by Chris Dennis
It was hours before Mother finally convinced her father to walk back over to Rupert’s with her. He was a suspicious man, with an oily comb-over. They found a goat strung up in the electric fence, its mouth wide and stiff from screaming. “There’s your ghost,” her father said. For being such a bigot, Mother was very superstitious. It’s obvious that the two are related.
In the recliner, looking out the picture window into the yard after dark, I imagine Mother running out of the woods, charging terrified through the leaves and tangled undergrowth. The trees are thick. When my mother was a girl, the house would have only been the single room I’m sitting in. Outside would have been the vaporous blue of a rural nightfall.
I have a handful of usable pages. I imagine each new word as a bacteria growing off the last. Writing about the body is suddenly an easy allegory about the ego. In last night’s dream Mother was trying to pry open my fist. I was holding something. She said to me, “What if Miriam isn’t dying?”
I woke abruptly to find Miriam standing over my bed. “Did you kill my dogs?” she asked.
“Shut up, Miriam,” I said, still drugged with sleep, angry at her for the proxy sentimentality of these dreams.
We’ve been searching. We walked to the ridge and back four times. We made circles around the property. “Maybe they’re just hiding,” I say. Or maybe they have fled—from her flagrant mortality, with their dog instincts. Perhaps they are preparing for her death.
Miriam’s face is half-lit under the yellow motion-sensor light above the porch. I expect the dogs to go running down the hill in front of the cabin, chasing a car, howling at the tires. But the country is quiet. Someone is headed toward town in an old pickup, kicking gravel dust up into a rolling cloud that drifts back over the yard like an enormous poltergeist in the moonlight. I ask her to come inside, please, but she says she can’t. “Can you hear that? I hear barking,” she says.
After I’ve been asleep for hours, she comes into my bedroom again, saying, “If you go out by the shed you can smell them. I can smell the rotting flesh.”
“Stop,” I say.
“They’ve been gone so long they have to be dead and I can smell them. I hate this. I hate that they’re gone. I have the right to bury them!”
“Your dogs are going to come back,” I say. “They’re out there eating shit right now.” I open my arms and put her against me—a balloon on a pencil.
I look for the dogs again. I walk a mile in every direction, crisscrossing through the trees, calling out until I am hoarse. I can hear Miriam calling too.
I am walking east, up toward where the cliffs begin at the foot of the ridge, when I see them. At first I hope they’re lying there asleep. I holler for them but sure as hell the fuckers are piled up like garbage, ugly and lumpy as old meat. Parts of them are scattered from where something has picked at them, the skin curled like paper around their rib cages. A knot rises. I sit there on the ground, staring. There is the stench, ripe and unfriendly. Mother refused to speak to me for a year after I told her I was gay. And after that she never mentioned it again. This is what I’ve inherited. A backwoods dream full of animals and dead homophobes. It is pungent and meager. It is homely, and hardly soothed by strange sex.
Miriam is sure I had something to do with it. We haul them back to the property in a wheelbarrow. I get the shovel from the garage and dig four holes while Miriam stands there petting the hard bodies. She steps back and I lift Trudy out of the wheelbarrow. Miriam says, “I want to lay them in there myself.” So I let her. I don’t want to touch them. The smell is stupid. She ties a shirt around her face and lowers each dog into her pit. I push the dirt back over the graves and then wait on the deck while she paints their names on scraps of plywood with some old paint she found in the shed. Of course the shovel is strange and heavy in my hands. She props the signs up in front of the mounds. She puts the boom box on the windowsill and plays her Eagles CD. I hide inside the house, holding X-rays up to the window, imagining what could have happened.
Probably Trisha will leave my life the same way she came in—an exotic snake crawling out of a toilet. Trisha is a dirt wasp trapped between a storm screen and a windowpane. Miriam is a magnolia in a bowl of water.
I dream Mother is walking with me to the garage. I give her shovel back to her.
“The dogs are dead,” I say.
“No kidding?” she says.
“We buried them,” I say.
“Sure,” she says. “Good. I bet your lady is upset,” she says.
“My lady?”
“Yeah, your woman. She’s your woman now, ain’t she? She’s upset? But she’s feeling better too, ain’t she?”
