by John Gould
kafkask
Lilith is immortal, liu.
writeclick
Glad you weren’t trying to be funny, timtime, because you aren’t. Or intelligent either. Death is the ONLY subject, except maybe sex (according to Keats, heard of him?). Or are we supposed to stop writing about that too?
crazy242
The wonderful amazing thing about fiction is you make it up for yourself. Just write from your heart!!!
opie
Saber-toothed tigers weren’t really tigers at all, but a genus of machairodontine. Not that it’s a big deal, but verisimilitude is important if you want people to believe things.
writeclick
I meant Yeats, don’t have a frickin’ cow.
genjok
Besides which there’s no such thing as death. Nothing is ever lost to anything else.
0
Touch This sukz.
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Anthropocene
The first of the dreams came to Babette early one morning about three years ago. I awoke to the sound of her panting in distress, and I touched her arm.
“What?” she murmured, coming up from under. “Was I … Oh.”
“Bad dream?”
She went up on an elbow and peered about. “There was a … lion? Yes, big, huge, with a big black mane. It was coming at me. We were in some sort of theatre thing. Stone.”
“Ancient Rome? You were a Christian, maybe?” I gave her a dopey chuckle.
“I guess. But I wasn’t scared, exactly.” She subsided onto her pillow. “I was … Oh, what a beautiful, strange, beautiful …”
She was drifting off again. I spoke softly for a while, making up a story about a lion who lived on Christians but longed only for water-lily soup. I fell silent — Babette had commenced gently to snore — without knowing how the story ended.
Later that day I did some research. I’m nerdy that way, and besides, I was between jobs and had time on my hands. Ancient Romans really did throw people to the beasts, I learned, and sometimes those beasts were lions. Barbary lions, to be more precise, imported from North Africa — extra big, with a heavy black mane, just as Babette had described. Which was odd, since there hadn’t been Barbary lions for decades.
I shared my discovery with Babette. “It makes you think, doesn’t it?” I said. “No shortage of Christians these days.” She humoured me for a while, and then lost interest.
A week or so later she recalled another dream. At breakfast one morning she told me how she’d befriended and ridden bareback upon a creature half zebra and half horse. “It was as though the artist ran out of patience part way,” she said, closing her eyes as she stirred cream into her coffee. And then, evidently recalling the surge of the dream-creature beneath her, “Such … power.”
When she’d left for the office I punched in “half zebra half horse.” I expected to discover a rich vein of mythology into which my wife had unconsciously tapped, and I feared that this beast would signify, according to somebody, the sexual vitality that was at that time missing from our bed. Instead I encountered a real animal called a quagga, a subspecies of the plains zebra, half striped and half horse-brown, whose onomatopoeic name (from the language of the Khoikhoi) was said to suggest the animal’s guttural call. The last of its kind had died in an Amsterdam zoo in 1883.
I printed off a painting by somebody called Franz Roubal, The Extermination of the Quagga. I showed it to Babette when she got home from work that day. She squinted at the fuzzy figures (it was a poor copy), each collapsing in its own balletic fashion. “So you’re saying what?” she said.
I shrugged. I was at loose ends. I hoped the next dream would come to me.
A couple of days later Babette asked, “What does an owl sound like?”
I did the who-who thing for her.
“So they don’t, like, cackle?”
“Not so far as I know.”
This time she sat with me while I looked it up. The laughing owl — Babette recognized it from an old black and white photo — was once common in New Zealand. Of the many characterizations of its cry, the best fit for Babette was “a desperate, even demonic laugh.” In the dream it apparently laughed at me, though Babette claimed not to recall what I’d done to amuse or horrify it. The last laughing owl was discovered dead on a sheep farm in 1914.
