Certain American States

by Catherine Lacey

  * * *

  I set a small fire yesterday. I can’t sleep and there are these fields near my house and I was out walking, no one was around—I wasn’t even around—so I went out in the field and clicked my lighter in some dry grass and watched the flames grow until I could feel a warm glow on my shins. Who knows what became of it? Not me. I went home.

  What every crime requires, you told me once, is a decent getaway.

  * * *

  This isn’t a large house—four small rooms in a row, barely furnished, badly lit—and this wouldn’t bother me if I didn’t know what terrible thing had recently happened here, the thing that created the circumstance in which I could rent this place so cheaply, no deposit, cash accepted, no questions asked.

  The landlady is broke and jobless, can’t pay the mortgage, a single parent to two kids, had to quit working to take care of the older one because he, in a single week, threw a neighbor’s kitten from a second-floor window, was kicked out of school for unabashedly groping another student in the hallway, and was later caught being molested by his own father, who still has custody rights until the criminal case goes through and they’re not sure it will because the boy won’t say anything and she’s got no proof.

  It’s just his word, and my word, and—it’s like—it’s like—the landlady stopped for a moment, her mouth still open, still wanting something, wanting to say something—it’s like nothing belongs to you. This world, I don’t know—it’s like someone else has everything and you have nothing. She was saying you, to me, but I knew she didn’t mean me, but she did sort of mean me, and herself, and you. All of us.

  The landlady didn’t say anything for a very long time or what felt like a very long time. She swallowed hard and nodded.

  He’s six, she said.

  * * *

  How long does an event stay in a room?

  I have wondered this most nights, staring at the stained walls, trying to fall asleep, thinking of that man I don’t know, that little boy I don’t know, and whatever might have happened, which I also don’t know. A few times I’ve tried sleeping in the yard, which was nice on the warmer nights except twice I woke up with a cat claw to the face and if I ever catch that motherfucker it won’t be soon enough.

  * * *

  I think sometimes of the afternoon we moved in here—the dog, a couple knives, a mattress, table, two chairs—and when you went back out to the truck to get the last box (your shit, your box, I don’t know what was in it) you just got in and drove off. I went out to the street where the truck had been and the fact that you’d just driven off like that was still hanging in the air, a sort of post-firework smoke, the sense that I had just missed something. Now that spot on the street where the truck was, then wasn’t, still has that smoky feeling. How long will it last?

  * * *

  A family of raccoons seem to be living on the roof of the shed, just under a low-hanging oak branch. They wash each other and seem pleased with the way the late summer is going—me alone in this house, the dog getting fat on the porch, mice running everywhere, the cat’s mouth dripping with bird blood. They waddle around all night and sleep all day in a contented pile. I found another smash of feathers in a mud puddle this morning.

  * * *

  The phone rings and I know it is you. It rings again—you you you. It rings again and I pick it up and we both sit in silence and I listen to you saying nothing and you listen to me saying nothing and we both know the other is out there and we both know we are apart and we both know where the past went, and we both know nothing at all.

  * * *

  I swear to God—this cat. Another bird left dead on the stoop. If I find this cat—and I don’t care who owns the cat, whatever neighbor in whatever direction—I will destroy it completely.

  * * *

  I’ve been picking raspberries from the neighbor’s garden before dawn with a flashlight. This, I feel, is not a crime. They leave them to die on the bush and I will not stand for it and I am not standing for it. I wear the camouflage jumpsuit you left behind. It reassures me that you are not just hiding somewhere. Sometimes I fling the jumpsuit across a chair while I’m eating a can of sardines. It’s a lot like you’re here. You’d be surprised how much it’s like you’re here.

  * * *

  I suppose I’ve started to become grateful that you left this dog, the only person I’ve spoken to in some time. I’m counting my blessings, as ordered. When I wake up I take him for a walk and when we first step into the morning air, I sometimes forget everything I’ve ever done, everyone I’ve ever robbed, every crime committed with you, and only then, for those few moments, do I feel I am a person.

