her wrists, and lowers her arms to her sides, all the while whispering in her ear. The mother takes a deep breath and nods, nods.

Then the father eases her out into the hallway and shuts the door. He licks two fingers and reaches up, unscrewing one of the bulbs in the two-bulb fixture over the mirror.

"I always thought that this bathroom was way too bright."

The boy's chin begins to chatter.

"
Mijo,
" he says. "My son. You need a bath."

Watch the father rummage through the cabinet below the small tin sink, looking for a washcloth. He runs the water in the sink until it steams. He whistles. Soap, cloth, steam, foam. He whistles.

Look at the son, lulled by the sounds of him, the ritual: whistle, water, suds, and splash. Now the father lathers the cloth. Now the son can only wait.

"How long's it been since you had a bath?"

The boy turns his head halfway away from him, stares up at a peeling tongue of paint dangling down from the ceiling.

"How long's it been since I
gave
you a bath?"

The boy closes his eyes. Listen to the slur, the tired confusion in the boy's voice as he asks, "Please, Paps, please. Leave me alone to wash myself."

"Hush," says the father. "Hush. Ain't nobody going to leave you alone. Not when you're all worked up like this."

"I'm an adult," the boy says. "I got rights."

"Everybody's got rights. A man tied to a bed got rights. A man down in a dungeon got rights. A little screaming baby got rights. Yeah, you got rights. What you don't got is power."

Down the hall, the mother opens her son's bedroom door and flicks on the light. Look how she steadies herself against the doorjamb. She whispers aloud to no one, enters.

Inside, the mother runs her hand over the surface of the boy's desk. From the high shelf of the closet she pulls down a canvas duffle bag. All the dresser drawers are empty, so she picks the clothes up off the floor, snaps them straight, and folds them, neat and slow. One by one they go, down into the bag.

Look. The snow is stacked two feet high on the roof of the house. Somewhere beyond the snow clouds, the sun rises. The light is stronger every minute. In the driveway, two brothers have started the truck's engine; now they hunch inside the cab. The exhaust billows from the tailpipe and hovers; there is very little wind. No bird song greets the sunrise. Inside, the boys hold their hands in front of the heating vents; they pass a cigarette back and forth in silence. The older boy flicks the knob for the wipers, but they won't respond. The boys look out the windshield onto the gray underlayer of snow. The younger boy stubs the cigarette into the ashtray.

"Well?"

Look. The father lays down the rag, crosses the room, and undresses his son. Cupping and lifting the back of the boy's head with one hand, he tugs his shirt up from his waist and exposes the boy's chest. He lays him back down, lifts his arms, and pulls the wet shirt the rest of the way off. Then he wrestles down the soaking jeans and fishes out one ankle, then the next.

"Paps," says the boy.

The father pulls down the boy's underwear, and he is naked. The father takes him in, stares. Look at the boy, naked from head to foot, searching his father's eyes.

The father squints at the boy, at this nakedness. As if he were looking at a deep cut or a too-bright morning. He calls the boy son again,
Mijo.

"You smell."

"That ain't me."

The father pushes himself into a laugh, into his role. "That's you, my boy. You're smelling yourself right now."

So the bath begins. Little waterfall flowing down from the tub's faucet. The rising tide. In the father's pocket sits a nail clipper—it has always been there, since before the boy was born. Look how the father brandishes the clipper, flips open the metal file attachment, and digs and files and clips away dead skin. The boy keeps still and quiet. The father presses the hooked tip into his son's foot until the boy curls his toes and groans.

"Just checking."

Then the washcloth running over the balls of the boy's feet, his heels and ankles, and down the bridge into the crevices between the boy's toes. The boy's feet have not been wet or touched by another in years. The father speaks of cultures where to wash a man's feet is to pay him the ultimate respect, but the boy can only half listen because there is the wet and the cloth and the touch, all of it so brand new and so familiar. Look at him sucking in air, look how the air sticks, a crisp lump in his throat.

The father sits on the edge of the tub, foot in hand, inspecting, rubbing, humming. He takes his time, moving the washcloth slowly up one calf, then the next. There is the wet, the touch. The father stretches his neck and peeks up at his son's face.

"Breathe, boy, just breathe."

Outside the door, the mother listens awhile, then knocks. She calls out the father's name.

"We're getting him fixed up," the father calls back.

Look at how she enters, holding a stack of folded clothes, jeans on the bottom, a sweatshirt, some boxer shorts, and on top a pair of socks bundled together. Except for her face, her wild, beautiful face, she looks like a servile woman, a television mom.

"The boys are sweeping off the truck," she tells the father. He nods. Hear the way she says it,
the boys,
how quickly and fully the son in the tub is excluded from that designation; how badly the boy wishes to be out there with his brothers, doing as he is told.

