When We Were Animals(40)

You could breathe the night. I never knew that before. The air tasted different when it was uninfused with light. It went deeper in you. You could want it—just that.

And it was cold. There was a high-contrast sharpness to everything. It was a wakeful night—so wakeful that daytime consciousness seemed a blur.

He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.

Yes, the crookedness of things. I could see it now.

You could get sick to death of delicate symmetry. You could want other things, and that wanting could be ambrosial all on its own.

You could even become angry at your own prohibitions—you could begin to suspect the origins of all the tinny moralities that point you in all the directions of your life.

It occurred to me that I would like to feel the moonlight on my bare skin. The thought occurred to me, and I studied it in the cool, rational part of my brain—but while I was studying it, I noticed that my fingers had already begun the process of undoing the buttons on my pajama top. I watched them, curiously, from the rational distance of my brain—I wondered who they thought they were, those fingers that had spent so much time doing my bidding in the past.

Those little crooked fingers, they run their crooked way.

You could sometimes want to run. You could sometimes want to run out your window, off your roof, down the street, deep, deep into the unlit heart of an emptied town.

*



I darted from yard to yard, looking in windows. Squares of light. Actions playing out in them. Like television screens hung randomly along the street. Sometimes you could see a television screen inside the television screen of the window. Layers of lit life in the distance. And here was I—shrouded behind the curtains of night, lost in the muffled dullness of a noiseless winter. And it was okay. It was better than okay. It was glorious.

I could leap. Fences were nothing to me. Rules were for those small enough to live inside them. I was large.

It was possible, I saw now, to be a grotesque, to be huge and free, to wander the streets in utter freedom despite your atrocity, as long as you did it when everybody else was sealed inside their little lit boxes.

Now it made sense—why monsters came out at night.





Chapter 6




I scrubbed myself clean in the morning, coating my skin with lotion that smelled of lemons.

I didn’t tell my father. I decided to keep it from him as long as I could. I dreaded being found by him curled naked on the back porch or befouled with mud.

The second night was more lucid than the first. I stayed by myself for a long time. In the distance I could hear the others, roaming the streets in packs. When their voices got louder, I hid. I watched them pass by, tangled around each other and caught up in their passions. I did not want to be joined with them.

In front of the church, I watched from a copse of trees as a group of breachers knocked apart a manger scene left over from Christmas. I waited until they were gone, then I put everything back aright.

As I put the baby Jesus back in his little nest, I stood back and looked at it.

It had nothing to do with God. It was just glowy and sweet, and it spoke of aching desire and a longing for peacefulness.

I wished the scene had been baked in an oven so I could eat it.

*



Attack the night.

I was hungry for things I didn’t know the names of, and the full moon was a strange kind of manna. It emptied you of yourself, and you were relieved.

Such release—you have no idea. Everything absolved. A world where signs meant nothing, where everything was permitted. The claustrophobic restrictions of life falling like clipped fingernails at your feet.

I ran the woods, and I was unstoppable. I thought nothing of school deadlines and frowning fathers. I was entire and alone—blissfully alone. There was nothing outside my skin that mattered—except maybe the odor of tree sap and the brittle ice that depended from tree branches. I wanted to go farther. I wanted to run all the way out of town—through the streets of large cities, leaping from the hood of one taxicab to another, laughing and indifferent.

You could nuzzle your face against the warm world. The undersides of everything. This is how you knew love. There was no ugly. All was beautiful. The bodies, dark or pale, bruised or unspoiled—they were beautiful. The violence was delicious in the way foreign food sometimes is—surprising on the tongue, fresh and sharp. My daytime resentments sloughed away, and I would have gladly merged my life with the lives of others—put my body, all uncovered, against theirs.

Except that I was afraid. Still afraid of myself. And of the others.

Later that second night I watched them from a distance. I ran across them, finally, in the middle of town, and I climbed a dumpster to the rooftop of the Sunshine Diner to observe them. There were so many of them, at least thirty, making loud noises in the square.

They seemed to run in packs, mostly. Like social cliques at school during the daytime. When these packs crossed paths during the full moon, there were fights. Sometimes the fights turned into revelry. Below me I could see some girls, locked into combat on the wide lawn, pulling at each other’s hair, biting, choking, shrieking. But they soon grew tired, and their violence became pathetic, little compulsory slaps as their chests heaved with exhaustion. Even kisses.

Elsewhere, near the gazebo in the middle of the square, a pale pink knot of breachers, most of whom I knew, were locked together in various manifestations of sexual congress. Girls, boys, it made no difference. You were skin, and they were skin, and you buried yourself in the skin of others as they buried themselves in yours. Some of them cried, and some of them howled—and whether the crying and howling was pain or pleasure, you couldn’t tell, and maybe they couldn’t, either. Such are the ambiguities of primal youth.