When My Heart Joins the Thousand Page 3

  Finally I drift off on the couch and wake to the glare of sunlight through the curtains. The light brightens and spills across the floor, illuminating the shabby blue-gray carpet, the cluttered stacks of books and newspapers in the corners of my living room. The rancid cheese smell permeates the air.

  I pry myself off the couch and plod to the kitchen, where I start a pot of strong coffee. My shift starts in less than an hour. I need to get ready for work.

  I brush my teeth, comb and re-braid my hair, and wash myself with a rag and a pot of soapy water. I don’t like showers or baths, but it’s possible to stay clean without them—not to mention I waste less water this way. Even hair can be washed in the sink. It just takes a little longer.

  It’s cold out, and it takes me a few tries to start the car. I turn the key, and there’s only a dry click and a faint wheezing sound. I try a few more times, and the engine sputters to life.

  At work, I clock in and walk down the cobblestone path. There’s a prickling itch in my skin, like an allergic reaction, as I pass the sign about anthropomorphizing.

  I’m on feeding duty this morning, so I retrieve bags of trout and squid from the walk-in refrigerator in the storage shed; cut the slippery, pinkish-gray meat into tiny chunks; then feed it to the two river otters. Afterward, I give the gibbons their fruit. The gibbons are a mated pair named Persephone and Hades. This, I believe, is intended as irony.

  The pale golden female leans down to pull my braid, and I let her. The touch of animals has never bothered me the way human contact does.

  I move on. Inside a large, barred enclosure, a red-tailed hawk named Chance perches on the branch of a fake tree. He’s the zoo’s first hawk, acquired from a wildlife rehabilitation facility a few weeks ago. His eyes are a clear, light copper gold, somewhere between the color of champagne and a worn penny.

  I unlock the door, very slowly, and remove a dead mouse—sealed in a little plastic bag—from my pocket. My hands are covered by thick protective gloves, the same khaki color as my uniform. I remove the mouse from its plastic sleeve and hold it by its tail. “Breakfast,” I say.

  Chance’s yellow toes clench on his perch. His claws are long and black, very sharp—weapons for seizing prey and puncturing vital organs. But his hunting days are over. He flexes the stump, which is all that remains of his left wing.

  I open the cage door, place the dead mouse inside, and nudge it toward him with my foot. Chance cocks his head, eyeing the rodent, but doesn’t move.

  Since he arrived, I’ve been spending a lot of time with him. He’s still skittish around people. All wild-born animals are, at first . . . and since Chance has been through a severe injury, he’s easily agitated. If he were human, his condition might be called post-traumatic stress disorder. A zoo probably isn’t the ideal environment for him, but since he’s stuck here, he needs to adjust to the presence of humans. It will take time, but I’ve already made progress. In the beginning, he would go into a panic whenever anyone entered his cage. One day, perhaps, he’ll take food from my hand—but for now, I’m just trying to get him to eat in my presence.

  The mouse lies on the dirt floor between us.

  Chance hops down to the cage floor, snatches the mouse, and climbs back up to his perch, using his wing stump for leverage as he grips the branches with his talons. I’m impressed at his adaptability.

  “What happened to that bird, anyway?”

  The familiar, nasally voice grates like sandpaper on my brain. I turn to see Toby—a newly hired part-timer—standing with a can of grape soda in one hand. His long face is speckled with acne, and a few straggly strands of brown hair hang out from under his cap. “He was injured in the wild,” I reply. “Probably by a coyote or a fox. His wing was badly broken and had to be amputated.”

  Toby raises his soda can and takes a long slurp. “That sucks,” he says. “Nothing more depressing than a bird that can’t fly.”

  “I can think of a few things more depressing than that. The Holocaust, for instance.”

  Toby laughs, loud enough to make me flinch. “True.” He takes another swig and wipes the back of one hand across his mouth. “Hey, can I feed him?”

  I bristle. Toby mostly works the concession stand and changes the garbage bags; he’s not qualified to deal with the animals. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s not used to you.”

