Found Life

by Linor Goralik

  And then, all of a sudden, I understood everything. It’s an amazing feeling, I can never figure out how it happens: you don’t understand something for a long time and then all of a sudden you understand everything. Anyway, I understood everything. I went to the bathroom to wash the ink off my hands. I was shaking all over, but on the other hand now I knew what to do. I went to my room, stuck a pillow under the bed and covered the beastie’s face with it so you couldn’t hear it whimpering anymore. Then I closed the door to my room, and Mom and I watched a funny show about a nanny. Sometimes I would listen closely and it would seem to me that I could hear the beastie whimpering and crying, but maybe I was just hearing things.

  After the show Mom asked me if I wanted a shower or a bath. I said I wanted a bath. All this time I had been washing in a hurry because I couldn’t hear the beastie over the noise of the water and worried that it would make trouble. But tonight I sat in the bath for real. It was really nice. Then I went to my room and put on the music I like to fall asleep to sometimes. The pillow and the music drowned out the beastie and Mom didn’t hear anything. She kissed me and said again that she loved me. I said I loved her too and would do anything for her. And she said that all she needed from me was for me to be healthy and happy. Mom asked if she could give me a piece of candy, and I said: “Of course.” Then Mom was glad and brought me the prettiest candy of all, the one in gold foil from that box Uncle Vitya had brought for my birthday. I said that I would eat it in the dark, it’s more exciting that way. Mom kissed me and left, and I got under the bed and took out the beastie.

  It was breathing really quietly now. Its protruding ribs rose and fell. In the glow of the nightlight the beastie looked pretty bad. The little round wounds from where I had poked it with the pen were bleeding. I unwrapped the candy and fed it to the beastie, little by little. It had trouble swallowing but ate anyway. The t-shirt I had put out for it was now horribly dirty. I wrapped the beastie in the t-shirt, pressed it close, and sat with it for a little bit. Then I stood up, placed the beastie on the windowsill, put my sneakers right on my bare feet, cradled the beastie in my arms and climbed out the window into the yard. All I had on was pajamas and snow was flying at me, but I was still sweating. The beastie in my arms moaned very softly, but I whispered to it: “Hold on, hold on.” I started walking in the direction of the park, then turned off into the second side street and climbed up the fire escape to the second floor, pressing the beastie close with one hand. The palm of that hand got all red again. I looked in the window. Vera the Dummy was sleeping on her stomach, butt sticking up, in a nightgown that went all the way down to her feet. I climbed over the windowsill. I could barely hear the beastie moaning in my arms. I carefully got on my knees next to the bed and put the beastie on the floor. I made sure that the shirt was underneath it, covered it with one free end and a sleeve, and then pushed it under Vera the Dummy’s bed, very quietly. Something banged under the bed, like there were pans or pots down there. I froze, but Vera the Dummy didn’t even move.

  Then I climbed back out the window, down the fire escape, and went straight home. I decided to first walk home, climb back into my room and lie down in bed, and only then start crying. That would earn me five green cards.

  FISHIES

  My mom doesn’t like butchers—she says that there’s nothing good about being used to the sight of blood. That’s why I usually go to our butcher alone—I’m not afraid of blood. I’m not afraid of anything at all because I’m really tall, sturdy, and strong. I think I might be stronger than the butcher. The butcher likes me, he lets me ask a lot of questions and answers me if he can find the time, and if he can’t, I don’t get offended because when he’s busy with other customers I can look at the fishies.

  The fishies make me feel so good that I can’t go home, I just keep on standing there. They’re just small gray fishies with little black stripes, but if you look at them for a while they become unbelievably beautiful. They don’t look at me at all, even if I stamp my feet and shout. I try not to do that because the butcher says right away: “Get out!” And I know that if you’re told to go then you have to go right away, and then I have to leave the fishies.

  But I really want the fishies to look at me. I’m not allowed to have fishies at home because my cat is deranged. Once I even had to go down to hell and ask them to let him go because, at the time, I was the one to blame for his bad behavior, not him, because I had trained him badly. Or actually, I hadn’t trained him at all because I liked that the cat could just do whatever came into his head. I myself can’t just do whatever comes into my head: I don’t know how to stop and can cripple or even kill someone, especially if I’m mad, and I get mad a lot.

