Tender is the Flesh(27)
The rest of the sign is broken and lying on the floor, but he doesn’t bend down to pick it up.
He walks over to a large building. The door frame has been burned. The building contains a room with big windows that have been broken. He thinks the space must have been a bar or restaurant. There are built-in chairs that weren’t removed. Most of the tables are gone but two remain soldered to the floor. There’s an elongated structure that could have been a bar.
Then he sees a sign that says “Serpentarium”, and an arrow. He walks through hallways that are dark and narrow until he reaches a bigger space with wide windows. There’s another sign painted on the wall. It says: “Serpentarium, please wait in line.” He goes into a room with a high ceiling, part of which is broken. The sky shows through the cracks. There are no cages. Instead, the walls are divided into compartments by glass panels. He thinks they’re called terrariums. There were once different serpents inside them. Some of the glass panels are broken, others have disappeared completely.
He sits down on the floor and pulls out a cigarette. As he looks around at the graffiti and drawings, an image catches his attention. It’s a mask that someone has drawn with a good deal of skill. It looks like a Venetian mask. Beside it, in large black letters, the person has written: “The mask of apparent calm, of mundane tranquillity, of the joy, at once small and bright, of not knowing when this thing I call skin will be ripped off, when this thing I call mouth will lose the flesh that surrounds it, when these things I call eyes will come upon the black silence of a knife.” It’s not signed. No one has scratched it out or drawn over it, but words and images surround it. He reads some of the things people have written: “black market”, “why don’t you rip this”, “meat with a first and last name tastes best!”, “joy? small and bright? seriously? LOL!”, “awesome poem!!”, “after the curfew we can eat you”, “this world is shit”, “YOLO”, “Oh, eat of me, eat of my flesh Oh, amongst cannibals Oh, take your time to / cut me up Oh, amongst cannibals Soda Stereo forever.”
As he’s trying to remember what “YOLO” means, he hears a sound. He keeps still. It’s a faint cry. He gets up and walks through the serpentarium to one of the largest windows. It’s intact.
It’s hard for him to make anything out. There are dry branches on the floor, filth. But he sees a body move. And then suddenly, a tiny head lifts up. It has a black snout and two brown ears. Then he makes out another head and another and another.
He stands there watching them, thinks he’s hallucinating. Then he feels an urge to break the glass so he can touch them. At first, he doesn’t understand how they got there, but then he realizes there are three terrariums connected by doors and that the glass surrounding two of them is broken. They’re not on ground level, which is why he has to climb up to enter them. He gets down on all fours and crawls through the door to the largest terrarium, the one in the middle, which is where the puppies are. The door is open. The terrarium is wide and fairly tall. He thinks it would have held an anaconda, or a python. The puppies whimper, they’re frightened. Of course, he thinks, they’ve never seen a human in their lives. He crawls along carefully because the floor is covered in stones, dry leaves, filth. The puppies are beneath some branches that do a fairly good job of sheltering them. Branches around which a boa might have wrapped itself, he thinks. They’re curled up next to each other to keep warm and protect themselves. He sits down close by but doesn’t touch them until they’re calmer. Then he starts to pet the puppies. There are four of them, they’re scrawny and filthy. They sniff at his hands. He picks one of them up. It hardly weighs a thing. At first it trembles, but then it begins to move desperately. It urinates out of fear. The others bark, whimper. He hugs the puppy, kisses it until it calms down. The puppy runs its tongue along his face. He laughs and cries silently.
22
With the puppies, he loses track of time. They play at attacking him, try to catch the branches he moves through the air. They nip at his hands with their tiny teeth and it almost tickles. He grabs their heads and shakes them carefully, as if his hand were the jaw of a monstrous beast who was after them. He tugs gently on their tails. When they whimper and bark, he does too. They lick his hands. All four of the puppies are males.
He gives them names: Jagger, Watts, Richards and Wood.
The puppies run around the terrarium. Jagger bites Richards’s tail. Wood appears to be asleep but gets up suddenly, grabs one of the branches with his mouth and shakes it in the air. But Watts is mistrustful, and sniffs at this man in the terrarium, then plays around him, smells him and barks, before climbing up his legs with clumsy movements. He attacks Watts, and the puppy cries a little and nips him on the hand, his tail wagging. Then Watts jumps onto Richards and Jagger. He attacks the other puppies but then they chase after him.
He thinks of his dogs. Pugliese and Koko. He had had to slaughter them knowing, suspecting, that the virus was a lie invented by global powers and legitimized by the government and media. He’d considered abandoning his dogs to avoid having to kill them, but he was afraid they’d be tortured. Keeping them could have been much worse. They could have all been tortured. Back then, injections were sold to prevent pets from suffering. They were for sale everywhere, even at the supermarket. He buried Pugliese and Koko beneath the biggest tree in the yard. The three of them would sit under its shade on afternoons when the heat was intense and he didn’t have to work at his father’s processing plant. While he sipped on a beer and read, they were by his side. He’d bring his father’s old handheld radio and listen to a programme that played instrumental jazz. He enjoyed the ritual of having to tune in to the station. Every so often, Pugliese would get up and chase after a bird. Koko would raise her head, drowsy with sleep, and look first at Pugliese, then at him, in a way that he always thought meant, “Pugliese is mad, stark raving mad. But we love him just as he is, bonkers,” and he’d always pet her head, smiling and saying softly, “Sweet Taylor, my beautiful Koko.” But when his father came by, Koko was a different dog. She couldn’t contain her happiness. Something lit up inside her, a dormant engine, and she began to jump, run, wag her tail, bark. When she saw him, no matter how far away he was, she’d bolt in his direction and jump on him. He always greeted her with a smile, hugged her, picked her up. Koko would wag her tail differently for his father, that was how he knew his dad was near. She only did this for the man who had found her on the side of the highway, curled up and dirty, a few weeks old, dehydrated, on the verge of death. His father had kept Koko by his side twenty-four hours a day; he’d taken her to the plant and looked after her until she began to respond. He thinks that slaughtering Koko was another of the reasons for his father’s mental collapse.