When We Were Animals (15 page)

I invited him in, but he didn’t want to be indoors. Instead we walked, wrapped in our winter coats. I kept my eyes on the shoveled sidewalk, paying close attention to whether or not I stepped on the cracks. I wondered if he would try to take my hand, and I left it dangling just in case—but he seemed morose and inattentive.

“You know where I’ve been all morning?” he said.

“Where?”

“Church.”

“Oh.”

“It used to make me feel better,” he went on, “but it doesn’t anymore. I forgot how to be good.”

“You didn’t forget.”

“All the things I’ve done. The way I’ve behaved. Do you ever feel like you’re two entirely different people? I mean, there’s the person you know you should be, the person you want to be, the person everybody else would like you to be. And you can be that person most of the time. It’s work. I mean, it’s hard—but you can do it. But then there’s this other person who does awful things. The sun goes down, the moon comes up—and suddenly you’re watching yourself do ugly things. Like you’re complacent, at a distance, just watching the happenings of your body as if you had nothing at all to do with them. Do you ever feel that?”

I was silent for a moment. But he didn’t give me a chance to answer before he continued.

“No. You wouldn’t know about that.”

“Maybe I would,” I asserted.

“No, you wouldn’t. You don’t understand.”

“I do. I promise.”

His smile was generous, but he didn’t believe me. I wanted to be something in his mournful life—a comfort or a remedy. Simple fancies, but my chest ached with them.

“Listen,” I said. We stopped, and I got in front of him to look up into his eyes. I put my hand on his chest to reassure him. I wanted him to feel the truth of what I was saying. I wanted to press it directly into his heart as though it were soft clay. I could feel the confession spilling out of me, and there was no stopping it. “Listen,” I said again, “sometimes…I don’t know…sometimes I hate myself. Especially lately. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who I am anymore—what I am. My dad, he doesn’t know I go out at nights. I can’t tell him. I’m not a breacher like other people, I don’t think. I can’t be. I don’t want to be. But I don’t know. My mom, she used to make dolls—except now I don’t know if she really did. I wish I could make dolls. I wish I were the girl who made dolls instead of the girl who—”

He put his arms around me. “Shh,” he said. “It’s okay.”

He held me and stroked my hair for a few moments until I calmed down. Then, when he let me go and looked me in the face, his expression had changed completely. His mood had transformed—he was elated. Had I done that to him? Did I have that kind of power?

“Come on,” he said, taking my hand. “I want to show you something.”

He pulled me into the middle of the street.

“Wait,” I said. “We’re going to get run over.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

He let go of my hand, took me by the shoulders, and turned me around so my back was to him. He put his head over my right shoulder, and I could feel his breath on my cheek.

“Look down there,” he said, and I looked at the row of houses and the purple sunset beyond.

“What?” I said.

“No,” he said. “You have to look harder.”

Just then the street lamps came on overhead with a little click and a buzz. Consecutive pools of light appeared in a bracelet of illumination that fronted all the houses, each of which domiciled any number of lives and dramas and passions and catastrophes. There it was, the way the street arrowed on to the horizon, the way the housefronts glowed rich, organic sepia into the night, the way the parceled land shivered with the deep harmonics of order and structure. I looked, and what I saw was the story of the place, the crystalline symmetry of the houses on their identical plots of land, the swooping curve of the curb and the wispy fans of the sprinklers that came on in the summer with timed precision. I saw the bones and the blood of the town, the infrastructure of copper pipes and PVC and electrical conduits and sump pumps and telephone wires suspended in elegant laurels overhead. I saw everything it took to make this one street, and I saw that street multiplied into a neighborhood and that neighborhood multiplied into a town and that town multiplied into a city and a country and a whole world.

I saw it. He made me see it, and I saw it.

“Think about it,” he said. “People
built
this. There used to be nothing here, and now there’s this. And the people who built it, were they pure? It doesn’t matter. Whatever they were, they overcame it to make something bigger than themselves. Look harder. It’s beautiful.”

