The Animators(46)

I recalled when I slept alongside TV, glowing in my house’s sullen dark, and knew that was my first real relationship, not Teddy. Because when TV dropped this nasty surprise on me, I felt betrayed. It ripped me open, caused the kind of deep, raw rivet torn when someone you love deceives you.

And for the first time in a decade, I saw myself with Teddy, crouched by that trunk. I saw, in my mind, his hand dipping into the dark. I made it to the wastebasket just in time to vomit.

There are some things you can never bring yourself to say, to yourself, to anyone: the dank, off-color details that define you. Secretly, for years, I had the distinct confusion as to whether I was in the audience or if I was, in fact, the photographed. And that, I couldn’t tell—even my dearest friend, who of anyone would know how it saddled my already overlaced heart.

My restless Internet wanderings inevitably led me to track down those old photos, evidence seized from the porn ring and censored for public view, eyes and genitals blurred. I examined them one by one, sweating, in tears. I gazed at one for a very long time. I thought I recognized a prom queen in her face, a country clubber, or maybe a wild girl who cut class with her friends, smoking cigarettes behind the ag-tech building in her boyfriend’s Carhartt jacket. Graduates of my county high school from anywhere between 1997 and 2002. Women with my history, my life. I think I pin it down. But I can never be sure.





PUSSYFOOTING


Mel buries her head in her hands. She rubs her eyes for a moment, goes still. Rises. Stares out into the swamp.

I feel my throat tighten. I’m afraid of what she’s going to say. What she might tell me about what she sees in what I’ve just told her.

She shakes her head slowly. “I always knew there was something,” she says. “Don’t ask me how.”

I look down. My hands are involuntarily picking lint balls from my sweater. “You did?”

She turns, giving me her ultimate nonplussed look. “You may not know this about yourself,” she says, “but you’ve got a serious gift for self-containment. You run a pretty tight fuckin ship, presentation-wise. Kind of freaks people out.”

I feel myself light up, like I do every time I hear an outside assessment of how I seem. Weirdly gratified, I say, “I don’t feel contained. Pretty much ever.”

“Well, I know you,” she says. “The stronger all this shit is brewing and beating in there, the calmer you are on the outside. Until something like Beardsley happens. Remember? At the party? Whenever you freak out like that, I wonder what’s really going on in there. Something big, to make you hemorrhage like that.”

She stares back out into the yard, blinking. Says, “Hold on.”

Jumps up, runs into the house. Bangs back out with the Moleskine. She sits, gingerly rolls the hair band off the book—it touches me how carefully she does this—and fingers through the pages, searching. Finds what she’s looking for.

She holds a page up—it’s one of the sketches between men, a placeholder that developed from a doodle. An entire landscape of something sharp and dark and glistening, a thousand bullets on a blank field. Zoom out: stubble on a man’s cheek.

Another interlude: a sheet of girls’ faces, disembodied, all with open mouths. The eyes have been taken out. Not merely left out but removed forcibly, by blurring. Censored.

A door yawns open, hanging weakly from the hinges. Within, darkness. A vague shape moves just beyond, approaching.

A field of bare girl-kid backs, slouched, exposed, the heads bent down.

Snakes emerging from the face of an old Magnavox floor set.

Two hyenas scream at each other.

Girls birthed from the mouths of coyotes, slick and cold and unclothed. Mel points: On the first, the remnant of a tan line circles her hip.

Mel replaces the pages. Gently closes the book.

She reaches into her breast pocket for her smokes. Picks one out, lights it. She does all this in small, careful strokes, then puts the pack on the grimy little glass-top patio table between us, lighter on top. Does not protest when I draw another one out for myself.

“You were trying to tell the story,” she says. “You were trying your ass off.”

I put the cigarette to my lips. It takes me three tries to light it. I can feel Mel looking at me from the corner of her eye.

I go quiet for a minute. Considering the unreality of someone else knowing this story. Now there are three: Me. Mel. Teddy. I say, “Teddy.”

Mel hums knowingly. “Our golden boy. Your number one.”

“My number one?”

She shrugs. “He’s one lucky motherfucker. If someone drew about me the way you draw about him, I would want for nothing.”

I shake my head. Take a drag. “Teddy is still ten years old to me. Like he’s in suspended animation.”

“I’m sure he’s not,” Mel says. “I’m sure he’s an adult, like we are. Out somewhere living a life. Imagine what his book must look like, right?”

“If he has one.”

Mel ashes. “I do like Teddy Caudill,” she says, sort of grudgingly. “Just from his page. Because he’s drawn with a cat. And a Nintendo controller. And a freeze pop.”

This makes me smile. “I liked him, too,” I say. Inhale deeply, cough out the smoke. Ash my cigarette. God, this is good. I missed smoking with Mel.