When We Were Animals

by Joshua Gaylord

  Then there was Alice, who suffered a life of agony because of physical ailments. She had leprosy, and she also went blind. The only comfort she received was in the form of communion. But even in that respect she suffered. She could eat the bread, but she was banned from drinking from the Eucharistic cup because of her contagious maladies. But she had visions, and in one of her visions, Jesus came and told her everything was okay.

  Lucy had her eyes gouged out, and she carried them around on a tray. But she was honored with a feast, which used to take place on the shortest day of the year, but then got moved to December thirteenth. Girls cooked buns with raisins in the middle to look like eyes and carried them on trays. I promised myself to remember Saint Lucy and her dug-out eyes on the thirteenth of December.

  Another saint, named Drogo, was so hideously deformed that no one could stand to look at him. He imprisoned himself in a cell and ate only grain and water. But there was something called bilocation, which meant that he could be in two places at once. Some people said they could see him harvesting the fields even though he was locked away in his jail. I wondered if his spectral self, the one doing the harvesting, looked any better.

  I discovered that there was a saint named Illuminata, like Lumen, but I couldn’t find anything else about her other than that there was a church dedicated to her in Italy.

  Apollonia was treated particularly brutally. The heathens bashed out all her teeth. They threatened to burn her alive, but she didn’t give them the chance to do it—she escaped from them long enough to throw herself into the fire of her own accord. She was a saint, though, so she didn’t burn. The flames had no effect on her. But the story doesn’t end there. Heathens, shown evidence of their wrongdoing, don’t fall to their knees to beg the Lord’s forgiveness. They remained undeterred. They dragged Apollonia out of the fire and decapitated her.

  Here’s another interesting case—Saint Etheldreda. She was known, commonly, as Saint Audrey, which is where the word tawdry comes from. See, after she died, women took to selling lacy garments in her name. Tawdries were sanctified things, holy garments. Then the Puritans came along and started looking down on cheap indulgences such as lace, so the word changed its meaning. Which just goes to show how you can’t do anything to protect your reputation when Puritans get involved—or heathens, either, for that matter.

  My favorite saint, however, must have been Osgyth. She was married to a king, even though she didn’t want to be. She bore him a son, as was her duty—but then when her husband was away hunting a white deer, she ran off to the convent to become a nun. The white deer. That was important. Whenever they specified the color of something, it was important. I wondered what the white deer symbolized. Something worthwhile, I hoped, because the king lost his wife in the pursuit of it.

  Anyway, she was killed at the hands of Vikings, and at the place where she was killed a spring erupted from the earth and continues to give water to this day. The tears of a saint, flooding the land. You could drink them up.

  Like Apollonia, Osgyth had her head cut off. But a moment after she died, her body sprang back up (like her tears from the earth itself!). She picked up her own head and carried it to the nearby convent, where she finally collapsed.

  This was not, so it seems, an uncommon occurrence among martyrs. There’s a whole category of saints who carried their own heads around after death. There’s even a name for them. They’re called cephalophoric martyrs.

  Walking home through the drifts of new snow, I thought about that image. I thought about it over dinner, when my father asked me why I was being so tacit that evening. I couldn’t stop thinking about it that day or the day after that or the next day—or ever.

  My virginity, my saintliness, like the new snow you hate yourself for tromping on. What saints do, I realized, is make everyone else aware of their lowliness. You were simply about the regular business of your day until the saint walks by and makes you reckon with your true state as a bristly animal wallowing in its own filth. That’s why everyone attacks the saints’ bodies—to prove they have them and are anchored by them. But what the stories tell us is that they’re not.

  Peter Meechum had wanted to prove my frail, chafable, blisterable bodiedness. But there I lay under the afternoon sky—like a floating fairy or an ephemeral saint, smiling with her head removed and looking on from somewhere else entirely.

  But what about the saint herself? Does she miss it—that puny tag of a body, with all its feeble, quaking pains and pleasures?

  I still see it when I close my eyes—Osgyth, her neck a stump on her shoulders, feeling around blindly on the ground until she finds the toppled loaf of her own head, carrying it with effort across the fields to the convent.

  What is a body without a mind? A slave to the feral instincts of ugly nature. An inelegant organ of gristle and stupid mechanics.

  But also, what is a mind without a body?

  It is a useless curd, lost in the mud. Or a pathetic piece of jetsam, bobbing in the spring-lake of its own tears.

  * * *

  Now it’s time to talk about Blackhat Roy Ruggle, who was no good.

  I remember how he was in grade school, runty and dark, the teachers leaning away from him with sour expressions on their faces. I remember him cursing them under his breath, seeming very mature in his primal anger. It never occurred to me as strange, back then, that I equated obscenity with adulthood—as though we all grow inevitably toward the twisted and grotesque. Later, in high school, the administration tolerated him with weary resignation, because it was well known that his father had left when he was only two years old, that his mother was a drunk who survived on state aid, that the two of them lived in a shack with a sagging roof on the edge of town, and that he worked in a scrap yard in order to make money to buy things like cigarettes and booze—things that stank of angry manhood.

