Hall of Small Mammals

by Thomas Pierce

  Babies Falling Down SUPERCUT

  “Are you liking it?” Amy asks, and flicks the cover of the beekeeper sequel.

  “Not really,” Beth says, dog-earing her page. “It’s not as good as her first book. The main character just got back together with her husband because he promised to give up his violin for her. It all feels a bit contrived.”

  They are in the park down the street from Beth’s house. Beth hasn’t been snowboarding in years, but she does have a credit card now that earns her frequent-flier miles. She and her husband, Randolph, try to go on at least one adventure a year.

  Her friend Amy is visiting from Georgia with her five-year-old daughter. Beth’s own daughter is only a few months older. The girls are on the seesaw: up and down, up and down. The playground equipment is shiny and new, the mulch beneath it still humid and smelly. There are rope ladders and tunnels and shaky bridges and towers and bubble-windows and slides and poles and swings. Playground isn’t the right word for this place. It’s a play-kingdom.

  “They should make playgrounds for adults,” Beth says.

  “I think they’re called bars.”

  “No,” Beth says, “I mean it. If this place was twice as big, we would be out there playing too. Admit it.”

  “Why don’t you just go ride a roller coaster?”

  Beth and Amy lived on the same street as girls, and their mothers were best friends. That life can repeat itself so neatly is a fact that Beth, depending on her mood, finds either comforting or unsettling. But having her friend here for the week has illuminated certain differences between them. For instance: Amy’s suggestion that they just pick up some fast-food biscuits for the girls on their way to the library yesterday morning. Beth tried her best not to sound like a judgmental yuppie, but really—fatty lard biscuits? And later, when Beth broached the idea of dropping the girls off at a yoga class for kids, Amy looked at her like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard: “For five-year-olds?” she asked. “Next you’re going to tell me you’re raising a little whirling dervish.”

  So what if she was? Beth wanted to ask. Amy never left Georgia, and while it would be easy to blame their differences on geography or class, Beth knows those aren’t the culprits. Their lives deviated long before Beth left their home state, and besides, Amy lives near Atlanta, where there are probably a dozen kids’ yoga studios and where there are enough yuppie mothers to keep a thousand organic-only farmers’ markets in business.

  When their girls are finished on the seesaw, they come running toward their mothers, elated.

  Deep inside the ear is a mazelike structure of bone and pink tissue called the labyrinth, and at the end of the labyrinth is the vestibular system, which governs balance and helps us stay upright. Amy’s daughter battles constant inner ear infections and suffers from bouts of vertigo. The little girl falls forward onto her knees and palms. She doesn’t cry and she isn’t hurt or embarrassed. She stands and continues as if it never happened, though the moment is preserved, temporarily at least, on the traffic camera across the street.

  After the park Beth and Amy walk their daughters to Pop-Yop, the ice cream shop, where customers don’t pay by the scoop but by the ounce. The cashier actually weighs the cup after you add the toppings. Beth can’t help thinking of livestock as they shuffle forward in line. They sit outside in the sunshine as the girls devour every drop of ice cream (Amy’s daughter actually licks the cup clean), and then Beth leads them on a slightly circuitous route back to the house, hoping to wear out the wee ones and kill the sugar rush. The strategy is semi-effective. It takes some singing and cajoling and reading, but thirty minutes later, they have the girls down for naps in Beth’s big bed.

  “I can’t tell you how rare this is,” Amy says. “She hardly ever takes naps anymore. This is so nice. I feel like I should celebrate. What do you have to drink?”

  “I think someone left a bottle of Prosecco here a few weeks ago. You want me to get it?”

  Amy nods and so Beth pours the bubbly liquid into two wineglasses. They sit down on the couch together and appreciate the silence. Spread out across the coffee table there are a series of messy half-finished watercolor paintings. Amy picks up one. The painting is of a red street and a gray building and, behind that, a flat and tall mountain. Beth’s daughter painted it. In a closet upstairs there are at least twenty other paintings just like it.