  I say, to the dog, to myself, What do we even do out here? I ask him, Are you even a dog? He answers by not answering, his tongue loose, his ears flopping, then I remember that all he wants to do is fuck something or eat something and run around in circles forever and ever and ever.

  You may have left this dog with me, left me with this dog, because you believe we are perverse in the same way. That we deserve each other.

  * * *

  The cat is dead or gone or both. The birds are rejoicing, swarming and manic in my garden, an entire town’s worth of birds not being killed or clawed. Someone has tacked MISSING signs on trees around the neighborhood, taped them to streetlight poles and novelty mailboxes. I walked up close to one on a sycamore tree—Our Beloved Cat, RALPH, has been missing since 10/19. We are worried about him!—and a picture of the cat, the Ralph, scowling. I draw a small cartoon penis aimed for his left ear.

  * * *

  A bad week for the dog. Monday night I woke up to the sound of him vomiting at the foot of the mattress, and Wednesday morning I found him whimpering over a diarrheal shit spread between two rooms. I stopped feeding him, thinking whatever poison was in him would eventually run out, but he only seemed emboldened by the fast and later that day he tried to fuck the side of a couch someone had left on the curb. He started sprinting after chipmunks and squirrels, barking until his voice ran out, digging holes in the yard, knocking over the neighbors’ trash cans in a rage.

  One afternoon, exhausted by all his bad behavior, he was walking somewhat calmly beside me when a man passing us said, Hi there, neighbor! What kind of dog is that?

  A horrible one, I said, and kept walking.

  Thursday night neither of us slept—he sprinted around the house, barking and vicious and I chased him, tried to catch him for a while until I gave up near dawn, slept a little while outside, wrapped in a quilt, dew soaked and shivering. Friday I left him tied up in the kitchen all day, put in earplugs, and turned on a fan to drown out his whine. I went to sleep early, but woke up to his paws on my face as he tried to fuck the inside of my bent elbow with a penis protruding like a terrible red stamen of some god-awful plant. As I threw him off me, he smacked his head on the floor, reopening a scab, splattering blood as he did a hunched run from room to room. In the kitchen I found the refrigerator had been knocked over.

  I managed to get outside, slam the door behind me, and watch him thrash around the house, possibly rabid or possibly demented, destroying whatever life I’d made for myself in there.

  I don’t know what to do now, a state I am so familiar with it feels like my only true home. I had fallen asleep almost completely dressed. Heavy boots, stockings, a big wool skirt. No shirt, but I’ve got the quilt, though it’s mildewy from being damp most of the time, or maybe that’s just me. I wander the yard wearing it like a cape, only then realizing that the mice are gone and I haven’t seen any of the raccoons in days. I can hear the dog yelling in the house—Dog! Dog! Dog! Dog! Dog! the dog says. I must find a way to be more like this dog and much less like him too, I think. Then I see Ralph’s teal collar and some splintered bones scattered around the back of the shed.

  Maybe being less like the dog is better than being more like the dog. But it’s hard to say.

  * * *

  It’s Wayne again, I see him coming toward me in the grocery
store. I had managed to slip into the house and get my overcoat and wallet, without waking the dog, though I had forgotten to put on a shirt so I had to keep the coat on everywhere I went, lest I make a problem for myself. I thought if I walked to town I might find some kind of redemption, maybe a fresh juice, something a real person would consume, and this is when I see Wayne.

  We think you know something, he says, about Ralph.

  This just doesn’t seem like enough information for me to form a legitimate response, so I wait.

  Wayne, I say, using his name all nice like that, like people do, what is it that you think I know about Ralph?

  He tells me someone saw me struggling with the cat and yelling at it a couple weeks ago, one morning, when it appeared I had been sleeping in my yard. He tells me he knows that I was the one who set the fire over on that empty lot and he put it out himself and didn’t report me. I realize I may not have been making such a great impression on the neighborhood, that maybe I should have tried harder to convince them I wasn’t all bad, smiled a little, lingered in the small talking people do on sidewalks. I’ve never been convicted of a crime but I have a convict’s face, always have.

