When We Were Animals (18 page)

Surely spirits lingered. Surely they moved slower than bodies, always half a day behind their corporeal counterparts. I knew this to be true, because I felt my own spirit still alive somewhere in the daylight, left behind in the comfort of my bedroom, reading a book or calculating trigonometry. My spirit was graceful and true—something to make my father proud.

I felt it alive somewhere. Somewhere else.

There was a sound behind me, and I turned. It was Roddy Ewell. We knew each other from school. He was in the grade below me, and he was small, too. I had wondered, the previous year, if he might ever consider being my boyfriend. Though it had been a long time since he had crossed my mind at all.

He casted a splay of shadows beneath the humming lamps of the parking lot—as though his own spirit were manifold and on the escape.

“I followed you,” he said.

“Why?”

“How come you don’t run with everyone else? It’s not natural.”

I turned my back to him and gazed through the plate glass into the empty store. There was a delicate magic to empty places. I wished myself inside and wondered what it would take to break the window with my head.

“Never mind,” he said behind me. “I like you. Can we do it?”

“What?” I said, not looking at him. “What did you say?”

“I said, can we do it?”

“Do what?”

“You know.”

“Oh, that. No.”

“But the moon.” He pointed at the sky, though there was no moon to be seen because it was hidden behind clouds.

“No.”

“Why not?”

This is what I had learned about breachers—you were either weak or you were strong. How you presented yourself determined what happened to you. Roddy Ewell did not bother to attack, because he assumed I presented no threat. He thought, between the two of us, that I was the weak one.

He should not have thought that.

When I didn’t answer, he came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my body. I could feel his penis, erect, against my bottom. I turned myself out of his grasp and shoved him backward.

“Stop it,” I said. “You’re pathetic.”

He cringed, surprised. “What?” he said. This was not going as he had imagined it. My defiance had caught him off guard.

I hated his weakness. I wanted to kill his weakness. I could feel the violence in me twitching all up and down the nerves of my body.

“You’re different,” he said. “You didn’t used to be like this.”

For reasons I did not care to explore, this was unacceptable to me. I reached for one of the empty bottles from the bin next to me, and I threw it at him. He flinched, and the bottle hit him in the shoulder then fell and smashed on the concrete.

“Ouch,” he said.

“Don’t say ouch.”

I took another bottle and threw it at him. He knocked it away, but it made a gash on his forearm, and there was blood.

“Ouch,” he said. “Stop it.”

“Don’t say it. I told you not to say it. You don’t come to me unafraid. Don’t you dare. You think I don’t know how to make pain?”

I attacked. I leaped at him, this meager boy, even though I was smaller than he, smaller than everyone. I threw myself at him, and we tumbled to the tarmac of the parking lot, the grit digging into our skin. He held his arms up to defend himself, but it made no difference. I clawed haphazardly, my fingernails digging bloody troughs in the flesh of his arms, his chest, his shoulders.

“Stop!” He sobbed. “Please, please stop it!”

I couldn’t hear for all the horror happening in my head. I didn’t think. I couldn’t tell what was happening. All I knew was ravenous hunger. I wanted to eat that little-boy soul. I wanted to chew it up and swallow it so that maybe he could be a little stronger, or so that maybe the world could.

I could hear my own voice, like a mongrel dog’s, grunting and gurgling, and I was surprised. I was blank. The world was white skin and red blood.

I tore at him until he wriggled out from under me. We were both bloodied and raw.

He ran into the darkness, the soles of his feet slapping wetly against the pavement.

I remember nothing else. My mind was truly lost.

I woke the next morning weeping, huddled in a tight ball against the front door of my house. My body shook with the pain of its injuries and the suffocating strength of my sobs. For a long time, I could not stop, and I put my fist in my mouth to hush my cries.

After a while, I had calmed myself enough to go inside.

That was the end of Beggar’s Moon.

Between moons, I
went back to the mine. And I discovered something new in my exploration—a large, hollowed-out chamber, an echoing cistern. Even though its entrance was near the mouth of the mine, I had never noticed it before because it required that I pry loose a collapse of stones and crawl my way through a narrow aperture.

It was a majestic place, a sacramental place. The cave was circular, the dripping walls rising high like a dome in a church. At the very top of the dome was an opening, the size of our kitchen tabletop at home, through which I could see the dusky pink of the late afternoon sky, the overhanging bristles of tree branches.