I hand her the shovel and we go out into the yard. She wants to walk over to the dog graves, so I take her over and show them to her. She tells me to plant grass over the graves.
I say, “I might.”
“Do it,” she says, “or else you and your lady will have to look at this until the grass grows back on its own. And that’ll be years from now.”
It is the self-devouring nature of theory—or maybe the road to resolve: A word appears, and then a sentence, and many ideas begin to take shape, then suddenly, more words, more theories. Some unwittingly cancel out preceding ones. Is the truest thing then left intact? When does the draft become a document? At some point every theorist will devastate herself. “One theory eats the other,” I write across the title page of Chapter Three. And: “Learning is a ceremony in which we eat many possibilities only to crap them out again afterward.” Just when you think you’ve proven something, you realize you’ve also opened yourself to the very opposite. One can locate me here, among the fallacies.
I have already gone to bed when I hear Miriam humming to herself in the bathroom. I get up to check on her. I am in the kitchen and there, standing on the other side of the sliding glass door, is the lab, Trudy. I am sure. I have to cover my eyes. I hear the tap of a paw on the glass just as Miriam comes out of the bathroom. I look at her, then back at the door, but the dog is gone. “My head stopped hurting,” Miriam says. “It’s weird. I feel”—she hesitates—“better!” She begins to laugh uncontrollably, until tears are running down. When she catches her breath she asks, “What are you doing?” She must see the look on my face. “What’s wrong?” she asks.
“I’m going outside,” I say.
I stand on the deck, watching a low fog smothering the grass. There is nothing, only the sound of an owl whooping somewhere beyond. I call out. I have a sensation of something electrical happening in my mouth. “Trudy!” I yell.
Miriam rushes out to stare at me. “What the fuck are you doing? God, you’re a bitch. What is wrong?”
“I thought I saw something!” I yell back, my hands and head vibrating.
“Some ideas must germinate for years,” Trisha writes in the last chapter of Morphologies and Eden. “They take a lifetime to grow into something good and intricate. If you hold any idea underwater long enough it will start to break down, like a prisoner of war. Is this a good thing? Does the filthy husk fall away? The purest kernel left intact? A tortured prisoner will confess to anything. On the back of the oldest print of D568 I write, in very small print: “The body is the spirit’s weakest echo.”
In the Martian Summer
Her dear friend, Pauline, insisted there was something wrong. “Deeply wrong,” was how she put it, in that administrative tone of hers. “Grave deep. Abyss deep!” Pauline carried herself with the passive authority of a politician’s wife or a middle-income sex worker.
“Or maybe it’s the moon,” Mary Ann said, with a secret eye-roll. “The moon can have all sorts of odd effects on a person’s psyche, Pauline! And that’s science.”
Pauline was no good at detecting sarcasm though. “I guess,” she said, heading off alone in the dark toward her car.
Pauline was referring to the exotic vacation Mary Ann was about to embark
upon. A handsome older gentleman wanted to take Mary Ann to the western coast of Mexico. He was going to teach her how to drive his yacht. Not a euphemism, Pauline! Ha. He actually owned a yacht. And honestly, the moon did hang low, perched like a colossal disk on the horizon, a bizarre amusement park attraction you could walk right up to if you wanted. Except Mary Ann didn’t want to. She sat on the stoop in her knit shawl, watching silently as Pauline attempted for several minutes to unlock the wrong car.
How many times in her life had Mary Ann pretended to be interested in a ridiculous thing? And often for the attention of a ridiculous man. Of course it could all be traced back to her father, the original ridiculous man—more timeless wisdom from Pauline. Mary Ann’s father had worked as a cartoonist, and naturally tended toward the goofier things in life. He’d asked Mary Ann to dress as a penguin while serving cocktails at his retirement party. She’d been the only person in a costume. But she did it for Daddy. He always had such affection for flightless birds, both in his work and personal life. Many family friends (old men) had patted Mary Ann on the ass during the party, fumbling awkwardly against the plush foam of the shortly cropped penguin suit. She was sixteen at the time, and felt obligated to endure most inappropriate attention.
