The Inner City (10 page)

My walls are lined with rows and rows of these photos, the blown-up retinas of the dead. They all seem to be looking in the same direction. And in every one of them, there is a clue.

“That one looks good,” her mom said, rocking the plastic-wrapped package so that the juices flowed back and forth. It was bright red behind the plastic, cheery almost. Definitely looked clean. Pink and fresh and lovely.

Her mom put it in the cart. Doreen picked it up and poked it. “I wonder if it minds?” she asked, thinking out loud. This past year she had become unable to let go of connecting the meat to the animal. She kept picturing it, eyes wide with terror.

“It doesn’t mind,” her mom said soothingly. “Why would it mind?”

“Being killed. Getting sliced up. Wouldn’t you mind?”

Her mom shrugged absently. “How about some potatoes? Or would you like noodles?”

“Do you think the other packages were the same cow? If I got the other packages, would it all fit back together again?” Doreen touched another package speculatively, testing it. She was seventeen, a senior in high school. She had refused to dissect a pig for Biology.

“Doreen, it’s got nothing to do with you. That’s what they’re made for; that’s what they want, really, when you think about it. Besides, it already happened, it’s just meat now. You can’t put it back together again like a jigsaw puzzle.” Her mom’s voice was soothing but automatic; she was used to Doreen’s nonsense.

“I’ve heard people eat people,” Doreen said thoughtfully, putting a fingertip on the package and poking it. “I wonder how they taste. What if that’s really human meat?”

Her mom wheeled over to the produce department, pointing out fruit to her, covering up the meat with bananas and pears. “That will be lovely, won’t it?” she asked. “Nice for dessert, with ice cream? Bananas and ice cream?” She had a great deal of hope in her voice.

At dinner she served the meat, covered in gravy, with mashed potatoes and peas. She snuck the meat under the mashed potatoes on Doreen’s plate. She knew enough not to give her gravy, the girl was almost religious when it came to animals, but Doreen’s father had gravy and he loved it. He looked away from her, mixing the stuff into his potatoes. Doreen wondered thoughtfully if cooking people made the same kind of gravy?

Doreen generally wore sneakers to school instead of leather shoes—cowskin shoes; she had told her mom last year that she would no longer wear animals. It was cold out and her gloves were good, microfiber. She kept the old leather gloves and the old leather shoes in her closet. She had looked at them last night, considering things. There were all these animal parts lying around, casually, innocently, and no one saw it but her. She was the kind of girl who saw patterns, and who tried to undo the bad patterns; she was the kind of girl who didn’t pretend that today made yesterday irrelevant; she was the kind of girl who never doubted that unpleasant things should be changed.

At school her class was given mice for the year-end science project. The mice were going to be fed different fast-food items. Girls screamed at the mice and a boy picked one up and bit its tail off before anyone could do a thing. He grinned and looked around with the tail still twitching in his mouth. The teacher sent the boy (Wallace, a continuing problem when it came to small animals) to the principal, which didn’t bother him in the least. A janitor came and took the mouse away and wiped up the mess. It would have been gravy if the mouse had been packaged, Doreen thought.

Doreen picked the mouse out of the garbage after school, waiting till everyone else went off racing, jumping and slapping each other. She always preferred to wait till the others were gone anyway and she knew better than to let anyone see her doing it. The mouse’s head was bashed in, but she thought it might be useful, so she put it in her pocket. She had made a decision. It took a first step, weren’t they always saying that? Someone had to stand up for the right thing, and she couldn’t put it off any longer: she was that someone.

On the way home she stopped at the deli and bought five packages of cow. She was a little perplexed, since she wanted to get slices from the same cow. That way, when she put them all back together she wouldn’t have to worry about rejection, which she had read about recently, when they had put a chimp heart into a man. They had showed the chimp being wheeled away, its hand outstretched.

She checked the date-stamp and divided the packages into piles, putting all the same dates together, and she took the pile with the most pieces. She put them in the cart, and the cashier laughed at her—a big eater? she asked—and double-bagged them so the blood wouldn’t run out. Doreen watched her pat each one through the plastic. People were always patting meat.

