by Tim Davys
Pedro was furious. He demanded to meet Horse Carl. Carl granted the audience and expressed regret at the decision, but explained that he could do nothing about it. The judgment had fallen, the person who would be pardoned was David Owl, that’s how it was decided. Why couldn’t Carl pardon both of them, asked Pedro.
Horse Carl sighed heavily. It was impossible.
“Why was it impossible?” asked Eric Bear in much too loud a voice.
“It was just impossible,” repeated Snake Marek, once again irritated at having been interrupted.
Well.
Former admiral Pedro made the most logical decision of which he was capable, under the circumstances. He went with a military stride directly from the audience with Horse Carl to David Owl and cut off the judge’s head with a saber. Then he took the head into the forest and buried it. In this way, thought Pedro, they should pardon the one who had received the next most votes.
But there former admiral Pedro was mistaken. Instead, the possibility of pardoning animals was taken away from Horse Carl with immediate effect.
“Taken away by who?” asked Eric.
“The story doesn’t say,” said Snake.
The Death List was classified as secret, no one knew in advance who was on it (and after a hundred years we didn’t even know if the list itself existed), and the routine with the Coachmen, later the Chauffeurs, was introduced.
Snake Marek fell silent. After a long while Eric said, “This indicates at least that someone decides, and therefore there must be a possibility of influence.”
“Perhaps one might see it that way,” nodded Snake.
“Now we’ll go home and decide how we proceed from here,” said Eric.
Snake nodded, and they slid down from barstool and counter and left Springergaast.
The night of the eighteenth of May became another night of alcohol, cards, and bizarre notions in the kitchen at Yiala’s Arch. Just in time for the Evening Storm, the bottles were uncorked. Crow showed signs of dexterity as he shuffled the cards with his longest finger feathers, Snake wriggled up onto the kitchen table and made himself ready for the first deal while Sam stole into the bathroom to make himself a cocktail of pills before it was time to play. Eric lit the tea lights and poured drinks for everyone.
Tom-Tom Crow only pretended to get drunk. When the others weren’t looking, he stole away to the kitchen sink, pouring out the vodka and replacing it with water. Then he cawed loudly and drunkenly for the sake of appearances. He couldn’t bring himself to drink; the last few days he’d felt strange, sensitive in a way he didn’t like; tonight he’d been awakened by tears running down his beak. He knew what was causing it, but he struggled to force the memories back into the deep ravines of forgetting.
Eric Bear, on the other hand, got drunk as a sailor. Drunker than he’d ever been. He’d intended to hold back, intended to guide his intoxicated companions through the night and direct them back up onto navigable paths of association when they slipped down into the ditch.
That’s not how it turned out.
When alcohol got the upper hand and Eric could no longer defend himself against his feelings, the bear disappeared first down into deep resignation, where he felt very comfortable because resignation excused him. What could he really do, asked resignation. He was fighting against death, and no mortal was victorious over death. Despite the fact that they’d gotten hold of a Death List, it felt just as unlikely as it had a few weeks ago that they would succeed in rescuing Nicholas Dove back to life. The only thing they had acquired was information about the Chauffeurs and the list that was mortally dangerous. It was of utmost importance that no one said anything, Eric observed anxiously. It was of utmost importance that these idiots for companions in Sam Gazelle’s kitchen could keep their mouths shut.
“Airybody,” attempted Eric Bear, “gotchto choosed. Now!”
But no one cared to try to interpret his slurring, and it was just as well. The two animals Eric loved most were at risk of dying, and he had only three days to do something about it. He felt inexplicably sorry for himself, and he thought he had the right to immerse himself in self-pity.
But the more he drank, the harder it was to hold on to this almost apathetic sorrow. The vodka heated him up. It was so unfair, he thought. It was as though a higher power was playing a joke on him, as if someone truly wanted to see him suffer and therefore let him discover his brother’s name on the list. Dove can go to hell, the bear thought crossly, and the anger chased away the loneliness and caused him to feel strong. Dove can go to hell, he thought again, and fate can go to hell, too.
Eric got up from the table. His chair fell over and the crash caused the others to fall silent and look up. He had absolutely nothing to say. He looked at them, one after the other, and was filled with a powerful love. They were sitting here for his sake; they were loyal. His bear heart was transformed into a cleaning sponge, soggy with alcohol and sentimentality, and tears welled up in the corners of his eyes. His friends. His confidants.
“Eric,” asked Tom-Tom, “what the hell are we doing now, actually?”
Eric Bear turned slowly toward Tom-Tom and tried in vain to focus his gaze.
“Yes, then,” repeated the crow, “I don’t get what the hell we should do.”
That swine, thought Eric, perplexed, and all his beautiful feelings evaporated. Does the big crow doubt my ability?
“I think we put Noah Camel up against the wall,” said Sam from over by the dish rack.
