No Animals We Could Name

by Ted Sanders

  “You will now. It’s my favorite shirt now.”

  “It’s freezing in here. Why’s it always freezing here?”

  “I turned the heat up,” Shad said. They listened to the man on TV talk about the famousness of the french fries they make in Belgium. The man stood beside a food cart near a park. In the background, old men played chess. “The Pope died again.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s weird how that happens. That whole thing.”

  Julie set the carton on the floor. “Is that your pineapple? In the kitchen?”

  “Yeah, I thought I might eat that.”

  “That damn cat,” she said. “He’s up on the counter, he doesn’t even care. He was licking that knife.”

  “What knife?”

  “It’s Ed that lets him up there. He says he doesn’t, but he does.”

  Shad shook his head. “That cat. Rory. I hate that cat.”

  “He walks in his own toilet,” Julie said, and Shad nodded heavily.

  They watched TV. Shad changed the channels. He stopped on an old woman doing yoga on a dark volcanic seashore. After a while he said, “She’s totally hot. This chick? I mean for what, like sixty? For sixty she’s smoking. That yoga, that’s for real.”

  Julie folded one arm across her chest and tucked her legs in. She watched the woman move her strange body, her too-high pelvis and her too-bent back giving her away, despite all the meaty leanness between her joints.

  Shad tilted his head toward her, his thick face buckled around an awkward crimp of concern. “I didn’t mean anything by that, Julie.”

  Julie felt herself flush. “Well, I’m not sixty.”

  “Fuck, I know that.”

  “I’m closer to your age than hers.”

  “I know.” The woman on TV talked to them about what she was doing. The camera switched to a close-up of her face. Her hair was pulled back severely, held back in an arcane and impenetrable bun, her face like wicker.

  Julie watched Shad watch the woman. She considered his sturdy neck, his deep shoulders. His torso uniformly broad but bellyless beneath the red shirt, looking pliably dense, monolithic and rubbery, like the body of some marine mammal. His heavy, hairy legs were spread, his hands hanging between them, the muscled curve of his thigh into his knee the most textured shape beneath the surface of his skin. “You should do yoga, Shad.”

  “Fuck that.”

  “You should lose weight.”

  “Oh my god.”

  “I mean, you’re not exactly fat, not really, but you could be smaller.”

  “I am very large,” said Shad.

  “Yoga’s good for you. I do yoga. And you should eat that pineapple. Fruit, you know. Your body needs that. You guys don’t have anything decent to eat around here.”

  “I was gonna eat that pineapple.”

  “Your body knows you need it.”

  “My body.”

  “You should listen to your body.” The yoga woman stretched into a bend that made her crotch bulge. Her ass disappeared and the fabric of her leotard went taut across the mound between her thighs. She talked all the while. “Jesus Christ,” Julie said.

  “Vulvular,” said Shad. He changed the channel to a shrill cartoon drawn with thick lines. The kids had big heads, crazy jaws. He switched again, landed in a courtroom drama that was just going to commercial. “Julie Julie,” he said. “You and that Ed.” He got up. The dynamics of the couch changed. He went into the kitchen. The TV began to meander through an advertisement for a Teddy Roosevelt coin.

  The refrigerator came open. “There’s no juice,” said Shad.

  “I have orange juice out here.” Julie picked up the carton.

  “You took my juice?”

  Julie froze, her mouth open indignantly. “It’s mine, Shad. I bought this juice.”

  “You’re buying juice now?”

  “I brought it over here, for myself.”

  Shad leaned over the breakfast bar. “Anyway, fuck that, I bought that juice.”

  “You don’t even drink juice.”

  “I drink orange juice. That’s why I bought it. Man, are you drinking from the container?”

  “You didn’t buy this, but get a cup, good lord.”

  “Yeah, I’ll get two cups. Drinking from the carton, you’re some girl,” he said, and when he said that, a flush curled out of her belly and lit her arms. Shad dug into the dishes in the drain board, made them rattle and shift. Julie examined the carton, wondered if it was hers after all.