Later, sans shawl, after Pauline had finally found the right car and drove away, the moon appeared blood-soaked—fatty and gristly as a tumor hovering over the twinkling city.
Recently there’d been a list of ridiculous excursions. A multiweek stint hanging around the Pony Palace Adult Theaters off I-70. Mary Ann was trying to be more open! An exhibitionist in charge of her own sexuality. To what improbable film plot did her days belong? A racy rom-com starring Goldie Hawn, that deranged platypus? Mary Ann had given hand jobs to several strangers. Eight. Who was counting? Partly she’d done it on account of her new cowboy friend, who she’d met in line-dancing class. And the whole adult theater idea had been the cowboy’s. He was a total daydream to look at. Those hard arms. That worn-out hat. The shiny little snap buttons on his shirt. The Wranglers! He was a pure sweetheart. Until, of course, their last day together in the adult theater, during a showing of Nympho Housewives III. Mary Ann was performing a sort of two-handed lubricated maneuver on a particularly well-endowed construction worker when the cowboy bent down over her thrusting arm, opening his toothy mouth right as the construction worker began a seemingly endless release of ejaculate. Maybe that was also a sweetheart move. Except it broke her. She heard a popping sound somewhere inside her face. And it wasn’t that the cowboy was interested in drinking semen. No. It was the other, stranger aversion he apparently had to touching a penis. Or telling her beforehand! My God. That this had been the goal all along. He’d encouraged her to perform hand sex on all these men just so he could locate the one with the most aggressive explosion. She had handled the young construction worker a week prior, and afterward, in the truck, the cowboy had gone on and on about it: “Man, what a load. He had it dripping off his chin. He almost got it in his mouth!” This announcement had been followed by an insane fit of laughter from the cowboy that sent chills up her arms.
In hindsight her foresight was terrible. That filthy, contortionist move, all so he could get a little sip. She felt a great sadness (sadness washed in annoyance) for people who longed to do an average thing but could not. Like have children, or get married, or wear a leash in public, or taste semen without ever laying hand or mouth to a penis. She couldn’t bring herself to see him again after that. But she wanted to view it as a final lovely moment, so she decided to imagine him as a nervous baby bird waiting to be fed. She didn’t want to cast herself as a victim either, though at her age it was so hard not to. She’d be forty soon. She was doing a multivitamin now, and it took double the number of squats and crunches to get the same results she’d achieved in her twenties. Growing old was hard, and naturally implied an inevitable state of victimhood.
After that, during an especially inebriated evening out with a real estate agent she’d met through 1-900-FUN-DATE, she badly wished she’d told the cowboy about her son. And her husband. A painful gloominess arrived in her chest as she and the real estate agent enjoyed their fruity cocktails, which had come served inside miniature watermelons. She’d meant to tell him—she’d wanted the cowboy to know he wasn’t the only one with secrets, that she in fact had so many they were beginning to pile up. Sometimes at night she feared she might be buried beneath them. The problem was, with a secret you were alone, and it made her angry to think that he had used her to alleviate that loneliness. Because what was she left with? More secrets. After the cocktails she and the real estate agent went to a nightclub where, at some point during the night, she’d smoked crystal meth in the bathroom. Someone had fingered her too, in the handicapped stall, with the door wide open. And it wasn’t the real estate agent, who, by the time it was all said and done, couldn’t tell his fingers from his toes. She’d left him drooling on the street. Perhaps the whole evening was a wash? Her whole life, even? A wash. In acid.
Apparently Daddy wasn’t the only one who gravitated toward the goofier things.
Why just one of these men couldn’t be bright. Like a star or a headlight. Someone to guide her off the meandering rural route of her life.
But it was always something unsavory with single men these days. There were times—mainly on quiet afternoons, bored and sober in her quiet condo—when she worried the problem might be her. Perhaps some crucial function in her brain had shorted out as a result of . . . a result of what? Being alive?
She desperately needed something simpler, something lighter and brighter than the greedy, black reptile sidewinding through her body most days, that twisted polluted river deep inside her, threatening to drown her nearly every moment of her fucking life.
