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  What if Bobby hit the baby?

  I had packed the knife in my suitcase. I had pretended not to notice when I slipped it under the beach towels, as if it were some kind of accident; it was like someone was talking to me in my head: Do it, do it, do it. I thought about how I must have had a mother, and a father, and maybe brothers or sisters; how something really awful must have happened, since I didn’t remember them. I dreamed sometimes that my father raped me, or my brother, or my mother abused me. But none of that felt right.

  But then again, nothing in my life felt particularly right.

  Anyway, Bobby got drunk. He sat facing me in our motel room with a bottle of Jack Daniels in his lap, and a strange smile on his face, and for some reason I was more afraid than I’d ever been before. Something was in the air, something sharp and dangerous and slashing. The air was too cold, and inside the sound of the surf, I thought I heard

  singing: Whales gray and kind; or dark-nosed dolphins; or

  people; or

  one person, one very special man.

  Bobby said, “Whatcha looking at, you retard?” I shrank from him. I thought about the knife. My heart pounded. My body was dry as dust, and my skin prickled. My legs ached.

  Jesus, they ached.

  “I’m going out.” He lurched to his feet. “And when I get back, Annie, you better be gone.”

  I stared at him. His face changed. He sword at me, came at me, hit me. Sliced my cheek open. “Goddamnit, I don’t want that kid!” he shouted, and slugged me in the stomach. “I want you gone!”

  I doubled over, my hands over my head. I wanted to ask, Did you never love me? Isn’t there something about me worth caring about and sacrificing for?

  Did I mention before that Bobby was only seventeen?

  My legs couldn’t hold me up, and I collapsed. He turned his back and walked out. My heart dissolved inside my body and I breathed out, in, long and slow, like it was new to me. I felt as if I were floating, looking down through water at what was happening. For a second, I thought I was going to rise up out of the motel room and fly over the ocean. I through I was fucking dying.

  I was so scared, I ran after him. I know, it’s hard to believe: Here he had just beat me up and I was chasing him for more.

  But I took the knife.

  The waves were racing up the cliff near the motel, just soaring like a typhoon or a tidal wave or something. I had never seen surf like that, and it was violent and terrifying, but somehow it was wonderful, too. The moon was out and I let out a sob, almost a noise, as I looked up at it. The knife was too long to put in my purse, or a pocket; I had to carry it at my side. There was no hiding it.

  I had the strongest compulsion to cut my legs; or maybe it was to cut one of them off. Like they were growths, and something wrong. Like they didn’t belong to me, the way I didn’t belong to anybody.

  The baby. I could never let him hurt the baby.

  But I added that in later; I remembered thinking that later. I was running after him, not from him.

  The waves crashed on top of the cliff and they roared like sea monsters. Even at a distance, spray slapped my face. It was the end of the world, I thought, mine and everybody’s. It was all over.

  I ran toward it. I ran as fast as I could, even though white-hot pains shot up my legs and into my heart. Throbbed in my throat. Scalding, blinding pain, coursed right through me and grew as I got nearer and nearer.

  And then I saw Bobby, standing on the edge of the cliff with his arms outstretched, laughing. His head thrown back, wild and free, his hair streaming behind him like a tail; he was brown and handsome, and even then, I wanted him.

  He shouted something, like a dare. He laughed again and began to sing, but I couldn’t make out the tune. The waves crashed over him and he staggered backward.

  I came closer. The water pelted me like stones. Angry ocean, I thought. Angry at him, angry at me.

  Another wave dropped over him. I couldn’t see him. I kept running. And I thought, Oh, God, when I reach him, I’m going to stick this knife into him.

  I ran. I ran hard. I was going to do it. I would do it.

  Another wave. He turned around and saw me. The laughter died. He screamed at me, “Freak! You fucking freak!”

  And I was going to do it. I was going to really do it.

  And then I heard the singing:

  Beloved, beloved,

  most treasured.

  The littlest princess,

  the littlest mermaid,

  the joy of the seas,

  the father’s lost darling.

  I heard it. I know I heard it. I heard it.

  And the wave took him, just reached out with a watery embrace and yanked him off that cliff and pulled him into the water and

  your voice moved the world and you screamed.

  No, that’s what you think when you’re crazy. That’s what you dreamed.

  You pushed him. You know you did, and they knew it, but your lawyers were cagey and got you off as a nutcase. With your scratchy, pathetic voice, and those sad, kick-me eyes, the jury pitied you and let you off, into a barred, safe place full of therapy sessions and medication. The baby was a miscarriage. You were knocked out when they took it, but they promised you it was for the best and looked away when they said it.

  Years of medication. And talking, talking, with a new voice. But there was a man in that wave, a powerful man with streaming gray hair and a long gray beard and a crown. There was a man, and he grabbed Bobby.

  You stupid lying bitch. There was no man. There was not.

  I’m better now. I don’t need this shit. I’m better now, and I don’t, won’t, hear that singing anymore.