  He came to school dirty, his clothes torn, his shoes tattered and repaired with duct tape, his hair unwashed. There was no fight he backed away from, no conflict he did not lick his lips at. It made no difference how big or small his opponents were—he gnashed his teeth and spit out vulgarities and burned himself bright and hot into a cindered black punk. Teachers avoided him because they knew their authority wouldn’t sway him. Younger kids avoided him because they knew their weakness wouldn’t, either.

  No one was surprised when he breached early. No one was surprised that his breach lasted longer by far than anyone else’s. He had always been part animal, and he needed no moon to tell him that.

  Me, I avoided him—which was not difficult. Our worlds had nothing to do with each other.

  Until the day they did.

  After the day in the woods with Peter, I had spent the next couple weeks mostly alone. I wore white as much as I could—because it was the color of sainthood and it was the color of the deer that Osgyth’s king hunted and it was the color of the snow descending everywhere around me.

  In school I saw that Polly spent more time with the boys who had already gone breach. They would often have her pressed in a corner of the stairwell or against the lockers, their bodies flush with hers. Sometimes Polly seemed embarrassed to be squished between these boys and the lockers—but other times she gazed at the ceiling with half-lidded eyes, and I could see that she was lost to them.

  “Do you have a boyfriend now?” I asked her in French class.

  “Oui et non,” she said. “C’est compliqué.”

  “Are you happy?”

  “Personne n’est heureux.”

  “Some people are. Some people are happy.”

  My voice pleaded with her to be again the Polly I had known just a year or two before.

  But that Polly seemed to be gone for good. This one, the one who got put into reveries by being pressed up against lockers, slammed her book closed and shrugged.

  “Not everything is about white picket fences,” she said. “Portes blanches.”

  “Clôtures.”

  Mrs. Farris, our French teacher, looked
over at us. I looked down at the passage I was supposed to be translating. When it was safe again, I looked at Polly. I apologized with my eyes, but with her eyes she told me that I didn’t understand, that it was not the business of saints to stand too close to the vulgarity of real life. She told me with her eyes to stay wrapped in my white shrouds.

  It was on that same day that I saw Blackhat Roy backed up against a wall in the alcove under the stairs by Peter and some of his friends. Such conflicts were never my concern—I was mostly concerned about avoiding Peter, who was facing Roy and not me. Out of the corner of my eye, though, I saw that Roy had fixed me in his gaze, as though I were more interesting than the group of boys threatening to assault him.

  “If you’re going to do it,” I overheard him saying, “just do it, and shut the fuck up about it.”

  Even as he said the words, he was watching me rather than them.

  I rushed around the corner out of his sight. I didn’t know what his gaze meant, but I wanted to get out from under it.

  It was later that day that Blackhat Roy spoke to me for the first time in my life. It was at the bike cage, where he leaned against the chain-link enclosure—it bowed with his weight. I walked by, trying to be nothing to him, trying to reduce myself.

  “Hey,” he said. “Come here.”

  I went over to where he stood.

  I flinched when he reached out to me, but he just tugged at the white ribbon in my hair.

  “What are you trying to look like?” he said.

  “Nothing.” This was untrue. We are all, in one way or another, trying to look like something—but we don’t like to be called on it.

  “You look like a Creamsicle.”

  “Creamsicles are orange, not white,” I said victoriously. Then I chanced to look down and see that I had worn my orange winter jacket over my white cotton dress and white stockings. “Oh.”

  He tilted his head to the side and seemed to examine me. Then he leaned forward toward my neck and inhaled deeply.

  “You haven’t gone warg yet. You’re late.”

  I said nothing. I wanted to run.

  “Can you feel it? I remember—I could feel it growing in me before it came. Like a tumor or something. A sick feeling in your stomach. Your guts all rolling around. Then it came, and I wasn’t scared anymore. Are you looking forward to not being scared?”

  He did not wait for a response from me. He seemed to have something in his teeth, and he rolled his tongue around in his mouth until he got it. He plucked it out with two fingers and held it up to look at. It was a piece of pink gristle from the school meat loaf at lunch. He flicked it away and returned his gaze to me.

  “Me,” he said, “I’m fourteen months already. Longer than anyone else. Maybe I’ll never come out the other end. That happens sometimes, you know. Sometimes you stay breach your whole life.”

  “I never heard of that.”

  He shrugged.

  “Sometimes,” I said, “sometimes people don’t breach at all. They just skip it.”

  “Now we’ve both never heard of something.”

  Behind me I was aware that two freshman girls were walking across the parking lot. Roy grew silent, and his hyena eyes watched them until they were out of sight.

  He leaned back and wound his fingers around the chain link over his shoulders. This is where I’ll admit that I’d never really looked at Blackhat Roy before. He’d always been an abstraction to me, like big human notions such as horror and courage and mortification. But now he was forcing me to look at him, all of him. Some people, when they’re breaching, don’t quite get back to their regular selves when the full moon is gone. For some, like Roy, their breacher sensibility follows them into the daylight, throughout the month, the entire year. This was the worst kind of breacher when the full moon rose—and between moons, even during the daylight, you could still see the feral radiance behind the eyes.

