When We Were Animals

by Joshua Gaylord

  A car came, and we stepped out of the road into a snowbank.

  “You know,” she said, “I kind of envy you that you’re just starting. But it’ll be better now. We’ll be together. It’s like you moved away for a while—but you’re back now.”

  The thought that I had traveled so far by accident the night before made me sick.

  “It feels wrong, Polly,” I said. “It just feels wrong.”

  “But it’s not,” she said. She took my shoulders and gave her head a maternal shake to reassure me. “It’s not. Don’t you see? It’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s only beautiful. That’s the only thing it is.”

  She shivered, then put her arms around me.

  “Come on,” she said. “Hug me. It’s cold. Let’s just forget about everything up till now. The past is dead and buried. That’s what the breach is all about, right?”

  I put my arms around her. Beneath the perfume of her shampoo, her hair smelled like something else—the fecund tang of earth and rot.

  * * *

  My second visitor of the day was Blackhat Roy. I saw him coming from down the street, and I rushed to meet him outside so my father wouldn’t see him at the door.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “Heard the news,” he said. “You’re out. You’re fair game.”

  “I’m not out.” In the daylight you scoff at the shadows you cowered from the night before. I had my mother’s blood. I knew I was different. I had faith that I was still not like the others. “I was helping my friend, and I was attacked. I ran.”

  “Spent all night running away?”

  “Go away.”

  He sniffled from the cold, wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

  “I saw you,” he said.

  “When?”

  “Last night. In the woods.”

  “You didn’t. I remember. I ran away from everybody.”

  “Fuck everybody. It was just me. And you saw me, too.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “The way you looked at me,” he went on, ignoring my denials, “I’ve never seen anything like that before. You didn’t just want to tussle—it was like you wanted to rip me to pieces.”

  He seemed delighted by the fact. The way he said it made it seem lascivious.

  “No,” I said again. “I was just running. But I’m not doing it again.”

  “You want to know the truth? I stayed out of your way. I’m not scared of much, but last night I was a little scared of you.”

  He smiled when he said it, a smile of filth and gloating. So what was that churning I felt in my belly when he winked at me?

  “See you on the wild side, girl.”

  I went back in the house and shut the door on him.

  In the kitchen, my father was making ginger tea, which was our favorite.

  * * *

  What was I?

  Defective, for one thing. I had grown wrong somehow. My atoms and molecules were failing to adhere to one another the way they should have. My organs were stunted, dwarflike. My body was one pale refusal.

  It didn’t matter that everyone else was doing it. Their doing it was native—my doing it was criminal.

  Even in this I had failed. Everyone was relieved that I had finally gone breach—they felt that they could talk to me now, that I was one of them, joined together in their wild union. But I wasn’t one of them after all. I was still different. They welcomed what I feared. They jumped when I cringed. They howled while I whimpered.

  Not that I was looking to be like the others. But to be between was too much to bear. To be defined by betweenness is not to be defined at all. It is to live your whole life at dusk, which is neither day nor night and therefore an hour of sad nothing caught between one kind of life and another.

  This was my inheritance from my mother.

  If I was truly out, as Blackhat Roy had said, why wasn’t I glad? And if I hadn’t fully gone breach, then what had caused me to blister myself with running?

  And that was something else, something my brain burned to think on. If I was still as breachless as my mother’s blood had made me, then the night before—when I had stripped myself bare and woken in the melted snow at dawn—who was the girl who had done that? What was she driven by?

  What excused her actions if those actions were not to be excused by instinct and biology or the horrible magic of this place?

  * * *

  Not everyone in our town acquiesced to the breaching so easily. It was difficult, sometimes, for parents to accept that their children could behave in such a way. Sometimes they even tried to delay the breaching or prevent it. There were urban myths about ways to keep your child from breaching. Giving them high doses of thiamine was one. Another was to make them sleep in a fully lighted room throughout their teenage years. For a while, before I was born, I even heard that some parents had begun to believe that if they kept their children shaved, completely hairless, the breaching would not set in. So for a period of five years or so, according to my father, there were a bunch of bald, eyebrowless teenagers walking around.

  I was fascinated by the idea. I liked to close my eyes and picture it. And I wondered about these parents. What did they believe? That savagery was something you donned as though it were a pelt?

  Other parents believed it was the town itself, our pinprick location under the moon, that was the cause of the breach. Sometimes parents would send their children away for the breach year to live with relatives in safe-sounding places such as Florida or Colorado or Arizona. And moving away did seem to work—insofar as the children did not see fit to run wild over the warm, sandy streets of Scottsdale. Sometimes, if they could afford it, the whole family would relocate and then return when the coast was clear.