  “So what? It’s not that complicated, is it?” Toby knocks on the cage bars. “Hey! Hey, birdy!”

  Chance shrinks away.

  I tense. “Don’t do that. He perceives sudden movements as a threat.”

  Toby grins, showing a pair of oversized incisors. “Relax. I’m just messing with him. Don’t you have a sense of humor?”

  I want to ask him how he’d feel if a noisy giant locked him in a cage and then started banging on the walls. Would he find that funny? “You should be working,” I say. “You’re not supposed to have beverages while you’re on the clock.”

  “I’m on my lunch break.” He digs around in one ear with a pinkie, then glances at his watch. “Guess I should go clock back in. Be seeing you.” He walks away.

  I breathe in slowly, then out. I doubt he’ll last another week. Ms. Nell has no patience for slackers; it’s one of her more admirable traits. I just have to wait until he gets fired.

  I fetch another bag of dead mice from the storage shed and go to feed the snakes in the reptile house. On the way, I pass a young couple lingering near the hyena enclosure. Their arms are draped around each other. The boy whispers something into the girl’s ear, and she giggles and kisses him.

  Watching people share affection with each other in public has always made me uncomfortable. But now, for some reason, I can’t look away. They both look so happy. They make it seem so easy, so natural.

  The girl notices me staring, and the smile fades. Her lips form the word creep. She takes the boy’s hand and leads him away, and I’m left standing alone. A dull heat spreads over my forehead and the back of my neck, burning in my ears.

  Creep.

  The world falls away, and I am six years old, approaching a group of girls on the playground during recess. My heart skips, and there’s a hard little nut lodged somewhere behind my belly button. The girls are giggling and talking together. As I approach, they fall silent and turn to stare at me. Their smiles disappear.

  My legs quiver. I twist my shirt and grip one braid, pulling until I feel the tingling pressure in my scalp. When I open my mouth, the words come out all in a rush: “Hi my name is Alvie Fitz can I play with you.”

  The girls exchange glances. They’re talking without words, beaming silent messages with their eyes, something I have never learned how to do.

  A blond girl turns to me with a wide smile. “Okay, let’s play a game. It’s called ‘puppy.’ Since you’re new, you can be the puppy.”

  I keep pulling on my braid with one hand and twisting my shirt with the other. “How do you play.”

  “Get down on your hands and knees and start barking.”

  The tightness in my stomach loosens. That’s easy. I drop down to my hands and knees. “Ruff-ruff! Ruff-ruff-ruff!”

  The girls giggle. I bark louder and faster, and they laugh harder. I pant and roll over, then I start to dig in the wood chips with my hands, and they practically squeal.

  More kids are gathering now. Someone throws a stick and calls, “Fetch, girl!” I pick it up in my mouth. More laughter. Excitement flutters inside me. I never knew it would be so easy to make friends.

  One girl looks at another, rolls her eyes, and twirls a finger around her temple.

  I freeze. The stick falls from my mouth. I’ve seen people do that before. I know what it means.

  A large group of children stands around me, staring, mouths open. My chest hurts. I’m breathing too fast, but I can’t stop.

  Whispers echo in my ears. Weirdo. Freak.

  I drop the stick and start to run. I run off the playground, away from the sch
ool, but I can still hear their voices, echoing over and over inside my head.

  Back in my apartment, I grab a box of Cocoa Puffs from the kitchen, sit on the couch, and turn on the TV. I scoop out handfuls of dry cereal and eat them as I watch a rerun of Cosmos. My gaze strays to the laptop sitting on my coffee table.

  Has Stanley sent me another email since last night?

  I turn off the TV and sit, turning a Rubik’s Cube over in my hands. I twist the rows of color this way and that, not really trying to solve it, just focusing on the smooth plastic under my fingertips, the click as a section snaps into place. My gaze wanders, again, to my laptop.

  Talking to someone online should be safe enough. As long as I’m careful about keeping my distance, confining the conversation to non-risky topics, what harm could it do?