  Ralph, I say to Wayne, if that’s even his real name, killed just about every bird that ever flew near my garden this summer.

  He’s a cat, Wayne says.

  That much is clear, but the fact stands that he was doing legitimate damage to the local bird population.

  Wayne scrunches his face at me. Now, what are you really saying? Are you saying you did something about this, that you … retaliated?

  What I’m saying is that it might not be so reasonable for a person to be upset by the disappearance of a cat if the cat was a known threat to a more vulnerable species. How do we know that the birds he ravaged weren’t endangered? And how do we know that Ralph’s deflation of the bird population wouldn’t have caused a spike in the insect population, which could have caused crop problems, famine, and so forth? How do we know that the overall good that came from his vanishing isn’t greater than the good he may or may not have caused in the lives of his owners?

  My overcoat is a thick parka with a fur-lined hood. You got it for me, stole it from a ski lodge, you said. It was almost too heavy for the cool morning walk to town but now, just past noon and warm, it is fully inappropriate. Wayne is wearing flip-flops. As I explain the relative costs and benefits of the existence of Ralph or the nonexistence of Ralph, we walk from the grocery store and into the parking lot, Wayne flip-flopping beside me, listening. He really is a good listener, that Wayne, and observant.

  Aren’t you too hot? he asks, pointing at the coat.

  No, I say, putting the hood up, and just then, at the edge of the parking lot I notice the landlady loading her children and groceries into her car. She waves vaguely at Wayne and Wayne waves back. I don’t wave at anyone, just watch the landlady’s car reverse and turn and leave the parking lot and disappear around a corner. I am beginning to think she just wants to be someplace else, anyplace else, and will say anything and do anything to get there.

  Please Take

  Everyone was talking about having less—picking up every-thing you owned and asking, Does this bring me joy? And if it didn’t you had to get rid of it. Everyone was doing this, asking themselves about joy. It felt incredibly dangerous. I was afraid for the world.

  I was staring into Adrian’s closet. Pants. Belts. Shirts. So many shirts. More shirts than he ever wore, more shirts than anyone could wear in a life. The brown flannel, striped oxford, baggy cardigans—none of it brought me joy. Nor did the jeans and slacks smushed in the back, old, forgotten. I couldn’t even ask myself about the thousand wool socks, the yellowed undershirts, the boxers, or that one decaying sweater I thought, perhaps, I had given him long ago.

  There was one shirt, though, pale blue with tiny green stripes, paper-thin and soft—I almost kept it. Adrian had worn it, I thought I remembered, at a picnic. Someone else’s dog was there. We never had a dog. After the picnic we had talked about getting a dog, but we soon forgot we’d wanted one and by forgetting that desire we realized it hadn’t been so true. So we said. That had been years ago. Now all I had was this faded, worn-out shirt and a memory but the memory had to go and the shirt had to go, just as days and people had also gone, just as so many tangible and intangible things enter and exit a life. Heaps grew; the closet emptied. I felt oddly fine.

  My neighborhood is one of those where you can leave all manner of things to be taken, leave things on stoops or flung over shrubs, leave household crap or books stacked on curbs, what have you, what has anyone—and passersby will take these things. So I folded the clothes in stacks and stacked the stacks on the steps, draped the coats on a fire hydrant, lined the shoes at the street, and left a sign: PLEASE TAKE. Two days, no rain, everything gone. Piece by piece, then a van came.

  But Adrian did not go as slowly. He went all at once. Here, then not. That was weeks earlier, a month even, a month and a half. You know, time passes strangely in times like that. You look up and think, Wasn’t I just married last year? No, that was five years ago. Wasn’t I just walking down Arabella when a bird landed on some crepe myrtle, shaking white flowers over my head—no, that was decades ago, a childhood memory you keep close by for no reason. Well, wasn’t I just in Guam? You were never in Guam; perhaps you dreamed it? No. No, I don’t dream anymore. Well, wasn’t it just yesterday, just yesterday, wasn’t it? They call it mourning, I’m told, so people in it remember to get out of bed.

