No Animals We Could Name

by Ted Sanders

  I come in to watch one morning and Celia is already painting on the far wall, wearing just a T-shirt and dark panties, and standing in the doorway watching her I’m instantly, outrageously aroused. Her hair up in a fist. She is stretching up to a high place above the window trim and there are round rectangles of sunlight stretching down her legs, and when she rises to her toes her panties wrinkle dark and deeply into her crotch. Her scar moves in place like a drop of water changing shape as it runs. It has a color I can’t quite gather. It threatens translucence, seems to shimmer. Watching, I begin to wonder if I could get Celia to let me do it to her there, there against the wall just now, and because of thinking it, it becomes unbearable. I come up behind her quiet, pull her soft hips into place, her panties down. Higher up, she has her chin on her shoulder now, lobbing sweet fragile objections at me and smiling, and then after a bit she steps half-out of her panties and spreads her feet for me, lays her forearms along the unpainted wall there. I wrap my fingers around the wings of that bone where you can hold a woman from behind. She doesn’t let go of the brush while we do it, and I don’t know why but I’m glad. It shudders in her hand. Her arms go slowly apart over long moments, walking up the wall, and eventually her empty left hand wanders up to the edge where the fresh orange paint is drying, and in a moment I scarcely see, maybe don’t see, her two longfingers and her thumb dip into the paint, out again. She leaves three small rounds there, a dear little cluster, gathered like a swiftly drawn pawprint. Like an animal was running there. I stare at it and stare until I’m through.

  Afterward, we sit on the floor in the kitchen, talking. I lean against the counter and she leans against a table leg. She has her panties back up, puddling into them slow. We talk about how that was nice, how the room will look beautiful when it’s done, what breakfast could be today. She picks at the paint on her fingertips. She looks up from them, up at the wall. She says goddammit.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say. She says she’ll just paint over it, and I tell her, “Don’t bother. We could just have it there.” She rolls her eyes at me and looks back up at the wall, and it occurs to me that it would be like her to think I’m not sincere, to assume I’m only inclined to craft some vague and dreamy compliment for her, or us. I doubt she is able to imagine that there’s a different way to wish that the mark would stay, that there is an intensely private worth in aspiring to the indelibility of moments.

  She gets up. She tries to paint her prints flat, but the wall is already too dry; she brings out a stab of sandpaper instead. I linger. I monkey my bare feet up onto the warm table leg where she was. I tell myself: fingers are the dreams of toes. Celia has the wall rubbed flat again before I make myself aware. You’d never know.

  “Okay,” she is saying, sidling back to me without looking. I look down at my feet. I picture the long bold tendons there, sliding beneath my skin. I think about what I’ve learned.

  I FIND IT BEST THAT I DON’T TELL THERESA ABOUT THE ACCIDENT anymore, about the close things I recall. Except about my thumb—I remember how it moved, and I sometimes dwell on the fact that it wasn’t saved. Otherwise I could tell her different things, like: I can feel that my arm is slightly lighter now. The rest is hard enough for me to understand; I can’t share my experience more cleanly, especially because every audience is interested in motive. What could I offer that would satisfy? I know that Dr. Lane, at least, doesn’t appreciate the context I provide. He distrusts my account in part because it lacks a motivational continuity. He says that. I can’t blame him. After all, my greatest dilemmas come from considering the quantum nature of life passing. If time goes by in discrete packets. And maybe you could tell me: Are moments laid like tiles? Or like bricks, or scales? I couldn’t say myself. I’m afraid I will venture the kind of guess that will lead Dr. Lane to conclude that I can’t be cured. That he could name my affliction, any affliction. That he could describe my mistake in terms that justify the context but don’t do justice to the problem, which is that I imagine things could happen. I believe they can, if only for moments. It’s a fear I can’t live without. How could you?

  Theresa asks me if I regret losing my hand. The sun hums in the morningside windows.

  “Yes,” I tell her. “I miss it. Very much.”

  “What do you miss about it?” she asks.

  “Most?” I say.

