But he’d gone into the wrong room, maybe even some other motel. The beds were made, the television off. His son wasn’t there. The sliding glass door to the balcony stood open. Loomis felt his heart seize up and he rushed to the railing. The courtyard was dark and empty. Over in the lobby, the lights were dimmed, no one on duty. It was all shut down. There was no breeze. No roar of rushing vehicles from the 5, the roar in Loomis’s mind canceling it out. By the time he heard the sound behind him and turned to see his son come out of the bathroom yawning, it was too late. It might as well have been someone else’s child, Loomis the stranger come to steal him away. He stood on the balcony and watched his son crawl back onto the bed, pull himself into a fetal position, close his eyes for a moment, then open them. Meeting his gaze, Loomis felt something break inside him. The boy had the same dazed, disoriented expression he’d had on his face just after his long, difficult birth, when the nurses had put him into an incubator to rush him to intensive care. Loomis had knelt, then, his face up close to the incubator’s glass wall, and he’d known that the baby could see him, and that was enough. The obstetrician said, “This baby is very sick,” and nurses wheeled the incubator out. He’d gone over to his wife and held her hand. The resident, tears in her eyes, patted his shoulder and said, for some reason, “You’re good people,” and left them alone. Now he and their child were in this motel, the life that had been their family somehow dissipated into air. Loomis couldn’t gather into his mind how they’d got here. He couldn’t imagine what would come next.
Ordinary Monsters
The Bodies
The bodies were posed as speakers, lovers, discus throwers, runners awaiting the starter’s gun, as models for artists or medical students, one breast, say, removed of its skin but for the nipple, a penis flayed down one side, scrotum as if it were never there — eyelids severed, noses sheared, abdominal walls peeled away in layers, and hearts, intestines, livers, kidneys there like fruits dried on the vine.
In another room there were glass cases in which millions of blue and red capillaries floated like strange galaxies captured, reduced to the size and shape of human bodies — what worlds operated in there, now?
The man and his son strolled through the exhibit as if through a gallery of art.
The son seemed disinterested, bored. Embarrassed by the sexual organs, at this delicate age of his own development? Or by the other visitors’ intense and open interest? Embarrassed, perhaps, for these people, who were once Chinese, who were once the unnamed and newly dead, who perhaps were prisoners or the inhabitants of a village, caught in the path of war. No one knew or was saying. Even the man felt somehow embarrassed to be alive among them, and he sympathized with his son’s discomfort. He and the boy’s mother had been divorced for only a year, and the man did not know very well just what the boy carried about in his mind and heart.
They came to a woman sliced the length of her body into four standing, parallel slabs, separated only by inches. The boy stood looking fiercely away. He glared at someone in a group that walked past them to another part of the exhibit.
As they left and walked out into the park, the boy said in an angry undertone, Did you see that woman looking at you?
What woman? the man said.
That woman, the boy said. You didn’t see her?
I was looking at the bodies, the man said. Weren’t you?
It was disgusting, the boy said, though he didn’t explain or say what or why.
Intermission
Her scent blossomed in the car like heavenly polecat, like flowers manufactured in a tire plant, something dusky and nostril-stinging, like perfumed coal dust, dead rose blossoms on hot oil-grimed engine blocks. She smacked her Spearmint in something like meditation and I didn’t know if we’d make it to the old theater or not. We drove down the near-empty wide lanes of Twenty-second Avenue, over the bridge, the heavy, sooted freights chugging by underneath, into the heart of town — silent and thrumming like hummingbirds, our hearts. Or maybe it was just me. I turned onto Eighth and pulled up beneath the marquee, the bright light slashing through the windshield, cutting her body in half. She pursed her glossy, strawberry lips, leaned toward me, and took my hand. I was trembling. Ever have a woman kiss the palm of your hand? No, she didn’t. She closed my fingers over the little ball of gum. Toss that out the window for me, baby. I wish she hadn’t looked up right then. Her eyes, between sticky spiked lashes, some kind of deep neon green. Her hair smelled of exotic salts at the roots. Her tongue like a blind, hairless, nursing mammal in my mouth.
The car was rolling, horns blaring, that bending sound going by. I was bent into Mona, I could feel the back of my leg against the wheel, steering somehow, I don’t know where. Folks shouting. It was like church. She was kicking, with those wild pointed shoes, big holes in the headliner. She made sounds like a peacock crying, Aye! Aye! Aye!
I don’t know how far we idled down Eighth. I don’t know how many folks we ran up over the curb. I don’t know how many cops they called out to run down the ’62 Bonneville driving itself down the road. I don’t know, the jailer said one cop called over the radio, Look like it’s being drove by a big hairy ass to me.
I don’t know how long I’ll be in here. I can see all that from the top of the county jail, the long stretch of Eighth Street, west. I can see the flickering sign of the Davis Grill, where I was going to take her to eat. I can see the marquee on the old theater there. I think I can see her sometimes, that plump-legged, kind of pigeon-toed waddle, her nylons going whish-whish, see her actually make it inside the place with some more restrained type of guy. I can see all the way south to Bonita, where her little white house sits on top of the hill. I can see other cars pull in there and, the next morning, leave. I can see the lights go on in the hallway, the kitchen, the bedroom, and out.
Her Tribe
She hadn’t been to the grove since high school, when they used to meet there before home room to smoke dope. Years ago. Before all of that, before everything since.
It was a holiday now, summer vacation. The oaks, sweetgums, and maples, strong-limbed, were in full foliage. She stood in the lower area, where a creek once went through maybe, before the school was there, ages ago, before town even came out this far. When this was the country.
A breeze, cooled in the shade down there, rattled the dense, waxy leaves of the water oaks. She closed her eyes, let her head fall back, felt the breeze on her open neck. She had almost drifted off when she felt the breeze drop even lower in temperature, as if it had passed over water, over the imagined, once-present creek down below, and she opened her eyes in surprise. That’s when she saw them, moving through the higher branches, coming into the grove down near the Vocational Building.
She thought, impossibly — apes. Gorillas. But they were pale, leaner. Muscled, she could tell even from this distance. But leaner. Hairless baboons. She crouched down, put a hand to the damp dead leaves on the ground to steady herself. She couldn’t see faces. Mostly, their sweeping, graceful movement from limb to limb. Through the gaps in between trees, she saw one, three, more make looping leaps from one tree to another. She began to hear noises, like grunts, croaking noises. She heard, as quiet as fingertips wisping over paper, the sound of their hands grasping, swinging on, and releasing the limbs. The slap of the palms grasping another. The faint creak of the limbs with their weight.