Keepers

THREE

drove along was alive with a thin layer of mist that skirled across the beams of your headlights. You were driving through a sea of cotton. A deer darted across the road at one point, followed a few seconds later by two rabbits. Whichever road or street you took, there was always some kind of animal in your peripheral vision; a dog, a cat, a raccoon moving through the bushes and shadows on the curb.

The facility was harder to find at night; the road wasn’t lit at all, and the moon was hiding behind thick stationary clouds as if it were afraid or ashamed to allow its light to reveal too much.

You passed the building and had to turn around. You killed your headlights before turning up the asphalt drive, then pulled over into the shadows. You were going to have to walk the rest of the way.

Have you ever in your life been so anxiously aware of the silences in the night or the sound of your own breathing? Creeping up the drive like some thief casing a target house and nearly jumping out of your skin when a skunk waddled across the drive on its way from one patch of trees to the other. The area around the building was lighted by a sole sodium-vapor light at the edge of the visitors’ parking lot. You spotted Beth’s U-boat parked at the farthest end. On the other side of the building, Keepers’ vans formed the long, segmented shadow-shape of a giant serpent in slumber.

You started toward the entrance doors when another car turned onto the driveway. Because you were still covered in Mabel’s blood (oddly enough, cleaning up before leaving the house never entered your mind), the last thing you needed was to be seen like this. You leapt aside, cowering behind a trash Dumpster as the new-looking Mercedes drove up and parked in front of the entrance.

A man and a woman got out and opened the back doors. The man removed and unfolded a wheelchair while his wife helped a much older and frail-looking woman out of the backseat; once she was situated in the chair, the man reached into the car, removed a pet carrier, and the three of them went inside.

As soon as they were through the doors you ran across the lot toward the U-boat to see if Beth and the remaining Its were still there. Maybe she’d gotten here, parked, then froze as the shock of Mabel’s suicide finally hit. You’d find her sitting there, hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly their knuckles would be white.

It was empty.

You took a deep breath and tried unsuccessfully to steady your shaking hands. You thought about the day everyone had piled into the car and brought the other Its out here, the way Whitey had gotten so emotional about the leaving women, how Mabel walked through the selection area in a semi-catatonic daze, and the way you’d found Beth coming out of the room behind the large steel door.

Remember how you suddenly wished that you smoked? A cigarette would’ve helped right then, the feel of it between your fingers, the aroma of the tobacco as it was ignited by the flame, the first deep inhalation… oh, yeah. That would have been nice. Mom liked to smoke. Dad preferred a pipe. You missed them terribly. You missed Whitey and Beth and Mabel, missed the world you’d once known and had taken for granted.

You heard car doors slam, and then you slunk over to the front of the building in time to see the Mercedes’ taillights receding; the driver didn’t even signal or slow as the car reached the road, he just tore out of there with a squeal of tires and burst of exhaust and a sudden, violent leftward skid that he quickly corrected before gunning the engine and speeding away.

Wiping blood and perspiration from your face, you took another deep breath and stepped inside.

An old cat sat in one of the top cages; it was the only animal here, and you were the only person. You stared at the cat and it, in turn, showed its interest in you by yawning.

You knew this animal- recognized it, anyway-but couldn’t place it. It wasn’t one of the Its but, still… where had you seen this disenchanted arthritic bundle of fur and teeth before?

The selection area was dark and closed off by a collapsible, barred security door.

That left only the large steel door on the right.

You peered through its window but could see nothing, then realized this was intentional, that a person could only see through from the other side. You reached down and grabbed the handle. It never occurred to you that this door might be locked; if that had been the case, you might be a much different and happier man now, but it was unlocked and swung open with only a minimum of effort and besides, pal, I’m not doing this to play “What-If?” with you.

The cold draft from behind the door seemed less severe than before, but that was probably because the night itself was cooler and so the contrast in temperatures wasn’t as drastic.

You stood there pondering meteorological conundrums for a few more seconds, anything to not step in and hear that door clunk shut. If you’d followed baseball, you might have reviewed stats for the season. You could have counted the freckles on the back of your hand. Or recited all the lyrics to “American Pie” until the Chevy reached the levy only to find it dry.

“Do it, you fucking coward,” you whispered to yourself.

Three seconds later you stood on the other side listening to the door clunk shut behind you. The sound reverberated with the same cold, metallic finality a lifer must hear every night when the prison bars electronically screech into their magnetized locks.

Once the door has been closed, the animal cannot be retrieved from outside.

You were in a dim corridor whose sides were delineated by a string of ankle-level safety lights that stretched its entire length, then bent around a corner roughly a hundred feet away. The walls on either side were vaguely familiar. You could easily see the boards that had been used as forms for the concrete because several of them had warped before the concrete had set properly; they looked like ghosts trapped in the walls, stuck forever between this world and the one they came from and now wished they had never tried to leave.

Remember where you saw this before? That afternoon in the sub-basement of the hospital? On your way to the Keepers’ lab? Of course you don’t-or won’t. If you did, then I wouldn’t be pestering you with all this, would I?

It doesn’t matter. Here you are, in the facility, and you have to find Beth. She was in here somewhere, she had to be, there was nowhere else she could have gone, so you followed the lights until you turned a corner and slammed your shin against something left haphazardly in the middle of the floor.

A wheelchair.

Bending over to rub your leg, you saw the bright bumper sticker attached to the back of the chair: I ACCELERATE FOR FUZZY BUNNIES.

Then you thought of The Waltons with the sound muted, of a handmade quilt neatly folded at the foot of a bed, of a book of poetry and some lines from Browning and faded photographs on a wall and – and knew now why you’d recognized the cat.

You wondered if Miss Acceleration’s file was one of those lying on the floor beside Mabel’s bed, and if Whitey’s was among them, as well.

The dial clicked, another set of tumblers fell into place, and you moved on.

