by Lee Klein
The sun was coming now, warming the ocean, lightening the sky, as thousands of birds commenced their morning tribute. For the last time I watched the transformation of my arms into wings, fingers into horns, feet into hooves, legs into delicate stilts. I crossed my eyes to watch the elongation of my face. Never again would I assume human form, everything united beneath a skin of human flesh, aware that within lurked my true, multiple, animal self, neither human nor man nor new Adam, neither beast, nor monster, nor vampire, nor dinosaur that survived mass extinction 65 million years ago.
I am the Jersey Devil, older than America itself, cursed at birth, damned to atone for an unfortunate reaction to my entrance into the world, perhaps doing what all infants would do if they could. Instead they wail about this wall-less world encountered beyond the womb.
The dress at my feet, used to its fullest and released to return to the earth or revive itself and do as it would like, I decided to hang for now from the limb of a suitable tree, thinking I might want to use it again, or need to, especially if my plan didn’t go as hoped— my dream of a theme park, profit and philanthropy, everyone on board, all those who would soon notice I was gone, presumed devoured by what they would soon see.
I could feel the effort it would take. My legs as light as ever didn’t provide much elevation when I pressed off the sand with my hooves. I tried to release myself into the air as I always did, just spread my wings and enter the aerial world.
A quick hop like a buzzard on a fence yet unable to fly.
Without flight, what would I do? What could I do? How spend my days in my natural state in my natural habitat if I couldn’t release myself into flight? How would I feed myself? How anything?
I tried again, but it was like a switch had been turned off.
I limped ahead as fast as I could and tried to propel myself into the air but couldn’t leave the ground.
I released a wail now that sounded so much like the sort I had made before I learned human speech. A wail I didn’t intend to make.
They had to have heard it, the way it ran unimpeded through the pines like sunrays ablating the morning fuzz. I imagined them up ahead, realizing I was gone, hearing that pitiful shriek, and now either running away or maybe even toward me.
I stepped onto the path and expected to see Moss make the connection and realize I was the one buried in the woods now, a head above the surface filled with swarming thoughts, all else buried in my current flightless form.
Did they not hear me?
Would a louder wail bring them back?
I released a fearsome roar, more like a lion’s than anything else, a jet engine, and as soon as silence restored itself, all birds quiet, I tried to scamper up the path, my legs so stiff. I ran slowly, like a mechanical animal, chasing after those I wanted to see again, at least speak to them in my own voice, the one they would recognize.
Was it possible I wore the dress too long and became degraded and devolved? All the time spent as a relatively normal human had cost me the benefits of my natural animal form? Or could it all be caused by that shift in the air I’d sensed?
I hobbled down the path, the sunrise behind me, my shadow cast far in front. Wide and bat-like, I spread my wings. Ahead, I saw my friends, huddled, discussing what to do, arming themselves with cameras.
Duven smiled the smile of the wholly impressed.
Corinne’s eyes opened so wide they accounted for most of her face.
Mack took a step toward me, but only one.
Kirsch peeled off and ran.
Moss stepped toward me.
Riv fell to his knees as though I were his god.
I tried to tell them it’s just their friend, Adam Merriweather, humble grocery clerk, but my words again came out all at once: every urgent sentiment and confessional phrase I mustered smeared in an inarticulate slurry, a percussive bark at most, something no one would understood pertained to plans to open a theme park, an irretrievable idea in my flightless state.
The sound of my attempt to placate had the opposite effect on my friends, even Duven. So many photographs they took, stumbling back and jogging away, expressions halted as though they watched a time bomb count down to zero. Even Riv crawled to his feet toward the car.
They must have thought that whatever beast they saw had consumed their friend. And, in a way, it did feel as though whoever I had been among them roiled in my gut.
What good were these wings if I could not fly? What next would I lose?
I’m being punished for every failure over endless decades to attend to anything other than the thirteen animal elements of my body. I’ve allowed an unruly democracy. Much better is a dictatorship of the mind, all lower organs subordinated.
The never-ending problem of the body. How to appease it, restrain it, and, in my case, conceal it.
I returned to the dress. Forever hadn’t lasted long. I began the Velcro-strap process once more, securing myself in a sort of strait-jacket. Dressed again as my socially acceptable self, my flesh unified, my form unimpressive, I traveled the sand trails toward the car. Footprints slowed from a sprint to a run to a fast walk before they disappeared into tire tracks.
Would they return for me? Did they suspect that the beast they saw and their friend were the same? And, if so, how might one introduce that opinion without being shouted down?
The logical conclusion was that the beast had devoured me— the beast now something I could speak of with some remove, something I might not survive if I took off the dress again. This garment of civilization felt like home, a safe and comfortable spot devoted to longing for acceptability, all that the dress—being outerwear— enabled. Time wearing it must have caused some deep transition within that made my original form, so unique and gifted in its way, now seem in need of a supernatural mechanic.
Rising sun on the back of my neck as I followed tire tracks I presumed were Duven’s, walking west, I was sure I’d hit a river or a major artery of automotive traffic. I was in New Jersey, after all, not an inescapable labyrinth in the middle of the Sahara. Never to see Riv again, Kirsch, Moss, Corinne, Mack. But why return to see them?
