Jacob and I are always the last to fall asleep. Sometimes I think it is because we feel a certain paternal responsibility for the others. Sometimes I think it is because we think our alertness will protect us from the inevitable.
In the middle of the night they come for Willy. I am somewhat comforted that he shows no signs of surprise. Surely, this is what he has always been waiting for. Tonight they come as eight or nine squirrels and a large black bird with a broken neck. The bird bothers me most: its head flops and stretches painfully on the narrow strand of neck flesh as it still manages to grab a bit of Willy’s pants in its beak and pull with the squirrels to drag Willy’s body off into the night. Now and again one of the squirrels will let go and turn its head, smiling at me so broadly I can see that all its teeth are missing.
Some people, I believe, are paid for dreaming. But most, I think, are punished.
In a few days they will come to take another of us. Rabbits, perhaps, or snakes, or shiny emerald-green beetles, or an old dog that so resembles one from our childhood we will be convinced it is the very same one. Soon only Jacob or I will be left.
But that is the worst kind of wish-fulfilment. How do I know I will be a survivor? At some things the imagination fails.
I know I should not whine about it. It is a natural process that happens to everyone. You can wait for it or you can play with it, you can roll your ball at it or you can run headlong into the cars that seem to be everywhere. But what you cannot do is stop it from coming.
Each morning we awaken to find that life is a bit less understandable. Each morning we awaken to the disappearance of the known. Each morning we awaken to discover that we have missed the last bus for the life to come.
PICNIC
Each day of fair weather they gather along the edge of the park: to eat and talk, heat their sluggish bodies under the sun, watch animals creeping through the woods beyond, exclamations of pleasure with each new sighting, holding up the kids, making them look. “Kitty!” his youngest cries. At two, every animal is kitty. “Kitty!” patting the iron squirrel holding up one of the many barbecue grills the park provides. “Kitty!”
“When I was a kid we ate squirrels my daddy shot: two, three times a month. But he still thought they were beautiful, and never killed when we could afford better. I don’t know, maybe that made it okay.”
“Bob…” his wife warned, looking at the kids, but only Julie was listening, eyes big above her clutched hamburger.
“No, it’s true. It didn’t taste bad, a little strong. Dark meat, heavy with blood. An honest taste, I think.”
“I don’t think the kids…”
“I think about the kids all the time, these past few weeks. They should get out and see more animals, get to know them. Everything isn’t a kitty. Now when they see one it’s this big surprise—shouldn’t be like that. Animals are invisible to us—when they appear it’s this big magic trick. Then at night, their eyes shining in the dark, and in our dreams.”
“We take the kids to the zoo.”
“That’s not what I mean. Julie? That hamburger you’re eating was made in a slaughterhouse, honey.”
“Bob!”
“They’ve got this gun, and it shoots a steel bolt into the cow’s brain, and almost before it falls there’s a hook and a knife in it, oh, and sometimes they use a hammer to finish it, but not always. I don’t think the animal’s always dead.”
“Bob, that’s enough!” His wife had Julie up in her arms, and Julie was sobbing, and their little boy too. Their eldest, Richie, the sullen teenager, sat at another table, a look of entertained surprise on his face. Bob stared at the half-chewed hamburger that had dropped out of Julie’s little mouth. He couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“I’m not saying she shouldn’t eat meat. I’m not saying any of us shouldn’t. I just don’t think we should be blind to the suffering is all, turning our heads all the time. And not just the suffering—we just don’t see them, we make them so goddamn invisible. We don’t want to be touched, we don’t want their eyes on us, we don’t want to look into their eyes.”
“Bob, you’re scaring them.” Not completely true, he thought, because although he couldn’t look at Richie right now, he could still hear him laughing over there, so hard his voice was cracking. “Could we just go home, please?”
He gazed at both of his youngest in her arms, crying. “I don’t want them to be scared,” he said softly. “I get scared. Each day I get scared. The doctor doesn’t know when, sweetheart. I see him twice a week and still he doesn’t know. Maybe I’m lucky—at least my when has a range. Three months, a year. I feel bad for you with no idea when your time’s going to be up. Like all those animals. They never know.”
She looked away, her crying sparking another round of tears in their children. Richie had stopped laughing, had sullenly turned his back.
“The main thing is… we look away. All of us. We won’t see. We pretend it doesn’t touch us, this messy thing. Our kids need to know about that, how life is this messy thing, but okay because that’s the way it is for all of us, we’re all in this messy thing. Don’t turn away. Look into our eyes.”
After a time the air cools and families leave the park. Few words are said in the car. In their fatigue they settle on takeout in front of the TV and an early bedtime.
In the park, small animals come out of the woods for abandoned scraps. They forage around the grill with no apparent recognition of the figure sculpted in metal. Other animals stay back in their lairs, alone, quietly licking at miscellaneous wounds.
DOODLES
“Her drawings know more about the world than she does.”
This thing his ex-wife used to say about their daughter eventually led him to take his seemingly compulsive, absent-minded doodles more seriously. He did them all the time: at work—on the papers due on his boss’s desk by the end of the afternoon, at dinner—on napkins, tablecloths, even credit card slips, even in his sleep, on the graying walls of his dreams. A nervous habit, or an addiction—he simply could not stop himself.
He had to have the pen firmly in his hand, and the pen had to be moving.
This habit underlined, circled, boxed, and generally ornamented his days. If he forced himself not to doodle, the days flowed on without form or direction.
“Her drawings are smart drawings.” He had no idea what this really meant, but he agreed completely.
His daughter had drawn pictures of houses mostly: huge, elaborate structures heavy with character. But however wonderful her depictions, she always seemed more careless in her execution than most children. Sometimes she didn’t even look down at the page. She just drew, sight unseen. She drew her world, and the houses that were in it, and the creatures who lived in those houses. This ceremony of drawing that she performed every day centered her, and seemed to make her happy.
But he scribbled and doodled, late into the night sometimes, and found no peace in it. He wondered if it was because of his age, or because of a long-standing pessimism about all forms of self-help. Whatever the reason, for him it was like worrying an infected wound. And yet he could not stop himself.
“Sometimes there’s magic in doing the same thing again and again.”
A series of vertical lines running up and down the page. Walls and borders that were not to be crossed. Some weeks he built these walls before and after everything he wrote: letters, reports, grocery lists. He’d write his name and construct the walls that were intended to hold it in, keep it from expanding so much that it became unrecognizable. Ego expansion could be a problem—it left one open to attack. A few individual walls scattered here and there emulated grass, or the spikes at the bottom of a pit to trap uninvited guests.