From there the dreams started coming almost nightly. During that first full-on week, Babette was visited by a Honshu wolf, a Bali tiger, a Caribbean monk seal, an ivory-billed woodpecker, a pig-footed bandicoot, a crescent nail-tail wallaby and a Conondale gastric-brooding frog (which opened its mouth wide to show Babette the riot of babies in its gut). All these beasts had died out in something called the Anthropocene, meaning the last couple of hundred years. Carnage-wise, we humans are in the same league as comets and volcanoes, apparently, and have earned our own epoch.
Poor Babette. She started hitting the sack early, waking up and jotting notes during the night. She learned to guide her awareness, ignoring the objects and people that populated her dreams, observing only the animals. Each morning she reviewed her notes with me to assist in my research. Each evening I reported back to her on the newest member of her menagerie.
Why had these creatures chosen my wife’s mind as the world in which to be reawakened? Why not mine? How did God pick Noah? It was that sort of thing.
I wanted to go public, of course, still do, but Babette refuses. “I don’t know what the point of all this is yet,” she’ll say, haggard after a particularly haunting night. “What good is it to know what’s gone and can’t be recovered?” It could make us a fortune, I’ll point out, talk shows, book deals — I’m between jobs again, is part of it. But for her that wouldn’t be right. This talent isn’t personal, but it isn’t the opposite either. It’s something else.
Babette still does her best work in the wee hours, and that’s made our nights eventful. The other morning I awoke four-ish to find her sketching by flashlight, though she soon grew frustrated by her new creature’s lack of shape. She’d been swimming with this “big ugly gentle thing,” as she put it, a lovable blob that allowed her to stroke it while it grazed on seaweed. “Big ugly gentle thing” — that happens to be how she described me too, back when we were first lovers. On this occasion her thoughts were elsewhere. She spoke with bemused tenderness of the great beast and its hide, “dark and rutty like the bark of some old tree.” This was Hydrodamalis gigas, as I determined the next day, a school-bus-sized herbivore that once bobbed in the North Pacific. Steller’s sea cow, folks called it. It was related to the dugong and the manatee — mermaids in the old myths — which are dying out now too. As a group, they’ve been around for fifty million years, but they won’t be around much longer.
Taking all this in, and recording it as best I can, it strikes me that there are still creatures in existence, some of them almost as fantastic as the ones we’ve eradicated. Theoretically, a person could go out and be with them. I’m pretty much done with animals by the end of the day, though, and I’m not wild about the company of humans either. I make do with myself and my own benign addictions until Babette gets home. Then I resume the duties of acolyte and scribe.
One upside to Babette’s new calling is that she’s cut back on the Marlboros and the manhattans, started getting more exercise. She sees it as a duty, what with all the life she’ll take with her if she dies — or when she dies, I guess would be a more ingenuous way of putting it. As for me, I’ve at least got something productive-looking to do while I wait for things to open up on the employment front. I identify and catalogue the species, create a little profile for each one. Atlas bear, sea mink, heath hen, blue buck, phantom shiner, rusty numbat, long-billed kaka, black-faced honeycreeper, Hawaiian rail, Tecopa pupfish, Saint Croix racer, Baiji river dolphin, Tasmanian tiger, Formosan clouded leopard, Mariana mallard, Arabian ostrich, Pyrenean ibix, Syrian wild ass, Tokuda’s flying fox, Spix’s macaw, Cocteau’s skink, Sturdee’s pipistrelle, Round Island burr
owing boa, broad-faced potoroo, lesser bilby, red-bellied gracile opossum, on and on and on. I love the names — “indefatigable Galapagos mouse” is my current favourite — but most of Babette’s creatures (especially the little ones, bugs and such) have never been named, don’t exist for us at all. Extra sad, it seems to me, that they died out before they could get themselves discovered. With Babette’s help I’ve roughed out sketches, and I’ve even started to assign names. There’s a red and green newt named after my mum, a stripeless bee named after me. Babette doesn’t want an animal of her own, but of course they’re all hers.