The laces of my left sneaker had come undone. I stopped to tie them. On one knee, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it there behind me, open wings shading the rising sun. As I stumbled from it, it sensed something beyond fear in me, almost like a perception of the afterworld that scared even this beast but then it had mercy and wailed. It seemed to express every dissatisfaction and complaint and mystification at the incomprehensible tumble and undulation of days. The sound held something unexpected in its upper registers, a semblance of hilarity or maybe a joyful shudder, suggesting that the monster knew it was serving its purpose, wings spread, complaining at terrifying volume instead of whispering in a dignified accent “Please allow me to introduce myself.” It seemed smaller than I ever was in my original form. Maybe it was a Lady Leeds Devil, my better half at last discovered? If I hadn’t worn the dress all those years, we could have flown off and lived happily ever after. Whatever it was, its presence meant I wasn’t unique, one of many humbling realizations I nevertheless welcomed at this point. The same forces that could compel my appearance during a ferocious nor’easter in late-October 1735 could come together to create another beast, perhaps a sign of calamity to come. It ran by me as though I were irrelevant, following Duven’s tire tracks along the sand trail as I passed out. Hours later, parched, sunburned, like expecting to wake in your own bed when you’re stranded on a desert island, I started to make my long way home.
I needed a break from all this, especially now that it seemed like my mysterious, fearsome presence in the Pine Barrens had been replaced. Let Mack tell the tale however she needed to tell it, let her reconstruct the evening’s events, compile photographs and analyze them and return to the scene to search for my body, or pieces of it, and perhaps encounter my replacement. Would they call the police? The national guard? And what about Duven? Would he keep giving tours now that he knew there was so
mething to see in the pines beyond illusions projected by his clients’ will to see?
The reverence with which Riv had kneeled, the beatific horror, the splendor of his encounter with that beast, forever he would trip through life unconcerned about Francesca: life was precious and impossible to predict. There was more to it than picnic baskets. On sand trails in the Pine Barrens, he’d heard a wail pronounced with such force it purified him, or at least set thoughts churning around another more productive, ever-mystified axle: we wanted to know and we tried to know and we thought we could know but the beauty of it was our persistent ignorance.
Kirsch now had another anecdote. The way he ran, without remembering to soothe the savage beast with a ringtone salvo from Beethoven’s Fifth, suggested he was quick to run from cities, obligations, confrontations, anything other than the easiest pleasures, always running from some core disappointment, uneasiness, underlying anxiety, or more generously, he wanted to live a long, simple, joyful life. He wanted to savor the coming season’s concoctions from the local craft breweries, to use the newly improved ancient intoxicant as a vehicle to carry him away as he stayed in one place—not the worst way to spend one’s days, especially when he spent his nights with Mack.
In a seriously prestigious national magazine, I would read Mack’s piece on the loss of a mysterious friend upon encountering the Jersey Devil. Without the appearance of her article, I doubt I would have spent so much time composing this elaboration. She had written her piece in such a way that made me think that, at least in terms of natural-born humans, she may have been my one true Eve. I was too cowardly, too awkward, too unable to convince her of this, of course. Always better to regret and imagine what would have been if one were bolder. All the obstacles of my history and vestments and Velcro straps and now my flightlessness would have served to advance our love and whatever internal clock controlled my aging would synchronize with hers as we clicked in time for fifty years, like the world’s most reliable metronomes, toward some golden coda. Instead, no happy ending other than acknowledgment of my muse.
Moss and Corinne would clench more tightly together after this night, united by it. Moss would tell her more. Corinne would respect him more. Their features would merge until husband and wife looked like brother and sister. Their children would look even more like both of them. The more Moss reproduced, the more difficult it would be to reduce the man to a head in the ground. Against all future embodiments of his teenage antagonist Marshall, Moss would protect his children, and by assuming the role of protector, rid himself of torments.
I made the long way back to my adopted home town in central New Jersey. In the middle of the night I reentered my apartment, packed a bag, recovered my savings in cash, touched the spines of my favorite books, and said goodbye to my life there, sacrificed for an uncertain afterlife. I hoped that everyone at the supermarket didn’t mourn too long and then I set out in whatever direction seemed most promising at the time. I let myself drift, saw the country, lived off savings, made it to California, the Pacific Northwest, and then back across the northern territories and the Midwest, to the South and back to the East Coast, before I settled down for good.
I’m not sure how much longer I have. My limbs and digits swell and stiffen, and my mind seems unwilling or unable to describe these travels. Maybe it’s better to say you may have seen me riding my bicycle, an old heavy cruiser complete with a little personalized license plate on the back, or reading on a park bench or on my lunch break at a café, maybe even handwriting in notebooks, trying to control the chaos of centuries alive.
I won’t confess where I’ve settled but I will say that my new friends seem none the wiser. I do my best to imitate Christ and Socrates but it’s not difficult: humility at this point comes naturally. Pursued by curses and the consequences of actions and reactions, I have escaped into reality. No more supernatural than anyone else, I devote what’s left of my life to the most remarkable species of beast on earth.
Lee Klein’s fiction, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in Harper’s, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007, and many other sites, journals, and anthologies. A graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the author of The Shimmering Go-Between, Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox, and Incidents of Egotourism in the Temporary World. He also received a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award for his translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. He lives in South Philadelphia and can be found online at litfunforever.com.