Large Animals

by Jess Arndt

“Hey!” I shout. The fogs finally lifting. “Butt Riley!”

  He stops. His beard, its mammoth overhang, seems to take over the cave. I’m nearly trembling waiting for him to speak. His mouth opens. He shakes his head. Finally—the transaction will take place.

  “It’s ’Paraiso, man,” he says. “Nobody calls it Valapai.”

  What can I do but get down on my knees and crawl first one way then the next? Until I’m crashing through the roble trees again and that filthy brush, away from the colonel’s ranchero with their colossal laughter.

  Pinkie, they sang after me, horribly pantsless. Señor Pinkie, Se-ñor!

  I hid below while their search fires smoked, my chest ballooning hard and hot, my poor arms suddenly so long my knuckles rubbed the ground.

  I don’t know why I do the things I do.

  Now I slouch into the tunnel’s sand. Frisco, honey, I’d love to touch you, if I could just get ashore. But down here, dammit, it’s just like Valapai.

  Third Arm

  All fall I’d been carrying around something that wasn’t mine. Or maybe it was carrying me. Regardless, it

  kept me company. I often dragged it out from where it

  cowered and tried to look at it. When that didn’t work I fed it alcohol.

  It’s not like I had a lot of time. I was busy with a new job as vice-vice-something at Queens College, New York—it was a job they were making up and so none of us really knew what I was doing. Plus I was bartending down the block from my Bed-Stuy apartment, and then there was “the writing.”

  The thing was more important than all of that, it must

  have been.

  Sometimes it made me shout until my voice went hazy and erased. I liked being without a voice, it was a complete relief. This went directly against what my healers at the Authentic Process Healing Institute told me: that I had a blockage in my throat chakra and had to talk. It was after one of these particularly long sessions that I got into my mostly crumpled Datsun 510, lunged on the engine, and began to drive. It was November so the poor air quality that swiped my windshield felt not only atmospheric but, in its opacity, right.

  I had a five o’clock meeting with an assistant dean. We were planning a suicide-prevention week that was supposed to preempt the inevitable depression of the season. In our meetings thus far he’d been sprinting past gung ho and I was invariably hungover, a combo that caused the team of us to skip forward many logical steps and ended with me in my small basement office calling companies like Maxi Adult Bouncing Castles, inquiring after the price.

  Traffic was bad. Something in my session had made me antsy, my Authentic Process Healing Institute Corps Leader, as they—refusing actual names and the inevitable attachment that came with them—liked calling themselves, had been in a provocative mood. What if everything you think is authentic about yourself is nothing more than affective glare? she’d said. For instance, that “thing” you carry around. It’s bullshit, right? And when the winter line comes out you realize Uniqlo’s selling them too?

  Not if H&M gets it first! I’d whooped. Then had spent the rest of the session in the long hallway, cycling between the vending machine and the bathroom.

  The news droned from the car radio: stocks belly flopping,

  a Trump rally, another one—nothing I could catch on to. I unbuttoned my jeans, dug my hand under the band of my boxers. I only liked jerking off while driving—otherwise the sincerity of the act completely killed me.

  I surveyed the gag of cars on the BQE. How many other commuters were fishing for pocket trout? Waxing the carrot? The terminology drove me nuts. Okay, so what do you call sitting against a steering wheel with all that freeway filth below you, imagining you have a cock in your hand? And about the cock: it’s yours, you made it, but you don’t care about it too much either. You aren’t that dumb.

  But I was too restless to make my body work. Plus a thingy in the catalytic converter had broken off and in the rearview mirror I could see a death cloud spewing out from my exhaust pipe. Other drivers were glaring and pointing. Now not only was I practicing self-abuse on the freeway, I was single-handedly causing the oceans to swell, the atmosphere to wimp out, and the defilement of forests so virgin they were irreplaceably ancient. All of it: me. I turned up the radio, mashed my cheek against the glass. Instead of feeling cool the window was

  brick hot.

  “This is Bubba the Love Sponge on Cox FM.” The speakers gasped back to life. “Okay, hunters, listen up.” Great, I thought. Following the squalling trail of a Zeppelin song had stranded me on a Tea Party bandwidth.