I wish I could say this new nighttime routine has revived our sex life, but not really. More like replaced it. And I get that — holding all the world’s lost creatures in your head must take the pep out of you. Besides which, there’s the raw intimacy of it, the natural world opening itself up to her again and again. What need does she have of my big ugly gentle self when she gets to spend the night with a broad-faced potoroo? It’s a remarkable gift she’s got, and a formidable burden. Her hiding it away makes me wonder what other marvels are out there undiscovered, what else we might not even know we’re losing.
The Purpose of Life
“Let’s look in on her,” I say, buttoning up. “You peed?”
Ken nods.
I flush, fiddle my hands under the tap. “What a day.”
“What a day.”
Across the hall, Angie’s room is illuminated by two nightlights, smears of pale yellow on pink walls. Angie stirs in her crib as we creep in.
“This is what it’s all about,” I whisper.
Ken touches the small of my back.
“How do you mean, Mummy?” says Angie. From amongst the blankets, the moist glisten of two wide eyes.
“Angie, honey, you should be asleep.” I slip a hand under her bottom, come up dry.
“Yes, but what do you mean?” Her bootied feet wave about in the air, blunt antennae. “Tell me and I’ll go to sleep.” She’s been pulling this crap every night since she started talking, which she did at four weeks. At four weeks, says the book, your little darling may coo or burble at you. At four weeks Angie said “breast,” making a big circle with her hands, and then “nipple,” making a little one. People tell us not to fret, that each baby is different.
“Well, honey,” I say, “I just mean you’re what makes it all worthwhile for us. You make it all … make sense.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she says. Re-dick-all-us — I love it. “How can my life make your life make sense? If one life doesn’t make sense, how can adding another life to it make it make sense?”
“Hang on,” I say. “I’m not saying —”
“Sure you are,” says Angie. She squeezes her pudgy fingers into a walnut-sized fist, brandishes it at me. “You’re expecting my life to be so replete with meaning that it will assuage your fear of mortality, make up for your own perceived lack of worth. You’ve failed to justify your own existence, and now you want me to justify my existence and yours too. It’s insane, and it’s cruel.” She mashes her fist into her cheek a few times, finally locates her mouth. She settles in for a good suck.
“But your mummy’s right,” says Ken. He strokes Angie’s silky hair with the backs of his fingers. “You’re our purpose, the same way a baby kangaroo is the purpose of a mummy and a daddy kangaroo. The same way a baby polar bear is the purpose of a mummy and a daddy polar bear. The same way —”
Angie pops the gooey fist from her mouth. “But that’s so flaccid,” she says.
“You mean facile, honey,” I say — you get a chance to correct this kid, you grab it. “The word is facile.”
Angie’s lower lip quivers, a little wet wave reflecting the room’s fake moonlight. “Fine, facile,” she says, mastering her emotion. “The point is, you’re mistaking a necessary condition for a purpose. Reproduction is a necessary condition of life, but does that make it life’s purpose? Eating is a necessary condition of life. So is breathing. So is pooping. If we don’t poop, life can’t go on. Is pooping the purpose of life?”
“There’s no need for that kind of talk now, pumpkin,” I put in.
“Is the purpose of each thing its own perpetuation?” she persists. “Is the purpose of singing a song to keep on singing it forever?”
“That’s a good idea, sweetheart,” says Ken. “Let’s have a little song, a sleepy song. How about ‘Over the Rain —’ ”
“And anyway,” says Angie, “what gives you the idea a living thing should have a purpose? A tool has a purpose. Toilet paper has a purpose. It’s for wiping bums.”
“That’ll be enough of that, young lady,” I say.
“But me? I should have a purpose?”
“Peekaboo!” says Ken, popping out from behind his hands.
Angie rolls her eyes. “We’re not for anything,” she says. “I’m not for anything.”
“Well,” I mutter, “at least we know where she got her brains.” Ken’s too busy peekaboo-ing to rise to this bait. I bend, scoop Angie from her little nest.
“But —”
“Shush,” I say.
I ease a breast from under my sweater. She opens her mouth and I fill it.
