I was born of an indiscretion. This is how my father tells it. One night he lost his head. He was all body. Hands, penis, stomach, butt. With no head. It rolled away and left him to grope, the headless horseman without the horse. It was a bowling ball in search of pins, a cantaloupe in search of mouths. When he finally found it again, it had a baby to think about, anchoring it to its neck.
My father says after I was born, my mother came to his parents’ house. My father was home from college for the summer. He hadn’t seen or heard from her since the night her hot, oniony breath wafted across the barren pedestal of his neck. This is how I tell it.
She carried me bundled in tea towels and handed me to him, saying, “I have things to do. You can’t expect me to stay home with a baby all day. I’m a busy person.” Then she walked away, and he called, “Wait, where can I reach you?” And she said, “You can’t.” He says he can still hear her clickety heels on the driveway.
I have often wondered if I somehow bear their lack of intent like a caul. If accident is written into my skin.
“What did she look like?” I ask my father. “Her face? What did you notice when you looked at her face?” “I don’t know,” he tells me. “It was dark.”
In our building there is a blind man. I like the tap-tap of his cane against stairs and cement. I like the sound of someone finding his way. This man is thin and stooped and he wears an earring, a small silver hoop. Once I held the door for him and touched the hand that held the cane. I said, “I could help you do your dishes. I could balance your checkbook.” I whispered to my shoulder, “You are one man I could love.”
* * *
He stopped in the middle of the doorway and straightened up as best he could. His bent posture stemmed from a desire to know the terrain before he traversed it; as he walked he leaned forward to lengthen the sweep of his stick. He said, “I could eat you alive, little girl. Easy as any man.” He grinned, exposing teeth that belonged in an American Dental Association commercial, the kind that would glint with magic sparkling stars punctuated by the ding of a bell. The glare of his teeth eclipsed his lips, his chin, his cheeks, his face. The world itself was swallowed up. All I could see were the steel points of his canines, the porcelain tiles of his two front teeth. Your teeth are blinding, I thought. I longed to be bitten.
Later he told me his name was Oedipus. Oed. His father’s sense of humor. “In my mind, I’ve killed him many times,” Oed said.
I am Hallie, fifteen, and he is O-E-D, like the dictionary, twenty-eight.
Corky Roth is twelve and tall and smells like fallen leaves. He thinks he loves me. He lives in building D. I see him watching me from his living-room window. I see his mother pull the drapes on his adolescent yearning. On Valentine’s Day this year, he gave me a card with a poem on it: I like noodles, I like toast, I like bananas on my pot roast. I like peas, I like taters, I like chocolate on my tomatersl But, Valentine, I must confess, with a cherry on top I like you best! On the card, a child balances on a large cherry and a halo of food floats above him the way cartoon bluebirds circle a steeple of smarting scalp.
It was better than the usual “Happy V.D.” I said, “Robert Browning?”
He said, “What?” He said, “I could show you the place at Union Station where there are bullet holes from the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, just like the big one in Chicago.” His eyebrows were arched. He was waiting for me to say “Cool” or “Really?” or maybe “Get lost.” I could see I was a wild card to him.
“Penis,” I said, I don’t know why. I liked the sound of it and had always wondered what it would feel like to say it aloud, out in the air, under the clouds, to see the breath it floated out on, to say it to a person who had one.
“Pardon?” he said. I smiled. Pardon. He broke my heart. On the bathroom wall of my mind, I crossed out the word I’d spoken and sniffed the Magic Marker instead. My father’s head rolled by and winked.
* * *
I went to the animal genetics laboratory today. They won’t allow me inside, of course. I stay outside where the animals take breaks from being experiments. I go there to visit Gretel. She is a cow too big for her legs. At the laboratory, they inject animals, farm animals mostly, with growth hormones that make them stretch and bulk to such proportions as only grade B horror movies can imagine. It is becoming a world that makes me feel small and wrong and out of place.
Gretel stands a good six-and-a-half feet when she is able. Her legs are not the kind of legs that can support her big brown girth for very long. I have never met legs in person that could, though sometimes on Wild Kingdom I see African elephants that make me envious on Gretel’s behalf.