  “Okay,” says Theresa, shrugging. And by the look on her face on this day, maybe I could tell her about the sadness I sometimes feel at having betrayed my own flesh, the way you would betray a lover’s confidence. I could tell her how it seems to me now that exposing the hidden strings and meats of my hand was akin to dragging a gelatinous deep-sea creature to the surface of the ocean, into a deadly and blinding alien light, a shape-killing near vacuum. I could tell her elements of truth, of course, but they might not be right. They would only be pieces. I’m not accustomed to thinking in the kind of extremes she asks for.

  She lets me think for minutes. At last I tell her, and I’ve thought about it carefully: “It’s quite a novelty, being asymmetrical.” I lean to my right to emphasize.

  Theresa nods at me slow. “Well isn’t that just something?” she says. And then we sit quiet at the table a while.

  And maybe someday I will tell her certain other things. I could mention to her, for example, that a sound from that day still haunts me, and it is not the sound of the maul’s head exploding into the picnic table or even through the spiderbones of my hand. Instead I recall, as the maul came off my shoulder, the heavy-fisted blast of a roar ripping out of me, barreling up from my chest on a single thick busy breath. The forced exhaust of a vehement exertion, desperate and brief, expelled like the air before a new emerging bullet. My lungs emptied by a crush of furious power, fiery down my trunk.

  But this is a part of my experience, which is not the same as my account.

  I do not like to talk to Dr. Lane. I see him once a week, briefly, and Theresa is always there too. She is something of a handler on these occasions. From the very beginning, Dr. Lane has gone on asking me things like whether I still want to hurt myself. At first I say no, I never did, but that doesn’t deter him. In my confusion, I’ve suspected for a long time that he hopes I’ll admit to it, but I realize now that I’ve misjudged him, his capacity for understanding. What he truly hopes to hear is that I used to fear myself but no longer do. My remorse would make him happy, too, or rather: a display of remorse. Remorse for myself, I mean. I come to this realization lying in my room, and I laugh out loud because of it, because it seems ridiculous that he would choose to care for me in such a manner. How presumptuously shallow, how blind, as if an extra display were needed—what, a narrative? Something oral?

  The woman outside my room tells me I am laughing. She is leaning into the bright doorway, making a rich shadow of herself, and she somehow has a lap even though she stands. She is that kind of creature. I can’t see into her lap, into her dark, but I can hear her fingernails grating and popping soft together there. Her shoulders, I think, shiver from it.

  “I am, I know,” I say. She folds out of sight, talking.

  “It’s a fact,” she is saying, again and again.

  I roll onto my stomach, bury my hand in my gut. I wish I could say: remorse would be a relief.

  THE NEXT TIME I TALK TO THERESA, I CRY. AS I BEGIN, ALL THE lines disappear from her face, a symptom of her surprise, I think. I’ve never seen it. But I don’t blame her; the strange cooling paths of the water moving from me, down my cheeks, across my lips and salty into my mouth, dripping. I might laugh again. Theresa stares smooth-faced and as she does I raise my missing hand and stare toward my palm and I say into it, meaningfully, that I hate myself for this. I don’t bother to draw on the weakening muscles that are meant to curl my fingers, but I try to look as though I were. Out to my other side, out of sight, I hold my other hand splayed and calmly straining against the tabletop. My fingertips, I know without looking, are like the bony roots of trees. Theresa looks where I look, at my
missing hand, says my name. She would never think to notice my other hand, I am certain that she wouldn’t, but I try not to let her anyway. I say what I’ve said again. I say it again.

  This happening gets back to Celia. Whenever she comes, often before she sees me, she talks to Dr. Lane. A gathered delicacy garnishes her talk then when we meet—her gestures, her voice, her working face.