  This, my life, once upon a time

  no, goddamnit, no.

  And now I’ll wad these pages up and stick them in that goddamned Scotch bottle, and no one will ever find them cuz they’ll sink like a stone.

  Like a dead man.

  Like Bobby—never found his body. Shed it. Found a new woman to live inside, hermit crab.

  And I don’t know why I’m writing this, except I feel so sick inside; I feel like I can’t breathe and I’m drying up. Shriveling into nothingness, and I really wish someone would really help me. Because I am a crazy bitch, and no one on this earth wants me.

  And now I’m standing on the cliff where I pushed Bobby, and throwing this bottle out to sea, cuz I can’t get that damned singing out of my head. I hear it all the time, and it makes me dream. I hate dreaming. I know what the world is: hard, and mean, and ugly. You’re a hungry puppy and it’s the boot connecting with your stomach.

  And the hunger’s for something you can’t name, anyway.

  And the name of the tune is:

  For a day and an hour, the bottle bobs upon the waters. Then it sinks down slowly, slowly, like a pearl in liquid gold, drifting into the outstretched grasp of the Sea King. He cracks it open like an oyster, extracting the morsel within. Reads quickly, as the ink begins to run.

  Then he flashes to the surface and screams for his daughter. But she is already walking away.

  Tears course down his cheeks, and while it is true that merfolk cannot cry, the laws of fatherhood transcend the laws of nature.

  In the ocean blue, home of the little mermaid, sea fantasy and sea dream: aqua, purple, pacific, and serene.

  “This, for a boy?” he wails to the cliffs, the waves. “This, for lust?”

  And he dives back into the depths, back to his throne and his six beautiful, naked daughters and their sunken Grecian temples, and pulverizes with his fists the bones of the boy who ruined his daughter and drove her mad; pounds the bones, and no heart! No soul!

  Pounds the bones, and the ashes

  of the beauty of the sea.

  I hear the mermaids singing, each to each,

  I do not think that they will sing to me.

  —T. S. Eliot

  Llama

  Bentley Little

  Measuring:

  The leg of the de
ad llama was three feet two inches long.

  And everything fell into place.

  Three feet two inches was the precise length of the space between the sole of my lynched father’s right foot and the ground.

  By the time my wife’s contractions were three minutes and two seconds apart, she had only dilated 3.2 centimeters and the decision was made to perform a Caesarean.

  My wife was declared dead at three-twenty.

  The date was March 20.

  I found the llama in the alley behind the bookstore. It was already dead, its cataract eyes rimmed with flies, and the retarded boy was kneeling on the rough asphalt beside it, massaging its distended stomach. The presence of the retarded boy told me that secrets lay within the measurements of the dead animal, perhaps the answers to my questions, and I quickly rushed back inside the store to find a tape measure.

  * * *

  In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt bought a new Ford coupe. The license plate of the coupe, which Roosevelt never drove, was 3FT2.

  My father voted for Franklin Roosevelt.

  I thought I saw my wife’s likeness in a stain in the toilet in the men’s room of an Exxon station. The stain was greenish black and on the right side of the bowl.

  I breathed upon the mirror above the blackened sink, and, sure enough, someone had written her name on the glass. The letters appeared—clear spots in the fog cloud of condensation—then faded.

  In the trash can, partially wrapped in toilet paper, I saw what looked like a bloody fetus.

  I left the llama in the alley undisturbed, did not tell the police or any city authority, and I warned the other shopowners on the block not to breath a word about the animal to anyone.

  I spent that night in the store, sleeping in the back office behind the bookshelves. Several times during the night I awakened and looked out the dusty window to where the unmoving body lay on the asphalt. It looked different in the shadows created by the moonlight and streetlamp, and in the lumped silhouette I saw contours that were almost familiar to me, echoes of shapes that I knew had meant something to me in the past but that now remained stubbornly buried in my subconscious.

  I knew the dead animal had truths to tell.

  Weighing:

  The hind end of the llama, its head and upper body still supported by the ground, weighed one hundred and ninety six pounds.

  My dead wife’s niece told me that she was sixteen, but I believe she was younger.

  I have a photograph of her, taken in a booth at an amusement park, that I keep on the top of my dresser, exactly 3.2 inches away from a similar photo of my wife.

  The photo cost me a dollar ninety-six. I put eight quarters into the machine, and when I happened to check the coin return I found four pennies.

  My feather weighed a hundred and ninety-six pounds at his death. He died exactly one hundred and ninety-six years after his great-great-grandfather first set foot in America. My father’s great-great-grandfather hung himself.

  A hundred and ninety-six is the sum total of my age multiplied by four—the number of legs of the llama.

  The Exxon station where I saw my wife’s likeness in a stain in the men’s room toilet is located at 196 East 32nd Street.

  I do not remember whose idea it was to try the pins. I believe it was hers, since she told me that she’d recently seen a news report on acupuncture that interested her.