The floor of the cave was mostly flat, but in the middle was the mouth of a wide shaft, roughly the same size as the opening above, that descended down into pure abyss. I wondered if the shaft and the opening had shared some kind of purpose in the old days of the mine, so symmetrical and aligned did they seem—as though God had poked a gigantic needle into the pincushion of the world. I crept close to the edge of the chasm and felt my stomach do vertiginous tumbles. I stared down into the void so long that I lost track of myself. I hugged a nearby outcropping of stone because I didn’t trust myself to stay sane exposed to such nullities. If I leaped in, I might fall forever. I wondered if I would die of fright before I hit the bottom so that my landing might be a curious ghostly bliss.

I thought maybe that’s where my previous self had gone, down there in the depthless black, and I spoke to her.

“Lumen Ann Fowler,” I said, trusting that my meager voice would carry down the well in the absence of any material to impede it. “Lumen Ann Fowler, Lumen Ann Fowler.”

I knew that repetitions of three had power to them. And if you could summon Bloody Mary by uttering her name three times in a mirror, then I reckoned you could summon a lost girl in a similar way.

“It’s me, Lumen,” I said. “I came looking for you.”

I waited, listening to my own breathing in that silent place.

“I know who you are. I remember you. Do you want me to prove it? Your mother wore orchid gloves at her wedding.”

I swallowed, and there was grit in my throat. I leaned my head against the outcropping of stone and gripped it tighter.

“It’s all right,” I said. “You don’t have to say anything. We can just be quiet for a while.”

It was a home. It was a chapel. A shaft of light shone down at an angle through the opening and lit up all sparkly the grains of dust afloat on the air. This was a chamber of echoes that might as well have been the clattering ossuary of my own mind, and I decided it would be a place of pilgrimage for me.

When the light through the opening above dimmed with impending night, I crawled back out into the mine shaft proper and piled a few stones in front of the entrance to my private citadel so that it would not be stumbled upon by strangers.

Once outside the mine I tried to locate the place in the ground where the cistern opened to the sky, but I never could find it.

As though the avenues of inside and outside used different maps altogether.

W
orm Moon was wet with rainfall. You listened to the showers against your windowpanes. You imagined what it must be like to luxuriate in such a torrent, naked, and you thrilled with anticipation. Blackhat Roy came back.

I went to bed early, listening to the thunder, and I fell asleep. But my body jolted itself awake an hour after I lay down. I lurched to the window and opened it and leaped out. It was all very simple when the moon came out. All the considerations and doubts and rationalizations of the daytime were sloughed away. I wanted to be outside, and so I went outside.

It is sometimes a joy to be rained on. The chill of it against your scalp, the tickle of it down the inside of your thighs.

I ran down to the lake to see the ripples on the water and to watch the lightning fork down from the clouds. The others were already there. Some were swimming in the black water, others lay on the muddy earth. I liked looking at the bodies from the shadows of the trees. To look at someone’s naked body in the moonlight is to know that person in a new way. Lumpy humanity laid bare. A person stripped of all masks. For surely, I realized, that is what we do. We start with one pure and concentrated version of ourselves, then we modify and mold, we layer defense over pretense over convention. By the time we’re done getting dressed in the morning, there is little left of who we really are. It’s all just art. Twee and ineffectual art. Cartoon figures drawn in crayon on a paper place mat in a family-friendly Italian restaurant.

Hondy Pilt was there, gazing monklike into the downpour. Sue Foxworth was there. And Adelaide Warren. Rose Lincoln came, too, emerging from the trees with Peter Meechum behind her. Rose’s breach had gone on longer than a year. Each full moon was supposed to be her last. But here she was again.

I wondered if she and Peter had been having sex in the rain, and I thought I might enjoy killing her. But such instincts in me seemed to go straight to the brain, where violence takes seed and grows larger over time rather than permitting itself release in the moment. I would say nothing.

Idabel McCarron came up to me and pressed her slippery body to mine. I allowed it, because the sensation was new to me—and, besides, we were all a little rain-drunk.

“Did you hear?” she whispered in my ear. “He’s back.”

“Who?”

“Look.”

She pointed, and just at that moment, emerging from the lake like some mammalian vestige of prehistory, was Blackhat Roy.

He was different—I saw it immediately. He seemed larger, for one thing, a bigger, more solidified version of himself—though after just three months, I don’t know if that was possible.

Peter was also seeing him for the first time. He left Rose Lincoln’s side and approached Roy. The two stood face-to-face on the lakeshore in the rain. When they were together like that, I could see that Roy still had to angle his head up to meet Peter’s eyes. But he was bigger. I swear it. Somehow he commanded more space.

“I thought you were in Chicago,” Peter said quietly.

“I’m back.”

“Why?”

