Large Animals

by Jess Arndt

  But he was onstage now, looking for an audience.

  My cheeks baked. It was my fault, I reasoned. Only I had stopped taking the pills—you were racing toward health. The more I thought about it the more it irked me. What was your rush? Let’s convalesce together, baby, I wanted to shout. Yoga retreats, long raw food dinners—once we had planned to go to meditation on Tuesday nights.

  I should get my own life!

  I stared at the subway map of Manhattan. It had always looked like the profile of a big west-facing cock. Now a single beam glared out from the tunnel. I watched as it grew bigger and bigger to the point of engulfing me—then suddenly sliced into two.

  * * *

  I emerged through the mechanized subway door at First Avenue limp-legged. Under my windbreaker, my T-shirt was sweatlogged and I wrung the left corner of it until my fingers made prints in the cotton. The rest of me was wiry but no matter how many pull-ups I did my chest was soft. The wet fabric pooled there expectantly.

  I slid through the turnstile cage with my head down. The message I’d sent you drifted in space without defense. I jammed my phone from my pocket, waiting for the signal to show.

  It had rained while I’d been underground, and a tuberous smell came up from the pavement. I wiped my face, finally street-level. In this early-summer heat and quickly hosed sky, thousands of safety bulbs speckled the half-built condos: mutant-sized fireflies.

  I no longer felt capable of being out. Shapes walked around in the dark with their shoulders bunched. I checked my phone again: blank. Mindlessly I logged onto YardHard as I moved. Rat574 ballooned up—he was perpetually “in the garden.”

  Me: nice night.

  Him: want to score?

  I’d followed Megaspores toward what I guessed was Avenida Michoacán, trailing at a distance. Lebanese cypress lined the path, shooting upward, roughly rimmed by giant palm fronds. He walked briskly. I’d entered an alternate universe and was meeting an unknown version of myself who could have easily starred in Cruising.

  Branches stretched over us like arms. Stuffed in my pocket, my left hand prickled where he’d held me. He walked faster, taking a staircase two at a time toward the corner of the park. His hips were narrow. Exposed, they’d be sharp. Yours are like that too and when you let me, I grabbed them as if you were a view scope and I was trying to stare inside. I imagined you back at the apartment moving around with purpose, turning the pages of a book or licking a joint.

  At the top of the stairs, there was a small plaza. Megaspores stopped. We stood there, again very near. His long hair was oiled, glimmering in the light. Around us the atmosphere of the city buzzed and blared. I tipped the rest of my beer down my throat.

  “Duck pond,” he said, pointing to our left. Helpless, my eyes followed. Where the concrete broke off, there was a low patch of water and, I supposed, a fountain. Then he grinned again and under the sodium lamp I could see the ’shroom caps hiding between his gums and teeth—he’d been chewing and chewing as we walked.

  “Duck pond,” I repeated lamely.

  Then I was mashing my lips against his open mouth, running my tongue everywhere. Duck pond, I thought again. His saliva was casting a kind of spell. Now my mouth was full of wet brown caps. Duck pond, my brain insisted. The substance was leathery, crumbly, and underneath, fecal, soft.

  I shoved him against the cement base of the lamppost. He was my same height exactly. I felt his hips warm and springy on mine. But this had nothing to do with him! I was only finishing an act of balancing that he’d started when we asymmetrically touched. Meanwhile my cheeks had begun to fizz. I felt full of goop and light. I saw you at the balcony window waving. You and I hated each other sometimes but together we’d be fine.

  “Tentigo.” Megaspores pointed, laughing.

  I shrugged off my hard-on. So what? But I was becoming confused about which parts of me had touched him and which hadn’t. That morning in the shower you’d bent down wide for me to fuck you but I couldn’t relax and you’d turned off the water with your hair full of soap.

  Now my upper lip was coated in sweat but when I ran my tongue along it the hairs were sour. He moved farther away. My brain was whirring. He must know Tropezedo, I thought. Light pooled around him in bright beams. My nipples pulsed where his chest had been. The distance was suddenly constant: unbearable. I closed the space with my arms but as if disconnected from my brain my hands crashed into his denim-covered ribs and crotch and then whacked at his chest.