  We sit on my bed. I see her expression as she is turning to sit beside me there on my right—that is, there beside me on the bed instead of across from me in the chair—and her look is blankly intense as she moves to sit, a look I recognize, though not on her: the look of distant surprise you feel when you find that an otherwise tiny decision has become an issue of consequence. She has that on her face as she thinks about sitting beside me; you can imagine. But anyway she goes ahead, and she sits beside me there on the bed, and in the space between us, the width of a leg, the thin sheet wrinkles roundly. She opens her mouth into quiet, leaves it open as though she only needed it to breathe. She has all her fingers shimmed between her knees, her laced feet tucked up into the bedframe.

  After a little while I say, “You’ve never asked me how the food is here.”

  “What?” she says, dipping her head and twisting it toward me. She curls her lips: she is making a smile. Her short hair swings. Her neck.

  “I’m just saying,” I say. “Celia. It’s strange. All this time.”

  “And so how is the food?” she asks me.

  “It’s good, actually,” I tell her.

  “What do you like to eat?” she says. “I mean, what is good?” And then there is a little shift beneath the skin of her face, a swift and subtle movement of plates, and her eyes go to soft spilling glass. She slides to her feet, swallowing sounds, laughing over them like you do.

  “Whoo, James,” she says, turning toward me and stepping away. She wipes her face and shakes out her hands, and now she is smiling red-faced, and I wish I could say that we talk more before she leaves.

  Later I tell Theresa I might like to begin keeping a journal. She frowns. But she speaks to Dr. Lane about it anyway and he offers me, the next time he sees me, a bright sympathetic encouragement. Picture me there, writing in my blank book late at the desk in my room, or over empty afternoons in the common area, holding the left-hand pages down with the paperweight potency of my clubbed arm. I write things in it about myself, things that are not strictly true; or rather, things I don’t truly know. I write along a narrow, purposeful path, a space that touches both what I suspect about myself and what I believe Dr. Lane would like to hear. I write, for example, this clever sentence: Now I’m beginning to realize that it’s fear that’s given shape to so much of what I’ve done. Or this one, which I choose because I’m certain it’s already been said, by others: I’ve made a certain peace with myself, realizing that only after I forgive myself will others be able to forgive me too.

  I ground my talk in a hopeful present. I imply change.

  I WILL MAKE A LAST CONFESSION: I WORRY INCESSANTLY about all the water pipes that lace my house at home. How they are forever full of all the waiting water that was arrested abruptly at each faucet, in the shower, at a rusted nozzle sleeping on the lawn, at machine-controlled outlets I only imagine—all those dark feet of water just barely too late to be necessary. Think of the deadly electric streams, dormant in the wiring, dammed at open switches. Or the brooding clouds of gas gathering in the bellies of the furnace, the stove, escaping scarcely and silently under pressure, thin burning threads drawn by tiny patient flames. I worry, I do, how the whole house must be holding its breath, overfull and ready, built to burst: trembling with availability.

  There was this apartment we lived in once. The one with black-and-white checkerboard tiles in the kitchen. It was in an old house with four other apartments, but we knew—you could tell—that our kitchen was the real one. We liked that; it meant no one else’s was. Our front door there led into that kitchen, and it fed out into a black-floored stairway up the heart of the house, and the outside surface of the door was bare wood, with a stain that had bled away in patches like a too-heavy tan. I don’t remember what apartment number it was, but whatever it was, it hung there. It was silver.

  I am thinking of that door now because of the woman outside my room, and because of the sound of Celia’s knife grazing the counter at home, and because someone had scratched into the soft wood on the front of that old door. The scratches were shallow, wide and round, pale. The kind fingernails would make; I can’t be sure. They had the broad randomness that is the product of a too-tightly focused purpose, an order like worm trails in old sticks.

  We lived there for a long time, and it wasn’t until we had nearly moved on that I realized the scratches made letters, that they were letters scratched into the stain by hand, long irregular lopsided ones, madly malformed, and because I knew they had been laid there I stood breathing on the door trying to realize them, slowly naming them. Some were nearly as long as my torso, some smaller than my palm. I stepped back, back up onto the stairs leading to the second floor, and the letters came together for me at last, in one of those slick moments of recognition that you can’t take back, and I saw on that day as we were leaving that they spelled out I was there, and then below that, in a space of its own: a lean tumbling question mark. All in a long angular scrawl I had seen a hundred times but never known for words until that moment, and I am thinking now, as I consider how Celia’s knife is able to carefully push the tomato apart into pieces: I never told her about that. I never did. And I think, maybe, that it’s because that sliding instant of discovery was so peculiarly mine, such a singularity of experience, that to tell her about it would have been a disservice to the moment, to myself.

