Hall of Small Mammals

by Thomas Pierce

  “What are you doing?” Tammy asked. “You need to be sleeping.”

  “I would if I could,” her mother said. She flipped through the channels and stopped on a home shopping network. Tammy swiveled her chair toward the television. They watched a woman model some clip-on earrings. The woman looked a little bit like Tammy in the face, her mother pointed out, “Just around the nose. Don’t you think?” Tammy didn’t answer that. The woman on the television had an ugly little snub nose.

  Tammy couldn’t get back to sleep after that. They watched prices for more clip-on earrings flash onto the screen, and then they watched a bald man with a thin mustache show off a vacuum that could suck up wet stains.

  “That could come in use around here,” Tammy said, and patted the end of the bed.

  “Ha. Ha. Ha,” her mother said.

  When the nurse came into the room, around four a.m., her mother asked Tammy to leave the room for a minute.

  “What for?”

  “Because I need to ask the nurse something in private.”

  “Mom, don’t be silly.”

  “You can come back in a few minutes.”

  “Fine,” Tammy said, “I need to get going anyway.” She grabbed her overnight bag out of the closet and left the hospital. On the drive home she stopped by a coffee shop for lattes to go. Billy was just waking up when she came into the bedroom and stepped out of her shoes and shimmied out of her underwear in front of the closet. She went into the bathroom for a shower. He followed her in to sit on the toilet lid and drink the latte she’d brought him.

  “You want to talk about it?” he asked.

  She said she didn’t. The steam curled over the shower curtain rod. The vanilla bar soap, from a farmers’ market, turned to goop in her hands. Billy stripped down and stepped into the shower with a hard-on.

  “Not now,” she said. “Tonight maybe.”

  “Just because I have an erection, doesn’t mean I’m asking for sex.”

  She laughed and left him in the shower. She got to work early but then fell asleep with her head on her desk. The supervising producer came in to nudge her awake. She’d missed the morning editorial meeting. He gave her the assignment.

  “But listen,” he said. “You don’t have to go. Take a few more days. Go be with your mother.”

  Tammy didn’t want to take any more time off from work. She would do the story.

  Standing in front of the crime scene, she collects her thoughts and waits for the cue from her cameraman. The air is muggy and her hair frizzy. Their van is parked down the street.

  “Details are sparse, Gary, but it’s here that—” As she says this, she twists, ever so slightly, to reveal more of the house, and her heel sinks deep into a bed of soft pine needles. She falls, not at all gracefully, her legs opening wide, skirt sliding up toward her waist, her black underwear and panty hose and who knows what else exposed to the camera. The microphone rolls.

  The network, thankfully, cuts away to her prerecorded story.

  “Are you all right?” the cameraman asks Tammy, extending a hand. He’s relatively new to the station. His name is Mike or Mel or Matt maybe. He helps her off the ground and swats away the dirt from her skirt and jacket.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” she says, her face flushed red.

  On the ride back to the station, he sticks out his pinkie. “I pinkie-swear that I’ll delete that footage as soon as I get back.” She hooks her pinkie in his, amused by the gesture despite the fact that thousands of viewers already saw her fall.

  “Could you see my underwear?” she asks, doing her best to smile.

  “Yeah,” he says. “But just a little. Not much. Nothing X-rated.”

  Fatty Kids Falling Watch N Laff

  A slightly pudgy boy in his white underwear slides across a blue tarp on his belly. Dish soap keeps the tarp slippery. There’s a garden hose positioned at the top, the chilly water gurgling out of it and streaming around his small body. The boy, Adam Fitzgerald, has tight curly hair, wet-dark, and he’s sliding headfirst. He didn’t bring a bathing suit to the party. Nobody told him there would be a Slip ’N Slide! Why didn’t anybody tell him? If they had, he would have brought his suit. Back home he’s got a blue one with a pocket that has another pocket inside of it. He keeps coins in there, and shells, and sharks’ teeth, and his house key.

