by John Jodzio
Greer took a tongue depressor from the drawer in the exam table, pried open the bird’s mouth.
“How long has he been like this?” Greer asked.
“Couple of days I guess,” Randy said. “He’s usually a funny son of a bitch. He knows a bunch of jokes. Before all this, I used to sit on the porch with a beer and have him tell me joke after joke. Damn thing really cheered me up.”
Since Greer had opened this clinic, he had a sense that he’d missed his calling, that he had wasted his time in the lab with all of the bubbling Erlandmeyers and multi-channel pipettes and grant applications. He was much better with live animals. Science was exciting when he was younger, but now there was too much that was unknowable for him, things were too theoretical, there was too much idle chatter about whys and wherefores. His last few years in the lab felt like he was fumbling in the darkness for a light switch and that even when the light got turned on it was disappointing and sad, too dim to even make the roaches scatter.
Greer took a package of saltines from a cabinet drawer and set a couple in front of the parrot. The bird ambled toward the cracker. He poked his beak into a chunk of the cracker and leaned his head back and swallowed. After he finished the cracker, he opened his beak and whispered something. Greer leaned in, but what the bird said was too low and breathy for him to hear.
“What is he yakking about?” he asked Randy.
“Hell if I know,” Randy told him. “I can’t figure out anything he’s been saying lately.”
Greer got up and walked over to the corner of the room. Before he’d turned the garage into a clinic, before Chloe had begun to attempt suicide so often and in so many various and creative ways, her band, The Whorphans, had used it as a rehearsal space. All of their equipment remained—Cassidy’s drums stacked under a tarp in the corner, Erica’s keyboard tipped on its end along the south wall. After a month of concerned phone calls from the girls, they’d both stopped calling to check on Chloe’s progress.
Greer plugged the microphone into the amp and held it up to the bird’s mouth. The animal was a goner, he knew that for certain, but there was something else, a look in the bird’s eyes that said he wanted to relay something very important to them before he passed on.
“What?” Greer asked the bird. “What’s so goddamn urgent?”
Greer noticed that Chloe was staring at the bird, waiting to see what he would say. The shirt of his that she was wearing slipped down off her shoulder. She removed the Kleenex from her nose and she stuck out her lip so that the small stream of blood trickled right into her mouth.
Greer stood and watched the bird. The parrot opened his beak, but instead of anything cogent what came out was a bunch of unintelligible hisses and crackles. It sounded like words, but words that were missing all their vowels.
“I am going to find that street vendor and kick his ass,” Randy said. “That’s my next move here.”
Greer stared down onto his driveway. He watched another car drive up and a man pull a small bear on a leash out of his back seat. Greer was already a little drunk and assumed that his eyes were playing tricks on him, that it was probably, in the end, just a fat brown dog.
He passed Randy the bottle of Jim Beam that he always sipped on while he worked in the garage. Randy took a long pull, wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
“Love him while he’s alive to love,” Greer told him.
Greer had hired a Dutch woman named Inge Hammaart to watch Chloe on Thursdays, while Greer played in a dart league with his former co-workers from the university. Inge came highly recommended from a colleague, Doug Wentz, who’d hired her for his wife, Beverly, who could not stop drinking rubbing alcohol. When they met the first time, Inge handed Greer a business card that read, “Inge Hammaart, Sober Companion.” According to Chloe it might as well have also said “Shadowing Bitch.”
“She makes me shit with the door open,” she told Greer. “I have to push and grunt right in front of her fucking butter face.”
Tonight on the way home from darts, Greer stopped off at the convenience store and bought ice cream sandwiches. When he got home, Chloe was curled up on the couch under a blanket. Greer sat down next to her and slid his fingers into her short hair, something she had, up until a couple of months ago, loved, but now, like everything else, either ignored or railed against.
“How was she tonight?” he asked Inge.
“The same,” Inge told him. “I try to play cards with her, but she never picks up her hand.”
Inge went into the kitchen to gather up her purse and her coat. Chloe pushed Greer’s hand out of her hair. She sat up and took a swallow of water. There was no calming his daughter now; she fought both affection and anger.
“I hate that fat dyke,” she said. “Why would I play cards with someone who stares at my snatch when I take a piss?”
Greer unwrapped Chloe’s ice cream sandwich for her. He sat down in the recliner next to the couch and while he ate his, he watched her chew and swallow. She’d gained weight in the last few weeks, had grown a little potbelly that paunched over his ancient pair of sweatpants, the ones that he’d worn all throughout grad school. Her belly was a positive thing, wasn’t it?
“Maybe she’s turning it around,” he’d suggested to Dr. Gupta on their last visit. “She’s eating better.”
“More than likely she’s trying to lull you to sleep before another opportunity presents itself,” Dr. Gupta told him. “That’s what she’s all about right now. That’s what she’ll be about for a long time.”
After Chloe finished eating, she got up and walked into the kitchen. Greer rose from his chair and followed right behind her. They were basically tethered to each other now. When her personal space had disappeared, his had too.
“She’s the opposite of MacGyver,” Inge had told him the other night. “Instead of saving herself by making a knife out of a bed spring, she’ll use it to stab herself in the heart.”