Hunter
“Dying isn’t the worst thing,” said the guy. “There are worse things.” He did a quick survey of the sleeve of his woolen jacket, found a relatively uncrusty bit and used it to dab at his nose.
“Yeah?”
We were sitting across the aisle from one another on a bus headed south, which for me meant home. I wasn’t hung over. He wasn’t either so far as I could tell, but we were both stupefied by a night spent dealing with the unwieldiness of our own bodies. Unwieldiness? Something like that, something to hint at the disjunction between our bodies and the space provided for them on the bus, and beyond that, at the basic discomfort and uncanniness of physical life. Plus we were a little shaken by what had just happened, or almost happened.
“Yeah,” said the guy. “Living when you should have died, that’s worse.” I figured he was twice my age, fiftyish. Recent years did not appear to have been easy on him. “That’s way worse.”
“Really? You think so?”
“I know so.”
A few minutes back, the bus had braked hard and swerved for something on the highway. One person up front said dog, another said deer. We slammed into the guardrail and shrieked along it for a bunch of seconds, long enough for each of us to contemplate something that wouldn’t happen if we went over and were crushed and incinerated. I wouldn’t get to see Andrea, for instance, who was waiting for me at the other end.
The guy shook his head, made a humourless little chuckling sound. “Is Jake miserable?” he said. “Is Monty?”
“Jake?” I said.
“Or Monty.”
“I’m guessing no?” It wasn’t just us, everybody was chatting now, one stranger to another. You couldn’t help it once you’d come that close.
“No,” said the guy. “You can’t be miserable if you’re dead. You can be one or the other, but you can’t be both.”
I was on my way back from school after my final exams. They’d gone well, though “Islamic Art from the Mongol Conquests to the Dawn of the Modern Period” had been brutal. The point being, I now possessed a bachelor’s degree in this and that. A death of sorts, like any accomplishment. The end of something. I knew it, but I didn’t know quite how to feel about it yet, beyond the slightly sickening anxiety I felt about everything in those days.
And now Andrea. We’d dated in high school, separated to go to different universities, then hooked up again online. We’d been having remote sex over the last few months, each of us masturbating in front of a laptop. I could open my eyes and watch her watching me while she went at it alone, or I could close my eyes and remember us going at it together a few years back, in her parents’ TV room, my parents’ Toyota. It had become a thing with us, a way of overcoming the weirdness of the physical distance, that we’d always come together, that nei
ther of us would ever be left alone. So I had to take my time, distract myself with some little worry. What would become of us when we were together again in the flesh? That sort of thing.
“In the Ilkhanid period,” I said, “there was a great cultural flowering.”
“What?” said the guy.
“Almost sort of growing out of the devastation of the Mongol conquests. Beautiful textiles and pottery and everything. And books.”
“So?”
“A good thing out of a bad thing.”
He had another go at staunching his nose. It occurred to me that he might have been crying on the sly over there.
“I guess what I’m getting at is, sometimes you just have to leave stuff behind. Move on.”
“Wise man, are you?” He looked at me over his glasses, then through them, then over them, as though the distance between us was wrong no matter what.
“Not wise,” I said, snorting a laugh, “just … I’m sorry.”
“We should’ve died, you and me,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“Why do I keep on not dying?”
I tried but failed to come up with a useful answer to this question. We fell silent, as everybody else was starting to do too. I should perhaps have been preoccupied with my own mortality, but instead got wondering about Jake and Monty, what might have happened to them that didn’t happen to my friend. I’ve wondered about it ever since. Well, obviously not, but it’s something I do ponder when my mind returns to that day, five years ago. Five years, long enough for Andrea and me to break up, get back together, get married, have Sky, and break up again. It’s a form of regret, the pondering — regret that I didn’t ask the guy, didn’t have the nerve to go further into his trauma with him. His survivor’s guilt — I’ve searched it, and it rings true for me. I see it in the faces of friends these days, friends whose marriages have endured, who wake up with lovers and little kids nearby. I don’t know exactly what happens when they look at me, but something does.