“You want to hear the whole story? It might cause you grief.”

He was different. In my mind, I tried to telegraph to Peter to be careful, because Blackhat Roy was different.

Thunder quaked in the distance. The rain unfurled sideways, like a sheet pinned to a clothesline in the wind. We didn’t shield ourselves from it.

“You shouldn’t have come back,” Peter said. “You don’t belong here.”

“Really? I would have thought this is exactly where I belonged.”

“You terrorized those people.”

It seemed that Peter, along with everyone else, had convinced himself of certain fictions about that night.

“Terrorized!” Roy laughed. Then he said the word again, as though he didn’t think much of it. “Terrorized.”

That’s when Peter struck him, his closed fist cutting across Roy’s jaw. But Roy didn’t move. He put his hand up to his face—as though curious about the pain he found there. Then he raised his voice, because he wasn’t just talking to Peter—he was talking to all of us.

“Nobody cares about your noble faggotry. You want dominance? This is how you get it.”

And he grabbed Peter’s shoulders and kneed him in the crotch. Peter went down, and Roy was on top of him. For several minutes we watched as the two grappled together on the wet earth, the lightning capturing them in gaudy white tableaux, their blood, as they clawed and bit at each other, streaming together with the rain.

Peter stood no chance. There was no fairness in the way Roy fought, no reason, no daylight. He fought as though the choice were pain or death and he had made his decision years before. Peter curled himself into a ball on the shore, but Roy kept after him, crouching over him, biting through the skin of his neck, licking the blood from his lips while Peter whimpered beneath him.

A great foulness, and we all stood and watched. Some, boys and girls alike, rubbed their hands unconsciously between their legs as they observed. We had appetites back then. We knew what we felt.

The rain stopped.
The tree branches overhead continued to drip for a while, but they finally stopped, too.

Once he was through with Peter, Roy walked away. I kneeled over Peter, trying to clean him up, but he hit my hands away.

“I’ll kill him,” he hissed. “Kill him.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“He’s filth.”

“Put your hand on your neck. Otherwise you’ll get dizzy.”

He would not let me touch him, but I tended to him as best I could and made sure he got home in the morning.

Me, I snuck back into my house and was in bed before my father woke. As my bedroom turned pink with early light, I fell asleep and dreamed of boy-skin made slick with blood.

The next day
I went to Peter’s house, but his mother told me he didn’t want to see anyone. I asked if I could write him a letter, and she gave me a pad of notepaper and a ballpoint pen.

I wrote:

That night I went back to the lake. It seemed to me that things had changed, and I wanted to see how.

Peter was not there. Instead there was Blackhat Roy. Just like that. And so masters and slaves are nothing but the turn of a card.

It was Blackhat Roy, pulling along, as if on a leash, Poppy Bishop, a girl I knew who herself had just started breaching. She was his. She had regressed to infancy, as some do under the influence of the full moon. Her violence was an infant’s violence, as was her sensuality. She trailed along behind Roy, sucking her thumb and using her other hand to tug on her earlobe. When she had a tantrum, she became hysterical, striking out this way and that with a toddler’s murderous rage. Afterward, when she settled down, you might find her curled up, her head in Roy’s lap, nursing at Roy’s indifferent penis as though it were a binky.

And there were two other new breachers, too. A boy and a girl I recognized from school—from the grade below mine. They held hands like Hansel and Gretel finding their way through the wilderness of mythology, and they were frightened.

I didn’t like to look at Blackhat Roy—who seemed to have contempt for everyone around him—and I thought about running off on my own. But I wanted to stay and look at the new members of the brood.

The skin of the two new ones—their names were Ben MacClusky and Mandy Cavell—shimmered pale against the trees. They seemed somehow brighter than the rest of us. As though we all started out luminescent and then faded over time. As though we were all just waiting for our lights to gutter out.

Mandy Cavell was not entirely naked. She wore a pair of white cotton underpants.

Blackhat Roy left Poppy Bishop sucking her thumb atop a rock and approached Mandy Cavell. He said nothing for a moment, instead just walking a slow circle around her while she stood there breathing hard. Then he stopped in front of her.

She would not meet his eyes. Her own gaze had been cast demurely downward, and then Blackhat Roy positioned himself in such a way that his genitals must have been directly in her line of sight.

“Hey,” he said. And he had to say it again before the girl looked up at him. “Hey.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

She had no answer to this.

“Don’t you want to take those off?” Roy said to her.

She shook her head.

“I think you do,” he insisted.

She looked at him. Then she looked at the boy next to her, but he was no help. His eyes snapped back and forth between the trees and all the naked girl bodies around him.