In a CD player by his bedside, Greer had the only recorded music that The Whorphans had ever made, a tinny sounding CD of three songs that were recorded at Scooter’s—a teen club in town.
Most nights, after he crawled under his sheets, after he’d strapped Chloe into her bed with the leather straps he’d bought from a man in Ohio in an online auction, he popped the disc into the CD player.
“Maybe you could pick up your guitar later,” he said to her now. “Maybe your guitar would help.”
Another Saturday, a couple of weeks after the parrot, a man named Karpus showed up wanting to connect a pair of hawk’s wings to his cat. The hawk was dead, his cat was not. Karpus cradled the cat in the crook of his elbow. It would meow for a bit, but then it would cough. Greer thought the coughing sounded bizarre. It sounded nearly human, like an old codger with late stage emphysema.
“Are you kidding?” Greer asked. “Is this some sort of joke?”
Karpus took the dead hawk out of his briefcase and set it gently down on the exam table.
“This bird’s been dead about fifteen minutes,” Karpus said. Greer looked at the hawk. It had a tread mark running down its abdomen, but the wings were still intact.
“If Whiskers could talk he would tell you that this was his dying wish,” Karpus explained. “To be able to finally fly.”
This line even got a chuckle out of Chloe. She was paging through a magazine and Greer turned around to look at her just in time to see her roll her eyes.
Undeterred, Karpus spread out fifty crisp one hundred dollar bills on the operating table. Greer tried not to look at the money, but then Karpus picked it up and waved it in front of Greer’s face. Whenever Greer saw money lately he immediately thought about how much Inge cost, how his mortgage was killing him, how much Chloe’s meds ran every month, even with the co-pay.
“You understand that this is never going to work,” he told Karpus. “You know that, right?”
Greer knocked the cat out, made a small incision above his shoulder blade. He�
�d thought this procedure over for a total of about ten seconds. He knew this was not going to work—the cat would die within the week, either from trauma or infection—but he’d been sneaking pulls from his bottle of Beam all afternoon and he was just drunk enough not to care.
Karpus sat down across the room. He looked over at Chloe sitting there with her wrist handcuffed to the radiator. She had dozed off, her mouth wide open, a bead of drool in the corner of her mouth that extended all the way to the floor.
“What’s with the girl?” Karpus asked him. “You a kidnapper too?”
Greer ignored him. He took a scalpel and sliced the wings off the hawk. He trimmed the wings back until he thought he had viable tissue. He began to suture the first wing onto the cat, weaving a needle in and out of the opening in its back.
Whiskers looked dead, his tongue flopping out the side of his mouth, his hips splayed wide open. His breath was soldiering on, though, his little cat stomach moving up and down nice and regular. After he’d attached the second wing, Greer closed up the cat, wrapped and taped the wings to his torso.
“If he’s breathing in two weeks,” Greer said, “then bring him back.”
During the next week or so, Chloe seemed to improve. Greer didn’t know if it was her new round of meds starting to find their way into the dark recesses of her brain or if she was honest-to-God feeling better about life and its prospects, but a couple of nights after he’d operated on Whiskers, Chloe went over and picked up her electric guitar, tuned it and then strummed out a few chords.
“Are you taking requests?” Greer asked her.
“It depends on what you request,” she said.
“How about ‘Crush All the Venture Capitalists’?” This was Greer’s favorite Whorphans song. It had a driving guitar and pounding drums and Chloe’s piercing voice screaming over the top of it all.
She brought her guitar up and strummed a few chords slowly, searching her brain for the rhythm. She paused for a second, but then suddenly she jumped right into it. She thrashed out the chords and then screamed out the first verse. When she was just about to get to the chorus, Greer’s favorite part, her voice trailed off.
“That’s all I can remember right now,” she said.
The color that she’d had in her cheeks a moment ago had drained away. Greer saw a trickle of blood snake out of her nostril. He handed her a paper towel and she wiped it away.
“Maybe you can try again later,” he said.
She slumped down on the couch and closed her eyes. She wrapped her arms around her body and sat there holding herself, like there was a leak inside her body that she was trying to stop.
“Maybe,” she said.
Karpus showed up two weeks later with Whiskers. He was still alive, but barely. Greer had wrapped Whiskers’ wings tight to his body and when he cut away the tape the cat’s new wings flopped out and hit the floor. The stitches looked like they had actually taken root. For a minute or two they all stood there and watched Whiskers walk around. It was clear that the cat couldn’t figure out what was going on. His wings were dragging on the floor and the cat spun in a tiny circle trying to get a better look at them.
Greer was tired and he wanted to get rid of the cat, get rid of Karpus, but then Greer saw the wings move. It was just a quick movement, almost a twitch, the cat lifting them up off the floor a millimeter or two, but once Whiskers did it, once the wings lifted, his cat lips pursed into what Greer could have sworn was a grin. Karpus saw this too.
“I told you!” he yelled.
Chloe had been watching all this. She stood up and pulled at her handcuffs to get a closer look. Greer went over and unlocked her and she stood next to Greer and they watched the cat move around the room, each time lifting his wings a little higher.