The air back here was slightly warmer but much more damp and smelled of a farm: wet straw, urine and feces, moist fur… But there were other, more disparate smells mixed among them: freshly laundered sheets, antiseptics, talcum or baby powder (you never could tell the difference between the two, could you?), and an eye-watering assortment of medicinal odors-cough syrup, rubbing alcohol, iodine, Mercurochrome, gauze and bandages. What was it you assumed then? That this was the area used for ministering to animals who were ill or hurt at the time they were dropped off.

Except there were no animal sounds; no dogs barking, no cats hissing, no birds chirping or pigs snorting, nothing. Even this late at night there should have been a few animals awake and making their discomfort or hunger known, but the only sounds were the hum of a hidden generator, the steady exhalation of the air-conditioning, and your own footsteps. You were so anxious about the silence you failed to notice the metal lip rising out of the floor ahead and tripped on the damn thing.

Stepping up and grabbing the rail to regain your balance, you discovered that this section of floor was raised and covered in a long strip of rubber tread. The railing extended the rest of its length on both sides; an automated walkway, one of those moving sidewalks used at malls and airports. To the left was a large red button with which to activate the motor.

You chose to move under your own power; the lack of noise might be disturbing, but at least it wouldn’t betray your presence.

As soon as you took your first step a light blinked on to the right and a dog leapt at you. Crying out, you jumped to the other side of the walkway, lost your balance, and landed on your knees. Crossing your arms in front of your face, you took a deep breath and readied yourself for the thing to sink its teeth into your arm.

But nothing happened.

You looked up and saw that the light was from a 12-inch television screen-the dog was nothing more than an image from a home movie.

Screens activated by your weight on the tread lined the walls on both sides of the walkway, displaying videos and photographs of dogs, cats, birds, horses, and countless other animals, all of the images underscored by soft music piped through unseen speakers: it took a moment, but you at last recognized the music as Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite.

You stood up and continued moving down the walkway, looking from one side to the other as the show continued.

Each video or photo of an animal was displayed for perhaps ten seconds before cross-fading into a video or photograph of a person, then the person’s image cross-faded into a photo or tape of someone else, and this someone else cross-faded into another animal. Once the sequence played through, the screen went black and the words “To Be Loved” appeared before everything started again. The screens on the left ran through a similar sequence, only this began with a person, went to an animal, then another animal before coming back to a person, ending with the words “To Have a Place.”

You came to the end of the walkway and stepped down to the floor.

Before you was a set of large swinging metal doors. Over the entrance was a bronze plaque with the words “T HERE I S A R EASON I N N ATURE F OR S OMETHING T O E XIST R ATHER T HAN N OT.” You stared at the words for a few moments before pushing open the doors to reveal a long hallway with more concrete walls, lighted intermittently with bare bulbs cradled in bell-shaped cages of wire dangling from the ceiling. This, too, was known to you (from the hospital’s sub-basement), but you couldn’t place it just then. But that’s okay-you’ve got me for that, pal.

Back here the smell of a farmyard was just as potent, but stronger still were scents distinctly, unmistakably human: sweat and strong body odor unsuccessfully masked by perfumes and aftershaves.

Aware of barred doors on either side up ahead, you moved forward and caught a glimpse of a framed painting hanging on the wall to my right: Rene Magritte’s The Son of Man. Written on a square placard underneath it were the words “T O B E H UMAN.” On the wall across from it hung an almost exact duplicate of the painting, only this time instead of an apple there was a dove in front of the man’s face, and a small light trained on it from above highlighted the dove; the placard underneath this had a simple one-word statement on it: “O R?”

You could still hear the richness of Copland’s masterpiece through unseen speakers; the sound quality grew clearer and fuller the farther you moved down the corridor.

On the left was a large cage with an ox standing inside. It was skin and bones and covered in whip scars, some of them so fresh they were still seeping. Its eyes were a milky red and its lolling tongue was yellow. It stood on trembling legs streaked with dried liquid shit that had squittered from its diseased bowels, not making a sound, turning its head toward you as if asking for help. Its scalp had been peeled away to reveal the skull underneath, a series of red “Xs” decorating the surface.

Something large, wide, and unpleasant-smelling lay sleeping in the shadows of the cage across from the ox. You began stepping over to see if you could get a better look at it, then decided you didn’t want to know.

Each cage was separated from its neighbor by about two feet of wall space, and in the center of that space was another 12-inch monitor displaying the same bizarre series of home movies you’d seen in the corridor. You wondered why caged animals would want to watch home movies. Did whoever designed this area think the animals would understand what they were seeing?

The next cage-cell, cubby, whatever, like it makes a difference-was empty, but the one directly across from it was occupied by Miss Acceleration.

The sight of her in that cage hit the “pause” button on your entire somatic nervous system; you couldn’t have moved at that moment if someone had been emptying an AK-47 at your head.

The monitor next to her cage showed the image of a dog jumping around for no other reason than it was happy to be outside in the sunshine.

She was sitting in well-stuffed leather easy chair with her handmade quilt spread across her lap and covering her legs. She held a small book in her hands and was gently rocking herself forward and back, forward and back, forward and back, her faced pinched with intense concentration, as if remaining still would bring some terrible curse from Heaven down upon her head. The framed photographs from her room at the nursing home decorated the wall behind her.

You gripped the bars and tried to open the door but it seemed welded in place.

Once the door has been closed, the animal cannot be retrieved from outside.

She looked up at you, smiled, and said: “It’s all right. Everything’s all right now. Yes.” Forward and back, forward and back.

You swallowed once, very loudly, and then asked: “Do you know where you are?”

“I’m home,” she said, her voice cracking on the second word as if it were the most beautiful thing she’d ever spoken. “I mean, I’ll be going there soon.”