  He had grown bigger—I never really noticed it until now. He was no longer the runty creature I remembered from grade school. He had a thick mop of curly hair that fell down over his wide brow. He was dark, and it looked like he needed to shave. When he drew his hand across his jawline, you could hear a gristly static. His teeth were crooked, and the way his lips curled into a smile made you feel complicit in all sorts of crimes—things you didn’t even have names for.

  His hands, wrapped around the metal ligatures of the cage, were scarred and dirty and short-fingered. The nails were worn down to almost nothing and one of them was ripped off completely, as though he had paws made for digging, hands for labor or violence.

  “How come you didn’t save me today?” he said. “How come you didn’t rescue me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How come you didn’t keep your boyfriend from attacking?”

  I said nothing.

  “Is it because you figured I deserved it? Because you thought I must’ve done something wrong? Is that the reason?”

  I shivered, and my throat tried to close up. I didn’t know what would happen to me.

  “Yes,” I said quietly.

  “Well, you’re right. Did you know it’s considered bad manners to take a piss in somebody’s locker? I guess we learn through our mistakes.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said, my voice pleading.

  “Didn’t you?” His teeth gnashed, and for a second I thought he would use them to rip my throat out. I would have run, but I was pinned in a way that was a mystery to me. “Guess what. I may be rotten, but I ain’t the only one. I know it was you.”

  “What?”

  “You pulled the fire alarm that one time. You did it. And I know why. Did you think I forgot about that?”

  I didn’t know what to say to him, this furious and filthy golem of a boy. What could possibly be shared between us, apart from fear and calamity? I wanted to be away from him—I wanted him back in his cell in the abstract part of my brain, where I could trace him in the safe trigonometric functions of my daily life. But he wouldn’t go. Maybe he would do what Peter couldn’t. Maybe he would attack. Even here at school, because the boundaries of wilderness and civilization were nothing to Blackhat Roy. I closed my eyes and waited for whatever would come.

  “Don’t worry,” he said after a while. “Probably I won’t hurt you. I don’t get much joy out of hunting down defenseless animals. Not much.”

  He unleaned himself from the fence, stretched himself to his full length, and rotated his head quickly in a way that produced an audible crack in his neck. He started away, and I thought everything was over between us—but then, before he had walked very far, he turned back.

  “But when you go warg,” he said, “then you better watch out. Because I think I’d like to chomp on you a little.” He smiled when he said it, as though he wanted me not to fear his threats but to savor them.

  I didn’t move until he was completely out of sight, then I got my bike from the cage and rode home fast. The icy air blasted my face, but I was not cold. My lungs burned sulfur, and I wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. When I got home, I showered—and in my stomach, I could feel the deep bowl of my guts. They sloshed around as though I had all the violent seas of the world inside me.

  Chapter 4

  Just as the streets of our little town were plowed, another snow came and buried us again. People speculated that we were in for a rough winter. The lake froze early, and it froze wide. That year ice skaters could go farther out than they ever had before. I went skating myself, but I went in the early morning, when nobody else was there. I did spins and twirls, and I thought I must be the most elegant sight, a lone skater in the sunrise. When others began to show up, I glided to the shore and sat on a stone to remove my skates. They would always be surprised to see me. Their thought was to have been the first—but they weren’t. Sometimes things work that way.

  Peter continued to avoid me. And Polly spoke to me as though I were a child—when she spoke to me at all. As soon as the final bell of the school
day rang, I rushed home to avoid any further contact with Blackhat Roy, whose eyes seemed to track me in the halls from one room to the next. I had somehow wandered into his domain, and now I couldn’t escape. Once I had lamented being invisible, but now there was nothing I desired more than to be out from under his gaze. He seemed to know when I came into a room, because his head would swivel on his neck and those dark eyes of his would nail me to a wall. Even in the cafeteria, swarming with hundreds of moving bodies, echoing with a constant din—even there, when I walked through the doors, I could see that dusky, scabrous face of his looking through the crowd at me, a still-pale petal in an algae-covered pond.

  So instead of looking things up in the library after school, where I knew I’d be discovered, I took my books to the deserted school auditorium and studied there.

  I was very much enamored with maps that year. Maybe it was because my father was a geologist and was always looking at elaborate technical diagrams that made earthly landscapes look like strange outlined amoebas on the page. I sometimes thumbed through his books, tracing the curved lines with my finger. But really my interest was in conventional maps. I looked them up in old atlases. I followed their legends, exploring—mistaking, perhaps, the paper on which the world was printed for the actual world itself. I read books that had maps printed on their endpapers. As the events of the book unfolded, I would turn back to the endpapers and locate them on the map. I liked how the linear progression of time over the course of a novel could be condensed into a single map image, as though it were all said and done before the book even started—as though all of any person’s life could be reduced to just a legend explaining some fixed map we could not see.