Therapy Mammals

by Jon Methven

  I cannot blame it on the Luderica or lack thereof, but perhaps on the combination of the drugs and my injuries, my anger and rage and because I cannot see out of my right eye. It cannot even be called a true blackout, though when I come to my senses I find myself squatting in the center of Jackson and Jason’s driveway, shitting into the blacktop that was sealed last September. It occurs to me as I bend—why do we have driveways if we do not park our cars here? What we need is more grass, lovely trees, gardens in bloom. One of the kids watches from a window, Rhythm I believe, which should be enough to shame me into moving ten feet into the grass. Instead, I let out a screeching howl that melds with the moonlight for an image that will remain with her forever.

  Existential Weather

  Despite the flawed decisions that have brought me to this point, wounded and limping across an abandoned golf course in the early morning searching for a pregnant feline, I am overwhelmed by a thought: how another cat was able to get close enough to impregnate Clint Eastwood. One of the fiercest creatures with which I have ever come into contact, my therapy animal will not allow me near it. I have not seen Clint Eastwood in days. If it had been living beneath the shed as I suspect, it would have scattered during Jackson’s rampage. A loose calculation based on when I kidnapped and uprooted her from the graveyard, I believe she should give birth shortly.

  I abandon the search when a white orb nearly bludgeons me, gliding beyond the tree line, crackling several twigs, and coming to rest near the Tomlinsons’ porch. The first wave of golfers in their ridiculous outfits traverses the fourth fairway. With my swollen eye and limp, I cannot chance an encounter with members of the homeowners association who have now issued me seven official letters and would add my nefarious appearance to the next dispatch.

  Inside the newsroom, I notice hands over mouths, curt glances. My odor, which as Little Petty predicted, has developed into a natural redolence, along with the red eye ensures no one approaches for explanation. The assumption is that whatever beating occurred was issued on my way to work, which I do little to correct. These are mostly kids, along with Melanie Trotter who calculably weeps, and an executive I do not recognize who studies my injuries as if watching an old racehorse trot into the newsroom.

  Today at Lustfizzle, “17 Pickles That Look Too Sad To Be Eaten” is trending. A fourteen-year-old in South Carolina, Gus’s age, shot his parents before taking the semiautomatic weapon to school and killing two students and a teacher. Different levels of problems occurred in Syria, where an overnight bombing clipped a children’s hospital. The pickles really do look sad. I am not going on air today, I overhear, something about a meeting. I point out that a segment of a bloodied me reading about sunshine is the recipe for viral success.

  “He’s right,” says a thin-necked boy with jeans and no socks. He holds a clipboard that seems to contain all of life’s answers. “Viewers will tweak. We can have the anchors ask him what happened. It’ll be a thing.”

  All of this planning and strategizing and blood is too much for Penelope Garcia who is threatening to quit if she has to stand next to my wounds. “You promise no more,” she screeches at Whitman, throwing a full glass of juice that strikes the sockless young man, who cannot stomach this anarchy and tosses the clipboard, promising to quit action news forever.

  Whitman smiles. “You look like shit, Pisser.”

  “I feel surprisingly at peace.”

  “You can’t go on air like this.”

  I’m partially inventing this, not having checked the radar or a weather module. “I’m seeing a suspicious pattern out of Canada, combining with a mass shopping spree sweeping across the Great Lakes. Ever heard of thundersnow?”

  Whitman likes storms, Mother Nature filtered through a camera and spit out into his ratings. He does not budge.

  “Typically occur in March, but this will be a clipper with pockets of thundersnow. Very rare. The snow suppresses the environmental acoustics, so the thunder is only heard within the very spot where the precipitation occurs. Intense emotions. Communal distress. Angst in the atmosphere.”

  “Existential weather.” Whitman twitches, behaving the way I imagined he does just prior to ejaculation. “That would be something.”