I am trying to strengthen Gretel. There is a small, grassy area where they sometimes let the cows roam, sit really. It’s a small area, not that Oh-Give-Me-a-Home kind of place at all. I’ve uttered many a discouraging word there myself. I curse those shifty whitecoats. I’ve heard there are five-foot chickens whose eggs rival those of ostriches, though I have never seen one. The idea is omelettes and chicken chow mein for a family of forty, I guess, all from a single chicken. So Gretel gets to come out in the sun every day at noon, and I bring her things to eat, food that will make her strong and self-reliant. I am planning a breakout of sorts. Today I fed her lentil soup, an English muffin, cold oatmeal, and an apple, something for each of her stomachs. Neither of us cares for brussels sprouts.
Sometimes I read to her from the newspaper or tell her about current events on television. She sits close to the wooden fence and dips her head at an angle that allows a good scratch in the right spot. I told her about what I saw on the news last night. In a country called Bosnia, there are gray-haired children. A mother throws rocks at trucks filled with soldiers and shakes fists balled up like hard tumors. Her son was killed by her former neighbor, a man she had had to dinner many times, a man who ate carrots and leeks with her family. I can see his mouth chewing orange. There was a little girl in a hospital. Her legs below the knees had been bombed away. One minute she had legs and the next she was an image on television. As the camera passed her, she smiled. I don’t think she knew what her lips were doing. Her mouth was shaping someone else’s language. Like the pains she will feel in her airy shins, it was a phantom gesture.
I know a man who is a celebrity look-alike. He lives in building A. There is not much call for celebrity look-alikes in Kansas, but occasionally it is lucrative. His name is Preston, Preston Fryatt. He looks like Woody Allen, and he has developed a stuttering, hand-flailing banter that is very convincing, though a midwestem twang lurks beneath his vowels. Two years ago, the Tivoli Theater had a Woody Allen Film Festival, and they hired Preston to pace back and forth in the lobby and recite from Woody’s movies and stand-up routines, monologues about sex and death and Kierkegaard. Afterward, Preston said, “You know, the sources of angst are increasing.” He told me that when he was younger he looked a little like Wally Cox, the voice of Underdog. He says he has always had a face that makes people thumb through their pasts, searching mental mug shots for a match. If people do not identify him as Woody Allen, they often look at him with narrow eyes, then say, “Weren’t you once my tax attorney?” or “Didn’t I see you on America’s Most Wanted?” Since Woody’s marital tribulations, Preston has had to be wary of the public. Woody’s backers are kind but reproachful; they approach him and say things like, “I never knew what you saw in that Mia Ferret, anyway. Didn’t you see Rose Marie’s Baby? You should have been forewarned.” The supporters of Mia he encounters at grocery stores sometimes become violent, clubbing him with baguettes or produce. Preston never leaves his house without his ascot and a hat tipped over his eyes. He waits for the storm to pass.
Oed and I are friends now. I could see it in his teeth that he would never eat me alive. He is angry, yes, and beautiful. I love the nothing that his eyes are, saucers of speckled milk. I love the nothing that I am in front of them. Oed hates it when I talk this way. He says I romanticize misfortune, that I am an annoying bleeding heart who has the luxury to be one. He says I seize on the shortcomings, disabilities, grief, and misery of others out of a sense of guilt over my own gentle and easy life. He calls it emotional sleight-of-hand. He is not as well acquainted with my heart as he thinks he is. I piss him off less than I used to.
Last year I met a man living, temporarily, next door to Preston. He was a college professor visiting for a semester. He had written a book and he told me things. He came here from Germany, but he had lived in Alaska, Australia, Mexico, even Siberia. He knew about the religious practices of many tribal cultures and he told me stories. One night he said, “Your skin gives off light. I’m going to teach you to dream.” He said in all cultures there are gods and goddesses and spirits who watch over us, look inside us, see who we really are, help us to find special strength. He told me about a medicine man he knew in Australia. When this man was still a novice, he went to a cave where the spirits of his ancestors lived. He carried with him his grandmother’s head scarf. He slept deep in the cave and dreamed until the spirits came to him. They put their billowing hands inside him and pulled out all his organs, his liver, his kidneys, his lungs and his heart. They scooped out his brain and unhinged his penis. They snapped his eyes out and held them in the dark mist of their floating fingers. His eyes rolled around and looked at the world. Then these ancestral wraiths plugged in new ones, new parts that would help him to heal other people, heal himself. And they slipped in extras, little crystal eggs that would expand and glow, aid him in mending broken souls. Then the man began to float and he lilted out of the cave on waves of air. He flew up and clung to the sky. The medicine man left this world and when he came back, he knew how to navigate pain. It took all of time to do this.