It’s become popular for people to talk about suburban dread, the cardboard sprawl that cheapens life, reduces life down to lawn ornaments, manicured shrubs, televisions with extra-large screens, quaint and degraded notions of family life. It’s easy to say that life should be grander, more meaningful, heartier—like a meat stew.

But what Peter showed me I’ll never forget. It was the land brought to life, the earth made conscious. And it was beautiful. It really was.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“It means that it doesn’t matter what it means,” he said. “It means that it’ll be okay, Lumen.”

The third night
I went into the woods because I was finished with other people and their capricious ways. I wanted my freedom to be mine alone. A wind blew through the trees, and the moonlight lit up all the icy branches, and it was like I was surrounded by stars.

The next morning, when I woke, my body was covered in crystals of ice. I was in the backyard of my house, on the lawn, in a little concavity my hot body had made in the snow. Sitting up, I saw a ghost of myself on the ground.

The sun was up, just visible on the horizon. I guessed it must have been five o’clock. My father would still be in bed.

“You sleep nice.”

The voice came from behind me. My body, still moon-driven and instinctive, shot rigid into a crouch. Flee or defend.

Blackhat Roy, still naked, too, sat on the stoop of my back porch. He looked haggard and somehow raw. He was raked with dirt, his hair caked with dry, frozen mud. He scratched at himself casually.

“Your eyelids,” he said. “They flutter when you’re asleep. You remember what you were dreaming about?”

“You’re supposed to be going to Chicago.”

“Leaving tonight.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Now, me,” he went on, “I remember all my dreams. I wish I didn’t. Good or bad, it doesn’t matter. I wake up in the middle of some fucking fantasyland campfire story, and it takes me a while to get my bearings. You know, what’s true and what isn’t. Where are you really? In the middle of some horror show with smiling dogs, or maybe an orgy of alien women, or maybe just tucked safe away in your bed. It’s a goddamn nuisance is what it is. You ever have that problem? Not knowing for sure what’s real?” He scratched behind his ear and picked something from his hair—a bug of some kind—then crushed it between his fingers. “Or have you got it all figured out?”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“How come?”

“Why are you here? What do you want?”

“You really want to know?”

Suddenly I didn’t like being naked around him. It was too personal, too intimate. Now that the sun was rising over the horizon, it was no longer just nature and breaching. Now there was something else involved—the shame of day. I stood and turned sideways, folding my arms over myself as best I could.

He chuckled, and I was embarrassed about my paltry modesty.

“Let me go inside,” I said.

“Who’s stopping you?”

I was keenly aware that I would have to pass close by him to go up the porch steps into the house. Taking two steps forward, I watched him to see what he would do—but he made no move. His eyes followed me as I got closer, and, as I put my foot on the first step, I thought his arm might shoot out and he might grab me by the ankle. And what then? Where would he drag me? What dirtiness would he scrape onto me? How would it feel on my skin? Would I hate it?

I bolted, running up the rest of the steps until I had my hand on the knob of the back door. Only then did I turn around to find he had not moved at all—he hadn’t even turned around. I looked at his back. There were scars all over it, little white and pink indentations highlighted by dirt and grime.

He had not seized me. He had not dragged me off somewhere, and now I didn’t know how I felt about that.

“You shouldn’t have attacked those people,” I said.

“Is that what you think happened?”

“You attacked them. I saw you.”

“If you saw it, then you know better. Sometimes you get tired of being the town garbage. And sometimes, when you’re tired like that, you realize that the only way to keep from being the prey”—he turned to look at me—“is to put someone else in your place. Besides, the whole town loves a slaughter. How come I don’t get to enjoy myself in the same way once in a while?”

I knew what he said was true, but I had no answer for him.

“You should go home,” I said.

“Home,” he grunted, turning away again. “Right.”

“You act like you’re separate from it.”

“From what?”

“All of it. What everyone’s going through. The breaching.”

