by Karen Heuler
She had given it eyes, and the eyes gazed at her. Its mouth rippled, trying to find a form.
It screamed again, but this time not so hard, and Doreen stood, watching it. There was an answering chorus of barks and some howls from far off.
There had been piglets at a petting zoo she’d once been taken to. “Don’t name them,” her father had said. “You’ve got to understand they’re food, not pets.”
“Your name is Gilgamesh,” Doreen said. It was a name they’d read about in school and she liked the sound of it, exotic and strong. And wasn’t Gilgamesh a king of some sort?
Gilgamesh opened his mouth, rolled his eyes, and shifted his head. He moved his arms and then his torso. The suede of his lips parted and came together. He looked at his arms, which ended bluntly, and lifted what should be his hands. Or cow feet. Or paws.
Doreen nodded. “I couldn’t find any hands, just that thumb. I suppose they were eaten,” she said. “I tried to find what I could.”
With that, the cow struck at her, hitting her with the meat on its paw, or hand. She was flung back. “But I saved you!” she cried out.
Gilgamesh mooed, or hooted, a long loud call. The dogs all barked in answer. Doreen thought she heard birds as well, those loud pushy ones, the crows.
There was no expression on Gilgamesh’s face—for she hadn’t given him delicate muscles. He lifted his arm again, brought it back, and knocked Doreen to the ground. Then he rushed away. Doreen rolled over, getting her breath back, dizzy. Her hand braced itself on the floor, in some of the blood that Gilgamesh had dripped. No, actually it was her own blood; her nose was bleeding. She sat back, thickheaded.
She heard yells from the houses around them, and her mother called out, asking what was wrong. Dogs barked in excitement. She got up and followed the sounds, yelling back to her mother that everything was fine, determined to make sense of what was happening. She could fix it, she was sure, if she could understand it.
Gilgamesh was roaming the neighbourhood, smashing into things, calling out wildly, and the neighbourhood animals answered. Tied up, fenced in, they howled to him, flinging themselves against walls and trees and cages. Doreen followed the noises of people shouting, but there was a panic in the street, and people ran every which way, so she wasn’t sure of the direction.
Her mother stood on the steps waiting for her. “What is it?” she asked. “I’ve heard terrible things. There’s a news report about wild dogs. Did you see them?”
Doreen shook her head. “They’re not wild, they’re just running.”
“Come inside, Doreen, it isn’t safe. What if they start biting people? Biting children? We can’t have that.” The sounds were far off now, going away fast. Doreen hesitated and then went inside.
That night the news reports showed police on top of buildings and crouching through alleyways. They said they would shoot any animal that ran past. The reporter showed gates that had been broken in certain yards where “a thing” had stumbled through.
“This is terrible,” her mother said. “What’s going on, who let that thing out? I won’t rest until it’s dead, whatever it is.”
“It’s probably just unhappy,” Doreen said stubbornly.
She waited for her parents to fall asleep. Then she dressed and snuck outside. She took a packet of instant gravy with her, just in case.
The streets were flooded with flashing lights, so she took the back yards, sneaking through bushes and behind sheds, falling over bicycles and mowers. She followed her own old routes, going behind the butchers, the stores, the dog pounds, the vet. She found Gilgamesh near the dumpsters behind the biggest supermarket, surrounded by dogs.
“You can’t stay here,” she said. “They’re looking for you. They want to kill you.”
Gilgamesh had a piece of meat hanging off near his shoulder and she went up to him very carefully. She wanted to put it back in place, but she didn’t have a needle and thread. She should have thought of that; she really should have.
“They’re killing other animals because of you,” she said unhappily. Gilgamesh lowered his great uneven head. “More and more. It’s my fault. I didn’t think about this too clearly. It just seemed so wrong, and yet this isn’t any better. I don’t know what to do.” She thought it would be best if Gilgamesh just went away, far away, so that all of this could stop—the shooting that she heard, even now, blocks away, the cries of an animal being hit, of people being excited. Yet she felt sad for Gilgamesh, too; for he now had a voice and an intent. Why else would he be roaming the streets? Why else was he learning to live?