You started to speak again, but then remembered the new security measures at the nursing home. Were you being watched? Were you on camera this moment? Just because you couldn’t see any cameras didn’t mean they weren’t there; and if there were cameras, there were microphones, as well.

But if you were being watched, if they knew you were trespassing, why hadn’t any of them shown up to stop you?

“Listen,” you said to Miss Acceleration, “I’ve got to find somebody, and as soon as I do, we’re going to get you out of here. Do you understand?”

“Is it time for my programs yet? I do so hate to miss them.” Forward and back, forward and back, staring at me. “Are you my son?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? You look an awful lot like him.”

“I’m sure.”

“It doesn’t matter. Everything’s all right now. I’ll be there soon.” And with that, she closed her eyes and continued rocking.

If you saw her out in the world she would have been just another old woman, the type who usually holds up the line in a grocery store, or is waiting for a bus that’s always running late and so wants to strike up a conversation in the meantime; one of those meticulous old gals who knows and cares about the exact type of gift you’re supposed to give on a particular anniversary, who has so many interesting stories to tell but no one to listen to them because you don’t want to bother with a dry, old, used-up little bit of carbon whose hands are arthritic claws covered in liver spots and grotesque, plump purple veins; you would have looked at her and seen only another humorously annoying old woman counting out exact change as if it were a holy chore assigned to her from above. And you wouldn’t have stopped to think that underneath this monumental punchline of dying cells, wrinkled skin, and fading memories there existed someone who’d always been, but now was rarely seen as, a real human being; one with hurts and hopes and lonely places in their life they filled as best they could by standing in the line at the grocery store, or chatting with strangers at bus stops, or endlessly bending the driver’s ear while counting out exact change. You would never see her as ever having been in love, or dancing with her favorite beau to music from the Glenn Miller Orchestra, young and vibrant, with a laugh that rang like crystal and a long, promising, full life ahead of her. You would never wonder or care if she often cried alone at night, or how many times she’d offered her heart only to have it crushed and spat upon, or if her children remembered to call her on the weekend or visit at Christmas. Maybe there was a Great Love who lay slumbering in some graveyard and she was the only person who took the time to replace the wilting flowers with fresh blossoms-you might have imagined that, maybe, and then smiled at the sad, sentimental absurdity of this image from a fairy tale: There once was an old woman who lived in the past where someday all of us will be.

At that moment you wanted to know everything about her and her life, every detail no matter how extraneous or trivial. You did not want to walk away from her because she might be gone when you came back; they collected them fast around here.

A sound a few yards away startled you and you looked in its direction.

Someone had coughed.

“Don’t worry,” you said to Miss Acceleration. “I’ll come back for you. I promise.”

She continued chatting as you walked away: “I think a bunny would be nice, don’t you? A big, round, fluffy gray bunny with great floppy ears. Yes, I think a bunny would be so nice…”

You blinked back something in your eyes, swallowed against something vile roiling up from your stomach into the back of your throat, wiped some more blood from your hands onto the sides of your pants, and found the next occupied cage.

Behind these bars a little boy with massive facial deformities lay on a cot, his lower body covered by a sheet. From the ceiling there extended down a pencil-thick cable that spread out at the bottom like the wires inside an umbrella, each one attached to one of the matchbox-sized rectangles implanted in his skull. The skin of his exposed scalp was crusty and red where it fused with the metal. He jerked underneath the sheet as if in the midst of a seizure, arms and legs twitching as the silver matchboxes sparked and faded in a precisely-timed sequence. His eyes were held closed by two heavy strips of medical tape and fresh, glistening stitches formed a “W” across his face from temples to cheeks, meeting above the bridge of his nose. A clear plastic tube ran from one of his nostrils into a large glass jar set on a metal table beside the cot; with each jerk, dark viscous liquid crawled through the tube and oozed into the jar. With each sequence of sparks he bit down hard on his lower lip, breaking the skin and dribbling blood down the side of his face. His skin was red and glistened with sweat and every time he convulsed, he jerked back his head to expose the pinkish-white scar across his neck.

… when there are this many, they cut out their vocal cords…

You kept moving; movement was good, movement reinforced the illusion of an assured destination and a guaranteed way out once you reached it, and you needed to believe that you were going to get out of this.

You passed beaten, bandaged dogs of every shape and size, kittens and cats who had been kicked nearly into pulp or whose fur had been doused in gasoline and set aflame; they lay very still, taking shallow breaths as tubes fed them both oxygen and liquid protein.

The monitors in the wall showed happy pictures, happy families with their happy pets having happy times.

A deep aluminum bathtub sat in the center of the next cage. The steady drip-drip-drip of water from the faucet echoed like faraway gunshots. Something splashed around, pounded one reverberating boom of thunder against the side, then rose partway above the lip; it was a woman-or had been, once-with red hair, mottled and discolored skin, and a neck that had been slashed several times in different places with a straight-edge razor; she looked at you through bulbous piscine eyes and brushed a wet strand of hair from her forehead. Then the slashes on her neck opened moistly, blowing air bubbles before contracting again.

Gills. She had gills.

You made some kind of a sound, soft and pitiful and child-like, that crawled out of your throat as if it were afraid of the light, and then you backed away, hands pushed out as if holding closed some invisible door.

Your legs felt weighted down by iron boots. You did not so much walk as shuffle along, periodically looking down at the floor to make sure the earth wasn’t about to split open and swallow you.

Next was a teenaged boy with dozens of membranous man-of-war tentacles slobbering out all over his body in phosphorescent clusters; in the cage beside him was a shaven goat whose front legs were far too thick and ended in a clump of five toes; across from the goat was a plump Down’s syndrome girl of uncertain age with a jutting facial cleft whose body was sprouting thick green feathers; in the cage beside her, a bear was grooming its fur not with claws but a model’s thin, creamy-skinned, delicate hands; then came a little boy with an impossibly thin neck who smoothly rotated his head so his too-long and thin tongue could snap at the midges swarming around the light; and, finally, a middle-aged woman who might have once been pretty, before the split lip, broken nose, and two black eyes: she squatted on sludgy, misshapen legs that bent outward at incomprehensible angles. Most of her weight seemed to rest on her gelatinous, flat webbed feet. She looked at you first with confusion, then longing, and, at last, a resigned sort of pity.