  He’s still sliding. The girls at the party in their pink and purple swimsuits, the red coolers with the white tops, the green blanket over the card table, the tall creamy brown birthday cake and the white plastic forks—everything is a colorful blur as he slides downhill. Time falls away. Space too when he squishes his eyes shut. He imagines himself like a bolt of lightning. Bodiless. An electrical current, sharp and fast. This is his third slide of the day, but it’s as glorious as the first. The sunlight warms his back. When it goes cool, he knows he has moved into the second half of his journey, the half under the shadowy cover of the oak trees. Is his heart even beating? Is he breathing?

  But then his slide comes to an end. Half of his body goes over the edge of the tarp. His chest and arms land in the scratchy green grass. He stands and wipes his palms across his bare legs. Grass blades stick to his skin like a disease. He picks off each one and flicks it away with his pruned thumb and index finger.

  Adam sees Madeline too late. She was next in line, and she’s sliding fast. She knocks out his legs. He falls forward and face-plants on the sudsy tarp. Madeline is pinned beneath him. She’s kicking and shoving. She’s crying. Mr. Bell comes running. Adam rolls over onto his side. Mr. Bell helps up Madeline, his hands under her soapy armpits. Adam can hear other kids laughing behind him. He runs his tongue along the bottom of his teeth. One of his front teeth is chipped, its edge so sharp it slices his tongue.

  If you were watching America’s Funniest Home Videos on October 9, 1993, then you saw Adam Fitzgerald’s fall on the Slip ’N Slide at his friend’s birthday party. His video was seven seconds long and appeared in a montage of children getting mildly hurt in a variety of ways—on bicycles, on jungle gyms, with hammers, with sprinklers. His friend’s father submitted the home video, though Adam’s mother had to sign a release form before it could air. She signed the form without really thinking much about it. She assumed it would be cute. She’s always been impulsive that way, and she regrets it.

  All grown up now and living in another city, her son doesn’t always answer her calls. It rings and rings, and she has to leave two and three messages before he ever calls her back. It’s not the worst arrangement. In truth she has an easier time saying I love you to a person’s answering machine than she does to the actual person.

  SCARY—Elevator FAIL

  Adam Fitzgerald shed his baby weight in grade school, and now he runs one of the most influential right-wing Listservs in the country. What he writes in the morning often winds up in the mouths of certain cable news anchors that evening. He keeps an office in an ancient building with ancient elevators.

  The elevator doors ding open in the lobby, and a group of people rush inside together, a confluence of hot breath, bad breath, mouthwash breath, wool suits, cotton tops, warm flesh, sweaty flesh, perfumes, and colognes. One of the passengers bundles mortgage-backed securities. Another one believes the Bible should be read literally, that Jonah really did get swallowed by the whale, that there really will be four horsemen with steaming nasty breath at the end of days. A man and woman near the back, both of them married to other people, are in love with each other and sometimes sneak into the out-of-order men’s bathroom on the twenty-first floor.

  Together, this group weighs 1,922 pounds. “Too many of us,” someone says, but the doors shut, and they are moving. The elevator rises arthritically up the shaft, and they are very quiet until, just before the sixteenth floor, something overhead pops. They scream, and the elevator plummets, down and down and down, all of them surely about to die, about to collapse i
nto a dense mangled heap of body parts.

  They fall for six floors before the brakes engage. They are breathing hard, their hot breath, bad breath, and mouthwash breath mingling. Somehow, miraculously, they have survived.

  If you looped the video, the elevator would fall forever.

  SCARY—Elevator FAIL Looped Forever MAKES YOU THINK

  Randolph is on that elevator. As it fell, he thought about . . . well, he can no longer remember what he thought about. Quite possibly he was thinking of nothing at all. After the elevator stops falling, the woman to his left sobs into a Kleenex. The mood is somber, but then a man behind him says, “Well, that was unexpected,” and a few people manage to laugh. But the laughter is uneasy. The elevator is frozen between floors, and they aren’t free yet. This could still go wrong.