“You want to take them off,” Roy said again. “But you don’t do it. Why not? What’s the point of fighting against yourself?”

“It’s not nice.”

Roy laughed.

“Not nice,” he said. “That’s true. Nice is one thing it’s not.”

Mandy Cavell looked around helplessly. I felt for her. She reminded me of some lost version of myself.

“Stop it,” I said to Blackhat Roy.

I emerged from the shadows, and everyone looked at me. I didn’t like all those eyes on me, but I was feeling hard, and it was a feeling new to me—and I wanted to own it for myself. Somehow Peter’s beating the night before had made me romantic for suffering.

“Leave her alone,” I said.

Blackhat Roy did leave the girl alone. Instead he came and stood in front of me. I didn’t feel like quailing, so I didn’t.

“Leave her alone why?” he asked me.

“What do you care if she wants to leave her underwear on?”

“Do you see anybody else out here with diapers?”

“Isn’t she supposed to be able to do what she wants? Isn’t that what this is all about? Or are you just replacing one kind of conformity for another?”

He looked down at me, and his eyes wanted to gnaw on my bones.

“No,” he said. “I’m just showing concern. When the moon’s out, you should be able to piss where you want.”

Then, without moving, Blackhat Roy let go a stream of urine that splashed against my thigh and ran down my leg. It tickled as it streamed over my ankle and between my toes and made a muddy puddle around my foot. The smell was sharp, and the heat of it in the cold night made a steam that rose between us as our eyes locked.

I made no move. But this wasn’t a refusal—not at all. It was an engagement. I stood still, allowing his urine to soak my leg. It went on for an absurdly long time. At first the others laughed. They brayed at this new spectacle. But then, when I refused to run or even look away from his gaze, they got silent again. They recognized that something was happening. They saw that this was not the end of something or a punch line, but really just the beginning.

When he was done, we continued to look at each other. I wondered what his eyes were telling me, then I thought it must be an invitation to violence.

Part of me wanted just to turn and leave—part of me knew that would be the true victory. The animal is no more diminished than when you turn your back on it.

But there was another part of me, and it was hungering to rip and tear. It was wanting to sunder the whole beautiful and ugly world, to play in the exposed guts of all that beauty and ugliness.

It was a desire to kill, and it was ecstatic.

My right arm shot up, my hand like a claw, and it tore across Blackhat Roy’s face. Three irregular lines of blood appeared on his cheek where my fingernails had torn him. As we faced each other, saying nothing, the blood began to seep from the cuts, trickling over the ledge of his chin and down his neck.

Everyone was quiet. Tiny waves broke against the lakeshore.

Still, he made no move. A smile spread slowly across his face, and his eyes narrowed.

“Okay,” he whispered. “Good.”

Then he raised a hand, and that’s when I flinched for the first time. But he didn’t strike me. Instead he put his hand to his own cheek to wet his fingers with his blood. Then he reached out and drew a bloody fingertip down my chest, making a vertical stripe of his blood between my nipples—like the longitudinal line where they cut you open for an autopsy.

He had made
his point. He returned to his girl, Poppy Bishop, who clung to him.

I left them then. I wasn’t in the mood to defend two new breachers—both of whom were bigger than me—from the ravages of the natural world.

I was feeling barbarous, and I hated myself a little.

I found a quiet length of the lake edge and walked into the water to cleanse myself of Blackhat Roy’s humors—his blood and his urine. But I had been marked, I knew, deeper than the skin.

I floated on my back. I let myself drift. The night sky was cloudless. So many stars on a night like this. The heavens were crowded. No one bothered to look at the happenings of one small town on one meager landmass on one satellite of one middle-aged star. Maybe no one cared about the moral transgressions of a girl floating on a lake under the moon. Sometimes it was comforting to be nothing at all.

I wanted to run. I needed to run—run like I did on that first night. My muscles ached for it.

But I clenched my teeth and my fists, and I floated. I would hold myself together—I would keep myself contained. Otherwise my body could burst to pieces. It could all break apart. There were shivering hairline fractures everywhere.

When I couldn’t
be still anymore, I swam to shore.

Blackhat Roy was there waiting for me. He was alone. He sat on the sandy verge. The claw marks on his cheek had stopped bleeding. They were black in the moonlight.

He watched me emerge from the water but said nothing. He leaned back casually, his palms on the sand. I hated him, but I knew why people followed him. There was some of the follower in me, too.

“Don’t touch me,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I’ll run.”

“I’ll catch you. You know I’ll catch you, right? Are you one of those girls who runs just so you can be caught?”