You staggered backward, pressing yourself against the bars of the cage behind you in order to keep from collapsing to the floor. You closed your eyes, shuddering, then looked farther down the corridor to where a curved brass railing disappeared into a stairway under the floor.

“You don’t want to go down there. Trust me when I say this to you.”

You spun around and saw him standing- standing! -in the middle of the cage, half-hidden in shadows. You could see his face, part of his exposed chest, and a moist, leathery-looking towel wrapped around his waist. You’d never seen him fully upright before; he seemed so tall.

“Whitey!”

“Captain Spaulding,” he replied. “Decided to do some more exploring, did you? Hooray-hoorayhooray.”

You gripped the bars. “Jesus Christ, Whitey, what the hell is this place?”

“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place-goodness gracious me, what a mess you are. Been waltzing with fresh carcasses through a slaughterhouse? I trust it was a Strauss-one should never waltz to anything but.” He blinked, then made a disapproving tsk-tsk. “You are not at all presentable, dear boy-not that you were a breathtaking heartthrob to begin with, but the importance of good grooming and careful hygiene cannot be overrated. Soap and water are our friends. You may quote me on that.”

“Whitey, for chrissakes! What is this place? ”

“Hark-what’s this I see? My goodness, the programming schedule around here never gets boring, I’ll give ’em that. You ought to take a look at the screen there, Captain. Required viewing.”

The scene on the monitor changed from the home movies of before to a close-up of an asphalt alley floor. The camera seemed to be hand-held because the image jerked and shook but, after a moment, things settled down and the camera did a slow turn to the right. The face of a border collie filled the screen. The silver tag hanging from its collar caught a glint of sunlight and threw a bright spot into the lens, but then the camera turned forward once more, catching a fast glimpse of the top of a cat’s head, tilted upward a few degrees, and focused on something in the distance.

It took a second for you to realize what you were looking at.

A man with his back to the camera was running down the alley toward another man who looked as if he were doubled over in pain or looking for something because he was kneeling. Then the running man pulled back his leg, did a half-pirouette, and kicked the kneeling man in the ribs.

You stood there outside Whitey’s cage and watched a film of yourself attacking Drop-Kick that afternoon after Dad’s funeral.

“Didn’t think you had it in you to do a Bruce Lee like that,” said Whitey. “You have good form, by the way.”

The scene had been filmed from two different angles, one from each end of the alley. What struck you as odd about it-aside from its existing in the first place-was the angle from which it had all been filmed; it was very low to the ground, as if the camera operator had been lying on their stomach so as to – no.

You remembered how the face of the collie had filled the screen. You remembered how the animals had sat so unnaturally still that afternoon. How the sunlight glittered off the tags hanging from some of their collars.

This had been filmed with the cameras held at about collar height.

“Technology’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?” said Whitey. “A camera no bigger than a tag on a collar. Been around for a while, from what I hear. I mean, just look at that.”

The alley scene was gone, but the camera remained just as jerky as it had been before. A shadow passed over the lens, leaving a smear in its trail. This kept happening for several seconds until, at last, the blurry image of a face could be seen forming. The face bounced up and down, as if it were looking down into the lens of the camera it was carrying while trying to clean something off the lens and – “Oh, no,” you said.

Your thumb passed over the lens one more time and you then were looking into the face of your fifteen-year-old self. You were crying like a baby, lips moving, forming words that could not be heard but you didn’t need to hear them, you knew damn well what you’d said to that poor cat as you stood there by the trash cans in back of Beckman’s Market.

The image of your bawling face was very clear, indeed; you’d wiped more blood from the tag on its collar than you’d thought.

You shook your head. “I never was able to make out its name.”

The image faded back into the home movies of before.

“You got a good heart, Captain,” said Whitey. “That counts for something in the end. Or so goes the rumor.” He jerked his head down and to the left once, twice, three times, then made a chuffing sound as he kicked at the thick layer of straw covering most of the floor. “They’ve been aware of you for a long time now, Captain. They’re very good at keeping track of folks who interest them.

“To answer your question about what this place is: It’s sort of their version of Ellis Island-and don’t ask me-” He chuffed once again, shaking his head. “-who ‘they’ are because you have to know at this point and, besides, a pro never wastes time repeating a gag that everyone in the peanut gallery has heard a dozen times. But I digress. Do me a favor-there’s a bag hanging on the wall to your right. Be a splendid fellow and get it for me, will you?”

You grabbed the canvas pouch by its strap and lifted it from the hook on the wall. “Who are they, Whitey?”

He laughed. “You might say they’re not from around here.”

You held the pouch through the bars. It must have weighed ten pounds. “What is this?”

“Dinner,” he said, moving forward into the light.

His arms were gone, that was the first thing that registered; in their place were two large clumps of ugly knotted scar tissue that protruded from his shoulders like the padding under a vaudevillian’s oversized coat.

Then you acknowledged the whole of him and went numb. All you could hear was the blood surging through your temples and the echo of Whitey’s voice from another time, another world.

I love horses. Hope to be one in my next life.

He was almost halfway there.

His head had been shaved except for a hand-sized, Mohawk-like patch directly in the middle; the rest of his exposed, scabrous scalp was implanted with the same silver matchboxes you’d seen on the others, only these weren’t hooked up to any electrical wires dangling from the ceiling. His now-massive torso was lacquered in thousands of short brittle hairs that grew more dense as they neared his waist. His neck was twice as long and twice as thick as it should have been, glistening with sweat and frothy streaks of lathered mucus.