The mother sits down on the toilet and watches the father bathe their son. She holds the clothes on her lap. The son will not speak to her. She watches him, and she wants to tell him that he can put all his hate on her; she will take it all, if that's what he needs her to do. Listen, really listen, and that's what she is saying in her silence. The boy can't help but hear.

The father whistles and hums; he is saying goodbye.

"Yes, ma'am," the father says without looking at the mother. "We're going to get him fixed up."

And the mother nods, nods.

The brothers are happy and thankful to have simple work ahead of them—slamming the truck doors with extra force to shake off the snow, scraping the ice from all the windows, pushing the snow from the roof and hood. Their minds are not on the boy and the father in the bathroom. Their minds are not on the mother, crying softly, or the packed duffle bag by the front door. Their minds are on the snow and ice, the simple problem of removal.

And in the tub, the boy is grateful, too, that his brothers have this task. Outside, they have the fresh cold air to clear their throats and noses after being shut up with that cigarette in the cab. In the garage they have aluminum shovels. They can start at the bottom of the driveway and work their way toward the truck, digging down until their shovels hit gravel—the crunch will echo in the silence around them. In work, they can be together, deep inside a chore they've split over many winters. Only the last task, the salting, will bring their minds to the boy in the tub, to the first winter he joined them out there, bundled into a full-body snowsuit. He was too slow and weak with the shovel, so the older brothers gave him a plastic sand bucket full of crystals and ordered him to follow along behind. Now the salting will be split between the two of them. They will pour the bag off into two buckets and scatter the salt across the drive, like seeds or ash. The boy knows that after the shock of this night, his brothers will treat each other formally, with dignity—if one accidentally throws snow in the other's direction, if one nicks the other's heel with his shovel, the guilty one will say
I'm sorry.
Listen and you will hear their whispers floating up toward the house,
I'm sorry, man, I'm sorry.
And a moment later, the refrain,
For nothing, brother, for nothing.

Look, they're opening doors. They're stepping out. Here they go.

Zookeeping

T
HESE DAYS, I SLEEP
with peacocks, lions, on a bed of leaves. I've lost my pack. I dream of standing upright, of uncurled knuckles, of a simpler life—no hot muzzles, no fangs, no claws, no obscene plumage—strolling gaily, with an upright air.

I sleep with other animals in cages and in dens, down rabbit holes, on tufts of hay. They adorn me, these animals—lay me down, paw me, own me—crown me prince of their rank jungles.

"Upright, upright," I say, I slur, I vow.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to United States Artists, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Stanford Creative Writing Program, the Ucross Foundation, Lambda Literary, the Truman Capote Literary Trust, and the Tin House and Bread Loaf conferences for their generous support.

Heartfelt thanks to Jin Auh, my agent, and Jenna Johnson, my editor at HMH, for working with me and working so hard for the book.

My favorite hobby is finding teachers to admire, then admiring the hell out of them. Here's a partial list: Dorothy Allison, Lan Samantha Chang, Allan Gurganus, Marilynne Robinson, Stacey D'Erasmo, Michael Cunningham, Paul Harding, Edward Carey, Bret Anthony Johnston, Jeffery Renard Allen, Ann Cummins, Elizabeth Tallent, Adam Johnson, and Tobias Wolff.

Extra special thanks to Laura Iodice, my high school English teacher, who brought me books when I was hospitalized, and whom I love very much.

And to Jackson Taylor, who taught and challenged me. Without your singular and exceptional generosity, Jackson, this book would not exist.

Connie Brothers, Charles Flowers, and Sally Wofford-Girand advised and inspired. And then there are the readers, friends, and heroines: Emma Borges-Scott, Ellie Catton, Angela Flournoy, Kyle McCarthy, Khaliah Williams, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Jennifer De Leon, Kristy Zadrozny, Sara Romano, Marissa Beckett, Casey Romanick, Becky Rotelli, Mary Bates, Ian Gold, Suzy Bentley, Kristina Paiz, Arianna Martinez, Sara Taylor, Adjua Greaves, Karen Good, Joyce Fuller, Valentine Freeman, Adam Gardner, Wei Hwu, Steph Krause, Ade Hall, Sara Minardi, my dear friend Christina Wickens, and the entire Dellios family, but most especially the irreplaceable Olivia Dellios.

Sasha Rodriguez, sister, thank you.

Jaime Shearn Coan, thank you for being an inspiring writer and an incredible friend.

And Ayana Mathis, thank you for reading every draft, every wild incarnation, and patiently, lovingly guiding both me and the book toward realization.

Lastly, vastly, Graham Plumb. I love you.