The bag was heavy and dragged her down a little on one side, but she liked the weight of it; she had seen women carrying small dogs in carriers; perhaps that felt like this. When she passed another store she decided to go in just to check, and they had packages of cow too. Some of them had the same date as the ones she carried, and she thought this through. Sure, if they cut up the cow it would be all on the same day and then they’d send it around, so she bought all the packages that matched the date on the packages she already had. She was thinking of them as pieces of an animal she needed to rescue. She saw things that most other people did not; she made connections that other people ignored; she acted when others stood back.

She got the big sewing needle and thread her Mom used to sew the turkey shut with the stuffing inside it, making it neat and tidy, a process that appealed to Doreen. Making it whole and not empty; that must have given the turkey a sense of relief, if only for a while.

She knew she would have to keep the cow cold, so she began to sew it together in the garage. It was harder than she thought because only three pieces actually fit together with the same shape. She tried to settle on a way of putting the others together, moving them around and up and down and flipping them over, lots of various combinations, but she needed more shapes. She got paper and pen and outlined some of the pieces, and then she went to a larger supermarket, where she was sure there would be more date-stamped pieces. She had always been good with puzzles so there was a pleasure in strategizing.

It was bright and cheerful in the store. The refrigerated aisles hummed, the lights blinked. She passed by the ground meat—could that be something from her cow? Maybe those were the pieces that would have fit? She took out her tracings at the cut meats section and found three packages that might work, but she thought that the ground meat might be useful too, so she took two of those.

She got outside and then scooted around the back, passing the dumpster, where she found chicken feet and some wads of fat, like thick ribbons. And skin! It might have been pork skin, because it was pale, but all animals needed skin, so she rolled it up and put it in the bag, along with an expired fish and some turkey rolls.

It wasn’t that hard, then, putting it all back together. Finding the pieces. She felt like she was doing a great good thing. Wherever the slices didn’t come together, she put in some ground meat. In order to keep that from pushing out again, she got some gauze and put the gauze around the ground meat and then sewed that to the firm meats. She wrapped skin at the joints and patted it all together gently, as if she were petting a dog or primping hair. She said little words occasionally, to encourage it.

She didn’t know whether it was a he or a she, because she had to take different parts as she needed them from different things. There was the pork skin, yes, and she was inclined to think of it as a he, but as she put the meats together she realized she needed to support it, and so she got some bones (“for a very large dog”) from the butcher. The cow was really a mixed cow.

It had a shape, kind of. It sort of stood up and hunched over. It had patches of hair on its lumpy head. When it oozed, she used plastic wrap to keep it firm.

It had a mouth. She had found a tongue, set on a foam plate and sealed and dated. She had made lips from the gloves. She’d put in marbles for teeth, then replaced them as she found false teeth in a dentist’s garbage bin. She looked for the scarlet bags of medical waste around the clinics late at night and she pulled out a thumb. She had heard in school that what made humans rank high above the animals was an opposable thumb. She wanted the animal to rank high.

She gave it two hearts, still in their plastic sacks. She found a brain and put it behind its fish eyes. And finally she thought it might be ready. She took it out of the cold and let it warm up, braised it with chicken stock, beef stock, minerals and herbs, stood it in a pan of stock, let it absorb some of the vitality, waited and stepped back. She threw in some Echinacea. Maybe an electric shock? An electric shock then, a curling iron turned on and sunk into the stock.

Phffft! The meat jolted upright. Should she do it again? Then it opened its mouth and screamed.

Slaughterhouse scream. Horrible.

It staggered around, lifting its head again, screaming. Doreen, heart pounding, threw juices at it, because it banged around like it was burning, and the juices seemed to help. Not enough skin? She threw all the juices and it stood there quivering, so she got plastic wrap and wrapped it tight around it.

She had given it eyes, and the eyes gazed at her. Its mouth rippled, trying to find a form.

It screamed again, but this time not so hard, and Doreen stood, watching it. There was an answering chorus of barks and some howls from far off.

There had been piglets at a petting zoo she’d once been taken to. “Don’t name them,” her father had said. “You’ve got to understand they’re food, not pets.”