  I showed her some of the books in my store: the photographic essay on African boys disfigured by rights of passage, the illustrated study of Inquisition torture devices, the book on deformed strippers in an Appalachian sideshow.

  She told me that if acupuncture needles placed on the proper nerves could deaden pain, wasn’t it logical to assume that needles placed on other nerves could stimulate pleasure?

  She allowed me to tie her up, spread-eagled on the bed, and I began by inserting pins in her breasts. She screamed, at first yelling at me to stop, then simply crying out in dumb animal agony. I pushed the pins all the way into her flesh until only the shiny round heads were visible, pressing them slowly through the skin and the fatty tissue of her breasts in a crisscross pattern, then concentrating them around the firmer nipples.

  By the time I had moved between her legs, she had passed out and her body was covered all over with a thin shiny sheen of blood.

  When the retarded boy finished massaging the llama’s distended stomach, he stepped back from the animal and stood there soundlessly. He looked at me and pointed to the ground in front of him. I measured the space between the retarded boy and the llama. Five feet six inches.

  At the time my father hung himself he was fifty-six years old.

  My stillborn son weighed five pounds, six ounces.

  Five times six is thirty.

  My wife was thirty years old when she died.

  According to the book Nutritional Values of Exotic Dishes, a single 56-ounce serving of cooked llama meat contains 196 calories.

  This information is found on page 32.

  The young man did not object when I took him in the men’s room of the gas station.

  He was standing at the urinal when I entered, and I stepped behind him and held the knife to his throat. I used my free hand to yank down his dress slacks, and then I pressed against him. “You want it, don’t you?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I made him bend over the side of the lone toilet, and although his buttocks were hairy and repulsed me, I made him accept me the way my wife had. All of me. He tensed, stiffened, and gasped with pain, and I felt around the front of his body to make sure he was not aroused. If he had been aroused, I would have had to kill him.

  I slide fully in and nearly all the way out fifty-six times before my hot seed shot into him and with my knife pressed against his throat I made him cry out “Oh, God! Oh, God!” the way my wife had.

  I left him with only a slight cut across the upper throat, above the Adam’s apple, and I took his clothes and put them in the trunk of my car and later stuffed them with newspaper and made them into a scarecrow for my dead wife’s dying garden.

  I hoped the young man was a doctor.

  I realized the importance of measurements even as a child. When my sister fell out of the tree in our yard, I measured the length of her legs and the total length of her body. Her legs were twenty inches long. Her body was four-foot-five.

  My mother was twenty years old when she gave birth to my sister.

  My sister died when my father was forty-five.

  Requirements:

  I was required to pay for the knowledge gained from my sister’s measurements.

  My sister had two arms and two legs.

  I killed two cats and two dogs.

  My wife was Jewish. Before coming to the United States, her parents lived 196 miles from the nearest concentration camp and 32 miles from the city where Adolf Hitler spent his youth.

  My wife was born in 1956.

  I showed Nadine a book on self-mutilation, letting her look at photographs of men who were so jaded, who so craved unique experience, that they mutilated their genitalia. She was fascinated by the subject, and she seemed particularly interested in the photo of a man’s penis that had been surgically bifurcated and through which had been inserted a metal ring.

  She told me that the concept of self-mutilation appealed to her. She said that she had grown tired of sex, that all three of her orifices had been penetrated so frequently, so many times in so many ways, that there were no sensations that were new to her. Everything to which she submitted was either a repeat or a variation.

  I told her I would make her a new opening, a new hole, and I took her to the forest and I tied her to the cross-stakes and I used a knife to cut and carve a slit in her stomach big enough to take me.

  She was still alive when I entered her, and her screams were not entirely of pain.

  She kept crying, “God!”

  My white semen mixed with her red blood and made pink

  I wanted to kill the doctor who
killed my wife, but I saw him only once after her death, and it was with a large crowd and the opportunity did not arise again.

  So I rented a small apartment and stocked the shelves with medical books and arranged the furniture in a manner consistent with the way I believed a doctor would arrange it.

  The apartment number was 56.

  I made friends with a young man who, save for the beard, resembled my wife’s doctor fairly closely. I invited the young man into my apartment, smiling, then I showed him the gun and told him to strip. He did so, and I made him put on the white physician’s clothes I had bought. I forced him into the bathroom, made him shave, then made him put on the surgical mask.

  I had purchased a puppy from the pet store the night before, and I had killed the animal by slitting its throat, draining the blood into a glass picture. I splashed the blood on the young man, and now the illusion was complete. He looked almost exactly like the doctor who had killed my wife.

  I had written out the lines I wanted the surrogate doctor to say while I killed him, and I’d typed them out and had them bound in plastic.

  I cocked the pistol, handed the pages to the young man, told him to speak:

  End Exchange:

  DOCTOR: I killed your wife.

  ME: You wanted her to die!

  DOCTOR: She deserved to die! She was a bitch and a whore!

  ME: You killed my son!