“Go and dream, Hallie,” the professor said. “Fly.”
I recently tried my hand at love connecting. I am o for one. It’s not as easy as it looks on television. I thought I had a sureshot match. Willette Mertz lives in building C. Hierarchically speaking, building C is the one we all strive for. If this apartment complex were karma, building C would be nirvana. All the apartments come with fireplaces, microwave ovens, miniblinds, and walk-in closets you could easily store several recreational vehicles in, and in the basement there are two laundry rooms kept so clean you could probably have an emergency appendectomy on the folding table without risking infection. One room even has a bill changer and Coke machine. It’s cush. I thought the fact Willette lives in C would automatically give her a status edge. I told Preston he should meet her. “Maybe you could do your laundry together,” I said. I hoped I might be invited.
Willette is a fiend for the color pink. Though Preston denies it, I think it is this fact that sounded the death knell to the potential blossoming of romance, this and Willette’s tight lips regarding Preston’s fate. When you first walk into Willette’s apartment, it’s as though you’ve stepped inside a well-lit mouth: pink overhead, to the sides, and underfoot. It’s disorienting. The first time I entered Willette’s apartment, my intestines began to vibrate. I had to leave. But I kept going back and stayed longer and longer each time. Now I am acclimated and hours pass before I get woozy.
Willette had to lobby the management to exchange the muted and innocuous color scheme for one most often seen covering the lips and fingernails of dressy women. She paid for the transformation herself and she has to pay to have it returned to its origins of white and gray when she leaves. Willette earns a good living selling Mary Kay Cosmetics and reading palms on the side.
(People in these parts are very skittish about colors that slap them awake, colors that compete instead of conform. We live in a community in which the presence of a White Castle hamburger stand was hotly contested because it was to be built in the parking lot of Loehmann’s Plaza, whose uniformity of beige exteriors had been strictly dictated by city council. The White Castle people did not want to be beige. The council people said if they did it for one community, suddenly you’d see Green Castles and Blue Castles and possibly even Puce Castles popping up all over the place. Complete anarchy. White Castle would come to mean nothing, half-baked, impetuous notions. They couldn’t have that. The debate raged for months—the White Castle people as unbudgeable as the beige-committed community—until one night my father stood up at a council meeting and screamed, “It’s a goddamned White Castle for Christ’s sake! They serve hamburgers that fit three to a mouth. Who gives a rat’s ass?” My father was asked to leave, but it was too late, the seeds of dissent had been sown. The White Castle now looms pleasantly out of place, like Lincoln Logs among Legos, in the parking lot of Loehmann’s Plaza.)
Willette and I went to this White Castle for chocolate shakes and she cheered “Hoo-hoo!” when I told her the story behind it. It was this that gave me the Cupid bug in the first place. She said she loved underdogs. I knew she must meet Preston.
Before we went over to Willette’s, Preston was nervous and mumbling, searching for an identity he could call his own. He said, “Hallie, I don’t know who I am anymore.”
I said, “You’re Preston Fryatt, and don’t you forget it.”
“I’m Preston Fryatt, I’m Preston Fryatt, Preston Fryatt,” he whispered solemnly, as if he were chanting a life-or-death phone number on the way to a distant pay phone.
Then he stopped and looked at me with small, dark eyes behind thick lenses, floating like tiny fish in an aquarium. “But what does that mean? What do I think about national health care?” he said. “Or petting zoos or the sight of blood?”
“For, no comment, against,” I said. Preston’s forehead became crimped. “Preston, relax. Willette’s easygoing. She won’t press you for particulars on the first meeting.”