  Shad said, in the kitchen, softly to himself, “Oh man, killed my pineapple.” He came back out and took the carton. He poured them both juice in the little green cups.

  Shad drank his juice. They watched TV. Shad put a red corduroy pillow across his belly and Julie didn’t tell him it just made him look fatter. A single hair jutted out from the mat of his eyebrow, terribly long—long enough to be a queasy curiosity—and it rose in a jagged curl back to touch his forehead about an inch up. What a hair, Julie thought, and she itched to pluck it. A commercial for detergent came on. Shad pointed at it and said, “Time and color enhanced.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It said that—at the bottom. Time and color enhanced.”

  “That means nothing to me.”

  “They had to say it. They enhanced those.”

  “Time, they enhanced time.”

  “Yeah. Made it go faster.” He lowered a finger at her. “Which is only occasionally an enhancement.”

  “You don’t even know,” Julie told him.

  A car commercial came on. A black car glided around the curves of a silvering, snake-shaped road. “I feel a little weird about it,” she said. “I didn’t really notice the enhancement. Did you?”

  Shad shook his head. “That’s because it’s all enhanced. You’re numb to it, man.”

  Julie pointed to the TV. “Professional driver. Closed course.”

  “They always say that,” Shad said. “It’s not very dissuasive.” He scratched his nose. He said, “I wonder what professional drivers do for a living.”

  “This, I guess.”

  Shad looked over at her. He gestured between the two of them. “This,” he said.

  Julie clucked her tongue, lifted her eyes. “Yes, Shad, this.”

  “With each other or with you?”

  “With me, of course.”

  They watched TV. “I don’t even know what this is. I don’t even know what you’re doing here,” said Shad.

  “There are a lot of car commercials, is what I meant,” said Julie after a while.

  Shad switched to a news channel. Julie waited for the newspeople to talk about the Pope, but no one did. They talked about the recovery. They talked about gas prices. They briefly showed a beautiful young woman in a long green skirt pumping gas. She wore sunglasses, held her hand against her cocked hip, watched the pump. She had her ponytail pulled forward over her shoulder. She was far away.

  Julie took her hair down, put it up again. Shad changed the channel. A commercial ended and another began, a juice one. They watched the bottom of the screen.

  “I might make some Jell-O later,” Shad said.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “I am.”

  “Make it now. It’ll be ready later.”

  “I’m not up for that just yet. You would think it’s like making Kool-Aid or something, but it isn’t. The stove and all.”

  “You know you can’t put pineapple in Jell-O.”

  “I wasn’t considering it.”

  “I’m just saying. It won’t set if you do.”

  “I think I’ve heard that. People say that.”

  “It’s true,” Julie said. “And not just any pineapple, only fresh pineapple. Canned pineapple is fine, but not fresh.”

  “Now why in the fucking world would that be?”

  “It’s something in the pineapple. But when they pasteurize it, it goes away. When they can it.”

  Shad reached for his cup. The pil
low slid to the floor.

  “Call fucking Jell-O, they’ll tell you,” Julie told him.

  “Just pineapple.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Now how would you know something like that, Julie?”

  “I’ve just always known it,” Julie said.

  A commercial for pills came on. The TV didn’t say what the pills were for.

  “Results may vary,” Julie read.

  “They must, necessarily,” said Shad. He set his juice down and gathered the red pillow into his lap again.

  Julie said, “I think Ed worries that something is going on between us. Or, I guess, that it could.”

  Shad squinted. “What?”

  “You and me,” Julie said. “Each other, I mean. I think he worries about us.”

  Shad began to nod rhythmically at the TV. “You and me. You.”

  Julie said, “That pillow doesn’t make you not look fat, you know.”

  “So what did he say?”

  “Nothing. He didn’t say anything.”

  “You just get the feeling.”

  “Sometimes. I have.”

  “You’re like twice my age.”

  “I’m twice Ed’s age.”

  “You’re hot, though.”

  Julie shrugged.

  “Not just for your age.”

  “I know what you meant, Shad. Thank you.” She scratched at the backs of her thighs.