“Your name is Gilgamesh,” Doreen said. It was a name they’d read about in school and she liked the sound of it, exotic and strong. And wasn’t Gilgamesh a king of some sort?

Gilgamesh opened his mouth, rolled his eyes, and shifted his head. He moved his arms and then his torso. The suede of his lips parted and came together. He looked at his arms, which ended bluntly, and lifted what should be his hands. Or cow feet. Or paws.

Doreen nodded. “I couldn’t find any hands, just that thumb. I suppose they were eaten,” she said. “I tried to find what I could.”

With that, the cow struck at her, hitting her with the meat on its paw, or hand. She was flung back. “But I saved you!” she cried out.

Gilgamesh mooed, or hooted, a long loud call. The dogs all barked in answer. Doreen thought she heard birds as well, those loud pushy ones, the crows.

There was no expression on Gilgamesh’s face—for she hadn’t given him delicate muscles. He lifted his arm again, brought it back, and knocked Doreen to the ground. Then he rushed away. Doreen rolled over, getting her breath back, dizzy. Her hand braced itself on the floor, in some of the blood that Gilgamesh had dripped. No, actually it was her own blood; her nose was bleeding. She sat back, thickheaded.

She heard yells from the houses around them, and her mother called out, asking what was wrong. Dogs barked in excitement. She got up and followed the sounds, yelling back to her mother that everything was fine, determined to make sense of what was happening. She could fix it, she was sure, if she could understand it.

Gilgamesh was roaming the neighbourhood, smashing into things, calling out wildly, and the neighbourhood animals answered. Tied up, fenced in, they howled to him, flinging themselves against walls and trees and cages. Doreen followed the noises of people shouting, but there was a panic in the street, and people ran every which way, so she wasn’t sure of the direction.

Her mother stood on the steps waiting for her. “What is it?” she asked. “I’ve heard terrible things. There’s a news report about wild dogs. Did you see them?”

Doreen shook her head. “They’re not wild, they’re just running.”

“Come inside, Doreen, it isn’t safe. What if they start biting people? Biting children? We can’t have that.” The sounds were far off now, going away fast. Doreen hesitated and then went inside.

That night the news reports showed police on top of buildings and crouching through alleyways. They said they would shoot any animal that ran past. The reporter showed gates that had been broken in certain yards where “a thing” had stumbled through.

“This is terrible,” her mother said. “What’s going on, who let that thing out? I won’t rest until it’s dead, whatever it is.”

“It’s probably just unhappy,” Doreen said stubbornly.

She waited for her parents to fall asleep. Then she dressed and snuck outside. She took a packet of instant gravy with her, just in case.

The streets were flooded with flashing lights, so she took the back yards, sneaking through bushes and behind sheds, falling over bicycles and mowers. She followed her own old routes, going behind the butchers, the stores, the dog pounds, the vet. She found Gilgamesh near the dumpsters behind the biggest supermarket, surrounded by dogs.

“You can’t stay here,” she said. “They’re looking for you. They want to kill you.”

Gilgamesh had a piece of meat hanging off near his shoulder and she went up to him very carefully. She wanted to put it back in place, but she didn’t have a needle and thread. She should have thought of that; she really should have.

“They’re killing other animals because of you,” she said unhappily. Gilgamesh lowered his great uneven head. “More and more. It’s my fault. I didn’t think about this too clearly. It just seemed so wrong, and yet this isn’t any better. I don’t know what to do.” She thought it would be best if Gilgamesh just went away, far away, so that all of this could stop—the shooting that she heard, even now, blocks away, the cries of an animal being hit, of people being excited. Yet she felt sad for Gilgamesh, too; for he now had a voice and an intent. Why else would he be roaming the streets? Why else was he learning to live?

Doreen ripped open her packet of gravy and sprinkled it on his shoulder, pinching the pieces together. It didn’t fully stick together, but it was better. “You have to get away from here,” she said, and led him past the dumpsters to the industrial park, and beyond that to the woods. Maybe he would be safe there. And if the animals followed him, maybe the shooting would stop. He loped along, shifting from side to side, his gait worse than it had been earlier that day. She frowned, trying to see what was wrong. Some of his body had slid down farther, she thought, so that his weight dragged down to his legs.