Doreen ripped open her packet of gravy and sprinkled it on his shoulder, pinching the pieces together. It didn’t fully stick together, but it was better. “You have to get away from here,” she said, and led him past the dumpsters to the industrial park, and beyond that to the woods. Maybe he would be safe there. And if the animals followed him, maybe the shooting would stop. He loped along, shifting from side to side, his gait worse than it had been earlier that day. She frowned, trying to see what was wrong. Some of his body had slid down farther, she thought, so that his weight dragged down to his legs.
She lay in bed that night, listening to the guns and the shouts and the drawn out animal screams. She had an awful feeling that she’d done the wrong thing, that Gilgamesh was a mistake, but how could that be? And if he was, what could she do?
In the morning she went out again and searched for him, back up in the woods, hoping she’d find him and that she would somehow know what the right thing to do would be. There was a sweet smell in the air, but it wasn’t a nice smell. It made her slow down a little, but it didn’t stop her entirely. Perhaps he was dead already; that would be the easiest thing.
A dog walked with her, a little bit away, its tail held high, its mouth open eagerly. She followed the dog and found Gilgamesh leaning against a large tree. His head was sloping downwards and to the side, and she could see that a piece of his back leg had fallen off. Some dogs were fighting over something in the bushes.
Gilgamesh lifted his injured leg when she approached him. He tried to straighten up. The dog walked over and began to lick at Gilgamesh’s feet. “Stop it!” she cried and threw a stick at the dog, who went away and sat down, watching.
She didn’t want him to die. He had a right to live—she had, she thought, given him the right to live. She’d brought water and thread and some more plastic wrap, but his meat came apart easily and it was impossible to get it all to stay together. She thought she might be able to go and find more meat, fresher packages, a later sell-by date, maybe she could still fix him. But it struck her that it was wrong to use the meat of other animals to keep him alive. It was contrary to what she had wanted, wasn’t it? Every time she remembered this it sent a little shock of despair right through her.
His skin was too soft, and parts of it were dried at the edges. “Wait,” she said, and she ran back to the store, looking for beef stock, chicken stock, even vegetable stock. “My, my,” the cashier said. “Soup? Looks like a lot of soup.” And the cashier smiled happily, a soup-lover herself.
She dribbled the broth over him slowly; she rubbed it in around his head, massaging his neck and his forehead. When he was stronger, she tugged him gently deeper into the woods, away from the people who wanted to catch him. She threw stones at the dogs, scattering them. Then she rushed home, telling her mother she’d been right next door, out of harm’s way. Her mother frowned and looked at her sharply, but let it go.
Doreen rose before dawn and found Gilgamesh and led him to the garbage cans on the street, opening up the plastic wraps and the brown paper bags, searching for discarded meats—old chops, dry slices of turkey, oozing packages of bacon. Gilgamesh bent over them, tilting his head so that his fish eye could see. His hand with the thumb reached out and took a slice of meat and folded it into his lower leg, pressing it in. A bag of dented cans burst open and he picked up soups and gravies, scooping out the remnants and applying them to the slice of meat aro
und the edges, making sure it was firmly in place.
She put the garbage back in the bin and they continued. She could see that Gilgamesh was intent on exploring each trash can and by the third or fourth he was selective and much quieter. She took out a plastic bag that was in good shape and put some things in it and he did so as well, picking out tuna salad, hamburgers, the gristle off steaks, chicken bones and shrimp tails. He loped along, an odd shambling walk, evidence of her lack of skill. With the bulging plastic bag he seemed an odd, unbalanced imitation cow or horse, or even a bear. Not well-defined, certainly. But alive, most definitely.
She led him back to the spot in the woods she had chosen. Then she hurried home and crept into bed.
