Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

“What about that one from before?” said Denise, looking up from cinching the screw on her hi-hat. “The opposite of a molar or something?”

“Not a molar,” said Bedwin. “The opposite of a wisdom tooth. Idiot Tooth.”

“Yeah, Idiot Tooth, I like that one, I always think about it.”

“How much can you like it if you can’t even remember it?” said Lucinda. She tucked her bass into the felt bed of its case. “Anyway, wasn’t there a band called Mystery Tooth?”

“Spooky,” said Bedwin, almost under his breath.

“What?”

“Spooky, Spooky Tooth.”

“Why does there always have to be something self-deprecating in the name?” said Matthew from the kitchen doorway. His beard was a week old now, a black frost that had overtaken his sallow cheeks nearly to his eyes. “What was that other name you guys liked? The Tedious Knives?”

“Knifes,” said Bedwin.

“What?”

“It was knifes, with an ‘f.’”

“Tedious, forlorn, morbid, crappy, futile.”

“The Futiles?” suggested Denise.

“Let Falmouth decide,” said Matthew. “I’m sure he’ll have a suggestion. Maybe he should bill us as the Papier-mâché Band. Or the Deaf-mutes.” He departed, not quite slamming Denise’s door. The rest were silent and unnerved in his aftermath, their songs all chased away. Bedwin slowly wound his cord around his amp’s handle, blinking at the floor. Denise leaned into her fridge and took out a beer. She waved the bottle at Bedwin, who shook his head. Lucinda stuck out her hand and Denise passed her a cold bottle.

“Things feel a little weird,” Bedwin ventured.

“It’s the gig,” said Denise. “We’re all a little cuckoo.”

“We sound good.”

“We sound great.”

“The new songs are okay, huh?” Bedwin didn’t meet Lucinda’s sudden glance.

“They’re the best songs,” said Denise. She put down her beer and opened her arms to Bedwin. He tolerated her embrace, his shoulders square, terror swimming in his eyes.

“I guess I’ll go home now,” said Bedwin.

After he’d shambled through the door Denise said, “So, what’s the matter with Matthew?”

“That’s not my department anymore.”

“Sure, but what’s your theory?”

Lucinda gobbled her beer and swallowed hard before speaking. “My theory is he has a new girlfriend who doesn’t speak such good English.”

“I’m not sure I understand you.”

“Maybe hostage is a better word.”

“Does this have something to do with the zoo?”

Lucinda nodded, wide-eyed.

“You want something harder than that beer?”

the two figures tumbled up the stairway in sloppy tandem, index fingers pressed to their whiskey-swollen lips, elbows at each other’s ribs. They left the hallway’s lightbulb chain un-pulled, as if illumination was their enemy, and so tripped on the stairs and over their feet. The banisters and stairs, even the walls of the stairwell felt muffled in dust, but beneath the dust’s mousy odor the drunken sleuths might have detected another scent, an acrid clue to what they were after, urine from another sphere. It was strong enough to bite its way even through their occluded noses. They sniffed their own fingertips stupidly, shrugged in the dark, advanced on creaking tiptoe.

“You got the key?”

“Fssshh.”

Inside the apartment, Denise flattened like a moth against the white hallway, pinned in moonlight that spilled through the kitchen. Lucinda slid past her, teeth bared and eyeballs bugged in commitment to their idiot foray. Their noses said they neared some goal. The rooms throbbed with mulchy life force, festering salad, mammalian sweat.

Matthew slept with his door open, sprawled on his back, nude outlines covered by a thin sheet. His penis was stiff under the sheet, a totem draped in pale shadow, nighttime body divorced from mind, rehearsing its secret forces. The invaders froze, shared a glance of dread, gnawed the insides of their cheeks. Matthew’s tongue lolled from his mouth, his head strained into its pillow as though smashing through dreams. Denise and Lucinda edged crabwise through the spotlight of the doorway, hands flat to the wall.

Past him, the smell was stronger. The room they discovered, Matthew’s parlor, with television, stereo, couch, held no answers. Lucinda duckwalked into its middle to examine its corners. There was no animal besides themselves.

At first sight the bathroom appeared empty. Yet here, their noses testified, was the source. Their eyes adjusted to the dimness as they bumped into the middle of a checkerboard tile floor strewn with celery butts and shards of cabbage. The invaders peered together into the only secret place remaining, a clawfoot bathtub glowing like an ivory icon in the gloom.

Shelf the Flyer gazed up at them, her yellow eyes training calmly on each of theirs in turn. The kangaroo lay on her side, filling the waterless basin of the tub, elegant legs spread like a book, neck and forepaws and tail slack as a sleeper’s. A trail of kangaroo piss beaded to the tub’s drain.

Denise mimed a scream. Lucinda clutched her around the shoulders. Knees tangling, heels skating in lettuce slime, they nearly tumbled to the floor. Shelf only blinked and tightened her whiskers, didn’t shift another muscle.

Lucinda held up a finger in a plea for stillness from Denise, then lowered Matthew’s toilet seat, slid jeans and underwear to her thighs, plopped down and peed, inspired to seek relief herself. She left it unflushed. Let it be their calling card, a reply to the stink. Matthew would likely credit it as some prodigious act of the kangaroo’s.

As Lucinda and Denise turned from the dim bathroom to the moonlit corridor the figure lurched into view—or had he stood there longer, just listening? Matthew loomed and swayed, wreathed in his sheet, eyes turtled in bafflement.

“Lucinda?” he croaked.

Caught, the drunken women only stared.

“This is so totally fucked up.”

Now they ran for the doorway, still mute, as if by fleeing they might persuade Matthew to retreat to dream and incorporate them as apparitions. Forget any clues they left, the front door they now unlocked or their handprints smearing in the stairwell’s dust. The essential thing was to give no testimony. The kangaroo in the bathtub had understood this principle, and kept cool. It was already impossible to be certain they’d seen her.

lucinda slid through more dark, past Falmouth Strand’s desk, on tiptoe again though there was no one to fool. It was two, three, or four in the morning, she couldn’t tell, wore no watch. Lucinda wasn’t ready to face her empty bed or the mocking twin faces of the foot sign. She’d delivered Denise to her own door, piloting her car on the empty Sunset Boulevard soberly, gingerly. Now, here alone in the gallery, she still felt drunk.

Seated at her unlit cubicle she lifted the phone and dialed the first six digits of the number she’d memorized without intending to, then circled her finger over the last, daring fate or at least gravity to cause it to descend. At that moment she heard herself snort or snore loudly, then woke with a jerk from some sudden depth, her head elbow-propped on the phone’s receiver, its mouthpiece mashed to her lips and slathered in saliva. The line rang.

“Hello,” he answered on the third ring.

“I called you,” Lucinda said stupidly.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Were you asleep?”

“Nope.”

“Mishomnia?”

“I was just awake.”

She widened her jaw, licked her lips, tried to gather herself. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“You were waiting?”

Lucinda moved the phone’s receiver from her head in confusion, as if the complainer lived within the instrument. The object gripped in her hand told her nothing, might as well have been a hair dryer or thermos. For an instant she weighed replacing it in its cradle. Instead she returned it to her ear and discovered again his breath hushed against a backdrop of howling static and her own mental buzz.