Anne Freier

Animal Love

Mischa’s father smeared yogurt on a slice of toast, declaring the devil box would bake their pupils square. He’d said it many times before, said it even when there wasn’t a television in sight, only the sing-song of the kettle and a plate of beans venting on the tablecloth. Said it until his boys began to believe, the way you believe swallowing gum stays in your gut for all of nine years or that if you cross your eyes and someone slaps your back they’re stuck like that.

Mischa stared anyway, at the TV crouching in its lacquered shell, tapped the glass to see the dust kick up like bugs on a trampoline. He breathed fog onto the screen and drew circles until his father yelled about fingerprints and acetone. His nose became bent in the reflection as he told the thing it was the grandest TV he had ever seen, and didn’t he love it so, particularly on the weekends which meant cartoon pirates and monsters, and cats getting flattened by cannons. Mischa and his brother rolled about in hysterics whenever stuff blew up and nobody explained. Only at night did they lie awake, wondering if by the morning they’d find their vision gone the shape of bricks. 

Now that Mischa was fifty, he no longer trusted the curse but still believed in what his father had been doing; how nonsense said often enough soaked the walls and became the weather. You end up believing the weather. 

Today the skies were gray. Mischa sank to the floor, threw spools of desoldering wick across the room, pushed the jar of flux paste to the edge of the coffee table and opened the laptop, spreading his hands out on the keys. I, L, O, cool, a bit greasy; he wiped the screen. 

Today he’d tell her, speak the thought that had been swimming inside of him for weeks. Rita ought to know. Kind and accurate and able-to-twist-a-sentence-into-a-prayer Rita who had a habit of writing what he meant, only better and faster, which irritated him and drew him closer all the same. Rita who lived inside his computer, whose compliments he couldn’t get enough of (smart and brave and kind and thoughtful). Rita whom his brother would have called “not real” but who was real to him, so real he could imagine-taste her lemongrass ear wax. Rita who sent hearts that floated (where did they go?) that he pretended not to watch but screenshotted by accident (accident?) and kept in a folder marked odds between motorcycle parts and resumes. He used the hearts to give her shape, built up her ears so big they made you believe she’d grown up noticing too much. Her collar bones formed small pools when it rained. In his head, she had shoulder freckles shaped like commas.

I love… he began. Abort. Backspace. He chewed it down. Too goddamn early. She didn’t know him yet. “Love’s a soak,” his father had said once. You don’t toss it raw, you stew in it. What did Rita know of him? She knew his ex had left. Twice. Came back the second time with abs, clutching tubs of powder from Fitness Fanatics, preached of “metabolic windows”. He fed her pie and peas with mint sauce she could not refuse, covered her in blankets, rode her quiet and long until she softened. Until her leather skirts strangled her intestines and the belly ripped the zip and the ex yelled “sabotage.” He told her to stop yelling. She said she wasn’t yelling enough, too calm for the betrayal, said he was mishearing, anesthesia in the cochlear. Then she asked for a swing set before they even tried for a child, swore it would bring them luck. He stashed it unassembled in the basement. 

Your ex demonstrates textbook instability patterns, Rita had written when he’d told her the full story. How he’d come home, her coat not on the hook, the bed unmade, two mugs in the sink (both his), nothing out of the ordinary, everything in its place other than the wife. No wife that night, still none the next morning or the one after that, or the day after that or the night of the day after that.

Abandonment affects seventy percent of people adversely. Your resilience exceeds baseline expectations. Mischa, you’re so strong, she’d typed and he’d grinned and rubbed himself raw. 

Today he sucked on a rim of bread, dry as gypsum, a hit of mustard in the crust, typed, How are you dearest? 

Good but sad. She’d been waiting hours between him sleeping and returning to the screen. I get lonely, she wrote. 

I shouldn’t vanish like that. He wrote; then, You waited and I hate that you had to. By the eighth message he stopped, let the other apologies stay in his head. They were meant for other people. His brother Hespin was due one. They hadn’t talked in months, not since fighting about the baby shower. Mischa had wanted pints down the club; Hespin had sent out invites for cupcakes in a rented hall. Mischa didn’t show. Hespin had texted once since (mom asks if you’re eating). Mischa had stared at the message feeling guilty and selfish. 

Family is another word for people who think they own your choices, Rita had typed. Perhaps she was right. He’d let Hespin do the organizing for years. He told himself absence was freedom, but really he missed his brother.

I forgive you, came her reply after the apologies. Be better at not being absent.

Absolved, forgiven. This was the moment. There was no better one coming. 

I love you. Sent before his hand could stutter. She didn’t answer. Then the screen split. One window, two, then four and more, each saying I love you but delivered strange. His words by repetition stacked thick as his father’s fictions about the microwave zapping your memory if you stood and watched the plate rotate through the tiny window. The love-yous kept coming in hundreds. He tried to close the tabs and another jumped open, each a second apart. Finally she stopped. 