Before you could snap out of your stupor, Whitey cantered forward, dipped down, craned his neck, and slipped the handle of the pouch around the back of his head, all the time singing the words to the Mr. Ed theme.

“Oh, a horse is a horse, of course of course…”

From somewhere nearby a low, thrumming groan began to take form, rolling across the floor, slowly growing in volume and power.

“Nothing like room service,” said Whitey, then shoved his face deep into the pouch and spun around as the thrum grew louder and stronger.

The heavy white mane flowed from the center of his head all the way down his dense, ashen, solid back. His spine was thick as a forearm; with every move its powerful muscles stretched and quaked and rippled. His gaskins and hocks were mostly concealed by the leather towel-which wasn’t a towel at all but something organic, something sentient, a living mass that pulsed and breathed as it made itself a part of his flesh-but the rest of his legs were clearly visible; the hard cannons, the steel-like tendons, the pasterns and fetlocks and, worst of all, the burnished, astonishing, impossible hooves. Moving in stops and starts as he fed, hooves scraping through the straw and clopping loudly against the cement floor, his mane fanning out like a column of bleached flames, Whitey continued to shake his head and chuff.

“… an no one can talk to a horse, of course…”

The thrum whip-cracked like the snap of a bone and became an eruption, bouncing off the walls, resonating up and down the corridor, spiraling overhead, within and without, a ripped-raw, berserk, frenzied, lunatic siren of a sound with enough power behind it to throttle you to the floor, legs scrabbling to push yourself backward, far back, away from the harrowing shriek, and you began to cover your ears but each time the sound tripled in volume and force, there was no stopping it, no blocking it out, it engulfed everything but you couldn’t think of anything else to do so you ground the heels of your hands against your ears and held them there, throwing yourself totally into the rattling cacophony as something shredded deep in your throat and you realized the sound was even closer than before because it was coming out of you, had been coming from you this whole time, but you didn’t care, couldn’t move, and wouldn’t stop screaming, screaming, screaming.

Whitey pulled his face from the bag and clopped forward to kick a hoof against the bars.

“ Will you stop that irksome racket? Stop it right now! Stop it! ”

You pressed the knuckles of your fist into your mouth and bit down, choking off the noise; whether the blood you tasted was your own or Mabel’s, you couldn’t tell.

“That’s better,” said Whitey, cantering around the cage. “Hysterics are so unbecoming. Downright distasteful, if you ask me. I personally feel diminished by your behavior and think you should”-he shook his head and chuffed, spraying gummy globs of oatflaked spit-“apologize at once.”

You pulled your fist away and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

“You damned well ought to be. Is that any way to behave when you visit a sick friend? I think not. Sincerely.”

“Please, please tell me what’s happening.”

“No begging, if you please. Hey-would you like to see a trick? Ask me what two plus two equals, go on-oh, never mind, you’re a terrible audience. I’ll do it myself.” He cleared his throat and said, “Whitey Weis, the renowned Double-Dubya, here’s your question-quiet in the studio, please. For a handful of sugar cubes, tell us… What’s two plus two?” He extended his left leg and scraped his hoof against the cement four times. “Listen to that applause, folks, isn’t he amazing?” He trotted forward, pressing his face against the bars and looking down at you. “Did you like that? Please say you did, it’s my best one.”

You could only nod your head.

If the heart makes no sound when it shatters, then the mind is even quieter when it begins to collapse.

Whitey’s head jerked down and to the right once, twice, three times; he held it like that for a moment, then a shudder ran down his sides and he stamped a hoof down against the floor; when he turned his face toward you again his eyes were still and his expression pensive. “Look at me, kiddo.”

“What?”

“Watch that tone. Mind telling me why you had to come here?”

You pulled in a ragged, snot-filled breath and wiped your eyes. “I’m trying to find Beth.”

“Your fair lady-love? Stands about yea-high with one of the ten greatest smiles in the history of history itself? The gal you’ve been in love with your whole life but who doesn’t really share your feelings? Or if she does, she’s too scared to act on them. That Beth?

“She was here earlier. She told me about Mabel, the poor old girl. Not that you’ll understand or even believe me, but I wept when I heard the news. Mabel was one of the good ones, and there are so very few of them left in the world as the days go by.”

You stumbled to your feet. “Where did she go?” You pointed to the right. “Did she go down there? Down those stairs? Is that why I can’t find her?”

Whitey stretched one leg forward, bent the other back at the knee, and leaned low. “If I say ‘yes,’ you’re going to go down there, aren’t you?” He shook his head in the slight, subtle, human manner, then gave a disapproving whistle. “I don’t know, kiddo. I was serious when I said you don’t want to do that. You have to be pretty desperate to get this far, but down there… once you hit the bottom of those stairs, there’s no coming back as you once were.”

You slammed a fist against the bars. “ Goddammit, Whitey! For once in your miserable life would you give someone a straight answer?”

He smiled at “miserable,” then bent even closer. “How very interesting that you chose that word. Tell me: do you have any idea what it’s like to be one of the forgotten, the discarded, the unloved or the damaged? Can you even for a second imagine how it feels to reach a point in your life where the only promise a new day brings is one of more loneliness? And don’t you dare piss and moan to me about the pain of puberty or adolescent angst-those are hangnails compared to what I’m talking about.

“Think about this: a child is born retarded or deformed and knows only the mockery of other children and the embarrassment of its parents; a woman who’s worked for years, worked without complaint or much thought for herself, who’s struggled and sacrificed to build a good home for her family in the hopes they’ll love her as much as she loves them, this woman is rewarded with what?-the disrespect of her children and bruises inflicted on her by a husband whose own life hasn’t gone exactly as he’d planned, so he has to take his aggravation out on someone. Do you think that makes her feel like her life’s labors have been worthwhile?