The gazelle was doing dishes? Eric squinted in order to make Sam out better. Indeed, he was standing there doing dishes. Wasn’t that overly zealous?
“Noah Camel?” asked Snake.
“He must have gotten the list from someone,” Sam defended himself, assuming that Snake thought badly of the idea.
“Was that camel bastard at the ministry?” asked Tom-Tom.
“You know who he is?” said Snake.
All of these retorts flying back and forth through the room confused Eric Bear. He understood that something was about to happen, something important, but he didn’t know what it was. Noah Camel?
“Noah and I…know each other,” said Sam, adding hesitantly, “you might say…”
“And you’re just saying that now?” Snake Marek almost screamed.
His irritation knew no limits.
“But this is good, isn’t it?” asked Tom-Tom.
Three days might be enough, thought Eric.
NOAH CAMEL
can’t understand it can’t understand it can’t understand how someone can want to cause such pain such pain such pain and tears don’t help because I’m freezing ’cause it’s cold, it’s always cold cold but I’m not freezing because it’s cold, I’m freezing from fear, I’m freezing down to the marrow and stuffing and this cold hurts so bad it hurts so bad
saw Sam Gazelle coming, saw him coming from the window in the hall, saw him coming from the window in the hall and it made me a little happy even because even if I knew he was dangerous we were friends he and I we were friends he and I for we’d met once long ago and I knew he was dangerous for I knew who he was and what he liked to do but I thought that was just talk because there’s so much talk and there’s too much talk and I opened the door when he rang the bell and asked him to come into the kitchen and sit down and maybe have coffee or a beer for you’re supposed to be nice to your friends
he took a fork and poked it through my leg, through cloth and cotton, the metal teeth of the fork right through my leg from one side to the other so I was stuck to the table and I can’t describe how much it hurt how horribly painful it was but still I almost didn’t feel the pain because I got so scared, so scared that my whole body started shaking but I didn’t scream even if I should have screamed but I wept silently and looked at Sam Gazelle who I thought was my friend and I didn’t understand I didn’t understand I didn’t understand a thing
he questioned me and threatened me and said that if I didn’t talk he would burn me, just
like that he said that he would burn me and I saw in his eyes that he wanted to burn me whatever the hell I said and by then I was almost happy because I understood why he’d stuck the fork through my leg, he was after something, he wanted to know what I knew and that’s the kind of thing that happens all the time, it was understandable and I didn’t give a damn who killed who so I told him, told him everything I knew about where I’d gone before and where I went after I’d been up to the ministry and then everything was as it should be, then he’d gotten what he wanted and then he could go away again, leave again and I never wanted to see him again
but he didn’t go
he did things with me I can’t talk about ’cause they’re much too terrible to say with words, things that are so horrible you can’t even mention them and when I think about everything he did I go completely dark inside for I don’t want to tell what he did with me, Sam Gazelle, but he did it over and over again and he never got enough and I screamed and I cried and I fainted and dreamed and woke up and he was still there and said that he’d come up with something new that he wanted to try and sometimes he laughed and sometimes he was serious and I don’t know if he saw me at all and the pain was…the pain was so enormous that I almost couldn’t feel it despite the fact that it was so great that it caused me to faint
but it wasn’t the pain that was the worst it wasn’t when he did what he did that was the most terrible but rather it was just before he was going to do it just before in the breath before he said that he wanted to try something new
can’t understand it can’t understand it can’t understand how you can want to cause such pain such pain such pain and tears don’t help because I’m freezing because it’s cold, it’s always cold cold down to the marrow and stuffing and it’s burning, the cold, it’s burning and it’s on fire and it hurts so bad it hurts so bad
and I screamed and screamed that I would tell everything he wanted to know and there was nothing that I wouldn’t tell if he only asked me to and I cried and screamed that I’ll do everything you want and I’ll tell everything you want if you just stop stop stop I’ll tell tell tell but he told me to shut up he told me to go to hell he didn’t give a damn what I had to tell, he said, and my desperation was greater than…
and I screamed and I screamed
and I told and I told
and I fainted and woke up and fainted and woke up
and finally I fainted again
can’t understand it can’t understand it can’t understand how it hurt so bad so bad so bad and tears don’t help because I’m freezing because it’s cold, life is always cold and life will always remain that way until the fire catches up with me and ignites me and consumes me and eradicates me and only then will I stop freezing, perhaps I’ll stop freezing then perhaps
TEDDY BEAR, 3
I move about freely. I am living a free life.
Eleven paintings in narrow, white wooden frames hang in the corridor on my floor. Abstract art. Painted with a lot of water and a knife’s edge of pastel paint. I don’t like them. I never would have chosen them myself. But in that case, would I have made things too easy for myself?