  “This is beautiful,” Amy says. “She saw it on a vacation or something?”

  “No, we’ve never been anywhere like that.” Beth has a few theories about the painting, but she isn’t sure what Amy would think of them. Her friend is slumped down in the couch, feet propped up on the coffee table, the Prosecco balanced on her belly button. She looks exhausted. Beth decides to tell Amy everything—about how she occasionally finds her daughter changing all the sheets, collecting all the towels, about how her daughter sometimes insists that she isn’t a little girl but a maid in a fancy hotel, a maid with a fiancé who works on a ship and who comes to see her whenever he can.

  Amy listens intently. “Huh,” she says. “And what do you make of that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she heard it on television.”

  “Or maybe it’s a past life,” Amy says.

  Beth has often wondered the same thing, but hearing Amy suggest this possibility is a surprise. Amy seems to sense what Beth is thinking. She takes a long sip and smiles before adding, “Don’t box me in. You don’t know everything about me.”

  When the girls wake up from their nap, thirty minutes later, the Prosecco bottle is empty on the coffee table, and Beth is feeling drowsy and warm and wishing her old friend didn’t have to live so far away. Her daughter comes into the room wiping gunk from her eyes and snot from her nose, gazing at them confused and half awake. So much might have transpired to land her little girl in this time and in this place. Beth imagines her daughter tumbling down into her body as some kind of thin mucous light. What she imagines, really, is a kind of fall, a series of them, one life to the next, on and on, accelerating until, velocity achieved, you fell right through the universe itself and were finished. It’s an exhausting thought, not to mention a tad New Agey, not an idea she’d dare try and describe to her friend, but she wonders if there’s something in it worth holding on to for later, for after this lovely haze has left her.

  “Where’s my grilled cheese?” her daughter asks, testy, and Beth’s fists sink down deep into the couch as she shoves herself upright, the Prosecco purpling her vision. Her body noodles to the left but she manages to lumber through it, crossing the living room with a short laugh, asking Amy if it was possible they’d been overserved, just in case her friend noticed the light-headed wobble.

  trans/FALL

  In an art gallery that was once a shoe factory, a meager crowd wanders through the exhibits. The white walls are eight feet tall and the dark factory ceiling is at least twice that. It’s like wandering through a rat maze. Halfway through the maze there is a room with forty flatscreen televisions across two walls. On each of the screens, a person falls down but in reverse, time slowed, each body emitting a pink and purple light that moves like ripples in water.

  “Looks like a music video from the 1980s,” someone says.

  “Okay, so they’re falling up,” someone else says. “I guess I get it.”

  The small crowd takes turns hovering in front of the artist’s statement:

  Until recently I was strictly a painter. I painted women to look like swans. If you’d asked me why I did this, I couldn’t have told you. I painted what I painted. But then an old injury made it extremely painful for me to paint anymore. Years ago I broke my arm and wrist and three ribs in a biking accident. Maybe the doctors didn’t set it right or maybe I have tendonitis now. Either way, it got me thinking about the accident. My brother had filmed it and posted it online while I was in the hospital. At the time that pissed me off but then, all these years late
r, I couldn’t stop watching it. I didn’t look like myself at all. I could pause it right before I hit the asphalt. I looked both calm and terrified at the same time. Like I’d given in to something. Was this me stripped of all pretense and personality? Was this the actual me? Was this me confronting the void? I showed the video to my wife and asked her what she thought.

  She said my face was like Moses’ in front of the burning bush—terror and awe.

  I started watching other videos. There were so many of them. Millions of people had already clicked on them—and why? Scientists have discovered something called “mirror neurons.” A mirror neuron is one that will fire in your brain when you perform an action and also when you watch that same action being performed by someone else. Why we have these neurons is a mystery. Maybe they’ve helped us become more empathetic. When you see or read about someone else’s bad news, maybe a part of you is experiencing it too. It occurred to me that when we watch videos of people falling down, we are waiting for the moment of impact—for a bruise, a hurt, a collision—and that expectation makes us full participants in the event. Every fall we see is our own, and all of us are falling all the time.