  I pick up my laptop and open my email. Sure enough, there’s a message from Stanley.

  So, the cat in the box, the one that’s alive and dead . . . I mean, is that really how the world works? Like things don’t become real until we observe them? But what does that mean for us?

  I sign on to Google Chat. He’s there, waiting. A funny, hollow feeling fills my stomach, like the swooping sensation of being on a roller coaster.

  He asked me a question about physics. That’s something I can understand, something I can deal with.

  Schrödinger’s cat is just a thought experiment. Originally it was meant to illustrate the absurdity of the Copenhagen’s interpretation, but some people take it seriously.

  Are you studying this stuff? I mean, are you a physics major, or something?

  I’m not in college. I’m seventeen.

  I bet you’re in AP courses. :)

  I don’t go to school, I reply.

  A brief pause. Homeschooled, then? My mom homeschooled me for a few years. Some people can be judgy about stuff like that, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with learning from your parents.

  I don’t have parents.

  Another pause. I’m sorry, he sends.

  Why are you sorry?

  No response. I shift my weight, wondering if I said something wrong. I don’t often talk about my situation with people—the fact that I have no living relatives, at least none close enough to take me in—that my mother died when I was eleven, that I never even knew my father. The few times I have mentioned this, it’s usually resulted in sudden silence followed by a rapid change of subject.

  Then more text appears: I know how tough it is, being on your own.

  My heart lurches. You lost your parents, too?

  Kind of. I mean, my dad is still alive, but we don’t talk much. I’m nineteen, so I can live by myself now, anyway. I’m getting by. But still, it’s not easy. It must be even harder for you.

  He’s alone. Like me.

  My body rocks lightly back and forth. My hand drifts to my left braid and starts tugging. I recognize the anxiety mounting within myself; I need to steer the conversation to safer topics. I do all right, I send. Anyway. You don’t need a teacher to learn about physics. Anyone can look up the information if they take the time. And a library card is a lot less expensive than college.

  Lol. Well, I am a college student, so I can vouch for that, he replies. I’m not studying physics, though. I’m kind of a humanities guy. I’m taking neurobiology for my science requirement because I thought it would be all about how we think and what makes us human, but it’s more like, “memorize these 50 different processes that are involved in eye movement.” Pretty boring stuff.

  It doesn’t sound boring. I like reading about the brain. It helps me make sense of human behavior.

  There’s a lot about the brain that we don’t understand, though, isn’t there?

  I tell myself that I’m only going to stay online for a few more minutes.

  We talk about perception and the nature of reality, which shifts to a discussion about truth and how much of what we believe is simply because other people have told us to believe it. That, in turn, transitions into a conversation about the lies adults tell to children.

  We tell each other our respective childhood reactions to finding out that Santa Claus is just a story. He cried; I was indifferent because the idea of a magical, omniscient fat man breaking into my house every Christmas Eve never made much sense to me in the first place.

  I tell him how, as a little girl, I was told that oatmeal sticks to your ribs—which is not exactly a lie but an expression, something you’re not meant to believe literally. As a child, it took me a while to understand the difference, and to this day I can’t eat oatmeal because I visualize all those sticky white clumps coagulating against my heart and lungs.

  I learn how, when he was little, his mother told him that thunder means the angels are bowling, and that the crescent moon is God’s fingernail.

  I reply that the moon is a ball of iron and rock, and that it’s getting farther and farther away from us all the time. It moves away from Earth by a distance of 3.8 centimeters each year. We are losing it.

  You know, you’re kind of a pessimist, he remarks.

  It’s just a fact, I reply.

  But 3.8 centimeters is hardly anything. That won’t make any difference, will it?

  Probably not for millions of years. The human race may not even be around then. But nonetheless, the things we think of as permanent are not. Eventually the sun will expand, engulf our entire solar system, and then die.

  There’s a pause. It’s beautiful tonight, he sends. The moon, I mean. Can you see it from your window?

  I look. It’s nearly full; there’s a misty ring of light around it. Yes.

