When We Were Animals(20)

Hold fast your white angel,

And cut it in twain.

Hold fast your black devil,

And cut it in twain.



And then, cut in two as we all are, can we ever take true account of ourselves? Or do we just lisp ourselves to sleep and dreams of freedom?

*



But the night when Peter Meechum stayed over was also the night when a pack of breachers stood outside my window howling. It was well after midnight, and I had not been able to fall asleep. I heard them out on the street, mewling in the peculiar way they had, which made me think of lonely cats on backyard fences in the nighttime.

Mine was the only window that faced the front of the house. My father’s bedroom and the den, where Peter slept, were both in the back—so they couldn’t hear.

Then I heard my name, called snakelike and taunting from outside:

“Luuuuuuuuumeeen!”

It was a girl’s voice. It was Polly’s voice.

Normally the breachers didn’t bother with people who kept indoors when the moon was out. They weren’t malicious—they didn’t stalk innocent prey. Normally they kept to themselves. They embattled each other if they battled at all. Some of them just liked to run through the streets—they kept on running until the sun came up. Others took to the woods and were lost in the morning when they woke. But by and large they didn’t make assaults on those who stayed out of their way.

So this was something different—my name teased out in that manic hyena voice they all had.

“Luuuuumeen!”

I hadn’t been sleeping anyway, so I went to the window and looked down.

There were six of them. They were naked, their skin pale and glowing under the light of the street lamps. They ran around in circles, testing the strength of their legs, the length of their arms. They hopped and ran and yipped and snarled. One of them grappled with another and was tossed into the shrubbery at the edge of our yard. When he got himself upright again, I saw there were perforations all over his skin from the brambles. He would hurt in the morning, but he seemed to feel nothing now.

In the middle of the pack, Polly stood very still, smiling up at my window. I didn’t like her smile. I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was. Her smile was the stillest on the street, but there was a breeze that blew strands of her hair across her face. She made no attempt to remove them.

When she saw me in the window, her smile widened—she even laughed, seeming to luxuriate in my witnessing her in such a state.

“Lumen,” she said, seeming to breathe through her words, “come outside! Please, Lumen. Look at me. I want you to see me!”

The girl who stood in the street was not the girl I knew. Instead, she was some nightmarish inversion of the person who had played in the sprinklers with me years before. This girl was raw, viperous, glutted on nature and night. They all were. Like coyotes, they made mockery, with their bleating voices, of those who needed light in order to feel safe.

And yet they were all too human.

I had never seen Polly without her clothes on before. There was a sickly luminescence to her skin, as of a glowworm or one of those creatures that live so deep underground that they have no pigment at all. Her dropsy breasts—I could see that one was larger than the other, that the rusty nipples were more oval than circular, that they possessed the persistent misalignment of nature itself. There were red blotches on her stomach and legs, as though she were rash-broken, and I could see the freckles and moles that dotted her body—even a patchy birthmark that looked like someone had spilled coffee on her hip. The triangle of her pubic hair was discomfiting in the way it grew partly onto her thighs and up her stomach. While I watched, the breeze blew a chattering of tiny leaves down the street, and one of them got caught in her pubic hair—where it remained as long as she stood there.

Then she started to call my name in various ways, feeling it in her mouth, tasting the varietals with which she might be able to permute my personhood were I down there with her.

“Lumen,” she called. “Lumenal…Laminal…Lamen…?Lamian…?Labian…Lavial…”

It seemed, at first, like a child’s game—but the way she said the names made them sound obscene. They were versions of my name—if my name were some vulgar tropical fruit whose juice ran down your chin and whose pulp got stuck between your gnashing teeth.

As Polly continued her catechism, another of the breachers took notice and came to stand beside her. It was Rose. I didn’t know if it was just because Rose had a different kind of body or because she cosmetically altered it, but her patch of pubic hair was smaller and shorter than Polly’s—and as a result it masked less, and I could see the ugly fleshy nubbins of her vagina.

I wanted to look away. I really did. But there are some things in this life that demand your sight, your vision. This was a scene played out particularly for my delectation. There was no one in the world, at that moment, apart from them and me. We existed on opposite sides of a pane of glass. But it didn’t matter—I was in their thrall. And they seemed to be in mine. As though I’d become a lonely Rapunzel at the top of a tower.

The others started to gather, too, standing very still in a group and gazing up at me. They smiled their grisly smiles and called to me in words or moans or hisses. Blackhat Roy was there with his two missing toes, but he stood apart, crouched at the line of trees that was the beginning of the woods on the opposite side of the street. A boy I recognized as Wilson Laramy stood at Polly’s side. Without seeming to think, and while still gazing up at my window, he reached blindly to his right, found Polly’s wrist, and guided her hand down to his crotch. Without shame, and still repeating the prayerful tautology of my name, her left hand closed around his penis. Casual—it was all so casual. You would think they had no idea what nakedness was.