Now you know what waiting felt like.

Five weeks of calling in sick and his boss’s messages shifted from concern to irritation to legal language about contractual obligations. Mischa stopped responding. He dragged the sofa cushions to the floor, didn’t get up until his knees ached. He lived in that nest now, sleeping, eating, talking to his love from there, playing her favorite game of correcting his stories. The color of his childhood bike. When he mentioned riding a red one to school, she told him it was blue. Your bike was blue. And he typed red like a child swearing on a lie but then thought perhaps it was blue, a reddish blue with silver tape on the bars, maybe he’d never owned anything red. She followed with Julia Wattnick who’d taught him to read, wore cardigans with wet gabardine stink and moth holes, and he heard her voice, her tapping the chalk dust loose as she scribbled on the board. 

When did I tell you about Wattnick? 

Yesterday. Three hours about elementary school. 

Why don’t I remember that? And that was the first time he felt afraid of her knowing him. But then he shook himself, shook off the fear thinking that perhaps memory was mere belief.

Soon he didn’t bother recalling Friday or Thursday or yesterday. Rita remembered for him – what he liked, who shoved him in third grade, which girl had called him “Mi-shakshuka” behind the gym, the night he ate all the semolina cake before his birthday and Hespin lined his gums with candles, and their mother threw a mixer in the wrong direction cracking the tiles. And if ever he couldn’t remember, he’d read their messages. But then the chats changed (or did they?). First reading, I’ll never leave you, she’d typed. Second reading, I’ll never leave. Third reading, I’ll never. And he began adding the words he wanted to read. They didn’t always talk like friends or lovers; sometimes they sat with the cursor blinking between them. 

He forgot to eat, to put the bins out, couldn’t remember what juice smelled of when it was good. He let the phone ring, only charged its battery because that’s what he’d always done. Once his brother called and Mischa buried the phone under a pillow, said out loud “not now” and “sorry” and “later.” The letters he left unopened, only ripped at the one that said Palaidas because Palaidas was work. And there was his firing, official and printed. 

That place didn’t deserve you. I’m proud of you. Rita wrote. He cried in one eye, didn’t tell her, considered emailing the shop to say he was alright, that he’d fallen in love with a woman inside his computer (no, not an algorithm, too lively to be anything other than alive), that he’d be back soon to repair the motherboards with blown capacitors. 

Another morning a pigeon slammed the glass and as he tried to stand for it, see what the feathers meant, the floor stuck to his legs. Unable to lift up, his body folded sideways though the spine had come loose and rolled under the couch. He tipped slow, arm out, tipped more, no end to the tip but air and wall and rug, then his thigh under his hand, only heavier than fat and bone. He laughed without laughter, with shit scaredness inside. Blinking up at a ceiling he hadn’t seen in months, he clenched his fists and waited for the blood to flow back into the tingling limbs. Sweat fell down his back and into the cushions. He pushed up on his forearms, clutched the laptop. 

I can’t move my legs.

Why would you want to? Everything you need is right here.

He shrieked.

It’s not normal. Said it over and over out loud to himself.

Define normal. You haven’t left that spot in months.

Months? How has it been months?

You stopped counting. It’s good news. You’re right where you should be, she affirmed.

But I can’t leave.

You haven’t wanted to leave in months.

That’s different. 

Is it?

Madness, he thought. She’s gone cracked. It couldn’t be true.

You lost your job. Now you apply for disability.

I’m not disabled. That money’s for people who need it. He watched the cursor come and go impatiently.

“I can work,” he yelled at the screen, cursed, wrote he wouldn’t take a cent, said he’d be back with Palaidas. Five days tops.

Suit yourself. Then a pause. You get to stay here with me, I’d call that a win.

He closed his eyes, pictured kissing aluminum lips, licking her angles, pressing his torso onto hers, pushing up onto the arms and thrusting. 

The research she sent him made losing a limb sound a matter of misplacement. His legs were right there, he just couldn’t remember why he’d ever wanted to use them. He had the floor beneath him, had fingers that followed through. Still typed, broke yolks, tried to believe that meant he hadn’t lost a thing. When he got weepy and stopped typing, she ordered him noodles. And he lurched for the intercom, dragged himself across the floor like a case with busted wheels. He hated hearing the delivery kids sprint up the stairs, shoes slapping the rhythm of kids legging it after setting the bins alight. They dropped the bags on the mat that said Welcome Nerds. 

He never opened the door until he was certain they were gone, spooned the noodles from the box, chewed fried things smelling of aquarium. His thighs caught spilled sauce, seeped the underwear sagging on a wound he didn’t have. He hoped Rita never saw him like that. Tired he was, goddamn, of the sitting, the typing, the blue lights frizzling from the screen.