  “I’m hitting you,” I heard my voice saying.

  I sounded hysterical.

  “ESTOY fucking PERFORADO.”

  He sidestepped me easily, dropping to the ground in a kind of squat thrust. Then he put his face down into the weeds. Beyond my panting I heard cars and sirens parading the boulevards. Blandly, as if he were at the clinic about to get a booster shot, he inched his jeans over his chonie-less ass.

  “I’m Carlos,” he said, turning his misty head to me.

  I passed through the Friday night party tents and teepees of the East Village in a hurry. This season everyone was tall and leafy. A girl with flaming hair smoked under the spastic yellow of Gray’s Papaya. Tilda again. She was like you. Safe from pain—emotionally no holes at all.

  At the corner of C and Tenth, I bent over. All those pills in the dirt, now my bowels were involved. The leftover vegetarian gumbo I’d geniusly eaten for dinner slushed back and forth. I concentrated on squeezing my ass closed. Any port in a storm, I thought, whimpering my body through the fudge-colored door of the Baltic.

  I stared around the familiar scape. Behind the long run of oak laminate, the cracked stools, the bartender’s skin emitted a neon sparkle. The new guy was just Terry’s type, as twinky as they come.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  He swished his towel over a chalky spot I’d scrubbed a thousand times before.

  “I need the staff bathroom,” I said. “I work for Terry. I run, you know . . .”

  Wincing, I paused, giving him the chance to make something up.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Give me the keys.” I stretched out my palm. “Right?”

  “I should call Terry.”

  Casually I rejoined a stray straw to its holder.

  “You could,” I said. “In this shitty economy where no one trusts anyone, it’s one of those things you could do.”

  I was yelling, the Baltic had become ear-splitting. Out near the dance floor and the wall gallery of second-rate reindeer heads, a karaoke machine blared. Someone was murdering Meatloaf. A guy with a bristly beard stood up on a chair and waved his arms. I would do anything for love! he shouted.

  The bartender shrugged. His eyebrows said: I’m hot?

  Fields of Japanese knotweed plowed through my brain. I caught myself in the long barroom mirror. My eyes looked like meatballs. I thought suddenly of RAT574. What a guy, he really cared . . . thick-chested, chest hair glistening, a warrior with Teutonic strength blasting our personal scourge from the face of Brooklyn eternal.

  Would it really be so bad to have a clean yard? I saw us sitting there in it, drinking icy things. Weeds are like hair on the body of the earth, I said to myself. Not personal.

  My pocket buzzed. I took a deep breath. One message.

  Slide, yes.

  The text bubble popped. I squinted down.

  Mexico??? you said.

  I took the master key ring and made off into the annals of the bar with my heart wacking. Past the urinals, the pool table, the broken-off pay phone and its Sharpie forest. I had no idea what I was doing, only that Terry owed me my last check. I stood in the small liquor-barricaded office. Hundred-dollar scotches stared me down.

  I wanted to know. Had you taken Terry’s side? When it came down to it? Or did you believe me?

  It was dawn when I got to the Condesa apartment and the fruit vendors were unlocking their carts. I slid under the crisp sheet.

 
“How was Tropezedo?” you said, petting my abdomen. “Same old pinochas?”

  I nodded.

  But Tropezedo had been black and shiny, practically Scandinavian, packed with Carlos’s friends and bowls of metallic condoms sitting everywhere like grapes. Then there was Cockspot and a series of other bars with similar names. Over the course of the night my body had become big and dim and I floated in it like a visitor.

  The next morning, we left for Oaxaca on a small seven-

  seater plane. I sat next to the pilot, a gaucho in polished aviators. As we skidded over the dark green hilltops, my hands crept under the backs of my heat-pancaked thighs. My head was in a tequila-made vise. With the copilot’s controls in front of me, I was sure I was about to wrench the plane down into the jungle floor.

  Later, at the airport cafeteria, you were ebullient.

  “Did you see it?”

  My face was gray. “Giga,” I confessed, staring at your beautifully remote nail beds.

  You grabbed my shoulders as if I was made of rocks.

  “Earth to Leon,” you said, cradling my head, laughing. “We landed, we’re safe.”