  “I wonder if he said something,” Shad said.

  “You can wonder,” said Julie. She put her fists into her crotch, closed her knees around her elbows. Shad flipped through the channels.

  They came into the thick of an infomercial, where a tan woman talked to them through the camera, through wires—through the deft mysteries of magnetism, or light—into the air, out of the TV. She said this was the greatest moneymaking opportunity available to the average American today. The simple answer to difficult times. Behind her a swimming pool gleamed. Fine print at the bottom of the screen said: Extraordinary claims, individual experience not guaranteed. They watched the woman. Her teeth were magnificent.

  “The world is full of desperate, right, Julie?” said Shad, and he laughed and he laughed, and he pushed buttons on the remote, and the TV flashed and blurted.

  The TV began to talk to them about lions. On screen, lions slunk across a lion-colored plain, lounged blandly on rocks. A narrator mentioned their deadliness. Shad put the remote down. Julie read from the back of the orange juice carton.

  “Folate,” she read aloud. “Thiamine.”

  “Riboflavin,” Shad said without looking.

  “There are no ingredients here. No ingredients at all. Only nutrition facts.”

  “It’s juice,” said Shad. “One hundred percent.”

  The TV told them about an ongoing situation with the lions, how poor people were fleeing hopefully from some miserable African country to some slightly less miserable one, crossing a wide savanna park there on their exodus. But occasionally in their search for prosperity—or security, it wasn’t clear—some of them were eaten by lions on the way.

  “Oh, man,” said Shad.

  A deeply shining black man in khakis stood and talked to the camera, his musical English sharp and sludgy in strange places, and he said that they found about seven kills a month in the park—would-be refugees from that other country. But when he said kill he mostly meant just evidence of a kill, because they might only find a shoe, or a jagged scrap of bloodied fabric. And when he said they found about seven kills a month he meant that was all they found, and the park was very large and the rangers were few, and anyway how would you know to look? These people who were crossing the park in the night, no one would tell you if they had gone missing. These people, the black man said, they want to be missing.

  “And then the lion, she comes,” the man said, and he slapped one flat palm off the other into the air, off the edge of the TV screen.

  Julie got up and went down the hall into the bathroom. She closed the door behind her. The fan came on. Shad lay down on the couch. He propped his elbow up in Julie’s warm depression. He listened toward the bathroom but there was nothing to hear. The clock said 10:52, and he tried to gauge what Ed would be doing at work now, and how likely he might be to come home for lunch, even though he never did. Shad watched the show about lions. He thought about Julie in the bathroom. After a while, commercials came on, and he read the small print: While supplies last. Use as directed. Serving suggestion. When the lion show came back on, he flipped to other channels. He went back to the moneymaking infomercial, in which a mustached, middle-aged man in an ornate sweater was just beginning to talk animatedly to some entity off-camera. After a few moments, below the man, the screen read: Opinion of person. Shad sat up. He turned the volume all the way down.

  Shad turned his head, kept his eyes on the TV. “Opinion of person,” he called down the hall.

  Julie’s voice came back, singsongy and muffled, unintelligible.

  Shad sat on the couch and watched the person on TV with the sound still down. The person gesticulated and smiled. He made a broad, circular gesture up into the air around himself, as though he were referencing the world, or everything available to himself, or something that had ascended, or would descend. The person made a gesture that involved laying both his hands on his belly. Shad tried to read his lips. He watched the shapes his mustache made. The person’s eyes were small, wide set. And then the person sat back in his seat, stopped talking, a look of completion on his face—or not just his face, but around his whole head, his shoulders, his chest. Something in his high-chinned slouch looked so proprietary, so smug. The camera lingered on him an awkward moment too long, and then the scene switched to an empty studio somewhere. Microphones hung from the ceiling.

  Shad tried to mimic the person, settling back into the couch, arching his neck and making his shoulders as heavy as they could go. He exhaled. He let his eyes unfocus on a specific point over the TV set. He sighed audibly. Down the hall, the toilet flushed.