  “Do you know what you were doing in 1840?” Bubba coaxed in baritone.

  Easy one, it was my favorite era. “Oregon Trail!” I shouted. “The wagon broke an axle and Sissy’s got the cholera!”

  Lime green pixelations on a field of black.

  Date: June 30, 1840

  Weather: hot

  Health: poor

  Food: 242 lbs.

  Next landmark: beer?

  “Well, if I know you like I think I do,” Bubba drawled, “you were probably shooting bear.” He said it bahr, I knew that word, I’d been there last night and part of this morning: my abandoned socks, jacket, pocket gunk spread between the bed and the toilet when I woke up.

  I listened absently as I drove down 495. It had been all over the airwaves, one of those stories announcers couldn’t put down. For the first time in two centuries, and only for this weekend, we were free to spray bullets at Connecticut’s black bears. I wasn’t an animal lover. They’re probably dangerous, I thought. Besides my antipathy to Bubba’s voice, I didn’t much care.

  By the time I got to Queens College, a pudgy dark had descended. The big beech trees rattled above the PTL parking lot. On my phone, a series of texts from the assistant dean:

  You’re late.

  Now you’re really late.

  I find it a big bummer that you don’t care more about what we’re trying to do here.

  Honestly it makes me worried about you.

  And finally: Call me when you get it together?

  He couldn’t help himself.

  Whenever that is.

  As I walked to the lounge, I wondered where it had gone wrong with us. There was a night a few weeks ago where we had been the last two at a post-reading wine reception. Both single, both ambivalent cooks, we crouched over the fig puffs and mini quiche that I fervently wished contained chunks of ham. Had I tried to tell him about . . . ? It was likely. September and October had been so bad I’d been practically hibernating but the FishEye merlot had woken me up.

  “The problem’s the women I’m into,” I’d managed, massaging the hollow above my clavicular head like my healers had instructed. Confessing to my habits made me feel wide open, part of the universe’s radiant core. Talk, I thought, talk.

  I shuffled my feet around meaningfully, waiting. But something was sticky. When I looked under my shoe there was a bit of gore.

  “Oh god,” I said. “Look, gore.”

  “Gore?” he said. He dived down toward my shoe and reemerged. “It’s an edamame pot sticker from that platter.” He pointed. “It’s not gore.”

  Salman Rushdie, the season’s big-ticket reader, had just exited the room and to be honest there’d been a kind of stampede. It was possible that food had been crushed. But as I inspected the fleshy blob, I became more and more resolute. “Gore.” The department always looked down on us creative types anyway. Thought we were all liars and hacks.

  Now I flicked on the fluorescent lounge light and stared over the scene. Microwave, mismatched chairs, multiweave carpet with a mid-nineties pattern made from some impenetrable armor-like fabric so it seemed barely worn. No assistant dean. It was a Friday night and Queens College was a commuter school. I didn’t want to be here but couldn’t stomach getting back into the Datsun, rolling home.

  Maybe I should go to the library? I wanted to find that story that Burroughs had written
when he was a kid: “Autobiography of a Wolf.”

  Don’t you mean biography? his teachers had prodded him.

  No, he’d said. And again: Nope, no.

  My phone wiggled in my pocket. “Going to tell the ass dean to fuck himself,” I said aloud.

  But instead of him, it was a Connecticut number, one I’d erased a million times.

  La Cocinita at eight?

  Sweat basted me. We’d driven each other so crazy that I couldn’t even remember when we’d seen each other last, that file was sealed. Three-day screaming matches (her idea), degrading meet-ups where I’d beg for her attention but only—I knew it as I was doing it—so that she wouldn’t have to be alone. But now another memory was strolling back to me, some horrible blip of drinking-induced magnanimity where my brain said to my typing thumbs:

  Yeah, sure, some margaritas? Great.

  I went into the bathroom and shoveled water over my head and shirt. Then I jogged to the car. If I left now I’d be late but tolerably late. Plus: I didn’t care what she thought anymore.