  I wondered if the same would hold true if I reversed the fall. Would our neurons mirror that rising? Are all of us rising right now? Are you?

  —Davy V.

  “I don’t think I am. I don’t feel like I’m rising.”

  “So it’s about sin, right?”

  “People falling. Of course it’s impossible not to think about 9/11.”

  “I think it’s about how fragile we are. The loss of control. I dropped a pair of scissors once and popped an artery in my foot and almost died.”

  “Is the artist here? We ought to push him down and film it.”

  “He’s the one over there. In that strange white hat. Talking to that woman.”

  “Pretty sure that’s his wife.”

  “She looks ten years older than him. At least.”

  “Supposedly she was his art teacher in high school.”

  “Let’s introduce ourselves.”

  Tammy is there in the art gallery wearing a black dress and dark lipstick. These days she dyes her hair blond. Not long after her mother died (no ghostly sightings yet), she left the station to start a family. Now that her sons are both in elementary school, she’s gone back to work as an editor. She steps forward to examine one of the screens more closely. She’s looking at her younger self—that teal jacket, her puffy bangs. Tammy feels uneasy. She’s not sure how this video wound up in this exhibit. She watches her body rise up from the pine straw, defying gravity: her dress slides back down her legs to meet and cover her knees, her expression transforms, eyes wide, mouth tight, arms spiraling, and then she is fully upright with her microphone in hand, twisting toward the camera ever so slightly. The video loops back to the beginning and Tammy is on the ground, sprawled, pink and purple lines rippling in the direction of the neighboring screen.

  The gallery owner is in the next room talking to a group of people. He is an older man with thinning gray hair, but he is dressed in dark jeans and hip dark-rimmed glasses.

  “I want to complain about one of the exhibits,” she says to him. “There’s a video of me that’s being used without my permission.”

  “I see,” the man says. She leads him into the next room and points at the video, her finger only a few inches from the screen. “Oh, I see, yes,” he says, looking back and forth at Tammy in person and Tammy on-screen. For a brief moment she interprets his equivocation to mean that he intends to help her by removing the video, but then he gives her a pained look, as if what he has to say next will hurt both of them, and explains that the video, in this context, because it has been transformed—artistically, literally, and otherwise—qualifies as fair use and there’s nothing to be done about its appearance in the installation.

  “But how did it even get here?” Tammy asks. “Where did it come from?”

  His answer to this question is even more perplexing. These videos, he says, come from all over, from everywhere, and, in a sense, the videos belong to all of us. They are our videos, collectively ours, not a part of what’s commonly called the public domain, per se, but as a part of what could be referred to as the proto–public domain, the substrata of all recorded human experience.

  “I could sue,” Tammy says without even believing it herself.

  “But you’ve inspired art,” he says. “You’re the modern Mona Lisa.”

  The Mona Lisa of Falling Down, she thinks. The gallery owner gives her his card. She watches the video loop through three more times before going home to her husband and doing her best to forget that things still exist even when you’re not looking at them.

  Celebrities Fall Too So Funny—Beyoncé Carmen Electra Simon Punch and More

  Years have passed since Marshall was convicted for the murder of Simon Punch. There is no video of the murder itself, but there are thirty-two videos—thirty-two distinct but not wildly different angles—of Simon falling down onstage the week before it happened.

  He walks onto the stage in a pair of tight jeans and a loose untucked shirt, guitar already around his neck. The woman in the front row, the one wearing the glow-in-the-dark T-shirt of Simon’s face, puckers her lips. For him? He isn’t accustomed to that sort of adoration. Until his song got used in the Julia Roberts movie about beekeepers he was never able to book venues this big.