  So that worked—kind of. Except not really, because when they returned, the breachers seemed different, odd. It wasn’t just that they no longer belonged to the town—though there was that. It was something else. I remember studying Caroline Neary when she came back after a year of living with her aunt in San Francisco. It was her eyes. She seemed scared. Not of anything outside—but of something else. I think I knew what she was scared of. There was something trapped in her—something grown too big to fit in her body, something stretching her at the seams because it wanted to get out but couldn’t. She moved out of our town the minute she graduated from high school—and we all thought she would be better off for it. But then we heard the distressing news, just a few years later, that she had impaled herself on a picket fence by jumping out the second-story window of her pleasant suburban home in the middle of the day on a Saturday.

  So I suppose whatever was trapped inside Caroline Neary eventually got out after all.

  There were other parents who, when the breach was upon their children and they knew they couldn’t escape it, tried to keep it at least contained, usually with disastrous results.

  When we were in the sixth grade, Polly and I had heard about Lionel Kirkpatrick, whose parents, unwilling yet to see their precious boy go breach, had locked him in the basement to keep him from running wild. Over the course of the night, Lionel had ravaged the space, trying to get out. It cost the Kirkpatricks ten thousand dollars in repairs, including a new water heater, because Lionel had somehow toppled the existing one and flooded the basement. In the morning, they found him asleep, curled on top of a pile of boxes, a castaway on an island in two feet of water.

  Another thing, from just the previous year: Amy Litt had gone breach and had come to school one morning with bandages all over her fingers. She, unashamed, explained to us that it was like the Bible story of Noah. Her father had found her sleeping naked in the street one morning after breach. He was a righteous man, and he felt a curse had befallen him for having accidentally seen his own daughter without clothes. So the next night he had shut her in the basement, just as Lionel Kirkpatrick’s parents had done to their son. Except Amy Litt’s destruction was of a more self-​directed variety. All she had wanted was
out. When her father had gone down to check on her in the morning, he found the concrete walls smeared with blood and his daughter huddled in the corner, shivering with pain. She had ripped all her fingernails out in trying to claw her way to freedom.

  The Kirkpatricks restored their basement, and nine of Amy Litt’s nails eventually grew back—so these unfortunate occurrences, like most things, were reversible with time. But they served as admonitions to the parents of our town not to stand in the way of the natural course of events, no matter how ugly or shameful.

  I know this now—and I raise my child to understand it as well. Some parents in our neighborhood do everything they can to keep their children away from violent images. And then, when something terrible happens, like murder or rape or genocide—well, then a conversation has to be had with these young innocents to explain that, yes, goodness is sometimes a fiction, like Santa Claus, and that humanity is, underneath all the cookie baking and song singing, a shameful and secret nastiness. Me, I’m going to raise my son differently. What he will be made to know is that there is violence in everything—even in goodness, if you’re passionate about it.

  But he already knows that. It’s why he pulls hair, why he bites what he loves.

  * * *

  But those were parents who had intervened against the wishes of their children. Their stories were different from mine. I was a half-breed. I wasn’t some wild creature. I was good. I was daylight and homework and logical answers. I was no tide to be puppeted by the moon. I had my mother’s blood. Maybe the night before had been an aberration. You didn’t have to give in to every impulse that stirred your blood. You could be better.

  I decided, whatever I had become, not to go outside the next night. I was determined not to yield to whatever disease was growing inside me.

  When it got dark, I found my father reading in the living room.

  “Good night,” I said.

  He looked at his watch.

  “It’s early,” he said.

  “I know. I’m worn out.”

  “Good Christmas, Lumen?”

  “Good Christmas, Dad. Good Christmas for you?”

  “Great Christmas. Among the best.”

  He was a sweet, oblivious man. He was the kind of man you wanted to be good for. How could you want to damage such a man with the truth of things?

  So I had to hide it from him—whatever it was. Up in my room, I shut my door and put my desk chair in front of it. I had seen people do this in movies, though my door didn’t seem any more secure for it. Through my window, I could see the moon through the tree branches, low on the horizon.

  My skin was itchy all over. I was feeling ragged and burned. There was a fan in my closet that was meant for the hot summer months—but I got it out and plugged it in and sat in front of it with my eyes closed, the air making me feel like I was moving at high speed, on my way to someplace grand and dramatic.

  Once, when I was much younger, I had asked my father what my mother had done all those nights when everyone had gone breach around her. He laughed and took me onto his lap, and this is what he said: “Do you want to know what she did? She sewed rag dolls. She was the most amazing seamstress, your mother. The dolls she made, they were exquisite. She became known for them all over town. Children would come by her house and stand beneath her window, and she would throw dolls down to them.”

  I always loved that story, and it wasn’t until I was older that I began to wonder why none of my mother’s rag-doll creations were still around. And then, later, my father’s story became even stranger to me because of its resemblance to something I read in Little Women. Still, I treasured the image of my mother sitting beneath a lamp at night sewing dolls, and I wondered what comparable thing I could do.