  ON THE DAY DR. LANE TELLS CELIA THAT I MIGHT BE READY to go home, very soon, Celia is wearing a yellow dress I don’t know. The lapels are large. We sit in the common area.

  “Dr. Lane has been encouraging,” Celia says. She has her head lowered quietly at me, her fingertips together in their pairs atop the table. She brings her palms together and apart slowly, so that her fingers fan slightly and deepen their kisses, roll back to their tips. She does it at the pace of flat dying waves sliding in succession over sand. I imagine that she does not know that she does it.

  “Yes,” I say, and I keep my eyes low. She sits with me in that small quiet space for a while, uncertainty bubbling up blue under her pink face, until gradually, eventually, maybe she recognizes me a little there in that place. I imagine she does. At least, I sense that the air goes loose between us, and she says, “You should see the garden.”

  I do not know what she means.

  “Oh yes?” I say.

  “Yes, I’ve done sweet peas. They’ve flowered, it’s unbelievable. I have beans and peppers, zucchini; pumpkins, but they might not make it. I’m even trying potatoes. Sunflowers all up at the north end, it’s crazy.” She speaks a laugh.

  “Well,” I say. “That sounds purely amazing, Celia,” I say, and I mean it. I try to picture what she describes, a riot I’m not prepared for, and I find a refracted memory in which I build her a raised garden bed from railroad ties, lay it down in a day beyond the last big hackberry in the yard. What she describes to me now could never be held there, I’m sure of it. I try sludgily to imagine where the garden could have grown to and how, where she was able to find more sun between the hackberry and the glut of buckthorns along the property line, what the flower of the sweet pea could be. And those railroad ties, they lay like long bricks along the hard ground when I first put them down, but you could barely discern them when I saw them last, and I wonder: do things sink into the earth or does the earth rise around them, swelling? My stomach broods like an animal.

  And Theresa is talking to me, her voice spinning, and I try to anchor my gaze on her across the table there, but it is Celia after all, and she is saying, “James? James?”

  “Celia. Yes,” I say. She is draping a crooked smile across her chin.

  “I’m
wondering if this is something you can do.” She nods. “I need this to be something you can do, okay? Can you talk to me, James?”

  And she waits for me to speak, she always does, she has always known to, but I watch her hands and I’m having a hard time pretending that thoughts could ever slow into words. I’m not given to lie to her. I’m not even sure what motive I would have to lie, what I want, what the meaning of possible is, what colors bleed from her garden, how the notion of promise was promoted from a quality to a deed. But I know that I slide my hand between her talking palms, and that I make a sound like a sigh. And there is this: her skin.

  Her fingers crumble down over my hand. She squeezes till it hurts.

  “James,” she says, and she looks up across my face like you look up at the underside of a belonging that must be carefully cleaned. She says, “James, can you do this? I need to know.”

  She is terribly beautiful, looking at me like that. Radiantly beautiful, in a way I can’t recall her being. I open my mouth. I open my mouth and I tell her: I imagine I can.

  She goes on crushing, crushing my hand.

  I AM GOING HOME. IT’S A PROBLEM OF PERSPECTIVE. WHEN Dr. Lane says good-bye, he shakes my hand hard. He is the kind of person who would prefer to surround your hand with both of his own, I can tell, but he doesn’t do that. He nods at me, tells me I’ll do well. He embraces Celia. Their eyes are bright and warm and sharp. Theresa is there, frowning, looking hard at me as though I cannot see her. She scratches one wrist with the other. We hug awkwardly, one arm apiece, and when I say good-bye to her I tell her that I will miss her, that I would like to thank her.