When We Were Animals(43)

“You know where I’ve been all morning?” he said.

“Where?”

“Church.”

“Oh.”

“It used to make me feel better,” he went on, “but it doesn’t anymore. I forgot how to be good.”

“You didn’t forget.”

“All the things I’ve done. The way I’ve behaved. Do you ever feel like you’re two entirely different people? I mean, there’s the person you know you should be, the person you want to be, the person everybody else would like you to be. And you can be that person most of the time. It’s work. I mean, it’s hard—but you can do it. But then there’s this other person who does awful things. The sun goes down, the moon comes up—and suddenly you’re watching yourself do ugly things. Like you’re complacent, at a distance, just watching the happenings of your body as if you had nothing at all to do with them. Do you ever feel that?”

I was silent for a moment. But he didn’t give me a chance to answer before he continued.

“No. You wouldn’t know about that.”

“Maybe I would,” I asserted.

“No, you wouldn’t. You don’t understand.”

“I do. I promise.”

His smile was generous, but he didn’t believe me. I wanted to be something in his mournful life—a comfort or a remedy. Simple fancies, but my chest ached with them.

“Listen,” I said. We stopped, and I got in front of him to look up into his eyes. I put my hand on his chest to reassure him. I wanted him to feel the truth of what I was saying. I wanted to press it directly into his heart as though it were soft clay. I could feel the confession spilling out of me, and there was no stopping it. “Listen,” I said again, “sometimes…I don’t know…sometimes I hate myself. Especially lately. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who I am anymore—what I am. My dad, he doesn’t know I go out at nights. I can’t tell him. I’m not a breacher like other people, I don’t think. I can’t be. I don’t want to be. But I don’t know. My mom, she used to make dolls—except now I don’t know if she really did. I wish I could make dolls. I wish I were the girl who made dolls instead of the girl who—”

He put his arms around me. “Shh,” he said. “It’s okay.”

He held me and stroked my hair for a few moments until I calmed down. Then, when he let me go and looked me in the face, his expression had changed completely. His mood had transformed—he was elated. Had I done that to him? Did I have that kind of power?

“Come on,” he said, taking my hand. “I want to show you something.”

He pulled me into the middle of the street.

“Wait,” I said. “We’re going to get run over.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

He let go of my hand, took me by the shoulders, and turned me around so my back was to him. He put his head over my right shoulder, and I could feel his breath on my cheek.

“Look down there,” he said, and I looked at the row of houses and the purple sunset beyond.

“What?” I said.

“No,” he said. “You have to look harder.”


Just then the street lamps came on overhead with a little click and a buzz. Consecutive pools of light appeared in a bracelet of illumination that fronted all the houses, each of which domiciled any number of lives and dramas and passions and catastrophes. There it was, the way the street arrowed on to the horizon, the way the housefronts glowed rich, organic sepia into the night, the way the parceled land shivered with the deep harmonics of order and structure. I looked, and what I saw was the story of the place, the crystalline symmetry of the houses on their identical plots of land, the swooping curve of the curb and the wispy fans of the sprinklers that came on in the summer with timed precision. I saw the bones and the blood of the town, the infrastructure of copper pipes and PVC and electrical conduits and sump pumps and telephone wires suspended in elegant laurels overhead. I saw everything it took to make this one street, and I saw that street multiplied into a neighborhood and that neighborhood multiplied into a town and that town multiplied into a city and a country and a whole world.

I saw it. He made me see it, and I saw it.

“Think about it,” he said. “People built this. There used to be nothing here, and now there’s this. And the people who built it, were they pure? It doesn’t matter. Whatever they were, they overcame it to make something bigger than themselves. Look harder. It’s beautiful.”

It’s become popular for people to talk about suburban dread, the cardboard sprawl that cheapens life, reduces life down to lawn ornaments, manicured shrubs, televisions with extra-large screens, quaint and degraded notions of family life. It’s easy to say that life should be grander, more meaningful, heartier—like a meat stew.

But what Peter showed me I’ll never forget. It was the land brought to life, the earth made conscious. And it was beautiful. It really was.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“It means that it doesn’t matter what it means,” he said. “It means that it’ll be okay, Lumen.”

*



The third night I went into the woods because I was finished with other people and their capricious ways. I wanted my freedom to be mine alone. A wind blew through the trees, and the moonlight lit up all the icy branches, and it was like I was surrounded by stars.