When the dog wails again, she goes outside. She doesn’t need a flashlight to see when she sits down next to the dog because there is light enough to see by from Caesar’s sex show and light enough from a nearby streetlamp. The dog is panting heavily and the kittens are awake and mewling. The mother cat is not there. “Come inside now,” she says to the dog, worried that the mother cat will never come back now to feed her kittens, but she cannot budge the dog. She pulls up on the scruff of his neck, but the dog is a large-breed dog, and he weighs more than Sarah. The dog cannot just be lifted and made to stand and come away. The dog turns his head toward her and Sarah wonders for a moment if her dog will bite her if she keeps pulling on him, even though the dog has never attempted to bite anyone in his life. Sarah goes inside. In her bedroom, when she is ready for sleep, the light from Caesar’s show is too bright. She wishes she could just get up and go over to Caesar’s house and ring the doorbell and tell him to turn it off and tell him to buy some curtains. If Benjamin was here, he would probably do it, she thinks. He would know exactly how to talk to Caesar and ask him kindly and smile, but she cannot do it. She would never talk to him about his sex show. The only way she has ever talked to Caesar was when Benjamin was standing right there beside her, and even then, she did not talk to him directly. It was Benjamin who did all the talking and she just nodded. She thinks how that is usually the case with everyone they know. Benjamin does the talking, and she just listens. If she does say anything, it is a short answer or she will ask a question, anything to prevent herself from having to speak for too long, because it is so much easier to let other people do the talking.
The light comes in through her curtains and, to make matters worse, the moon has now risen and it’s coming up from the opposite direction of Caesar’s screen so that Sarah feels like she’s now living on a two-moon planet with so much light bathing her room and her body. Just when she thinks it can’t get any brighter in her house, that even daylight would be less glaring, there comes a chopper. It is flying low and loud, its searchlight landing on her yard and on all the yards around their house. She can hear it heading for the nearby stretch of freeway, and she can hear it circling back again, over her roof and down her street. Its beam of light comes right through her window and onto her body where she’s on top of the covers wearing just a short nightgown because the night is such a hot one. She gets under the covers, pulling them over her head.
When she hears a creak and then footsteps on the linoleum floor, just inside the back door, she takes her head out from under the covers. She thinks of running out of bed and grabbing the phone, but it’s too late. There is already a man standing in her room. She thinks she can smell him first. He smells of sweat and of the city itself when the endless car tires rolling over the pavement on the hot days smell like burning rubber, and he smells of the stale dust that blows down from the palm trees in a Santa Ana and swirls at your feet on the burning-hot sidewalks.
But there is no man there. It’s just her imagination. It’s just a hot Santa Ana wind that has come through the window and is trapped against the wall of her room so that it feels almost like a man is standing there. Outside, the dog howls and barks, and every once in a while she can hear the chain-link fence ring after being struck by the dog’s paw as he hits it in his frustration to be closer to the kittens.
Out her window, she hears what sounds like the wind rustling the fallen leaves from the grapefruit tree, and then she hears a voice. “Sarah?” she hears. She sits up in bed, clutching her covers to her front. She peers out the window.
“Yes?” she says, her voice sounding like she is answering a telephone instead of leaning out her window late at night talking to an unknown dark figure.
“It’s Caesar. Your neighbor. Sarah, your dog keeps howling and barking. I can’t sleep,” Caesar says. She does not recognize Caesar at first because he isn’t wearing his glasses that she always sees him wearing, that and the fact that he is just wearing his boxer underwear.
“I’m sorry. I’ll bring him in right away,” Sarah says.
“Thank you, Sarah,” he says. After he walks back to his house, she goes outside to the dog.