“Pomp and faggotry,” he said. “Girl shit.”

“But you’re doing it, too.”

“Nope,” he said simply.

I waited for him to say more, and eventually he did. Though he did not turn around, so I still could not see his face.

“What I do, it’s personal. I take responsibility for it. It’s me. It ain’t some hormones or rite of passage or mass hysteria. I don’t fucking cry about it in the morning.”

By the time
the sun went down, Roy was gone.

I was nervous, because it was the fourth night. Usually the breach went three nights—but the jury was still out on what form of sinner I was. So I thought maybe I would go out again. Maybe for me it was an everyday thing for the rest of my life.

But when the sun went down, I didn’t feel the urgent tugging in my chest. I was able to keep my bedroom window closed. And so I knew I would be free of it for another month.

When school started up again after the holiday, things were different. People weren’t exactly friendlier. They didn’t strike up conversations with me in the cafeteria—but sometimes they gave me a cursory nod as they passed. And I noticed something else, too. When I walked down the hallways, people moved out of my way. Before the winter break I had had to be very conscious of where I walked, because if I weren’t careful people would simply walk right into me. But now there was an understanding of presence, a mutual shifting of bodies as they moved through space.

It was as though I had become suddenly
visible.

In the girls’ restroom, I encountered Polly and Rose Lincoln. They were brushing their faces with powder and looking at themselves in the mirror. First they sucked their lips in, then they puckered them out.

Polly still looked pretty beat up, but there seemed to be no animosity between the two of them.

“Lumen!” Polly said when she saw me. “How are you?”

“Fine.”

“We didn’t see you after the first night,” said Rose. She didn’t look away from the mirror.

“You didn’t try to stay in, did you?” said Polly.

“No,” I said.

“It’s strange the first couple times, I know.”

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“What, this?” Polly said, gesturing to the abrasions showing through the powder on her face. “It’s nothing. I didn’t mean to frighten you the other night. Sometimes things get a little emotional in the moment. But everybody gets busted up sometimes. Life, you know?”

“One thing you can say about Polly,” said Rose approvingly. “She knows how to take a beating.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You should come with us next time,” Polly said. “We’ll take care of you. Shouldn’t she, Rose?”

“Uh-huh,” said Rose.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Come on,” Polly said. “I know you just started, but mine’s almost over. Just for once I’d like to run with you. Don’t you want to run with me?”

Rose Lincoln closed her powder case with a snap and turned to us.

“She won’t come with us. She’s too busy praying at manger scenes.”

“I wasn’t praying,” I protested.

“Where were you the night Roy almost killed those people?”

“I was there.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“Yes, I was. I was watching, and it didn’t happen that way. It wasn’t just Roy.”

“Watching!” Rose Lincoln scoffed. “All you ever do is watch. Well, don’t pray over me. I don’t need it, and I don’t want it.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“But I wasn’t praying,” I said lamely.

“Never mind,” Polly said. “You’ll run with me next time, won’t you?”

“I guess.”

“Do you promise?”

“Yes.”

Promises are easy to make. You utter a word or two, and it’s done. But those are magic words, too. They speak of a defined future to which you are required to adhere. They commit you beyond the length of your experience.

What they do is they take away possibility.

Promises are the opposite of hope.

My father said,
“You look tired. Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Come here. Let me feel your forehead.”

I went to him. He placed his palm on my forehead.

“You feel a little hot. You’re sure you’re not getting a fever?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “You’ve been cooking. It’s probably your hand that’s hot.”

He looked at me with suspicion.

“Really, I’m okay. Look.”

Then I did some dancing twirls, the kind I used to do for him as a girl. He clapped. He was delighted. He was convinced, once again, that everything was just fine.

And there was
something else. Peter started visiting me in the afternoons, as he had earlier in the school year. He looked at me in a new way since I had gone out during the last moon—as though he had never had sex with Rose Lincoln, as though he had never taken me to the woods and been unable to rape me.