  When the cat got let out of hell, I took charge of his upbringing so that the next time he died he could answer for himself. When I’m training the cat, I often get horribly mad at him, so mad my eyes turn white (that’s when I stop even being able to see what I’m doing). I know that at times like that the most important thing is to have time to put my hands behind my back. Dina taught me that. That was the first thing Dina taught me. Dina also taught me never to yell at anyone, but I can’t not yell at the cat. I yell at the cat and stamp my feet with all my might, and Mom sits in the next room and worries that I’m going to kill the cat, so I always feel really ashamed afterward. But the cat is totally deranged, so there’s no way to scare him.

  That’s why it’s so hard for me to train him not to eat every single thing. The cat eats cockroaches, ants, worms, and this one big beetle that he choked on so badly that we had to take him to the vet. I cried the whole way there because the cat was breathing in a really scary, loud way and I was scared he would die un-re-trained and would end up in hell again, but everything turned out OK, and the cat learned to first kill beetles and tear them to pieces and only then eat them. I think that’s a result of my training. I try to teach the cat everything Dina taught me before she went away, but I can’t tell him to put his paws behind his back when he wants to kill someone, because then the cat would fall over. It’s because of the cat that I can’t have fishies—that’s why I like to go to the butcher’s so much. It used to be that I could look at the fishies for as long as I wanted to in Dina’s room, but Dina went away.

  I go to the butcher every Tuesday. This Tuesday I also went to the butcher, and he didn’t have any visitors except me. I was really glad, and said that I’m really glad that lately the butcher hasn’t had as many visitors because now he can talk to me and answer my questions, and also I said that I’m grateful to him for answering my questions. Dina always told me that if you think good things about a person, you should definitely tell them about it right away, but when you do it you shouldn’t hug or lift them up into the air because not everyone likes that. When I like someone, I always want to grab them with my hands and hug them and spin them around, but Dina says that you can only do that to the cat, but for everyone else, words are enough to get across that I like them. Even Mom doesn’t really like me to pick her up and spin her around. Dina I tried to hug the very first time I came to her room.

  I used to see her every week, like the butcher, before she went away. Dina talked to me and answered my questions too, but we agreed that we’d play a game: first she would ask me questions and I would answer them, but before leaving I could ask her about something. I don’t really like being asked questions, and Dina’s questions could be really unpleasant sometimes, and they made me want to scream and stamp my feet, but Dina taught me not to stamp or scream but to look at the fishies until I stopped feeling mad, and to answer only after that. Sometimes I would even forget to ask her my question at the end, and sometimes I wouldn’t know what to ask and would ask what she had for breakfast or if she had a cat. We would talk about my cat a lot—Dina didn’t have her own cat, so she was interested in hearing about how I was training mine. And sometimes I would really want to ask a question and could barely make it to the end of our meeting, and when the clock would read three minutes to
six, it would be my turn. One time I asked who she loved the most. She said, her mom and dad. That made me love Dina even more.

  Sometimes I would have to look at the fishies for five or even ten minutes right after coming into her room, because it would happen that Mom would get me there on time, I would go down the hall past other doors to Dina’s room and knock like you’re supposed to, but Dina would say through the door: “Wait, please,” and then I would know that Baldie was there with her and didn’t want to leave. I hate Baldie, and if he visits Dina on the same day as me, I think he’s doing it on purpose. I picture Dina smiling at him like she smiles at me and teaching him to look at the fishies, and telling him that he’s a good person just like she does with me. Sometimes I hear him crying in her room even though you’re not supposed to eavesdrop, but I can’t help myself, and Dina comforts him and talks to him like she’s his friend, and that makes me feel really sick because Dina is my friend.