  The neighbors, having noticed the clothes, asked me if everything was okay. Well, not all the neighbors, but one neighbor, Corina—she asked. Corina is old, all burned up and tiny, and lives alone in 2F. She often receives heavy, large packages—nearly the size and weight of a human body—and I carry them up to her floor. And when I do something like leave my husband’s clothes strewn across our stoop and sidewalk, she asks me about it, asks me just what the hell might be going on.

  I told Corina, I’m moving on. And she said, Is that so? Good for you. And I said, You know, it’s really fine. It’s going to be just fine. I nodded and she nodded. I asked her, It’s fine, isn’t it?

  I thought perhaps she would tell me some great wisdom to confirm my decision to move on, to get it over with, to begin again.

  It’s not fine, she said. Nothing is just fine about this. Can’t you see? It cannot be undone.

  And she said, Kate, you must know that death is not that which gives meaning to life. And I told her, yes, that I believed I had read that somewhere, but Corina, having not heard me, continued on—she said, Life is that which gives meaning to life, so I said, a little louder, Yes, Corina, I read that story many times, everything dies and knowledge is circumstantial—and she, having still not heard me or perhaps just unwilling to listen, she said, The human heart has the capacity to make enormous changes at the last minute, and I said, I know this well, Corina, I’ve heard all this before, I must have read it somewhere.

  Just that morning, Corina told me, she had been clearing off her desk. It had been months, perhaps years (Who can tell anymore?), and she had been going through the papers, the letters, receipts, tax forms, old postcards, legal documents, currency from countries she couldn’t remember, a pocketknife, another knife, unsent letters, and eventually, she said, eventually she had forgotten what she’d originally been looking for, and she worried that she had accidentally, perhaps, thrown this thing out years ago and she’d only just now realized she needed it. Only—what was it?

  I told her I was so sorry, but that I had to go now and she agreed that she too had to go. She’d just realized that she’d left the buttermilk out, so she went to her buttermilk and I went to the park. It was spring so people had their legs out, and good-looking people had become, it seemed, incredibly good-looking people, and even regular people seemed aided by the light.

  Habits were helpful, someone had told me—people were always giving me advice for this newly broken life—so the park was my habit, the
way I was structuring my days. Habitual bench, habitual time of day. These little things will make life bearable, they said (Who said? I can’t remember).

  On the walk to the park I always saw a man smoking cigarettes behind that restaurant, same man who was always there, and a black-haired woman reading library books on a bench just outside the park, same woman each afternoon, and that tall, large-nostriled man with a little boy in the playground, same man, same boy. How many of them, I wondered, kept these habits for the same reason I did—like a single nail somehow holding up the whole home? I did not dare look at them too closely, didn’t want to confirm anything, to catch a glance that felt familiar.

  Returning from the park I would sometimes miss my building and only realize the mistake once I was several doors away, and sometimes I made it all the way to Lafayette, where I stood at the curb wondering where on earth I was or wondering if perhaps my home had been somehow taken away forever this time, and now I was all that was left. But I always turned and walked back. I went inside. I locked the three doors behind me. Once or twice I left all the doors slightly ajar, wondering if anyone might stop by, let themselves in, make themselves comfortable.

  The last time I saw my husband it was nearly four in the morning and he had a plane to catch. We had stayed up late fighting about something, who knows what we were really fighting about (what couple ever really knows what they’re fighting about?) but we had worn ourselves out—me shouting at him from bed, him shouting at me from the bathroom, neither of us even able to hear what the other was saying. Then I gave up, mumbled, and wept into the pillow as he sang in the shower, all low and throaty, some jokey country song. We were the sock and buskin, he and I, always understudying each other but hardly ever called to switch.

  He packed a two-month suitcase while I was half-asleep, waking me up to do our goodbyes, cool kiss on my meaty face. It wasn’t clear who should apologize or what for.