We’d relied on that baby to salvage whatever was broken. Yet we knew the only way that could happen was if our kid was born malformed, encephalitic, with a hole in its heart. A Lorenzo’s Oil scenario to ennoble us through shared suffering. But as Abby was perfectly healthy and neither of us suffered from Münchausen syndrome to make us dissolve rat poison into her pablum, well, that infant life preserver we’d hoped would rescue us from the misery of one another may as well have been tossed off the deck of the Titanic. Fuck it all, anyway. Men and women are fundamentally different creatures. DNA helixes, desires, plumbing, hysteria levels. What fool stuffs a mongoose and a viper into a gunny sack, tosses the sack in a raging river, and harbours hope of a pleasant outcome?
Then Abigail was born… staring at her bloodscummed face I knew I’d do anything for her. Never such ache for my wife. On our marital altar all I’d been thinking was: I will let you down. Yet I can no longer recall Abby’s face with exactitude. They say when a person dies you often lose the image of them; your memories degrade at the pace of that body interred. She isn’t dead. Still, I cannot frame her face. Her profile made of sand, continually erased by a steady wind gusting through my head.
The setting sun is a swollen ball backgrounding shore pines as I crank the wheel starboard to butt a dock girded with hacked-apart radial tires. WELCOME TO BOBCAYGEON reads a sign above the marina fuel pumps. Summer rentals all battened down. Locals look startled in their habitat: slugs at the heart of a lettuce head. Catch sight of myself in a shop window. A winnowed aspect to my face. You’d think its angles had been scored using a dentist’s drill.
The bar’s enclosed by a wrought-iron fence. Girls too young to be legal sit on the patio with a jug of radiant green cocktail resembling engine coolant. Inside it’s quiet enough to hear the sucksuck of sorrows in their drowning. The assembled rubbydubs’ faces look fashioned from slum-grade tin. Pitted, discoloured, robbed of whatever dignity flesh possesses robing men of substance. Fuck me if I don’t fit right in. The draft beer glows unhealthily. Quaffing the blood of an irradiated god.
Blood. Bones. Organs.
Imagine your breastbone cracked apart. Organs gouged from knits of silverskin. Price tags clipped to each. How much is a gently used gallbladder worth? Liver and pancreas and heart and kidneys attached to threads extending thousands of miles. Design of those commercial airline maps tucked into seatbacks: a fountain of red threads departing The International Airport of You. Those threads are mercilessly winched and your parts skip-roll-bounce on tethers, sucked through incision lips into new habitats, plugged into varied veinwork, pumped with foreign bloods. Your skin and bones rolled up like a moth-eaten carpet. Can a body shatter into some greater good? Are some men worth more in pieces? Again, I say: Fuck it. I’ll do as much damage as I can. This hilarious scene in my mind: my bloodslicked organs in vats and when the faceless butchers get to my liver — the crown jewel! — it’s naught but a blasted wineskin riddled with ulcers and while by rights I should be dead I rise up in a triumphant jerk to shriek:
“You bought a LEMON! Caveat emptor, motherfuckers!”
Drain my beer and order the next with a bourbon chaser. I’ll get so stinking pissed you could douse me in kerosene and strike a match: I’ll burn in bliss. Some forensics team will be amazed to discover a resin of boiled bourbon has epoxied my spinal knobs together.
I’m three sheets to the wind — erstwhile goaclass="underline" nine sheets or full-body paralysis — when one of the girls swans in. Vision of pulchritude! Minx! Wood nymph! Pixie! That green goo has stained her tongue the colour of a freeze-dried frog. She’s so perfect she belongs in a music box. You forget skin possesses marvellous tension when teenage-fresh. My own feels moored on strips of ancient velcro and if a few more hooks come free my face will slide right off, bunching up in my neck like an un-elasticized tubesock to present my rye-stained skull.
“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” I tell her solemnly. She brands me a “freak.” So, I’ve been reduced to weathering insults from this hip sophisticate who likely believes pink bubble gum to be the ideal pairing for a bottle of six-dollar Chardonnay.
“You can’t come in here with that,” says the bartender.
That: a pitbull. Off-white with a bridled coat tufting at the rolls of its neck. Heeled beside the man who is presumably its owner. Trousers torn up his calves showcase the baguettes of his legs. A friendly face but his teeth jut on tangents like a handful of dice rolled into his gums: Come on, lucky sehvaans! One eye’s so discoloured it looks like a plum kicked into his socket.
“She won’t whiz on the floor.”
Bartender says: “Health code violation.”
“No offence, but this whole place is some kind of violation.”
“Takes a dump, you clean it up.”
“Bottle of Jamieson’s and a pint glass.”
The bartender obeys. The guy presses the icechilled pint to his battered eye and faces me.
“Well, how bad is it?”
“The first I’ve seen you. No basis for comparison.”
He sets a bowl of cocktail peanuts on the floor. The sound of tiny bones snapping as the pitbull chows down.
“He looks tough.”
“He’s a she. Matilda. Matty. I’m James. Owner.” “Fletcher. She bite?”
“A little.”
Matilda sniffs my topsiders. I pet her anvil-heavy head — like petting an Indian rubber ball. No water in the tendons beneath that stretching of hide. Each defined muscle a ball of copper wire. Ears bitten off. She licks my fingers. Tongue hard as strop leather.
“You’ve fought her.”
“Birds fly. Rabbits fuck. Pitties fight.”
“And you — fighting?”
“Mighta been.”
“You win?”
“Basest human nature. Who ever wins?”
James pinches a stray peanut between his fingers. Eases open his swollen eyelid. It rests cradled in the pocket of purple flesh.
“My wife’s hubby decked me.”
“She’s got a couple of you on the go?”
“Ex-wife, okay. The new hubby socked me. Busted his hand. Ha! Ha! A surgeon. Dumb bastard makes a living with his hands.”
“What provoked that?”
“When we split I said keep the dogs.” The peanut pops free. Matilda eats it. “I didn’t have the bottle for a pissing match. But I love that bitch”—indicating the pitbull—“and let her be taken away. I knew they had a cottage somewhere-hereabouts. Practically a mansion, on a lake. I pitched my tent off in the bushes.”
“You robbed them?”
“My property.” Meaning Matilda. “How’s that robbery?”
“The stipulations of my divorce are pretty ironclad.”
“Are we talking laws? Jurisprudence? No— karmic fairness. That dog and me are wedded above any law. Anyway, when they showed up, my ex leashed Matilda in the yard. Went to do whatever she does with Doc Hotlips. Screw on a bearskin rug. I grabbed Matilda. She’s barking her head off. Next it’s Hotlips steamrolling at me. I took a swing. He painted me. All she wrote.”