  If it’s going away, he says, we should enjoy it while it’s here.

  Clouds glide slowly across the moon. The world goes dark, then bright again, bathed in a ghostly glow.

  You don’t have to stay up with me, you know, he sends. I know it’s late. You probably have to get to bed.

  I glance at the clock. 4:00 a.m. You’re an insomniac, aren’t you?

  Lol, guess you found me out. Yeah, I’m not eager to go back to tossing and turning.

  I know what he means. There’s no worse feeling than being alone and unable to sleep at four in the morning, with the tick-tick-tick of the clock echoing in your skull. I’ll stay up with you, if you want, I offer, surprising myself. But the truth is that I want to keep talking to him. It’s a curiously addictive experience.

  I appreciate that. But I don’t want you being exhausted tomorrow on my account. I should probably at least try to sleep, anyway. I’ve got class in the morning, and I don’t want to be a zombie.

  I’ll send you some alpha brain wave recordings, then. They’re supposed to be for meditation, but I use them when I’m trying to sleep. Sometimes they help.

  Cool. That’s really nice of you. :)

  Not really. It won’t take much effort on my part.

  Well, thanks anyway.

  I upload the recordings and send him the links, then sign off. For a while, I sit there on the couch. The moon shines through the curtains. It’s very bright. I rise, spread my fingers and press my palm against the window, over the pearly sphere, as if I can capture its light.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A dead mouse lies nestled in the palm of my gloved hand. Slowly I stretch out my arm.

  Chance cocks his head, peering at me. I can see my reflection in the glass-like, convex curve of his cornea. In one swift movement, he snatches the mouse, pins it beneath his long yellow talons, and pulls out a string of bloody meat with his beak. A thrill of triumph runs through me. It’s the first time he’s taken food from my hand.

  A hawk’s claws can exert over one hundred and sixty pounds of pressure. They’re designed to lock into prey and hold it immobile. Even without his wing, he could seriously hurt me. But he won’t—not unless I make a sudden move and frighten him. He’s grown to trust me a lot more over the past two weeks. I’m looking forward to telling Stanley about my success.

  It’s strange, how routine my conv
ersations with him have come to feel—how quickly and easily he slipped into my life.

  Chance finishes his lunch and yawns. The feathers on his throat are a creamy yellow brown, speckled with black. When he preens his one wing, the sunlight shines through his pinfeathers, turning them almost translucent.

  I check my watch. Lunchtime for me, too. After stripping off and disposing of my gloves and washing my hands, I retrieve my bag lunch from my car and make my way to the main office building where the break room is located. In the hallway outside, I freeze. There are people inside the break room; I can hear them talking through the door. I recognize the voice of Toby and one other coworker, a young man with a unibrow whose name I can’t remember.

  “I dunno, man,” Unibrow says, “she’s pretty weird.”

  “Well, it’s not like I’m gonna ask her out or anything,” Toby replies. “I’m just sayin’, she’s got a nice ass. I’d hit that.”

  “But isn’t she, like, autistic or something?”

  “What, so she can’t fuck?”

  “Gross,” Unibrow says. “You’re sick, man.”

  Toby laughs.

  I back quietly away, retreat from the building, and lean against the wall outside. My heart is beating a little too quickly. There’s an unpleasant, squirmy sensation under my skin—the sense of violation that always comes from overhearing people talk about me behind my back. My appetite has evaporated, so I throw out my sandwich, grab a broom and dustpan, and start sweeping the path.

  After work, I go straight home. Since I started talking online with Stanley, I’ve stopped going to the park. He doesn’t come there anymore, and without him, it feels empty.

  It’s Wednesday. My meeting with Dr. Bernhardt is at four o’clock.

  This time, I’m not caught off guard, so I straighten up my apartment before his arrival, dousing every surface with Lysol and shoving the dirty laundry into the closet. I buy a bag of oranges so he can’t complain about the lack of fruit or vegetables in my kitchen.

  “You know,” he says, “you could offer me a seat. Or something to drink.”