She lived in Colorado, for God sakes! How did that even happen? Among the flashy mountains and constant pothead tourists. When would she ever need to know how to drive a damn yacht?
Yet, it appealed to her.
She imagined which outfit she would wear while manning the elegant helm. She was leaning toward a pale blue sweater-and-shorts set from Land’s End. Also she was mulling over her little bartender’s handbook, trying to determine which obscure cocktail she might enjoy while sailing those vast glittering waters broken only by the wake of the pristine ship charging to Chile, maybe, or Antarctica.
The man with the yacht was Cuban. He wore large horn-rimmed glasses that framed his milk-gray eyes like two small, sad photos. He also sported a gold watch, and rarely wore socks. He did something with oil and gas, living out of hotels for several months of the year—another thing that appealed to her.
It used to be that, years ago, she’d had a specific type, which was really just any man who reminded her of her dead husband. Apparently Bill had set a kind of precedent, activating in her a predilection for dense body hair, a meaty thickness, a Neanderthal forehead, a stiff gait that didn’t allow the arms to make contact with the body when he walked. Bill had been a foreman in the coal mines at La Plata County. He’d had such an easy laugh, and a clownish tendency of being overly polite. It wasn’t as if she encountered men like this all the time, but any one of those things reminded her of another. The traits seemed related. As if huge foreheads were closely linked to a peculiar ability to laugh, sincerely, even when nothing funny had been said. Biology was weird.
Come back, Bill, she often thought to herself, alone in the bathrooms of the places she attended with these new men, come back now or else I might die too. With my head pressed against the cold, dirty stall of some random public toilet.
But then again, absolutely not. Stay dead, Bill. Please stay dead. It wasn’t uncommon for her to be walking down the street and think, for a burning second, that she saw Bill rushing toward her with some alarming purpose, until the man turned, with that witless smile, to enter some store or side street, slipping out of view again. “Just take a moment to imagine the nightmarish heartache this conjure
s in me!” she’d exclaimed to Pauline. Each time it happened she felt unhinged for hours. She always likened it, after the fact, to the sensation of some space-age material capable of turning from solid to liquid in an instant. When it occurred she did her best to rush home, pop a Xanax, and lie down face-first on the kitchen tiles.
“Keep an open mind, Mary Ann!” Pauline would say. “Imagine a world where the dead really do live among us. These sightings could be a miraculous thing! Think of it like this: Bill will always be nearby.”
Unfortunately, mental breakdowns ran in both her and Pauline’s families, so neither’s perception could be trusted.
Several miles off the coast of Nayarit, on the bow of the great white ship, she stood next to the Cuban, each of them holding in their hands a shockingly emerald-colored drink. It tasted foul, like licorice mixed with perfume. But, oh, how it looked when held out against the near-blue churning and the smoother sea beyond. Like something from a movie. The Cuban had paid for the whole excursion, thank God. Because even though she’d been prepared to pay her own way, she did not want to—news of the lavish vacation had caused more than one nasty interaction with Pauline, who’d basically begged Mary Ann for money the month before. Mary Ann had respectfully declined, if only because she felt Pauline lived beyond her means, a habit that caused all affection for Pauline to leak like fuel from the iron tank of Mary Ann’s heart. Helping others was so hard sometimes. Even devoted Pauline. Being friends with a person for over twenty years didn’t just entitle them to a portion of your hard-won assets!
While considering this, even perhaps beginning to feel a little guilty, the crystal drink carafe slid off the edge of its little marble table and, before she could manage to catch it, fell and shattered against the smooth wooden deck. She jumped back just in time to avoid getting her new sandals wet. The whole yacht began to pitch itself rapidly, and the small man whom they’d hired to oversee the yachting lesson put his hands up to his leathery face and started screaming. Mary Ann jerked her head in every direction, in front of the ship, and behind, before finally realizing that from the east rose a blistering white wall of water. It was hard to understand what was happening, at first. Was it abnormal activity? Mary Ann removed her expensive sunglasses to get a better look, and all at once it came into focus: A giant shimmering hellscape was charging patiently toward them. “I knew the water was rising!” the tiny bronze captain called out, more to himself than to anyone aboard. “I fucking knew it.”