  It is not that we are alone, without cameras. Rather, it is Whitman’s sadness that allows the pulse of what is occurring to burst onto my perception. The executive suddenly matters, white and crusty, a man who has relied too long on phosphorescent lighting for his Vitamin D. I am being escorted by office security, both myself and Whitman, the BB gun stiff against my tailbone. They place me in a chair and look on from the far side of a table, the executive, a lawyer, Whitman, a pen, a set of papers. The end does not come with a flurry of shouted accusations. Instead, initials on various lines.

  “It’s not a bad idea, Pisser,” Whitman says, ignoring the others. “Existential weather. Theater for the anxious. Hear me out a minute.”

  “Let’s get this done,” the executive says.

  Whitman circles the table. “It’s the weather report but it’s not about weather. It’s about the state of our national misgivings. Our worries and fears. Feralism, isn’t that the word you used the other day?” I don’t remember using it. “What does feralism mean, though? We need a new word, something that can be branded. We can probably run an algorithm on the day’s news and actually give you a Doppler and some percentages to gauge just how bad the anxiety is out there.” He smiles and pants and part of me loves Whitman, his energy and youth. “The Existential Weather Report, with Tom Pistilini.”

  I tap the pages. Whitman shrugs, defeated by the forces of morality.

  “Someone lodged a formal complaint, Mister Pistilini,” the executive says. “That you stole a woman’s artificial leg out of a health club locker.”

  “I would never do such a thing.” But my tribe would.

  “There are photos.”

  “Impossible.” I know there are no photos, no videotape, Josey’s crew combing the security for meddling eyes.

  “Not of the theft,” the lawyer corrects, passing printouts across the table.

  Tungsten Sedlock, the clever little bitch. My naked image wandering my backyard, the headline in one of many of Lustfizzle’s competitors: “Sasquatch Weather.” I do resemble a primitive ape scrounging the woods for protein. Whitman shakes his head. The photos, while poor quality, have been packaged with a millennial charm, a clever wit that has even me chuckling at my messy life. Whitman joins me. The lawyer cracks a smile and then quickly adjusts her frown.

  I begin initializing the lines. “Fine then,” Whitman says. “Look at it as gardening leave for the summer. Everyone forgets about the pictures and fake leg. Then you come back. We’ll put you on late night at first, remedy your image, lose a little weight.”

  “That’s not part of the agreement,” the executive says.

  “So we change the language.”

  “The boycott,” the lawyer advises. “Our female viewers.”

  He waves it away. “Something else will be bothering them by then.”

  I sign my name and hand them to the lawyer. My string comes to an end at eighty-one consecutive days, though I will go on with my uncanny predictions on the Gopa website. Whitman raises a fist, a manly bump goodbye, but I tug him in for a hug. We do not hug enough anymore, not the people we love, certainly not the strangers we fear with their grimy diseases and concealed weapons. If there were such a thing as an existential weather report, hugs would be our umbrellas.

  “Moveable Museums,” he says into my ear. “I’m still in.”

  “Stay out of things that do not involve you,” I say.

  Whitman squeezes. “Just like the weather. It impacts all of us.”

  Video Footage The New Achilles’ Heel

  By the time I reach a computer it is too late. Hecticmom14, Olivia McClutchen no doubt, posted a video of my beating to the Gopa website, pa
rents clicking on it in droves, quickly forgetting last night’s rebuke by the administration. The beating is followed by several photos of me wandering my backyard naked, along with more controversial footage that many have passed off as myth. The final insult is Josey Mateo’s doing. Had she asked my blessing, I would have notified her that I deserved the beating, that I nearly killed Jason’s daughter, that he had every right to attack me, rendering retaliation unjust.

  The footage is dated, but one can make out the Gopa students, wiry anatomy running from the dog as a slight man enters the frame to distract it. There’s an admirable intensity to the faceless man’s courage, which quickly turns to violent lewdness once the dog gets the better of my neighbor, Jason. Confused by the testosterone and fight, the animal begins thrusting itself into the fallen man. The same children who moments earlier feared for their lives intrinsically turn to watch, a few reaching for phones to capture their survival.

