Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

Yesterday they had to wait forty-five minutes for the doctor to return to the examining room. Brooks was a broken record while they waited: “Pencil box screen door pencil box screen door.” Dr. Groom was to blame for this. One of his memory games. The doctor often began his checkups by listing a random series of words for Brooks to later repeat on command, a test of his short-term memory. Before leaving on her month-long adventure to Bread Island, Mary’s mother warned that Brooks might attempt to scribble the words on his hand when the doctor wasn’t looking. Brooks, her mother had explained, wanted his independence back almost as much as they wanted to give it to him. But that wasn’t possible yet. He still had what she called “little blips.” He could be coherent and normal one minute, and the next… well.

“Pencil box screen door pencil box…”

“You don’t have to remember it anymore,” she said. “The doctor already asked you, and you got it right. You already won that game.”

That didn’t stop him. He hammered each syllable hard, except for the last one, door , to which he added at least three extra breathy o ’s. He ooooohed it like a ghost or a shaman might. Maybe he is a shaman. Who can say? What the doctors call hallucinations and delusions — maybe they are something else entirely. Mary read an article somewhere online explaining that people with brain injuries sometimes report unusual and even psychic side effects. There was a stroke victim who said he could read a book and be there — actually be in the book , tasting the food, smelling the air. A teenager in a car accident lost his sense of taste but said he could feel people’s emotions. It had something to do with unlocking previously unused parts of the brain.

Watching her brother clumsily tap his fingers on the shiny metal table, Mary wondered if it was possible he was in communication with something larger than both of them: a cosmic force, the angels, Frank Sinatra, anything. She doubted it. Her poor brother could barely button his shirt. And as for those words, the skipping record, maybe he’d fallen into some sort of terrible neural feedback loop. He seemed to be saying it involuntarily now.

She was almost ashamed by how much she wanted to slap her brother. Her whole life, Brooks had been the one looking after her — and so what right did she have to be irritated now? When things got rough with her boyfriend Tommy after college, it was Brooks who drove all the way down to Atlanta and helped her pack. It was Brooks who defended her to their mother when she quit her job with the real estate company. It was Brooks who wrote her a check to buy the Pop-Yop, her soft-serve franchise.

She worried that it would never be that way between them again, that the balance had forever shifted, and then she felt selfish for worrying about such a thing. Brooks needed her. It was her turn.

“Your pants, Brooks,” she said, and handed him his khakis.

He stood there beside the exam table in his white underwear and a wrinkled blue shirt, holding the khakis in front of him like a matador’s cape. Mary was supposed to have ironed his shirt for him before leaving the house that morning, and that she hadn’t fulfilled this duty was a source of some anxiety for her big brother. He could no longer tolerate creases — in clothes, in paper, in anything. Watching him step into his pant legs, she worried that he was about to bring up that morning’s ironing debacle again, but he tucked the shirt and zipped his pants without comment.

His crease intolerance was one of many changes that had come with the accident. A longtime smoker, he now said that smoke made him feel sick. A closetful of dark clothes that these days he deemed depressing. In fact, his new favorite article of clothing was a tight bright pink and purple sweater that they wouldn’t let him wear outside the house because it wasn’t his but their mother’s.

When, finally, Dr. Groom returned to the room, Mary stayed seated in her little plastic chair, eyeing all the instruments, the cotton swabs and tongue depressors in the glass jars, the inflatable cuff of the blood pressure device, the trash can with the metal step-lid, biohazard stickers plastered across it, all of it highly unadvanced medical paraphernalia, stuff you might have seen in a doctor’s office a century ago. The bigger, more impressive machinery was somewhere else, in another building. The nurses had trouble keeping Brooks still in those machines. Apparently he got antsy.

A frail smile formed on Dr. Groom’s face. His eyes were large and blue behind a pair of fashionable glasses. According to Mary’s mother, he was the best traumatic brain injury doctor in the state.

“Pencil box screen door,” Brooks blurted, all trace of shaman gone from his voice.

“Very good, Brooks,” the doctor said, and then leaned back against the table to explain the scans, how they were looking fine, better than expected given the nature of the accident and Brooks’s age, which was forty-four. Of course, he said, it wasn’t all about the scans. The scans wouldn’t show any shearing or stretching, for instance. But Brooks was doing well, that was the bottom line. He wasn’t slurring his words. His headaches were less frequent. Even his short-term memory was showing signs of improvement. A fuller recovery, the doctor said, might very well be possible.

• • •

Brooks is not sure how possible it will be to pee, cleanly, into a third-full bottle of organic extra virgin olive oil, especially given the tiny circumference of its plastic top. The tip of his penis will not fit into that hole. The bottle is a little slippery. He pops off the black top that controls the outward flow of the oil and hands that to Mary. He turns away from her and unzips.

“I’ve got this can of Pirouette cookies if you run out of bottle,” Mary says.

“I just need you to be quiet.” He concentrates — or, doesn’t. What’s required is the absence of concentration. That should be easy, shouldn’t it? He’s a pro at that now. He sees a yellow brick road. The urine comes in splashy spurts at first and then streams steadily. The bottle warms. The urine pools in a layer above the olive oil, all of it yellow. Thankfully, he doesn’t need the cookie tin for overflow. Mary hands him the top when he asks for it and tells him job well done.

Bottle plugged, they decide to store it under the lowest shelf, out of sight for now. He plops back down onto the dog food bags. If he had to, he could sleep like this. He checks his wristwatch with the shiny alligator leather strap, a gift from a long-ago girlfriend. Which girlfriend, he couldn’t say.

“We’ve been in here for an hour,” Mary says. She stands and peers again through the crack in the double doors. “Maybe we should just go for it. I don’t see the dogs.”

Her left eye still at the crack, she crouches down for a new angle on the outside world, her small hands on either side of the white doors for balance.

“Let me,” Brooks says, rising. He grabs the brass knob near her left temple. He shoves the doors open, outward into the house, and Mary slides away to let him pass. He emerges from the pantry. To his right, through another open doorway, he can see a kitchen with high white ceilings and recessed lights. To his left a long unfamiliar hallway unfolds, hardwood floors with wide dark red planks, at the end of which a cantankerous grandfather clock ticks.

“Not that way,” Mary says when he starts down the hall.

He hears a distant clacking of nails, a jangling of collars. Never has such a tinkly sound seemed so ominous. Mary is behind him now, tugging at his shirt, his arms, pulling him back into the sepulcher of the pantry. The dogs are approaching, their stampede echoing down the hallway. When his back collides with the food shelves, two fat cans drop and roll at his feet. Mary pulls the doors shut again. Seconds later, the dogs galunk into them. Their bulky, invisible weight shakes the flimsy wood of the door so hard Brooks wonders if the hinges might pop. Mary holds the brass knobs tight, as if worried the dogs are capable of turning knobs. The dogs growl. It’s hard to think straight over that noise.