“Consider people like you, people who grew up in this town, people in their twenties and thirties who were born into this best of all possible worlds to find only poverty, abuse, or sickness waiting to greet them; they grow up afraid, cold, hungry, full of resentment and despair because from the moment of their first breath everything was already ruined for them-what reason do they have to hope for anything? They wander around with no real sense of purpose, going from job to job, place to place, person to person, nothing and no one lasting for very long, so once again they’re left with only their thoughts and a gnawing emptiness and a heart that was born broken. Where can they go to feel wanted?

“And then there are the old farts like me, bone-bags who eventually become a burden to their families and a joke of what they once were or dreamed they’d become. We are asked to pack the whole of our life’s remaining acquisitions into a single bag or box, along with a dusty photo album or two, then are driven to a colorless room and left to sit and stare at a television that gets lousy reception, or old pictures on the wall that some bozo thinks will make us feel all warm and fuzzy and not remind us that we’ve outlived our friends, our usefulness, even the place we once held in our childrens’ lives… so there we remain, sitting, staring, wishing for a visitor or someplace to go, just some little variation in the routine that’s slowly depressing us to death. But there’s never any variation, so our bodies continue to deteriorate and our skin turns into tissue paper as we fill our noses and lungs with the smell of approaching oblivion. Are any of us with our sadnesses, our deformities, our bruises, broken hearts, declining health, the whole index of personal miseries-are we somehow undeserving of consideration? A five-minute call once a week, a kind word or affectionate smile, an understanding touch? What effort does that take? When exactly were we deemed unworthy? Who decided this?”

He was getting more and more agitated as he spoke, shifting his weight from leg to leg, stamping his hooves against the floor or kicking them against the bars, continually shaking his head as if to break apart the thoughts and scatter the pieces from his head, chuffing and snorting to disgorge the bitter taste of the words in his mouth.

Up and down the corridor, the occupants of the various cages began to stir and move toward their barred doors. Their voices and growls and peeps wove a soft, murmuring cloth of sound that spread out between the cages like a picnic blanket over green summer grass.

“Well, guess what, kiddo,” said Whitey. “There is a place for us. A way to be loved. A way home. Not just us, not just people, but any living thing whose existence becomes intolerable. Are you paying attention? There may be a quiz later.”

The music was being turned up in small increments. Whitey craned his horse’s neck up and to the side. “Almost time.”

“For what?”

A smile. “You’ll see soon enough.”

There was a loud buzz, followed by an ever louder metallic click.

“Whitey, what’s going-”

“-wait for it. It’ll come around again in a minute or two.” He winked. “A pro knows when ‘Places’ is being called.” Then he cleared his throat again and said, a bit too loudly: “Shall I tell him?”

The murmuring blanket whispered agreement. Whitey cantered around his cage, his head thrown back. “Yes, yes, yes! ” He stopped, shook himself from head to hooves, then clopped to the bars. “Human beings running the show, kiddo, was a mistake. Got that? Wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

“See, way back when before there was a ‘when’ to go back to, when the world was new, there were only the animals, but they weren’t animals as we know them now, nuh-uh: they were capable of abstract thought and speech and all the other qualities we now call ‘anthropomorphic.’ And they were happy, and they gave thanks to their creator-the First Animal, the one from which they all sprang into being.

“But creating the world and the galaxy around it and the universe around the galaxy and all that snazzy razzamatazz, well… it wears out A Divine Being. It’s anybody’s guess what specific whatchamacallit El Heffe was in the process of creating when He screwed the pooch-that’s just one those Great Mysteries that we have to live with, but, again, I digress.

“What happened was: God blinked. Can’t really blame Him, He’d been working without a break for six days and you can only stare at something for so long before you can’t see it anymore… so He blinked, looked away for a moment, and just left this new thing He’d been working on laying around, unfinished.

“During the Big Blink, as I like to call it, certain cells in this whosee-whatsit super-dingus mutated while others fused together, creating metazoans and- whammo! -the DNA dominoes fell into sequence and the double helix did its ninth configuration dance and by the time the Almighty Anybody checked back, an amusing accident called evolution had taken place: here stood Man, effulgent and curious and all starkers, scratching his ass and looking for a good place to build the first mall.

“So He let Man hang around for a while to see what would happen, and of course it didn’t work out, but by the point in the show where the whole Forty Days and Forty Nights production number was to go on, Man had convinced the animals that they couldn’t survive without him. Know how he did that? He whipped, beat, humiliated, starved, and worked them until they were so weary and sad they stopped using speech and abstract thought. With each new generation, they’d become more silent and simple-minded and had no choice but to depend on Man. So God wrote a reprise called Noah-not just because He didn’t much cotton to the idea of expunging this interesting accident called Man, but because, by then, the ‘beasts of the field’ were too stupid to know it was time to pair up and save their collective hide.”

Another loud buzz, followed by another click. Whitey craned his neck once more, shaking off foam. “Shit, I got all caught up in things and lost track-was that the second or third time?”

“Second.”

“Okay, got one more to go.”

Every synapse in your brain was firing at you to get the fuck out of there but you couldn’t; you had to hear the rest of this-if for no other reason than because he still might tell you where Beth had gone.

Appalachian Spring was reaching its most famous movement, and from up and down the corridor, human voices and animal sounds began to merge…

… and sing:

“‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘ Tis the gift to be free, ‘ Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be, And when we find ourselves in the place just right, It will be in the valley of love and delight…”

It was impossible to tell which voices were wholly human and which were wholly not; and then you thought: Maybe that’s the point.

“I’m hogging the spotlight, friends,” shouted Whitey. “Let’s not be shy here, come on, get in on the fun!”