  I quickly dial Josey. “What have you done?”

  “He had it coming.” Her voice is soft, impassioned. I imagine her skin a ruthless parade of stick animals bobbing their young and tirelessly marching across the plains of her tendons. “He’s one of them.”

  “This doesn’t help my situation.”

  “Your situation?” Things have shifted between Josey and myself, boundaries and allegiances, a submissive administrator I thought once sought me for adultery now acquisitive of bedlam inside my languishing paradise. It is not clear if Josey Mateo and her people are my allies, or if I am being blackmailed into serving as their stooge. “He humiliated you. In front of Laura. In front of the parents.”

  “I didn’t know the dog rape video existed.” The phones that captured the footage were confiscated, videos deleted, but Josey has her ways. If she was able to obtain this footage, the Zapruder film of the Gopa community, I find it impossible that she cannot get her hands on the video Toby possesses. “You knew about the video, the coach in the shower. You knew it wasn’t Iliza. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t think you were going to kill him, Tom. Besides,” she shifts the phone, types into a computer, a casualness to her manner that feels deplorable. “Russ Haverly was a bad person, a cancer that had to go. He’s the reason we spared you, why we didn’t bomb any Standcake shops, which incidentally I despise. Pancakes are meant to lie horizontal, prone, relaxed. It’s what makes them comfort food, not standing up all jittery and decorated. Don’t tell Laura that. I’m fond of her.” She giggles. “It does kind of look like the dog is raping him, doesn’t it?”

  I watch it again. “He saved those kids.”

  “You need to come to terms with the mission, Tom. I’m sure if we bothered to calculate it, all your neighbors would exhibit shades of goodness. We don’t care if they do occasional good, or that you sit on committees, or that your children volunteer during Thanksgiving to collect cans of pumpkin filling for the homeless.” She repositions the phone. “We care that the roots of the creature are worthy, wanting of redemption. Our religion opposes your exponential homogeneity, your default gluttony. Your neighbor, like you, can save himself, the same way he made a choice to save those kids; all your neighbors can. They have to walk away from Moveable voluntarily. The same way you and Laura did. If they don’t, we will expose them. We will hit them in the only place that matters. Their wallets. There,” she says, shifting the lecture. “I took down the video of your beating and the photos. You need to lose some weight. The dog rape video stays.”

  Bill Chuck’s cruiser is parked out front of my house when I arrive. He takes in my bruises meticulously, an old cop tying it together. He has likely heard about my misfortune from Misch and shrugs that beatings are inevitable. Bill’s retirement involves sitting in an oversized office inside the Slancy Clubhouse monitoring screens hooked up to wireless cameras stationed all over the island. His only job, as Slancy’s security man, is to hunt down the vandal destroying the cameras. He probably realizes by now that I am the vandal, or rather a tribal version of me, but my opposition to Moveable Museums is my saving grace.

  “You shit in the neighbors’ driveway last night,” he says. “Security camera picked it up.”

  He points at the house next door. The Hendersons purchased the property for the novelty, its proximity to the golf course and Manhattan. Wealthy, they spend most of the calendar year golfing in exotic locales. I never noticed the camera before.

  “I tried to hose it off to save you the hassle, but it’s on their good.”

  We watch the Jays’ driveway, trying to see if we can spot where a grown man relieved himself. “Tell them I’ll have it repaved.”

  “Probably not necessary,” Bill says. “Camera also had footage of your neighbor dumping concrete in your Jacuzzi. That’ll cost more than a driveway.”

  “Same camera?”

  Bill nods. Something about this conversation troubles me. Bill Chuck is not leaving, and I am loosely coming to grips with the reason. The Hendersons’ security system is a series of high definition weatherproof domes disguised as birdcages that retail for $15,000 each on VillageShop, four different mounts capturing every angle of the property. Bill does not have access to the videos. From a remote location, they monitor their property from the cameras, occasionally phoning Bill if a faulty delivery is made to their property, or a neighbor defecates publicly. While one birdcage captured me in the driveway, another is pointed directly into my backyard, witnessing Jackson dismantling my oasis.