  I put my headphones on and listened to some music at volume level seventeen—I normally wouldn’t allow myself any volume over ten for fear of ruining my eardrums. But there was a bustle in my head that needed drowning out.

  On the wall over my bed there was a mismatched seam in the wallpaper, and tonight, for some reason, it bothered me. I picked at it without thinking, digging my fingernails underneath it until I had ripped away a whole flap. My hands wanted something to do. I made myself stop and reaffix the flap with white glue. But then I found myself winding my fingers around strands of hair and tugging them out of my scalp.

  To keep my hands occupied, I opened my sketch pad and started to draw a map. It was a map of a place I didn’t know. Sometimes those were the best ones. You started with a river and grew a town up around it. You discovered the place as you created it. Sometimes there were surprises.

  But tonight, for the first time, I was irritated by my little fictional operettas. The music in my ears seemed mechanical and false. The map emerging under my artless hands seemed flat, predictable. I began to wish I knew how to paint scenes rather than just maps. I wanted to paint like Edward Hopper. I wanted to show the depth of the dark by delivering just a small, broken segment of light. I wanted to look into windows from the outside.

  I was hot, and there was nothing the fan could do about it. My skin itched, the kind of itch that made diving into a thorny shrub sound like a delicious dream.

  It was only nine o’clock. I went to the window. It was safe, I imagined, just to look. I renewed my resolution not to set even one foot outside. The moon was still low. I could see it superimposed over my reflection on the pane of glass, yet still very far away. I pressed my forehead to the glass and used my hands as a visor in order to see more, to get closer, but my breath quickly fogged the view.

  I unlocked the window and slid it upward. It was just something I did. It required no thought or bargaining.

  I knew a rhyme that had always seemed powerful to me. If I spoke it aloud, maybe I could still be saved, even with the window open. So I leaned as far as I could out the window into the night and repeated the rhyme over and over.

  There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.

  He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.

  He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.

  And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

  I leaned out the window, and the air sighed upon my itchy skin.

  Were these, then, the pathways to damnation—and was this why they were so difficult for people to resist?

  There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.

  My window was in a dormer, and I crawled through until half of me was lying on the downward slope of the roof.

  But my legs were still inside the house. Inside the little crooked house. No walking a crooked mile tonight—not without those little crooked legs.

  You could breathe the night. I never knew that before. The air tasted different when it was uninfused with light. It went deeper in you. You could want it—just that.

  And it was cold. There was a high-contrast sharpness to everything. It was a wakeful night—so wakeful that daytime consciousness seemed a blur.

  He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.

  Yes, the crookedness of things. I could see it now.

  You could get sick to death of delicate symmetry. You could want other things, and that wanting could be ambrosial all on its own.

  You could even become angry at your own prohibitions—you could begin to suspect the origins of all the tinny moralities that point you in all the directions of your life.

  It occurred to me that I would like to feel the moonlight on my bare skin. The thought occurred to me, and I studied it in the cool, rational part of my brain—but while I was studying it, I noticed that my fingers had already begun the process of undoing the buttons on my pajama top. I watched them, curiously, from the rational distance of my brain—I wondered who they thought they were, those fingers that had spent so much time doing my bidding in the past.

  Those little crooked fingers, they run their crooked way.

  You could sometimes want to run. You could sometimes want to run out
your window, off your roof, down the street, deep, deep into the unlit heart of an emptied town.

  * * *

  I darted from yard to yard, looking in windows. Squares of light. Actions playing out in them. Like television screens hung randomly along the street. Sometimes you could see a television screen inside the television screen of the window. Layers of lit life in the distance. And here was I—shrouded behind the curtains of night, lost in the muffled dullness of a noiseless winter. And it was okay. It was better than okay. It was glorious.

  I could leap. Fences were nothing to me. Rules were for those small enough to live inside them. I was large.

  It was possible, I saw now, to be a grotesque, to be huge and free, to wander the streets in utter freedom despite your atrocity, as long as you did it when everybody else was sealed inside their little lit boxes.

  Now it made sense—why monsters came out at night.

  Chapter 6

  I scrubbed myself clean in the morning, coating my skin with lotion that smelled of lemons.

  I didn’t tell my father. I decided to keep it from him as long as I could. I dreaded being found by him curled naked on the back porch or befouled with mud.

  The second night was more lucid than the first. I stayed by myself for a long time. In the distance I could hear the others, roaming the streets in packs. When their voices got louder, I hid. I watched them pass by, tangled around each other and caught up in their passions. I did not want to be joined with them.

  In front of the church, I watched from a copse of trees as a group of breachers knocked apart a manger scene left over from Christmas. I waited until they were gone, then I put everything back aright.

  As I put the baby Jesus back in his little nest, I stood back and looked at it.

  It had nothing to do with God. It was just glowy and sweet, and it spoke of aching desire and a longing for peacefulness.

  I wished the scene had been baked in an oven so I could eat it.

  * * *