Preston stared down at his penniless loafers. “I haven’t had a date in two years,” he said. “I don’t even know if the, you know,” he began to whisper, “e-q-u-i-p-m-e-n-t still works.”
Preston and I often watched television together on Sunday nights and I knew from his viewing habits he had come to see sex as something to forestall extinction. “Preston,” I said, “you’ve been watching too many wildlife programs. This isn’t about mating. The propagation of the species does not depend on this meeting. You’re just going to make the acquaintance of one of your neighbors.”
Preston nodded and looked up, the fish of his eyes now floating near the top of the tank.
As Preston entered Willette’s apartment, he walked slowly and held his hands out to his sides as if to steady himself. I guided him to the rose-print couch and sat him down. The pupils of his eyes seemed to shrink and dilate like breathing. Willette’s apartment affected Preston in the manner of a pocket watch on a shiny gold chain that swings to the lilt of a voice, calming as a foot rub, chanting sleepy, sleepy.
“You look familiar to me, Preston,” Willette, of course, said. She sat in a rocking chair opposite him and stared and nodded. “Have you ever been married? Maybe I sold your wife some cosmetics?”
“I’ve never been married,” Preston said. The way Preston spoke, without inflection, made it sound as though he’d been programmed. I thought of 2001: A Space Odyssey, that movie with the fetus bobbing in the ether. Preston brought to mind the diabolical computer Hal 9000, although he was currently exhibiting less personality and no apparent chess skills. I hoped Willette was not making this same association. I sensed my yet-to-be-earned reputation as a shrewd matchmaker was in jeopardy. I casually kicked Preston in the calf. “You?” Preston asked, although it sounded sort of accusatory, like the kind of you that follows a hey.
“Yes,” Willette said. “Technically, I guess I still am.”
“You’re married?” Preston asked. He looked at me as he said this. I could tell he was thinking about all the trouble he’d gone through scrambling for a self and fretting about his equipment and all.
Willette said, “Joseph and I haven’t seen one another in over five years, so I figure we’ve got us a common-law divorce.” Willette began to rock. “Joseph’s best feature was his toes. You’d never expect a man so strapping to have such lovely feet, but his toes were hairless and white, flat and squared off at the nails like piano keys. I swear I nearly swooned the first time I saw them.
“But, well, you know.” Willette stopped rocking; she straightened her legs out in front of her and wiggled her feet. “Toes in and of themselves do not a marriage make. When Joseph was in a state, which was common enough, he’d go out in the streets and look for cats to kick. So whenever we had a fight, I had to race out of the house and run up and down the streets clanging a ladle against a kettle until all the animals were safely spooked.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yep.” Willette sat forward. “Say, Preston, has anyone ever read your palm?”
Preston shook his head and looked down at his hands. “Um, my mother used to check the bumps on my head to see if I, I, I would be going to medical school, but, you know, hands, I, no.” Woody was slipping in.
“Are you a religious man, Preston?” Willette moved over to the couch and squeezed between Preston and me.
“Well, I mean, sure, unless, you know, there’s something better on television.” I shot Preston a look equivalent to a sock in the arm. As Willette took Preston’s hand in hers, I moved over to the rocking chair. She rubbed her thumb over his palm and Preston began to smile.
“Do you have experience at this?” he asked.
“Mm-hmm. It was one of the things that made Joseph apoplectic, the fact that I could see in the notched lines on his hands the hardships he had yet to negotiate. This riled him fierce. ‘Let me tell you something,’ he’d say. ‘I predict a knuckle sandwich in your future,’ then he’d raise his fist in front of his face, ‘so if you don’t want to add this to your diet, I suggest you abandon this crackpot visionary babbling of yours. My fate is not in your hands.’ And I’d say, ‘No, but it’s in yours.’” Willette held her finger on a line as though she were pointing to something on a map. “Says here you’re likely to have quite a brood, Preston, and …” Willette stopped and squinted, then her eyes got big and she raised her head up. She dropped Preston’s hand and said, “Oh, my stars!” She looked at me. She looked at Preston.