“Come on now. It’s time for bed. It’s time to go inside, you big pain,” she says. She lifts up on the scruff of his neck, but he hunkers down, whining. He is so big she cannot lift him or even push him or pull him. Every time she tries to pull on his neck, she gets a handful of fur instead. She goes back inside the house, not needing a flashlight, of course, to see the way because Caesar’s show is still on, and she can see the cracks in the paved walkway as easily as if it were daylight. “What does he mean he can’t sleep? Does he fall asleep every night to that show? Is that the only way he can fall asleep?” she thinks to herself. In the house she takes some leftover chicken out of the refrigerator and brings it back out with her to the dog. He is usually quick to grab the food from her hand. He is usually so hungry all the time, but now he does not have any interest in the food, and when she lets him smell it from her hand, and takes a few steps backward toward the house, he doesn’t even look at it. All he wants is those kittens.
Her hand is small, but not small enough to fit through the chainlink fence. If only her hand were smaller. There is only one person she knows whose hand is small enough to fit.
Her boy is sleeping peacefully on his back. She gently shakes his shoulder, saying his name, but he is deep in sleep. In each hand he is holding a race car. “Wake up,” she says, and when he does not, she picks him up and carries him out with her to where the kittens are behind the fence. In his sleep, he still holds on to the race cars. As she’s carrying him he starts to stir. “Hmm,” he says, and then his body becomes more rigid as he wakes up completely. “My cars!” he says, and then he looks down at his hands and realizes they are still there and relaxes. “Mommy, why are we outside?” he says.
“I need for you to do something. Bob needs one of those kittens. The mother cat was out here earlier and I talked with her. She said Bob could have one.”
“Really?” her son says.
“Yes, it’s OK,” Sarah says. “Go ahead, you reach through and take one. My hand is too big,” she says. The boy does not want to put his cars down. “I’ll hold them for you,” Sarah says. She holds out her hand so he will give them to her.
“Mommy, you have to give them back. Give them back, OK?” her son says.
“I promise,” she says.
“Then I get to keep them for tonight. Right? I don’t have to give them back until tomorrow at school. Right?” her son says.
“Yes, OK. They’re all yours tonight,” she says; anything, she thinks, to keep Caesar from coming back over without his glasses, wearing his boxers. He lets her take the race cars and then he reaches in. “Which one?” he says.
“Any one, the mother cat said I could take any one.”
Her son grabs an orange kitten, smaller even than his own hand, which mews when he lifts it, and pulls it through the metal of the fence. Bob jumps up immediately when he sees that her son has the kitten. “He’s so soft,” her son says. She takes the kitten from him and gives him back the race cars. She holds the kitten up high because Bob is now jumping up and down, trying to get the kitten. “Run back into the house,” she says to her son and they both run into the house, Bob running behind them, and then in front of them, his paws stepping on her, his claws digging into her bare feet and scraping her instep, drawing blood.
Once everyone’s inside, she slams the door behind her, so the dog cannot get out again. “Give him the kitten. He wants it, Mommy,” her son says. But Sarah is afraid to give Bob the kitten. If she gives it to him, she’s not sure what he’ll do. The length of Bob’s tongue is even longer than the entire kitten. Just by licking it he may hurt it.
“Get me a towel,” she says to her son.
“What?” he says. He cannot hear her because Bob now is barking louder than ever. He’s frantic,
jumping up onto her, placing both paws on her chest so that she has to lean against the wall so he doesn’t knock her down. Standing full height, the dog is even taller than she is. “A towel!” she yells. She knees her dog hard, and she kicks him, but he doesn’t care. “No! Knock it off, Bob!” she says to the dog, but he doesn’t listen.
After her son comes with the towel, she wraps up the kitten, while still holding it high in the air. “You can’t hold him up forever, Mommy,” her boy says.
She knows he is right. Eventually she will have to give Bob the kitten. The kitten is so small. It feels as if she could be holding just an empty towel in the air. “You, go back to bed,” she says to her son.
“But what about the kitten …”
“No buts, if you want to keep those race cars for the night, you march back to bed right now.”
“But you already said I could keep the race cars tonight, Mommy.”
“Yes, I meant it too. Just go to bed, please,” Sarah says. “I will take care of this kitten. The kitten will be fine.” Her son walks back to his room, looking over his shoulder as he walks down the hallway.