  Shad flipped back to the lion show and went into the kitchen. He pulled an open tube of flavorless crackers from a box, took them back to the living room, sat down on Julie’s side of the couch. He ate the crackers one by one, putting them whole into his mouth salty side down. He turned the volume back up on the TV. And now he saw that the show wasn’t just about lions, it was about big cats in general. There were interviews with a number of people who had been attacked by the animals: lions, yes, but leopards, tigers, cheetahs. An account was given by a man, a trainer, who had been attacked by a captive tiger he’d known for years. He described how the tiger had him in its jaws and was shaking him, trying to shake him, basically, to death. And the man’s leg was ripped open, and muscle was being torn from his bone, and his leg nearly came off entirely, but the man said he felt no pain while it was happening. Just a kind of calmness, a surrender, or like a peace. And he was saved by another trainer but he almost lost that leg, and he still walked funny.

  After that a French man came on and he spoke in French, but a voice-over was translating for him, and he talked about how that phenomenon is often described by survivors of big-cat attacks—a calmness, a ludicrous absence of pain—and how naturalists have observed the same behavior from prey in the wild when a lion or a tiger has a hold of them: a kind of peacefulness, a seeming resignation.

  And then the French man kept talking, and the voice-over translated for him: “And maybe this is God: that prey, in its final moment of discovery, would be asked to have faith in the futility of resisting a predator so lavishly designed.”

  “Oh fuck,” Shad said, and he sat on the couch and listened to the rumble of his bones tingling.

  The toilet flushed again. Water ran loudly. On TV, a man showed off a huge and gruesome scar on his inner thigh. It looked like cabbage. Julie came out of the bathroom. She slid into Ed’s bedroom, rustled around, came back out. She had pajama pants on. Her ponytail was pulled forward over one shoulder and was wet
at the end.

  “That cat is fucked up somehow,” she said.

  “This guy just said the most incredible thing.”

  “This guy?”

  “No, no, this other guy. A French guy. About, about the tigers and stuff. The lions. They, like, grab you in their mouths, and they’re so goddamn strong and there’s nothing you can do and you know it, and you go into this sort of trance, and you don’t feel any pain. Even though he’s shaking you, you know, tearing the muscle off your bones. You just like surrender. And he said, this guy said, maybe that’s what God is.”

  Julie stood there, watching the TV. A woman was holding a leopard pelt in both hands. Julie scratched her chest. Her boobs shimmied.

  “What’s this now?” she said. She walked around the table, curled into the other end of the couch. A soft wave of soap smell drifted briefly over Shad. “What’s this?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s God? The lion is God? The tiger?”

  Shad said, “No, no, it’s not about the lion. It’s not about the lion or the tiger at all. Or the animal, the person. It’s the—” and he tried to cup a shape in his hands. He shook his head.

  “That cat is all messed up,” said Julie. “That Rory.”

  “You should’ve heard it,” Shad said.

  “He’s got some stuff all over him. Some sticky gunk, all up on his head. I don’t know.”

  Shad rubbed his chin. “What, like glue?”

  “I don’t know, some sticky wet crap. Look, there he is.” Rory stumbled into the room. He was dying, it seemed, on the verge of collapse, allergic or epileptic, maybe, some devastating neurological spell—but he was only staggering into a bath. He sank against the wall, already licking his side, his back legs out, stiff like skis. There was a dark shiny stain on his fur, all down his back and head. He licked and licked. He held his eyes closed. The dark patch was smoothly curled in places, where he’d been working.

  “What should I do?” Shad said.

  “I don’t know. Nothing.”

  “I hate that cat.”

  Julie said, “I heard about this lion once, there was this lion, and he had killed about fifty people. Somewhere over in Africa. It was the deadliest lion ever. And they finally caught him, the people caught him and killed him—I think it was a him—and they found out one of his teeth was all cracked. All busted up and fucked up, terrible, and they think he must’ve been in terrible pain. Toothache, I mean. And that’s why he was eating people, they think, because apparently people are like butter compared to, like, water buffalo.”