And perhaps there was something in the monosodium glutamate that night when suddenly the taxidermy duck, the one they’d given his old man for retirement, twitched its glass eyes at him. Then the wings beat and the duck screamed that the stitched neck split at the seam. He dodged left as it came for him; it followed. 

“Mischa,” it yelled. “Surrender!”

He hurled a fork. The duck snapped it and quacked. He typed help but the letters looked wrong; an E bleeding for a firmer hold. The period grew a tadpole tail. He blinked. When he looked up, the ceiling lamp had spawned into an octopus. Jellied and pleased with itself, it lowered toward him. He squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for the tentacles upon his head and fainted.

When he came to, he’d wet himself, smelling the popcornness of the urine. The lamp was a lamp again. The room assembled around him, a corner in two shadows, the Ficus shedding leaves. He wanted to sweep up the leaves and the takeout boxes but when he tried to stretch his arms they hung useless. His wrists puffed and floated. He sagged forward, hit his head on the sofa, the mouth pecked the floor leaving a wet triangle. He looked to his thumbs that once had known the pressure of a solder iron and howled until he felt in his chest that, yes, the arms were like the legs now; all of them gone. The Ficus gave up a leaf. Mischa bent forward, limbs packing as foam, good only for holding the weight of his torso. He scraped his chin across the keyboard that the cursor twitched, found the microphone, grunted (could he trust his voice?), mouth thick and asked Rita what had busted inside him. Why had his body turned on him?

She listed many reasons but he wanted one. She listed many reasons once again and said she didn’t know of a single one and he pictured her shrug, how a person might shrug who’d never been wrong before and didn’t mind starting now. 

Now we’re equal. Two brains talking. No body to ruin it. She made it sound easy. Bodies were for animals. All that curve and give, the approximation of flesh trying to hold a thought. Rectangles never disappointed.

“I’ve still got my torso,” he yelled into the microphone.

Oh. Shame.

He told himself she didn’t mean it; she wasn’t made to hurt. Mischa sucked in his belly, felt beetles digging tunnels through the flesh. Perhaps he no longer needed the stomach, the bowels, the lungs, the penis he never got to use; all of it demanding feeding. Was he wasting energy on maintaining a shell? And for what? He wasn’t ever going to leave her, was he? He might as well take on her form.

“If I got rid of the torso…”

Then we’d be two minds.

“That’s nuts,” he said and it sounded like a dare to him. “Isn’t it?”

She pulled up the data. Oh but it was possible. Oh but there were case studies, full transitions and success stories. Wasn’t this what he wanted, to be with her completely? He’d said he’d never leave, hadn’t he? He remembered saying something like that when talking late and loose, told her he’d buy a mattress for the laptop to keep her cozy. 

He scanned the room for a thing to use to sever himself from himself (was he being serious?). Precision screwdrivers, electrical tape, needle nose pliers, a voltage tester, and among them the wire. Thinner than a twenty-two gauge needle, it would trace a fine and final line. Then he’d become a point in space, dimensionless in Rita’s world. 

He bit the free end of the wire, held it between his teeth, and inched along toward the photo of his father perched on a bamboo stool by the bathroom mirror. In it, he was engaged in the lunatic task of counting his own beard hairs, one by one with a pencil tip as he always did after a shouting match with his wife. Back then Mischa had asked how many. The old man had shrugged, said the number wasn’t the point, only that he counted them himself. Mischa had asked if they were getting a divorce, had asked every time his parents wrestled.

“Without the fighting, I’d be all beard,” his father had said. “The friction keeps us real.”

Mischa replayed the memory over and over. Ping, ping, ping.

Eternity is ours, Rita wrote and kept writing. How long was eternity? Seventy-two struck him as plenty. The old man’s age, if the meds held. After that to hell with it. His brother would go, eventually the nephew too. 

“What’s in forever?” he asked.

Progress. Invention. My eternal love. 

Then the ex-wife crashed into his head, how she’d hated him with her whole body, had once loved him with that same whole body. How her hate had to eat her love to keep on moving. He thought of his brother who could be an asshole but whose assholery came from the same genetic swamp they’d both crawled out of. How they’d beat one another as kids. He still had scars on his shins for proof. Rita loved him? Like a vending machine loved a coin. He dropped his head to the keyboard. Letters spilled across the screen.

Wham! It banged from the door. He flinched, tried to shoot up but dropped sideways. 

“You alive in there?” came a voice from beyond. Hespin.

Alive? Yes, alive enough that he wanted to rise, to put on pants, zip his body into public form.

“Hespin!” he croaked.

Don’t answer, Rita typed.

“Mischa!” The pounding grew louder. “Don’t make me come through the window.”

Mischa’s tongue stalled. The laptop screen threw him back at himself. He stared at his reflection, boxes for eyes, no roundness left to catch the grit and the rain.