She found him again the next day at dawn and he was greedier at the garbage cans, faster, ripping through bags impatiently, finding lard and chicken fat and drippings in plastic containers, congealed stews and overcooked fish. She followed him, trying to pick up the garbage he discarded, but she couldn’t get it all done by dawn, he worked so furiously. She had worn sneakers and running clothes in case her mother got up before she got home, but she crept inside unobserved.
She took out their own garbage that night, keeping herself from sorting it only by an enormous effort.
“Make sure the lid is on tight,” her mother warned. “It’s raccoons. All that fuss. Raccoons. They went through every garbage can on Kessel Street,” she said. “Monsters, ha! Some people have active imaginations. Just make sure the lid’s on tight.”
She worked harder at cleaning up behind Gilgamesh, but there was never enough time; he went from can to can recklessly, gathering meats and liquids. He didn’t always wait for her, and she had to come earlier, hours before dawn, to catch him.
And then he moved. She stood at his usual spot, shining her flashlight around, afraid that something terrible had happened. She saw a trail of flattened ferns and followed it, her heart pounding, looking at shapes quickly and then away and then back at them again.
Finally her light flashed on him. His back was turned from her. She called out and he stiffened, then moved to look at her, his thick arms dragging. His body was heavy and loose. She could see bits of garbage around him, foam plates, plastic wrap. She wondered if he had a need to repair himself in privacy. Some animal instinct to conceal his weakness, maybe? She turned slightly away from him, to protect his feelings.
When he was ready, she took him to a mini-mall with a specialty shop, and Gilgamesh found dented cans of consommé, dirty cans of oxtail soup in addition to dried-out ends of deli meats. She had brought a cloth bag to make it easier for Gilgamesh to carry his finds. She made him close the lid on the dumpster and had him repeat the action until she was sure he understood. It was light; she began to hear cars on the avenue, so she hurried him back into the woods. Gilgamesh was even clumsier than usual, pushing roughly through the bushes and undergrowth, moving hastily to his new area, where two small bush trees, their lower branches broken, formed a kind of cave. Gilgamesh headed to it directly, his back to Doreen, filling the space quickly so that all she glimpsed was a mound of leaves. His hand must have brushed the leaves because for a second she thought she saw a movement. She was tired and it was just before dawn; no doubt she had imagined it.
Her mother asked her if she was sick when she overslept, and Doreen was careful for the next few days to keep to a normal schedule. That weekend she snuck out again, worried how Gilgamesh was doing. The blue pre-dawn made Kessel St., normally so orderly and self-conscious, seem gloomy. The only oddity on the street was a flyer on a lamppost, advertising a lost dog. On the next street she saw one for a lost cat, and Doreen began to feel a sense of alarm. But there could hardly be a connection, she told herself. The memory, though, of Gilgamesh hunkering down over something that was now, in her mind, most definitely moving—it horrified her. Why hadn’t she looked?
She found Gilgamesh in his green cave, his back resting against the tree trunk behind him, his right arm flung out, his left arm hugging something to his side, and Doreen felt her dread increase as she crept closer. She wanted it not to be a small dead animal he clutched; she wanted to believe that her fears were unfounded; she wanted to believe he was still innocent.
He lifted his head and saw her just as she saw what he held.
Gilgamesh’s arm surrounded a smaller version of himself, even more awkwardly constructed and held together with tape and the small coated ties that held sandwich bags together. Gilgamesh rolled his great fish eye to her and then back to his makeshift child and then, in a gesture of trust that tore at Doreen’s heart, he put the child on the ground, where it wobbled tentatively before taking a step towards her.
She could see that the lips and arms were stubs, and would need new attachments, new meats to stabilize it. But the face, she noticed, was quite good, much better than she had done, skillful.
It blinked at her and then she realized that the eyes were mammal eyes, not fish eyes. She stiffened in concentration, dreading to notice more details, but helpless against her own desire to know. Cat’s eyes.
“Gilgamesh,” she said finally. “No. You cannot kill things. No killing,” she said feebly as Gilgamesh turned his head from her to the stubby creature on the ground. “Let’s go,” she said uncertainly. But Gilgamesh sat, his gaze on his child, and Doreen thought it would be best after all, if she gathered scraps of food for him. For them.