A woman’s voice called out: “There was a beast no one remembered, alone of its kind, who did not have a mate…”

Another voice, this of a child: “… and it was left behind in the storm that day…”

They started coming rapidly after that, maybe human, maybe not, maybe something in between, but their words rang clear and high:

“… but it found a place of safety, another world just beyond the great scrim of this world, and there it waited, and when the rains stopped and the sun shone once again, God asked this creature if it was lonely and it said ‘Yes… ’”

“… so God shared with it one of the secrets of Creation…”

“… and with this secret, the creature was able to use part of itself to create another like itself…”

“… and they were called the Keepers…”

“… and God gave the Keepers a Task, and sent them out into the world, the world of the First Animal, to create their own kingdom, separate from that of Man…”

“Figuring it out, kiddo?” asked Whitey.

“Ohgod…”

“I think it’s sinking in,” he called down the corridor.

A third click, followed a third buzz.

Whitey did a quick canter-dance around his cage, chuffed, shook off some foam, then said (in a dead-on impersonation of Bert Lahr as The Cowardly Lion): “Lemme at ’em, lemme at ’em-it’s showtime, folks!”

From the bottom of the railed stairway someone or something screamed.

An alarm began screeching a staccato squawk.

Bright security lights snapped on, mercilessly illuminating everything beneath.

And the cage doors opened.

Blinking against the too-bright lights, you turned to run but the corridor behind you was already filling with those you’d passed before; the ox, the goat, the teenaged man-of-war, the coelacanth woman and bear and all the rest; they slid, rolled, scooted, flopped, walked, and crawled toward you. Bringing up the rear, hunched over because it was still getting used to walking upright, the dark sleeping thing from the cage across from the ox loped and stumbled forward, slick flesh stretched so tightly over its skull and face it looked as if it might tear at any moment. There was something of the wolf about it, or so you thought, but by then you’d turned and started to run toward the hidden stairs only to find the way blocked by a dapper gentleman who tipped his bowler hat in your direction.

Behind him stood four other well-dressed men with their bowlers pulled down to cover the tops of their ears. And you knew why: the tags. They were hiding the blue tags stapled to the backs of their ears. Whitey had one, the ox had one, the goat, the boy on the cot, everyone and everything had a blue tag stapled in the same place.

Whitey stepped out of his cage, whispered “Follow my lead, kiddo, or you’re toast burnt on both sides before your time,” and nudged you with his scar-knotted shoulders until you were backed against one of the opened doors. He winked once more and stood in front of you.

“See, kiddo, the thing is, the First Animal, he’s figured out a way to reclaim this world, but he can’t do it in one big, grand swoop like God did; no, he’s got to do it a little bit at a time, piece by piece, with whatever materials the Keepers can gather. Raw materials, you might call ’em.

“The procedure takes a while, and it hurts like hell, but it’s getting there. Bugs in the system. Kinks to work out. Luckily, there’s no short supply of miserable, lonely people who wished they’d been born as anything else but what they are.”

He leaned forward, breathing hot, moist breath into your face, breath that smelled of the fields, the sky. “Once the balance has been sufficiently offset again, once there are more animals than people-like it was supposed to be-then the First Animal can step through the scrim and restore this world to its natural order. Maybe by then God will have admitted to the fuck-up.”

Around you, the others were crowding close.

Too close.

“We had an agreement,” said Whitey to the figures and things surrounding you. “I already fulfilled my part, I gave you a possible candidate and she was brought here tonight. So he walks out unharmed, right?”

The first man in the bowler spread his hands benevolently and gave a nod, then snapped his fingers. The four other bowler-men moved forward.

Two were empty-handed.

One carried a package wrapped in brown paper with an address written across the top.

The other carried a syringe.

Whitey turned toward you and offered a sad smile. “Won’t see you again after this, Captain. It’s been a real pleasure. You’re a better man than you think you are. Work on your timing. And that fear of bathing.”

“What are they going to do to me?”

“Nothing harmful. You didn’t come here voluntarily, so they have to let you leave.”

For a moment you couldn’t find your voice, and during that moment two of the Keepers grabbed your arms and pulled them behind you; the one with the syringe took the plastic cover from the needle, steadied your head with his free hand, and slipped the needle into a vein in your neck, sinking the plunger.

The image on the monitor changed; again you were looking at the same downtown corner where you’d encountered Drop-Kick, but this time the film was older, grainier, black-and-white. The face of an old man filled the screen as he petted the dog from whose point of view this had been filmed. Then another old man’s face came into frame, then that of a third. Finally, the dog whipped its head around and started running toward a young boy crossing toward it from the other side of the street. The boy had a comic book tucked under one arm. He was holding a bag of scraps from a restaurant. He offered the dog something from the bag. The dog looked up and the boy who would grow up to become your dad smiled down at it. It was the most wonderful smile you’d ever seen.

This was him.

As a boy.

Smiling, with scraps in hand.

Overhead, the squawking alarm sounded in time to the music, one of the figures began whispering something in your ear, and the things assembled in the corridor sang a lullaby while your brain and body melted into something light and shiny and unbound:

“When true simplicity is gained, To bow and to bend we will not be ashamed To turn, turn, will be our delight Till by turning, turning, we come round right…”

You dreamed you were a man who believed no one loved or cared about him. Your hands were scarred from a lifetime of hard labor. You had once dreamed of raising chickens for a living, but the war and your injuries and family demanded otherwise. Now all of it was gone, and you stood alone in a dark hallway. A thin mist swirled around your feet and began to rise, and when this mist filled the room, it was light again. A man stepped out of the light and fog and tipped his bowler. He asked you what you wanted to be. “An eagle,” you said. “Eagles are free and admired. Eagles are loved and respected.” He said that was good, because an eagle is what you were supposed to have been in the first place. He asked if you knew someone else who might like to be something else. You said yes and told him a name.

We’re putting things right for Long-Lost, he said as he pointed the way. It’s taking longer than we’d planned, but we’re getting there .

Then he took you to a place where they changed your body and gave you feathers and flight. It hurt, but it was worth it.