“What?” Preston asked. “What is it?” Willette patted Preston’s shoulder. “Anyone for a cheese puff?” She stood up quickly and sailed into her pearly pink kitchen.
And that was it. I could not imagine what sinister thing it was Willette espied in the creases of Preston’s telling palm, but it was enough for her to force an hors d’oeuvre and cold beverage on us in a hurry, then after a bite and sip beg off with a forgotten appointment. Willette sealed her lips and shook her head. When she finally spoke, all she said as she worried a twist of hair and swept us out of her apartment, whose now pulsating pink interior seemed on the verge of a swallow, was that “the responsibility of deciphering the dialect of hands” had grown “too weighty.” She said, “I am aiming my energies at peddling blush and concealer, things that hide and blind those old loud-mouthed lines.”
Eventually Willette spilled it. Though I had to promise to breathe nary a syllable to Preston (“Sometimes these things can be overcome, it’s written in flesh not stone, but sometimes awareness of a possibly foreboding fate can be feared so much it’s self-fulfilling”), Willette divulged some visionary details. She said that after years of being kind and quiet and humble and awkward, Preston would one day see dreams hoped for in dark silence come screaming into the light of day. “He’ll have the world by the tail. He’ll swing it round and round with nothing left to lasso. We’re talking the Big Payload, El Grande Oyster, and all that hoopla.” She said one day he’d have fame and fortune, peace and new love.
I could feel my brows knitting. I said, “Cut to it, Willette. One day Preston will have it all. And …?”
She said, “And that’s just it. It lasts one day. On the same day he reaches his zenith, he dies a random death. He steps in front of something, a deadly virus, a bus, a bullet, a woman scorned, I don’t know what. I just know it all ends the minute he breathes easy.”
“Yipes,” I said. I didn’t care a bit for the notion that the cosmos had a wicked sense of irony. Willette nodded, her face pinched in chagrin.
I told Oed about it and he told me all my friends were flakes. “You’re my friend,” I said.
Oed aimed his face at my voice. His lips were reddish and wet, juicy, arrogant plums. “Come here,” he said.
I moved from the beanbag chair to the couch. He took my hand. I jerked, but he gripped it firmly. He ran his fingers over my palm. I imagined my body as a tablet of Braille, bumps and lines he could read, decode. He could tell me who I am. I almost wet my pants. I have to keep my head on my neck, I thought.
“What’s this?” he asked. He traced the scar across my palm. I jerked again. His grip tightened.
“It’s mine,” I said.
“Hmm. Tender?” He held my hand in front of his eyes, my wrist a handle, angled up, as if my palm were a magnifying glass through which he might see the ceiling, the sky, the world beyond his dead view. He touched the scar again. “The ridge of fate,” he said. He smiled. His sunny teeth flashed. “You will live in infamy,” he said. “You’re a fast burning centrifuge spinning spirit from flesh.” Oed winked, the slow lowering of a perfunctory eyelid, a sighted gesture I had taught him. I told him it meant Between you and me, I know who you really are. “You don’t get fortunes like that from a cookie,” he said. He dropped my hand and grinned. “Get me some socks, Hal.”
When I handed him the socks, he felt them and smelled them and said, “These are mismatched.” It was true: one black, one green. Oed had a strongly developed tactile sense of color that I was always trying to trump.
* * *
Oedipus builds violins and I watch. I love to see him feel his way through the wood; the maple, the spruce lure his fingers to just the right place and he sculpts with such loving delicacy, I imagine the ghost of Stradivari ecstatically swirling through a seizure of clouds. I love to hear Oed talk as he works, naming the parts for me: pegbox and purfling and f-hole and bass bar, neck, ribs and belly, my own crackling beneath the words, the resonant body he molds.
It is on one of these nights as I watch him rub and shape, pull contours from wood, that I decide to undress. I take off my shoes and socks, jeans and underpants, shirt and bra and lay them on the couch. As I do this, I wait for the moment when he will hear the eager rustle of fabric and ask what I am doing. But he doesn’t. So I move to him, slowly. I don’t want him to notice the sound of my flesh moving against itself. I bend over his back curved with purpose and put my lips to his neck. He stiffens, stops breathing. I place my hands over his eyes. “Guess who?” I say. I bend farther and place my cheek against his hot neck.