  * * *

  I approached the passenger-side door. It was an embarrassing form of self-chivalry my car enforced. The driver’s side could only be opened from the interior lock. But something was sticking between the door and the frame. As I pulled the door open, it plopped onto the ground. I bent down and flashed my phone.

  This piece was apricot-sized and, unlike the Rushdie gore, seemed mostly made of fat. But there were darker globs too. It made me think of a bar I’d been to near Joshua Tree. I was driving the 10-east. The structure seemed cool and friendly against the mid-afternoon blare. I gulped two beers and, in

  the bathroom, seeing no option besides a urinal, crouched with my shoe wedged against the door. From my position I eyed my pubic hair, then the darker seam that was usually camouflaged by curls, with fresh but falling hope. Gross. When I sat back down on the barstool I realized I’d been staring at a mostly disintegrated human foot floating in a formaldehyde-filled jar.

  “Colombia?” The bartender seemed unsure when I’d asked him where he’d gotten it. “No, Hawaii,” he said. “Or Nam.”

  “Actually eBay,” he admitted later. “You’d be surprised.”

  “Huh?” I said, snapping out of something.

  “I could tell you were a writer,” he continued, “so I had to get my story right.”

  “Scientists have proven that matter doesn’t exist,” I said. “You see a foot but when you get past all that skin bone squishy stuff et cetera, nothing’s really there.”

  * * *

  Traffic had cleared and I accelerated over the Triboro. I couldn’t stop thinking about the assistant dean. His life seemed pitiful to me. I couldn’t imagine what he’d had to get home for. Or why, when we’d been talking and drinking wine, he hadn’t understood that my problems, and in fact this was my problem, came from outside of me.

  WELCOME TO CONNECTICUT, the sign said, bulging into my headlights’ view. On cue the wheels thumped in misalignment. La Cocinita was a hole. A taco joint that smelled instead of fryer grease. I remembered a faraway night when I’d popped a tire on the curb and she’d psychoanalyzed my flaws while spinning the iron over the hub nuts. That’s talent, I thought.

  “What’s wrong,” she’d said later, “what’s wrong?”

  It was raining very softly. My vision turned diffuse. Coffee. These injections of anxiety always came accompanied by a chasm-like dip. “An emergency brake,” my Authentic Process Healing Institute Corps Leader told me. We’d been working on it together to little effect.

  The Merritt Parkway only had a few gas stations but I’d seen a REST STOP AHEAD. I drifted along the gentle curve of the exit. When sleep did come, it was so abysmal that each morning I woke feeling worse than when I’d gone to bed.

  The phone jackhammered again. I cranked the stereo dial in response.

  “. . . shoot out a nice bahr skin,” shouted Bubba.

  My eyelids were thickening. My narcoleptic friend once described it as a seduction so druggy you’d never want to resist. No problem, I resisted nothing.

  Suddenly drooling against the Datsun’s steering wheel, I was gone.

  When I woke, the rest stop stretched around me. Someone who looked like the assistant dean was mowing a path between the bathroom sheds. Dark lawn spit out behind him. I had to be awake. I didn’t believe in dreams. They were forbidden in writing class, my students all knew it—immediate, pitiless F.

  “You’re such a control freak,” the dean-ish guy shouted, looking over his shoulder. He was wearing a headlamp. “And that thing you were trying to tell me about, what a joke!”

  I felt like joining him—laughing back—but as hard as I shook, no sound came out. I gestured to the mower that I’d lost my voice. He kept mowing blindly.

  Closer, I told myself, lugging my body.

  Only—something was blocking me from his sight. Trees. I was standing in a giant fir forest, thickly needled branches brooming my sides.

  Something else was wrong. My pulse was ragged. My gut hurt. Then it gushed at me: I was hornier than I’d ever been. Feeling the mower near me, sensing him completely, cell by vacant cell, I was going to bust, discharge molten spunk, cave inward, fuck anything in sight.

  Was this how everyone else felt all the time?

  I lumbered from behind the branches, my head swinging down. Black fur dragged with me. The thing I’d been carrying twinkled everywhere.

  “DEAN,” I bellowed. My lip curled without meaning to.

  Terrified, he steered the mower engine between us.

  “Just let me shave these down,” I begged.