  They have to wait another twenty minutes for a group of firemen to drag them up and out by the arms. Once lifted out, Randolph checks the plaque next to the elevator. He is on the eleventh floor. The passengers mill around until everyone is entirely free and safe. The woman who was crying says someone should really complain, someone should sue the building, someone should write the mayor. Nobody responds to her. Some people press the button for another elevator. Other people go looking for the stairwell. Randolph wonders if this choice between stairs and elevator is significant. His immediate impulse is to take the stairs—but it’s not as though he’s never going to take an elevator again. What happened was a fluke, rare as being struck by lightning, and it would be foolish to spend the rest of his life climbing stairs or avoiding tall buildings altogether.

  He takes the stairs.

  He’s in the building to visit Adam Fitzgerald, his racquetball partner. Sometimes, between games, they discuss their work, but Randolph can never quite make sense of Adam’s job, of how a Listserv can generate an income. “So who’s paying you, exactly?” he’s asked his friend.

  “You are,” he says.

  “What do you mean, I am?”

  “I mean, all of it, everything, what people say, the entire system. It feeds itself.”

  These conversations are always elliptical and frustrating, and so mostly they just play racquetball in the gym on the second floor of this building, where they are both members.

  Randolph climbs twelve flights of stairs. He’s breathing heavy when he knocks on Adam’s suite door.

  “You’re way late,” Adam says.

  “I had to take the stairs from the eleventh floor. Your elevator almost killed me.”

  “Did it drop again? We’re supposed to be getting a new one,” Adam says, and then turns his computer slightly sideways so that Randolph can see the screen too. He clicks through his in-box. “Come and look at this. Someone sent it to me.”

  They watch about two minutes of a video montage. A chubby man rides a motorbike over a dirt mound and gets tossed. A woman with a birthday cake gets knocked by a small child into a swimming pool. In front of a crowd of people at Kennedy’s Eternal Flame, an older woman trips and stumbles forward forward forward and down onto her chest. A man, Marshall, turns away from a bank ATM and slams into a wall of glass before falling back onto the floor. A small pudgy boy gets knocked down on a Slip ’N Slide.

  “Look at that fat little fucker,” Adam says, and replays the Slip ’N Slide accident. He doesn’t tell Randolph that it’s him, that he’s the little fucker. The first time he clicked on this video link, he was mortified to find himself among its victims. But then he started playing it for people and forwarding it. He started posting cruel comments on the video’s thread, subjecting the fat little fucker to all sorts of online abuse. “Take it easy,” another commenter said once in response to Adam. “He’s just a poor kid.”

  Adam watches his friend react to the Slip ’N Slide fall, smirking, then lets the video play forward. The falls are repetitive and hypnotic. It’s hard to believe these are the same mammals that sent one of their own to the moon. When the video ends, it suggests ten more just like it. Adam clicks on one. Beyond each video are ten more. It could go on forever, a video fractal.

  “Who has the time to compile all this?” Randolph asks. “Who makes them?”

  “We all do.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Not you specifically. But all of us, what we watch, what we want, everything, the entire system. It’s all of us.” Adam has his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His hair is tight and curly. They’re watching reporters now. One reporter falls after getting kicked in the nuts by a giant bird. Another one, Tammy, falls backward and flashes her panties.

  “God, I love local news,” Adam says. “Isn’t it the best? This morning they did a story on defective treadmills. Oh, man, you should have seen it. Funniest thing ever. The reporter actually interviewed a guy while they were both walking on treadmills.”

  “You ready to play? I’ve got to be back at work in an hour.”

  They leave the suite, and Adam locks the door. Downstairs at the gym, they play two games of racquetball. They are evenly matched, but Randolph wins both games today.

  “Everything all right?” Adam asks. They are in the changing room, in towels after their showers, arranging themselves in the steamy mirror. “You seem a little out of it.”

  Randolph combs his hair and tells his friend about the elevator, how his mind emptied out while he was falling.

  “Sounds like you went Zen, brother. It means you’re an enlightened dude.”