“I want to go out to your roof,” Karpus said. “I want to go now.”
Greer wanted to argue, he wanted to tell Karpus to wait until the cat got stronger or to find some other place, a high cliff or a tall building, but he knew Karpus wouldn’t listen to him. He realized that they were too far down this road to do anything other than take the cat up to the third floor of his house and toss him off and see what happened.
“I suppose you want to go up there too?” he asked Chloe.
Greer knew that she was going to try to jump, that those wheels were moving in her head.
“Of course I do,” she said.
“Fine,” he told her. “But no funny business.”
Karpus picked up Whiskers and all of them walked through the house and up to the third floor. Greer opened his bedroom window and Karpus carried Whiskers out onto his roof.
After Karpus climbed out, Greer followed. When Chloe came out, Greer wrapped his arms around her, locked her in a bear hug.
“I promise I won’t do anything,” she said.
Greer wanted to believe her. He wanted to let her body go and close his eyes and he wanted her to be there when he opened them, but he could not take that chance.
He and Chloe watched Karpus say his goodbyes to Whiskers. Karpus brought the cat right up to his face and planted a kiss right on the cat’s mouth. He whispered into the cat’s ear.
Greer thought Karpus was going to keep talking to the cat for a while, reminiscing about all the good times they’d had, but suddenly Karpus tossed Whiskers up into the air.
“Go!” he yelled. “Fly!”
Whiskers plummeted toward the ground. Greer was certain that the cat was going to splatter on the front sidewalk, but just before he hit the ground, Whiskers spread his wings and swooped upward. It looked strangely natural, Greer thought, like the cat was remembering something that was embedded deep inside him, an instinct from a time long past.
As Karpus jumped up and down, cheering the cat, Chloe began to struggle. She reared back and kicked Greer in the shin with her shoe, tried to push one of her thumbs into his eye socket.
“Stop,” he told her.
Chloe continued to buck and writhe. Greer would corral her for a second, but then she would wriggle free. Finally Greer got a good grip on her flailing limbs. Chloe quit struggling and they stood on the roof and watched Whiskers become a tiny speck on the horizon. The cat grew smaller and smaller, until it curled over the edge of the earth and disappeared.
THE DOJO
I stole my yoga teacher Michelle’s wallet because she was stupid enough to leave it sticking out of her purse for me to steal and because I think there are hard lessons about the real world besides remembering to inhale and exhale that can be taught inside the dojo or whatever the fuck they call it. Michelle had two hundred dollars and a bus card in her wallet and the next day I rode the bus back to the dojo for free and used her cash to buy an unlimited monthly yoga pass.
“I didn’t think you liked coming here,” Michelle said to me. “You kept saying you hated it.”
The real reason I kept coming back here was because Evelyn, a pretty brunette who I stalked occasionally, came here to decompress from me stalking her. Evelyn had recently changed apartments and phone numbers and the yoga dojo was now my best chance to locate her.
“No way,” I told Michelle. “It’s the exact opposite. I love coming here.”
- - - - - - - -
I’d stolen a pair of light blue panties from Evelyn’s dresser and now whenever I went to yoga I carried these panties in my pocket to help me achieve Zen or whatever it was called. Sometimes I pulled them out to wipe the sweat from my forehead. The panties were silky and they didn’t do much to sop up perspiration, but I used them anyway. I was waiting for Evelyn to show up and see me wiping my brow with them. I thought she might get a real kick out of that.
After class that night, Michelle was outside, smoking.
“Are you supposed to be doing that?” I asked. “Isn’t that against your teachings or something?”
Michelle had extremely long arms. When her hand was at her side it took her forever to get her cigarette up to her mouth.
“I was really off my game tonight,” she said. “I totally fucked up the tilted crane.”
She flicked her cigarette onto the sidewalk and then immediately lit another one.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Really bad week,” she said.
The next day Michelle was not at class.
“Where’s Michelle?” I asked the sub.
“She called in sick,” the woman said.
Since I had her wallet, I knew where Michelle’s apartment was. After class, with the last of her money, I bought her a bouquet of tulips.
“How did you know where I lived?” she asked me when she answered the door.
“That’s not important,” I said, holding out the flowers.
I had given women presents before, but usually they were presents that they did not appreciate. This present, though, some-thing felt different. It was like these flowers had pulled our two worlds into alignment, and now she and I were cosmically even or whatever it is people say when something like this happens.
Michelle wrapped her long arms around my neck and pulled me in tight. “This was so sweet of you,” she said.
“Really,” I whispered into her pretty ear, “it was nothing.”
ALEJANDRA
My new lover said he loved me. I told him I loved him back. We’d met only forty-five minutes before, but we both agreed that we were totally and completely in love.
“I have something to tell you, Francine,” my new lover told me as we laid naked on my futon.
“More important than our love?” I asked.
“No,” he told me, “but pretty important.”
Just before this, I had taken my fingernails and written words on my new lover’s back. He was supposed to guess the words I’d written there, but he was not very good at this game. I wrote “enchanted” and he guessed “extradited.” I wrote the word “forever,” but he guessed “foreskin.” He turned toward me now, took my hands in his.