  He strums the first chord and a giant screen behind him flashes quick clips from old black-and-white movies and nature shows—frogs, bees, bears. The screen was his label’s idea. He smiles back at the woman in the front row before he sings the first verse. The lights change from purple to blue to black to purple again, swishing across the audience and the front half of the stage.

  After the first few songs, a band comes out to join him. Simon walks stage left to trade guitars and slips on the spot where one of the roadies set down a bottled water during sound check. Simon’s brow hits the floor and gushes blood. He rolls over to look up at the lights. They flash red and orange. The bass player waves two fingers in front of his face. “Seventeen,” Simon says, and sits up. They bring him a towel. The audience cheers when he shows off his head wound. “If I forget all the words,” he says, “there better be a doctor in the house.” The crowd laughs. Probably he will need stitches later. The concert continues.

  After the show the woman from the front row finds him backstage. Her name is Susan. She’s not wearing her wedding ring. It’s on a key chain that tinkles deep inside her purse. She left her husband, Marshall, a few days ago and emptied their bank accounts because, really, the money belonged to her. It was her grandmother that died, not his. Depositing the inheritance in their joint savings was a mistake.

  When Susan begs for his signature, Simon asks for her T-shirt. “This one?” she asks. “The one I’m wearing?” She looks around uneasily but strips down to her black bra.

  Simon smears his blood across the picture of his face on the shirt. “Better than a signature,” he says. She takes the bloodied shirt between her thumb and index finger. A long time ago Simon decided not to sleep with fans, but with this woman, he would make an exception. Her deep blue eyes are wide-set, her face heart-shaped. She seems kind. He can imagine waking up with her and not feeling bad about himself.

  “Thanks for this.” She doesn’t seem to know what to do with the bloody shirt: put it on or continue the conversation half naked.

  “Here,” he says, and grabs her a tour shirt from a box down the hall. “Sorry, I didn’t really think that through. It seemed cooler in my head. I’m on my way to this after-party around the corner. Might be fun. You should come. All the chairs at this club are apparently Fisher-Price.”

  “As in, the little kids’ toys?” The baggy tour shirt swallows her whole.

  “Yeah, exactly. A club decorated for kids that’s really for adults.”

&nbs
p; “Sure,” she says, smiling. “Count me in.”

  They leave the concert venue through the back door and walk down an alley wet with rain and full of dumpster-stink. Her high heels echo ahead of them. Outside the club, she digs inside her purse.

  “Hold on, sorry,” she says. “My sister’s calling for like the millionth time. I have to take this real fast, okay?”

  BlackBerry flat against one ear and hand cupping the other to block out the traffic noise, Susan walks ahead up the sidewalk, though he can still hear bits of the conversation. “Fine,” she says. “I’ll call him in a minute. From inside. But you do realize this will only make it worse.” She seems upset but, incongruously, turns back to smile at Simon with perfect teeth. “No, of course,” she says to her sister. “I’m not trying to make you the go-between.” She nods her head quickly. “Okay, yes, love you too. Don’t stay up.” She drops the phone in her purse and slides her arm through Simon’s. “Ready?”

  Raindrops clinging to a high gutter splatter down on Simon’s neck. A taxi zooms by at the end of the block, sweeping water across the curb. Briefly, he considers running after it. He could go back to the hotel, take a hot shower, stick an ugly Band-Aid on his brow, and fall asleep in front of the television. The night could end here.

  The bouncer waves them into the club, and they shove their way to a low plastic table decorated with a plastic flower in a plastic pot and an Easy-Bake Oven. The first round of drinks arrives, in little sippy cups, and then the second and third, and Simon realizes his hand has somehow found its way to Susan’s back. His hand is under her loose shirt: warm skin, the soft knobs of her spine. Later, he knows, they will wind up at his hotel—or at her house. He doesn’t care which. He downs his drink and opens his phone. She props her chin on his shoulder, asks who it is he’s calling. Sometimes he likes to leave himself voice mails—for later, like a diary.