  Enlightened. Randolph tries on the word like a pair of pants that won’t ever fit right. He doesn’t know a lotus from a lama. The only time he ever meditated—“Your thoughts are balloons,” the instructor kept saying—he fell asleep and started snoring in front of the entire class.

  “I never believed in heaven,” Randolph says. “Not as an actual place. But I always kind of hoped that at the moment we die, time no longer works the same and your final three seconds of brain activity might feel infinite. Like a dream that doesn’t end. And your last conscious thought would determine the dream.”

  “The average male thinks about sex every eight-point-five seconds, so—”

  “But I wasn’t thinking about anything. It just would have been over. Just like that.”

  That night Randolph gets home very late. Beth, now his wife, is already in bed, reading the novel about beekeepers. He brushes his teeth and then lies awake in the dark beside her. Their five-year-old daughter is asleep in the next room.

  “How was your day?” she asks.

  Sometimes when they sleep with their backs to each other, her voice sounds impossibly distant, like the bed is twenty feet across and they’re on either edge. He pretends, for a moment, that the bed really is twenty feet across and that he is the sort of husband who tells his wife nothing, who holds on to stupid little stories simply for the satisfaction of possessing something she knows nothing about. Pushing her away could start here, now. But he tells her about the elevator, about the nothingness, even about his fear that this life is all there is. She takes his hand and asks him for more. He tells her everything.

  Funniest Treadmill & Stairs Falls Ever

  Carol Spivey—whose beekeeper novel was on the Times bestseller list for forty-two weeks—runs on a treadmill in a wide and bright gym. Her speed is 6.2 miles per hour. Affixed to the treadmill is a small television screen. She has the news on but forgot her headphones, so she has to read the captions. The anchor is interviewing the defense attorney representing the cellist who murdered his wife’s lover. The case has been all over the news because the wife’s lover was a semi-famous musician. Musician-on-musician violence, the banner at the bottom of the screen says. The anchor asks how the cellist will plead, and the lawyer says that hasn’t been determined yet.

  “We just don’t know all the facts yet,” the lawyer says.

  “But I think it’s fairly open-and-shut, isn’t it?” the anchor asks. “They have a witness, the sister.
They have a motive.”

  “We just don’t know all the facts yet,” the lawyer says again.

  Carol changes the channel. She doesn’t like to watch that kind of filth. It pollutes the mind. She runs to clear her head and think of new book ideas. But then again, the cellist’s story is an intriguing one, full of interesting contradictions. In his picture he looks like such a mild-mannered man. They say he worked in a stationery store, of all places. He was capable of producing such beautiful music, and yet he committed this horrible crime. Carol has never explicitly written about murder. She’s never inhabited a killer’s head (a type of head she has always assumed to be very different from her own). Already she is constructing a plot, an intricate one, with so many characters and story lines that she’ll hardly have to focus on the murder at all. She’ll be able to write all the way around it without touching the dark sticky thing itself.

  The treadmill makes a disconcerting whipping noise, the belt kicks sideways, and it spits Carol off the back end. She rolls into a stationary bike, and its gray plastic pedal nicks her neck. She is the 342nd person injured by this type of treadmill. It leaves a small, light scar.

  Later that year she joins the class-action lawsuit against the manufacturer, which coincides with the cellist’s trial. In spite of herself, Carol finds herself tuning in for the highlights every evening. They say the cellist is guilty; the cellist is not guilty; the cellist lost his mind; the cellist was depressed; the cellist was lonely; the cellist was a good man in a bad situation; the cellist was a bad man who had always acted like a good man; the cellist was jealous; the cellist had been treated poorly; the cellist had so much to be grateful for; the cellist is deeply sorry; the cellist should be put to death; the cellist should be put in a hospital; the cellist should get locked up with his cello but without a bow and rosin ha ha ha; honestly, who cares about the cellist?

  Eventually Carol loses interest in the cellist like everyone else. She doesn’t write a novel about him. Instead she does what everyone wants her to do, which is write a sequel about the stupid beekeepers.