These paintings, in particular the two hanging before my door, counting from the stairwell, irritate me. Irritation stimulates reflection. Reflection develops me.
With paintings that I appreciated I would have stagnated.
My room is my universe. My bedroom and my bathroom.
I take my meals with the others in the dining hall one floor down.
Every week I go into the city. I take long city walks. I keep myself up-to-date. I know they’re performing a comedy by Bergdorff Lizard at the Zern Theater. It’s a tragic piece that must be carried by the individual efforts of the actors. Every other week I visit Mother and Father. I call them in advance and tell them I’m coming. I don’t want to surprise them at an unsuitable moment. I know that Father thinks my visits can be trying. I wish he himself would choose to see me.
As it is, he chooses not to.
Eric comes out to my place to visit.
Mother and Father never do.
What is more absurd than the life I’m living today is how defensive I get when I have to describe the life I’m living today.
That says something about society.
I shouldn’t need to defend myself.
On the other hand, I might agree that it’s peculiar that I’m married and responsible for the city’s leading advertising agency at the same time as I’m living this life in my own universe.
The mayor appointed our mother as head of the Environmental Ministry the same week that I completed my academic degree.
Mother has worked at the Environmental Ministry her entire life. At the transportation and energy offices, she had been in charge of recycling issues and responsible for the city’s road maintenance.
Nonetheless, her appointment came as a shock to those of us who were close to Mother.
There were many of us who were close to her.
I was the closest to her.
Her double identities were so well separated that I had a hard time seeing her in a role as a department head. To me her list of qualifications consisted of slow-cooking and roll-baking. For Mother herself this political success was expected. The animals in the city as well felt that the choice of Rhinoceros Edda was a good one. Mayor Lion knew what she was doing. Her most important mission was to appoint popular department heads. If she made popular decisions, the Mayor’s chances of reelection increased.
We celebrated Mother’s appointment in the evening. It was a Thursday in the beginning of June. There was me, my brother, and Mother and Father. We sat in the kitchen, and Father had bought a bottle of champagne after work. The news about Mother had been in the newspaper and Father got a discount on the champagne.
I don’t recall what we ate.
I smiled dutifully, raised my glass, and toasted.
I was deeply downhearted.
I had applied for an internship at the Environmental Ministry. For several years Mother had been in charge of the Planning Division, which dealt with issues of city planning and resource allotment. Her office was in Lanceheim. I had applied for a job at the Energy Unit in Tourquai. I believed that my future was in advanced energy research.
Now that was impossible.
With Mother as head of the Environmental Ministry my application papers would be questioned. My competency would be closely scrutinized. Even if I were deemed qualified, there would always be a measure of doubt.
I sipped the champagne, feeling confused.
What would I do now?
Time would help me answer that question, but that evening I felt the weight of an unobliging fate. For several years I had set my heart on a career in the Environmental Ministry, a place of employment big enough to hold both me and Mother.
Father gave a little speech.
“In order to gain something you have to give up something else,” he said.
His eyes glistened. I had never before seen him cry. Now a tear of pride was rolling down his cheek.
“But what you have given up, I don’t know,” he continued. “It’s not your family, in any case. Not your friends, either. Or your cooking ability. Perhaps it’s the other way around, because you’ve refused to give up, that you have gained?”
He’d intended to say something else, but Mother stood up and silenced him with a hug.
Eric applauded.
I applauded too. This took the edge off my brother’s irony. My smile, however, was still strained.
Then I recall a cozy evening in the kitchen. I recall that I set my disappointment aside to be happy with Mother. I recall that Eric and Father for once found something around which to unite. We showered Mother with congratulations and prophesied success for her in things both great and small. Not until I turned off the lamp on my nightstand did I again recall the situation that Mother had unknowingly put me in. I brooded a while, but soon fell asleep.
I was no longer the los
t bear I’d been before.
I had become aware of myself.
These words from my late teens still apply. This was the way I saw, and still see, myself:
I am a stuffed animal who cannot commit an evil action. I am an animal who is driven to always, as far as is possible, do right.
With that it was said.
Not so remarkable.
Nonetheless, unusual.
This insight about how things stood grew during my secondary school years, but it was in the final grade that these intuitions blossomed into certainty.
When I understood, it was impossible to understand that I hadn’t already understood.
I’d always been the same, but when I was little I was not in command of my actions. Someone else—my parents or teachers or other grown-ups—decided in my place. Besides, I could still not determine what was right and wrong. I was brought up to believe that there was a kind of unwritten rule book in ethics to fall back on in difficult cases, and that you weren’t allowed to read that book before you were an adult.
I imagined to myself that I could disregard my intuitive sense of what was right and wrong, and that the anxiety created by the conflicts between my own conviction and the norms of society was just part of being a teenager.
That I would grow into myself.
That it was a matter of maturity.