  I know that you’re supposed to share your friends, for example I don’t get upset that in our arts and crafts group, Vera the Dummy isn’t only my friend, and Alik doesn’t get upset that I’m not only his friend, although maybe Alik doesn’t understand anything. But Dina is a completely different story. One time I even started yelling and trying to grab Baldie, but Dina yelled right back at me and got really mad and said that I’m not the only one who needs her, her other patients need her too, and that she’d try to make it so I didn’t have to see Baldie anymore. But sometimes Baldie would cry and I knew that Dina couldn’t throw him out, so I would have to wait. Baldie would come out all puffy from tears and run quickly past me, I knew he was afraid of me, and serves him right too. On days like that I would come right into the room and start looking at the fishies while Dina put on her kerchief and only then would we start to play the question game. On days like that it was much harder for me to play, but I tried.

  I didn’t hug the butcher, I just told him that I would be very happy even if I ended up being his only customer, because then we could talk all the live-long day and look at the fishies. The butcher said that I’m a good person. That’s true, I’m a really good person, because I train myself all the time and try really hard. I hope my cat also becomes a good person someday. I said so to the butcher, but then some man in a suit with a briefcase came in and started to look around. The butcher seemed scared and came out from behind the counter to meet him. I saw the butcher get scared and purposely asked the man in a loud voice if he was a gangster. He was quite small, this man, especially by comparison to me, I could have easily beaten him up, but the butcher quickly said that the man wasn’t a gangster and apologized to him. They went way into the back of the shop and I started looking at the fishies. One of them was swimming really slowly today and lay on the bottom of the tank most of the time. I couldn’t help myself and shouted a couple of times: “Hey! Hey!” but then scolded myself in my mind right away.

  The fishies made me feel awfully good, so good that I don’t even have words for it. Maybe it was because they swam around so slowly and were so aloof or because they weren’t afraid of me at all or because they would start to glow when sunlight fell on the aquarium and I could see their little bones through their skin, bones teeny-tiny and soft like little hairs. When sunlight fell on Dina’s hair it would also start to glow and the hairs looked teeny-tiny, like the little bones of the fishies, though not gray but bright and orange. My hair is all gray and very smooth, but Dina’s grows in ringlets and shines above her head. Looking at her hair always made me agitated and after I came to visit her for the second time and asked to touch her hair before leaving and told her that it made me agitated, she started to put on a kerchief before I arrived. Dina always knew how to make me stop being agitated.

  Dina also taught me to imagine that I’m looking at fishies swimming around all lovely and moving their lips even if there aren’t any fishies around. That actually helps me feel way less mad. It helps a lot because I’m really sturdy and strong and when I get seriously mad my eyes go all white and it’s really hard for me not to attack people. I put my hands behind my back, close my eyes, and start imagining the fishies looking at me and moving their lips. When I open my eyes, the person I’m mad at usually has had time to run off, or Mom has had time to take me away.

  I get really mad when I think about how Dina went away and didn’t even say goodbye to me, but that doesn’t make my eyes go white at all. It just makes me want to cry. I think that if I saw Dina again, I wouldn’t want to yell at her, I’d want to hug her and spin her around. Of course, I wouldn’t do that, I’m just saying that I would definitely want to, even though I’m really mad at her. I asked Mom what happened to Dina’s fishies. Mom said Dina took them with her. That’s really good because I couldn’t have taken them home because of my crazy cat. I also asked Mom what happened to Baldie. Mom said she didn’t know. I asked if Dina had taken him with her. Mom said no, she hadn’t. That made me feel a little better because Baldie is probably even sadder about Dina than me. At any rate I almost never cried in her room, and it seemed like Baldie cried every time. I’m really strong and barely ever cry.

  I listened to the butcher talking to the man in the suit in the back room. The butcher was really angry and I thought that probably this man couldn’t pay for his meat, but he didn’t seem poor at all, and plus the butcher didn’t care, when Mom and I or old Nadya came to get meat at the end of the month the butcher would always tell us not to give him money right then, adding: “No big deal, we’ll settle up next time.” Mom would always insist that the butcher take the money, and would say that we’re all in the same boat. I think that was her joke because of the fishies swimming in the butcher shop. I always felt happy when Mom said that, it was a really funny joke. I really wanted the butcher to say that today, too: “We’ll settle up next time,” I would put the money on the counter and say: “We’re all in the same boat,” but the butcher just wouldn’t come out.