She takes the kitten to her room and sits up in her bed with him. Bob, of course, comes bounding onto the bed too. In her arms she holds the kitten wrapped in the towel and Bob sticks his huge head into the towel and starts licking the kitten. She lets him lick it a few times, and then she pushes his head away. “That’s enough, let it breathe, Bob,” she says. When he doesn’t get to lick it, though, he starts to bark.
“What’s he barking for, Mommy?” she hears her son call from his bed.
“Go to sleep!” she says back to her son.
Bob paws at the kitten now, his heavy paw pressing into its body, making it cry. She gets up from the bed. “This isn’t working, Bob,” she says, and she puts the kitten in the towel in a shoebox, then she goes in the hallway and puts it in the linen closet on the top shelf, and closes the door. Bob scratches the door and barks. She goes back to her bedroom and lies down in bed, holding her hands to her ears, but she can still hear everything.
“You didn’t really talk to the mother cat, did you?” her son says loudly from down the hall so he can be heard over the barking. She doesn’t answer him.
“You lied about the mother cat!” her son yells.
“You lied about the race cars!” she yells back, before she can stop herself from saying it, before she realizes how immature it sounds, and how she doesn’t want her son to know how adults can be so stupid sometimes that they sound like children.
Her son doesn’t say anything. She is hoping that maybe he did not hear her.
“I can’t sleep, Bob is barking too loud,” her son says.
“Just let him bark. He’ll stop soon,” she says. Bob barks for a long time, though, and she’s awake listening to him. Even if he were not barking, she thinks, she would not be able to sleep because the light from Caesar’s show is still on. She thinks about going over there and telling him to turn it off, to get some damn curtains, that his show is keeping her awake, but she doesn’t dare. She doesn’t want him to know she knows he is watching a show of himself having sex with his wife who’s now dead. She doesn’t want to know herself, even, that such sadness exists. Eventually, in the middle of the night, Bob stops barking, and she falls asleep. Sarah doesn’t even wake up when Benjamin arrives home and gets into bed next to her. She only wakes up when he leaves the house at daybreak to go back to work, and she hears the front door close and his car engine start.
She gets up from bed and sees the hall closet door is open. In front of it is a stool. The kitten and the towel are no longer there. For a moment she has a ridiculous thought, she thinks the dog was able to drag the stool to the closet to reach up and get the kitten. Then she opens her son’s door to his room and there is the dog curled in a ball beside her son’s bed. Between the dog’s front legs is the towel the kitten was wrapped in. When she goes to unwrap the towel, the dog is too tired to wake up and doesn’t stir. The kitten is in the towel, and she puts her hand on it.
“The kitten’s dead,” her son says, still holding his race cars. “Bob licked it to death. I couldn’t stop him, Mommy. He held it between his paws so he could lick harder, and he pushed so hard on it. I’m sorry. I gave it to him so he would stop barking. He was so happy to have it, Mommy,” her son says, crying. She hugs her son. “It’s OK,” she says. “The kitten was so little. It couldn’t survive without its mother. I shouldn’t have taken it away from her in the first place,” Sarah says.
She takes the towel and wraps it so that it covers the entire orange kitten. They take it outside and the dog, who is still sleeping, doesn’t follow after them. They use a large spoon to dig up the ground and bury the kitten under the grapefruit tree, where her son says is the best place because it is cool under there in the shade and the kitten will not have to be hot during the day. They check on the other kittens. They are all gone. “The mother cat must have moved them. That’s good,” Sarah says.
After that they eat breakfast, and then her son gets out two lined sheets of paper and two of his pencils from his pencil box. He gives her one sheet and one pencil. “Let’s start writing,” he says.