  I stared at my paws and their gore-smeared claws. I knew if I touched him I’d turn him to human paste.

  But I was so full of love.

  Together

  We had it together but we also had it when we were apart. We got it in that comedor in Oaxaca, we both agreed. Or maybe it was that little town, just a few palapas actually and a beach with a deceptive number of black dogs, called San Angelino. But it’s also quite possible that we had gotten it on the subway. Don’t forget about a head of lettuce! our naturopath said. They caravan those heads in from anywhere imaginable. And water these days—it’s no good washing with it.

  We made a list of what was now okay and what wasn’t. Sugar, yeast, all the essentials—out. Enter: lines and lines of herbaceous esophagus-jamming pills we swallowed noon dinner and night.

  “It’s not so bad,” you said. “We weren’t into that kind of junk anyway.”

  But who could tell? What we were and weren’t into? For instance, Bloody Marys at Giondo’s, what about that? And occupation politics—was it possible our parasite was affecting those too? Before, we’d been heavily committed: gotten arrested even, clubbed by the militia-era NYPD.

  “Let’s take it back to where it came from,” you said. “Niagara Falls or the Jurassic period or what about that town you like, Boring, Oregon? It really feels like it came from there.”

  What we shared had sticktuitiveness. You had to give it that.

  When we looked it up online the definition said: “one who eats at the table of another,” which seemed kind of cordial, so 1950s, like a neighbor plus misshapen apple pie dropping by.

  But who had neighbors like that?

  Ours were more like that guy we knew, Raif, who on his way home sloppily inserted himself into our kitchen, slogging through our sole bottle of scotch, probably shoveling coke up off the back of our toilet seat without offering any, probably crying even—before wheeling away again into the splashes of light and dark, the leafy trees and trash that made up our block.

  We had it together, this relative of giardia partying in our now shared intestinal tract, but we reminded ourselves—we could have picked this thing up anywhere. The lack of fault was comforting. Plus the parasite wasn’t all. In our Greenpoint yard hard pink asparagus-like weeds were erupting everywhere, pubing skyward with a level
of tenacity I no longer recognized.

  When I was young I knew that everything was sentient and I was capable of great harm. Moreover, I knew that things should not be separated—that pairs, no matter where you found them, should stay intact. Under everyday pressure, that feeling had gone underground. Now, looking out at our yard, a spray of turf between the parallel avenues of McGuinness and Manhattan, it swam up again.

  The stalks seemed so invincible, thrusting through the heavy metals and constant turnover of Popov bottles that made up our soil. Should I inject them with syringefuls of recently outlawed weed killer, as RAT574, my new buddy in the underground chat rooms, urged? The kind that gives everything gooey eyes? I could do it at night beneath the pale gray dome of light pollution we lived under.

  Or what if I let the stalks showboat, have their time in the sun? Nothing else was growing.

  “Make a choice,” you sighed. “I don’t care.” You’d been saying that a lot lately.

  Still I was locked in an intractable standoff. It distracted me no end. I often stood on the pitched steps, dolefully. Then I would descend into the dirt and snap off their waist-high heads, pinching the magenta frill between my finger and thumb. That barely slowed them. Even pulling at them did no good. It was Japanese knotweed, and, as you liked explaining, their roots flanged out at the base like butt-plugs.

  Around that time I got fired from the Baltic, a ramshackle tavern on a drifty block of Avenue C, left smoldering from an older, more terrifying era. It was huge, draped in once-regal green felt, with smoke stains that stippled the floors and ceiling like Sherwood Forest fungus.

  “Too bad about that Big Fuck Up,” said my boss, Terry, a pleathery fag in white Keds. He shook my hand in a friendly way.

  I’d been there for years, dutifully slinging Yuenglings. But I didn’t have the heart to fight for my job. I knew he was trying to get rid of us, his loyal few, so he could bottom for the Pinnacle Corporation. In the last month their goons had come around nonstop, checking the place out while Terry twisted them a fortune of cold beer.

  I faced the barroom for the last time. Ooooh I feel good I feel good I feel good, said Donna Summer. Gerald sat on his stool with his long braid dangling behind him, drinking E&J. I walked over to him.