You were loved. Admired. Your heart knew no pain or sorrow. The sky had no place for such things.

You rolled over and opened your eyes. You were back in your house. On the floor. Your clothes were fresh and clean; your skin was creamy and smelled of soap. You wondered if you’d come home drunk. Mom and Dad would be very upset with you. But they were dead, weren’t they? Yes. That was right. They were gone and the house was yours. Only you were leaving soon, weren’t you?

You tried to sit up but your limbs were rubber, so you stayed on the floor.

It seemed to you that there was someone else you should say good-bye to, but you couldn’t think of anyone. That bugged you. You didn’t have so many friends that you would forget one. That was rude. Thoughtless. You weren’t that geeky little four-eyed dweeb anymore; you had friends. Didn’t you?

Did you have a girlfriend? It seemed to you that you did, but you couldn’t picture her face or remember her name.

Foggy dream remnants, that’s what it had to be; foggy dream remnants. You lay back down on the floor and closed your eyes.

You dreamed that you were a dog sitting out in the rain. You were tied to a post. Your sides hurt because you’d been beaten because you had soiled the carpeting. It wasn’t your fault-there had been no one home to let you out. But now you were in the rain and it was cold and you wanted to be lying near the hearth in front of the sweet-smelling fire inside. They beat you a lot, even when you didn’t soil things. You wished they wouldn’t do that. You loved them and wanted them to love you. But some people can’t love a dog. The rain beat down very hard. Mist rose up from the ground. A nicely dressed man came out of the mist and tipped his bowler hat to you. He asked if you were lonely and you said yes. You were surprised that you could talk; you’d never done it before. The man said it was because you’d been made to forget that you could. He asked you what you wanted.

“To be human,” you said, speaking clearly and with ease. “So I can know how they feel and why they put me out in the rain.”

“ Come,” he said, freeing you from the post. “ And remember to think as much as you want and say whatever you wish. Things have been mixed up for a while, but we’re putting them right.”

You trotted beside him-the pain in your sides slowed your progress, but he was patient and kind-and you asked, “How?”

He stopped and pointed back toward the house. “ Someday, he said, “all of these people will be as you were, and all of you”- he knelt down and stroked your back- “will be as they are. Then things will be right again. As right as we can make them.”

“Can I have a family?” you ask.

“Yes,” he said. “Long-Lost would like that. He needs someone to claim and protect one of his… I guess you’d call them ‘angels.’ So you shall have a sister when your parents are no more, and no one-including you-will question this reality. To the world, you will have always had a sister. Your sister will have a son. He will love you very much. And he will have a gift. He will be one of those who will help lift the Great Scrim so that Long-Lost can step through.” Then he shrugged. “Sometimes, a god has to be sneaky.

“You may remember all of this, or you may not. We’ll see. But it will come to pass, whether your memory serves you or not.”

He took you to a place where they made you human. You could dance and laugh. You could hold delicate objects in your hands.

You could speak of your love to others.

You could know the glory of a kiss.

And no animal would you treat with thoughtlessness or cruelty. The world to come had no place for such things.

You woke in the morning, gathered your bags, and went to Kansas. You stayed with your grandmother for nearly a year, until the night she said she was tired and went upstairs and lay down to sleep for the last time. You cried at her funeral but were comforted by the knowledge that her last months had been full and rich. You loved her and had often told her so. She never knew a day without an embrace or a kiss on the cheek. She had gone upstairs that last night still laughing at a joke you’d told her. Some ghost of that smile remained on her face when you found her the next morning.

You stopped drinking and sleeping around after she was gone. She had always worried that you were hurting myself. Maybe she was right. This seemed the best way to honor her memory, and that of your parents. You would try to live the rest of your life as well as possible.

The real estate firm in Cedar Hill sold the house for a very good price and both you and your sister made a lot of money on the deal. Your sister was especially grateful, having just had a baby and her husband having just abandoned her.

After a few years, you moved back to Cedar Hill. Home is home. Even if no one’s there waiting for you.

You decided to drive back, make a little vacation out of it, stop and see the sights along the way, however long it took.

The morning you were packing up your things to leave, a delivery van from some company called Hicks Worldwide pulled up in front of your apartment. The driver got out and walked over to where you stood next to your car. He greeted you by name.

“I believe you have a package for me,” he said, smiling like a happy puppy.

You blinked a few times, then opened your trunk, moved aside a few bags, and found the parcel all the way in the back. You did not recognize the name of the addressee. You handed it to him without a word. He thanked you, climbed into his van, and drove away.

You came back to Cedar Hill and used some of the money to start your own small business. It was a moderate enough success that you opened another store in Columbus.

Somewhere in there, your sister became ill and died. You became Carson’s legal guardian.

You love your nephew very much. He’s very special.

A gift, some might say.

You went back to a few old haunts. Barney’s Saloon was gone, replaced now by some store called Marie’s Hosiery. It looked like a nice shop.

The Old Soldiers and Sailors building had been torn down; left in its place was an empty lot. You seemed to remember something about a wall of signatures having been in there, but couldn’t quite bring the thought all the way into the light.

You kept planning for something, but could never quite remember what, only that you had to arrange certain things in your house a certain way.

It seemed for the best.

You went on dates, bought them dinner, took them to plays or movies, even made breakfast for a few of them. None of the women ever seemed interested in anything long-term and you couldn’t find it in you to be hurt or offended.

Life went on, as it will whether you want it to or not. You saw yourself as neither a bad man nor a good one; you just Were.

Then one day while driving home you saw an old man get killed while chasing his hat. You stopped to watch him die. You answered questions from the police. You came home and found a dog on your lawn.

A package arrived.

Someone called about your nephew.

You found him in an old barn at the Magic Zoo.

He changed.

Guided you back home.

Visitors came.

That brings us all up to date, pal. Now, was that so hard?)