She sees he is writing “I will never steal race cars again,” over and over again. She rubs her eyes. She is so tired from the night before. She feels so bad for the kitten that had to die by Bob’s incessant licking and pawing. She feels so bad for her son, who was crying so hard to see the dead kitten, thinking it was his fault. If it wasn’t for Caesar, it never would have happened. She can hear that Caesar is awake. She can hear his morning radio show playing from his open kitchen window as loudly as if the radio were in her own home. She begins to write. She writes, “Your sex show kept me up all night and if you really want to watch that stuff you should go to the store and buy curtains.” She writes this fifty times.
“I’m done!” her son announces and holds up his page.
“Good, I’m done too. Let’s put them into envelopes.” She quickly folds her letter and seals it into an envelope so her son can’t read it.
After breakfast, on their way out the door to drive to school, she tells her son, “You go on ahead and get in the car. I forgot something in the house.” She runs back into her bedroom. Through her open window she can see Caesar’s open window. She can see his unmade bed. She takes her envelope and tosses it through her window and out over her small strip of grass and right in through Caesar’s open window, where it lands on his wrinkled bottom sheet.
She goes back out to the car. Her son has already strapped himself into his car seat and is holding his race cars.
“How about I take you late to school? How about we go to the store first? You can pick up two race cars if you want to. You can pick up the same exact ones even,” she says and turns the car on.
“Yippeee! Let’s go!” her son says.
She can see Caesar with her envelope in his hand coming out of his house. He comes up to her side of the car and leans in her window before she can drive away. “We’re off to the store to buy race cars!” her son says, leaning over from his car seat to tell Caesar.
“Race cars! That’s great. I’m off to the store myself,” he says.
Sarah drives onto her street. The Santa Anas are picking up again. She can feel the bone-dry desert air coming in through her open window. Warm as another person’s breath, it feels as if someone she couldn’t see were very close to her and sighing heavily.
Zeroes
Magdalena Zyzak
Now for the third death. The second was Adam in 2016, Adam with whom Erica had been sleeping, not without his wife’s permission, until he became too ill for sex. The first was a dog Erica struck. She didn’t stop—she was hours from the nearest town and driving her new boss’s car. It was a dachshund, and she cried until the nearest town.
They’re
walking down a trail into a coppice of pines. The air has a cold celebratory smell with undertones of flesh, like a hand that’s handled ice cubes.
“I find what you’re saying, I don’t know, distasteful.” Saskia’s smiling and saying this.
Perhaps this is not precisely a smile. If you don’t know someone well, Erica likes to say, especially to younger women, you only see the median of faces.
“That’s the point, of course,” says Erica. “These days, nobody has any taste and that’s just fine, because this way, no one can oppress anyone. We’re all just happy, equal philistines.” Walking stick in hand, Erica atop a car-sized stone.
Melting snow and black and yellow lichens fill the fissures in the limestone barrens.
“Oh, I don’t know. Everyone should just do what they feel. As long as they don’t bomb a city or teach kids creationism or whatever,” Saskia says.
“I’d vote the majority shares your opinion.” Erica checks Saskia’s face. Unsatisfactory. Reaction minimal. Smiling Buddha face, content with simplifications.
They met last night, at the hotel restaurant, and over several mediocre wines, Saskia told Erica all about Timmy’s Ping-Pong tournament. Timmy is Saskia’s older, happy son, equal in every way to his depressive younger brother.
“You’ve got my vote,” says Erica. “Timmy’s got my vote for president of Ping-Pong.”
This gets a reaction. Oxytocin, serotonin, and whatever all else is in the neuro cocktail called maternal pride. “Well, I texted Timmy’s picture to my brother,” Saskia says, “but then I wasn’t sure he got it, so I sent it again in an e-mail, in the body and as an attachment.”
“Timmy wins!” says Erica atop the rock.
“Fourth place, so cowinner, actually.”
“Penduline tits? Really?” Erica jabs her stick into an oblong galaxy of saxifrage, disrupting the universe ever so slightly.
“It’s true,” says Saskia. “But they don’t live in Newfoundland. They live in Europe and North Africa. I know all about birds. The penduline’s related to the true tit. There’s even a fire-capped tit.”
Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand Page 34