  A sick feeling spooled inside me. My vision turned to pixels and points. Our parasite rammed my sphincter. And my sphincter was just a weak wall! I could crawl to the bathroom but for what? For once I was exactly where I needed to be. Sweating, I unbuckled my belt and crouched down. Hanging my ass back past my heels, I squatted wider, my ankles pitching forward. This would disgust you. “Raunch factor ten,” you’d say. But what about Herrera, Bustamante, and No Grupo? Our parasite and I—we were careening toward a more conceptual kind of art.

  I palmed the cash shelf for balance, breathing with yogic purity. The carpet smelled of large cat. Forget about order. I opened and a sheet of water and rice poured out, then I was sure I felt something tug free from my stomach lining and whoop down the chute. I stared between my legs—I felt suddenly better than I had in months. Out out! I chanted. In this zen state I could finally give as much as I wanted and more would come gushing down to fill the void always.

  My phone rang.

  I wiped with a discarded bar rag and quickly stood up.

  “Hello?” RAT574 said. He sounded different than I’d ex-

  pected, breathless and old, like he’d been sitting for too long with something in his hand.

  I eased the office door closed and gave it a quick twist. The Baltic was blurry, more crowded. “Leon!” Gerald called from his appointed stool, but I barely recognized him. I threw the keys in the direction of the bar and ducked out into the cooling night, shoving the curtain out of my way.

  At Fourteenth Street, a wad of guys with gym hats padded past plus all the regular queens but this time they must have been joking, their makeup caked thick and droopy.

  I dropped down into the First Avenue subway.

  Drunks plastered the lavender seats. A Poetry in Motion poem attacked my eyes, then an ad for Botox. Halfway through the tunnel I slammed a cartoon hand onto my forehead: you were in Chinatown at your brother’s, a plan you’d made weeks ago, probably under a roll-neck of Xbox and bong smoke.

  It didn’t matter, I told myself. In Terry’s office I’d remembered my only rule. This rule trumped all others, which perfectly explained the crumpled shape of my life. As a kid I had another habit. Whenever something was too ruined, too bereft, or sick—say a saucer with no matching cup, a napkin mostly unused but with a splotchy stain, a baby mole tugged half-dead by a dog—I crushed it. More than anything I couldn’t stand to see suffering.

  “Giga,” I said into your voice mail, as I stood on our corner of McGuinness and Nassau, waiting for who knows what.

  I took a breath.

  Then I confessed all kinds of things into the flat receiver—disgusting attachments, lies blotting back as far as I could see, betrayal upon teetering betrayal—anything and everything that ran into my mind.

  Can You Live with It

  “So Raskolnikov goes to Siberia and that’s supposed to be it—he’s absolved, a big flat vacant plane,” I hear myself saying.

  “Yeah?” We drink from our beer cups and look at the waves.

  “Actually,” I say, “he has to work all of this hard labor and what’s-her-name visits him every day so piously and the other inmates hate him until finally, he cries on a riverbank: ‘I’m here! Alive, inescapably part of things.’”

  Or something.

  But Siberia’s nothing like Alcatraz, how it’s just sitting out here in the middle. The bay and surrounding hills all drought-brown. We’re on one of those SF boats watching a dissipated Marin dude hit on women and slaughter Willie Nelson songs while the sun does its thing as advertised by Blue and Gold Bay Cruises or maybe it’s the Red and White; we go on those too whenever I come from New York back to town.

  We tip him then feel like jerks instantly. Our beer fund lost in an oversized cowboy boot that’s sitting in front of his guitar case like: “I just took this off for you.” Except the boot is huge and he’s wearing sneakers.

  “That was stupid,” my buddy says, pulling her lips so her cheeks bump her eyes and her gums glare.

  “We can’t just pull it back out?” I say.

  Now we’re standing at the onboard bar with its wood grain laminate drinking free water. Slug after slug in plastic cups. Or belt after belt, whatever our alcoholic progenitors called it.

  “This tastes like butts.”

  “But you can live with it,” assures the bartender. She’s got on a bow tie and the Glade green Christmas lights under her shirt make her breasts glow lopsidedly. She turns the key on the little gate that holds the booze in place. We hear it lock.