“Hallie,” he says. He sets his work down and turns in his chair. “Don’t.”
I hold his face in my hands. I kneel and smile up into his emptied eyes. “What do you see?”
He takes my hands by the wrists. “Goddamn it, Hallie,” he whispers. “I’m blind, but that doesn’t mean I can teach you anything. I can’t fucking sensitize you to the world. I can’t help you see things that aren’t there. I’m not a prophet, I’m not a poet. I’m a goddamn blind man, and I eat and shit and build violins, so leave me the fuck alone.”
I stand up and lean forward, press my breast to his parted lips.
* * *
When I was eight years old, I heard a sound like a low scream and I walked toward it. I was visiting my grandparents, who lived in a neighborhood with farms. The sound came from a nearby clearing. When I got to the field, I saw a cow walking slowly back and forth, as though she couldn’t remember where she lived. And then I saw a naked man, my first, and I froze. The naked man’s hair was frizzed and spoked out in all directions like flames. He had blood on his hands and chest, and he looked and looked at me. He raised his hands above his head, as though I were going to take him prisoner. I walked backward until my feet hit the gravel, then I turned and ran.
The next time I saw a naked man, I was walking home from school, crossing Pierson Park. A man in a three-piece suit and hat appeared next to me in the quiet air. He elbowed me, showed me a black-handled knife. He pointed his head in the direction of a stand of trees. I looked into his gray eyes, the color of something tarnished. His blond hair was slicked back and I could smell his cologne. We walked until a dense thickness of trees surrounded us. He told me to take off my clothes and he also began to undress. My legs ached and trembled; it felt as though I’d just crossed a continent, entered a foreign land. I tried to stiffen them. I didn’t want him to see me shake.
When we were both naked, I stared at his penis. It looked like an egg hidden in bleached grass. The naked man smiled. I smiled back. His grin straightened and he said, “Shut up.”
He laid the knife down in the grass and held his hands up in front of him. His hands were smallish and clean, his palms unremarkable. He said, “I won’t hurt you.” He said, “Some of us just say that, but I really mean it.” He came closer to me and got on his knees. I stood still with my hands at my sides, licking my lips over and over again. I had this impulse to pat him on the head, touch his cheeks, but I was afraid my hands might choose a path of their own, might hook their fingers into his eyes.
“I just want to look,” he said. He raised his hands between us and held them in front of my chest; they hovered in front of the humble beginnings of breasts. I leaned backward and he shook his finger at me. Then he began moving his hands up and down, around, miming desire; he never touched me. It was as though a plate of glass separated us, glass he pretended was hot skin. Then he put his hands down and just looked.
I tried hard to think of escape and survival but strange things darted into my thoughts and edged out my instincts, my panic. An image flashed in my mind: my father’s jeweled cuff links that I so loved to hide under my covers, pretending they were magic eyes that could see me in the dark. I remembered the bus I had passed earlier. It was a white school bus with a red hood and two stripes that ran the length of it. Red letters on one side announced: C H _ _ C H. What’s Missing? U R! I thought of God. I thought of how they say God sees everything, every single thing, even things far inside us, like bad thoughts and broken bones. I thought of God, thought he’s watching me now, careful to keep quiet, watching and watching. I looked at the man. I wanted to polish his eyes. I breathed.
He moved his face close to my body but didn’t touch. His eyes moved across my skin, and I felt the sticky legs of beetles inching along my chest and throat and stomach and thighs. My body itched. His eyes circled the dots of my nipples, traveled around my navel, migrating along the bare V between my legs. I wondered if God saw me now, if there was a me to see.
My hand reached out for the man’s shoulder and he fell backward with a quick inhalation of air. “Touch me,” I said. “Touch!” He shook his head and put his hands to his mouth. I cupped my small breast. He put his hands in front of his face and shook his head. “Look at me!” I yelled. The shaking in my legs moved up through the rest of my body and I lunged into the grass and groped for the knife. The naked man sat on his knees and buried his face in his hands. “Look,” I said, holding the knife. I ran the blade across my palm. I felt the knife cut, but it wasn’t what I expected to feel. It felt like it was an opening that had been there all along. The naked man shook his head and cried into his fingers.