She went farther away so as not to empty out the sources nearest to Gilgamesh’s cave; she wanted him to find food easily, not be tempted to go after any other pets. She wondered how he caught them, though, how he killed them. Pets on chains; pets in dog houses; cats asleep in the sun?
She brought back bags and bags of discarded foods, dripping pink spots along the street until she noticed and tried to restrict her steps to lawns and dirt. She ran home, later than usual, reeking of garbage, and met her mother at the door.
“Have you been out all night?” Her mother stood there, coffee in hand, judgemental, her nose sniffing. “And what’s that smell? Are you drunk?”
Hastily, Doreen said she’d gone out for a run and slipped on some spilled garbage. Her mother weighed her words and scanned the stains on her arms. “That’s blood,” she said, surprised. “What’s that blood from?”
Doreen felt an impulse to tell her mother everything—it was lonely having so much knowledge—but she pulled herself back. Who would look at Gilgamesh and let him live? Her mother’s world was orderly, and Gilgamesh was not. “It must have been in the garbage,” Doreen said wearily, and went to shower.
Her mother’s eye was always on her then, checking her comings and goings, studying her clothes. When Doreen went to find Gilgamesh, he had moved, and she couldn’t find a new trail to him.
More pets went missing; more flyers appeared. And then finally someone managed to take a picture of forms moving through the woods. There were three of them now, and their movements were smoother; she could imagine them sneaking up on pets and reaching out with a quick, meaty grab.
The notices were everywhere, for disappearing cats and dogs and once for a picnic cooler; suddenly people were posting all the things they suspected they’d lost. A few took guns and went into the woods; the only one who didn’t make it back was thought to have deserted his family—the neighbourhood had been watching him for years and knew he was just the type to take advantage of any excuse to disappear. He was not a casualty but an opportunist.
Doreen walked home from school and saw toddlers in yards, saw babies in prams snoozing on front porches. She saw open windows in the evening, with stuffed toys lined up on the sill. She couldn’t find Gilgamesh and she didn’t know how to stop him.
She thought of Gilgamesh out there, somewhere, and the community he was creating. It was a difficult thing, feeling responsible for a creature so dangerous; at least that’s what she usually thought. But sometimes she felt bigger, stronger, for having done it, for knowing she’d done it.
At night she slipped out now, thr
ough the darkness, putting up posters of her own. “Watch your children,” the posters said. “He’s coming.”
She was a child herself. Maybe he would find her.
BEDS
There are twelve beds in the hospital ward today; tomorrow there will be eleven.
My right-hand bedmate is instantly conciliatory to the hospital staff: “Of course you are overburdened,” she says, her voice dripping with compassion, “and there is at least one person here who is creating his own disease, just for attention. At least one,” she says, and shuts up, her hands placed saintly on the top bed sheet.
“Is that me? Is that who you mean?” This comes from the end of the row against the wall, at the end of the line. “I have been dragged about by life—do you think you can be dragged all over the place without being wounded? That life doesn’t wound you? That life doesn’t kill you? There’s no worse thing than that. I ask you,” he said, pointing to the nurse with her cart of medications. “Do you have a cure for life?”
“Oh, we all get cured of that eventually,” the nurse said, largely ignoring him and moving on. “I want to watch you take that, now,” she said severely to the skinny man past the conciliatory woman, who took it glumly and popped it in but didn’t swallow. “It could be you on that bed tomorrow, dearie. Is that what you want?”
He swallowed hastily and she put a tick on the chart on her clipboard.
“Where’s the bed going?” I asked. They all had such narrow concerns; their fear overruled their curiosity. One bed less, one patient less; what did it matter? I was feverish and wobbly; they would let me stay. Surely. Neither the healthiest nor the sickest. Safe.
She handed me three pills and a pink liquid, and never looked to see if I took any of it. Was that a good sign?