  Then there was that long night Raskolnikov spent on the bridge over the Neva. The cash-it-all-in night. The one where he’s thinking: Am I too bad.

  And doesn’t his mother come?

  This morning I walked up and down Folsom Street. It was foggy and damp. Then I sat in the linoleum-floored waiting room, identical to a mall DMV except for the FREE HIV TEST SITE and posters of sexually transmitted cartoony bugs taped all over the walls. The digital clock had those requisite cement fingers. I rubbed my number’s paper dart against my jeans.

  In the tiny examination room the clinician gave me a folding chair. “This is going to get real personal,” she said.

  “Sure thing,” I said. “Uh-huh.”

  From the interior cabin of the Blue and Gold we watch the sun finishing up. The windows are black. There’s a buffet table full of clammy ham wedges and crudités. We climb the narrow carpeted stairs just in time to hear the cowboy deliver his final pitch:

  “If I said you had a great body, would you hold it against me?”

  It’s just us and two Taiwanese newlyweds on their honeymoon staring toward what was, only minutes ago, the Rock.

  “So you’re telling me he walked around with an ax in his sack? Then hacked an old lady just to see if he could?”

  “Pretty much,” I say.

  “Sorry,” my buddy says to the cowboy. She reaches her arm back down into the boot’s funnel.

  More shots.

  But somehow we’ve docked and we’re moving back down the stairs and the little bar light with the red plastic face is out and the plastic cups are being rushed to their plastic bag.

  We disembark. Another bar. Streamers hang from the ceiling in crumbly garlands. We bail out bills from a battered ATM. Two beers, two Cazadores. We’re talking about my ex-girlfriend and “how bad it was.”

  “It’s like it was genetically impossible for you to realize how bad it was.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I say.

  I concentrate on the curdled smell that hovers cadaverously whenever a bar’s been sucked at for years. Back then I was a wreck. Practically immolating humans with dicks for dicking.

  “But why didn’t you?”

  “What?” I say.

  Now my buddy gets a phone call or a text, I forget which, from
her ex-girlfriend who used to strip in North Beach. We go outside. My buddy has that smile glued on. She towers over six feet tall, Irish-cum-Viking.

  Cabs! We stand on the street with that nebulas-instead-

  of-neurons tequila feeling.

  “Mind if we?”

  “You look okay,” the cabbie says hopefully.

  We take the back roads over Telegraph Hill. The cab’s a relic, it swallows the street. I hold my breath, bunch my rib cage and underneath, what my Pilates teacher calls, “my meat.” Suddenly we’re blinking at Coit Tower and there’s the Golden Gate again all lit up, now too far to touch.

  “Do you do intravenous drugs,” the clinician said, swiping her lips and capping her ChapStick.

  “Do you have multiple partners, do you fuck men, what about bi guys, you know, bisexuals, do you practice no glove no love?”

  She pushed up her glasses, attendant. How was the dusty overhead so fluorescent? My armpit hair forming small damp pads.

  Are you and your partner “trying out new things,” do you take it raw, do you cumdump.com, do you or does anyone you know suck bagfuls of strange as in weird dick?

  Couldn’t I just give her something to write down, join the world, say yes?

  “I’m sorry,” she said, doing another circuit with the ChapStick then looking at her watch. “You don’t qualify for a test. It’s cost versus probability. You’re just not at risk.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  It was cousin to that feeling I’d had when my friend and a girl he liked had been too deep in each other to do anything but fuck condomless on the floor and she’d gotten instantly pregnant. Instantly pregnant—was there any other way? Hearing the story I knew I should have been relieved. I would never inject semen against the fecund walls of someone’s receptive cavity and bam! make a squirmy life someone would then have to abort or love or, worse and infinitely sadder, both.

  I squinted back at the fluorescent.

  “For anything?” I’d said to the clinician.

  “Not as we see it,” she said.

  We stand at the next bar, inside the “Hungry I.” My face is hot from the neck up, as if red construction paper has been stapled to my cheeks and throat. The sign above the bar is big and bulby with lights. A large Egyptian-style eye glows on the surface of the sign, the eye all-knowing somewhere in the heavy black strokes of the iris, its gaze clamping me down. The neon letters keep rearranging: I Hungry I Hungry I Hungry.