Each time I play this memory back in my head, I change what I felt during the ten minutes it took for this to happen. Sometimes I make myself feel terror or shame or horror or anger so hot it burns the inside of my head to conjure it; sometimes I even feel longing. And when I think about it now, I feel all of those things. But I realize what I felt then, when it was over, was envy. I know this is not the right thing to feel, but I felt it. I envied his power to decide to spend ten minutes changing a little girl’s life.
* * *
Oed pushes me back by the shoulders and lowers his head. “Hallie, don’t do this. I can’t…”
I say, “There was a man. He was naked. I was twelve.” Oed raises his head. His blown-out eyes twitch back and forth. I sit on his lap. He hugs me to him and rocks. I touch his cheek. “What do you see?” I ask.
“Nothing.” He closes his eyes. I touch his eyelid. I feel his sightless eye, an excess like the wings of penguins, flutter beneath my finger. He sits me up and steadies my face in front of his. “Hallie,” he says.
I cross my arms and grip my shoulders. I squeeze my arms, my thighs, my hands. My skin is warm.
* * *
Yesterday I went to the animal lab to visit Gretel again. I fed her popcorn and carrots and told her about the massacre in Hebron. A man walked into the mosque in the Tomb of the Patriarchs. He had a machine gun. He opened fire on praying people. The shooting lasted six or seven minutes. He killed men and boys. Thirty or maybe more. Survivors jumped the gunman and beat him to death. A five-year-old boy was shot in the back of the leg. His father, an ambulance driver, arrived on the scene and saw his son, bleeding, cradled in the arms of his uncle. The boy lived.
Gretel’s sticky lips and tongue pumped and slid. The slimy velveteen space between her nostrils bobbed. Strings of sleepy wetness oozed from her eyes. A young man in a white lab coat paced nearby. When I first arrived, he told me Gretel’s bones were beginning to give, that she was growing less and less able to stand on her own. He told me he was not the one who thought this up, this experiment was not his idea. “I’m just an intern,” he said. He told me he loved animals, that he had a dog and a canary and a salamander at home. I watched his eyes stare at Gretel. “What do you see?” I asked.
It is late at night and I have been sleeping. My window is open and in the breath of wind that stirs through my room I can smell that it has rained. The light from the moon spills onto my futon and washes across my bare feet. I sit up. I rummage under my bed frame and pull out a box. I open the lid. Underneath photographs and envelopes filled with baby teeth and fine curls of hair lie the two tea towels I once wore. I pull them out and carry them with me, walk outside.
As I stand in front of my building, I hear someone walking on the sidewalk. I see black sling-back pumps clicking toward me. A woman with my face approaches, her arms open. She stops in front of me and smiles. Taking my hand, she leads me to the area between buildings. I blink and blink and see people in the moonlit grass. They are sitting around a cow, my Gretel. A little girl whose legs stop at the knees links hands with a boy with a bandaged thigh. Oed is there, and he holds a violin and waves at me with the bow. The woman leads me into the circle and I see the skin on my arms begin to flash, a neon stutter. I drop the towels. Oed stands and Gretel unfolds her brittle legs, shaky bamboo stalks, and wobbles upward. The boy rises, hoists the girl in his arms. Oed begins to run the bow across the strings of the violin and as it hums, Gretel and Oed and I lift into the air. We lift up and up, floating over buildings and trees, looping through power lines, listing near towers ablink in the night, and I feel my heart swivel inside me; my lungs bubble and fizz. I hold onto Gretel’s neck as she paddles the breeze, her gentle lowing rumbling beneath my hand. Oed clutches my waist, sandwiching me between fiddle and bow; we are music in the making. And as we float higher and higher into the ionized air, far from all that’s familiar and heavy, I know we’ll continue to weave through the atmosphere and scale the sky until the bottoms of our superlunar hooves and feet, all that is visible from earth, flash a spectral exit, and then we will sizzle, devoured by scalding stars, and burn ourselves out of this world.