  He and the man kept slapping something on the table like they were throwing down magazines or papers, the butcher was talking really loudly, but the man either didn’t talk at all or talked really quietly, I couldn’t hear him. When people are yelling and fighting nearby, I always get agitated and right away I want to yell, too, so I plugged my ears and started looking at the fishies.

  Dina had amazing fishies, I’d never seen ones like that before. I hadn’t seen ones like that even when Mom took me to the special store where you could come and look at the fishies for fifty rubles even if you weren’t going to buy any. There were such lovely ones there, such amazing and beautiful fishies, that I couldn’t help myself and quickly hugged one of the tanks because if I hadn’t done that I would probably have gone crazy. I’m not allowed to go to that store too often because I always hate the cat afterward and I yell at him even harder if he doesn’t go a good job training. But even that store didn’t have fishies like Dina’s. One time we made an appointment for ten after five and I came on time, and knocked, but Dina called out, “Wait, please.” I had had a bad day because that morning I had gone to arts and crafts and they told us that Vera the Dummy had gotten sick and wouldn’t do arts and crafts with us anymore, but instead she was going to the sanatorium to get better.

  I felt sad because Vera the Dummy was my friend and also because I was worried for her, and also because she and I would do that thing sometimes and I knew that I would miss her. The other women in our class don’t do that thing even though they sometimes glance at me because I’m really big and strong and sturdy, even though I’m all gray, and Lola is always saying all kinds of dirty things when she looks at me and gets scolded for it, and in fact you can’t do that thing there because some of us don’t understand responsibility. We also aren’t allowed to do it because someone like me could get agitated and kill someone. And people like Alik always start crying if Lola or Vera the Dummy tries to grab them. If anyone grabs anyone, we get scolded.

  But Vera the Dummy couldn’t care less about any of it, she always laughed a
nd showed everyone what she had under her skirt whenever and wherever she wanted, and that day Lola started to tell everyone that Vera the Dummy didn’t get sick but instead ran away from home and tried to grab a policeman and now she’s been arrested and put in the Institute. The Institute is really scary, I could end up at the Institute too if I yell at someone besides the cat and I got really scared for Vera the Dummy and for myself too, and I really needed to look at the fishies and tell Dina everything because Dina would have calmed me down, but Baldie just wouldn’t leave, he just wouldn’t leave. I was feeling worse and worse and Baldie kept crying and crying in there, behind the door, and then I knocked again, but Dina yelled again: “Please wait!” and all of a sudden I really wanted to scratch my feet, which always means that everything has gone all wrong and in a second I’m going to start yelling and running in circles and won’t know what I’m doing anymore.

  Then I put my hands behind my back and started to picture the fishies. My feet itched horribly and something was shivering in my throat and so I couldn’t picture the fishies for a long time, I kept seeing these red spots. Then they thinned out a little and I noticed that the door to Dina’s room was all see-through, which I hadn’t noticed before. My hands got really heavy and my fingers started to hurt. Because of the red spots my head was going around in circles, but on the other hand through the see-through door I saw the aquarium and started to look at the fishies like Dina had taught me to. It was hard to breathe, but, bit by bit, the red spots went away and I saw the aquarium. It turned out to be really big, I complimented Dina and said that I really liked her new aquarium, but Dina didn’t answer me—she was probably tucking her hair into the kerchief just then and couldn’t hear. I had already calmed down a little and was ready to play the question game, but she still hadn’t come back. All of a sudden I noticed that there was a person lying at the bottom of the aquarium; the aquarium was so huge that their entire body fit inside. I jumped in the aquarium right away and tried to take them out of the water, but all of a sudden it turned out that there wasn’t much water in there, it wasn’t even knee-high. It was just spilled all over the bottom, everything was wet, the rug and even the walls, I think—I wasn’t sure because I was still seeing the red spots, but they weren’t swimming in front of my eyes anymore, they were just sitting obediently in their places, and that was good.