Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

He strips down and gets into bed, cuddling up behind her. Once she is asleep, he waits for something to happen. He’s not sure what. Claire’s dream marriage makes a certain kind of awful sense: a theoretical husband for the woman who spends her days in a theoretical haze. Her advisor was never the threat; it was always Alan. He watches her sleep as if the drama is unfolding just behind those eyelids. Maybe she will say something in her sleep. It would be like eavesdropping on a conversation taking place in a universe that Walker cannot reach, one where Walker does not even exist. He tries to imagine not existing. He imagines darkness, the absence of thought, but then his thoughts invade, and he exists again. Claire , he wants to call out. Claire .

“Claire.” She doesn’t budge. He places his palm flat between her shoulder blades, her skin warm through the T-shirt. He shakes her gently and feels her body tense.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“Where were you?”

“What?”

“Were you with him?”

“You’ve got to be kidding. Go back to sleep.”

“If you ever stopped dreaming about him, for whatever reason, would you be upset?”

She rolls over to face him. Her loose state championship volleyball T-shirt twists tight under her stomach.

“I’m beginning to regret I ever told you about Alan.”

And why did she? Guilt, he assumes, or as a provocation. A part of Walker fears this is her way of pushing him away. She turns back over to sleep. Walker climbs out of bed and goes downstairs. He digs some D batteries out of a cluttered drawer and plops down on the sofa with the tape deck. The old batteries are corroded, crusty and white. He inserts the new ones, rewinds the tape to the beginning, and presses Record.

“You are… very sleepy.”

He presses Stop, Rewind, and then Record again, his lips within kissing distance of the microphone. “You will not dream about Alan Gass. You will not dream about Alan Gass. Alan Gass does not exist. Alan Gass is not a man. Alan Gass is not made of daisies. He is made of nothing.”

He rewinds the tape and presses Record again. A new and less sinister idea: he could make a tape for himself.

“You will dream about Alan Gass. You will tell him to stay away. You will dream about Alan Gass. You will dream about Alan Gass.”

He presses Stop. This is going to take too long. He needs to think out a strategy. Is there a button that makes the recording loop?

“What are you doing?” Claire is at the top of the stairs.

“Nothing,” he says, and goes to the hall closet. He shoves the tape deck up on the high shelf and joins her in bed. That night he doesn’t dream about Alan. His dreams are uninteresting and unhelpful, a slurry mess of anxieties and fears from his waking life. He is lost and swimming in a giant ocean with small gray waves. In the distance metal transformer towers jut up into the sky crackling with electricity, and far away a boat crests each wave, a boat that he cannot reach no matter how much he swims.

In the morning he wakes up to steam slipping under the bathroom door in misty curling puffs. He can hear Claire humming in the shower. In her dreams she is able to visit an alternative universe. It’s hard not to feel a little jealous.

• • •

Everywhere he goes he sees a Lexus. Lexi. They are a species, classifiable but indistinct. He sees one in the fire lane in front of the liquor store, then another in the parking lot at the gym. The cars are empty. He feels ridiculous each time he glares into a car. The tinted windows reflect only his own face, grim and warped.

Before Claire, he once dragged a date to a five-year high school reunion and made the mistake of telling her that he’d slept with one of the girls in the room. The date wouldn’t let it go. She had to know which girl. She wanted him to point her out. She said she wouldn’t be comfortable until she knew. But why? Walker asked her. “So I can avoid her,” the date said. “Or maybe introduce myself. I don’t know. Something.” At the time, Walker found it amusing. God, he even made her guess the girl.

He makes a full tape of his Alan Gass mantras and tells Claire it’s music for the play. When he wakes up, his ears are hot and sweaty from the foam headphones and, even more frustratingly, he remembers almost nothing of where he’s been for the last seven hours, an amnesiac tourist whose film rolls have come back from the lab damaged and half developed — ocean waves, broken escalators, his mother’s scowling face, a pack of vicious blue-eyed dogs. It’s all meaningless dribble.

• • •

Walker’s Alan Gass calls with what he can only describe as amazing news — news that he won’t share over the phone. Walker agrees to meet him at a pizza buffet called Slice of Heaven.

They sit across from each other in a red vinyl booth that squelches under their butts. Aside from two dumpy women at a table on the other side of the restaurant, they are alone. Walker has already eaten lunch and doesn’t plan to stay long.

Alan is distracted. He wants pizza. A certain kind of pizza. He’s waiting for the waitress to bring it out on a tin tray. When she does, at last, dropping it on the buffet at the center of the room, Alan is up in a hurry. His body pressed hard to the sneeze guard, he loads his plate with one slice after another. He comes back to the table and takes a large bite. The pizza is yellowish and drizzled with a translucent pink sauce.

“What is that?” Walker asks.

“Strawberry cheesecake. Try a piece.” He slides the plate across the table, still sticky from the waitress’s rag. Walker declines and asks about the news that couldn’t be shared over the phone.

“Be patient. You’ll find out in”—he checks his wristwatch, digital with an orange Velcro strap—“about ten minutes.”

Walker takes the tape recorder out of his bag, slides it across the table to Alan.

“Did it work?” Alan asks.

“I’m letting it go. Like you said, some dumb fantasy.”

Alan smacks on pizza and dabs the strawberry sauce from the corners of his thin pink lips. Though a wiry man, he has the look of physical inactivity. He has a curved back, flaccid arms, and probably a poor heart. Something about this pizza buffet — the quality of the light or the greasy floor tiles, perhaps — makes Walker feel exhausted.

“Until you came to see me,” Alan says, “I’d never really thought about there being other Alan Gasses in the world. But that got me thinking. Somewhere out there is the best possible Alan Gass.”

“And somewhere else is the worst.” Walker motions to the waitress.

“I’d like to think I’m somewhere in the middle. Most Alans are. Statistically speaking.”

The waitress waddles to the table, her stockings tan as crust, her eyes green as bell peppers. Walker asks for a coffee.

“Over the last few days I’ve been digging around online and making some phone calls,” Alan says. “To other Alans.”

“And?”

“There’s an Alan Gass in Utah who runs a ranch. There’s an Alan Gass in New York who travels the country selling baseball cards.”

The waitress brings over a mug and a hot pot of coffee, its steam thick with the smell of burnt peanuts. Walker dumps three creamers into the cup, turning the liquid a cardboard brown.

“Oh, good, you’re here,” Alan says to someone behind Walker.

Walker turns. A heavy man in a blue polo shirt with eyebrows so dark and thick they look like two black holes in his flat face smiles at them. His short hair is parted neatly down the middle.

“Walker,” Alan says, “I’d like to introduce you to Doctor Alan Gass.”

The man shakes Walker’s hand firmly. His knuckles are hairy. Alan makes room for the other Alan on his side of the booth and explains that the second Alan lives only an hour north of here and when he discovered he was a doctor, well, he thought Walker might be interested in that.