  “How long those cameras been up?”

  “Since the Hendersons moved in I’m guessing.”

  “And they record everything?”

  “Imagine so. Missus Henderson saw you in the driveway. She called from Ireland. Claims the neighborhood is going to hell.”

  “You think they’d let you look back through the archives.”

  “Anything I’m looking for in particular?”

  “January. Around the time of the accident.”

  Bill was the first police to the scene of Tilly’s death. He phoned the coroner and authorities. “I’ll delete what I find.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking.” I turn to Bill, who seems mysteriously willing to overlook minor transgressions, such as emptying my bowels in the neighbors’ driveways, and perhaps murder. I need to know what I am capable of doing during the blackouts, if, as Josey says, the roots of my creature are good or if I am just pretending. “I’m going through strange times, Bill. Transformation I guess you could call it. There are…lesser attributes of myself I believe could be destructive. I need to know what I did.”

  Bouts Of Insomnia

  Sleep will not have me, my mind replaying the day’s events, our finances, my discussion with Laura that I am no longer employed as a meteorologist. The severance package will keep us afloat for the rest of the year. After the money runs out, we are technically broke, vegan-cyborg pancakes our only method to keep the lights on, the children fed, the therapy bills paid. We will get through this, she says, and she believes it because she does not know how deep I am, the extent I will go to finish what I have begun. She thinks Josey and her people are community activists, not urban terrorists who will not cease until they have established victory on their terms.

  My tribe is still hungry at oh-three-hundred when I emerge from a blackout to the howling, the brutal hours of paranoia as I clutch a BB gun expecting retribution. A feline’s tantrum calls to me from the rough of a fairway glistening with sticky dew, a yellow moon low over the earth to cold open on a bloated Clint Eastwood. The late May chill gnaws at my neck as I fight exhaustion and arthritis and other fresh aches I have inherited from my insatiable tribe, their gripes and terrors deposited into my bloody creeks. I brought Clint Eastwood here, to this artificial Eden. My therapy creature belongs to me the way normal people have pets with names and habits and personal toys.

  If I harbored sentiments that I would turn Clint Eastwood into a needy kitt
en, docile in my embrace beneath a Christmas sweater as we pose for our annual holiday card, that is not us. Clint Eastwood belongs to the land. She will make it in this world with or without my assistance. She will starve in pain in a deserted hollow to protect her young, and in that we are in agreement. I am ready to die to protect mine. I have white privilege, and class privilege, also father privilege, husband privilege, human privilege, the privilege of knowing right from wrong, the feral creatures summoned through a chemical birth to inspire my path. I know what I must do. I have dreamt of it. In the manner I intrinsically know what the atmosphere will spill forth before each sunrise, I can sense the destruction. There is little difference between myself and the terrorists bent on godly honor. In many ways, I am more dangerous and undeserving of postmortem generosity. I went looking for my God and did not find her, and I operate with my own creed and spirits: one dead by four iron and strangulation, one possibly dead for reasons unknown, too many chipmunk souls to tally.

  The Angora rabbits flourish in their new home, having habituated to the Slancy tree line near the fifth tee where even the chipmunks and Clint Eastwood did not realize that an underground rivulet had woven itself into the sediment. It is cooler there in the shade of trees, and they thrive in their own lifestyle, ignoring the other creatures native to this island and going about their tasks with a spontaneous playfulness they never knew in the Gopa cages. They have become a photo sensation with the golfers, many noticing from a distance the furry white balls grazing on clover, assuming the universe has planted them there for significance, good luck, vast fortunes, a hearty tee shot. It is only when they get close they notice the strange faces, rabbit lips where they ought not be, curious placements of eyes, a puckering that grows fiercer. The golfers discover there is something wrong, something malfeasant on the course, and they wander back to their golf bag to arm themselves with steel and beer.